Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  ‘If we need to fix him,’ she smiled, ‘nothing would be easier.’

  ‘Fix him?’

  ‘Well, you saw the way he looked at me.’

  Morris tried to think. ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Oh come on, Mo, it was obvious.’

  ‘Was it?’ Morris didn’t like this. She seemed amused that he hadn’t been aware.

  ‘I’m just saying, you know, if you gave me the word, I could put him in all kinds of trouble.’

  Morris couldn’t quite grasp what she was saying.

  ‘I mean if he’s really standing in your way. I’ll just give him the come-on. Then we can blackmail him.’

  ‘We can what? Sammy!’

  ‘Only if you give the word, Morris.’

  ‘I would never let another man touch you,’ Morris said sharply. He was upset. ‘And most of all not a monstrous beast like Volpi. He’d crush you.’

  In his agitation Morris stood up and walked to the window that looked down over a narrow side street where snow had begun to fall through the December twilight. How was it that just when something was beginning to seem idyllic, suddenly it turned out to be exactly the opposite: rotten and putrid and filthy. Only Massimina had never let him down in this regard.

  Still looking out into the street, he said in a low voice:

  ‘How can you even think of it? What would Tarik say? He’d be furious!’

  Samira cocked her head in amusement.

  ‘My brother is not my keeper.’

  ‘Well, he should be! And you can be damn sure he wouldn’t want his sister fucking a greasy old pig like that.’

  ‘Tarik doesn’t want me to be fucking you,’ she said evenly. ‘But it’s none of his business, is it? I don’t ask him who he’s fucking and he’s no angel.’

  ‘You can’t compare me with Volpi!’

  ‘I’m not, but Tarik would.’ She laughed. ‘Come on, Mo, I’m not your wife.’

  Morris was nonplussed. He hated conversations like this.

  Samira sat with her legs crossed, a smouldering cigarette between her fingers. Now it was she who had the confidence of maturity, while he was just an insecure middle-aged adolescent hovering at a windowsill. Morris turned his back to her and stared out at the thickly falling flakes, willing them to mesmerise him with their silent whiteness, to return him to childhood perhaps, to the time he had held Mother’s hand in sooty snow singing ‘Once in Royal David’s’ outside St Bart’s on the Uxbridge Road. Morris vaguely remembered a certain confusion in his infant mind between the slums of Park Royal and the Royal Jerusalem. What suckers the English were for royalty!

  Mother had breathed her last in the Royal Free.

  Mother.

  Outside the dark cobbles were already white and the street lights had come on. White and pure.

  ‘Fact is,’ the voice behind his back was saying, ‘a smart young woman can get pretty well all the money and attention she wants these days, if she has a mind for it, can’t she? Men will never say no. And I can’t see any harm in that. It’s her business what she does with her body.’

  Shifting his attention Morris found his concubine’s reflection in the dark gloss of windowpane. She was bent over her lighter, the flame illuminating a beauty that was pure Caravaggio.

  ‘What she can’t get is a respectable position of her own. Independence.’

  That was too much. Morris turned: ‘But, Sammi, you have a job! And at the Cultural Heritage Department, for Christ’s sake! Most young people would kill for that.’

  ‘I have an internship that pays 500 a month for a max of six months. I can’t live on that.’

  ‘But I pay your rent.’

  ‘That won’t last forever, will it?’

  ‘Yes, it will,’ Morris said. Then he repeated: ‘It will. Sammy, I’m a serious person. You must sense that. I’m mad about you.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Mo, you’ve had strings of internee girlfriends, you’re not paying their rents now, are you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t!’

  ‘But I can tell! Why deny it? I don’t mind. It’s been fun.’

  This was very difficult. All of a sudden Morris wished he was at home in Via Oberdan with Antonella, Don Lorenzo and the children, Massimina perhaps banging out something clumsy on the piano. God rest ye merry gentlemen. He might light the logs in the big fireplace for once. He might even invite Stan over for Christmas sherry.

  ‘Your son, for example,’ Samira was saying, ‘you’re always telling me what a lazy ungrateful lout he is, but he’ll still get himself a respectable job easily enough, which I never will.’

  Morris couldn’t quite see the point of this twist in the debate. She knew how painful it was for him to discuss his son.

  ‘You’ll give him a place in your company.’

  ‘I will not!’ Morris protested. ‘I’ll give him one internship like everyone else and nothing more. Same with my daughter. I want them to fight their own way in life, like I did.’

  In the end, he suddenly thought, we all, like poor Cain, had to make our offerings and hope that God would find them acceptable, without having any idea what the odd fellow’s tastes really were, meat or veg.

  ‘Oh Morris!’ With charming impulsiveness Samira suddenly stood up and came over to hug him. She buried her head in his chest and held him tight. ‘I only said that about Volpi because I saw how much you wanted this show to happen. You really, really want it, don’t you? It’s the first time I’ve seen you so excited. I just thought, I won’t let that fat pig stand in my man’s way. I’ll do something about it.’

  In the glass of the window, Morris could now see his scarred face resting against a shock of raven hair above the bronze curves of her shoulders and the plump ball of her neat bum in black knickers.

  ‘What was that lovely nickname you thought up for me?’

  She was kissing his neck.

  ‘Sammimi,’ he muttered, then declared in a surprisingly croaky voice, ‘If anyone stands in my way, cara, be sure I’ll kill them long before they get their hands on you.’

  Chapter Six

  THOUGHTS OF HIS OFFSPRING did indeed bring Morris pain. Walking home in the fresh snow, down Via Roma and across Piazza Bra, it occurred to him that he had still to buy them presents for Christmas. What though? What they deserved was a kick up the backside, both of them.

  It was aperitivo time and the idle rich were steaming the windows of expensive cafés festooned with tinsel and piled high with red and gold boxes of pandori and pannettoni. People with money were enjoying themselves. Glancing in at the jollity and warmth, Morris remembered that Christmas was supposed to be a time of truce; the white snow fell mainly to remind you to open a bottle and not be Scroogey. In spite of all, then, he should try to please the brats, show his legendary Duckworth generosity. On the other hand the two ‘lower-key m’s’ as he sometimes thought of Massimina and Mauro (minors of a major Morris) already had everything, and anything he gave them that they actually desired—a computer game for his son, what else? a graphic novel for his daughter—would only feed their crassness.

  The Englishman stopped where the piazza opened out into a Christmas-card expanse of snowy cedars and old-fashioned street lamps, the eighteenth-century café-culture frivolity of the Liston to his left and the ornamented arch of Porta Nuova like some crusty old Austrian uncle to his right. Behind it all, majestically floodlit, the looming pile of the arena gave a stony substance to that antique past compared with which, Morris thought, this present moment is just the blink of an unseeing eye.

  Drifting crystals tickled his nose and ears. Slowing his step to take it all in, he felt at once immensely privileged to live in such a beautiful and above all solemn place—there is no world without Verona walls!—yet full of regret that somehow he could never really feel part of it. He was here, but not here. Morris had always felt that. An honorary citizen now, but not a real citizen. Would Painting Death put that right at last, put him at the centre of Veronese society,
or simply define with even greater finality his condition of resident alien, well-to-do murderer?

  Suddenly, Morris desperately wanted to be indulgent, to make amends, bury hatchets. What if he appeased Mauro, he wondered, perhaps, with some football-related gift? Knuckledusters? Morris laughed. What if he gave Massimina a subscription to some awful manga mag? He had tried so hard over the years to make his family into a work of art, to have the children become the wonderful people they ought to have been. Unfailingly, unflaggingly, he had pointed the dear creatures with their unformed minds in the right direction. There had been piano lessons and dance classes, judo and singing. There had been catechism and Sunday school. There had been operas and concerts and art exhibitions. There had been Tonbridge School, for Christ’s sake. Culture didn’t come more expensive than that. Yet nothing had stuck. Even these fugitive snowflakes in the December dusk had more adhesive power than the great art Morris Duckworth had sought to thrust upon his refractory children.

  Morris started to walk again, fast, very fast. For heaven’s sake, snap out of it, he told himself. After all, if the children didn’t fit the frame, he would simply make his art elsewhere. Hadn’t that always been the logic of The Art Room? And of Painting Death. Morris had a genius and it would out. On a sudden optimistic impulse he slipped into the palatial splendour of La Costa’s, ordered himself a negroni at the bar and pulled out his iPhone.

  ‘L’Arena di Verona,’ a languid female voice responded.

  ‘Domenico Belpoliti, please, the cultural page.’

  ‘Pronto?’

  ‘Salve Domenico, come andiamo?’

  Morris had given Belpoliti interviews in the past about his company’s sponsorship of cultural events.

  ‘Discretamente,’ the pompous young man told him. ‘Discretamente be-ne.’

  ‘Listen, Domenico, I just thought you might want to know—sort of in advance, if you see what I mean, of the imminent press conference—that today we, er, probably best if I don’t say who exactly, we decided on July . . . yes, next July, for this big exhibition we’re planning . . . you hadn’t heard? . . . at Castelvecchio. Yes . . . Painting Death, that’s the title . . . Yes, yes, you can definitely say it will be the most ambitious show in the museum’s history. Absolutely . . . A hundred masterpieces—give or take a sketch or two—showing mankind’s centuries-old inability to do without, well, killing . . . Alas, yes! There you are. Hardly Christmas fodder, I know, though there was the Massacre of the Innocents of course, a glitch in the festive season that tends to get edited out. Do you know Breugel’s version, in the snow? . . . Yes, Dutch skaters and all. Hard to believe. Sort of white Christmas with freshly butchered babes. It’ll be there! Museum politics permitting. One can’t put one’s hand on one’s heart for every work . . . Oh, entirely sponsored by the Duckworth Foundation, I’m proud to say . . . Extremely contemporary theme when you think about it, terrorism too, yes, suicide bombers, genocide . . . Many of the world’s most famous museums . . . This time I’ll be taking an active part in organising the show myself . . . Not sure if you could actually say the curator, I’m a bit busy to go the whole hog, but certainly the ideas man . . . Oh no doubt about it, quite a development. Yes. But you were aware I collected works of art in this field? . . . Many years now. No, not suicides. Suicide I find depressing . . . Well, Sickert, for example. You know Walter Sickert’s work? . . . Some people actually thought he might be the Ripper himself, painting his victims . . . Truth definitely stranger than fiction . . . A Gentileschi too . . . Sì Signore, the real thing, I have it, right here in Via Oberdan. But there are more than a dozen versions, you know. She couldn’t stop beheading poor Holofernes. The face of Judith is a self-portrait apparently. Revenge for being raped early on in life, they say. You know her story . . . Ha ha, yes, very good, the women, any excuse. Watch out for the kitchen knives! . . . A Stuck too. Otto Dix. A Frey-Moock . . . You like Stuck? Hard not to . . .’

  When the president of the Duckworth Foundation finally closed the call he was in a savagely complacent mood again. It would feel pretty damn marvellous to be reading all of that in tomorrow’s papers, and even better to think of Volpi reading it.

  So now, Morris thought, eyeing up the potent orange drink that winked at him from the pearly grey granite of the city’s most expensive bar with neatly waistcoated waiters in attentive attendance and a perfumed parade of mink and sable swishing and crackling behind his elegant chrome-and-leather barstool—now for a pleasant evening with wifey at home-sweet-luxury-home after a healthy fuck with my dusky mistress in the icy Veronese afternoon. Here’s to living, Morris A. D.!

  The negroni went down in a gulp.

  Don Lorenzo was dining with them which meant the problem of meat again. Morris had gone vegetarian almost a decade ago after watching a documentary on industrial pig farming in California. ‘It’s not the actual killing,’ he always explained—for some reason vegetarians always had to explain themselves while meat-eaters never did—‘but the fact that they don’t even allow these animals a life in the first place. Oh, if I knew they’d been killed in a fair fight, I’d eat ’em up gristle and bone.’

  Some months later Antonella had joined him in abstention, though strictly ‘for health reasons’ she always said, for, as Morris reflected, it would have implied criticism of others if she had taken her husband’s moral position; ‘others’ like Don Lorenzo, who always declared that a meal wasn’t a meal without thick red meat on the table and a heavy red wine to wash it down, this despite the man’s crippled wraith physique and general aura of asthmatic asceticism.

  The charming upshot was that Mauro and Massimina, who had neither of them darkened a church door in years, were more likely to grace the family with their presence when the ancient priest was their dinner guest than at any other time. For if Morris had never been one to force his dietary habits on others and would gladly have eaten whatever was on the family menu, minus the kill, Antonella was made of sterner stuff: healthy food—be it lentils or risotto or pasticcio di melanzane—she declared, was equally healthy for everyone and to have la povera Maddalena, whose own health was so poor, slave to produce two different menus merely for the benefit of carnivorous children would be a greater cruelty than shooting an electric bolt through the brain of a fattened heifer. Only in honour of Don Lorenzo, then, did such cruelty become admissible on the Duckworth dinner plates, and only when the limping priest hitched up his cassock and lowered his scrawny buttocks on to one of the stiff wooden seats around the great oak table did the children miraculously appear. Otherwise, while Morris and Antonella scooped up curried chickpeas or rice and khorasan, the lower-case m’s would very probably be lolling on benches in Piazza Bra sinking their incisors into mutton kebabs in defiance of the mayor’s recent edicts.

  Don Lorenzo liked to be indulgent with the children. He had known them all their lives. In general he prided himself on being in touch with his flock, particularly the stray lambs, with always the benign assumption that they strayed only because they were lambs who, once adult, would be sheep enough to know they were better off in the fold. Blinking behind smeared glasses, the ancient priest leaned across the table to Mauro and announced, ‘I used to go to football matches too, you know.’

  Morris couldn’t help but wonder if he had heard correctly.

  ‘When I was in the seminary.’

  Antonella smiled warmly.

  Mauro, his chubby cheek still bruised, ear torn and right arm in plaster, was forking up chunks of beef that his vegetarian mother had carved up for him. She and Morris were eating a leek and mushroom quiche.

  ‘What team?’ the boy asked from a full mouth.

  ‘Used to play, too,’ Don Lorenzo went on. ‘Right wing. We had matches against the Franciscans and the Dominicans. And the new recruits from Africa. There was even a cup.’

  ‘Is that how you hurt your foot?’ Massimina enquired. She too was making short work of a generous steak. No sooner were their plates empty, Morris knew, than the children w
ould be gone. They had never understood the joys of conversation and certainly wouldn’t be around for Bible-reading and prayers after sweet and brandy.

  ‘Oh, no, that was later, Mimi.’ The priest smiled at the girl as if she were even now still sitting on his knee. ‘Juventus!’ he told Mauro proudly. ‘We used to see them when they played in Verona. Once or twice we even went to Turin.’

  ‘Not Hellas?’ Mauro protested. His naturally loud voice seemed to have more meat in it than the ageing priest’s entire body. ‘Not your home team? You could have watched Hellas every week.’

  ‘Juve played so much better,’ Don Lorenzo recalled complacently. He chuckled. ‘I remember them putting five past Hellas once. Bettega. Causio. Five!’ Still chuckling, the priest drew a razor-sharp knife across half a pound of tender flesh.

  ‘Juve merda,’ the young man muttered under his breath.

  Morris watched the blood ooze.

  ‘I beg your pardon!’ Antonella demanded.

  Swallowing, pointing his fork, Mauro insisted: ‘For me football is about belonging and community. It’s about who you are. Veronese. Born here, belong here. My town, my people. Winning and losing is for nobodies.’

  Morris was impressed: from the carnage on his plate his son was claiming the moral high ground. With what unexpected gravitas!

  ‘Oh, I was always more of a sportivo than a tifoso,’ Don Lorenzo nodded cheerfully. It wasn’t clear whether he had registered the indignation in the young man’s voice.

  ‘Anyone can support a winner,’ Mauro complained. He had a lamentable habit of eating with one elbow on the table, his head propped on a fist. As he leaned forward over his food, his Hellas sweatshirt could barely contain his barrel chest. ‘It takes passion,’ he said vehemently, ‘to support a side that always loses.’

  Don Lorenzo laughed openly now. ‘I think if one spends one’s hard-earned money to go to a game, Mousie, it’s only wise to make sure you get value and see some good football.’