Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  The fog pressed down on the car, seemed to clutch and catch at it as it flew past.

  ...so that I couldn’t really have killed you at all, could I, Mimi?’

  Suddenly finding a pink blur of tail lights only feet ahead, Morris braked hard and geared down violently. But it wasn’t enough. To avoid a collision, he swung left to overtake into absolute grey blindness. Immediately headlights appeared. The local bus skidded towards him. Morris squeezed round a 126 to a chorus of klaxons.

  He picked up the receiver from the passenger seat where it had fallen. ‘. . . And I just thought, Mimi, I thought, if you could give me some sign, or something, you know, that you’re alive and well, it would mean so much to me. Any sign. So long as I really know it’s you. And that you’ve forgiven me.’

  Morris frowned. For, of course, the worst part of recognising her in that Madonna by the Renaissance painter had been remembering how the post-mortem had shown she was pregnant. Mimi was pregnant and he had killed his own child, their love-child, a saviour perhaps. This horrible fact could still occasionally rise to the surface of Morris’s consciousness, bringing with it a sense of nausea and profound unease. Though again, this was actually rather gratifying in a way, since otherwise one might have been concerned that one had no sensibility at all. Experience suggested it was a common enough failing.

  ‘Will you do that for me, Mimi? Give me a sign? I don’t care what form it takes, just that it be clear.’

  Again he imagined her saying: Sì, Morri, sì,’ in that most accommodating voice she had had. Certainly Massimina could never have been accused of having addressed him as Mo or having invited him to jump into the sack and give her a poke. Sex had been something special with her, something holy. Mimi, had he had the good fortune to marry her, would never have been so selfish as not to want to have children. Then all at once an idea had him laughing. What a funny old bloke I am, he thought. Get Paola pregnant despite herself is what I should do. Give her a purpose in life. Before she becomes a mere fashionable parasite. She’ll thank me for it in the end. Wasn’t that the purpose of marriage, as declared in the wedding service?

  Amidst these and other thoughts, some of them only half- conscious perhaps, Morris suddenly changed his mind. Acting on one of those intuitions he had learnt to trust over the years, he chose not to go straight to the florist’s to pick up the huge wreath he had ordered, but turned right, up the Valpantena, on the fast road into the hills where the family had its winery.

  He came out of the fog shortly above Quinto and drove very fast on this holiday morning as far as Grezzana. In grey winter light the valley was rather ugly, with its ribbon development of light industry and second-rate housing projects, many of which had a disturbingly English flavour to them. Certainly it wasn’t the Italy his spirit had yearned for when he had decided to marry into one of their rich families. He had talked this over at length with Forbes: the race was obviously degenerating. They still produced and loved beautiful things, and this was very important for Morris, who could imagine few other reasons for being alive; but they didn’t seem to care if they made their country ugly in the doing of it, and they appeared to think of beauty more as a consumer product than something of spiritual value, a question of owning a particular shirt and tie, a particular style in furnishing. Many of them had no idea at all of their own historical art and heritage. It was a shame, Morris thought, a real shame, and he turned off the road along a gravel track that after a couple of turns brought him to the three long, low, breeze-block constructions that made up the vinification, bottling and storage facilities of Trevisan Wines.

  He fiddled in his glove compartment for the right remote control and a long, low gate began to rattle and whine. The new dog barked wildly, as it always would at Morris, as dogs always had with him since as early as he could remember. He must talk to Bobo about it, try to get through to him that it was completely pointless keeping such a beast, since if somebody did want to break in they would surely have no difficulty shooting the thing. No one was around to hear a gunshot in these low-key industrial areas outside working hours. You had to think of such things.

  Unless Bobo had been meaning to prevent precisely visits of this variety, Morris wondered. His own. But that was paranoia. He was a member of the family now. And once you were family, you were family.

  He pulled up and turned off the engine. The big Dobermann or whatever it was (for Morris had not the slightest interest in animals) snarled and leapt around the car. Uncannily, it seemed to be aware of the door he would have to get out of. Oh, for Christ’s sake! This was a problem he hadn’t considered at all. But far too silly to make him change his mind, surely.

  He started up again and drove through shale and puddles to the door of the office located in a kind of annexe at the end of the long building that housed the bottling plant. He managed to negotiate the car into a position only six inches or so from the door, and while the dog was squeezing, panting and yelping to get into the narrow space, Morris buzzed down the window, slipped his key into the lock and turned it twice. He then drove away, heading around the building at little more than walking pace, thus luring the stupid animal into a following trot through parked trucks and stacks of bottles. Then, turning the last corner, he accelerated hard to arrive back at the door with just the few seconds’ grace he needed to be out of the car and into the building. He slammed the door behind him. The dog was furious. Likewise Morris. And he decided on the spot he would poison the thing.

  2

  There are three major wine-producing areas around Verona: the Valpolicella to the north and west; Soave twenty kilometres to the east; and, between them, the Valpantena, stretching north from the eastern suburbs of the city. The first two need no advertising anywhere in the world. Indeed Morris even remembered his father picking up the occasional ‘Suave’ to impress one of his tarts after Mother’s death, while Morris himself had drunk many a glass of ‘Valpolicelly’ at artsy-fartsy Cambridge parties without having the slightest idea where the place really was. Had the Trevisans, then, had their vineyards in either of these two areas, there would have been no obstacles to the grandiose plans of expansion Morris liked to conjure (the principle being, surely, that if one deigned to do something, and above all something commercial, then one should do it in grand style).

  But the Valpantena . . . the Valpantena was decidedly second rate. It was difficult to get DOC certification. The soil was too clayey. The alcohol rating was low. The wine had no body and less flavour. Worse still, it simply had a name for being plonk. With the result that sales were falling sharply as the population moved up-market in the wake of snobbery and brand-name advertising, while the dour hard-drinking peasantry succumbed to cirrhosis and the miserliness (since Thatcher) of those European subsidies aimed at keeping them on the land and inside the thousands of smoky rural dives where Valpantena was drunk over interminable games of briscola,

  What, Morris often dreamed, if it had been one of the Bolla family’s girls had run off with him, and not Massimina Trevisan? He could then have become the respected export manager of a major company with a vast international distribution network. He could have been responsible for sponsoring small cultural ventures, workshop theatres, local exhibitions of Etruscan art, sober books of artistic photography. Or again, what if he had taught English in more exclusive circles in Milan (as why the hell shouldn’t he with his educational background)? Then only the sky would have been the limit: the Berlusconis, the Agnellis, the Rizzolis, quite unimaginable wealth and signori-lità . . . . Given that he had pulled it off with the suspicious and decidedly refractory Trevisans, was it so unfeasible that he could have done the same with the more generous industrial nobility? Could still do it perhaps, if only he put his mind to it.

  But there lay Morris’s snag. Morris didn’t, except in emergencies, put his mind to practical things. And sometimes not even then. He allowed himself to be drawn into aesthetic considerations, existential dialogues. His brain was incredibly fertile terr
itory, but it seemed that what had been planted there was exotic and ornamental, rather than practical. He prided himself on flying off at tangents, on making acute observations, but he could never plan anything more than a day or two ahead. (Would he ever have started the Massimina business had he had the faintest inkling of how it must end? Surely not. That had been an appalling discovery of the very last hour.) He was like a novelist who could never remember what his plot was supposed to be, or more appropriately, a miserable opportunist, picking up crumbs wherever they fell.

  Hadn’t it been the same with his marriage? The situation had presented itself; it was Paola had made the offer, just as two years ago it had been Massimina approached him, rather than he her. And Morris had been unable to hold off and play for higher stakes, unable to see that he was made for better things.

  Of course, there had been certain alleviating circumstances on the second occasion: the euphoria arising from his having survived a major police investigation had doubtless played its part. In the happy-go-lucky mood he’d been in, the surprise invitation to accompany sister Paola to England had had a smack of destiny about it. Riding high, he had accepted, plus of course there had been that prurience, that perverse poignancy of remaining, socially and emotionally, so close to the scene of the crime. Ostensibly Paola had been going on an extended holiday to help her get over the family bereavement, and this again was the kind of pathos that attracted Morris, rich as it appeared to be with noble emotion and dignity. In the event, however, it all too soon emerged that the real reason for her English trip was her need to avoid her friends until such time as she could get over the snub of having been dropped by her long-time dentist fiance.

  Be that as it may, when they had arrived at the airport and were sitting in a taxi (the very first taxi of Morris’s life as it happened), her cosy suggestion that he stay in the expensive Notting Hill flat which family friends had provided for her had been nothing if not explicit. Still excited, understandably, by his newly acquired wealth (certificates for 800 million lire’s worth of Eurobonds in his suitcase), lulled by the excellent Barolo they had drunk with their snack on the plane, and by no means averse to pursuing the sexual experiments which had so pleasantly if poignantly brightened up his abduction of Mimi, Morris did not even look for reasons for not agreeing. He was riding the crest of a wave. He could do nothing wrong. And it had been particularly good fun, one London afternoon to invite his dumb, proletarian, carping father over to the Pembroke Villas address and flaunt an ambience of Persian rugs and Mary Quant curtains that even the pigheaded Mr Duckworth must have recognised (in money terms if nothing else) was a definite step up.

  Shrewd herself, Paola had quickly developed a fatal attraction for Morris’s own particular brand of shrewdness, his curiously polite stiffness and reservation, which she found a ‘terrific turn-on’ (and imagined was exquisitely English and fashionable, not realising, as Morris himself was all too painfully aware, that on the whole Anglo-Saxons were an uncouth and violent lot). For three, four, five months they had thus lodged together, enjoying a sex life as ambitious as it was exquisitely free from sentimental complications. Paola had learned not a word of English and spent a great deal of money. Unlike dear Mimi, it turned out that she shared, more than shared, Morris’s interest in expensive food and drink, with the result that Morris had made the mistake, for the first and hopefully the last time in his life, of succumbing to an almost constant state of inebriation, something that had doubtless blurred his awareness of other, less attractive sides to her personality.

  Returning to Italy together in the spring of the following year, it had been to find that as a result of an unplanned pregnancy elder sister Antonella was being hurried into marrying the ugly heir to a battery chicken empire, Bobo Posenato, or Polio (chicken) Bobo, as Paola disparagingly called him (one of the few things Morris genuinely liked about Paola was her ability to be wittily disparaging). All kinds of extravagant arrangements were under way. Mamma Trevisan was over the moon with the expediency of this marriage, which obviously far outweighed the tawdry circumstances that had precipitated it. Very large sums of money were being spent. A beautiful apartment had been bought, designer wedding clothes were even now being made. The Due Torri, Verona’s most expensive hotel, had been booked for the reception.

  With all this extravagance and festivity, sharp Paola had not unnaturally felt herself being upstaged by her blander, rather goosy elder sister. For his part, Morris, having vaguely wondered in London if he mightn’t set himself up as the man of the family, had felt his previous antagonism for Bobo reinforced if not doubled or trebled. Hadn’t this arrogant boy with his nosiness and enquiries been responsible after all for the rejection of Morris’s initial attempt to court Massimina in a traditional fashion, and thus, in the long run, for forcing Morris to become a criminal? And surely it wasn’t right that a taciturn, acned young man with no imagination and less manners should be so extraordinarily well set up in terms of wealth and power? It was the kind of naked injustice that fed Morris’s insatiable appetite for resentment. Of course, he did have some wealth himself now, enough to buy - what? - two or even three apartments perhaps (why hadn’t he asked for more when he’d had the knife by the handle?), but absolutely nothing like the miliardi available to Polio Bobo and his ilk; and to make matters worse, Morris, at that time, still had to be painstakingly careful that nobody noticed him spending this money, whose existence he would never be able to explain. Like a fool, he must continue to play the pauper, the poor mouse of the family, even when he wasn’t. It was infuriating. Because you weren’t rich until you had your hands on the means of producing wealth - Marx had been right about that. With just a few hundred million (lire!) in Eurobonds you were barely hedging against inflation. So that when one evening Paola had very coolly remarked how upset the others would be if she and Morris got in on the act by making it a double marriage, he had immediately said yes, wouldn’t they? Plus, if they didn’t watch out, Paola had further observed, there was every danger that Polio Bobo, still kept out of his own family business by Father and elder brother, would worm his way into Trevisan Wines and even further into Mamma’s good graces, no doubt with the intention of annexing the company to his own family empire. Whereas if they married immediately. Mamma would have to give Morris a position of some, and hopefully equal, importance.

  Of course in retrospect Morris saw now what a sad, sordid poverty-stricken kind of opportunism it had been which had made him agree to this: surrendering his privacy to a creature he barely knew out of the sack or in various states of intoxication (because she was keen on marijuana too), committing his very considerable brain power to the promotion of a few plonky vineyards, and above all entering (for there seemed no alternative if he was to make a go of the Trevisan clan) into a partnership with a gawky, spoilt, chinless young man who was as unworthy of Morris’s opposition as he was of his collaboration.

  But one was who one was in the end. Wasn’t this what Morris had been trying to tell his father in spool after spool of dictaphone tape these past five years and more? One was who one was. Character was destiny. This was the kind of thing that Morris Duckworth did (still afraid of ending up on the street despite that 800 million). And if he had recently stopped trying to explain himself to Dad after a cupboard full of cassettes stretching over six or seven years, wasn’t it precisely because he had at last realised that by that very same token - character destiny - his father could and would never understand anything Morris tried to tell him? The uncouch old goat was an uncouth old goat. How could you expect him to be otherwise? Morris was Morris, and thus he would remain, locked into his own skull, his own inadequacy, to the bitter end: an underachieving, desperate, somehow pantomime Morris. Wisdom meant accepting this.

  Though sometimes he felt quite different about life. Sometimes he felt there was nothing could stop him. Or at least that he might as well enjoy himself.

  Events had moved with soap-opera rapidity. The apartment had been bought (with hi
s money, in his name - leaving less than 400 million - but he would never be held to ransom by his wife). Morris had attended a catechism course for adults and turned Catholic (interestingly enough it was here that he first came up against those Third World sufferers whose fate so often occupied his mind these days). A summer date had been set for the wedding. All had appeared to be going well. But then, despite this considerable effort on Morris’s part to conform with local mores, Paola, with typical instability, had at the very last moment changed her mind and decided she wanted to be married in the register office so romantically, albeit ominously, located on the supposed site of Juliet’s tomb. This was, and was intended as, a deliberate snub to her mother, a punishment for her being so syrupily ingratiating with the Posenato clan and so offhand if not actually cold with Morris.

  In the event it turned out to be a brilliant idea. Not only was Mamma furious (for the Posenato family would be upset by the idea of down-market, register-office in-laws), but Morris was actually able to gain ground with the old lady, and even with the fiercely pious (despite her pregnancy) Antonella, by presenting himself as the wise and reserved Englishman ostensibly struggling to have capricious young Italian Paola see reason. Indeed, the ruse worked so marvellously that, come the great day. Mamma’s frustration at being crossed like this had been too much for her and she was struck down by a thrombosis precisely as Morris turned from signing the papers to smile at the small gathering of Paola’s friends (including, rather disturbingly, the dentist).

  Mamma collapsed and was rushed off to rianimazione. Hearing the news during a last-minute dress-pinning session for her own ceremony later in the afternoon, Antonella had tripped on her train while hurrying down the stairs and, after much panic, ambulance-calling and toing and froing at the hospital, was found to have lost her child. When Morris had tried (and he had cancelled his honeymoon flight to the Azores, for God’s sake) to express his quite sincere condolences to Bobo, the unpleasant young Veronese had scowled at him as if it must somehow be his fault. But there was no limit, Morris sometimes thought, to people’s desire to find a scapegoat. Nobly he decided not to bear a grudge against the boy. Perhaps in time and against all the odds they would learn to like each other.