by Tim Parks
Having said this, the blessed Virgin removed her holy crown, and opening her long blue robe on the most perfect wax-white nakedness, stretched out beside him. Waking in the dark light of the small hours, Morris found himself as it were borne upwards out of sleep on an extraordinary tide of well-being, the air around him dense with her perfume, the prison darkness throbbing with her presence. Footsteps passed, plodding slowly down the corridor, keys jingled, his cellmate groaned in his nightmares. Apparently nothing had changed. But Morris knew that he was in the best of hands now. All would be well. ‘Mimi,’ he breathed into the dawning of another day.
23
Despite mourning, Paola had applied Marlboro-red lipstick and Baci-blue eye-shadow. Which was somewhat injudicious, Morris thought as he emerged from the prison gate into hard, bright winter sunlight. For sure enough, a small knot of pressmen were waiting, in search of fresh fuel for a story that had been smouldering on the inside pages of the local papers for more than a month now.
‘Scandalous Revelations Imminent,’ had been the line throughout. Was Posenato really dead, or had he been kidnapped? Could it, perhaps, have been a mistress’s husband who had made the anonymous call to say he had got what he deserved? And why was the English brother-in-law refusing to co-operate? But with so many questions and so few answers, the affair had never quite managed to match up to the editors’ expectations, was in danger of becoming, like Mimi’s story of two years ago, just another saga of ungratified speculation.
The photographers stepped forward. Embracing his wife with simplicity and restraint, Morris was careful neither to hide his face nor to pose, in short to offer nothing that might encourage those paid to daydream on behalf of a jaded public. His expression, for the brief moment he faced their flashlights, was that of someone who has survived a difficult ordeal with dignity. On being asked for comment by a man with a microphone, he said politely that he hoped his release meant that the police now had some kind of idea who the real culprit was. No, for his own part he bore no hard feelings about his imprisonment, despite its manifest injustice. On the contrary, the experience had been instructive, had brought him to a deeper understanding of himself.
A moment later he was in the Mercedes, with Paola pulling quickly away into traffic. For a minute or two, they were silent, then at the first crossroads she burst into laughter.
‘Dio santo, you’re so funny!’ she said.
Morris was still in something of a daze, his head full of plans, people to see, vows and resolutions to be honoured.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know, it’s the way you always say exactly the right sanctimonious thing to these people. You’re such a beautiful hypocrite. I do love it.’
Morris said crisply: ‘I meant every word of it. I bear no hard feelings at all towards anyone.’
But again his wife was laughing softly. ‘My old Mo,’ she said in her sardonic English. ‘Dio Cristo, I’ve missed fucking you.’
Morris winced. It occurred to him that one of the factors that had made his prison cell less of a misery than he had expected was the absence of his wife and this peculiar way she had of interpreting his character and then damning herself by appearing to appreciate the devil she mistakenly saw in him. No, he hadn’t missed her at all. Although now that she was to be the mother of his child there was nothing for it but to settle down and do his best to love her, hope that motherhood would mellow her. Because this was one of the important decisions he had taken in the last few days in prison. Marriage would be a sort of alternative life sentence. After all, Morris had never pretended that he hadn’t sinned Call had gone astray’), only that it must be he who decided on the appropriate form of expiation.
A life with Paola seemed more than sufficient.
Steering with her left hand, Paola put her right on his thigh and began a fingertip massage down the inside of his leg. Morris took the hand and lifted it chastely to his lips. Again she burst out laughing.
‘Che romantico!’ she said. Then, without any apparent change of tone she asked: ‘AIlora, what did you tell them in the end?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Come on. About where you were that evening. I couldn’t tell them anything in case you’d told them something different. I said I thought you were having an affair maybe. I tried to get the lawyer to suggest it to you, but when he told me about your little scene, I realised you must have something else in mind.’
Morris was silent. The extraordinary thing, he thought, was how he could be at once so clever and so stupid. Having accepted Mimi’s complicated plan for getting him out of gaol, giving an alibi and at the same time explaining why he hadn’t given it before (how well humiliation could stand in for authenticity), he hadn’t even begun to think of what he would say to the pregnant wife he was supposed to be spending the rest of his life with. The fact was of course that if the carabinieri hadn’t gone and arrested him that night, she would never have realised he wasn’t by her side. Since between falling asleep in the evening and rising in the morning, Paola had never been known to wake up once. So deeply complacent was her spirit.
It occurred to Morris then that somebody who never lost sleep would likewise never be able to begin to understand him. They were utterly incompatible.
‘Allora?’
‘I am not having an affair,’ Morris said coldly. ‘I am not the kind of person who has affairs.’
Braking for a red light, she said: ‘It wouldn’t be the end of the world if you were, you know, Mo. One understands that these things happen.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I mean, people do have affairs, you know. It’s not something to lose one’s head about.’
Morris said firmly: ‘As I see it, faithfulness is the basis of any relationship that involves complicity. Being married means being faithful.’
For some reason saying this made him think of Kwame. More and more his brain seemed to make connections all its own, while that part of him that was most consciously Morris experienced a vague and not unpleasant sense of vertigo.
Paola was laughing again. Almost everything he had said this morning seemed to have made her laugh. She shook softly, holding the wheel with two hands again now.
‘Sei comico, Mo.’
Morris began to feel angry. It was this way she had of never taking him seriously.
‘I imagine,’ he said, ‘having read yesterday’s newspaper, that they’ve let me out, not because of anything I told them, but because they’ve finally arrested those two marocchini who presumably did whatever it was that was done.’
Paola nodded: ‘According to the police, yes. But that man Fendtsteig with the carabinieri obviously feels differently.’ After a pause she added: ‘He still thinks it was you.’
Folding his arms, Morris said: ‘Clearly I’m the victim of some sort of ridiculous rivalry between the police and the carabinieri. Both of them want to solve the big local crime first. And since the police are on to the right people, the carabinieri have to find someone else.’ But in the silence that followed, Morris was careful not to ask whether his wife shared Fendtsteig’s suspicions. Even to show that such a suspicion was imaginable on her part would be a considerable error.
Paola was accelerating now, driving up the city’s circular road to where rugged hills loomed from the plain. A late fall of snow was sharply white in the blue distance of the pre-Alps, and Morris was pleased to realise that in his absence she must have completed the change of households. They were going to Quinzano. He’d be able to sleep in Mimi’s bed again tonight.
‘All the same,’ she came back, ‘you must have told them something, since whatever they say, you were really being held for reticence. They could have kept you another five months if you hadn’t told them something.’
When he didn’t reply, she laughed: ‘Not much complicity here for anyone to want to remain faithful to.’
But Morris bit the inside of his cheek. He would not speak. He would not be told wh
at he could and could not say to his wife, whose duty in the end was simply to trust him willy-nilly. ‘Honour’ and ‘obey’ were the words as he recalled them. Then noticing the shrine of La Nostra Signora di Lourdes perched on the first hilltop above the city, he suddenly remembered a vow. Turn right at the lights,’ he ordered. He was determined to be a more head-of-the household Morris.
‘Why?’
Turn right, I have to go to a church,’ he said,
‘Scusa?’ She honestly thought she had misunderstood.
‘I have to go to a church,’ he repeated.
Ten minutes later, in the disappointingly modern surroundings of San Giovanni Fuori, he lit a four-hundred-lire candle. Bowing his head on a small seat beside an incredulous Paola, he was briefly reminded of that time he had gone into a church with Massimina, the first day of their elopement, of how eager she had been to convert him, how cynical and superior he had felt. Well, she had won in the end. The wheel had come full circle: Morris was at last learning humility. But what wouldn’t he have given to be back there now! Back with that breathless, eager young girl at his side in the house of God.
Standing to face a poorly executed Deposition above the altar, Morris crossed himself and muttered a determined prayer of gratitude.
Behind him, Paola whispered: ‘Have you gone crazy. Mo, or are we being followed by the press or something?’ At the threshold, coming out, she pulled her cigarettes from her bag and thrust one between bright-red lips. It wasn’t clear whether she was irritated, or just plain nervous.
Morris turned and rather dramatically put his hands on her shoulders, determined to give her a chance. His eyes found hers, his own glassy and blue, hers flightily quick and brown. ‘Seeing that you’re pregnant, cara,’ he said, speaking very slowly, ‘I really do think you should stop smoking. I mean, I think we should try to settle down now and concentrate on having a healthy, happy family. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.’
His wife’s pretty features froze. For a moment it seemed she might burst out laughing. Then the colour drained from her face.
‘Whoever said I was pregnant?’
‘I know you are,’ he said. ‘I was told in a dream.’
Returning to the car he realised the phone was ringing, and since Paola had already buzzed the door open, Morris hurried to pick up the receiver before the call was lost. But on hearing his ‘Pronto whoever it was must have realised they’d got a wrong number and hung up.
24
Later on that day, Morris made a list. There was the company to get running again (state of order book, possible investments), the immigrants to keep happy, Forbes to mollify, the Quinzano house to get in order (furniture and one or two paintings to buy), his wife to deal with (how?), and above all his own back to watch. Sitting at the seventeenth-century writing table in the small room he had decided would be his study, this attractive young Englishman was at once daunted and excited by the prospect of the coming weeks. Clearly, however, if one were to arrange one’s responsibilities in order of priority, then watching one’s back would have to be the first; since the success of all other tasks depended on that.
Morris sat erect at the elegant table, very aware of himself, of his new-found liberty, and sucked on a Parker pen. Could they really have lost interest in him, or was Morris Duckworth still a (the) prime suspect? It was hard to tell. As far as Fendtsteig was concerned, it had been enough perhaps to have a story to go on, however bizarre and bizarrely presented, so that he could then get to work to show that it was false. Indeed it was quite possible that they had let him out without officially charging him simply in order to catch him when he made some mistake. Was he or wasn’t he under surveillance?
The problem, of course, Morris reflected, was knowing anything. Above all, knowing how much they knew.
Was it possible, for example, that they hadn’t found the car yet? Was that really possible? When he had put it there on purpose to have it found! In precisely the kind of place criminals did put cars. Pinewoods way up in the hills. The problem was, you couldn’t even rely on these people to know the things they ought to be ashamed of not knowing. You threw red herrings into a tiny pond and they didn’t even catch them. Certainly the papers had said nothing about the car.
Or did they really believe now that those two dumb immigrants had done it? Was Fendtsteig’s posturing mere sour grapes?
Morris contemplated one of Signora Trevisan’s supermarket Sacred Hearts on the wall above him and wondered if the choice of such ugly bric-a-brac hadn’t been a deliberate act of mortification on her part, a refusal to sublimate humble religious contemplation in the arrogance of the aesthetic. Probably not, knowing Signora Trevisan and her peasant origins. But it was certainly an excellent reason for keeping the ugly things now: a mortification of Morris’s essential good taste, and thus all the proof anyone could ask for of the profound nature of his conversion. Tomorrow, Sunday, he would go to Mass at Don Carlo’s church in the village square, which should give him his first chance to see Antonella again, to assure her that he was in no way involved in what had happened to her husband. Just the thought that she might suspect him hurt him deeply. Whereas with his wife it was more a question of his determination to outsmart her, and to defend an area of privacy for himself.
Morris allowed himself to dwell on this subtle difference for some time. Yes, he was looking forward to seeing Antonella, looking forward above all to sharing the news of his conversion with her, his whole-hearted commitment to Christ and Christianity, the chapel he was planning to build in the grounds of Trevisan Wines. Because she wouldn’t be scathing the way his wife had been. She wouldn’t make comments about whether they’d have to eat fish on Fridays now, whether grace would have to be said before every meal, whether workers would be fired if they didn’t attend Mass and genuflect before the altar. Morris smiled weakly. Paola was going to prove a penance and a half, that was for sure.
Considering his list again, he opened a sublist beside the entry watch your back, and wrote:
1. Bobo’s car: send Kwame to check if it’s still there?
2. Kwame: has anybody been asking him any difficult questions?
3. Azedine and Farouk: don’t sound too eager to condemn them,
4. Mimi: remove file in office. Priority!!!
5. Stan: Antonella’s conversations with? Avoid or tackle?
6. Coffins: possible exhumation? Refuse permission on grounds of emotional damage to family.
7. Miscellaneous tell-tale evidence: fingerprints, witnesses, flakes of skin, blood and the like. Reflect at length.
8. Anonymous phone call: try to find out if man or woman?
9. . . .
But it was hopeless. Morris stopped. How could he even begin to control everything? How could he know what Fendtsteig knew or might find out, or even what the man needed to find out to get a conviction? A body? A witness? It was simply amazing, he thought, his mind flitting rather dangerously from the sensibly practical to the philosophic, amazing how one - anyone - could live so blithely in one’s ignorance, one’s unknowing, until such time as one knew something, did something, that others mustn’t know. At which point it became necessary to be almost omniscient, to know everything about what everybody else was doing and thinking, simply in order to make sure that they remained ignorant of what you knew, of what must be for ever hidden.
The truth was, you had to become a sort of god when you committed a crime. In the day ye eat thereof,’ he remembered, ‘then ye shall be as gods.’
Standing up, straightening his tie as he watched himself in the glass of a bookcase (it was so nice to be able to wear his own smart clothes again), Morris phoned Inspector Marangoni and offered his congratulations on the policeman’s having arrested the two immigrants. And thank God he had! Because that man Fendtsteig or Fennstig, or whatever he was called, at the carabinieri just hadn’t seemed to be interested at all.
‘I hope,’ Marangoni said, cautious as ever, ‘that you didn’t find prison too trying
.’
Morris was aware that it would be as well to appear consistent. Yet he must not seem to be flaunting consistency. He hesitated. ‘From a commercial point of view’ - he spoke slowly - ‘it was something of a disaster, I’m afraid, with Bobo gone and me out at the same time. The company’s just been drifting. By the way, I don’t suppose there’s any chance of compensation over that?’ But then, before Marangoni could tell him the inevitable no, Morris added somewhat vaguely: ‘In personal terms, though, I don’t know, I suppose it proved quite a watershed. I mean, I had time to think about a lot of things.’
Marangoni managed a sort of sad chuckle. ‘I often think I wouldn’t mind a month or so in prison myself with all the work I’ve got to do here.’
‘I can imagine,’ Morris said politely.
‘Anyway, I’m sorry, but there can be no question of compensation,’ Marangoni went on, ‘since I gather that you were in fact choosing to be reticent in a situation where there was the apparent danger of perverting the course of justice.’
Morris left a brief embarrassed silence, before saying: ‘I suppose I should apologise if I held up investigations, but it was a very personal matter. I was confused.’
‘So I gather,’ Marangoni said, but non-committal.
‘Anyway, yes, I just phoned to offer my congratulations, I mean, I’m sure it isn’t easy to track down these people.’ He hesitated. ‘And then to say that if I can help in any way, I’d be delighted to do so.’
‘We’ll be in touch,’ Marangoni said.
