Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  Then quite suddenly she was sitting beside him. He knew she was, Mimi’s ghost, even though he couldn’t see her. Her perfume filled the car. She was pulling up her dress. On those same stitched and patched pants Morris kept under his pillow. He felt his hand as if guided to his zip.

  She began to quote: ‘My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.’

  Morris closed his eyes. At the same time, a voice said drily: ‘Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ah omnibus. . . .’ Forbes was standing by the car, hand in hand with the young Ramiz, a benevolent smile on his face.

  How cleverly Mimi had planned this little introduction to what Morris now accepted must inevitably happen later.

  That evening he dined with Antonella at Casa Trevisan. It was a deliciously formal occasion, with the Signora’s old donna di servizio cooking costole di manzo and an excellent side-plate of steamed finocchio. Antonella was wearing a simple black dress, but belted to bring out the extravagant hourglass of her shape. She moved gracefully against a backdrop of antique furniture, sombre houseplants. Her face had that depth of awful experience, a lesser beauty suffused and enhanced by terrible wisdom, Bobo’s betrayal, her sister’s unmentionable crime and fate. As if like some Greek widow, she’d lived through the whole Trojan War and worse, and now wanted only to forget.

  With the maid sliding silently back and forth, they talked business: the larger and larger orders from Doorways, first interest shown by an American liquor-store chain. There would have to be some expansion of the bottling facilities, which might be difficult with interest rates back at fifteen per cent again, though Morris was willing to sell the flat in Via dei Gelsomini to raise part of the money. He’d had another excellent offer from the builder.

  Then Antonella said that she herself had been thinking of selling her flat.

  ‘Which means you’d expect me to move out of here?’ Morris asked.

  But she said not at all. Not at all. Casa Trevisan was big enough for both of them, wasn’t it? They could economise. ‘Anyway there are no unhappy memories here,’ she added, ‘for either of us.’ She dipped her eyes into a plate of cooked plums and cream.

  They talked about politics. The local politicians Bobo had always relied on for cover from tax inspections were all under investigation in the wave of bribe scandals. The government was tottering, the electoral law had been revolutionised. Italy was changing. They would have to run the company in a different way now: openly, honestly, but without losing sight, Morris insisted, of this policy of employing people who needed help.

  Antonella agreed a hundred per cent. She made notes on a piece of paper, discussed quotations for new plant, the possibility of grants. An architect was drawing up a design for that chapel they were to build. Morris lapped it up. When had he ever met a woman you could really discuss things with before? When had he ever felt so free, from all his anxieties, his prejudices, that constant collision of exaltation and angst that had characterised these last sad years?

  Wiping her mouth, she said: ‘By the way, Fendtsteig came to talk to me again today.’

  Immediately every blood-vessel hardened. If the alarm didn’t immediately show on his face, it was only thanks, once again, to Bobo’s old guard dog. A plum stuck, unsavoured, in his gullet.

  ‘No, he just pointed out all the contradictions in the case, all the loose ends.’

  Morris almost choked into his napkin, but then managed to get out: ‘Such as?’

  Obviously she was determined to arrive at a point where they could talk about the thing straightforwardly and without emotion. ‘He was concerned about Kwame’s motive for, for killing Bobo. He was concerned about your wife’s motive for covering for him. He was concerned about who made that anonymous phone call the night after his disappearance. He was concerned as to the identity of Bobo’s,’ she hesitated, ‘woman.’ She stopped, then very matter-of-factly added: ‘He obviously still believes that you were involved in one way or another.’

  Morris stared at her across a table whence the maid was clearing plates now. Antonella smiled rather sadly at him over an elaborately embroidered lace tablecloth above which the cruet was two tiny silver wine vats supported by a gnarled trunk of vine, cast by expert artisans for Non-fortuna-sed-labor himself.

  ‘He says one disappearance and two corpses and nobody in gaol is too much for him to consider the case closed.’

  Morris sighed. He decided, and told her so, that he would go and see the man tomorrow. He would go and see the man and hammer the whole thing out with him and insist that he consider it over, closed, finished, otherwise it was just too humiliating.

  Later they adjourned to a straight-backed sofa and read a passage from Revelation together, closing the evening towards ten-thirty with a chaste kiss at the door. ‘Your poor cheek,’ she said, lifting a gentle finger to the many scars. ‘You must think you were terribly unlucky running into our family, with all the awful things that have happened.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Morris replied, and his soft blue eyes must have told her: not so long as I have you.

  He lay in his bed and gazed at Mimi. He liked to light the room with a candle these days. The flickering flame brougtmhe painting alive, shifting shadows over her face, drawing out glints of colour from her eyes. When the phone rang he dealt quite quickly with a sickeningly grateful Forbes. Apparently the man had already been in touch with Stan to tell him there was no place for him at Villa Catullus. Good. Then, sitting up, propped upon the bolster and staring at her for inspiration, he once again brought all the facts together, listed them one by one, this extraordinary series of distasteful events, betrayals, blackmails, idiocies, spitefulness, lust, excellent intentions, listed them all to then toss them into the kaleidoscope of his imagination, where they might be shaken this way and that in the hope that at the end some coherent and suddenly obvious pattern might emerge which he could then memorise and take to Fendtsteig like some theory of relativity that finally explained everything.

  It was an exercise that brought on a mild and not unpleasant sense of vertigo, like the night he and Mimi had lain on the beach in Ostia and looked for patterns in the stars, or when one took on some puzzle that was too difficult, and yet clearly did have a solution somewhere. And the agony of it was precisely that, that it did have a solution. If it didn’t, he might have just let be and given up.

  The idea that Bobo, having run off with his mistress, might have been responsible for Paola and Kwame’s deaths brought something more than the ghost of a smile to Mimi’s face.

  And had the handwriting of that billet-doux ever been compared with his wife’s? Could he himself count on having recognised it as Paola’s writing, given that she wrote so very little?

  There were circumstances in which it was not unreasonable to suppose that Paola might have made that call. If, for, example, Kwame had already told her that Morris had done it. To cover for him. Though of course he had never been able to wring from the police whether the call had been made by a man or a woman.

  The hypothesis that he might have made the call himself in some somnabulistic post-homicidal trance brought on a dizziness that was almost exactly hilarity and horror reflecting each other down the interminable hall of distorting mirrors that was Morris Duckworth’s mind.

  An invigorating thought.

  Until, far on in the early hours, it occurred to Morris to let be. He would never marshal these facts into anything like coherence. In the end this was no more of a defeat than the one almost everybody had to face when it came to understanding their lives. No more of a defeat than the one Fendtsteig would be savouring for many and many a year to come. Yes, Morris thought, yes, he would accept his mere humanity and live in the only way one could: from day to day, from hand to mouth.

  Tour hand to my mouth,’ he told the painting.

  The candle guttered. Dyin
g, then flickering to life again, the flame definitely stirred the fingers of a white hand on the blue velvet of her robe, lifted the corners of her lips.

  ‘Morri,’ she said. ‘Morri!’

  And Morris knew it was enough. He had reached a point of rest. He need do no more.