Read Online Mimi's Ghost by Tim Parks - Free Book Online Page B

could have picked that brick right up from the floor and smashed it straight down on her sneering, sluttish head. Massimina would never have behaved like this.
    â€˜I bought it for you!’ he screamed. To film ourselves. I was kind to the guy and he let me down!’
    Paola got up and came to hold him, trapping his arms in hers. Irritated, he pushed her away, but she came right back and repeated the gesture, arms folding tightly round him, pushing her face into his neck. ‘Mo, take me,’ she whispered, ‘take me. I love it when you’re angry. You’re so naive and sweet and strong and violent all together.’
    He made a half-hearted attempt to resist, not unaware of the gratifying intensity of these emotions, the pornographic aspect of her sheeny underwear on the dark petite body.
    â€˜I love it, I love it,’ she insisted, and pulling open his dressing-gown began to tug him by the two lapels.
    Later, when she was quietly sleeping, Morris lay awake in a sort of massacred consciousness where every element of his humiliation was kaleidoscopically alive and vivid. Until it occurred to him to get up and go back into the sitting-room. He switched on the light, picked up the brick in its polythene bag and set it down carefully on a rug by the sofa. Then, examining the floor, he found that there was indeed a severe chip in one of the tiles, an ugly, grainy white patch in what was a Bertelli design of delicate geometric greens. So that now the scenario was even worse. Not only had he been fool enough to give money to a man who, due to the way society had treated him, was bound to be a fraud, but then in his foolish hothead anger on realising his mistake, he had allowed himself to damage a tile that had cost in the region of forty thousand lire and would now cost at least twice that to remove and replace.
    Returning to bed, it was to find that Paola had invaded his space as she so often would. There was something childish about her luxurious slantwise sprawl under the heavy quilt. The kind of spoilt child who is used to having and taking everything. Morris put on his dressing-gown and sat in the room’s one armchair. For about an hour he stared into the dark. Once again he allowed vivid images of his humiliation to pass before his mind’s eye: the Moroccan’s practised scowl as he squatted down by the car window; his own foolish flush of triumph as he ‘brought the man down’ to one hundred and fifty thousand; Massimina’s painted wryness later on in the gallery, as though looking down on a poor, flailing enmired Morris from the great height of redeemed martyrdom; and then his wife’s pealing laughter, her animal grunts and satisfactions, as if her husband were no more than a source of pleasure, something to be enjoyed rather than understood and comforted. ‘Call no man happy until he is dead,’ Morris remembered from his Moralist Paper Tripos Part Two, and repeated it to himself over and over for much of the night. ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ He almost envied his mother-in-law, so close to the blissful threshold.

7
    Precariously perched on the hill above Marzana, it had three stories and a leaky roof with four statues, which Forbes, after standing discreetly in a corner of the terrace for a few moments, promptly pronounced of no aesthetic value, though Morris thought them, if nothing else, picturesque. Apparently they represented San Zeno, San Rocco, Sant’ Anna and Sant’ Agata, minor local saints of miscellaneous and implausible miracles. But this was the best part of Italian culture, Morris often felt: its fantastical superfluity. Who would ever believe that Mimi winked at him from photographs or called from old paintings? There was a way, he was discovering, in which his mentality was firmly grounded in the Italian religious tradition, and thus in a very profound way legitimised. He belonged here.
    Forbes also objected that the place