Mimi's Ghost (6 page)

‘A
hundred and fifty,' Morris said, since of course this was what was expected. They didn't want charity.

Two hundred.'

I said a hundred and fifty.' He was rather enjoying this. Forbes appeared, and so would see the aplomb with which Morris carried it off.

‘A hundred and eighty.' The Moroccan's leathery smile was forced. But Morris was used to forced smiles.

‘A hundred and fifty and it's a deal,' he said.

The Moroccan scowled. As he must. Forbes climbed stiffly into the car, one dusty eyebrow raised.
‘Caveat emptor,
m'boy,' he said wryly. But Morris felt he was on a winning streak. ‘I said a hundred and fifty, not a lira more.'

Already he had half a vague idea of videotaping Massimina's winking eye on the tomb photograph. Might she eventually be sanctified if one could prove something like that?

Reluctantly, the Moroccan gave in. ‘OK. You have the money ready. You stop by that white van.' He pointed to a decrepit VW beyond the petrol pumps, where a small boy was apparently filling a flat tyre from the air stream. Morris duly drove over, wallet in hand. Then a few moments later, on the road again, box with video on the back seat, he was enjoying such a high that he went and explained his whole plan to Forbes in just a few well-chosen sentences. His main aims being, he insisted, first to help out his friend, Forbes, and second, not to let this Polio Bobo merely exploit the poor immigrant folk in his bid to increase production. If one had to be an industrialist, Morris said, he would like to think of himself as being in the benevolent Cobden tradition, rather than a Gradgrind.

Forbes was clearly surprised. If not floored. It wasn't exactly what he had had in mind, he said. He fiddled in his jacket pocket for pipe and tobacco, a look of prim concern on his face. ‘What I was planning to do, as you know, was to bring over public-school children from England, teach them a little Italian and art history in pleasant surroundings, and give them an opportunity to see the country firsthand. As a means of earning my daily bread, of course. I wasn't intending to, er, set up a hostel for Ghanaians and Senegalese on shift work.'

Morris hated smoking in the car, but let it pass. He was mature enough to appreciate that everybody had their shortcomings. For two or three minutes he drove steadily, letting his idea sink in, waiting for any further objections to surface. Then, with a businesslike frankness he was consciously cultivating these days, he set about persuading Forbes as to which side his bread was buttered.

The point is you'll need a fair slice of capital to set up this school, correct?'

‘Res angusta dorni,'
agreed the old man.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I was merely accepting your premise.'

Well, Morris of course had access to that capital through the Trevisan family. Say, four or five hundred thousand a month to rent an old farmhouse somewhere, plus a few million to make it functional. The problem being, he explained, that the selfish Trevisans would never make an investment like that just for Forbes. There would have to be something in it for them. Immediately if possible. Hence the idea of using the place to house the immigrants for shiftwork in bottling and packing. In fact it was rather fortunate that Forbes had spoken to him just when Polio Bobo had got this bee in his bonnet about stepping up production and using the machines at night. Then if Forbes could teach them, the immigrants, a little Italian and art history into the bargain, for which he would of course be paid, he would not only be carrying out an act of charity, but they would also be willing to accept, lower wages. ‘Maybe the local government would even give us a grant or something. Everybody would be happy.' And since bottling was seasonal, as soon as the immigrants were gone, Forbes would have the building ready and could get over the kind of people he wanted, the public-school children. It was a way of setting up. Within a couple of years he'd have exactly the kind of institution he wanted: a gentlemanly live-in school of culture. ‘Hopefully with a couple of scholarship places for people from my own kind of background,' Morris added complacently. He did have this genuine feeling of needing to repay a debt.

Forbes was silent. They were descending the far side of the Apennines now, picking up the first signs for Florence.

The only trouble, as I see it,' Morris admitted, ‘is that they'll all be boys. You know? They don't seem to have any of their women with them as yet.'

‘Ah.' Forbes paused, brow knitted over a packed pipe. He sighed heavily, then spoke with that generosity Morris had come to associate with true class: ‘I suppose if it really is the only way, I shall have to let you twist my arm.'

Mother had been interested in art. Father was a piss artist. Morris was aware of a Lawrentian banality in this analysis, this antithesis. But if things were banal it was presumably because they did indeed happen a lot. As caricature also had its unmistakable authenticity. So, his case had been no different from thousands of others. But what could you expect? Indeed it was precisely that lack of uniqueness, the sheer number of those united by a common cultural poverty, that gave his childhood its poignancy. Though by the same token, the anonymity of that starting line must render his later distinctions all the more remarkable.

Mother had been interested in art. She had encouraged him to read, draw, play the violin. Drawing he had never been any good at (his instinct was for the succession of events in time, not the deployment of objects in space), and then Father had trampled all over his jumble-sale violin when the boy's practising had coincided - but it was hardly an improbable coincidence - with a particularly dire hangover. But nobody had been able to stop Morris reading. Indeed there were times when it seemed he had read every book Acton library had to offer, from
Aachen: Her history
to Stefan Zweig's not unformative
The Tide
of Fortune
(Jewishness was something Morris had often found himself deeply attracted to). Father told him that only idlers and wankers read all the time, because reading was the only ‘activity' which allowed you to keep your hands in your pockets. Morris had been aware of a certain crude veracity in Father's observations. There was the rub.

But he would not talk to his father about it any more. No, no and no! There would be no more self-justificatory hours with the dictaphone. Absolutely not. No more postcards with boastful allusions. After that brief summer with Massimina he need prove his manhood no more.

Due to the difficult circumstances at home, Morris had done his reading in the library's reference room amongst diligent schoolboy Sikhs and the unemployed rustling their
Suns
and
Mirrors.
Happy, happy days. Knowledge of the visual arts, on the other hand, had mainly been limited to visits to provincial museums when climatic conditions on their unfailingly coastal holidays finally made the beach too grim a prospect even for Father's pioneering spirit. Or rather, Father would roll his towel round still-damp swimming trunks and announce that they were off for their dip anyway, come hell or high water, and Mother would at last rebel and weep, gesturing at the bowing poplars round the caravan site, the racing clouds, the drizzle spotting their view of the communal toilets. Courageously, she called attention to Morris's cough, his weak chest. So while Father eventually agreed to sit out the long wait till opening time in one of the seafront amusement parlours, she would take the boy to the local art gallery, or, better still, on a country bus ride to the nearest stately home where a cap-in-hand aristocracy had just begun allowing the likes of Morris to savour their wealth the better to be able to keep it for themselves.

Above all he remembered the steady eyes of powdered faces in high white neck ruffs, and the kind of gothic, angst-torn romantic landscapes that only the well-off could afford to contemplate with equanimity. Yet the ten-year-old Morris loved it. He loved the smell of polished parquet, the flower-patterned chaises longues, the tall windows with their sash-tied velvet curtains looking out on manicured slopes cradling dainty fish-ponds. He loved the hush and echo of spacious interiors whose designers had always put abundance before necessity. And he knew he had been bora into the wrong class.

And quite probably into the wrong race too. For after Mother's death, when West London became so alien he was all but forced to spend his weekends at the Victoria and Albert, the National Gallery, the British Museum or the Tate, a restless, adolescent Morris had slowly begun to appreciate that the sort of elegance he felt most attracted to, even akin to,- did not originate in the glorious military and meteorological past of his native land: the Wellingtonian battle scenes. Constable skies, Turner seas. But in Italy.

It was an undistinguished triptych by Cespo di Garofano that finally brought the idea to the surface of his consciousness. There were Santa Cecilia, the Madonna, and San Valeriano. They stood so straight, yet at the same time with such ease and enjoyment. They were dressed so well, but not with that strait-laced English constriction of ruffs and bodices, as if correct presentation were some kind of social curse. No, these people took pleasure in their clothes, the soft swathes of red and blue, the glittering brooches, elegant sandals. And what senuousness about lips and eyes! The Madonna no less than the others. Sensuousness expressed through formality. Formality growing out of sensuousness. So that Morris saw for the very first time how the rude pleasures of his father and the piety of his dear dead mother need not always be at odds.

Also, despite the darker hair colour, San Valeriano bore a definite resemblance to himself.

Hence, when events conspired - and there really could be no other word for it - to get him thrown out of Cambridge, it had seemed only natural for Morris to head for Italy.

‘Do you ever look for people you know in paintings?' he enquired of Forbes now, as they drove round Piazza della Libertà a second time. As always in this chaotic country, parking was proving impossible. There were cars on the pavement, cars on the central reservation, cars double parked even at the bus-stops. But Morris did not wish to break the law. Surely there must be a car park somewhere. He was perfectly willing to pay.

‘How do you mean?' Forbes enquired.

‘People you know, who are dear to you, do you ever look for them in paintings?'

‘You mean for portraits which resemble them?' Forbes specified.

‘Yes.' For the sake of the conversation Morris chose to accept this loss of meaning, niggling though it was.

‘Not really my line in art history.'

‘I know. I appreciate that. But out of curiosity. You've never found a face in a picture? Your wife, for example.'

‘No.' Forbes was emphatic now. ‘Neither found nor looked for.'

Morris was silent, his eye searching the car-cluttered twentieth-century pavements beneath the majestic elegance of Renaissance palazzi. Forbes was watching him from small green eyes. Then the phone trilled.

Morris was so engrossed in the rich pleasures of thought and the tribulations of parking he almost made the mistake of picking it up. But no, he had told her he would be seeing a client at ten-thirty and it was only ten to eleven. He wasn't such a greenhorn as to make a slip like that.

Forbes watched. After exactly ten trills and another turn round another piazza the phone stopped.

‘You know, you are a curious chap, Morris,' Forbes told him.

Morris turned and flashed him his most brilliant smile from beneath the blond thatch. He could almost feet the blueness of his own eyes, he felt so flattered, and in a gesture of anarchical flamboyance he stopped the car on a pedestrian crossing right outside Palazzo dei Signori.

The gallery was certainly a great improvement on the street. Yet curiously a reflection of it too, Morris thought, performing one of those sudden penetrative turns of mind that always pleased him. There were the same colours, but frozen here in the dull pink of the marble, the cream of frothy travertine. There was the same sensuality of the men and women in the piazza, but stilled into perpetual contemplation by brush and chisel, a sort of shadowy distillation of the intense and too often vulgar world outside, a cool simulacrum, purged of urgency and appetence. He decided he would extend this visit as long as was reasonably possible. Massimina was on the third floor in Room VIII, but she could wait. Morris had always been a great believer in the deferment of pleasure.

After a brief trip to the loo, Forbes took him by the elbow and began to guide him through the Vasariano corridor, then the Hermaphrodite's Room. The man was so knowledgeable , so intelligent. He invited Morris to touch the smooth thighs of an Apollo, to feel the volume, the muscle-bound fullness of the stone. This was the kind of thing he wanted to teach his young students, he said, when the school was finally set up. To appreciate the pleasure of art, rather than just being in awe of it. Children should be invited to copy and then to create. It was really the only way to learn the
gratia placendi.

Which meant? How Morris loved that Latin! His hand ran down the stone across a perfect knee that might have been his own but for the lack of reflex.

The delight of pleasing.' Forbes's voice was plummier than ever.

‘Attenzione, signore!'
The attendant appeared from nowhere. A firm hand pulled at Morris's elbow.
‘Non si tocca,
not to touch. Or out! Is very bad!
Capito?'

Morris whirled round. Why did authority always make him so nervous? That sense of being caught doing something he shouldn't. Immediately he was ready to run. And at exactly the same moment he remembered he was supposed to have sent a fax to Doorways stores to confirm their order. The trip was ruined, the mood he had been so carefully nurturing gone.

‘Philistine mentality masquerading as protector of the arts,' Forbes commented with a sad shake of the head as the attendant returned to his seat. ‘Surely he could see we weren't doing any harm.' In a rare moment of self-revelation, he added: ‘One of the reasons I left England actually.'