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

be possible to buy a picture like that from a gallery like the Uffizi? I mean, they must have about thirty coronations of the Virgin.’
    Forbes thought not, but agreed that art was something one needed to have around in one’s own environment, rather than merely visit in museums. As with all beauty, the element of possession was important. He frequently felt nostalgic for his old house back in Cambridge and the paintings he had there. But not for the company. Would that he had left earlier and younger.
    Again Morris was too engrossed in his own thoughts to accept the invitation to enquire about the older man’s private life. Anyway, it was Forbes’s culture that interested him, not his personal vicissitudes. When the phone rang he hesitated a moment, wondering if he would ever experience the miracle of her phoning him.
    But it was Paola.
    â€˜Mamma’s come to,’ she said tersely. Tor God’s sake, it seems she’s going to recover. I can’t believe it!’
    Nor could Morris. Still, It did seem tasteless to show one’s disappointment so openly.
    The only consolation,’ his wife was remarking, ‘is that Bobo is more furious about it than we are.’
    Putting the phone down, Morris wondered how furious his brother-in-law would be when he realised Morris had confirmed, as he would the moment he got back to Verona, an order for four thousand cases with the tightest possible delivery dates. Quite suddenly he was determined to bring matters to a head.

6
    Towards midnight, when they had commiserated together over a good bottle of prosecco and Paola was exploiting Morris’s weakness for frozen chocolates to engage in some oral foreplay, the young Englishman remembered his purchase of that morning. Paola pouted around a melting praline. ‘A present, my dear,’ Morris insisted. In dressing-gown and slippers he walked down the stairs and out into the icy fog of the November night. Quite brazen, the builder had left his excavator parked outside the main gate, making entrance to drive and garages difficult. But some day Morris would find a way to make him pay. There was no hurry. He pulled the package from the back seat of the Mercedes. - It was stopping by his first-floor neighbour’s door to listen a moment to the television, that it occurred to Morris that the thing was too heavy. He was hearing the strip music from Channel 7’s late show. Surprise, surprise! And yes, it was distinctly audible on the stairs. Which was useful to know. Lifting the package and shaking it slightly, his self-satisfaction began to bleed away into swooning anxiety. Something had shifted inside with an unconvincing thud.
    â€˜I’ve made a fool of myself,’ he announced on walking back into the flat. Paola was tummy down on the sofa in just the kind of underwear he found at once exciting and in awful taste. She beckoned with a finger. Morris almost shouted: Tor Christ’s sake, I’ve been a complete and utter prick!’
    â€˜Mmm,’ she said.
    â€˜I hate myself.’ He began to tear at the Sellotape around the package with its photo of a Sony Videomaster. ‘I meant it as a present for you and instead I just wasted a hundred and fifty thousand lire. A hundred and fifty thousand!’
    Suddenly, but not entirely unexpectedly, he could feel the tears coming to his eyes, such a welling of conflicting emotions: self-abasement, anger, forgiveness, humiliation. His nails finally tore open the package, allowing a brick in a polythene bag to slither out and crash down on the tiled floor.
    Paola burst out laughing. ‘Oh, Mo, you idiot. You didn’t buy it from a m arocchino, did you? Everybody knows they’re all fakes.’
    The tinkling of her voice seemed to coincide with a sort of bubbling behind his eyes as if blood were flooding to the boil. For a moment even his pyjamas and dressing-gown felt tight around a swelling body. He was so full of rage. He