Mimi's Ghost Read Free Page B

girls had run off with him, and not Massimina Trevisan? He could then have become the respected export manager of a major company with a vast international distribution network. He could have been responsible for sponsoring small cultural ventures, workshop theatres, local exhibitions of Etruscan art, sober books of artistic photography. Or again, what if he had taught English in more exclusive circles in Milan (as why the hell shouldn’t he with his educational background)? Then only the sky would have been the limit: the Berlusconis, the Agnellis, the Rizzolis, quite unimaginable wealth and signori- lità . . . . Given that he had pulled it off with the suspicious and decidedly refractory Trevisans, was it so unfeasible that he could have done the same with the more generous industrial nobility? Could still do it perhaps, if only he put his mind to it.
    But there lay Morris’s snag. Morris didn’t, except in emergencies, put his mind to practical things. And sometimes not even then. He allowed himself to be drawn into aesthetic considerations, existential dialogues. His brain was incredibly fertile territory, but it seemed that what had been planted there was exotic and ornamental, rather than practical. He prided himself on flying off at tangents, on making acute observations, but he could never plan anything more than a day or two ahead. (Would he ever have started the Massimina business had he had the faintest inkling of how it must end? Surely not. That had been an appalling discovery of the very last hour.) He was like a novelist who could never remember what his plot was supposed to be, or more appropriately, a miserable opportunist, picking up crumbs wherever they fell.
    Hadn’t it been the same with his marriage? The situation had presented itself; it was Paola had made the offer, just as two years ago it had been Massimina approached him, rather than he her. And Morris had been unable to hold off and play for higher stakes, unable to see that he was made for better things.
    Of course, there had been certain alleviating circumstances on the second occasion: the euphoria arising from his having survived a major police investigation had doubtless played its part. In the happy-go-lucky mood he’d been in, the surprise invitation to accompany sister Paola to England had had a smack of destiny about it. Riding high, he had accepted, plus of course there had been that prurience, that perverse poignancy of remaining, socially and emotionally, so close to the scene of the crime. Ostensibly Paola had been going on an extended holiday to help her get over the family bereavement, and this again was the kind of pathos that attracted Morris, rich as it appeared to be with noble emotion and dignity. In the event, however, it all too soon emerged that the real reason for her English trip was her need to avoid her friends until such time as she could get over the snub of having been dropped by her long-time dentist fiance.
    Be that as it may, when they had arrived at the airport and were sitting in a taxi (the very first taxi of Morris’s life as it happened), her cosy suggestion that he stay in the expensive Notting Hill flat which family friends had provided for her had been nothing if not explicit. Still excited, understandably, by his newly acquired wealth (certificates for 800 million lire’s worth of Eurobonds in his suitcase), lulled by the excellent Barolo they had drunk with their snack on the plane, and by no means averse to pursuing the sexual experiments which had so pleasantly if poignantly brightened up his abduction of Mimi, Morris did not even look for reasons for not agreeing. He was riding the crest of a wave. He could do nothing wrong. And it had been particularly good fun, one London afternoon to invite his dumb, proletarian, carping father over to the Pembroke Villas address and flaunt an ambience of Persian rugs and Mary Quant curtains that even the pigheaded Mr Duckworth must have