Mimi's Ghost Read Online Free Page A

Mamma’s good graces, no doubt with the intention of annexing the company to his own family empire. Whereas if they married immediately. Mamma would have to give Morris a position of some, and hopefully equal, importance.
    Of course in retrospect Morris saw now what a sad, sordid poverty-stricken kind of opportunism it had been which had made him agree to this: surrendering his privacy to a creature he barely knew out of the sack or in various states of intoxication (because she was keen on marijuana too), committing his very considerable brain power to the promotion of a few plonky vineyards, and above all entering (for there seemed no alternative if he was to make a go of the Trevisan clan) into a partnership with a gawky, spoilt, chinless young man who was as unworthy of Morris’s opposition as he was of his collaboration.
    But one was who one was in the end. Wasn’t this what Morris had been trying to tell his father in spool after spool of dictaphone tape these past five years and more? One was who one was. Character was destiny. This was the kind of thing that Morris Duckworth did (still afraid of ending up on the street despite that 800 million). And if he had recently stopped trying to explain himself to Dad after a cupboard full of cassettes stretching over six or seven years, wasn’t it precisely because he had at last realised that by that very same token - character destiny - his father could and would never understand anything Morris tried to tell him? The uncouch old goat was an uncouth old goat. How could you expect him to be otherwise? Morris was Morris, and thus he would remain, locked into his own skull, his own inadequacy, to the bitter end: an underachieving, desperate, somehow pantomime Morris. Wisdom meant accepting this.
    Though sometimes he felt quite different about life. Sometimes he felt there was nothing could stop him. Or at least that he might as well enjoy himself.
    Events had moved with soap-opera rapidity. The apartment had been bought (with his money, in his name - leaving less than 400 million - but he would never be held to ransom by his wife). Morris had attended a catechism course for adults and turned Catholic (interestingly enough it was here that he first came up against those Third World sufferers whose fate so often occupied his mind these days). A summer date had been set for the wedding. All had appeared to be going well. But then, despite this considerable effort on Morris’s part to conform with local mores, Paola, with typical instability, had at the very last moment changed her mind and decided she wanted to be married in the register office so romantically, albeit ominously, located on the supposed site of Juliet’s tomb. This was, and was intended as, a deliberate snub to her mother, a punishment for her being so syrupily ingratiating with the Posenato clan and so offhand if not actually cold with Morris.
    In the event it turned out to be a brilliant idea. Not only was Mamma furious (for the Posenato family would be upset by the idea of down-market, register-office in-laws), but Morris was actually able to gain ground with the old lady, and even with the fiercely pious (despite her pregnancy) Antonella, by presenting himself as the wise and reserved Englishman ostensibly struggling to have capricious young Italian Paola see reason. Indeed, the ruse worked so marvellously that, come the great day. Mamma’s frustration at being crossed like this had been too much for her and she was struck down by a thrombosis precisely as Morris turned from signing the papers to smile at the small gathering of Paola’s friends (including, rather disturbingly, the dentist).
    Mamma collapsed and was rushed off to rianimazione. Hearing the news during a last-minute dress-pinning session for her own ceremony later in the afternoon, Antonella had tripped on her train while hurrying down the stairs and, after much panic, ambulance-calling and toing and froing at the