Mimi's Ghost Read Online Free Page B

hospital, was found to have lost her child. When Morris had tried (and he had cancelled his honeymoon flight to the Azores, for God’s sake) to express his quite sincere condolences to Bobo, the unpleasant young Veronese had scowled at him as if it must somehow be his fault. But there was no limit, Morris sometimes thought, to people’s desire to find a scapegoat. Nobly he decided not to bear a grudge against the boy. Perhaps in time and against all the odds they would learn to like each other.
    After three months’ intensive treatment. Mamma had still not regained the use of the left side of her body. Without having any specific instructions, Bobo simply stepped in and took over Trevisan Wines, inviting Morris, after a couple of violent arguments with Paola, to open a small commercial office for the company in town. And of course what Morris should have said was no. He was not cut out for trade and commerce. Fundamentally, he had a delicate, aesthete’s personality, and no desire at all to engage in the hurly-burly of commercial life. He should have been a photographer, a fashion designer, a theatre critic. Yet the opportunist in him wouldn’t pass it up. Perhaps because in another department of his mind he had always wanted to be who he wasn’t, always wanted to please macho Dad as much as darling Mum. And then because he wanted to be Italian of course, a real member of a real Italian family, and because he felt strangely drawn to the surly Bobo. Either he would make the boy like him, or make him pay for not doing so. In any event, he was given an office two metres by two in the centre of town and invited to find new buyers for a company he knew nothing about. That was six months ago.
    Morris slammed the door on the barking dog outside. He was in a small grey office which nothing could redeem - certainly not the cheap gun-metal desks, nor the fifties filing cabinets, nor the squat computer, the smeared windows with their sad view of two large trucks tucked between dirty trees, the shelves with their manuals on vinification and piles of brochures on Trevisan Wines (published in 1973 and far from being exhausted). One of the first things Morris had done on joining the company had been to flick through the English translation of this brochure, which told the unsuspecting buyer that: ‘Born of moronic soils and famous stock of vineyard plants, this nectar of the pre-Alps cannot not satisfy the updated gusto for palette harmony and a fragrance that entices.’ His suggestion that the piece be rewritten had been met with scepticism. The company had only a handful of foreign clients and none of them was English. It wasn’t worth the printing costs. So that there the brochures still sat in dusty piles, unused and unusable. Indeed, the only new thing around was a down-market pornographic calendar, free gift of the Fratelli Ruffoli bottle-producing company, where the said company’s product was presented in intimate proximity to what most men presumably thought of as the great focuses of pleasure. A small plastic crucifix hung opposite the calendar over the door that led through to the bottling plant proper. Morris found both decorations equally distasteful.
    Reckoning he had about half an hour, he switched on the computer on the production manager’s desk and one after the other slipped in the disks he found in the top drawer. Unfortunately he had no experience of computers, nor any desire to gain any; thus when finally he found the file. Safari e stipendi, 1990 , he was unable to access it. It was too infuriating, especially since this was precisely the kind of information that should have been freely available to a member of the family. Another file on another disk promised to tell him about Fornitori - uvalvini, but again he couldn’t get at it. Still, there was something odd there just in that title, ‘Suppliers - grapes/ wines’. Morris stared at the unpleasantly glowing