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

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.’
    â€˜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.’

5
    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