Free Mimi's Ghost by Tim Parks Page B

anybody had done for him when he first arrived here! Driving the boy across town a few minutes later, he picked up the phone, pretended to dial, and immediately started to tell Mimi about his weaving metaphor. He experienced a curious frisson in doing this in front of somebody else. Like letting someone overhear you flirting without their knowing who with. Though it was cheating a little, choosing somebody as insignificant as Kwame for one’s audience. The point being, he explained, that for a successful design one would require a good variety of colours combining together in ways at once surprising and harmonious. Which meant you needed an artist. Only an artist would see as self-evident the congruity between apparently disparate elements, the way for example even Polio Bobo’s hostility and refusal to get involved was now to become part of the pattern, to galvanise it, give it tension, make it more fun, more of an achievement. So that if he had never felt that he really had the talent, and more critically the contacts, to become a writer or painter, perhaps in the end the truth was that he was an artist of life. He knew how to make things happen between people. ‘As they did between us, Mimi,’ he finished rather huskily. ‘As they did between us. How I miss you and miss you!’ Then he had to fight back the inevitable gnawing emotion these phone calls always prompted.
    On putting down the receiver, he turned to glance at Kwame. The boy smiled warmly and began to slap his knees in a slow, even rhythm. Pleasant company, Morris thought. Dumb, no doubt, but curiously understandings and deeply deserving of the help Morris was going to offer.

8
    It was a sort of village for the rich. Two older but completely renovated villas split up into flats, then four new palazzine with extravagant terrace balconies, expensive window fittings and copper drains. There was a swimming pool and tennis courts. But the most important feature, and one that Morris finally decided was a rather sad comment, was that the whole thing was surrounded by a tall, wire-topped wall, the entrance being guarded by an electronic gate and two video-cameras. As if one could simply cut oneself off from the whole of the world and wallow in one’s money! He felt these people deserved the sight of Kwame in their midst, a sort of visual expression of Morris’s own spiritual alienation. He rang one of forty bells.
    â€˜Sono to, Morris.’ He looked straight into the camera to the right of the gate and did not say he had come for Bobo.
    The maid said she would have to ask, thus allowing Morris to note that he was not among the privileged group of people whom the girl presumably knew to let in at any time of the day or night. A short, but telling wait, then the gate buzzed. Morris turned and only now beckoned to Kwame to get out of the car.
    The tiles were polished Sardinian granite, the walls a new kind of waxed stucco very much in vogue, the furniture predominantly antique, but with a curiously modern feel to it, perhaps because the chests and dressers had been so perfectly restored, stood out so cleanly against glossy floor and wall. Rather than suggesting some anchoring in history, the rich composure of an awareness of time, it was more as if everything had been snipped from the sheeny pages of Casa Bella,
    Yet Morris could not help admiring the environment. There was nothing gauche about it, none of Paola’s depressing predilection for pastel silks and soft low sofas, her vision of home as some kind of high-class brothel; nor was it the ad hoc muddle of the English homes he remembered. Yet one still felt there was something missing. The old family home in the outlying village of Quinzano, where Massimina had first taken him to meet her mother and sisters, had had some magical extra element, something that transformed provincial conservatism into richness and culture: a place that had been tastefully lived in! That was the goal.