Juggling the Stars Read Online Free PDF

poultry magnate in the Veneto. A coup for the signora mamma who was doubtless happy to the point of wetting her pants. And hence Bobo’s opinion would count for everything. Morris smoothed his face blank with humility.
    'That’s right, I do some teaching.’ He hesitated. From the corner of his eye he caught a glance of Massimina’s mother, standing at the doorway, her face grained with the hard lines of fifteen years’ most businesslike widowhood.
    â€˜But that’s an extra really that I do more for my own pleasure than anything else, and then as a favour to the director of the school. My main job here is as an import-export agent. I’m associated with the London and Bristol trade boards and when companies in those towns are looking for customers or suppliers in this area, I do the contacting for them.’
    Morris then very casually mentioned the names of three Veronese companies he was working closely with at the moment, two clothing producers and one wine exporter, names you saw on posters and local television commercials. There was a fair chance, of course, Verona being the tiny, tight-knit place it was, that either the signora or Bobo would know people in these companies. But precisely the aplomb with which Morris took that risk should prove the clinching factor.
    Having said that, Morris waited. He mustn’t, at all costs appear to be defending himself. There was a space of almost a minute. The signora’s mouth had a definite, sunken, false-teeth look about it.
    â€˜And why did you come to Italy?’
    â€˜Fell in love with the place like everybody else. Holidays, you know. You do have such a marvellous country, Then, when my father in the Trade Board said he could get me this job, I jumped at the chance. I’ll be here permanently I imagine.’ Morris smiled, his own teeth being, as he knew, perfectly white. The fact that it was his father’s patronage that had got him the mythical job would be just what they wanted to hear. Strong family. Plenty of leverage. And then one could always have the man die if the whole thing got dicey.
    Over coffee, Antonella wanted to talk about Massimina’s studies. Antonella and the other older sister, Paola, both sat cross-legged and straight-backed on their straight-backed chairs with an atrocious air of nunnery about them, and for the first time Morris felt a twinge of genuine sympathy for the younger girl’s plight as the family dunce. He said he felt Massimina’s main problem was nervousness when it came to the exam, since in his evening class she worked hard and well. He accepted a piece of marzipan in the shape of the tower of Pisa. Massimina smiled a meek thank you. Then at the mere mention of photographs from somebody or other, Morris insisted on wading through all the family albums to the polite boredom of everybody else bar Massimina and the grandmother (charmed
her
pants right off!). Here was an afternoon on Monte Baldo, here another when Antonella was bora. Here was Massimina at five.
Oh ehe bella! Che carina!
And what a fine man Il Signore had been, my word! Very handsome.
    Morris didn’t even have to grit his teeth. He felt marvellous, was the truth. The smell of polished wood mingling with expensive female perfume was like a drug taking him up and up; the taste of quality cognac, Vecchia Romagna (how could he refuse a second glass?), and then the wonderful, the quite exquisite straitlaced opulence of it all… perfect! At the front door he kissed Massimina most decorously on both freckle-dusted cheeks.
‘Coraggio!'
 he whispered.
    â€˜I left my car down in the square,’ he explained to the others
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and then all the way home on the bus he was trying to remember whether he had ever told Massimina he didn’t have a car. (Why on earth did he go home by bus every evening if he had a car?)
    The letter arrived only two days later, quite a feat by Italian postal standards. And it was