Mimi's Ghost Read Online Free PDF

had developed at the corner of the mouth. Morris thus faced the problem of choosing between pushing her chair and carrying the very large wreath of flowers he had bought. But would they imagine Paola had bought the flowers? Morris knew there was no limit to people’s inattention. Sometimes it was useful and sometimes it wasn’t.
    Fog had melted into rain and the cemetery car park was overcrowded. Antonella was fussing hopelessly with the chair’s brake release; she couldn’t get the thing to move. Bobo had apparently mislaid the remote control to his Audi I oo in one of his tailored pockets. Morris stepped forward, seeing the solution. ‘May I?’ he offered, and handed the wreath to Signora Trevisan. ‘I thought perhaps you might like to put this on Mimi’s grave.’ Then, without waiting to decide whether the twisted mouth meant a grimace or a smile, he bent down to release the brake. After all, if the stiff-necked woman had welcomed him into the family in the first place, Mimi would never have met the end she had, there would never have been any register-office marriage, because Mimi would have settled for nothing less than the Duomo, so there would have been no stroke and no corpse to visit. Or rather, they could have walked together, arm in fashionable arm, to lay a couple of token chrysanths beside old Signor Trevisan, dead these fifteen years and more.
    There was quite a crowd flowing through the gate, past the gloomily hooded statues, the confidently engraved resurrecturis on the arch above. Impeccably dressed mourners strutted slowly beneath sober umbrellas, their voices suitably low, greeting friends, muttering sensible cliches. Inside, the porticoes offered a precise geometry of well-swept colour. The grave niches up on the walls were festooned with flowers and there was the pleasant click of expensive patent leather echoing on flags of provincial stone.
    Immediately Morris felt a sense of quiet satisfaction. The ritual formality of it all was so exhilarating, so right. Where would you find such an exquisitely poised communion of the living and the dead in grimy, pragmatic old England, such a sensual mix of extravagant furs and wine-warm marble, a whole population turning out to tip their hats to the industrious ancestry that had generated all this wealth and then so decorously departed? Son-in-law Morris was desperately delicate, easing Signora Trevisan’s chair down travertine steps to where the more pompous family tombs offered a competitive range of albaster Madonnas, guardian angels and stony Crucifixions. Suddenly he felt so pleased with himself, he turned to smile intimately at Polio Bobo, and thoroughly enjoyed the boy’s discomfort, the ripple of incomprehension passing over his mask of sobriety. Did he think Morris was homosexual or what?
    Pious Antonella picked up the smile and returned it, though coloured now by a sort of sad propriety, the consolations of religion playing unmistakably across her goosy cheeks. Could she be pregnant again? An heir to the Trevisan fortune? That would be most unfortunate. Sharing an umbrella with him, Paola was feeling down her fur on the left side to check that it wasn’t getting wet. Ten million lire’s worth, of course, and one had to be careful, but there were moments when a proper sense of occasion was even more important. Morris nudged his wife sharply as he swung the wheelchair into a small avenue of crushed white stones.
    non fortuna, sed labor , the letters were six inches high, gold-edged in a slab of white carrara, and the angel above had not come cheap either. Labor no doubt there must have been. All the same, Vittorio Trevisan had apparently been unable to work his way around a doubtless deserved cirrhosis. Now his photo stared bleakly from an oval blimp screwed into the marble, a respectable square-jawed man in a collar and tie that must have been too tight. Obviously the family had plumped for black and white