Painting Death (Duckworth and the Italian Girls Series #3)
352
Painting Death (Duckworth and the Italian Girls Series #3)
352eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Never satisfied with being anything short of the best, he comes up with a plan to put on the most exciting art exhibition of the decade, based on a subject close to his heart: killing. All the great slaughters of scripture and classical times will be on show, from Cain and Abel, to Brutus and Caesar. But as Morris meets stiff resistance from the director of Verona’s Castelvecchio museum, everything starts to unravel around him. His children are rebelling, his mistress is asking for more than he wants to give, his wife is increasingly attached to her aging confessor, and, worst of all, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore the ghosts that swirl around him, and the skeletons rattling in every closet. The shame of it is that Morris Arthur Duckworth really did not want to have to kill again. Tim Parks’ acclaimed Duckworth trilogy has been thirty years in the making. In Painting Death, he brings it—and his serial-killer alter ego—to a very fitting—and very funny—end.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628726206 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2015 |
| Series: | The Duckworth and the Italian Girls Novels , #3 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
MORRIS WOULD ARRIVE LATE for the ceremony. That was appropriate for someone of his importance. It was in his honour after all. But not so late as to be disrespectful; if one disrespects those doing the honouring, one diminishes the recognition. He watched in the mirror as steady hands pushed a Tonbridge School tie tight into the still-firm skin of his strong neck. He would look smart, without being obsequious; neither formal, nor casual. These were fine lines to tread and that he could do so with ease was one of the rewards of maturity. Ease: that was the word. Morris would appear at ease with the world, at ease with himself, his scarred face, his thinning hair; at ease with his wealth, his wife, his fine family, fabulous palazzo and now, at long last, this distinction conceded in extremis. All's well that ends well. You're a happy man, Morris Duckworth, he told himself out loud, and he smiled a winning smile. No, a winner's smile; not a single niggle that nagged, not a prick of the old resentment. Thank you, Mimi, he mouthed to the mirror, admiring the brightness in blue British eyes. Thank you so much!
'Cinque minuti,' sang a voice from below. It might have been the dear dead girl herself !
'Con calma!' Morris called cheerfully. After all, they lived only a stone's throw from the centre of civic power. If he had one regret, it was that this was only Verona, la misera provincia; Piazza Bra, not Piazza di Spagna. But then think how dirty Rome was.
How chaotic. And how grey, grim and gauche Milan. This prim little town is your destiny, Morris. Be happy.
As he left the bathroom, the flick of a Ferragamo cuff revealed a Rolex telling him it was indeed time. Le massime autorità would be waiting. The maximum authorities! For Morris!
'Papà!' came the voice again. His daughter's wonderful huskiness, so like dear Mimi of old. She was impatient. All the same, Morris couldn't resist and stepped into The Art Room for a moment of intimacy with his most recent acquisition.
The heavy old frame rested on a chair. Morris hadn't quite decided where to hang it yet. He ran a finger down its mouldings. How austere they were! The gilt had gone gloomily dark, from candle smoke, no doubt. It was a pleasure to think of sombre old interiors made somehow darker by their flickering candles. But in the painting itself the two women were walking down a bright street. It was the Holy Land, millennia ago: two bulky figures, seen from behind, in voluminous dresses. Between them, trapped by hand against hip, the woman on the right held a broad basket. It was partially covered, but the white cloth had slipped a little to reveal, to the viewer, unbeknown to the two ladies as they sauntered away, not a loaf of bread, not a heap of washing, not a pile of freshly picked grapes but, grimacing and astonished, a bearded male face: General Holofernes! His Assyrian head severed.
'Papà, for Christ's sake!'
Now there came a deeper voice, 'Morrees! You mustn't keep the mayor waiting.'
Morris frowned, why did he feel so drawn to this painting? Two women carrying a severed head. But the scene was so calm and their gait so relaxed it might as well have been the morning's shopping.
'Dad!'
In her impatience, Massimina switched to English. Morris turned abruptly on a patent-leather heel and strode to the broad staircase. As he skipped down stone steps, running a freshly washed hand along the polished curve of the marble banister, his two women presented themselves in all their finery: Antonella magnificently matronly in something softly maroon; Massimina willowy in off-white, and both generously bosomed in the best Trevisan tradition. Morris smiled first into one face, then the other, pecking powdered cheeks and catching himself mirrored in the bright windows of four hazel eyes. Only his son had inherited the grey Duckworth blue.
'Where's Mauro?' Morris asked, pulling back from his wife. Her gold crucifixes still galled, but he had learned not to criticise. He was not a control freak.
Antonella was already making for the door where the ancient Maddalena stooped with her mistress's mink at the ready. Antonella pushed her arms into sumptuous sleeves. 'The cardinal will be there,' she was saying, 'and Don Lorenzo. We're late.'
'But where's Mauro? We can't go without Mauro.'
Morris couldn't understand why his wife wasn't taking the problem more seriously. Or why the decrepit maid wasn't wearing a starched white apron over her black dress, as specifically instructed. This was an occasion for family pride.
'I don't think Mousie came home last night,' Massimina said.
'Don't think?' Morris stopped on the threshold. 'Home from where? Haven't you phoned him?' He was not happy with the thought that a son of his could be nicknamed Mousie.
'I'm sure he'll meet us there,' Antonella said complacently. She was standing in the courtyard now where threads of water splashed across the stony buttocks of a young Mercury apparently leaping into flight from a broad bowl of frothy travertine. All around, vines climbed the ochre stucco between green-shuttered windows while just below the roof a sundial took advantage of the crisp winter weather to alert anyone still capable of reading such things that Morris was now seriously late for the ceremony that would grant him honorary citizenship and the keys to the city of Verona.
'He went to the game.'
'What?'
'Brescia away. I called him, but his phone is off.'
'He knows when the ceremony is, caro.' Antonella hurried back and took her husband's arm. 'We were chatting about it yesterday.' Her manner, if only Morris had had the leisure to contemplate it, was a charming mix of anxiety and indulgence. She treated her husband as a troublesome boy, which rather let their obstreperous son off the hook. 'I'm sure we'll find him there before us. But we mustn't keep the mayor waiting. In the end, the only person who really counts today is you, Morrees.'
This was such a pleasant thought that Morris allowed himself to be pulled along, outside the great arched gate and into the designer-dressed bustle of Via Oberdan. All the same, he hadn't begged his boy two days' truancy from one of old England's most expensive schools, and paid a BA flight to boot, to have the lout abscond at this moment of his father's glory. For some reason the word 'coronation' came to mind: Morris was to be crowned King of Verona. He frowned to chase the thought away; one mustn't lose one's head.
'By the way, who won?' Antonella asked. Morris's wife had a magnanimous air; it was the mink's first outing this season.
Massimina took her father's arm on the other side. 'Alas, Brescia,' she sighed. 'Own goal in injury time.'
Comfortable between them, though it was disconcerting that his daughter was so tall, Morris marvelled that his lady-folk should be aware of such trivial things. What was injury time in the end? He had never really understood. Dad had not wanted company when he set off to Loftus Road and anyway his son would not have been seen dead with a man wearing a green and white bobble cap.
'But if he didn't come home,' he protested, 'where did he spend the night? And why wasn't I told?'
There was no time to hear an answer, for on emerging from Via Oberdan into the wide open space of one of Italy's largest squares, it was to discover that Piazza Bra was not, right now, wide open at all. They had chosen this of all mornings to erect the stalls for the mercatino di Santa Lucia. Damn. From the majestic Roman arena, right along the broad Liston, past Victor Emmanuel on bronze horseback and as far as the Austrian clock, palely illuminated above the arch of Porta Nuova, the whole cobbled campo was chock-a-block with gypsies, extra-comunitari and assorted exempla of Veneto pond life scrambling together prefabricated stalls for the overpriced sale of torroni, candy floss and other vulgar, sugar-based venoms. It was a dentist's Promised Land, which fleetingly reminded Morris that this was another area in which his son was proving an expensive investment.
Through clouds of diesel from trucks unloading trifles and baubles of every bastard variety, not to mention the construction of a merry-go-round, Palazzo Barbieri on the far side of the square, solemn seat of the Veronese comune, suddenly seemed impossibly distant. Morris almost panicked. What if they called the event off? What if they mistook his belated arrival for a deliberate snub? One could hardly blame the traffic, living only three hundred yards away. Morris began to hurry, at first dragging his women with him, then freeing his arms to dive between a wall of panettoni and their leering vendor, the kind of squat, swarthy figure one associates with black markets the world over. It was a disgrace! He would say something to the mayor.
'Da-ad!' his daughter protested. 'Why do you always have to be in such a rush?' Only now did Morris realise the girl had put on four-inch heels, to cross a sea of cobbles. The original Massimina, who had been half her height, would have known better. And he had thought his first love dumb!
Antonella laughed. 'This way, Mr. Nonchalant,' she said and pulled her husband to the left, out of the throng and down the small street that ran behind the arena. Here, almost immediately, the way was clear and though the change of route had added a hundred yards or so to their walk, Morris understood at once there would be no problem. Thank God he had married such a practical soul! So much more sensible than her dear departed sisters. Nevertheless, he kept up a brisk pace, past beggars and chestnut vendors, just in case something else should come between him and his overdue due. The complacency of ten minutes before now seemed a fool's paradise and Morris knew from bitter experience that there was nothing to be gained from seeking to retrieve it. It took carefree weeks and important art acquisitions to consolidate a mood as positive as that, or at least an afternoon's revelling with Samira. For a moment, then, passing on one side a café advertising hot chocolate with whipped cream and on the other the arena ticket office promising the world's largest display of Nativity scenes — from the Philippines to the Faroe Islands! — Morris found himself struggling to relate two apparently remote but peremptory thoughts: first the memory of how he had ignominiously scuttled through these same streets thirty years ago, a wretched language teacher hurrying head down from one private lesson to another, always at the tight-fisted beck and call of people richer and stupider than himself (dear Massimina among them, it had to be said); and second, the reflection that his son was hardly likely to have taken his Tonbridge School uniform to a winter evening football game; so that even if the boy did make it to this morning's ceremony after a night slumming with thugs in foggy suburbs, he was not going to be sporting a burgundy and black striped tie that matched his own. Only now, still striding along in the shadow of the Roman amphitheatre with Antonella panting to keep pace in her furs, did Morris realise how much he had been looking forward to that little touch of father — son complicity; it was the kind of quietly significant detail he liked to think a fashion-conscious Veronese public would register with a twinge of envy: style the Italians might have in abundance, but never the sober solidity of a great British educational institution. In which case, come to think of it, the ungrateful boy might just as well not turn up for the ceremony at all. Perhaps I should pull him out of Tonbridge, Morris wondered, save myself thirty grand a year, and have the boy eke out a living teaching English, as I once had to. There! Realising that the two apparently separate thoughts had after all found a very evident and purposeful link — his spoiled son needed reminding what was what — Morris suddenly felt pleased again: whatever happened this particular morning, or any other morning for that matter, he would always have his wits, his wit. Hadn't he, in the end, Morris Duckworth, got himself to Cambridge University from Shepherd's Bush Comprehensive, the first and very likely the last pupil ever to do so? Let Mauro 'Mother's Boy' Duckworth do the same!
'I asked, have you prepared a speech?' Antonella was saying. 'Morrees! Eih, pronto? Aren't you listening?'
They had arrived at the bottom of the grand steps. The columned facade was above them.
'Of course,' Morris said, realising as he spoke that he had left the thing at home: three sheets of A4 on the windowsill beside the loo. He had allowed himself to be distracted by Judith and Holofernes.
His wife reached up to straighten the lapels of his jacket. Very quietly, she said: 'Just be careful not to say anything stupid.'
Morris was taken aback.
'Like the time at the Rotary.'
The English husband felt a dangerous heat flood his loins. 'It will be fine,' he said abruptly.
'Only trying to help,' she explained, brushing something off his shoulder. But he knew she was laughing.
'I was drunk,' he insisted.
'I know,' she smiled.
'The punch was too strong. They should have been gaoled for poisoning.'
'We're late, Morrees,' she said calmly. 'Come on.'
Right. But now where was his daughter? Son or no son, at least the three of them could ascend the town hall steps together. Morris turned but couldn't find her. The ridiculous Verona trenino was passing, a fake electric steam locomotive, bright red, with an open carriage behind and piped Christmas music deafening the dumb tourists on board. 'Hark the Herald.' How anybody could have imagined introducing such an atrocious eye-and- ear sore into the centuries-long sobriety of the city's ancient piazzas was beyond Morris. Had anyone ever sung 'Hark the Herald' in Italy? 'Late in time behold Him come!' Indeed. Just as Morris fought off a fleeting memory of his carol-singing mother (he himself had soloed 'Once in Royal David's' at St Bartholomew's, Acton) the train lurched forward with the clanging of a bell and Massimina emerged from behind, swaying impressively as she stepped out to cross the road, closely watched, Morris noticed, by three motorcycle louts smoking outside the wine bar at the corner. The girl was too attractive by half, too present and alive for her own good. Those heels would have to come down an inch or three. Confident nevertheless that his daughter was still a virgin, otherwise he would surely have known, Morris held out his hand as if to draw his child toward him. They would cut a fine figure entering the corridors of power side by side. Except that now an ancient gypsy woman reached up from the pavement — Grazie, grazie she wheedled — she must have imagined the wealthy man's outstretched arm held an offering of change. Irritated, Morris was about to shoo the crone away when he caught his wife's quick intake of breath. They were in full view of a dozen dignitaries and newspaper photographers standing under the portico at the top of the steps. Morris reached into his pocket and found the fifty-cent coin one had to keep ready for such occasions, because to open your wallet was always a mistake.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Painting Death"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Tim Parks.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.