Puccini's Ghosts (13 page)

His English accent is so reasonable. His words rise and fall like folds of dark brown velvet. All you have to do to believe him is to listen.

Well see, this is the official register, you’ve to be a properly constituted and affiliated club, association or society otherwise you’ll no get on it. An’ if you’re no on the register you’ll not get the hire.

My mother comes and leans on the wall with her arms folded. She sets her mouth in a thin line.

Uncle George bluffs on, giving assurances about honorary office-bearers and Memoranda and Articles of Association.

We’ll have all the proper affiliations in place. May we not book now, for August? It’s still several weeks away.

Our hearts lift a little, he is so easy to believe.

August?
The hall’s booked solid for August.

George shakes his head at my mother. He sticks out his tongue at the telephone.

The Burnhead Majorettes Display and the Bathing Belles go in the Town Hall in the eventuality of inclement weather. There’s the Land o’ Burns Ceilidh and the Accordion Championships Junior Heats. If you’d just said your dates to begin with, the man scolds, you’d have saved all the bother.

He sounds exhausted.

And it’s only a twenty-eight foot stage, any road.

George rings off. I shuffle away and lean back against the opposite wall.

My mother’s eyes are full of tears. She says, You see now? I told you. That’s all you get in this bloody place. Oh
God
!

She spins away up the stairs to her bedroom, sobs juddering out of her as she goes. Over our heads, the door slams and the house goes quiet.

Just the first hurdle, Uncle George says. You’re not deserting me, are you?

Now it’s just him and me. I look at him sitting on the floor opposite, and I turn away from noticing the little deposits of yellowy stuff in the corners of his eyes. I have my back against the wall and my legs are slightly apart, knees bent; the telephone directory is still open in my lap. I tip my head back and concentrate on the ebbing away of our good spirits. Uncle George is looking at the directory as if it fascinates him. No, he isn’t. I realise that the back of my skirt lies open on the floor under my thighs. He can see all of the backs of my thighs, right up to my pants, and not only that. He sees not just a glimpse of the gusset but the crack into which it has ridden up and now clings, the place of which I am ashamed and over which I have so little control that from it, these days, various dark-smelling and unwanted excretions seep and flow for no other purpose, it seems, than to degrade me. His eyes are bleary, wistful with interest and it is my fault, yet in the moment before I swing my knees to the floor and cut off the view, some other feeling swamps my shame. This feeling is impersonal, because I am momentarily in thrall to curiosity itself—to his, my own, anyone’s—I am captive to a fascination which is also, for a second or two, mine, helpless in the glow from any greedy eyes and anyone’s strange need to truffle between my legs. In that instant I think I would offer no resistance at all to a lascivious inspection of that part of me, and for the first time in my life I am open to the possibility of being unashamed. This thought at once gives rise to more shame, and I blush.

I’ll help you, I say. After all, there must be other halls. Of course I’ll help you.

I am delighted to have any chance to show him how helpful I can be. I’ll make sure he knows that it’ll be the same when I’m staying with him in London, and he’ll realise he can’t do without me.

The gas fire flickers. I push Uncle George’s notes off my lap onto the floor. There’s a smell in here. It’s the smell of dirty old man: gas, matches, crumbs and ammonia, and it makes me angry.

9

U
ncle George tipped back his head to finish his coffee and Lila heard it go down with a wet, secret noise. He pulled a hand across his mouth and half stood to get his cigarettes from his pocket.

‘All right then, not the Town Hall. Too small, anyway,’ he said, lighting up. ‘There are other halls, surely?’

‘There’s only church halls,’ Lila said. ‘Even smaller.’

Uncle George tapped his finger on his cigarette.

She added, ‘It’s no good. I knew it wouldn’t be.’

‘Don’t say that! What about…I know, what about doing it in the open air?’ he said. ‘Like
Aida
at the pyramids. People bringing their champagne and picnics and all that, like Glyndebourne.’

Lila looked hard at him. ‘Outside? Here? Champagne?
Here?
’

‘Okay, I’m just trying to think. You’re right,’ George said, screwing up his eyes in the cigarette smoke, ‘they’d probably come with limeade and fish suppers.’

‘It’d rain. It’s always raining.’

‘All right. Shut up.’

They thumbed through the directory and tried a few of the church halls. Uncle George rang a marquee firm in Glasgow that had only one marquee big enough, and that was booked out for August to a golf tournament at Turnberry. Lila was slightly, guiltily relieved. In the grip of what was their last chance she had not wanted to point out to him that they had nowhere to put a marquee.

‘Don’t scowl,’ Uncle George said, getting up from the floor. ‘Keep thinking. We’re not giving up on day one.’

They drifted into the kitchen and washed the coffee cups. There was silence from upstairs.

‘Tell you what,’ Uncle George said. ‘It’s nearly lunchtime, let’s get in the car and go for a picnic. Let’s make sandwiches and go off somewhere, wherever you like, somewhere we can think. I’m going mad cooped up here. Cheer your mother up.’

Lila wanted to believe that life could be like this, that maybe something as simple as a picnic could actually
be
simple. Then she shook her head. ‘We can’t. There’s no bread and the baker’s boy doesn’t come till three.’

‘Doesn’t matter, we’ll get some on the way. We’ll take a knife and butter and things and make sandwiches on the spot.’

‘There’s nothing to put in them.’

‘We can buy meat paste. Cheese.’

‘Grocer’s closed till two. Anyway, she,’ Lila said, raising her eyes to the ceiling, ‘she doesn’t like picnics. And it’s about to rain.’

Uncle George sighed. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. All right, what have we got here, then?’

‘There’s nothing,’ Lila said.

‘Don’t scowl. There’s never nothing.’

Uncle George seemed to feel he had something to prove. He nosed about in the pantry and came out with an onion held under his chin. In his hands he had a bowl of dripping and the platter with the remains of the Sunday joint and some leftover potato. He opened a jar of Marmite and sniffed at it. Lila watched him, pessimistic about anyone’s chances of turning the ragged grey brick and surrounding rubble of yesterday’s joint into something they would want to eat; the attempt seemed hardly less doomed than the opera. But Uncle George sliced up the onion and started to sing something silly in Italian and she couldn’t help laughing. He threw the onion and some dripping into a pan on the stove, added the chopped-up meat, stirred it furiously, tipped in the potato and gave her the wooden spoon.

‘Keep it moving,’ he told her, springing away to the pantry again. He emptied in a tin of baked beans and shook on some Lea & Perrins, took the spoon again and told her to lay the table.

‘See? Lunch. There’s never nothing. Go and call upstairs for your mother. Tell her we’re eating in the kitchen and I want her down here in one minute,’ he said, opening the window above the sink, ‘and no histrionics.’

Uncle George and Lila kept up a humdrum conversation as they ate but Fleur said nothing. Tears kept rolling down her cheeks and time after time she wiped them away with a movement more covert and modest than any Lila had ever seen before. Watching her, she swelled with guilt. In Uncle George’s company she had been beginning to forget to feel accountable.

Afterwards, the afternoon began to press in. Lila was wondering what they’d do once the washing up was done when they heard whistling and then the clack of the gate into the back garden.

‘Jimmy from Brocks,’ Fleur told George, dully. ‘The coke, first Monday in the month.’

Jimmy passed by the window under a loaded sack. Lila heard a pause in the whistling, a rumble as he emptied the sack into the bunker against the back wall, a scrape of boot nails as he returned, folding the sack as he went. He passed backwards and forwards, weighted in one direction and straightening up in the other. A few moments later the face appeared back at the kitchen window. Lila opened the back door.

Apart from a pink patch where he had lately wiped his nose, and the lids of his swimming blue eyes, Jimmy was like coal itself, as if he had been dipped in it and burnished. With a show of gums and sparse teeth he explained that the truck wouldn’t start.

‘Auld bitch,’ he said. There was grey glue in the corners of his mouth. ‘Bitch’ll no start. No been right all day.’ He held out a dirty delivery note with the coal merchant’s address at the top. ‘Goannie ring this number for us? Need tae get somebody out from the yard tae give us a tow.’

Fleur, as lady of the house, went away to make the call while Jimmy waited in the garden. She came back and arranged herself in the doorway. She seemed to have brightened up with something to do.

‘There’s nobody at the yard who can come in less than two hours. They say you should try starting her again, maybe all she needs is a minute to cool down.’

They all trooped out to the truck. On the back were a few full sacks and several heaps of empty ones weighted under bricks. Jimmy tried the ignition again. The engine wheezed and died. He tried several more times and climbed down from the cab.

‘Bloody nuisance,’ he said. ‘See they? They’re for the farm, last call.’ He nodded at the last few sacks and gestured across the road towards the track between the fields. ‘They was wanting it urgent. They’ll no get it the day.’

He shook his head, releasing a dusty smell that was both human and tarry.

‘But they could load the sacks themselves from here if they brought down a trailer or something,’ Uncle George said. He and Jimmy were now lighting cigarettes from George’s packet.

Jimmy turned his lakes of eyes on Fleur as he took his first drag. ‘So they could, right enough,’ he said. His black finger and thumb, tipped with ridged grey horns of fingernails, held the cigarette with strange delicacy. ‘If they kenned it was here. But they don’t ken.’

Uncle George turned and scanned the distance. ‘Well, somebody could go and tell them, couldn’t they?’

‘Canna go mysel’,’ Jimmy said. ‘Got to stay wi’ the truck. Mind you, Mrs Duncan…’ He grinned at Fleur.

‘Me? I hardly know them,’ Fleur said. ‘We never see them.’

He sucked again on his cigarette. ‘See me? I hate letting folk doon. And they was wanting it the day.’ He looked sadly up the track.

‘George, I really don’t think we can go barging up there. I don’t know them.’

‘We wouldn’t be barging, it’s just neighbourly. We’d be doing them a favour.’

‘I’m not wearing the right shoes, I’m afraid.’

Jimmy looked at her light slingbacks, the same toffee colour as the cardigan slung over her shoulders.

‘Right enough,’ he said.

‘But I’ve got the car, silly,’ George said. ‘I’d rather walk though, it’s no distance. Anyway, Florrie, you don’t
possess
the right shoes. There’s no need for you to come. You stay and make Jimmy a cup of tea. We’ll go, won’t we?’ he said, turning to Lila.

‘All right,’ he said as the two of them started up the track. ‘What about these people we’re about to see?’

‘They’re called McCarthy, I think.’

‘Big family?’

‘Don’t know. Well, there’s a boy. He went to the High School. Older than me, he left soon after I started. Never spoke.’

‘Just him? Does he work the farm with his dad or what?’

‘Don’t know. Think so.’ From time to time she saw one or other of them at a distance, in the fields. The question of talking to them, even if she wanted to, never arose.

‘Anybody else? Just the two of them?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Is there a mum?’

‘Don’t know.’

Uncle George seemed exasperated. ‘Listen. Your mother…I know she doesn’t mix much but does she stop you? I mean, stop you taking an interest? Aren’t you curious about people? Or is Enid all you’ve got?’

Lila shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

‘I see. Well, wouldn’t you like to widen your horizons a little?’

‘How can I?
Here?
’

‘Well, by doing
Turandot,
for one thing.’

‘I want to go and live in London.’

‘I’m talking about right now. About
Turandot
. Your mother’s desperate to, though she’s pretending she isn’t. Don’t you want to?’

The truth was Lila was ashamed of her excitement about doing anything that involved Uncle George. She shrugged again. ‘Doesn’t matter now anyway, does it, ’cos we haven’t got anywhere to do it.’

Uncle George picked up the pace and soon snatches of
Turandot
started to rumble from his lips. Lila strode along, trying to keep up. He was deliberately putting distance between them; she wondered why he did not care about her sorrow at being left behind.

She had seen the farm from a distance every day of her life but had never been there, so that reaching the end of the track felt like entering a landscape known from a picture, familiar but unfamiliar; there might be different customs here, and a strange language. Together they passed under the trees and entered the yard and stopped, taking in the clutter strewn across what had been the small garden of the farmhouse: choked flowerbeds round a patch of grass criss-crossed with tractor ruts and petering out at its fringe into cracked concrete that led round to the farm buildings. Lila gazed at the front of the house. They were alone, yet something about it suggested they were awaited, as though they were arriving in a story already being played out behind the windows. Around them lay a queasy silence that might at any moment turn out to be no more than a lull between disasters. The day could yet blow open.

Uncle George strode up to the door and hammered with the knocker. After a few minutes he banged on the door, bringing down a few flakes of pale yellow paint. Then he turned away and walked round the side of the house out of Lila’s sight. She waited. The trees rustled in a gust of wind and a few crows let out hacks of complaint and flew away. As she looked up, the wind descended smoothly into the yard and sleeked around her, as though the sky were pouring emptiness straight into her. Gooseflesh rose on her neck and arms and she shivered, and suddenly the quiet yawned open, as full of certainties as the stillness in the house three days ago—it felt like weeks—when she thought her mother had killed herself and she had gone looking in empty rooms for her dead body, her mind fighting between horror and desire. Once again time was passing in a way that must belong to the kind of afternoon on which a death might take place, when a quiet person might suddenly kill another with clean, beautiful strength; in the air hung a calm that threatened to end in the taking of a life, a ripping apart of dreams. She ran a few steps in the direction Uncle George had taken, calling out for him. He reappeared and took her by the hand, as if he knew.

‘Nothing round the back. Come on.’

They returned to the yard. ‘Halloo-oo!’ he called, in a womanly falsetto that returned Lila to the world; she snatched her hand away and prayed nobody had heard. Then a dog barked and skeetered into view. It slavered around them as they skirted past it and followed the direction from where it had come, past the side of a low barn and round to the entrance of a newer, higher building behind. The dog overtook them at the wide doors and rustled through a scattering of straw on the floor towards two people leaning into a tractor. A radio sat squealing in the straw like a small dark animal. The building was vast, and seemed too clean to belong to a farm. It smelled of oil and electricity rather than of earth and blood and hoof, and in its echo there was something metallic.

The older man looked up. ‘Well, now?’ he said, advancing on them with his hands on his hips. Uncle George stepped forward, offering his hand.

‘You must be Mr McCarthy?’

‘McArthur,’ the man said, not smiling. ‘I’ve oil on my hands. What’s your business?’

He listened while George explained. The boy Lila had known by sight at school kept his head in the tractor and did not look up. When Uncle George finished, the corners of Mr McArthur’s closed mouth tilted slightly upwards. He wiped his hands with a rag from the floor, finger by finger, giving him a long, assessing gaze. Then he accepted a handshake.

‘Obliged to you.’

Uncle George looked past him into the shed. ‘A pleasure. Sound building,’ he said. ‘Bone dry. How wide, about forty feet?’

‘Five thousand feet square, fifty-five by ninety-five. Doing well, only eight year old,’ Mr McArthur said, as if he were talking about offspring or livestock. ‘I put it up to expand, there was to be a big expansion. Fully automated.’

From the radio on the floor Mantovani and his orchestra pealed out a tune on high, silvery wires: ‘Forgotten Dreams’, a spiralling chase after elation and sadness and the chance of love. If she could see it, Lila thought, the sound would lift from the straw and curl up through the shed in plumes of shining dust.

‘Good acoustic for music, anyway,’ Uncle George said, with a backward grin at her. Then she saw the way his mind was going.

‘Aye well. I never got round to finishing. Never expanded the herd, we hit a wee bad patch there. I’ll maybe still do it, one of these days.’

‘Shame to let it sit empty.’

‘Handy for storage,’ Mr McArthur said.

She followed Uncle George’s eyes up to the pitched roof. The floor and walls were of concrete and breezeblock and the steel struts from which lights were suspended crossed from side to side like rafters at a height of about ten feet. Six square, metal-framed windows, some with broken or missing panes, ran down one side. At both ends of the building, wide sliding doors opened it up like a hangar. Apart from the tractor and boxes of tools, some lengths of timber and a heap of tarpaulin, the place was empty. Uncle George clicked his tongue twice and sang an arpeggio over the sliding racket from the radio. His voice rose and echoed generously.