Puccini's Ghosts (15 page)

I am half-looking for their house. If the Old Farm collection of streets bears some relation to where the farm used to lie, I must be near it. It should not be difficult to find.

Part of the deal when they sold the land was that the developers would build a house to their specification close to the site of the old farmhouse. For a few years I used to get, along with their newsletter, a Christmas card with a photograph of the new one, floodlit. Makes a better card than the ubiquitous robin! she would write, and each year I would privately disagree. Then I suppose I moved and didn’t send my new address and the cards stopped. In the last year or two I was treated to a view of not just the house but an extravaganza of fairy lights racing around the eaves and a flashing reindeer on the grass, so it was no great loss.

He went into golfing supplies and sports equipment. Her idea. As soon as the land was sold she put him in silly caps and pastel jerseys and shoes with fringed tongues and sent him off, pulling a top-of-the-range, two-tone leatherette caddy, to play golf in the afternoons. He turned middle-aged overnight. Given the company he was keeping it was a natural development that he should spot a ‘gap in the market’ and start selling the gear to men like himself: foolish great boys as ruddy in the face and as thinning on top, as bored and gadget-hungry as he was. He needn’t have turned out that way. The Christmas newsletter would give a tally of the number of outlets: Gleneagles, St Andrews, Harrods. There was talk of Scottish airport concessions and a tie-in with Burberry. He must have gone along with it.

I find it at the end of Pow Drive, a bungalow more than double the size of its neighbours and standing in a plot four times larger than theirs. It alone has a faade of pink faux marble and is surrounded by low walls made from ornamental blocks with fancy shapes in them that make a pattern of daisies, as if someone has been at work with a giant biscuit cutter. The wrought-iron house name on the wall—‘Casa Lisboa’—stands out in the beam of floodlights set into the ground.

The floodlights must be on an automatic timer for the house is shut up and dark. Around the porch sit the hulks of patio plants overwintering in black plastic shrouds and in the apex of the front gable a burglar alarm winks its alternating red and green eyes. This is just as I expect. I would not have come this way if I thought there was any chance of running into them. I took the small risk of supposing that their habits haven’t changed; the habits of people like them don’t. I’m confident they still spend January and February in the Canaries. They will still own property—with them, it’s always ‘property’—in Gran Canaria, and they will have kept the apartment in the Algarve that one newsletter explained they couldn’t part with. She wrote, you do get very attached to your very first overseas property! So with two properties abroad there’s nothing for it but to take more holidays! But they prefer Portugal in the spring, when his golfing weather is more reliable and she can take her classes on wild flowers in watercolour.

I gaze at the house for a while until I am numb to its immaculate ugliness. I picture the garden of the old farmhouse where lupins and a tangle of roses grew up through rusting machine parts and old tractor tyres and where in Sherpa’s water bowl on the front step you would sometimes find flakes of paint from the peeling yellow door when it was slammed. I turn round and head back to Seaview Villas. Going in this direction I am walking straight into the wind and raindrops land in wet explosions on the umbrella that flaps loose where the cover has torn away from three of its spokes. I tip it downward in front of my face and walk fast, looking at my feet. I do know that this is the last time in my life that I shall walk here, but I can’t make this feel significant. I can find no mental commentary for the occasion; as I step briskly back down Old Farm Drive, my footsteps refuse to feel historic.

I wonder if the
Burnhead & District Advertiser
will take up my idea for an article. I wonder if I could put into clearer words this feeling—this sad truth, and true sadness—that although you may be exiled from a place long before you leave it you still crave, upon your return, an invitation to belong.

Traces of the old farm exist nowhere now except in my head. The sounds of that day when I saw it for the first time—my mother singing scales above the noise of a coffee grinder, the whistle of Jimmy from Brocks and the rumble of coke hitting the bunker, a barking dog, Mantovani from the Café Royale in the echoing farm shed—mingle in my mind with the day’s many other accidents and coincidences. Suppose we had not run out of bread? Uncle George would have trampled over my mother’s distaste for picnics and frog-marched us out to some freezing beauty spot with travelling rugs and sandwiches and flasks of tea, and we would not have been at home when Jimmy’s lorry refused to start. Then we would never have wandered up the track to Pow Farm and found ourselves a venue—an improbable one, a putative cowshed with a tractor in it, draughty and floored with straw—for
Turandot
.

I might never have met Joe Foscari.

10

U
ncle George returned the next day from the farm and told Fleur and Lila that they had ‘a space’ for the opera.

‘Stanley—Mr McArthur—he’s converted. All for it,’ he said, rubbing his hands, but Lila thought his jollity was forced. ‘It is a great
space,
isn’t it?’ he said to her. ‘Tell your mother. Isn’t it great?’

They were in the kitchen. Fleur, perched on a kitchen chair, looked papery with exhaustion. She had pulled out the twin tub and started on a washing but then lost heart, and was now watching while Lila got on with it. Lila was used to the petering out of her mother’s energy. It came and went like matches struck in the dark—weak, random flares usually ill-directed and almost immediately extinguished. She seldom found any forward momentum for the jobs she undertook because they never acquired enough purpose for her; long before she came close to finishing anything she would succumb to a listlessness in herself that would be even deeper than before the doomed effort was made.

‘I’m not performing in a shed,’ Fleur said, over the droning and sloshing of the machine. ‘I want a cigarette.’

‘It won’t look like a shed, we’re going to whitewash it. Paint the back wall black. We’ll do the whole production very modern, almost bare. With drapes and lights and…and…shapes.’

‘Shapes?’

‘Shapes, yes…to suggest things. Scenery, buildings, you know. It’ll be sort of experimental. Though it’s been done before,’ he added quickly, ‘I mean this kind of approach. They use all kinds of spaces for opera now—it’s modern.’

‘I suppose he’s charging a fortune.’

‘I don’t want you worrying about that,’ he said. ‘You leave that to me. You need to concentrate one hundred per cent on your part.’

Fleur sighed. ‘I’m exhausted just thinking about it. I need to lie down.’

George looked hard at her. ‘Why are you always coming out with these
statements
about yourself?’

‘I don’t come out with statements about myself. I’m just exhausted.’

‘You’re only just up. It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning.’

‘I can’t help it,’ Fleur said, yawning.

George shrugged. ‘Well, all right. Go and lie down. I’ve plenty to do, anyway.’

‘You’ll manage on your own,’ she said, eyeing Lila and sniffing weakly at the wet smells of bleach and washing soap. She pushed herself up from her chair, pressed her fingers into the space between her breasts and produced a deep, solid note that after only a few seconds faded to a sigh.

She said, ‘I’m tired,’ and let the line of her shoulders sag. ‘I don’t know where I’d be without you.’ She drifted through the door, not caring which of them she was addressing.

Uncle George sagged a little, too, as she passed. ‘I should make some calls,’ he said to Lila, loitering. ‘I should ring the paper and get the ball rolling. If we’re going ahead.’

Lila half-turned from the sink where she was holding the draining hose.

‘If? What do you mean, if?’

Before he could answer there was a hot grunt from the twin tub and then the pump started to throb softly. The hose reared in Lila’s hand as a snake of grey water gushed from its end into the sink, wave after wave of suds raising the smells of wet wool and warm rubber.

He said, ‘Oh, of course. It’s just…I need to make some calls. Have to ring the publisher, we’ve only got your mother’s vocal score. We need to hire all the parts.’

He was tossing a box of matches from hand to hand and bouncing on the balls of his feet but the little dance of optimism did not fool Lila. She frowned.

‘Shouldn’t you get your orchestra before you get the music?’

‘Don’t scowl,’ he told her, throwing the matchbox high and catching it. ‘We can’t delay that long. We have to advertise in the paper for players and singers, for everybody. We’ll have to hold a meeting. If we left getting the parts till after that it’d be too late.’

He stood neither in nor out of the kitchen, shaking the matchbox in time to some tune in his head. ‘Anyway we still need to get our Calaf,’ he said.

‘I thought we’d got our Calaf,’ Lila said, glaring at the diminishing trickle of water pulsing from the hose. She was disappointed. Uncle George had arrived with at least as many dirty clothes as clean ones and more than half the things in the wash were his, but he didn’t seem to notice either the hard work she was doing or how willingly she did it. This was the second load. Standing in all this steam, hauling the sodden weight of washing from tub to tub was exhausting; did he not know that? Was there a washing machine in the flat in Crouch End, or would she be taking his things to a laundry?

‘Calaf? Well, we have, really. It’s only a matter of getting hold of him.’

He looked at his watch. As if he had just thought of it he said, ‘Actually I might be able to get him now. He starts work at twelve. He’s working as a waiter, just for the summer, did I say? I suppose I might…I might just catch him, before he goes.’

Lila had now attached the filler hose to the kitchen tap and was running fresh water into the machine. She looked up. If he had calls to make then why was he sighing in the doorway? If he might catch this person before he went to work, why wasn’t he trying his number right now? He had withdrawn something from her—his conviction, perhaps—and had grown suddenly mean with his certainties. She resented it; he had handed out promises like sweeties and was gathering them all back, still in their wrappers.

She said, ‘Well, go on then, for God’s sake,’ placing in her voice a sharp edge that belonged to her mother’s. ‘If you’re so sure he’ll want to do it, why don’t you just go and ask him?’

She dragged the dripping clothes from one tub to the other, using the long wooden tongs. Uncle George twisted his hair in the fingers of one hand and stared at the wall.

‘Yeah. Maybe I will.’

He looked at his watch again and then at Lila. Her arms were pale and slippery, the ends of her fingers tight wrinkled nubs. A weak sun gleamed through the steamed-up window behind her and illuminated her strangely. Down the thin curtains in cascading vertical lines the pattern of wine flasks, soup ladles and sticks of celery was casting patchy tints of sage and yellow and charcoal across her damp skin.

‘Have you…I mean, is all that nearly finished? When will you be ready to hang it out?’

‘Well, there’s the rinsing, two more rinses, then it’s to go through the mangle.’

‘You’ll be a while then?’

‘I don’t mind.’ She smiled her forgiveness. ‘The mangle’s electric, it doesn’t take long.’

‘You’re a good kid. Look, I’m not sure, you see. About doing this. The opera.’

The day lost its balance for a second, threatened to tip into chaos.

She said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean it’s a big thing. Your singing, are you going to take it seriously? Are you prepared to take it seriously enough?’

Not just the balance of Lila’s day but the rest of her life lurched dangerously. With a tiny indrawn breath she caught the idea that was still as delicate as a gasp. She held it, set it upon its pivot.

‘But I don’t want to do just the opera. I want to be a real singer. A proper one.’ Then, quickly, she said it. ‘I want to train properly. At college in London. I want to live with you and go to a London college.’

Uncle George looked at her. ‘Well now. Well, that is serious.’ He nodded. Lila waited for him to speak and then realised he wasn’t going to. But the nod was enough. She knew she must not ask him for any more now, but she would get what she needed. She smiled.

‘Hard work,’ he said.

She wasn’t sure if he meant the singing or the laundry. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said, which was true in either case.

‘I’m thinking, you see. You should do some work on your voice today too, like your mother, and it’s much better done in the morning when it’s freshest.’

‘Work on my voice?’

‘So why don’t you leave all that for now and go and do some scales while I’m on the phone? Might be easier if I’m, you know, not interrupted or anything.’

‘But if I leave it now I won’t get it hung out by dinnertime,’ Lila said. ‘If you’re on the phone, I won’t interrupt. I could help you with the numbers again.’

Uncle George laughed. ‘I think I can manage!’

‘The rinsing’s easy, the machine does it all. I could help you and still keep an eye on it.’

‘No. You go and make a start in the music room. I want you to get busy on that voice.’

‘But any minute I’ll have to empty it again. And then it’ll—’

George gave the matchbox a savage shake. ‘Jesus! Look. You need to realise something,’ he said. ‘This opera’s not just a little joke that we fit in round everything else. If we do it, it’s going to be done properly, you hear me?’

‘I don’t think it’s a joke.’

‘It’s not too late, you know. You just have to say, “I’ve changed my mind. I want to do the washing and squabble with Enid and watch my mother going round the bend. I don’t want to sing, I don’t want to put in the work. It’s too hard.” Is that what you want?’

‘No,’ Lila said in a whisper.

‘Sure? Because you’re going to have to work hard. Starting right
now
.’

‘I don’t mind. As long as something nice happens in the end.’

t
hat day in the kitchen there are three voices, a trio of strands weaving around one another and each telling a separate story to which the other two are deaf, a story about what each one of us wants and loves and fears.

Snatches of his voice, his modulated deceits: It’s only a matter of getting hold of him.

Hers, twisting itself into a disappearing wisp of sound slipping away up the stairs: I don’t know where I’d be without you.

My voice barges in comically. I’m the ingénue in the dreadful dress with the wet sleeves, guilelessly wielding the bawdy toys—the hose and tongs—and knowing nothing, not even how burlesque my mimicry of the adults is, for the sniggering has not yet started. As long as something nice happens in the end.

A trio, all of us blind and expectant and for the time being only—this far in the story, in the delicate plaiting of lies—innocent, still unaware of how massive and ungainly our expectations are, how grotesque we look as we go about their concealment and how ugly, in our final disappointment, we will all be.

I have no choice but to leave the washing in a pond of filmy grey water and be led away, placed in the middle of the music room and bullied about my posture. Uncle George shakes my shoulders, makes me breathe in and out so deeply I feel slightly faint. He talks about my spine and my shoulder blades and my diaphragm and the tip of my tongue on the floor of my mouth and keeping it out of the way; he waggles my jaw and pinches my chin and comes out with something about smiling through my ribs (most of which, I will appreciate years later, makes a sort of sense). He makes me think about the space around myself. I wave my arms. I am to claim this air and claim my sound and the right to make it. He gives me a note to start on and a page of exercises: scales and arpeggios and octave leaps to Ay, Ee, Ah, Oh, Ooo. He warns me that he will be within earshot and that if I fail to breathe properly and concentrate on the sound I am making, he will be able to tell. It always shows, he says, if a singer doesn’t mean it.

Do I blame him? At fifteen I am a lanky, dull-eyed girl solidified by neglect and on my way to becoming hard; his arrival is pulling me out from the slow drip of my parents’ misery and inattention, under which I am gently calcifying. Starting with the singing on the beach and now, with my very first singing lesson, he is softening me up. I may start to leak feelings, but for the moment I must work on my scales.

Even while I am singing my exercises, and in the intervals between them, I listen to him in the hall as he speaks with private urgency into the telephone.

Joe? Look. Of course I’m not changing my tune, you know I have to stay up here.

I do not actively decide to do it, I do not think, but by the time he rings off and comes back to tick me off about my vowels, I have decided that I have not been eavesdropping.

Because she’s my sister. Of course I want you here! Of course it’ll be better than staying in London, there’s a beach on the doorstep, don’t forget.

Joe? You’ve got to come, I need you to.

I have not learned that the gift of making Uncle George happy rests with someone other than me.

Joe, I need you here, I really do.

I have not learned that he put me in here to make a noise of my own in order to get me out of earshot, so that I would not hear him plead. Joe will be here tomorrow, and I am having my first proper singing lesson and the attention—I have never had a lesson in anything all by myself with just one other person before—is intoxicating. That’s all I know.

He pops out and makes another call: a man from the
Burnhead & District Advertiser
will be round this afternoon. My mother comes downstairs and is happier than I have seen her in weeks when Uncle George says he hopes she’s had her beauty sleep because the man from the paper is bringing a photographer. At last it is safe to reenter the day and for me to pick up my plans and dreams again.