Puccini's Ghosts (22 page)

Luke says, So hey, no need to sit here in the cold. Let me get you some more tea. Lila, wanna let me get rid of some of these papers?

The meeting goes on, words swill around me. It’s been a clear day and the music room curtains have not been drawn. The sky is darkening from turquoise towards the amethyst dusk and the Pow Farm fields at the horizon are the colour of a deepening bruise. This window faces east so I can’t see the sun going down behind the sea, but in the sky over Mr McArthur’s land the moon and the first few stars appear. It’s getting late when people finally leave. Joe does not join in the goodbyes, but disappears upstairs. People spill down the path and onto the road and linger. They stand and talk, voices rising softly in the air; any excuse to breathe in the smell of the cooling land in the gloaming and the freshwater scent of the night to come. Senga and Linda and Deirdre and Enid circle round Billy and one or two other straggling boys who can’t be older than thirteen. Their muttered and breathy words mingle with the grown-up talk. I watch from the doorway. My mind is elsewhere; part of me is with Joe upstairs, of course. But I am thinking too of the sharp marram grass at the shore’s edge and imagining a campfire burning in a hollow dip in the dunes and I picture Joe there, free from the tugging eyes of those girls. He is with me and there is nothing to fear. Wrapped together in the firelight, we are alone and separate from the others, swaying in obedience to some tide, some warm, gathering wave of optimism, a pride that pulses through us—it is nothing less than youth and love and the promise of more tides of love to come, swamping us and washing us away—and of all these he is talking to me softly under the moon, with a sweet curling of his mouth.

14

G
eorge tried to instil some discipline. He began sentences with ‘Speaking as the producer and musical director’. At odd moments he pulled out the folding baton he now carried at all times and practised his conducting technique in front of an invisible orchestra. He addressed Lila, Joe and Fleur by the parts they were singing instead of their names and gave them written schedules: the mornings on private practice and coaching with him, and part of the afternoon on other tasks, rest or quiet study. He gave each of them a tuning fork and taught them how to practise alone without the piano. Evenings were taken up with proper rehearsals with combinations of principals, chorus and band. In between times he was overseer of the set, lighting, costumes and publicity. He never stopped.

Lila felt sullenly that if she obeyed his rules it would be because they coincided with her wishes. She was still obliquely grateful towards him but Uncle George was no longer in command of his glamour; it seemed not so much his own as a reflected gilt that belonged, really, to the London world he seemed less and less a part of. But she had to remember that she needed him as a springboard from which to launch herself on her London life with Joe. Late one night when the house was quiet she pulled out the largest of the suitcases from the cupboard under the stairs, took it up to her room and hid it under her bed. No need for declarations. By stealth and in tiny stages she would pack and be ready to leave with him. She would share Uncle George’s flat until she and Joe could get married. Lots of students got married. They wouldn’t wait until everybody thought they could afford it, they would just do it and be happy even if poor (she knew she would be marvellous at managing on very little). She tried not to let her spent love for Uncle George—more often now just plain George—show in her eyes. Even as a toppled idol he was, for the time being, essential.

If she had had to, she would have invented ways of throwing herself into Joe’s path. But it wasn’t necessary; they were tumbled in together to ‘the production’ and its demands—no life outside it was much thought of. Sometimes Lila minded the lack of a decent courting distance between them. If only she could have retired to a cool room sometimes, miles from where he undressed, washed, shaved and slept and where she could not see him, or hear him sing or talk or laugh—if she could have kept a small space for recovery from so much of him so soon—she thought she might, though she had already lost her heart, be able to lose it a little less abjectly. For there was no escaping the risk, run a thousand times every day, that he could by some jokey or ambiguous remark or unconscious omission—a cue for a small compliment not taken, an elusive reference to the rest of his life that seemed not to include her in it—plunge her into hours of private misery, hours spent shaving an interpretation out of his words strip by strip until she exposed the buried place where she decided that he had said more or less what she needed him to have said.

There were days when she woke up feeling over-exposed and fearful, thrown out of sleep with unbearable abruptness; the light reaching through her window cast much too bright a beam over her love for him and threatened to reveal it as hopeless. Then she would hide under the pillow and wish for a few more hours’ relief from the effort of getting him to love her. But soon she would hear from the room above his cough, a grunt, the squeak of the mattress, and then her heart would start pounding and the day would quicken with meaning. By now she knew how to time her own comings and goings so that at the foot of the attic stairs she would happen upon him tousled, stripped to the waist and smelling of bed and skin. She fancied that in his extravagant Ah, and a very good morning to you,
la bella
Liù! and his accompanying, rippling scale to
lo, lo, lo, lo
! he puffed out his chest just for her. And then she felt that some unnamed, benevolent force at work between them made it inevitable that one day she would wake up with his adoration glittering like a star over her. She would be glad, watching his thick bare back as he strolled away down the landing, that nothing could stop her imagining both of them naked in the same bathroom, even if she stopped just short of imagining them there at the same time; while she was learning to accommodate the notion of Bliss of Union as opposed to One Thing Only, location was important. Neither the sand dunes nor the bathroom, which seemed a kind of opposite, was fitting.

George collected the orchestral parts from the station one afternoon and the house filled up even more. The number of boxes sent by the publishers took everyone by surprise; it was sobering, what quantities of music there had to be, how many volumes and pages and hundreds of thousands of notes it took to capture on paper the floating sounds of the opera that to them had been, until now, essentially airborne.
Turandot,
from the stereogram or sung by Fleur, Joe or Lila or played on the piano by George, sounded through the house all day long, and the music had grown easy on their ears, almost simple. Judging by the written music, Puccini had not found it simple at all.

Lila helped George unload the boxes and stack them along the wall in the front hall. Space was already running out. Gordon Black, now appointed chorus master, chief rehearsal pianist and part arranger, had borrowed twenty music stands from Burnhead Academy and they lay in a heap of folded metal just inside the door. Raymond had come home with a Chinese ornamental cutlass, on loan from the Mathiesons, carrying it in a string shopping bag slung over the handlebars; that and a brass gong lent by somebody else lay in a large box labelled ‘PROPS’. Enid’s mum had ordered thousands of yards of white muslin for the set from the wholesaler in Glasgow, who delivered it direct to 5 Seaview Villas. Bales of it were stacked in the hall waiting for somebody to come up with a way of dyeing it red. (Though he had no idea how it was to be done, there had to be red drapery, Joe said, to express Liù’s sacrifice of blood. There was also to be white drapery and a huge white paper circle to depict Turandot’s coldness and purity and the moon. The only other colour would be black. Black was for death, he said. George said he didn’t know about that but a coating of black would flatter the workmanship of the set, which was likely to be shaky.) Meanwhile 5 Seaview Villas was beginning to resemble a badly organised warehouse. Nobody swept around the accruing piles of stuff or opened a window or wiped a surface. The air was sharp with damp, tobacco and musty cloth.

Several of the chairs that had been brought into the music room for the first meeting stayed there. George said he needed them because people were coming and going all the time and he had to be able to sit them down and deal with them in one place. So the back room off the kitchen remained bare, a place where nobody could sit anymore unless they perched on a kitchen stool, not that anybody did want to settle for long. It had become no more than a space that people crossed on their way to somewhere else, adding to the sense of transit.

Visitors seemed to arrive in no obvious pattern and often without apparent purpose, and George, who tended to make arrangements without writing anything down or telling anybody else, was at times bamboozled by the traffic. They came for auditions and stayed and talked about costumes instead, or they turned up to discuss transposing the trumpet parts for coronet, or to hand in props or donations of paint, and found themselves singing one of the principal roles. Sometimes they arrived just to be friendly and to see what was going on, they brought cake and then stayed to have some. They brought their curious friends, most of whom found themselves persuaded by George into swelling the ranks, as he put it. The numbers signing up for shed painting, set building, front of house, backstage, chorus and band grew and grew. Within days, at least twenty people knew their way round the kitchen well enough to take over and make pots of tea.

The frequent arrivals and departures dislodged the already precarious domestic rhythms of the house. Fleur’s small tyrannies in the details (no drinking straight from bottles, use the butter knife and ketchup ruins decent food) masked an indifference to actual housekeeping, and now that she had the distraction of visitors coming and going, kettles on, expeditions to the farm with George, long sessions of singing, chats on the telephone, she ceased even to pretend to care. There was no discussion about it. She simply took it as read that Princess Turandot was exonerated from household responsibilities.

‘I hope nobody’s expecting me to know what’s for lunch,’ she would say around noon, to whoever might be present, ‘because I haven’t the foggiest. Just help yourselves.’

She was too busy to bother, too happy holding court amid the passing waves of new people which now included Moira Mather and Delia Hunter, who declared her a scream and whom she now called ‘the girls’. She had had no idea, she said, what a scream those girls were and how much they all had in common. Nicknames and catchphrases developed. Whenever any two of the girls were together at Seaview Villas they would telephone the absent one to make her feel included, holding the receiver out to the whole room and getting them all to shout hello.

Arrangements in the house collapsed for any or no reason: the hot water gave out because nobody had stoked the Rayburn, in the morning Raymond would iron a stale shirt and wear it again because the laundry was behind. On the day there was nothing but baked beans for tea because there was no bread left for toast, Fleur waved her arms and said, ‘Well, just have beans on beans, then!’ Her speaking voice was now a little breathy, not unlike Delia Hunter’s.

Every day they ran out of something. George made inefficient emergency excursions in the car to pick up milk or cigarettes or lavatory paper. Once or twice Raymond, acting on sudden initiative, would call in at the butchers and arrive home with an oozing parcel of mince that he would disown as soon as he got in, thumping it on the draining board as if it had come into his hands by means he preferred to forget. Sometimes when Joe was working in the music room and she knew she was not squandering any opportunity to be with him, Lila took some of the housekeeping money from the kitchen drawer and went to Burnhead, striding there and back if there was no bus, slipping quickly in and out of the shops and never succumbing to the temptation to pop into Sew Right. Away from him, she would imagine that all that needed to happen for Joe to realise he loved her was for her to walk back into his line of vision; this little break in their proximity was going to be all it took. So she would arrive back laden and breathless, only to find the disorder of the house sliding further towards chaos. A hope that she would deal with it would, in her absence, have hardened into expectation. Still there was no let-up in the flow of visitors. In the lulls between the door closing behind one lot and the sounding of the doorbell, the atmosphere could be a little accusatory.

e
nid says, See Joe? You fancy him, don’t you?

No.

Away, you do so.

I do not.

You do so. I seen you.

Seen what?

Seen you fancying him. See Joe?

What?

Would you let him go all the way?

I would
not
! Anyway, you fancy Billy.

I field these questions nearly every afternoon. I suppose she notices the change in me from pessimistic little sloth to busy household bee, from aertex and bare legs to back-combing and chiffon accessories, and jumps to the right conclusion, proving that stupid people do well, on the whole, to run with their instincts. It’s all they have. Those with more powerful brains too often distrust first impressions; they addle them with the wrong mix of qualification and interpretation until the impressions split into something useless, ideas that refuse to bind and are fit only to be thrown away, like ruined mayonnaise. That is how my mind works, now. It cannot make thoughts and feelings smooth themselves into memories that are clean and whole and assembled unselfconsciously into something that makes sense.

But at least I see what’s happening here. I see the need to get a grip on myself, oh yes. I can’t go on like this, as if a simple funeral and a houseful of junk are the stuff of opera. They’re Life and that’s all. And thank God it
is
only in opera that people exist in such idiotic, heightened states and not in Life, unless of course, we put quite tremendous efforts into being inconsolable. I will calm down, because with what feels like my last scrap of common sense I know I have to. My cross-stitch is coming on nicely. People die, of course they do.

Though in between bouts of embroidery I can’t just ignore what’s in these boxes. There’s this:

Burnhead & District Advertiser
Thursday 14th July 1960:

BAST director says,
‘Look, we’ve borrowed a tenor!’

Giuseppe Foscari (20) as his picture reveals is the real thing, an Italian tenor with the looks as well as the voice tailor-made for Puccini’s famous heroes. Grins George Pettifer, musical director and founder of the Burnhead Association for Singing
Turandot,
‘If you need a tenor and you don’t have one, you’ve got to borrow!’ Brought up from London to sing the lead role of Prince Calaf in BAST’s upcoming production of
Turandot,
Mr Foscari is challenged but not daunted. ‘It is every tenor’s dream to sing Calaf. I’m absolutely thrilled to have this opportunity.’ And not only is he the real thing, he’s home grown! Or almost. Born to Italian parents, his family first settled in Scotland only to abandon these shores for the South. Mr Foscari says the move down south was necessary for family reasons but it is a decision he regrets even though it was long ago. ‘I’m absolutely thrilled to be here. Scottish folk are the best in the world and Burnhead is a wonderful place.’