Puccini's Ghosts (23 page)

By Staff Reporter Alec Gallagher

Alec Gallagher makes quite a fuss of Joe. He and the photographer spend nearly a whole afternoon together. There isn’t a lot to show for it in the paper but Alec says that’s not his fault, he wrote a big piece and it got spiked. It’s his editor, who says he’s not running a fan club.

You can’t deny it’s a good face even in a blurry photograph, but what it doesn’t reveal is that Joe’s only five foot five, a good two inches shorter than my mother. When she’s in her heels and headdress she dwarfs him and he’s sensitive about that.

He’s sensitive about his voice as well. Quite often through the music room door I hear Uncle George trying to talk to him about it and then the day comes when he loses patience and shouts sarcastic things about a modicum of accuracy in pitch being a fair expectation. Afterwards he walks around conducting jerkily with his baton as if swatting flies, glowering like an animal you’d know better than provoke.

But I love Joe’s voice. I love it all through those wet days in July when rain tips down outside and we all work hard, when among all the comings and goings—the doorbell, the visitors, the telephone—there is always the sound of at least one person singing somewhere in the house. In my room I listen for Joe and I arrange my own practice to coincide with his. Even though we are singing from quite different parts of the opera most of the time, I feel close to him. I love the cloistered, dedicated feeling; even the damp makes me mellow and serious. Outside, summer pleasures that in Burnhead are at the best of times enjoyed under a sun that bestows little heat are rained off altogether; it feels like a kind of approval of our undertaking that the weather tempts nobody out of doors. Gutterings drip and ooze. I listen to the rain and the voices. On the quiet I am selecting and preparing my London clothes, though getting them dry after washing them is impossible in the wet. I filch from my mother’s cupboards, picking things I’m sure she won’t miss: nylons, a green silk blouse she’s gone off and a white sweater with a spot on it, black Capri pants, her old red patent leather belt, a nearly empty compact, old squashed lipsticks. My case is filling up. I perfect my plans.

Sometimes George summons us to sing for the visitors, to get us used to an audience.

He calls out from the piano, Liù, over here, you first. Let’s have
‘Signore, ascolta!’

Everyone is staring at me. My heart hits so hard on the inside of my throat I think I shall choke.

He whispers, Breathe. Forget them. Do it like on the beach. Remember to breathe, sing out past the room.

I fix my eyes on the field beyond the window and sing to Mr McArthur’s cows. It’s only about two and half minutes long,
‘Signore, ascolta!’,
and even if you don’t know the story of
Turandot
you know from this pleading little lament that nothing nice is heading Liù’s way and you want to cry out and warn her. Not that it will help. It’s rather in the nature of opera that people don’t see these things in time. I do not sing it as well as I can, but there’s a burst of applause when I finish and Uncle George is on his feet too, clapping and nodding and showing me off as if I am all his own work, as if he carved me himself out of a piece of driftwood picked up off the beach. My feet are crying out in the pointy shoes but my knees are shaking with joy, because Joe is looking at me.

Now Joe sings
‘Nessun dorma’,
standing with his feet splayed. Let no-one sleep, he sings. He presses one hand against his chest and offers the empty palm of the other in a turning motion, describing in the air the waves of a gentle sea.

—O Principessa,

Nella tua fredda stanza

Guardi le stelle

Che tremano d’amore

Oh, Princess, he sings, in your cold room you are looking at the stars that tremble with love.

I am only Liù the slave girl, but I know that by
Principessa
he really means me, not Turandot. I know the cold room is mine. He thinks of me lying there below him. Let no-one sleep. I can tell we are both thinking of the same thing, of last night, when again I heard him on the attic stairs in the middle of the night. I lay frozen and unable to breathe, wondering if my door would open. It didn’t. We both know that. I lay there while he paused on the landing, his hand just touching the handle. I see his face as he fears to come any closer and decides to retreat once more, and it is not another failure of courage but another triumph of respect for me over his true wishes. But it will not always be so. I picture him turning with manly anguish and regret from my door. Soon I am half-dreaming again for I do not follow the direction of the footsteps after that, only later I hear the soft squeal, like gagged mice, of the attic bed as his weight presses into it again.

He’s singing out of one side of his mouth and raising the eyebrow on the other as if for balance, and he girds himself for high notes and prefixes many of the words with a kind of extra half-syllable ‘huh-ynn’ that helps him locate the note.
‘Huh ynessun dorma’,
he sings. At times there is a pushing quality behind the sound as if he is trying to force a small potato down one nostril. His voice cracks on the top note and although his face is already red he blushes even deeper. I think him magnificent.

My mother jumps up and joins him in their final Act III duet
‘Che è mai di me?’
and I listen with tingles running up and down my back. Calaf has kissed her and Turandot’s struggle is over; she submits, transformed by love. I marvel how opera transcends such trite considerations as the relative ages and heights of the singers: my mother at thirty-six, statuesque and striking with her powerful though unpractised voice and Joe, short, round and an eagle-faced twenty. He can’t live without her and she can’t hold out against his heroic charm. They sing combatively, locked in a duel to out-express each other. Then Joe advances on her, rises on tiptoe and holds her against his chest. He gazes over her shoulder with a look of faraway longing and then sinks his face into her neck. He’s awkward because he does not really want to be doing these things with my mother. It’s me he wants. As I watch, our music room evaporates and dawn breaks over the Imperial Palace of ancient Peking. Love conquers all.

And I’m very calm again. Christine has been organising me and now I have a list. She’s given me the name of a hairdresser who she says is the best one in Burnhead. I will want my hair tidying she says, since I’m not shampooing or doing much to it myself at the moment.

And you need a skip, she tells me. The council takes paper on a Wednesday as long as it’s in green bags. And if you ask them they’ll do a special pick up, anything at all you want rid of but they will charge, oh and keep organic matter separate, she says, tapping the list. I’ve got green bags I can loan you. I’ll leave them in the porch, will I? You just need to ring them. Or will I ring them for you?

I’ll get round to it, I say. When I’m dressed.

She leaves it at that and after she goes I think, now she’s been, there’s no hurry after all. I settle to a bit of cross-stitch. I don’t know where the time goes.

So when I do ring the number for the bin men I get an answering machine telling me to call back in office hours. And Sheena the caterer who is on the case (as Christine says) for after the funeral but who has a query about the ham sandwiches has an answering machine that starts, Hiyaaaa!!! I feel foolish leaving a message about mustard and no mustard and white and wholemeal so I ring off before I finish.

When I call the hairdresser it rings and rings and rings. Is everyone on holiday?

Now I’m in the mood to get on, though, and I won’t be discouraged. Christine’s got me fired up. Some bin bags seem to have appeared from somewhere. Not that I’m about to start just shoving papers in them. There is far too much sorting out still to be done. I don’t want to throw anything away that I might later find I need.

15

W
ith Fleur no longer much present, let alone in charge of the kitchen, Lila seized the chance to satisfy Joe’s stomach. It would be demure and wifely and an endeavour he would surely love her for, though thanks to Raymond she found herself having to do it far too often with mince. Twice she produced it stewed in the ordinary way, serving it up in a bumpy grey slick.

The third time Raymond dumped mince on the draining board she knew she had to do something. Once they were in London they would never touch it again, but how could she convey to Joe now that mince was the last thing she would cook if she had any choice in the matter? She had to surprise him. She wanted to deliver to him on the end of a fork mince that revealed her originality and cleverness. Her cooking would make him curious about her, and having got him intrigued she would preserve the aura of mystery and feminine authority around herself by revealing none of her culinary secrets.

Fleur’s two or three basic cookery books only confirmed the limitations of mince, but one line at the end of a recipe for making rissoles caught her attention: ‘Cooked, finely diced chicken may be substituted for the minced beef.’ She remembered seeing, in ‘Broadcast Suggestions for the Housewife’ (the only page she could understand) in George’s current copy of the
Listener,
a recipe for Summer Chicken. Chicken was too expensive, but if mince and chicken were interchangeable then she could make it with mince instead. She fetched the
Listener
and made a shopping list. The recipe contained a great many other things as well as the chicken, some of which she had never tasted, and it sounded different and exciting enough for Joe.

Nobody ate quite everything that they found in their Summer Mince. Joe left the prawns and the green pepper (that Lila had had to go to four greengrocers to find), George left the pineapple and Fleur the spring onion, but only because of her breath, she said. Raymond did best, leaving only a small, generalised heap on his plate, but his lips swelled up from the paprika and chilli powder. Lila looked at Joe. She knew that her eyes were shining too hard, as if enamelled or like dolls’ eyes, because she needed his praise too much.

‘Did you like it, Joe?’ she said.

He said, ‘Aah! Such splendours! The splendours of the continental kitchen! Dear Liù, what wonders you have performed, and would I could do you justice. But alas, I am not
piscivorous
.’

He pushed with his finger at one of the curling grey prawns on his plate, pretending to be surprised when everybody laughed. ‘I mean only what I say. I am not piscivorous, a fish-eater. Indeed I am, you might say, not a savoury person. I am a
sweet
person. I have a very, very sweet tooth.’

So Lila turned her attention to puddings. With everything else that was happening she had no time for all the weighing and mixing and baking and steaming that the proper recipes called for, so she stocked up on packets promising, at a fraction of the trouble, a blancmange or a whip, a table cream or chiffon—
desserts to please the whole family
. Dessert rather than pudding would be more in line with Joe’s tastes anyway, she felt, and she liked the pictures on the packets of a hostess in a perfect apron bearing to the table her trophy, an airy froth piped into minarets and studded with exotic fruits. And they were so easy! They made her feel modern and carefree.

The packets spilled their contents in a trickle of pastel-coloured dust, dry and silky as talcum powder and smelling the same, sometimes with tiny sharp crystals of something that looked like glass. When mixed with the animating liquid—milk or water, sometimes hot, sometimes cold—and beaten, the powder burst into life, coagulating into lurid gobs that clogged the whisk and ballooned up to the top of the bowl, releasing fumes more redolent of a colour, often pink, than anything edible. Lila would feel as she placed it in the pantry to set that she was leaving it in peace to calm down.

But her desserts, no matter what she did to them with glacé cherries and tiny silver balls and hundreds and thousands, tasted of sugar and chalk with a whiff of perfume, and were not the focus of anyone’s interest. She soon gave up telling them, as she brought one to the table in the manner of the lady on the packet, how thoughtfully she had chosen today’s flavour or how carefully she had placed the decoration that she was about to destroy with one plunge of the spoon. When Uncle George bothered to look up he was usually weary and watchful of Joe, more inclined to smoke than to eat and too busy making lists to notice what was on his plate. Her mother, humming from her latest conversation on the telephone, seldom had more than a few moments to spare. She would always be just off out; the girls would be arriving any minute in Moira’s car to pick her up for some excursion: talking to the printers, buying trimmings for the headdresses, choosing outfits for the ceilidh. Having just touched up her lipstick, she would take only a mouthful or two off the end of her spoon, gingerly and with a show of teeth. But because she was happier she was not unkind, and showed Lila some spasmodic appreciation:
I don’t know where I’d be without you.

Since her offerings were not really for them, Lila did not mind. But Joe turned out to be a shoveller. She put his apparent lack of table manners down to superior appetite and found it slightly thrilling to watch such relish. In the congealing lull afterwards she would scrape plates and let the inevitability of the coming afternoon settle on her. She tried to be at the sink with her back to him so that she did not have to see him rise to go. But she would hear the scrape of the chair and have to turn in hope of a smile or a look, and once he was gone she would stuff into the most meagre half-glance all the meaning she could make it hold and try to let it be enough. But she hated the afternoons. When, still standing at the sink, she got a glimpse of how deep her desolation might go in the space of the hours that stretched ahead, she would seek out company even if, as it usually was, it had to be Enid’s.

e
nid comes round on Sundays, now, and on it goes. See Joe? What about him? You fancy him, don’t you? I do not. You do so. She seems not to be Gathered very much anymore, but I don’t want her to think I’m interested enough to ask why.

One day we wander up to the farm, on George’s instructions. I am to get a feel for the space. I go reluctantly because Joe might be around later and I might miss him, and because I resent doing what Uncle George tells me.

Enid gets bored early on and we walk in silence. Sherpa the dog meets us and bounces along and we talk to him instead. The yard is deserted but the yellow door of the farmhouse stands open. Sherpa lopes over the overgrown grass and stands barking into the narrow hall, his whole body twisting. I peer in. One dim, hanging bulb fails to light the place but manages to stain the air. Mr McArthur appears, holding a length of rope. He is too big and looming for the doorway and in his farm clothes and boots he seems unsuitable, generally, for indoors, even an indoors as shabby as this.

Aye well, girls, you’re here just at the right time. Come on, he says, and turns and disappears back into the house.

We are too sullen with each other to express any suspicion about what dire thing involving rope we might be here at just the right time for, so we follow across the mud-scented hall and through a flat door with an ochre patina of grime and smoke. Billy stands in the front room. Both his arms are stretched around one end of a tilting upright piano that is resting half-on and half-off a low platform on castors. He looks hot and fierce.

Hiya there, Billy.

I am showing Enid that I know him better than she does, staking my claim. Even if he is just a farm boy he is mine to say hello to first.

He nods at me and says, I’m needing a hand. I cannae lift the back end on, the wheels keep slipping. Dad, get the rope round it again and pull from the front.

He grunts and nods at Enid and says, You, hold the wheels steady. Don’t let it run away.

To me he says, Here, you help me lift this end.

I go to help him with a slight simper. With a couple of pushes and pulls we manage to get the thing up and balanced on the set of wheels.

From what feels like a long way off I hear a noise, a small scream that even so may be coming from me, and I feel a tightening and a tugging as if a long, invisible piece of my clothing has got caught under the bottom edge of the piano. Nobody says anything.

The space the piano leaves against the wall is brighter and cleaner than the rest of the room and shows that the flowers on the paper were once two colours, lilac and green, before they faded together and aged into shadows of themselves. On the newly exposed area of floor weightless rolls of dust eddy over the linoleum in the air disturbed by our hauling and panting. The smells of a trapped past lift into the room: camphor and book covers mix with candlewax and the old bready scent of wallpaper stuck on decades ago with flour and water. Age and neglect smell the same everywhere, I think; this place reminds me of Seaview Villas. Enid straightens up from crouching by the wheels, and claps her hands. I feel the smack of palm against palm as if they are my own.

We’re no finished yet, Billy says. It’s going out. It’s to go in the shed yet.

Mr McArthur says, You’re daft, Billy, I’m telling you.

Billy glowers. It’s my piano and it’s going where I please.

Mr McArthur turns on me. See your man, your George? After one thing and another, now it’s to be a piano. A piano for rehearsals, a bloody
piano
. I’ve a farm to run, I’ve no time to go shifting pianos.

But how can he do the opera without one? I say, protective of Uncle George for the first time in a while.

This is no a bloody concert hall.

We just need to get it to the shed, Billy says. Pay no attention.

It’s not my fault, I say. Or Uncle George’s.

Mr McArthur glares back at Billy across the top of the piano. Well, you’ll no be wanting me now you’ve got the lassies here. Eh, Billy?

He looks angry and strong enough to lift the piano single-handed and hurl it across the room. He slaps the top of it with the flat of his thick hand and strides out. We listen to the tramp of his boots, the clatter of clawed feet and a bark as he curses the dog. The front door slams.

I can feel my hand stinging as though it were mine that slammed down on the cold lid of the piano. I raise it to my lips and stroke it across my mouth. My poor hand is sore and trembling.

Enid tosses her head prettily. She has seen Doris Day do it exactly like this. Billy makes his eyes deliberately sleepy and looks away.

Your dad, he’s maybe just in a bad mood, I say.

This is how I used to explain my mother’s behaviour to myself, before
Turandot
. I want to tell Billy that I understand what it is to live with an unpredictable adult.

It’s because of the piano, he says. You just need to leave him. It doesn’t last.

I think it’s very rude, in front of us, Enid says.

I see the effect she’s after. She thinks it’s attractive to flounce and insist on feminine privileges and nice manners. The Doris Day tricks are embarrassing the way she does them, like an overgrown child still playing in her mother’s shoes, too old to play dressing-up but fooling nobody because she clearly isn’t doing it like a proper grownup either. I seem already to have marked myself out as separate from all that where Billy is concerned. I just want to talk to him as if he were real, but I feel a sudden flush of embarrassment because what if this is what I’m like with Joe?

Just you shut up, Billy says to Enid. You pull from the front and keep the door open.

I half expect her to storm off but her eyes are gleaming back at him and she gives one elaborate finger brush of her hair and does as she is told. The piano rolls forward with a squeak and a boom from its insides that sounds like a guitar strummed in a cave. Enid helps the trolley over the doorjamb, while Billy and I push.

It is extraordinary how cold I suddenly feel, although when we walked up the track it was a warm day. And how heavy the load, as if nobody else is helping. It is so heavy. I feel as if I am moving this thing all alone.

Laboriously, slowly, we make our way down the hall, the castors sticking on the linoleum. When we ease the piano over the front step there is a wild, stray planking of jammed notes that raises a flurry of small birds out of their secret places in the garden and up they go, little frayed parcels of bone wrapped in feathers swooping over the wire fence and across the field. Away from the sick light of the hall and in the bright air of the afternoon, we pause. Billy lifts the piano top, peers in and pokes around with one hand to check that none of the hammers is stuck or broken. A fustiness belonging to the house clings to the piano; a smell of rusty strings and dead coal fires rises from the carcase like a dying exhalation. In the bleached outdoor light the shadows that hide in the corners and under the slope of the keyboard lid are revealed as simple dirt and the once polished surface is a yellowy grey as if the sulphurous air of the front room has soaked into the wood.