Puccini's Ghosts (26 page)

Lila had never been so fussed over before but she took it all calmly. She thanked everyone nicely, but did not really need the attention. She was content to abjure the world until Joe should return, counting her get-well cards and listening to the sounds, lapping through each day, of her visitors coming and going, sounds that belonged to other lives and so were essentially meaningless to her and Joe, the lives of other people being to both of them now peripheral. Voluntarily alone and only temporarily exiled, she basked in the certainty of her life to come. She was in no hurry. She luxuriated in her clarity and faith and was a model patient; she sipped and gargled as expected and sent the visitors away feeling glad that they had come.

By the end of the week she was not very much worse than she had been before the tonsillitis. She came downstairs bathed and dressed late on Saturday morning, aware of a glide in her movements, not consciously copying her mother’s way of holding herself but sensing that something of that elegance was now in her possession. It was a surface smoothness only, a subterfuge to hide the workings of a mind that had pre-empted all obstacles and was now simply anticipating events, because how things were going to be was decided. A timetable for the rest of her life had been drawn up. She was finally in control of the cast of her own mind; there was no need for her to draw attention to herself, to make any noise, to bound downstairs or flap her hands. A drowsy, final look had settled in her eyes.

n
ow at last I’m getting somewhere. That busted piano still out on the front grass, an eyesore! Can’t leave it that way.

Further down one of the tea chests I find wads and wads of muslin: Joe’s experiments with dyeing. I remember him in the back garden with tubs and buckets borrowed from all and sundry, dipping lengths in red ink, poster paint, pigments of one kind or another, in search of his true Chinese red. Cherry won’t do, apparently, nor will vermilion nor cerise nor scarlet nor crimson. Chinese red. The truth is he quickly loses interest and leaves these yards and yards of dreary experiments hanging around all over the place. He gets other people to deal with it. Enid’s mum sorts it out in the end, I don’t recall how.

I pull out yard after yard of it. The cloth holds the colour reluctantly; fragments of red are flaking off everywhere, smelling of chalk and salt and dead minerals. He never did get a proper red and now the muslin is the colour of old insect blood and it’s filthy after years bunched in heaps in the attic. It’s full of pink dust and black broken bits you can’t name, as if smashed wings and shells and legs as thin as threads are all wrapped up in it, as if these great lengths of muslin have been used to wipe a giant windscreen clean of mortalities after a long journey. There has been massive loss of life and spillage, but long ago; the stains are too dry to associate with anything recently alive.

My foot is a trouble to me, I won’t deny, but I can hobble about when my mind is set on getting to a place. I gather up the muslin in my arms and shift myself out to the front garden, where I unwrap folds of it in and around the broken frame of the piano. I arrange the cloth so that it pours in motionless floods of red around the ruin and makes it look like what it is, a corpse. Dried entrails. Christine will be pleased with me, for I add also some of the papers, the early newspaper cuttings and George’s jottings, his handwritten sheet music, jamming them tight into the gaping holes in the piano so they won’t blow away. White, fluttering paper birds come home to roost like memories—they stop its twanging, broken mouths with some of the very notes this piano came out with and the very words we sang: promises, lies, threats and desires all set to music.

I also find near the bottom of the chest a large bag of buttons and beads. Surplus to requirements. Everybody in the production is asked to provide at least thirty buttons or beads, for decorating the principals’ costumes—red for Turandot, gold for Calaf, black for Calaf’s old father, Timur. Liù doesn’t get beads. The Mandarin and the old emperor Altoum and the courtier Pung are going to wear
Mikado
costumes with Chinese adjustments, though most people won’t make the distinction. I put my hand into the beads, lift them in dry handfuls and let them run. The rattling coloured river of them makes an old sound, like rain on the privet.

There are close to two hundred people connected in some way to the production now: we’ve got four boy scout and girl guide troupes roped in as the chorus of boys, though we are letting the girls sing too as seems only fair, and the boys are helping with the shed painting and the set. Most of my school orchestra and Ayr Academy’s too are enlisted, as well as more than half of the Ayrshire Amateur Philharmonic Orchestra, and dozens and dozens of people from choirs and the two amateur operatic societies, several music teachers and their star pupils. It really does seem as if all these people were just waiting at a loose end, desperate for something to do. George is permanently nervous and his mood alternates between thrilled and ratty. It is Mr Mathieson who keeps us organised and who follows through George’s and Joe’s whims and flights of fancy over the set and costumes. Getting everyone to donate a few beads and buttons is another of Enid’s mum’s ideas, practical and simple. Lots of people donate lavishly, and we are awash in them.

There are more papers at the bottom of the chest, impacted into a clump that sticks to the base. They are smeared with red and stuck together as if once they were the first thing to come to hand after an accident. I suppose the muslin was shoved in on top before it was quite dry, and seeped colour on to them. I have to lean right in with a torch and I can read only the page on the very top, through a film of pink like dried, blood-streaked saliva.

Burnhead & District Advertiser
Thursday 28th July 1960:

Opera Hopeful ‘Not Serious’
Says BAST Maestro

Common Complaint

The high hopes of BAST (Burnhead Association for Singing
Turandot
) were struck a blow earlier this week when leading hopeful Eliza Duncan(15) succumbed to the singer’s classic complaint: tonsillitis! A condition which on occasion renders even the greatest sopranos speechless. Maria Callas herself is notorious for announcing, minutes before the curtain, ‘I can’t go on!’

Show Must Go On

George Pettifer, BAST’s Conductor and Musical Director, assured
Burnhead & District Advertiser
reporter Alec Gallagher that Miss Duncan, singing the part of Liù in Puccini’s
Turandot,
is made of sterner stuff. ‘It’s not serious. It’s quite common among singers. With proper rest the voice will be fine long before the first night.’ Miss Duncan, Mr Pettifer’s niece and daughter of Fleur Pettifer who is singing the lead role of Princess Turandot, can certainly boast an operatic pedigree! She commented, ‘I’ll be right as rain in a day or two.’

Well Wishers

There has been a steady flow of visitors and well wishers to Eliza’s home at 5 Seaview Villas. ‘News travels fast!’ she smiled. ‘I want to thank everybody who asked after me and sent cards and presents, it honestly feels as if the whole of Burnhead has been wishing me better.’

Performance to Remember

Miss Duncan added, ‘The rehearsals are going superbly well and my being indisposed hasn’t disrupted the schedule at all. And it certainly won’t affect my performance. When I finally get up on that stage I shall be singing the very best I can. I want to repay everyone’s kindness by giving a performance to remember!’

By Staff Reporter Alec Gallagher

Well, does that sound like me? Not a word of it is mine. Either I’m asleep when Alec Gallagher pops in to get the story or I’m overlooked, being upstairs and out of the way. Uncle George supplies him with news of what I think and feel.

The tea chest has a raw metal edge that scratches me as I lean over to read. Not badly, just the skin snagged and broken at intervals in a line of red dots and dashes running from side to side under my breasts. Later I lie back in a hot bath and the line of the scratch looks like a pulled thread in fine knitwear and from here and there along it tiny, stinging little plumes of blood escape. But I’m all right. I’m even managing to keep my bandaged foot dangling over the side out of the water. A bath calms me. Then I’m going to do some cross-stitch and then, taking care not to cut my hands on it, I’ll haul that filthy tea chest out of the house. It can join the pile on the front grass.

18

G
eorge pulled a stray sour thread of tobacco out of his mouth, threw the cigarette end away and spat into the grass. Something about fresh air raddled the taste of a cigarette and reminded him too much of burning leaves which, although that was all it was when you got down to it, he found an unpalatable thought that put smoking in almost the same category as eating grubs, a savage habit. He did not like the picture of himself hunkered down, lapsed and apelike, sucking in fumes just for the corrupting trickle of nicotine in the blood, but that was the kind of smoker an outdoor fag made him feel like and that he feared he must look like, crouching to take the weight off his legs and keep out of the wind in a corner of the field bordering the yard of Pow Farm.

To be more truthful, he was also keeping out of the way of the Mathiesons. The Mathiesons and all the rest of them: the ladies, the helpers, the ‘useful pairs of hands’ who were setting up for the ceilidh. He could hear Mrs Mathieson calling out to people as they arrived—
Mrs Burnside, would you butter gingerbread with the Misses Bergsma? Trestles to the shed, please! Are those macaroons, Miss Anderton?
And over the hedge Mr Mathieson was going to and fro from the boots of cars with a pencil behind one ear, unloading crockery on loan from the Townswomen’s Guild, counting out plates, cups, saucers and spoons and marking numbers down on a clipboard. If Mr and Mrs Mathieson ran the world it would be, George felt, better organised, though with more inventories and home baking than people were used to. He wondered why, when these people contributed so much, they made him feel so weary, as if their energy sucked away all of his.

He hadn’t been able to put Joe out of his mind. It wasn’t that he was worried because he didn’t know what he might be getting up to, he was in a slough of quiet despair because he knew exactly what. All week he had found himself hanging around Seaview Villas in the hope he would walk in; he’d made himself late for rehearsals and meetings because he was reluctant to leave, feeling superstitiously that his not waiting in the house would somehow prevent Joe’s coming back. He hadn’t come. Now it was Saturday and George was bracing himself to discover, whenever Joe might deign to re-appear, that his fears about how he’d spent the past five days were well founded. He was too tired to conceal from himself anymore how much it wounded him.

This morning he had eaten some bread and marmite and waited again, listening for the sound of his arrival. He’d done some more work on the score (there was still so much cutting and changing to do to arrive at a version that this cast and orchestra could perform, never mind what he was capable of conducting) but still Joe had not come, and by then George’s spirits had sunk so low he had been unable to stay in the house another minute.

He’d come up to the farm and found Billy hosing and brushing down the yard, sweeping off dust and cow muck and tall weeds, and he’d hovered for a while and offered to help. But Billy wouldn’t ask him to do more than put a few buckets and brooms away, and when Mrs Mathieson appeared there had been in her voice, George thought, a hint that he might not be pulling his weight.
Oh George,
she had said,
do I spy you empty-handed? I’ve an urn needs lifting and going in the shed, there’s a table up waiting for it, it’ll need filling.

Yawning, he felt acid rise in his gorge and a slow pain spread under his ribs. His eyes watered and he swallowed a mouthful of bile and spat again. Rubbing his chest, he straightened up and strolled up the field, turning out of the wind to light another cigarette as he went. He leaned over the gate and inhaled and held the smoke for as long as he could, but he still felt hollow inside and sick with yearning. He sighed the whole chestful of smoke back into the air.

It didn’t help being hungry, and he didn’t suppose there would be lunch to speak of. He needed some proper food, not the plateloads of stuff these people ate. From the field he watched the ladies, most of them in small workaday hats, bustling with towered cake tins and covered plates. One or two arrived on foot and some had come on bikes with filled baskets and bags slung from handlebars. He caught snatches of talk and sometimes a gust of surprisingly excited laughter.

It wasn’t quite fair to call it a sugar orgy, he knew that, but he had been surprised at the scale and seriousness of the undertaking that had become the ceilidh tea. There was a kind of sumptuous finesse in it, he discovered. There had to be three kinds of scone: plain, fruit and cheese, and gingerbread both dark and light, and if Dundee cake then also, for balance, cherry Madeira. He found them strange and touching, these people who with their thick legs and broken veins seemed constituted to go overnight from childhood to middle age, the desires of young, crazy hearts shelved before they were out of their teens in favour of decency and responsibility, yet who would be hilarious within ten feet of a cake stand, giddy on Viennese fancies, raspberry kisses and butter icing.

George felt a sudden longing for Chez Hortense in Soho, a bistro rather than a restaurant (a distinction that appealed to him) that aspired to being French, though it was enough for him that it was foreign. It was a place he liked when he was in the mood to find roughness amusing; it smelled of scorched meat and mustard, the salads were full of raw onion in thick chunks, the steaks were bloody, the wine cheap and the waiters ham-fisted, friendly Greek thugs. He had taken Joe there. In fact, dinner at Chez Hortense was probably all they needed now to set things straight.

He shivered, feeling desperately homesick. It was a mistake, standing here long enough to let his fears crowd in, and he tried to remind himself why he couldn’t just leave. Poor Florrie. Chez Hortense would appeal to her too, or would have once. She was probably too brittle and precious for it now. There were glimpses still of the Florrie he was losing, but they were rare; there was a fragmented, obscured quality to her as if she lived in a cloud of disappointment, sidestepping joy when it crossed her path, distrusting it, preferring her familiar shadows. How hysterical and disillusioned she was, and how bewildered and emptied of resistance Raymond had grown. Singing
Turandot
might be bringing her round somewhat and even Raymond seemed to be enjoying himself but even supposing they pulled it off, what would happen to them when it was over?

At the whistle and the yip of a dog’s bark he turned and saw Stan McArthur, hands in pockets, in his slow, rolling walk across the yard. Sherpa bounded ahead of him to the gate and George stooped down and rubbed his ears through the bars.

‘Band’s on their way,’ Stan said. ‘That’s them just off the phone.’

He turned and leaned his elbows against the gate so that he and George looked across the yard, not at each other. The ladies came and went.

‘Billy’s in the bath. Splashing away and singing, stinks like a tart’s boudoir. You never heard the like.’

Their eyes followed Sherpa as, nose to ground, he tracked in a wavering line the path of Mrs Mathieson who was marching past on neat unsuitable shoes, bearing a tray. She was carrying it almost at chin level to allow clearance for her bosom that sat like a high, padded bar across her chest, pointing the way forward. With her head tipped back to see over, she seemed to be following it, while her bottom swung eagerly behind.

‘Aye, good effort,’ Stan said. ‘Good spread, by the looks of it.’

George pulled out another cigarette for himself and offered the pack to Stan.

‘Naw thanks,’ Stan said, shaking his head. ‘I’m a pipe man.’

Sherpa gave up the trail, trotted over and lay down. After a pause Stan said, still with his back to George, ‘See that dog? Name used to be Schubert.’

‘Sherbet?’

‘
Schubert.
Yon composer.’

‘Really?’

‘Aye,’ Stan said, his voice clipped. ‘He wrote songs. I thought you’d have kenned that.’

‘Nice dog.’

‘He was the wife’s. She got him young, just a puppy. Called him Schubert. I says that’s a daft name, she says, I like it. I wisnae bothered, tell you the truth.’

‘But you changed it?’

Stan stared into the sky and tried to make his voice casual, as if he hadn’t thought about the question before. ‘Aye well, the wife, see, the wife died. Eight year ago. It wisnae expected. She was a young woman, she was a
well
woman. Twelve year younger than myself. But she took a bad stomach, couldnae eat, and at the finish-up they said she’d a growth. Nothing they could dae.’

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ George said. He didn’t know how to sound as if he really meant it, though he did. ‘How terrible.’

‘Aye well, she didnae linger. They tell you that’s best. Thing was, right after, I couldnae stand it, the dog. Only a puppy still, crying for her. The noise, day and night like it felt worse than me, a bloody
dog
and she’d only had it seven weeks. I’d been married to her eleven year. I was ready to shoot it, tell you the truth.’

‘Dogs do feel things, though, don’t they?’ George said, feeling inadequate. He took his cigarette from his lips and studied the smouldering end. ‘They can get awfully attached.’

He meant this as a drawback. He didn’t much like animals; their devotion could be only an inconvenience. He didn’t want to hear any more about death, either. He had never lost a wife and wasn’t qualified to comment, and however sorry he might feel for Billy it was in the way of things for children to lose parents, and sometimes young. George was thirty now and couldn’t remember how it had felt when his mother died, beyond an empty feeling that he supposed he had learned to live with since he didn’t think about it any more. George the child was as distant to George the man as his mother now was: a dim figure from a past that he thought of as belonging to other people, a scratched reminder on a stone over an untended grave in some place he would no longer be able to find.

‘Well, see, the bloody dog…I dragged it out in the yard here one night, I had the shotgun, I was out my mind wi’ the bloody thing, and here Billy comes crying after it,
Schubert, Schubert
! He was only ten. And I’m shouting back, I was that mad I couldnae stand to hear its name, and Billy’s crying and bawling away—No don’t, don’t, he says, I’ll take it, I’ll change its name, don’t kill it. See, what I’m saying is—’

‘Hmm?’

‘Billy. He says, don’t make the dog die
as well
.’

George could not find a reply.

‘What I’m saying is, I’m no proud of that night. Billy was a wee boy.’

‘Yes, but you were very upset. When people are upset they—’

‘Aye, even so. Anyway, he trained that dog to a new name. That’s no easy.’

‘I’m sure you were just upset.’

‘What I’m saying—see, the dog, how I see it, the dog was getting it oot its system. An’ see me and Billy? We never talk about it. Still.’

‘Well, he probably knows how you feel, don’t you think?’

‘But it’s that quiet. See him and his mum, they were the ones for the music. And see if she was here, she’d be that pleased, with yon opera and that. She’d be tickled pink.’

‘Yes, Billy’s a great strength in the chorus. And so willing, with the set and getting the shed ready.’

‘No, what I’m saying is, him up there in the bath singing away, it’s
good
. See what I’m saying? Me getting to do something for Billy just like his mum would have done. See what I’m saying?’

‘Yes, I think I follow,’ George lied.

Stan cleared his throat, started up from the gate and set off back to the yard, clicking his fingers at Sherpa. Still walking, he turned and said, ‘Ach, the hell you do. I’m trying to thank you, you wee bugger.’

m
y first day up after the tonsillitis and I have much to do before I will be ready for the ceilidh tonight. I’m meeting Enid because she is lending me her turquoise dress. (I know, secretly, that it looks better on me with my dark colouring than it does on gingery Enid.)

When I leave the house I see that the boy scouts have been busy. In the field adjoining the farm track there is now a painted sign that says:

Saturday 30 July 7.00–10.30

COME TO A CEILIDH
All Welcome

Dance to Jackie Shenley’s Accordion and Band
Tea Refreshments Raffle

Tickets 5/- and 3/- on the night or in advance from leading Burnhead retailers

The ragged edges of the entrance to the farm have been scalped. Skeins of lopped grass tumble over the mown verges and branches of hawthorn and torn bramble are strewn across the track, which seems wider now. The hedges look startled, stripped by the cutter down to short twigs like fingers ripped to their white bone tips. At intervals along the verges small boulders—from the beach, probably—have been set in the grass and whitewashed to form a pale and lumpen guard of honour all the way up to the farm. Is this all it takes, I wonder, a bit of mowing and a few white stones? For the place is transformed. It looks prosperous and poised, less homely but oddly, more welcoming. It looks unlike Burnhead and is somehow operatic, my mother’s kind of place.