Puccini's Ghosts (17 page)

Paris has got hold of my cross-stitch, pulled it out of its bag and is making a kind of cat’s cradle out of my silks. I jump to my feet. I don’t want it spoiled, she’s a sticky-looking child. She may have chocolate on her fingers. Plus there’s a needle in it.

Christine gets there first and pulls the work gently away from her. Paris wails, plonks herself on the floor and returns to Stripey.

Hey, brilliant, Christine says, smoothing it over, did you do this? It’s brilliant.

She turns it this way and that. Honest, it’s really good. What’s it meant to be? What way up does it go?

It’s not meant to be anything, it’s stylised, I say. It’s not meant to be anything, it’s just a symmetrical pattern. Just shapes.

Christine doesn’t know what to say to this, so as she sits down again she picks up the cutting and looks at it.

My God, she says, this is over forty years old. People hang on to stuff that long, don’t they? She waves an arm over the boxes and papers on the floor. It’s daft. I mean what would you want to hang on to stuff like this for?

BAST

BURNHEAD ASSOCIATION FOR SINGING
TURANDOT

Needs

YOU!!

COME AND JOIN IN this thrilling amateur production of Puccini’s
Turandot
taking place in Burnhead 26th, 27th and 28th August under the baton of top London professional. NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY. We need the following VOLUNTEERS AGED THIRTEEN OR OVER:

…
PERFORMERS
Chorus: (all voices, no auditions, just bring your enthusiasm!)
Principals: (some amateur experience desirable)
Strings, brass & percussion players
(own instrument and stand preferred)
Dancers, jugglers, acrobats—any style,
all other special skills also very welcome
…
PRODUCTION

Carpenters, painters, technicians, general helpers, front of house, costumes, makeup, props, production assistants. Electrical knowledge helpful. ALL HELP WELCOME

…

WHATEVER YOUR AGE OR EXPERIENCE

you can join in and have lots of fun. Come to an INFORMAL MEETING to LEARN MORE at 5 Seaview Villas, Pow Road, Burnhead, Saturday 9th July at 6.00 p.m.

I wouldn’t know, I say.

When she goes I sit among the cuttings and papers and they feel like old wrappings, the crumpled and torn tissue round precious things so long ago put by that the reasons that made them worth keeping have disintegrated silently inside their coverings. Treasures shrink with time, as do the objects of all youthful ecstasies; unwrapped and recalled later, they are mystifyingly undeserving of preservation. Although those paperweights in the sideboard may be the exception here. I bring the paperweights out again and set them in a row along the sideboard. Clean and pretty things make a contrast in this house.

My father was a mild man—a gentleman, as Christine says—mild to the point of powerlessness, unable to put up much resistance, but still I ask him now, aloud, over the purring of the fire: Why did you allow it? When Joe Foscari came that night, did you not see? I saw you watching. Surely you saw me fall for him. Why was there nothing in me that inspired your protection?

No answer comes. I see his face in old age when his mildness had deepened and he had grown whimsical and ambiguous. No answer will come now.

All right then, I say. All right, just tell me this. Were you not in the least concerned about the way they came and took us over—all of us? Were you not at the very least concerned about the money? You always worried about money. Did it not bother you, the whole Premium Bond being wasted on an amateur opera?

Ah, wasted? It was wasted, you think?

I see him, his hands draped over the arms of his chair like empty, hanging gloves. I could never actually have seen him this way in life so I must be imagining what it was like for him afterwards, late that night, that botched night when everything disintegrated and everyone left.

Yes, I think it was wasted. I lick my fingers clean of chocolate, pick up the cross-stitch, rearrange the skeins of silks, take up my needle and work by the glow from the fire. I don’t want bright light.

Christine grows bolder. This afternoon she is back. Paris has just been deposited at the Pow Little People’s Paradise—a wee playgroup kind of thing, Christine says—and she is dropping in to ask if I enjoyed my soup. My eyes are hot and dry from my sewing. Her lips tighten a little when I find myself unable to answer and she walks past me to the kitchen and starts to bang around looking for a pan to heat it up in. She rests in the doorway while it’s on the stove and asks if I’m all right for bin bags, because if I like she can pop home for a couple and give me a hand to get some of this mess tidied up.

No thank you, I say.

She sighs. It’s just, I seen it in the paper at lunchtime, she says. The paper, the
Burnhead Advertiser,
it’s out today. Mr Duncan’s funeral’s in the paper, the announcement? So I was kinda wondering.

Wondering what?

You know. Wondering where you’ll be going after, Christine says, as if such a concern is natural or obvious. After the funeral, for the refreshments. The announcement never said. I’m thinking if you’re having them back here you’ll need a wee hand to get tidied up first.

Refreshments? I haven’t thought about refreshments, I tell her. There won’t be many there. There may be no-one.

Christine disappears into the kitchen and comes back with soup in a mug. It is far too hot and smells of compost but something tells me she’s not leaving till I’ve eaten it.

Listen, she says. When her voice drops like this, it’s pleasant enough. I watch her over the rim of my mug. Listen, it’ll mainly be old folk, it’ll be a cold day. You need to give them a cup of tea. It’s expected. It’s what you do.

The soup tastes green and salty and makes my eyes water. I fish about for a tissue. Christine finds one on the floor. There are, in fact, many paper handkerchiefs on the floor, among all the other papers.

I’ve got this friend that does wee functions, teas and parties and that, Christine says. She works from home, does all her own baking. Want me to ask her? She’ll do it all nice for you, brings the urn and cups and everything. She’s not dear either, not like the hotels.

She pulls a business card from the pouch in the front of her fleece. On it there’s a picture of a pie with ‘Sheena’s Party Fayre’ and a telephone number written underneath. In a cloud of steam coming out of the pie it says in fluffy letters: ‘Function catering in your home. Complete service. Large or small. All fresh made.’

I wonder what this has to do with me.

Here? I say, looking round.

Christine is looking at me carefully. Uh-huh, she’s got a wee van and everything. I’ll help you get straight. I’m thinking, maybe, she says gently, maybe Mr Duncan would have liked folk back here. He was the gentleman.

Maybe, I say.

She is catching me off guard, this girl, easing herself sideways into my business with bloody soup and chocolate krispies and that blonde, blank child and now, pictures of steaming pies.

See, I’ll help you get tidy. Want me to phone Sheena for you? Will I tell her tea and sandwiches and cake and maybe a dram? For about a dozen, or maybe twenty?

I don’t stop her. It’ll be something to work towards.

12

A
udrey entered the clients’ waiting room and saw that Raymond was frowning. That meant it would be one of their talking days. She liked those, especially after one of the other kind; it allayed the sound of her mother’s voice that could sometimes still, even now, start up in her head, telling her she was plain oversexed and a shame to her parents (there being no shame like that of missionaries with a daughter in trouble), just the type to get caught in a trap of her own making, a web woven from her dirty wants, her cheap compliance and her graceless soul. No man’ll ever respect you, she said. After all these years Audrey found this information wearying, but not much more. She was safe from the worst consequences of it, even supposing it were true, but still she liked to see that Raymond was as anxious to talk to her as he sometimes was to have her splayed, as decorously as she could manage, on the leather Chesterfield. He was frowning at the
Burnhead & District Advertiser
.

‘Paper’s just out. Would you take a look at that,’ he said, folding the page back for her to see. They studied it together.

She said, ‘So they’re really going ahead with it?’

‘Daft,’ Raymond said. ‘They’re dead set. We’ve the young fella up from London now, moved in for the duration. Tenor. Fancy talker.’

‘Well, what Fleur wants Fleur gets, isn’t that usually the way?’ Audrey said easily.

On and off she tried to get Raymond to stand up to his wife a little, for his own sake, but the pattern of her encouragement followed by his failure to act on it was by now reassuring and neither expected any more of it than that. It was a marker, that was all, of how things were and how things were done, like the cool paper smells of the office, tea cups washed as soon as finished with, pencils sharpened: daily, expected, approved. Raymond lived by such measures and so did she.

‘Aye, well. Well…’

His voice tailed off. Audrey waited, without expectation. He often tried to feel his way forward like this, with little murmured observances that carried no meaning. He would let the potential of words expire in a sigh of exhaled breath, compromising the moment when he might speak by letting it pass with a shrug because it always turned out to be not the right time, after all, when he might come out with a speech about what he really felt. She didn’t regret his lack of rhetoric anymore.

He said, ‘It’s not just Fleur, mind you…it’s the lot of them. They’re egging each other on. I’m to stage manage the thing, so I’m told.’

‘Stage manage it? Can you do that?’

‘I’m to get a team to build the stage. In the evenings. I’m to talk to a firm about lighting, I’m to look at drawings for the set. I’m to ask, no, I’m to
tell
Mr Mather I need to take my holidays to fit in with it.’

‘You’ll be busy, then.’

‘I’ve tried to tell them! I’ve tried to say I can’t do this kind of thing but George won’t hear a no. Fleur’s not listening at all, the Italian fella just smiles and swings his arms about. I mean, what’m I supposed to do?’

‘You’re not to worry. They can’t expect you to do it all by yourself, can they? They couldn’t, surely.’

‘Och, Audrey.’ Raymond hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Maybe if, how about if you come in on it, too? Maybe help with the costumes or something, just so’s maybe…maybe I’d not be so much on my own?’

Audrey took Raymond’s hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘Well, maybe I could. Though there’s John.’

Another moment passed with a faint clearing of the throat from one or both of them, and a small sigh of respect for John. The anemones on the low table that he had grown and that Audrey had brought into the office on Monday were open and curling now, the petals gaping inside out to their polished hearts, stamens purple and smoky like the remains of a private, burned-out pyre. A dusting of sooty pollen lay on the cloth under the vase. She didn’t know whether her deceiving of John was important or not, in the wide sense. Conducted so modestly that Raymond, beyond the door of the clients’ waiting room, was shy of asking anything of her at all, her infidelity felt like a discreet grace note in her life in which she was permitted to take a small and private pride, such as the filing kept up to date, the placing of cloths under vases.

‘John’d help too. He wouldn’t want to be left out. And he’s practical enough,’ she said.

Raymond murmured, then withdrew his hand from hers and hit at the folded page of the newspaper. ‘Ach I mean, look at it,’ he said. ‘How am I supposed to know what to do?’

Audrey pulled the paper away and folded it up and tucked it out of Raymond’s sight. ‘Don’t worry so much. We’ll come to the meeting, John and me.’

‘That’s good of you.’

‘And what’s Lizzie making of it all?’

‘Oh, Lizzie.’ His incomprehension became even more burdensome. ‘We’re to understand from George that Lizzie’s got this voice, a real big voice. He’s got her full of it. She wants to get properly trained.’

Audrey raised her eyebrows. ‘Like her mother?’

‘Or so I’m told. I’ve never heard her on the subject. Lizzie never speaks to me.’ He sighed. ‘She’s living in a world of her own. I think she’s away with the fairies.’

Audrey thought for a moment. ‘Well, it’s probably her nature. I was like that once.’

‘Her head’s in the clouds.’

‘She’ll be all right. As long as they’re
her
clouds,’ she said, ‘and nobody else’s.’

i
go to bed in my old bedroom, and I dream. Though I am there in the dream, I am not doing anything except watch, nor am I utterly myself. It is some more valid person than I am who is doing the watching; through my eyes and from inside my own head she is looking out and seeing my parents and somehow me as well. This nearly-me, beside-myself person wonders if she is asleep or awake.

What she—or I—sees is a fragile picture. It comes and goes in light that is full of tricks and keeps changing and is the colour of neither night nor day; in an unsteady glow that could be from sun or moon the picture flickers and could evaporate altogether if stared at too long. In the dream I know that it is 1960, so it is another trick, then, that the dream is playing this picture back to me as if it were a memory, for it is impossible that I ever did see my parents like this in 1960, or ever. But there they are, staring as from a photograph, my mother at the end of her rope and my father dull with bewilderment. Their eyes, impenetrable circles of darkness, are larger than in life. They are standing in the garden and all around them on the ground lie the splintered remains of something they have broken, and they are sick at the loss and waste of it. They look ready to end their lives, and it seems arbitrary—a question of timing only—whether they will kill themselves or each other. But in their eyes sits the knowledge that one way or another the whole sorry business will soon be over and the hush surrounding them has something to do with respect for this fact. The waiting must be borne out with decorum.

Now I am lying down and staring through darkness towards the ceiling. I rise and take myself to the attic where at night the air smells even older than in daytime. The light of the bare bulb glares on the camp bed, which is still strewn with things piled up in a bank against the wall. I start to remove them, methodically at first, ferrying armloads to unfilled patches of floor, imagining that I am sorting things out. But all I want is the bed cleared, so I start to push stuff off and fling it around anyhow. Under all the junk, the surface of the dusty bedcover is still its original indigo blue. I ignore a fleeting, dark movement across its surface; something swift and scurrying has already vanished with the lightness of blinking. When I give the cloth a shake I find woven into the underside of its folds little silky white swellings that are powdery to the touch, the remains of ghostly, fled cocoons. Where more than forty years of light from the square skylight has fallen on the edge of the cover as it spills over the side of the bed to the floor, the colour has faded to a dim lilac.

I pull back the cover and get in and surrender to the embrace of the cloth and also to my own disgust, for it smells, and is heavy with damp and sticky with the layers of years; it feels like a coating of death. No trace of Joe remains. Not a breath or a hair nestles in the brown-stained ticking of the pillow, no memory of his skin is held in a whiff of talcum powder or aftershave between the cover and the rank mattress. Yet here is where he lies night after night while in my room below I stare upwards. I have to know how he sleeps. Is he on his back staring up too, not at the ceiling but through the skylight at the moon? On his side? Are his legs straight or scissored and are they covered or bare, does he grasp the bedcover between his thighs? Does he think of me and touch himself, imagining my hands, as I am trying to make my fingers feel like his body, opening mine? Does he listen for the sea or turn at once towards the wall and dream? It seems that I am still lying awake and burning in the dark, tormented by the heat in myself.

Now I see him. As I watched my parents so I watch Joe, simultaneously witnessing my invisibility to him. He is here in the attic but lying in a high, carved, baronial bed, the kind of bed I imagine his family owning. Uncle George is in the doorway with his back to the room, explaining something to my parents, who are out of sight. What he says is making them unhappy. Joe sleeps. I fancy George is talking about him. Nobody sees me.

A dream and not a memory, but this is how it was that summer. My watching with nothing to do while others talk, talk, talk, stretches of time when I hesitate between rooms, unsure whether to go towards or away from the sound of voices. Spells of loitering, waiting for Joe to turn up and give shape to long, senseless hours. Days filled with the single purpose of awakening a part of him that doesn’t really see me, to bring him alive to the necessity of me. Day after day when I fail to rouse him beyond a vague, drowsy friendliness and into a revelation of what I mean to him, when I squander hours devising excuses for his being unaware that his life and mine are unbearable unless we are together.

I am wrong to try to remember that time as if I saw one thing leading to another. Memory tries to insist that there is a kind of inevitability between events but even if there is, it is hidden at the time. But that summer, we really are marooned and voiceless until Uncle George comes along. He makes everything possible, even easy; swinging to our rescue the way he does, he seems to explain to us who we are. Above all, he disguises the preposterousness of it: an amateur production of
Turandot
mounted in nine weeks with a cast of kids, oddities and thwarted also-rans. How blind I am not to see that Uncle George is just as blinded, and chasing just as hard after what he himself wants. But I don’t care to go over and over it.

Now I sneeze and the blue cover fills my nose with a smell like pepper and dead leaves and is rough against my face, like a prison blanket. I struggle to my feet and try to wave away the frowsty air around the bed, protesting. I feel things crawling in my scalp. My eyes water under the bright light that casts a blade of shadow along the sloping ceiling of the attic and now I really am awake, scratching at my arms and shivering on the bare floor.