Puccini's Ghosts (2 page)

ACT I

The First Riddle

In the dark night flies a many-hued phantom.
It soars and spreads its wings
Above the gloomy human crowd.
The whole world calls to it,
The whole world implores it.
At dawn the phantom vanishes
To be reborn in every heart.
And every night ’tis born anew
And every day it dies!

HOPE.

In ancient Peking, the cold-hearted Princess Turandot has sworn a terrible oath. Her ancestor Princess Lo-u-Ling was ravished and killed by a conqueror and Turandot will never be possessed by any man. But her suitors are offered a chance. She will marry the one who correctly answers her three riddles. Those who fail, die. Calaf, prince of Tartary, incognito and exiled, falls in love with Turandot at his first glimpse of her. His old father Timur tries to dissuade him from attempting to answer the riddles and so does the slave girl Liù, secretly and hopelessly in love with him. But Calaf remains steadfast.

1

T
he school year fell in a heap as soon as the end of term exams were over and done with, trapping Lila Duncan and everybody else under the final shapeless week that had to be got through. Cupboards were tidied and books counted in and then Lila’s class sprawled on their desks playing noughts and crosses, bickering in low voices, basking in aimlessness. Sunlight burned through the windows and glazed their hair and dark backs; like giant, stranded flies they fretted and buzzed as if condemned to perish where they lay, the prospect of escape—the summer holidays—seeming too distant, too exhausting and unreal. Over their heads the last days of June loitered, the hours advancing casually with the drowsy menace of things trite but unpleasant that were still to come, like milk turning sour or fruit waiting to rot.

By Wednesday the week had halted. Late morning took all day. Lila had not acquired the knack of looking forward to things and now time itself, because there was enough to spare for her to wonder at it, seemed crowded with tiny, hovering omens of ill. She thought she could see them, hanging in specks of dust that sparkled out from emptied cupboards into shafts of sunlight or washing back and forth in watery shadows on the ceiling, wafting with the lazy threat of jellyfish in the weight of the tide.

On Thursday Miss Marten set them an Ink Composition, even though they weren’t meant to do Ink Composition in the last week. They weren’t meant to do anything but wait in a slump and suffocate in the sitting-out of the term, and in any case the inkwells had already been cleaned. Miss Marten knew this as well as the class did, but she hated them after a year of their round shoulders and eyes like greasy stones, their smell of sour wool. You runts, she thought, smiling at the back wall. You’ll never see me again.

‘Ink monitors Enid Foley and Barry Henderson. Inkwells out, one between two. “The World As I See It Today”,’ she said. ‘To be handed in at the end of this period.’

The class rose from its torpor to stir tired hostilities into the air, and Miss Marten bowed her head over her desk. None of them would write anything worth reading, though one or two of the oddballs and outcasts might try. It filled her with warmth to set work she had no intention of marking. In August she was marrying an air traffic controller called Leonard and she wasn’t coming back.

‘ “The World As I See It Today”,’ she repeated, placing ticks against an inventory of the books that stood in ruined columns around her. ‘And no outer space stuff, no seeing the world from a Sputnik. Crossings-out will lose marks. When you come back and look at what you write today, you might be surprised. A lot can change in a summer.’

Was she really still trying to scratch at their minds? She glanced up again and found herself looking into the faces of people staring as if through smoke and wandering from a battlefield, unconscious behind wide-open eyes.

Lila wrote:

The World As I See It Today

Today as I sit in this classroom on Thursday the 23rd of June, 1960, the world looks a hard blue colour. That is because it is a Thursday. Monday is pale green and unripe. Tuesday is beige, Wednesday is white, Thursday see above, Friday is grey like a man’s suit, Saturday is a different blue from Thursday and Sunday is that dark green that old people paint their houses. I would rather not do this but I can’t help it. I think if I lived somewhere else that was better and a more definite, proper place, I might have other things to think about and not get the colour coming straight into my mind the minute I think what day it is. This is the first time I have mentioned this. Other people would laugh and I get teased quite enough anyway! By certain people who shall remain nameless though everybody in this school knows who they are. I would even get teased for my name, the one my mother uses on me, which is Eliza. That is her sort of name. I don’t feel like an Eliza. I stick to Lizzie at school, that’s what my dad calls me, an ordinary name. He is ordinary himself so it suits him to use it, but I don’t feel like a Lizzie either. I used to get called Lila but that was a long time ago.

Best friends don’t tease one another or at least they shouldn’t, but I still wouldn’t tell even Enid Foley (about the colours), though she is my friend she takes things the wrong way and she’s only interested in God at the moment, since Easter she is OBSESSED. She thinks everything is a sin and only Jesus can get you out of it. Most people are obsessed by something, Elvis Presley is one, Cliff Richard ect, who I really like but being obsessed is going a bit far and makes you look stupid. My mother hates them, she only likes classical music and opera, the rest is just noise according to her. My father likes Lonnie Donegan but he doesn’t play the records in our house.

Anyway, the world as I see it today, it’s a stupid idea because I don’t see the world today in any way at all. Nobody can see the world. We only see the bit we’re in ie this bit of Scotland called Burnhead. And if you only had Burnhead to go on you would say the world is a dump. Burnhead is neither one thing or the other, and I am the same. Anyway who cares? How I see the world isn’t important as I am only me and it doesn’t matter what I think, so I will just go on seeing the world my way, you can’t change. Why I have to live here I don’t know, there must be thousands of places more interesting where people really enjoy living there. But wherever you go you have to take your own head with you. What I mean is wherever you go it’s the same you inside. You can’t get away from yourself, it all comes down to what goes on inside your own head unfortunatly, changing that is your only hope of changing the way you see the world.

In the staff room on Friday morning, softened by her leaving present of a stainless steel hors d’oeuvres tray with matching coasters and a bottle of sherry, Miss Marten marked Lila’s composition. She returned it to her in the dinner hall. On it she had written:

Rather solipsistic! You fail to address the question. Perhaps you will ramble less as you mature. 55%

After dinner, order broke down. Boys roamed the corridors wearing their blazers inside out, they started chalk fights and set fire to rolls of lavatory paper, turned on all the taps and threw dustbin lids onto the roof. Senga McMillan and Linda McCall stripped every twig, leaf and bloom from the line of flowering currant bushes that grew along the path bordering the school field and got the belt from the headmaster for it. Lila waited out the afternoon in the empty library, lulled by the smell of dust. She looked up ‘solipsistic’ in the dictionary and then the bell sounded and before she reached the gate where Enid was waiting she had forgotten what it meant.

‘Can we go to yours?’ Lila said. She always wanted to go to Enid’s. Enid always waited for her to ask.

‘What for? It’s only a stupid shop.’

‘Just. No reason. Just, might as well, why not?’

‘Can’t. See Senga? She got three of the belt. You should see her hand.’

‘So what?’

‘She wasn’t even crying. Her and Linda, they’re going to the Locarno, they said I could go as well.’

They had come out of school into cloudless sunshine. But the heat in the classrooms had been an illusion of summer; outside, a sharp wind off the sea pulled at their hair and raised swirls of wastepaper and ripped jotters in the playground. Lila squinted in the brightness, thwarted and annoyed.

‘The Locarno’s tough,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we just go to yours?’

‘It’s not tough. They’re not toughies.’

‘They are so.’

‘Not when you get to know them.’

‘Oh, so you know them? You’ve changed your tune.’

‘So? It says in the Bible you should forgive your enemies.’

‘Where in the Bible? Bet you don’t know where. And you’re the one loves going to church.’

‘It’s not church, it’s the Fellowship of Sinai Gathering in His Name.’

‘Senga’s been going round behind your back. She says it’s not a proper church.’

‘So?’

‘So. You don’t even sing hymns.’

‘You don’t need to. You speak the Word and that’s when the Lord hears.’

‘You said you hated Senga. She calls you Holy Foley.’

‘So what? That was ages ago. You should come off your high horse.’

‘I’m not on a high horse.’

‘Well, your mother is. Thinks she’s the next Maria Callas, everybody says so.’

They walked along for a while without speaking beside the naked currant bushes. As they went, the wind lurched through the branches, sending gusts of stray leaves and squashed flowers down the path, whipping away the bitter smells of torn blossom and spilt sap. Though she was seething over Enid’s defection Lila was pleased; the scent of the flowers had always made her feel queasy and restless.

They followed the wind as it blew a veil of sand across Burnhead Main Street. Shop awnings cracked in sudden gusts and the painted buckets and spades strung up in clusters outside gift shops clacked next to beach balls and rubber rings wheezing against the window fronts. Mrs Dobie brought the bin filled with toy shrimping nets in off the pavement outside Dobie’s Hardware & Fancy Goods and replaced it with one of canvas windbreaks.

In the branch office of Kerr, Mather & McNeill, Solicitors & Commissioners for Oaths, Mrs Audrey Mathieson got Hugh Mather out of the office for his Round Table meeting on time, checking his papers, dusting off the hat and clicking her tongue without once letting her smile drop. In the calm after the door closed, she finished some typing—only a letter that took no time at all but, as she said, if she had a thing to do she preferred to be allowed to get on and do it. This was true, but the real reason she rattled out a minute or two of typing every now and then, rather than wait until she had what Mr Mather called a proper batch, was that she disliked the brittle sounds and smells of office work and could not bear the thought of them filling an entire afternoon. She liked to get the snap and ting of the typewriter over with and afterwards she would flap the smells of carbon paper and ink away from her desk with a duster dipped in polish.

When she had finished the letter she sat listening to the silence that sang between her office and the small room across the corridor behind Mr Mather’s, where Raymond the legal clerk worked. His door would be ajar. Waves of afternoon stillness lapped from room to room.

Through the ridged glass of the window she saw the bobbing, blurry shapes of children in school blazers go by on Main Street, beyond the stretch of gravel and low wall that fronted the offices of Kerr, Mather & McNeill. Their voices reached her only in faint, neutral snatches, adding to the pleasure of her distance from them. She looked at her watch. Twenty past three: out early for the last day, most likely. Raymond’s Lizzie would be among them, drifting along in the tide of black blazers yet not quite of it; she was like him, dreamy and tall and not an ounce on her, knock-knees in the offing. The mirage of children passed; the dancing pattern through the window faded. Traffic noise was a murmur.

The distance from the street was a feature of the offices that Audrey liked, along with the fact that Kerr, Mather & McNeill occupied detached premises, one of the better double-fronted bungalows on Main Street just before the shops. It had been the home of the senior partner’s mother, a powdery lady with a dowager’s hump and large buckled shoes who hadn’t lasted the war; in 1946 the firm took the house over and Audrey joined them soon after.

It had required explanation, to her neighbours if not to John, an accountant’s wife of thirty-seven going out to work. Not that she would ever tell them the truth: she and John, already married ten years and settled back from China and Hong Kong for four of those, had been awaiting the babies that she, silently, never quite believed in. Childlessness had seemed to her apt enough. Punishment in some form, as her missionary parents had taught her, there was bound to be, for John not being ‘the first’ and for her ‘coloured’ baby, given away to a couple from the New Territories before she had seen his eyes open; punishment too, for remembering the touch of Wang Hoa’s skin and her heart’s refusal to feel that loving him was a disgusting and immoral blunder. Her little job distracted her from John’s disappointment, his forbearance, his goodness. It helped her to be nearly as kind to him as he deserved. And there seemed less to explain if she worked somewhere that looked like a private house. It’s just a small branch office, she would say, and it’s only secretarial. Oh, there’s a lot of working wives now, people told her, pretending to judge her leniently. They did not need to add mind you, not in St Quivox Drive, but at least no-one alluded directly to the empty cradle.

So Audrey saw to it that the house-turned-office, dignified and aloof despite the new gold lettering and ridged glass in the windows, remained homely. At her desk she hurried through the typing in snatched moments, anxious not to disturb a peace that was essentially domestic. Her suits for work were apricot, mint and powder blue, never charcoal or bottle green; she would not wear clothes the same colour as the filing cabinets. Paper clips were kept in a porcelain sweet dish from Shanghai. It was she who tended the bulbs edging the path between the two squares of gravel up to the front door, and who kept tray cloths laundered for the junior partner’s tea tray. She brought in the spherical millefiori paperweights of Vasart glass with brilliantly coloured chips set in their bases in frozen patterns of flowers that John gave her nearly every birthday and Christmas. They accumulated over the years; now there were at least four in every room. She was an excellent secretary.

Her ear picked up a creak from the floorboards in Raymond’s office and the burr of the second desk drawer. She covered her typewriter, stepped out to the hall, pulled down the blind over the glass portion of the front door and pushed down the snib on the Yale lock. Then, leaving her door open, she returned to her desk and took the compact and comb from her handbag. She freshened her lipstick, tidied her hair and popped the things back. Holding her breath, she snapped her handbag shut, a loud single shot into the silence, a dart of enquiry to Raymond. With its usual whine, his door opened wider and his footsteps squeaked along the floor to the clients’ waiting room at the back. When she joined him there a minute later he was ready for her on the Chesterfield.