Puccini's Ghosts (25 page)

‘No, I mean I’m not staying here,’ Lila said, as she stood up. ‘
Here.
I’m away to London. I’m going as soon as the opera’s finished. I need to go.’

‘I’m not stopping you. See you.’

It was not until she had almost reached Seaview Villas and could hear Joe’s voice swimming out from the music room that Lila managed to clear her head of the atmosphere of Billy, his salt and animal skin, the scents of both sea and earth. She crept into the house and up to her room, seeking peace.

i
hear you’ve been a bit restless at night. Have you ever consulted a doctor about this? Has this been a long-term difficulty for you, the noctambulism?

Dr Chowdry has her hair in a bun and wears a crossed pink ribbon pinned to her front. She has large spectacles with red frames.

The what?

The restlessness at night.

Nessun dorma,
you mean?

Dr Chowdry blinks.

No-one shall sleep, I translate for her.
Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me.

I’m sorry, I’m not with you.

But my mystery is locked in me, I explain. Till the riddle’s answered, anyway.

I’d like to talk to you about your sleep-walking. Noctambulism. Has it troubled you before?

I’ve hurt my foot.

She listens to my heart and lungs, takes my blood pressure, looks at the whites of my eyes and all the time my foot is throbbing and she isn’t interested. Then she pulls up a chair and places her hand on my arm. She has been trained in the skill of appearing to care.

It’s my
foot,
I repeat, when she asks me if I have been eating.

She looks up at Christine hovering in the doorway of the kitchen, who says, See when she first arrived, she wasn’t like this. Were you? she asks me, raising her voice. And you’ve lost weight. You’re skin and bone.

It’s my foot, I remind them. I’ve hurt my foot.

But I already know Dr Chowdry isn’t interested in the real problem. When she arrived she just took the bandage off and pressed here and there and told me to wiggle my toes and bandaged it up again.

Christine says, Sure you want me to stay? Will I not go so you can talk to the doctor in peace?

Stay, I tell her again.

Dr Chowdry smiles at Christine. Your husband did a good job strapping it up last night.

Lucky he’s a trained First Aider, Christine says. We tried to get her to A & E but she wasn’t having it. We didn’t press, we didn’t want her any more upset. She was quite confused.

Oh, there’s no harm done. And he’s a better bandager than I am!

What I don’t understand, Christine leans forward to ask, is you wouldn’t think she had the strength. It’s like she was superhuman.

Dr Chowdry nods, looking at me.

I mean it’s on castors but a piano’s that heavy, I don’t see how she could do it all by herself.

Dr Chowdry says, I think it’s a bit like a form of hypnosis. The body does what the sleepwalker’s mind believes, you know? Same as people under hypnosis.

She hypnotises herself, you mean?

Maybe. In a way. Under deep hypnosis, for instance, if you tell someone you’re slapping their face their cheek can actually turn red, they’ll even get the finger marks. It’s because the unconscious mind is in charge. Mind over matter, I suppose.

Christine says, Really? I thought it was all fake, those hypnotists on the telly.

I don’t know. But maybe if a part of your mind is telling you you can move a piano, then you can, even if only a little. Eh, Lila? What are you up to, Lila, eh, when you should be asleep in your bed?

Two of my toes are round and purple and split like ripe grapes and I’ve also hurt a muscle in my shoulder. My back aches.

What about my toes? My toes hurt, I say.

Dr Chowdry says, Your foot is bruised and cut. It looks worse than it is. Nothing to worry about if you stay off it for a day or two, now the bleeding’s stopped. A & E might’ve put a couple of stitches in if they’d seen you last night, but you’re borderline. Just painkillers and antibiotics to be on the safe side, okay?

She says the last bit in an extra-smiley voice, patting my arm. And a tetanus jab just to make sure, okay? I’ll call in and do it for you here, easier than getting you down to surgery. It doesn’t take a second.

We tried to get her to go in but she wasn’t having it, Christine says again, more quietly.

They both look as if they are waiting for me to explain myself.

So you’re not sleeping, Dr Chowdry says. Why do you think that might be?

I’m restless, that’s all.

Christine has made tea and hands me a cup as if it is some kind of truth drug, a tool of persuasion.

Here. You’re up all hours, you know you are, she says.

I have a lot to do, I say.

Bereavement is very stressful, says Dr Chowdry, shaking her head. Bereavement’s certainly a difficult time, it rates right up there. I wouldn’t automatically resort to medication but there are things that can help short term, if you feel it would be helpful. I would need to know if you’re taking any other medicines.

There is a silence, filled with polite bafflement and tea-sipping.

You know, maybe it’s even a wee blessing in disguise, Christine offers, nodding at my bandaged foot. You’ll maybe not be so restless if you can’t get around so much. You’ll need to keep the weight off it. Accept a wee bit of help. I’m only too willing.

Is there anyone else nearby, any family? Dr Chowdry says in a perfect whisper of empathy. Is there anyone else? Somebody who can come and help with things for a while? Any friends?

Friends? No, there was only Enid, I say. And Enid’s mum—Enid’s mum looked after me. When I got ill, that summer.

Dr Chowdry and Christine exchange another look. Christine shakes her head.

Enid’s mum? Is this you going back over things again, is it? she says.

Enid’s mum was very good at sewing, I say. She could make anything. She sat and sewed and listened. She let you get on with it.

And Enid, what about her? Enid herself, is she still in the area at all? What’s her other name?

Enid? Foley…oh, but no…it was Foley, now it’s McArthur. Mrs Bill McArthur, now.

Oh! Dr Chowdry says, her eyes lighting up in Christine’s direction. I know who she means, I know the family. She turns back to me. You mean Enid McArthur, the McArthurs in the big bungalow, do you? House with a Spanish name. They’re on the practice list, she whispers to Christine. The mother’s a patient as well.

It’s Portuguese, I think you’ll find, I say. They used to go to Portugal.

I think they still do. They’re away a lot, Dr Chowdry tells Christine. She bends closer and talks to me in a slow, loud voice. So you remember old Mrs Foley, do you? From a long time ago?

Enid’s mum. Isn’t she dead?

Mrs Foley’s fine. She’s still in Burnhead. She’s in sheltered accommodation.

Enid’s mum, she didn’t mind anything. She sewed and listened and let you get on with it, I tell them. I suppose you could say she was a banal sort of woman. I suppose by this time she’ll be soft in the head.

17

L
ila woke early with the idea that during the night a pair of tiny crusty sea urchins had climbed into her mouth and lodged themselves high up in her neck under the jawbone. When she tried to swallow they clung on, tearing up the lining of her throat and bringing it with them. She ran a hand up her neck and prodded at the two swellings under her fingers and her eyes watered with pain.

She lay and reminded herself what she was in for: today, a high temperature and possibly tomorrow, for a while, even higher. She would stay in bed and hope that by lying still she would not need to drink. She would spend hours trying to talk herself out of thirst until she was parched, and then she would rise on one elbow and sip some water and fall back after the effort, her throat stripped raw by swallowing. She would lie worrying that her ears and eyes were getting in on it, too. She would wonder why a disease of the throat should make her legs and arms feel as if they were rolls of cloth badly stitched to the rest of her body. By the third or fourth day the symptoms might be taking their leave, subsiding over the next few days and leaving her tired out and with a scoured, fragile throat. But she was too exhausted to imagine it with anything but calm. As long as it did not make her ugly (because suppose her illness brought out the Florence Nightingale in Joe?) she could almost welcome a dose of tonsillitis; she liked the idea of staying put for a while. Already feeling an invalid’s detachment, she watched the light through her window change from a blue dawn to the yellow of a rare, hot, cloudless day.

Her father was first up. He clicked his door, cleared his throat softly on his way to the bathroom on bare feet, slipping from night to day as imperceptibly as he moved through all his plain routines of living. She heard him go back to his room, clicking the door again, and then she forgot about him. Uncle George was next, starting up like a motor and pounding around on the landing, thumping downstairs, calling out to Raymond as he went, not so much waking up as announcing to an anxious world his resurrection from sleep. Lila fell into a doze and woke with her throat drier than before. Birdsong reached her from the garden and filled her room with a strange, clean sweetness. Later she heard the creak of Joe walking above, his descent of the attic stairs, and then she heard noises from the bathroom that made her quickly cover her ears with the blankets. She would not think about such splutterings from unthinkable parts of him, or from herself for that matter; after they were married all that kind of thing would happen off-stage. Their bathroom would be safe from all that, a fragrant place sparkling with hygiene. She turned her mind to the little flat they would have and how she would scold him good-naturedly for leaving the bathroom so steamy, and fold the towels up neatly after him.

Some time after that, her mother stirred. Lila imagined her floating progress from nightgown to clothes, seeing to the needs of her body as if it were not quite hers but an article entrusted to her aloof, appraising care. After that, the upper floors fell silent again. Lila lay and let her throat and face burn. They would notice, surely, that she had not come down?

After what seemed a long time her mother tapped on the door and opened it. Around her head she had wrapped a scarf like a turban and she wore a strand of thick beads the size and colour of walnuts; the look was arty and high-minded.

‘Eliza?’

Lila rose on her elbows. ‘I’ve got tonsillitis again. My throat’s sore. I’m all hot.’ Her voice sounded as if it came from behind a closed door.

‘What? Oh, for God’s sake, not now! Your voice!’ Fleur backed onto the landing and made her way downstairs, wailing. ‘George! George, she’s gone and got tonsillitis!’

A few moments later Uncle George came tramping up. Fleur followed, fingering her beads with a thin, cold-looking hand.

‘What’s this? Poor old you,’ George huffed, landing heavily on the end of the bed. He was carrying a torch and a teaspoon. ‘Oof, I took those stairs too fast. So—what’s up? A dose of Soprano’s Delight?’

Lila slumped back on her pillow and stared at the ceiling. She’d had tonsillitis before but it hadn’t really mattered. Enid’s mum said everybody had their weak spot: with Enid it’s cold sores, with you it’s tonsils, she said, nothing you can do about it. But Lila felt she was being awkward. It was now her responsibility, she realised, to play down how ill she felt.

‘Just tonsils,’ she said, with a grunt that she intended to come out like a sigh of boredom rather than pain.

‘Let’s take a look. Open wide.’ Uncle George leaned forward, pushed her tongue to the floor of her mouth with the handle of the spoon and peered in, moving the torch from side to side. He snapped off the beam.

‘Red and raw,’ he said, cheerfully, ‘but
nil desperandum
! You just need to stay put and get dosed up in time for the run-through on Sunday.’

‘She’ll be all right, won’t she?’ Fleur asked, rubbing the toe of her shoe up and down the back of one leg. ‘We won’t have to cancel the run-through or anything?’

‘Oh, no, shouldn’t think so. You’ll pick up, won’t you, Liù? Liù will muddle through?’ He laughed his disparaging, own-weak-joke laugh.

Lila didn’t care much about the run-through on Sunday. The ceilidh was on Saturday. She had to be better by Saturday. Five days.

Counting off on his fingers, Uncle George turned to Fleur. ‘First thing, you and Calaf stay away, she might be infectious. Two, she needs aspirin. And put the kettle on, she should have hot orange squash. Cold flannel for the neck, bring down the inflammation.’

Fleur was turning to go, still playing with her beads. For the first time since she arrived she took her other hand from the doorknob, and gave a delicate finger wave. ‘Well, you take care of yourself,’ she said.

Uncle George got up and patted Lila’s shin under the bedclothes and told her, ‘You’ll be better soon. After all, you’re young and strong!’ Then he broke off in a fit of coughing that made them all laugh.

The day passed. Uncle George came and went with orange squash and aspirin. Lila slept and woke and dozed. She thought she heard Joe singing, somewhere far away. The telephone rang. Two flies circled her room in a maddening metallic-sounding duet, as if they were flying around in an empty tin. When she absolutely had to, she drank, turning her face into her pillow to wipe the tears that came every time she swallowed. Outside, the sun burned fiercely, the first hot day in weeks. The next time Lila woke there was a thick, briny taste in her mouth and she felt bloated and crabby. The room was hot and bright and the house beyond her door was full of a flat, dreamy silence that belonged to afternoon. She got up and ran a tepid bath. While she waited for the tub to fill she brought down Joe’s bottle of Gentilhomme Debonair from the bathroom cabinet, removed the stopper and stood sniffing it, shocked at her pleasure. Surely when she was this ill it should be impossible to feel so alive? She tipped a little, not enough to be missed, into the water, and Joe’s scent rose into the air as if he had quietly entered the bathroom and closed the door. She sank into her bath feeling that he was with her, watching.

She returned to her room to find it cool and dark. In her absence the window had been opened wide and the curtains drawn, and her bed re-made. Although she was touched—so far Uncle George’s nursing had been unrefined, only aspirins and orange squash—Lila was too exhausted by the bath to feel more than mild surprise. She climbed into bed with Gentilhomme Debonair still on her skin; smeared with essence of Joe, she felt owned and happy. Then, sliding one foot down the sheet that was now smooth and without ridges, she remembered that Uncle George had gone up to the farm for the afternoon. Her mother was down on Burnhead beach with the girls. It was Joe who had made her room nice.

The sun was burning lower. It glared straight through the thin brown material of the curtain and cast a tremulous filter of shadow on the wall opposite, setting it a-shimmer with runnels of watery, amber light. A gash of escaped gold hit the floor directly under the window and leaked across the linoleum to the corner of the rug, one elongated, fluttering edge of light moving like a frilled skirt as the hanging curtain stirred in barely moving air. Beneath the clean sting of Gentilhomme Debonair murmured a sweeter, older scent, the drowsy melancholy of summer flowers. On her bedside table next to a glass of lemonade—that had not been there before, either—stood the little blue and white Spode jug filled with plum and gold pansies, almost blown over, their petals velvety in the softened light, some already shed and lying like dusty curls of silk on the tabletop. Happiness swelled in her like a bubble. Joe must have picked them from the front of 1 Seaview Villas where Mr and Mrs McBray, who were away for a week in a caravan at Loch Lomond, grew them behind the low wall along with their petunias and lobelias and primulas.
The first time you gave me flowers.

For a long while she just lay. With the window open she could hear gulls, so far away over the sea that their calls sounded offhand and less cruel, and from the back garden came the chuck of the hoe. The yellow slice of sunlight on the floor under the curtain had paled and lengthened. It was after six o’clock and her father must be home from work, now in his shirtsleeves and his braces hanging at his sides, weeding again in the vegetable plot where so very little grew.

As the light burned down deeper the sounds from the garden stopped. Inside the house people were now about, there were doors opening, greetings, voices in the hall. Lila was content to be out of the life downstairs, even though it sounded as if she were not being missed. It would be like this if I were dead, she thought, as long as I have a soul and don’t just die. Even if she were quickly forgotten she would still be present yet hidden, eavesdropping in this ghostly private way. She wondered how long it would be before anybody came.

Later, Uncle George appeared with a tray with a cup of tea and a plate of bread and butter.

‘Thank you,’ she croaked, when the tray was settled on her knees, ‘for everything.’ Her eyes were stinging.

‘I haven’t really had a minute, I’m not long back. Here, can you eat something? You should drink the tea.’

Lila drank in sips, watching him. His eyes were electrically bright.

‘I’ve been up all afternoon at the farm with Gordon Black,’ he said. ‘He’s already rehearsing the chorus up there. And I popped in to Sew Right, Enid’s mum was asking for you. Enid says to tell you she’ll maybe come and see you tomorrow.’ He looked at the flowers. ‘They’re nice.’

Lila’s eyes sparkled in the shadowy room. ‘Somebody put them here while I was in the bath.’ She was keeping her lovely secret for the time being. Joe must be the first to know that she knew they were his gift.

‘Your mother’s caught the sun. She’s covered in calamine and lying on a wet sheet. Mmm, pansies,’ George said quietly. ‘ “Pansies, that’s for thoughts.” They don’t last in water, though.’

‘Pansies for what? They’re for what?’

‘Thoughts. Don’t you know, in the language of flowers? Ophelia, in
Hamlet
. Pansies mean “I am thinking of you”, I think that’s right.’

‘Really? Where’s Joe?’

‘Joe? Huh,
Joe
. I only got two minutes’ notice myself. Joe,’ Uncle George’s voice grew tight, ‘Joe appears to have gone.’

‘
Gone?
Gone where? When’s he coming back?’ Lila cried, pulling herself up straight.

‘He left a note. He’s gone up to Glasgow, about the headdress trimmings and the material for Timur and Calaf and the Emperor Altoum. Apparently.’ Uncle George pulled a hand over his face and sighed hard, longing for a cigarette. He glanced at the door. ‘He’s after proper brocade. He says there’s trimmings and brocade he can get in Glasgow that Stella can’t get here. He says he has to choose it personally.’

‘Oh.’ Lila looked over at her flowers. ‘Did he not want to say goodbye? Did he say how long he’s to be away?’

‘He said goodbye in the note,’ Uncle George added, working to keep his voice level. ‘He said he’d be back in a few days.’

‘Why
days
? Why’s he away so long?’

George shrugged. ‘He said in the note he needed a break. Says he’s feeling the strain.’

Lila’s head started to pound and she lay back, desolate. She wanted Uncle George to go so that she could get under the covers and sob.

He said, ‘Look,
I’m
not going to worry, I can assure you. So you certainly shouldn’t. He’ll be back in a little while.’

‘In a little while? In time for the ceilidh?’

‘Oh, I’m pretty certain he’ll be back for the ceilidh. I don’t suppose you’d catch him missing that.’ George’s lips puckered and squirmed for a cigarette. ‘Not a word about missing rehearsals, as if that doesn’t matter. I mean, I should really kick up a fuss. Talk about
selfish
.’

Lila was not really listening now. Joe had said everything, anyway, and so shyly and delicately that only he could have said it. Nobody else in the whole of Burnhead would know that pansies meant ‘thoughts’. He had stolen into her room with the flowers while she was bathing, and then he had taken himself off so that she could get better in peace. What else could be meant by the leaving behind of thoughts, and his scent, and his promise to be back for the ceilidh?

The weather continued hot. Over the next few days Lila let herself be borne along like a rag, bobbing on the surface of hours that passed and receded, washing her in and out of sleep. The sky flared with heat. Sunlight burned in every day through the curtains and melted in a trickle of yellow-white over the sill of her window, and was consumed, as night came, by shadows that solidified into a cold grey-blue at dawn, when she would wake shivering in a fit of fractious coughing, pulling up blankets that felt wiry and foreign in her sleepy fingers.

After three days she was not that ill anymore—it felt as though her throat were being scratched by stiff feathers, nothing more—but she had slipped into a mood of detached, almost religious waiting, blessed by a kind of patience that seemed to have been dormant all this while in the shadows in her room and that she could now invoke and bestow upon herself. All around her, get-well cards appeared: from Mr and Mrs Mathieson, Enid, Mr and Mrs Gordon Black and stuck-up Gillian, Jimmy the coalman, and even ‘Alec and the gang’ from the
Burnhead & District Advertiser
. Willy and Joanna Bergsma came by on early closing day, with a gargle that they swore by and said you couldn’t get now. The bottle was nearly empty and Willy herself solemnly measured out three brown drops, her wet eye watching them fall into a glass of warm water. It had a taste of tar and scorched rubber that made Lila think of the burning house in Rotterdam. Enid’s mum sent Enid with a rice pudding that she said would slip easy down a sore throat, and Enid managed to slop most of it in her bicycle basket. Delia Hunter and Moira Mather brought grapes. Fleur, finding the role of visitor bearing a gift more natural than that of nurse, gave her an excitingly large bottle of eau de cologne. Senga, Linda and Deirdre clubbed together for a big bag of barley sugar.