Puccini's Ghosts (3 page)

‘Och, Audrey,’ he said, glancing up with his usual slow smile.

‘That’s your Lizzie out for the holidays, now,’ she said, settling beside him and turning to look at his face.

‘Aye, eight weeks. Eight weeks getting on her mother’s nerves.’

His smile gets wearier every time, she thought. Was it silly to think he was beginning to look old, when he was nine years younger than she was? The gap in their ages seemed to be closing.

‘And how are Fleur’s nerves just at the moment?’ she said.

Instead of answering, he leaned over and kissed her, a dry touch on the mouth. It was the only kissing they did now; at fifty-one she felt too old to kiss him with hunger and he, at forty-two, no longer expected it. What a relief that that peculiar, questing curiosity that possesses lovers about each other’s mouths had faded.

He pulled her against him and placed a hand on her knee and cleared his throat with a long murmur, the signal that he would like to make love to her. He didn’t often, nowadays. More often they talked or just held hands. The important thing was the space and time they took, the blind drawn over the front door on the days of the junior partner’s meetings: Round Table last Friday of the month, partners’ lunch at the Ayr branch every second Thursday. Space and time not snatched by stratagems, merely offered by circumstance and taken without greed for nearly fourteen years. They didn’t go in for declarations or breathless discussion of what had brought them together to the back waiting room in the first place; they had no zest for an extenuated philosophy of wrong turnings or missed chances. A little space and time in which to rest from their stoicism was all they took.

Audrey shifted to let Raymond reach under her skirt, smiling over his shoulder at the customary murmurs and familiar moves, assisting him in the removal of the relevant clothing. She sighed as he slipped fondly into her, grateful for life’s sweet routines: Raymond’s respectful use of her body, neither abrupt nor protracted, and then the resumption of propriety—the tucking away of those parts of themselves, the smoothing of cushions—as pleasurable in its way as Raymond’s stately, conscientious thrusting, and after she had popped to the Ladies to make herself decent, a cup of tea made and brought by him and a little talk of ordinary things. Adultery was the last thing it felt like. Adultery meant devious and dangerous and uncontrolled, and what they did was kindly, and ceremonious.

‘Well,’ was all she said, glancing at him as she finished her tea. Like many sensible ceremonies their lovemaking changed very little over time and sealed a bond that was never expressed in words.

‘Och, Audrey,’ Raymond said, draining his cup.

At a quarter to five they closed the office and walked down the front path. Raymond removed the padlock from his bicycle in the corner behind the wall, put on his cycle clips and rode away with a backwards smile and a ring of his bell. Audrey started on her walk along Burnhead Main Street, nodding to people she knew, scarcely glancing into prams parked in front of shop windows. When she left the busy pavement and made her way up past St Ninian’s church to her immaculate house in St Quivox Drive, she began to prepare her greeting for John, who would be busy in the garden despite his lumbago and would look up as she clicked along the pavement and turned in at the gate.

i
don’t think there is anything reprehensible about putting my mind to an outfit. One has to wear something to a funeral and it takes my mind off being here. They’ll expect me in fur and probably sunglasses, so I shall try not to disappoint. Leather is a definite possibility. Black, of course. I packed both, skirt and trousers.

I’m wearing the trousers. It seems a good idea to put them on for a few hours to see if they feel right. My black wool coat will have to do, though maybe it’s marginally better with the skirt. I may find an opportunity to mention that of course there is nothing like real fur on a cold day but it’s impossible to pack fur in a suitcase and what a pity nobody travels with trunks anymore, all of which is true whether one actually has real fur or not. I’ve brought boots, but if I decide on the skirt with shoes then I’ll have to buy tights. There will be tights for sale in Burnhead but they won’t be anything special and there’s nobody I can send to get them, and somehow going into a shop myself to buy very ordinary ones will reduce me in their eyes. I know that’s silly. Whose eyes, exactly? I don’t know anyone here anymore unless I count Enid and Bill—and I suppose old Mrs Foley, though she’s probably dead by now—and I don’t.

But there it is, I’m not comfortable. I feel watched. I feel known by the strangers in the low, new houses across the road. I sense an interest in my return, if not from the people who once knew me then from their children, or perhaps by now
their
children, God knows quite who; the labyrinthine, passive interconnectedness of people here revolts me. People in a place like this just have to stand still to proliferate. They reproduce in long invisible strings; they form, they hang and then they drop, like beads of water along the strands of a web.

I’m at the window thinking about this when a young woman comes to the door. I can’t judge the age of women under forty anymore, especially the blondes—they all look like underfed children—but I guess she’s in her twenties. She has a pushchair with a child in it who looks to me too old to be wheeled around. Apparently they live next door. That figures; I noticed this morning that next door’s back garden is full of plastic. She’s in one of those fleece tops, bright red with the sleeves some other colour, not the sort of thing I think a person should wear to come and offer condolences, quite apart from the fact it’s spitting with rain. I don’t ask her in.

These people! They fill the little houses in the tidy web of Burnhead streets in long, dripping lines, one soggy generation after another. She can’t help glancing past me up the hall.

She says, I’m awful sorry about Mr Duncan, was it your father?

Yes, indeed, I say. Thank you. That’s most kind.

Lovely man, your father. A gentleman. And he was still managing fine, right up to the last stroke.

Yes. He was very independent.

I seen him around, you know, when he was still getting out. He was saying you’ve been moved away a long time. Is it down south you stay?

I live abroad, I say. I have an international career.

Oh aye, abroad, that was it. Sorry, only your dad was saying you was retired, I remember him saying one time. You’ve lost your accent, any road, she says.

I tell her I have never spoken with the local accent because my mother was English and never would have allowed it.

And singers never really retire, I say. My father may have been confused. I smile to show I don’t expect her to understand.

She looks put in her place and a little pathetic, and laughs nervously.

I smile again. I suppose I really don’t blame her for being unused to people like me.

I’ve lived in several European countries, I tell her. In fact these trousers came from a place in Stuttgart where Princess Caroline of Monaco was a frequent customer. I’ve bought from the finest shops in Europe. Julie Christie, she was a regular, too.

(I never actually saw either of them but I don’t say that. They had their photographs up in the shop. While my trousers were being wrapped I told them it was my first season in Stuttgart but they didn’t ask for my picture. Perhaps because I was only buying the one pair of trousers. Or maybe because I was in the chorus.)

Stuttgart’s in Germany, I add.

She looks rather startled. She’s probably never been further than Glasgow. Her kind don’t go far, they hang about a place like Burnhead breeding and watching. She’s staring at me now. Maybe she sees me as the big, black, jewelled spider that’s come back to trample her under my shiny black legs and set the web swinging. No wonder she watches. In a place like Burnhead one never escapes the eyes of people like her.

Well, lovely trousers any road, she says. So, anyway, if you’re needing a wee hand with anything I’ll be only too pleased.

I’m very busy, I say, to get her to go.

Funeral’s one thing but it’s the stuff, builds up when you’re in one place all your life, she says. I’m Christine, by the way. This is Paris—say hello, Paris! You’re never here on your own with the whole house to clear?

When I tell her I am she tilts her head and clicks her tongue. I want to throttle her.

Well, if there’s anything at all don’t hesitate, she says.

Actually there is something, I say. I need to know where in Burnhead I can buy tights. Proper tights.

Tights? Oh, all over. There’s a wee Boots. And the Somerfield keeps them, there’s loads of places, plenty wee dress shops. No problem.

I stop her. No, no, no—I’m talking about tights of very good quality, I say. Oh, never mind, I don’t suppose there’s anywhere here that sells very, very good ones. It doesn’t matter.

Right. Well, if you’re needing a hand I’ll maybe can pop in when this one’s asleep, she says, nodding at the pushchair. You know, help you out.

Perhaps I’ll pop up to Glasgow for the tights, I say. It’s only thirty miles and I’ve got the hire car. But oh, the parking. I don’t think I can face having to find parking. How it does spoil one, having a driver!

Sure, well, just you feel free to chap on my door. And Steve’s back day after tomorrow so don’t go lifting anything heavy, he’ll be only too pleased.

Steve? Is that your husband? I’m afraid I don’t know the people round here, I say. I have already noticed she isn’t wearing a ring.

He’s my partner, aye, she says. He’s through in Edinburgh on a job next couple of days, he’s in IT. Nuisance, ’cause he’s got the car. Lucky you’ve got yours. You’d be stuck if not, the buses are useless.

I have to smile when I say yes, I’m lucky to have the car. Do they never learn? Stuck alone in cheap clothes at Seaview Villas with a child and no way of getting out, and because she’s not married she thinks she’s keeping her independence. I get rid of her before she can start asking for lifts here, there and everywhere. I think she gets the message that I want to be left alone.

I am undecided about the tights. I wonder if I could find my way back to that place in Glasgow—Fenwicks, is it? I think it was on Sauchiehall Street. My mother got a lot of her clothes in Glasgow.

Glasgow. Suddenly it sounds again as it did years ago, when it meant the same as dark, alarming, noisy. When I’m small, in the holidays when she has no choice but to take me, I go, too, on the train from Burnhead to Glasgow Central. She always tries to find a compartment that is empty, but even when she does I am not allowed to sprawl beyond the confines of my place. I want desperately to rub the insides of my arms and the backs of my legs all over the velvety seats. I have a memory of Glasgow afternoons filled with coal smoke and car exhaust, the squeal of bus brakes and the rustle of tissue paper and the silent opulence of dress shops and new clothes. From the ladies who bring things to the fitting room I sense a kind of approval towards my mother that extends to me, sitting outside the door on a chair dangling my legs, and although I do not ask, I always wonder why these ladies, who are clearly our friends, never come to our house. And I see a sort of dream of Fenwicks, the revolving door from the street landing us in the shining Perfumery and Cosmetics, hard and dazzling with mirrors and lights reflecting thousands of myself, when I feel quite awkward enough about being just the single me. The enamelled-looking ladies trailing their bright, pepper and powder scents between the glass counters are less friendly than the clothes shop assistants; I feel like a black stone tossed into a pool of crystals. We stop halfway through the afternoon and my mother has tea and I have ice cream in a freezing metal dish with a wafer. The ice cream has chips of real ice in it and for years I will think this is the sign of superior ice cream, chunks of ice big enough to creak when you bite into them, because from my mother’s face I can tell the place we are in is superior. I also know that I am tagging along and not the point of the outing but I love the high decorated ceiling and the swift black and white waitresses carrying tongs and cake-stands, notepads hanging from their belts. I don’t think these afternoons are planned. I think my mother acts on sudden impulse. There is always a numbness on the journey home, certainly.

I wonder if it’s gone now, Fenwicks. If it is still there it’ll seem ordinary now. It’s Glasgow.

On the other hand they’ll think black leather trousers at a funeral—black leather trousers anywhere on a woman my age, no matter how long her legs—are outrageous, and that in itself is enough to tempt me.

I suppose it’s not really about the tights.