Puccini's Ghosts (16 page)

The sound of Uncle George’s naked begging to Joe will be sent to the now quite crowded place in my mind where I keep words that I wish I had never heard spoken. The general clutter of words already in there—the weaponry of all my parents’ rows and altercations—is a blessing; Uncle George’s entreaties can nestle there unnoticed with the rest of the spent arsenal, his collapsed dignity like a punctured breastplate under a heap of broken spikes and arrows and staved blades.

He shows me my aria written down in my mother’s vocal score—the aria I sang on the beach,
‘Signore, ascolta!’
—and goes through the words with me and tells me who is singing them and why. He asks me what I like best about singing it, and I tell him it’s the highest note, the note on which it ends, the saddest one. The most difficult, he says. Your favourite part is the most difficult part. That means you’re a real singer.

When I sing it this time, my eyes fill with tears. I am softening, flooding on the inside; a river has started to flow in me, bearing my thoughts and my feelings and my voice along, swirling and commingled. As I come to the last note my blood bubbles up and my heart is cast free of its moorings and is afloat in clear, fast-flowing water.

ACT II

The Second Riddle

It kindles like a flame
But it is not flame.
At times it is a frenzy.
It is fever, force, passion!
Inertia makes it flag.
If you lose heart or die it grows cold, But dream of conquest and it flares up.
Its voice you hear in trepidation,
It glows like the setting sun!

BLOOD.

The ordeal begins. Turandot poses her three riddles, and inspired by love, Calaf solves them all. He has won her hand. Turandot is overcome with distress; she will belong to no man. Calaf knows he must win her heart. He gives her a chance to defeat him. She does not know his name. If she can discover who he is before dawn she will be victorious and he will die.

11

T
he next evening Uncle George stopped Lila from coming with him to meet Joe off the train. From the window she watched them arrive, George trudging up the path under the weight of two suitcases and Joe following with a holdall and a smaller case balanced on one shoulder. He swaggered, in search of an audience. Lila kept still. She could tell he was pleased she was watching and she was drawn to him for that alone, for the compliment of enjoying her eyes upon him. She liked the showmanship of the suitcase borne aloft, his display of strength behind Uncle George’s struggle with the heavier cases.

Inside the house he took her hand and said, ‘I say, how do you do, you must be the sweet little brand-new soprano I’m hearing about, how very delightful.’

His voice was like no other she had ever heard. It was a little high-pitched and had a slight flouriness in it as if he spoke through a dense white cloth, and it was mesmerisingly hard to place. Any accent that might have attached him to a region or a category of person had been washed out by elocution, and to Lila’s ears the result, a controlled neutrality in the vowels, consonants quaintly pointed, was enchantment. His words floated from him unhindered by the local grunt that rendered delicate, private things unsayable; Billy with his floppy hair and sideways looks and reticence would never come out with
sweet, little, delightful
. Words like that would not survive in his rough Burnhead mouth to be at her disposal even half-meant when she might need to hear them. In Joe there was a hurry to put words to use. He was anxious to be known.

‘Well, all the way from London! You’re very welcome. I hear you’re Italian,’ Fleur said, wiping her hands down the back of her skirt. Her voice clicked oddly.

‘Dear lady, indeed! Indeed I am. How do you do?’

‘George says you had restaurants. In Glasgow.’

‘Ah, did he, did he now? Well, but those are past glories. Oh, how are the mighty fallen!’

Raymond said, ‘I never heard of a Foscari’s in Glasgow. Rogano’s, yes.’

‘Oh,
don’t
!’ Joe said with a strange shudder. ‘Oh, the heyday of the Foscaris is lost in the mists of time. It’s little more than hearsay now. But I want to hear all about
you
. Tell me, tell me, tell me—all about yourselves.’

Lila felt his urgency had something to do with her, that she was drawing out not just his words but setting loose inside him some thrilling notion of herself. His voice was a road to elsewhere, his words an invitation to her to shed her limitations: her name, her fear, this wrong place where she had somehow got stuck. She resolved to start talking like Joe immediately.

They sat round the table pushing food and drink at him and letting him amuse them, as if he were a strange new pet whose habits they had to learn. He produced a quarter bottle of whisky from his holdall, tipped some into his teacup, swilled it round and tossed it back. As an afterthought he offered the bottle round. Raymond fetched liqueur glasses and took what he called just a wee hoot, but George refused. He looked, suddenly, as if some air had been let out of him; the spinning ideas and the whipped-up energy of the previous few days were in abeyance. Like Lila he watched Joe who, in between nips of whisky, had plenty to say. When Joe was talking his eyes would settle on some object, the cruet, the hedge outside the window, his two thumbs circling each other, and stare at that rather than look in the direction of the person to whom he was speaking. Although short and round and solid—there was a substantial quilt of flesh around his torso—he seemed ready to flap away into the air if startled; his beak of a nose added to the impression of a solitary and alert bird of prey. When he looked at Lila, in the same way that he had stared at the hedge, she felt floodlit, as if there were something in her that he was determined to find in the bright beam of his gaze. His eyes were channels for escaped light, as if a sun blazed somewhere in his body; his skin seemed luminous. He wore short sleeves, and she studied the plump lilac veins in his forearms as they writhed down to his hands under dark, shining hairs. Why had nobody else noticed how startling he was? Her father was half-asleep. Her mother was listening too hard, leaning forward with her chin resting along the back of an arranged hand. Uncle George just sat looking folded up, his hair dull with smoke and his dark eyes, next to Joe’s that were the same green-grey as a winter sea, merely blank.

Nothing was to be trusted now. Angles were newly treacherous, objects unreliable, words slippery; what if she were to collide with furniture or drop a teacup or come out with something childish? She was having to learn much too suddenly how to pretend that nothing had changed, when everything had. She got up from the table and began to fill the tray with things to take back to the kitchen, trying to do what she always did on an ordinary day. But Joe’s eyes drifted over the outline of her body as he handed her his plate and she needed the shelter of the table again and sat back down. She felt as if he knew something, as if all her seams and fastenings and buttons were showing and now that he had seen them she could be in an instant dismantled.

‘Aha! Kind young lady,’ he said, tipping his head to one side. He poured himself more whisky and to Raymond he proposed, lifting the cup and draining it, ‘A toast, to the daughter of the house!’

Raymond pulled at his earlobe with a finger and thumb and glanced at George. His glass was empty anyway.

Fleur touched Joe on the arm. ‘Joe, carry on with what you were saying. You’re ambitious, you have a strong sense of direction, do you, about being a singer?’

‘I feel something pulling me towards a career in music, certainly,’ Joe said, frowning attractively. ‘
La Forza del Destino
! Whatever the hurdles might be—and oh my goodness, Fleur, you know what
those
are—whatever the hurdles. I simply must sing!’

He flashed a smile around the table, stood up, struck his chest with one fist and launched into ‘Ode to Joy’.

Fleur got to her feet and joined in from the other side of the table, lit up with mirth. They sang to Lah, stretching arms towards each other, trading actors’ glances; they were both equally proud of the power of their eyes. When they came to the end everyone clapped. Joe pulled Fleur’s hand to his lips and kissed it and turned a sparkling look on her. She sat down stroking her hair with both hands as if arranging a veil of his admiration over her head. Across the table she looked at him as if saying calmly, can I help it if I fascinate you?

Lila got up from the table again. Joe’s attention was all that mattered now, and she wouldn’t have it again this evening. Already she was getting an idea of how hungry life could be when you were in love, how it would call for patience and cunning to live from now on in need, waiting to pounce on whatever thin bones of hope he might drop behind him. With some idea that by drifting up to her room she might leave behind a memory of herself that would be more compelling than her presence, she said goodnight. She knew that her eyes were too hot and bright, her face too pink and young-looking for her to be taken seriously by the adults for a moment longer.

In her room she peeled the clothes off her limbs as if she were undressing a doll, imagining Joe’s gaze. She lay very still in bed with her eyes open, straining to hear his voice and waiting to be struck down by a fever whose first symptoms were already creeping through her. The stereogram started up: Act III of
Turandot
and
‘Nessun dorma’,
to which Joe sang along. There was clapping and more laughter. Somebody, she assumed her father, clanked knives and forks alone in the kitchen and ran water into the sink.

Later, Joe and Uncle George came up to the landing and paused at the door of the spare room across from Lila’s. There was some bumping of luggage, doors opening, the rise and fall of their voices. Her father’s joined in; she wondered if it were being explained that Joe would be sleeping in the attic room because Fleur (on account of her nerves) had her own room and George was in the tiny spare one. There was a clattering up the attic stairs. Doors opened again, feet shuffled to and from the bathroom, water gurgled, doors closed, the landing light was snapped off.

Lila lay in the dark, glad to think of Joe in the room above, alone like her. She heard his feet on the boards and the creak of the camp bed, and sent silent messages up through the damp-stained ceiling that he was to wake up the next day to find himself in love with her. She had no notion that he was typical of anything or anyone; he seemed freshly invented for her alone, in answer to a long, aching list of things that until now she had barely realised she wished for.

w
hen you go to Venice you see scores of Joe Foscaris. I was a little unsettled on my first visit. I kept accidentally catching the eyes of strangers and opening my mouth to speak—but to say what? Then, the moment I knew there was nothing I could say I would realise it couldn’t possibly be him. But he is replicated everywhere, the stocky, squat Italian running to fat, arms swinging, bandy little legs bearing him along with a pugilist’s bounce. He sells fish, steers the
vaporetti,
hawks headsquares and keyrings on the Rialto Bridge. Through eyes the colour of the Adriatic he scans yours, without malice, to see the size of the bargain. I remember reading in a guide book about the people of the Veneto, their meeting and mixing with whoever it was—the Phoenicians or some other seafaring tribe, perhaps more than one—and the attractive genetic accident as east and west conjoined: the aquiline nose, the dark hair and black lashes fringing eyes the colour of the lagoon. You never truly see through the milky greeny-grey to what lies below.

Paris. The child’s name is Paris. She is quite an engaging little thing, twisting in Christine’s arms as she stands at the door this morning, and staring at me from under a hat that looks like the toe of a sock. She holds a rag of striped brushed cotton up to the space between her top lip and her nose, and rubs it gently against her skin. Her eyes are glazed and distant; she sees only the secret landscape of the comfort it gives her. She doesn’t even hear when Christine tells her to say hello. Christine can’t get her Stripey away from her, she says. She supposes she’ll grow out of it but she’s looking forward even more to the day when she grows out of needing so much picking up, she’s a dead weight. Paris comes to, grins and turns to hide in her mother’s neck. Christine is holding a carrier bag as well as Paris and looks rather burdened. I tell her she may come in as long as she takes me as she finds me.

Paris made you some chocolate krispies, Christine says, putting Paris down among the papers and boxes and chests in the back room. Didn’t you, Paris?

I warn her to watch the child because there is no guard round the gas fire but actually Paris can’t get near it for all the stuff. Christine takes a deep breath and I notice a smell of hot cardboard that I don’t think was here before.

Christine looks at me. Are you not well? I didn’t get you out of your bed, did I?

I don’t understand the question.

I mean, you in your dressing gown. Are you all right? Still turning stuff out?

I’m fine.

You look tireder than you did before. Is it getting to you?

She raises her voice as she says this because she is on her way into the kitchen with the chocolate krispies. I hear her putting on the kettle.

I’m making you a wee cup of tea, she says. See when you’re on your own—you sometimes forget. I’m the same, I don’t look after myself. Oh, is there no milk?

She pops home to get some while I wonder how to be friendly to Paris and she stares back at me from behind Stripey, her eyes full of suspicion. Just before she starts to cry, Christine comes back with the milk and a plastic container with a lid.

I brought you a drop soup, she says. You don’t look very well. If you’ve no much appetite I thought still you maybe can manage a wee drop soup.

She pronounces it ‘seup’ and I want to smile.

Instead I say, Oh, you Scotswomen! You and your soup! If in doubt, make a pot of soup, eh? Soup, soup, soup!

Christine stares at me. It’s out of a carton, she says. I’ll put it in the fridge.

She pours our tea and brings it in and we sip at it. She has put sugar in mine. The dark clumps of Paris’s chocolate krispies sit on sideplates in neon-coloured paper cases. I nibble a piece and find it hard to swallow. Then I see on Christine’s face another impending outbreak of compassion so I draw attention to the half-empty, upended tea chests, some of whose contents are littering the floor. I pick up a cutting, the full page advert Uncle George took in the
Burnhead & District Advertiser
on 7th July, the same day they published our photograph and the old one of my mother.

What do you think of that, then? I ask, holding the page up to her. The paper is filthy, the edges frilly with rot and damp. I sneeze, twice.

She cranes forward and reads it.

I wouldn’t know, she says. What’s it meant to be?

I don’t answer because suddenly she exclaims, Paris! Paris, come out of there!