Puccini's Ghosts (40 page)

Mrs Mathieson and Enid’s mum are quite good friends by now and I grow skilled in looking wan and preoccupied so that they talk in front of me as if I cannot hear. Mrs Mathieson likes to speculate on who’s keeping my mother in the manner to which she’s accustomed now that Uncle George has been suspended without pay. Enid’s mum has to lower her voice when she utters the names George or Joe. She’s sorry to say it but she can’t give the time of day to that kind.

By the time I’m well again, returning to school is impossible. It’s too late after all that’s happened for returns to anything; it’s time for me to start learning the moves I need to master on the way to appearing to be someone else.

But it turns out that all I can do is sing. The elderly owners of Sew Right and the three other Sew Rights down the coast between Burnhead and Glasgow live in a big house in Paisley next door to a widow who takes lodgers and will do an evening meal, so off I go to live in one room and to take proper singing lessons and, to be on the safe side, a course in shorthand and typing.

In the months that follow, I picture George wondering how the police will come. He’ll spend his time waiting. He’ll chain smoke and drink too much, and when he’s drunk he’ll swell with bravado. He’ll start inventing how things will be, which is what he is still best at. He’ll say
‘nil desperandum’
and make jokes about nancy boys and tease my mother that at least in prison he’ll be popular. She will try to stay calm but all she’ll do is fret away the hours between one nervous headache and the next. They’ll sleep in the afternoons and wake when another day is drawing to a bitter, unsatisfactory close.

Will the police barge in almost comically, or will they crash through the door at dawn or do they creep up with a stealth that he’s not alert enough to notice, so gentle and slow an invasion that he’s leaving the flat handcuffed before he knows what’s happening? When it comes, surely it’s a relief. For months he’ll have been studying the papers, following all the trial reports from the mundane to the most lurid. He’ll plead guilty but will that mean six months, a year, two? He will have acquired a smattering of the law but won’t be able to divine the formulae that govern mitigating, aggravating, and ‘other’ circumstances; he’ll reel off the sentences handed down but won’t understand how they’re arrived at. A lot seems to depend on the judge. What he will understand, from careful study of grainy newsprint photographs of the convicted, is what the expression on their faces means. Forgive me if you think forgiveness is what I need, and if you care to, their faces say, but I’m tired, so if you don’t care to, go away and let me sleep. He gets a year.

He’s the first of them to go. The cutting’s here.

Burnhead & District Advertiser
Thursday 19th October 1961:

Jailed Opera Conman Dead
After
Turandot
Fiasco

Died in Prison

Fraudster George Pettifer (31), imprisoned in April under the Homosexuality Act, has died in Wormwood Scrubs Prison following a sudden collapse. Welcomed in Burnhead last year in a bid to bring ‘opera for all’ to the town, Pettifer’s offences were exposed from the stage on opening night amid dramatic scenes that police later described as ‘a threat to public order’.

Debts Unpaid

Pettifer’s death spells the end of hope for several local traders as well as Glasgow and London firms who remain unpaid amid financial chaos following Pettifer’s disappearance from Burnhead. Several contracts including the hire of stage lighting and musical scores remain outstanding.

Family Turmoil

Florence Duncan, sister of Pettifer, who also played a major role in the opera fiasco, now resides in London estranged from husband Raymond Duncan who resigned from local firm Kerr, Mather & McNeill following further revelations concerning fraudulent trading.

By Staff Reporter Alec Gallagher

It’s Alec Gallagher’s indignation and sense of betrayal in print, I suppose, though admirably toned down to be merely judgemental and inaccurate. The editor’s interest in an old scandal is waning and this is, it turns out, the last vicious little flurry of attention from the paper. It could be worse. It could go further on the abuse of effort and goodwill of the good folk of Burnhead, it doesn’t recount the details of Ricordi’s threat to sue for BAST’s breach of copyright, unauthorised abridging of the score and libretto and withheld royalties. It doesn’t hint that our youngsters were lucky to escape George’s perverted clutches and that there was no telling how far he might have gone.

I don’t think Alec bothered to find out that George’s death was due to acute respiratory failure as a result of a collapsed lung. Who’d be interested in hearing that his tuberculosis went undiagnosed or rather ignored by the prison doctor, because the nancy boys were notorious for malingering, always trying to get themselves admitted to the hospital wing for a few days’ escape from what was done to them by other inmates?

It’s not much of a funeral. In these circumstances the prison only lets you have four people. My mother is nominally in charge of arrangements.

He wanted to forget you were ever born, she puts in her only letter to me, in which she also spells out how he died. Don’t come. I don’t know how you can live with yourself. You killed him.

As if my presence at his funeral would alter that, but I don’t go. My father doesn’t go and if Joe does, I never hear about it. Actually, I don’t know how I live with me either, but I know how I try: I pretend not to notice dates. Around the time of his birthday, and the trial, and when he died and was buried, I take special care not to think. I strive to make those days pass with nothing more than a tightening around my heart, which at least doesn’t show on the outside.

She’s next, in 1964, and I don’t go to her funeral either. She’d want me to carry on, I lie to myself (crediting her with a capacity for forgiveness that she never possessed in relation to me), feeding my burgeoning self importance because I’m a proper music student now and I’ve got a job for the summer—bed and board and little else but experience in the chorus in a Gilbert & Sullivan season at Abersoch. She dies in London and if I ask for time off for my mother’s funeral they’ll ask me what she died of and I don’t care to go into it. She doesn’t leave a note. She leaves her record collection scratched and cracked, some tattered sheets of manuscript, a collection of clothes that the moth is already into and some split and faded gloves, now laughably old-fashioned.

Hers has to be a quiet one, too. My father manages to get her a service and a minister rather than the usual suicide’s dispatch—quick and ashamed by authority of the coroner—and even gets it done without a mention in the
Burnhead & District Advertiser
. He doesn’t even put in a death notice because surely there’s been enough fuss already. He reports back in a short letter to me what he finds out: how on the day Dickens & Jones decide they will turn half their ladies’ fashions floor into a boutique staffed by seventeen-year-old girls in white boots and lipstick, and relegate my mother to a lower paid job in the stock room, she returns to her bedsit, tapes over the window and door, feeds the meter with coins, turns on her two gas rings, closes the curtains and goes to bed. It’s a sunny day about a week before her fortieth birthday. When I hear about it I imagine the buses passing on the road outside her window and people on the top deck noticing how motionless the curtains hang, for can’t it be seen somehow: all that sorrow in one person sealed in the world of a tiny room, taking her leave as the buses trundle by?

I think nothing moved her as much as the pathos she detected in her own life, a life that should have grown towards some blossoming, accumulating beauty and value, but didn’t. I think she withered from the inside, using herself up on grievances about her hungers and wishes and desires, and in the end it was too much, the vague though massive deficiencies of her life whining in her head like the echoes of huge whimpering animals who had died in a cellar.

My father doesn’t comment on either death except to say that they’re at rest. We both need the thought that they’re tidy in their graves now; we use it to avoid further discussion. We don’t care to wonder out loud how long George gasped for breath on the concrete floor of his cell, or to plot her descent, after he died, from single room to worse room and job to more demeaning job. Coincidentally her death certificate reads ‘acute respiratory failure’ too. Not a word on either one about hearts and pride and promises fatally collapsed and broken.

No idea about Joe. I imagine him still at the seaside, though I’m not sure why. I see him as older than his sixty-three or -four, I suppose because twenty is so very much older than fifteen. He’ll be a fastidious, nautically-dressed old bachelor and the life and soul of a senior citizens’ club, outnumbered about eight to one by the ladies, who adore him and whom he still likes to keep guessing. It still won’t be his fault that he is a natural taker of attention, though perhaps by now he will have learned how to exploit it more graciously. I imagine he still looks past people so that they can feast their eyes on him as he talks, and I’m sure that still nobody ever quite knows how long they’ll have him for. In any gathering, in any room with other people he’ll somehow always be the one nearest the door. But if he is now a happy man he will also be genuinely kind-hearted. He’ll be stout and his lips will be very thin and he will choose ties and cravats to match his eyes, which he will consider his best feature. And they are, although these days they will tend to get pink and wet very early into a tumblerful of relaxing whisky; they may well contain the dim, frantic light of the intractable drunk living always somewhere between sobriety and oblivion and scrambling for shore without knowing which way it lies. Or perhaps his drunkenness these days is casual and innocuous. Or perhaps he’s dead.

I’ve packed what I arrived with and put my luggage in the car. There’s nothing else I want to take, except maybe this. Fancy him keeping it. It was right at the bottom.

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 another 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.

The lines of dried ink sparkle like graphite—the faded, dry river of one afternoon’s lazy thoughts fixed in its meandering across paper. Written on my second last day at school, as it turns out. I remember Miss whatever-her-name-was the English teacher saying a lot can change in a summer and that is true, but a lot doesn’t.

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.

The truth is I am exactly the kind of singer my mother would have become. I can’t sing without feeling it’s a perilous undertaking. I can sing loud and I can sing soft, but I never go to the limits. I want a quiet, a liveable kind of life, not one that might have in it anything that is bigger than I feel myself to be. Turning away from the huge and frightening open sky towards the dark, contained air of opera houses is not so high a price to pay for remaining free and lonely; I’ve been safe all this time from having anything more taken away from me. I do not want, ever again, to make too much noise.

So I fear that most of my performances have been obstinate or smug. It’s not that I can’t act; it’s that it never looks like anything else. I never seem to mean it, and it always shows when a singer doesn’t mean it. I try to use my imagination, but my imagination though vivid is not agile, and is not drawn to originality; it still follows the rules as it did that summer, as children’s imaginations do, but unlike a child I no longer believe in angels and devils or that there is any logic in goodness and love.