Puccini's Ghosts (41 page)
It’s done now, the last chest sits atop the high pile in the front garden. At this time of year as soon as darkness comes the wind gets up. But at least it’s dry. I have made a tight cluster of the newspaper so the
Burnhead & District Advertiser
will be the first thing to go up in smoke, which seems only right. I push the wad deep into the pile, arrange the last of the papers and boxes and debris around it to keep it out of the wind, and light a match. It takes three or four attempts, and then the flame catches. I return to the house to watch at the dining room window but it’s not satisfactory; I cannot hear or smell the burning or feel the heat so I try to raise the window and of course it will not budge. It has not budged in years. I’m suddenly angry that there has been no fresh air in this room all this time, and just then the glass shatters from the heat of the fire and there is a warm inrush of smoke.
The wind is always blowing somewhere in Burnhead. It conspires in corners, it whips rubbish into unruly eddies and drops it in roiling heaps or it ambushes you on a high corner and catches in your hair like twisting fingers. You could scream at it. But now the wind is sucking through the fire and there is a bed of pink and orange flame at the core of it and a roar pulling up cloudy plumes of smoke into the air. The night splits with sounds and smells of bursting wood and white-hot piano wires and cracking varnish. Burning veils of muslin are lifted by the wind, they sparkle, disintegrate and fall over the garden and waft through the window in smoking wisps. Glowing flakes of ash drift around me and the wind throws a speck in my face that hits my eyes and I cannot move. Tears pour down my cheeks and dry tightly on my skin. I’m back at the window, stranded and weeping. There’s no place in the world like Burnhead for chucking grit in your eye.
Acknowledgements
I
would like to express my gratitude to the staffs of the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and the Carnegie Library, Ayr; the Department of Printed Books, Imperial War Museum; Helen Smailes, Senior Curator of British Art, National Gallery of Scotland; Veral Marshall of the Stone Gallery; Bruce Ritchie, Director of Professional Practice, The Law Society of Scotland; Miranda Jackson and Nick Cutts, BMG (Ricordi). I was greatly helped by varied enlightening writings on
Turandot
by John Black, Mosco Carner, Jürgen Maehder, Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Jeremy Tambling, Eva Turner and William Weaver.
Very many thanks also to Judith Murray at Greene & Keaton Limited and to my editor Carolyn Mays at Hodder & Stoughton.
Also by Morag Joss
Funeral Music
Fearful Symmetry
Fruitful Bodies
Half Broken Things
PUCCINI’S GHOSTS
A Delacorte Press Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Hodder and Stoughton (UK) hardcover edition published 2005
Delacorte Press hardcover edition / September 2006
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by Morag Joss
Extracts from
Turandot
libretto reproduced by kind permission of BMG Ricordi Music Publishing, Milan. All rights reserved.
Extracts from ‘A Big Hunk O’ Love’ Words & Music by Aaron Schroeder & Sid Wyche © Copyright 1959 Elvis Presley Music/Rachel’s Own Music, USA, reproduced with permission from Carlin Music Corporation (50%)/Minder Music Limited (50%). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Joss, Morag.
Puccini’s ghosts / Morag Joss.
p. cm.
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Family—Fiction. 3. Sopranos (Singers)—Fiction.
4. Opera—Production and direction—Fiction. 5. Scotland—Fiction. I. Title
PR6060.O77 P83 2006 2006042664
823/.92 22
eISBN: 978-0-440-33630-3
v3.0