Puccini's Ghosts (5 page)

And so, I go up to the attic to see if there is an empty box up there for the paperweights, and now I have got myself into something. There are no boxes, at least not empty ones. There are boxes and tea chests, full mostly of papers thrown in anyhow and spilling over the edges, with shadows of dust sloping into their depths like a powdering of charcoal over white hillsides. There are scrunched-up piles of cloth on the floor, heaps of unrecognisable shapes wrapped in newspaper and pushed in one corner next to suitcases; there are dust-sheets, a yellow-grey glacier of newspapers in a slow slide against the wall, a row of jars. A thousand doomed mending jobs flung through the barely opened door have landed across the camp bed or have missed it and hit the floor: bits of lamps, a bag of old plugs, coils of flex ending in wire tongues, chair legs, wallpaper, linoleum off-cuts, picture frames with broken glass, an open box full of tools fused together under a coat of rust like handfuls of sifted sand. Standing up here under the attic skylight at the back of the house, I realise I can hear the sea, and then everything in the room seems to have come from there, thrown up in great freak waves and deposited to rot: the washed-up relics, ruined and stranded after the tide.

I turn to go back downstairs but I know I can’t. I can’t go on clearing out his sideboard, emptying his fridge, sorting his clothes, with all this waiting above. I tell myself it makes sense to change the plan, to start here at the top of the house and in the scene of greatest chaos and decay, but that’s not it. It’s the sight of the camp bed and a glimpse of the papers stuffed into the tea chests that make me admit that this is what was waiting all along.

And maybe it should, but it does not surprise me that stuff from the
Turandot
summer is still here, though it doesn’t look deliberately kept, and certainly can’t have been cherished. On the morning after that unforgettable first night it must have been unbearable for him to see it: cuttings and scraps of paper and lists and sheets of music and props and bits of costume and the rest of it all over the empty house, so I guess he bundled it up and just stuffed it up here, maybe for my mother to collect later, which of course she never did. It doesn’t look as if anyone has touched any of it since. I wonder if he forgot about it. I can only hope so.

I bring the tea chests down, scratching my shins on the way, and start them in no particular order—my eye caught first, I suppose, by the cutting from the
Burnhead & District Advertiser
on the top of one of them.

3

I
t was Wednesday and
Turandot
still raged from the music room. Fleur’s voice had deteriorated to a rasp and now she was singing along with Callas only in short bursts. It seemed to Lila that everything sung by one person to another in an opera was a complaint of some kind—too heartless, too cruel, too jealous, too beautiful, too young to die—and also a waste of breath. It was all supposed to be about love. But wasn’t it obvious that nothing would be settled before there was blood on the floor?

And now an old man was singing:

Abbi di me pietà!

Non posso staccarmi da te!

Lila had been put through enough books with titles such as
Opera Tales for Children
to know the
Turandot
story. It was Timur, the deposed and exiled king of Tartary, roaming disguised and unwanted somewhere through Act I, alone but for his loyal slave girl Liù. Have pity, he sings to his son, I can’t separate myself from you. Have pity. I cast myself moaning at your feet.

She remembered. Timur has just come across his lost son, Prince Calaf, also exiled and in disguise. But joy is short-lived because no sooner are they reunited than Calaf glimpses the Princess Turandot, falls in love instantly and vows to solve the riddles that will win her in marriage. Timur begs him not to try.

Lila sighed. The story was a fairy tale, full of people who were not very real, yet Timur’s frail plea to Calaf brought her own father to mind. Not that
I cast myself moaning at your feet
was the kind of thing Raymond would ordinarily come out with, but Timur sounded more tired than he ought to be and her father, too, cranked his voice into speech with difficulty, as if winding up words in a bucket from a brackish, underused well. By contrast her mother’s words were always waiting in her mouth, ready. Lila began to listen as though her father, no less deposed or exiled or royal for being a lawyer’s clerk rather than the king of Tartary, were across the hall on his knees in front of the Decca stereogram, beseeching her mint green nylon dressing-gowned mother to have pity on him. Casting aside his disguise of grey cycling cape, her wandering, exhausted father would beg:

Pietà! Pietà! Non voler la mia morte!

Pity! Pity! Do not wish my death!

It wouldn’t work. Anything sung from the heart would sound out of place in 5 Seaview Villas; the house was too damp for heroics. It was one of a row of five built in the 1930s, between two wars. There were meant to be more of them; Seaview Villas were to have been the start of a new suburb—high-class, according to Raymond—between Burnhead and Monkton, but for some reason the others never got built. So the five stood detached and shabby along the road in plots too small for them, looking like the abandoned advance party they were and guarding the empty land behind that nobody wanted, a flat stretch between road and sea less attractive or useful than either salt marsh or meadow, where hardly anything grew in the briny wind off the Firth of Clyde. Across this stretch and almost at right angles to the road, on the Burnhead side of Seaview Villas, ran the Pow Burn. Its brown water trickled between banks overgrown with nettles and under the sandstone bridge next to 1 Seaview Villas, and emptied thickly into the sea.

Like the others, number 5 was double-fronted, with ruby and dark green glass in a pattern of diamonds and leaves in the top pane of the downstairs windows, and had been cheap for its size. But it was the only house to have had a brick garage added at some later point on its far side, there being no space between the others for garages. (This small superiority had softened Fleur’s dismay a little when Raymond had first brought her here but because, fifteen years later, it sheltered nothing but Raymond’s bicycle, the garage now enraged her.) The front gardens were so small that the houses had the look of wide matrons lifting little green aprons clear of splashes from the road that ran by much too close. When Fleur complained from time to time about the permanent garnish of rubbish and grey dust in the hedge, Raymond told her that the houses were built close to the road because of the drains.

‘Drains,’ she would say, as if drains could ever be a reason for anything. ‘For God’s sake don’t talk to me about drains.’

‘Och, Fleur,’ he might reply, or he might not bother; his failure to win her over in the matter of drains would be noted whether he spoke or not. If Lila were present Fleur might cast her a glance and raise her eyes and her father would look droopily from Fleur to Lila and back again, getting them no further forward with the drains but implicating Lila in the general exasperation and fixing her firmly in the middle.

Drains, and all matters concerning the disposal of water, were often on Raymond’s mind, for in and around 5 Seaview Villas there was too much of it. Damp lived there too, and to Lila that also seemed in-betweenish, neither wet nor dry, just
damp
; hinderingly dank like her father, whose fault it seemed. Damp was always nearby, waiting upstairs or in the room next door. They quietly tracked its movements as if it were the owner of the house, a smelly old relation who must be tolerated and whom they secretly couldn’t wait to see dead and buried. Raymond made a hobby of it. He called it intramural moisture. It was a minor science, he said. The movement of intramural moisture was predictable because certain materials retained moisture while others drew it—it was a question of drawing the moisture. With pathetic optimism he applied his mind to futile little remedies, stalking the damp and laying traps: rice grains in the salt cellar, a dish of pumice stones in the pantry, a branch of seaweed at the back door. He forbade houseplants, sprinkled talcum powder on the carpets, pasted the downstairs floors with rubberised paint. Intramural moisture was not drawn.

They heard it in the tapping of rain on the hedge, the drip from downpipes, and if they did not hear it they felt it in the claggy weight of clothes left too long in wardrobes. They smelled it in the yeasty gust from a cupboard suddenly opened and they tasted it when a biscuit that should have broken tight and crisp instead clung in a sluggish pulp to the roof of the mouth. Every spreading stain on the wallpaper and fresh patch of mould cast a new pall over their mealtimes, which were anyway quiet but for the excruciating chewing and swallowing noises of people trying to eat silently and Fleur’s ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Raymond!’ when he clanged his fork against his teeth. And all the time from behind the walls it seemed that the damp, too, contributed to the hush with the wordless percolation of water through plaster.

‘Skirting board’s warped,’ Lila’s father might offer. ‘Of course, wood retains intramural moisture. There’s a plastic skirting you can get now we’ll maybe try.’

Her mother would adjust her immaculate shoulder seams, looking across the table not at Raymond’s face but at his hands, which seemed to appall her. Lila didn’t know why; he kept them clean and usually remembered to hold a knife to her satisfaction, tucking the handle out of sight inside the palm. But Fleur would watch his hands and shudder as if she were managing, just, not to scream out loud.

‘I don’t suppose I am ever going to get a holiday,’ she might reply. Then she would lift the salt cellar and shake it over her plate and because it was clogged with damp and rice, no salt would come out, precisely as she intended.

Nor did Seaview Villas view the sea. The dining room window faced inland. Lila was looking out at the road and beyond that a kind of bogus farm with tussocky fields bordered by barbed wire and hawthorn, which harboured broken drainpipes and lost hubcaps and in whose corners pieces of metal and piping that could once have been bicycle parts or bathroom fittings were stacked. Today some cows loitered round the pylon in the middle of the field bordering the road, offering their brown and white sides to slanting arrows of rain.

The farmhouse lay at the end of a cinder track that ran past the pylon and down through more fields. Today it was partially obscured by the only tall trees for miles—sycamores, according to Raymond—whose branches were almost black against a sky the colour of cold grease, but for most of the year you could see it, a red-brick house that would have looked ordinary in any street in any unprosperous town, with the farm sheds set randomly around it.

And offering a view in one direction of a farm that didn’t look like one, 5 Seaview Villas looked out from the back towards a beach that was not much of a beach. The shore behind the house was not like Burnhead’s proper seafront nearly a mile south that drew the Glasgow crowds in summer, with the new coach park, boating pond, putting green and coloured lights along the esplanade, and where a line of semi-detached villas not only viewed the sea but offered ‘B & B, H & C, Home Baking & TV Lounge’ on creaking board signs.

The cross tides met and curled in on the length of coast behind Seaview Villas in a particular way that dumped all the seaweed in that spot; when a west wind blew in hard on a rainy day the smell was like old vegetables rather than brine and seashells. From her bedroom window at the side of the house, Lila could see over the garage roof to the rise of the low dunes where the zigzag wrack of seaweed lay fused to the land, trapped and dead in the sharp dune grasses and dried more by the wind than by the sun into cracked brown shards. And apart from the seaweed and a faint whiff of cow, the air round Seaview Villas smelled of ash from the smouldering heaps of the council tip down by the shore, half a mile further up the coast towards Monkton. The sky, summer and winter, was usually white and empty but for twists of smoke from bonfires on the tip and the hundreds of seagulls that wheeled and dived over it in greedy orbit, their wings flapping to soundless music with the irregular, lazy beat of scavengers on the make.

Now in ancient Peking the courtier Ping was singing

Ho una casa nell’Honan…

I have a house in Honan

With its little blue lake

All girdled with bamboo…

Lila pictured it. A place, for all that it sounded suspiciously perfect, a real place that knew what it was. A place you wouldn’t be ashamed to get stuck in.

i
wonder if one ought to wear a hat with trousers? I always think it looks a little odd. I have one with me, in case I wear the skirt.

I am roused to this and other practical thoughts. His death should be announced in the
Burnhead & District Advertiser.
I jot down the names and dates and hope I’ve got them right. The date of death is easy. But was he born in 1918 or 1919—his birthday was February 10th, that I do know, but was he eighty-four or eighty-five? Heaven knows where his birth certificate is and I haven’t the heart to go looking; I’ve seen enough for today. My guess is 1918. I may be out by a year but there’s nobody to ask which means there’s nobody to mind if I’m wrong. Strange to think that if it was 1918 he was a wartime baby like me, and with me being born in May 1945 we were both only just wartime babies, both born right at the end. Never occurred to me before.

I find I don’t feel altogether insincere saying ‘beloved’. So I will put ‘Raymond James Duncan, aged eighty-five, beloved father of Lila du Cann’ and leave it at that. I’m sticking to ‘du Cann’. I don’t need to revert to ‘Duncan’ just because he’s dead and anyway, I changed my name too long ago to switch back now. I won’t add ‘soprano’ or anything, people will probably know. Nor am I going to put after his name ‘widower of the late Florence’ even though they never divorced, because I can’t go as far as ‘beloved’ in front of ‘widower’, and its absence would make the whole thing look odd. Is there something else? It feels as if there should be something but I can’t think what. My thinking is letting me down, oddly; it’s not quite that I can’t think, it’s that the thinking I’m doing feels a little less reliable. Anyway, I can’t think what else unless it’s ‘sadly missed’. I don’t think ‘sadly missed’ is called for.

Although, strangely, he is.

I could telephone the paper and give them the wording but I don’t trust them not to misspell ‘du Cann’. I shall write it all out and take it in person and make sure it’s taken down correctly. In any case I could do with an outing. There’s nothing here I can eat and there are other errands, too.

The funeral. Before I get as far as the newspaper office I realise what’s missing. You have to say in the notices what the funeral arrangements are, don’t you? The undertaker did hint something about ‘arrangements’ on the telephone but I put them off coming to talk to me about them. Why do undertakers always hint? But arrangements must be made and they are up to me, too. He left no instructions.

So I park in Burnhead, in a car park behind a supermarket that never used to be there. It doesn’t surprise me that the Main Street’s changed in over forty years but I am not prepared for the extra smells and colours and all the glass. Every third place is a Thai or Chinese or Indian takeaway and is a Palace or a Garden or a Jewel according to the signs painted in gold over purple, yellow or red. They all have flat windows reaching to the ground showing interiors full of white light and tiles and benches where you sit and wait as if you’re keeping an appointment at a clinic for people with some affliction connected to deep frying. It’s funny to remember a time when you could get fish and chips at one end of Burnhead from the Seashell Café, at the other from the Locarno or in the middle from the Central, and you felt spoiled for choice.