Puccini's Ghosts

by Morag Joss

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Burnhead Association for Singing Turandot

  Characters

  Now I’m here I begin to sense the trouble I’m…

  Act I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Act II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Act III

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Morag Joss

  Copyright

  Puccini’s Ghosts

  is for

  Sue Chilcott

  8 July 1963–4 September 2003

  whose life, music and friendship inspired me in many ways although

  not in the creation of any of the characters or events in the story,

  which are entirely imagined.

  ‘Covent Garden was haunted last night. It was haunted by the gentle and immaculate ghost of Puccini…who died with the final bars of Turandot still imprisoned within his brain, who disappeared to solve an enigma more terrible and profound than any created by the Princess Turandot.

  We like to think that Puccini revisited the glimpses of the moon last night to observe the opera’s performance in England, where his works are so universally cherished, to watch his tricksy spirits at their revels. We imagined him pleased with the magnificent production and the sensation it created.’

  Daily Express, 8 June 1927

  BURNHEAD ASSOCIATION FOR SINGING TURANDOT

  Presents

  TURANDOT

  Lyric drama in three acts and five scenes

  Music Giacomo Puccini

  (completed by Franco Alfano, abridged by George Pettifer)

  Libretto Giuseppe Adami & Renato Simoni after Carlo Gozzi abridged by George Pettifer

  Conductor

  George Pettifer

  Directed by George Pettifer

  Designed by George Pettifer and Giuseppe Foscari

  The BAST Chorus

  Chorus Director George Pettifer

  Chorus Master Gordon Black

  The Orchestra

  Leader Wilhelmina Bergsma

  CHARACTERS

  Populace, guards, Turandot’s ladies, phantoms,

  wise men, heralds and soldiers

  now I’m here I begin to sense the trouble I’m in. I’m back at the window but the view has changed. I haven’t switched on a light so I’m standing in the dark watching night colours gleam through the glass: silvered wet tarmac, darts of rain caught in the cloudy glow under the streetlights and across the road, garden walls soaked in warm, sodium glare. There are no streetlights on our side—they belong to the new houses—but their orange sheen leaks as far as our privet hedge, staining its green leaves brown. The old road is a street now. At intervals across it there are lumps lying in wait to slow the traffic; even at this hour one or two cars pass. The beam of their white headlamps tilts and dips and steadies as they curtsey over the bumps and then they pick up speed with the fizz of tyres on the wet road, pulling their shadows after them. I follow the line of streetlights stretching through the sky all the way back to the bridge, receding spangles of orange distorted by the rain on the window into a row of tiny bursting suns. Behind me, the room creaks with damp, its emptiness sighs. But I will not turn round yet, nor switch on a light. I know what it would show me. I shall carry on standing here, looking out and feeling ridiculous.

  What was the rush? Why did I drop everything and come immediately to arrive so late at night, when tomorrow would have done? When they rang to tell me he was dead I came at once as if, having just died, he might be still within reach, somehow not quite gone. His death reminds me of something obvious that I feel stupid for having overlooked, that he was old and one day would die, and yet how can he leave like this, a man who never did anything sudden in his life? I talked to him in my head all the way here. I told him I was sorry.

  I’m sorry, I say again now.

  All I hear in reply is his tired voice, Och, Lizzie. His voice comes to me, it seems, from a great distance. He sounds lost and cut-off as if he has got himself stranded somewhere, though he isn’t crying for help; he is, if anything, resigned.

  Och, Lizzie.

  I can’t tell if he means it as dismissal or forgiveness.

  Maybe it isn’t so ridiculous, my jumping to attention now he has died; maybe it’s an effect the newly dead have on the rest of us. And am I acting any more suddenly than he did? Off he goes raising a cloud of dust and up I start, needing to move in some direction or another, as if giving chase. It’s the kind of thing, scrupulously misinterpreted to feed their hunger for a disgraceful tale, that people round here get their teeth into. I can hear their voices, too.

  Doesn’t see him for years but she’s here fast enough to hear the will read.

  I don’t know if he made a will. But even while I’m booking a flight, packing, cancelling appointments, I think I make out a shape in the dust as it begins to settle, some dark weight he left behind. It’s cumbersome, as heavy as history, and I have no use for it, yet I can’t leave it lying unclaimed. It’s the past, and now it’s mine and I have to do something with it. He’s not been dead a day but I intend to be practical about it, as I will be about his other things. Already they are no longer just his things but obstacles of a kind, an affront to order, a challenge to the clarity of what belongs where and to whom. I am unsettled by the sudden knowledge that, for an interval at least, everything the dead leave behind is still theirs and yet no-one’s, though I’m not sure if this question of ownership is a trivial or a profound matter. But what a strange hurry I feel to bestow or destroy, as if his belongings might be dangerous if they are not at once attached elsewhere. I don’t care where they go as long as I get them off my hands, and it’s the same with this story of our past. It’s a shapeless load with one straggling thread, its unsatisfactory ending, that trails from it like a fuse. I want it tucked out of sight. I have to find somewhere to dump it, some unvisited place in my mind, a kind of mental cupboard under the stairs for a filled sack of worn-out memories.

  They’ll expect a show at the funeral. Not necessarily of grief, but they’ll expect me to make myself somehow conspicuous; I’m sure there are still those who like to think I’m as bad as my mother. Thinks she’s the next Maria Callas your mum, everybody says so, Enid used to say, smirking at the very idea, and I would snigger with embarrassment because my mother did think that. Or believed she might have been if my father hadn’t ruined her chances, as she so perfectly rewrote events. In my mother’s mind she and my father are Persephone and Pluto; he practically threw her in a sack and bore her down into darkness although he, lacking any authority, makes an improbable god of the underworld. But by the time I’m fifteen I believe completely in her shuttered and powerless misery, which seems irreversible. She lives here as if unable to break out of some truly dreadful contract, under a form of house arrest that leaves her in turn distraught and enervated. All that changes, of course, but I cannot look round from the window now that this recollection is upon me.

  Behind me she sits, with Uncle George. They’re lingering over breakfast, I’m clear
ing it away.

  I need a day off. The voice is tired, she tells him. I’m tired, vocally.

  I remember now, she’s in a sulk because he has made her give up cigarettes but is still smoking himself.

  He says, But you don’t know the part properly yet.

  I don’t want to get stale.

  Come on, Florrie, he says, wise up. If Callas spends every hour God sends preparing a role, why shouldn’t you?

  He’s the one who sounds tired. He has his chin cupped in the hand that holds the cigarette and threads of smoke are weaving up through his hair, silvery blue into chestnut. With the spent match in his other hand he is stirring a little paste he has made out of toast crumbs and leftover butter on the side of his plate, black into pale yellow, over a pattern of ferns.

  Don’t call me Florrie, she says, waving away the smoke. It’s Fleur. And don’t talk to me about Callas.

  She stands, sets her shoulders wide, looks through this window and arches her eyebrows. Out pours the final phrase of ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca, minus the words, for she doesn’t know them beyond the first two lines. I notice how unused her lips are to being stretched, as if they haven’t done enough laughing. Uncle George looks away and smiles his private smile with one last drag on the cigarette, which he stubs out in the paste of crumbs and butter. The way it hisses a little seems to seal the point, as far as I am concerned.

  Of all those people who said my mother thought she was the next Maria Callas, I wonder how many are still here.

  When I arrived, I found the key where it’s always been behind the loose brick in the garage wall. I stepped through the kitchen and into the back room that my father’s life had shrunk to fit: one armchair, the television, everything else on castors. At once I snapped off the light and came in here to the dining room. In a minute or two I’ll find my way upstairs in the dark and grope around for blankets in the landing cupboard. I cannot bear bleak electric light scouring the corners and washing out shadows, showing me how unchanged everything is.

  I’ll linger here just a while longer. In the silences between cars I listen for the rasp of the incoming water of the Firth up the beach not far behind the house, but maybe I only imagine I can hear it, in the same way that I imagine the moon, invisible tonight behind clouds, pulling the tide across the shore. I like such commonplace movements as these: the coming and going of the sea, the falling of rain, the passing of cars. In this dead room, from behind the glass, I feel I am witnessing a kind of breathing.

  ACT I

  The First Riddle

  In the dark night flies a many-hued phantom.

  It soars and spreads its wings

  Above the gloomy human crowd.

  The whole world calls to it,

  The whole world implores it.

  At dawn the phantom vanishes

  To be reborn in every heart.

  And every night ’tis born anew

  And every day it dies!

  HOPE.

  In ancient Peking, the cold-hearted Princess Turandot has sworn a terrible oath. Her ancestor Princess Lo-u-Ling was ravished and killed by a conqueror and Turandot will never be possessed by any man. But her suitors are offered a chance. She will marry the one who correctly answers her three riddles. Those who fail, die. Calaf, prince of Tartary, incognito and exiled, falls in love with Turandot at his first glimpse of her. His old father Timur tries to dissuade him from attempting to answer the riddles and so does the slave girl Liù, secretly and hopelessly in love with him. But Calaf remains steadfast.

  1

  The school year fell in a heap as soon as the end of term exams were over and done with, trapping Lila Duncan and everybody else under the final shapeless week that had to be got through. Cupboards were tidied and books counted in and then Lila’s class sprawled on their desks playing noughts and crosses, bickering in low voices, basking in aimlessness. Sunlight burned through the windows and glazed their hair and dark backs; like giant, stranded flies they fretted and buzzed as if condemned to perish where they lay, the prospect of escape—the summer holidays—seeming too distant, too exhausting and unreal. Over their heads the last days of June loitered, the hours advancing casually with the drowsy menace of things trite but unpleasant that were still to come, like milk turning sour or fruit waiting to rot.

  By Wednesday the week had halted. Late morning took all day. Lila had not acquired the knack of looking forward to things and now time itself, because there was enough to spare for her to wonder at it, seemed crowded with tiny, hovering omens of ill. She thought she could see them, hanging in specks of dust that sparkled out from emptied cupboards into shafts of sunlight or washing back and forth in watery shadows on the ceiling, wafting with the lazy threat of jellyfish in the weight of the tide.

  On Thursday Miss Marten set them an Ink Composition, even though they weren’t meant to do Ink Composition in the last week. They weren’t meant to do anything but wait in a slump and suffocate in the sitting-out of the term, and in any case the inkwells had already been cleaned. Miss Marten knew this as well as the class did, but she hated them after a year of their round shoulders and eyes like greasy stones, their smell of sour wool. You runts, she thought, smiling at the back wall. You’ll never see me again.

  ‘Ink monitors Enid Foley and Barry Henderson. Inkwells out, one between two. “The World As I See It Today”,’ she said. ‘To be handed in at the end of this period.’

  The class rose from its torpor to stir tired hostilities into the air, and Miss Marten bowed her head over her desk. None of them would write anything worth reading, though one or two of the oddballs and outcasts might try. It filled her with warmth to set work she had no intention of marking. In August she was marrying an air traffic controller called Leonard and she wasn’t coming back.

  ‘ “The World As I See It Today”,’ she repeated, placing ticks against an inventory of the books that stood in ruined columns around her. ‘And no outer space stuff, no seeing the world from a Sputnik. Crossings-out will lose marks. When you come back and look at what you write today, you might be surprised. A lot can change in a summer.’

  Was she really still trying to scratch at their minds? She glanced up again and found herself looking into the faces of people staring as if through smoke and wandering from a battlefield, unconscious behind wide-open eyes.

  Lila wrote:

  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 musi
c 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 the other, 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.

  In the staff room on Friday morning, softened by her leaving present of a stainless steel hors d’oeuvres tray with matching coasters and a bottle of sherry, Miss Marten marked Lila’s composition. She returned it to her in the dinner hall. On it she had written:

  Rather solipsistic! You fail to address the question. Perhaps you will ramble less as you mature. 55%

  After dinner, order broke down. Boys roamed the corridors wearing their blazers inside out, they started chalk fights and set fire to rolls of lavatory paper, turned on all the taps and threw dustbin lids onto the roof. Senga McMillan and Linda McCall stripped every twig, leaf and bloom from the line of flowering currant bushes that grew along the path bordering the school field and got the belt from the headmaster for it. Lila waited out the afternoon in the empty library, lulled by the smell of dust. She looked up ‘solipsistic’ in the dictionary and then the bell sounded and before she reached the gate where Enid was waiting she had forgotten what it meant.