Puccini's Ghosts

by Morag Joss

  ‘Can we go to yours?’ Lila said. She always wanted to go to Enid’s. Enid always waited for her to ask.

  ‘What for? It’s only a stupid shop.’

  ‘Just. No reason. Just, might as well, why not?’

  ‘Can’t. See Senga? She got three of the belt. You should see her hand.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘She wasn’t even crying. Her and Linda, they’re going to the Locarno, they said I could go as well.’

  They had come out of school into cloudless sunshine. But the heat in the classrooms had been an illusion of summer; outside, a sharp wind off the sea pulled at their hair and raised swirls of wastepaper and ripped jotters in the playground. Lila squinted in the brightness, thwarted and annoyed.

  ‘The Locarno’s tough,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we just go to yours?’

  ‘It’s not tough. They’re not toughies.’

  ‘They are so.’

  ‘Not when you get to know them.’

  ‘Oh, so you know them? You’ve changed your tune.’

  ‘So? It says in the Bible you should forgive your enemies.’

  ‘Where in the Bible? Bet you don’t know where. And you’re the one loves going to church.’

  ‘It’s not church, it’s the Fellowship of Sinai Gathering in His Name.’

  ‘Senga’s been going round behind your back. She says it’s not a proper church.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So. You don’t even sing hymns.’

  ‘You don’t need to. You speak the Word and that’s when the Lord hears.’

  ‘You said you hated Senga. She calls you Holy Foley.’

  ‘So what? That was ages ago. You should come off your high horse.’

  ‘I’m not on a high horse.’

  ‘Well, your mother is. Thinks she’s the next Maria Callas, everybody says so.’

  They walked along for a while without speaking beside the naked currant bushes. As they went, the wind lurched through the branches, sending gusts of stray leaves and squashed flowers down the path, whipping away the bitter smells of torn blossom and spilt sap. Though she was seething over Enid’s defection Lila was pleased; the scent of the flowers had always made her feel queasy and restless.

  They followed the wind as it blew a veil of sand across Burnhead Main Street. Shop awnings cracked in sudden gusts and the painted buckets and spades strung up in clusters outside gift shops clacked next to beach balls and rubber rings wheezing against the window fronts. Mrs Dobie brought the bin filled with toy shrimping nets in off the pavement outside Dobie’s Hardware & Fancy Goods and replaced it with one of canvas windbreaks.

  In the branch office of Kerr, Mather & McNeill, Solicitors & Commissioners for Oaths, Mrs Audrey Mathieson got Hugh Mather out of the office for his Round Table meeting on time, checking his papers, dusting off the hat and clicking her tongue without once letting her smile drop. In the calm after the door closed, she finished some typing—only a letter that took no time at all but, as she said, if she had a thing to do she preferred to be allowed to get on and do it. This was true, but the real reason she rattled out a minute or two of typing every now and then, rather than wait until she had what Mr Mather called a proper batch, was that she disliked the brittle sounds and smells of office work and could not bear the thought of them filling an entire afternoon. She liked to get the snap and ting of the typewriter over with and afterwards she would flap the smells of carbon paper and ink away from her desk with a duster dipped in polish.

  When she had finished the letter she sat listening to the silence that sang between her office and the small room across the corridor behind Mr Mather’s, where Raymond the legal clerk worked. His door would be ajar. Waves of afternoon stillness lapped from room to room.

  Through the ridged glass of the window she saw the bobbing, blurry shapes of children in school blazers go by on Main Street, beyond the stretch of gravel and low wall that fronted the offices of Kerr, Mather & McNeill. Their voices reached her only in faint, neutral snatches, adding to the pleasure of her distance from them. She looked at her watch. Twenty past three: out early for the last day, most likely. Raymond’s Lizzie would be among them, drifting along in the tide of black blazers yet not quite of it; she was like him, dreamy and tall and not an ounce on her, knock-knees in the offing. The mirage of children passed; the dancing pattern through the window faded. Traffic noise was a murmur.

  The distance from the street was a feature of the offices that Audrey liked, along with the fact that Kerr, Mather & McNeill occupied detached premises, one of the better double-fronted bungalows on Main Street just before the shops. It had been the home of the senior partner’s mother, a powdery lady with a dowager’s hump and large buckled shoes who hadn’t lasted the war; in 1946 the firm took the house over and Audrey joined them soon after.

  It had required explanation, to her neighbours if not to John, an accountant’s wife of thirty-seven going out to work. Not that she would ever tell them the truth: she and John, already married ten years and settled back from China and Hong Kong for four of those, had been awaiting the babies that she, silently, never quite believed in. Childlessness had seemed to her apt enough. Punishment in some form, as her missionary parents had taught her, there was bound to be, for John not being ‘the first’ and for her ‘coloured’ baby, given away to a couple from the New Territories before she had seen his eyes open; punishment too, for remembering the touch of Wang Hoa’s skin and her heart’s refusal to feel that loving him was a disgusting and immoral blunder. Her little job distracted her from John’s disappointment, his forbearance, his goodness. It helped her to be nearly as kind to him as he deserved. And there seemed less to explain if she worked somewhere that looked like a private house. It’s just a small branch office, she would say, and it’s only secretarial. Oh, there’s a lot of working wives now, people told her, pretending to judge her leniently. They did not need to add mind you, not in St Quivox Drive, but at least no-one alluded directly to the empty cradle.

  So Audrey saw to it that the house-turned-office, dignified and aloof despite the new gold lettering and ridged glass in the windows, remained homely. At her desk she hurried through the typing in snatched moments, anxious not to disturb a peace that was essentially domestic. Her suits for work were apricot, mint and powder blue, never charcoal or bottle green; she would not wear clothes the same colour as the filing cabinets. Paper clips were kept in a porcelain sweet dish from Shanghai. It was she who tended the bulbs edging the path between the two squares of gravel up to the front door, and who kept tray cloths laundered for the junior partner’s tea tray. She brought in the spherical millefiori paperweights of Vasart glass with brilliantly coloured chips set in their bases in frozen patterns of flowers that John gave her nearly every birthday and Christmas. They accumulated over the years; now there were at least four in every room. She was an excellent secretary.

  Her ear picked up a creak from the floorboards in Raymond’s office and the burr of the second desk drawer. She covered her typewriter, stepped out to the hall, pulled down the blind over the glass portion of the front door and pushed down the snib on the Yale lock. Then, leaving her door open, she returned to her desk and took the compact and comb from her handbag. She freshened her lipstick, tidied her hair and popped the things back. Holding her breath, she snapped her handbag shut, a loud single shot into the silence, a dart of enquiry to Raymond. With its usual whine, his door opened wider and his footsteps squeaked along the floor to the clients’ waiting room at the back. When she joined him there a minute later he was ready for her on the Chesterfield.

  ‘Och, Audrey,’ he said, glancing up with his usual slow smile.

  ‘That’s your Lizzie out for the holidays, now,’ she said, settling beside him and turning to look at his face.

  ‘Aye, eight weeks. Eight weeks getting on her mother’s nerves.’

  His smile gets wearier every time, she thought. Was it silly to think he was beginning to look old, when he was nine years you
nger than she was? The gap in their ages seemed to be closing.

  ‘And how are Fleur’s nerves just at the moment?’ she said.

  Instead of answering, he leaned over and kissed her, a dry touch on the mouth. It was the only kissing they did now; at fifty-one she felt too old to kiss him with hunger and he, at forty-two, no longer expected it. What a relief that that peculiar, questing curiosity that possesses lovers about each other’s mouths had faded.

  He pulled her against him and placed a hand on her knee and cleared his throat with a long murmur, the signal that he would like to make love to her. He didn’t often, nowadays. More often they talked or just held hands. The important thing was the space and time they took, the blind drawn over the front door on the days of the junior partner’s meetings: Round Table last Friday of the month, partners’ lunch at the Ayr branch every second Thursday. Space and time not snatched by stratagems, merely offered by circumstance and taken without greed for nearly fourteen years. They didn’t go in for declarations or breathless discussion of what had brought them together to the back waiting room in the first place; they had no zest for an extenuated philosophy of wrong turnings or missed chances. A little space and time in which to rest from their stoicism was all they took.

  Audrey shifted to let Raymond reach under her skirt, smiling over his shoulder at the customary murmurs and familiar moves, assisting him in the removal of the relevant clothing. She sighed as he slipped fondly into her, grateful for life’s sweet routines: Raymond’s respectful use of her body, neither abrupt nor protracted, and then the resumption of propriety—the tucking away of those parts of themselves, the smoothing of cushions—as pleasurable in its way as Raymond’s stately, conscientious thrusting, and after she had popped to the Ladies to make herself decent, a cup of tea made and brought by him and a little talk of ordinary things. Adultery was the last thing it felt like. Adultery meant devious and dangerous and uncontrolled, and what they did was kindly, and ceremonious.

  ‘Well,’ was all she said, glancing at him as she finished her tea. Like many sensible ceremonies their lovemaking changed very little over time and sealed a bond that was never expressed in words.

  ‘Och, Audrey,’ Raymond said, draining his cup.

  At a quarter to five they closed the office and walked down the front path. Raymond removed the padlock from his bicycle in the corner behind the wall, put on his cycle clips and rode away with a backwards smile and a ring of his bell. Audrey started on her walk along Burnhead Main Street, nodding to people she knew, scarcely glancing into prams parked in front of shop windows. When she left the busy pavement and made her way up past St Ninian’s church to her immaculate house in St Quivox Drive, she began to prepare her greeting for John, who would be busy in the garden despite his lumbago and would look up as she clicked along the pavement and turned in at the gate.

  i don’t think there is anything reprehensible about putting my mind to an outfit. One has to wear something to a funeral and it takes my mind off being here. They’ll expect me in fur and probably sunglasses, so I shall try not to disappoint. Leather is a definite possibility. Black, of course. I packed both, skirt and trousers.

  I’m wearing the trousers. It seems a good idea to put them on for a few hours to see if they feel right. My black wool coat will have to do, though maybe it’s marginally better with the skirt. I may find an opportunity to mention that of course there is nothing like real fur on a cold day but it’s impossible to pack fur in a suitcase and what a pity nobody travels with trunks anymore, all of which is true whether one actually has real fur or not. I’ve brought boots, but if I decide on the skirt with shoes then I’ll have to buy tights. There will be tights for sale in Burnhead but they won’t be anything special and there’s nobody I can send to get them, and somehow going into a shop myself to buy very ordinary ones will reduce me in their eyes. I know that’s silly. Whose eyes, exactly? I don’t know anyone here anymore unless I count Enid and Bill—and I suppose old Mrs Foley, though she’s probably dead by now—and I don’t.

  But there it is, I’m not comfortable. I feel watched. I feel known by the strangers in the low, new houses across the road. I sense an interest in my return, if not from the people who once knew me then from their children, or perhaps by now their children, God knows quite who; the labyrinthine, passive interconnectedness of people here revolts me. People in a place like this just have to stand still to proliferate. They reproduce in long invisible strings; they form, they hang and then they drop, like beads of water along the strands of a web.

  I’m at the window thinking about this when a young woman comes to the door. I can’t judge the age of women under forty anymore, especially the blondes—they all look like underfed children—but I guess she’s in her twenties. She has a pushchair with a child in it who looks to me too old to be wheeled around. Apparently they live next door. That figures; I noticed this morning that next door’s back garden is full of plastic. She’s in one of those fleece tops, bright red with the sleeves some other colour, not the sort of thing I think a person should wear to come and offer condolences, quite apart from the fact it’s spitting with rain. I don’t ask her in.

  These people! They fill the little houses in the tidy web of Burnhead streets in long, dripping lines, one soggy generation after another. She can’t help glancing past me up the hall.

  She says, I’m awful sorry about Mr Duncan, was it your father?

  Yes, indeed, I say. Thank you. That’s most kind.

  Lovely man, your father. A gentleman. And he was still managing fine, right up to the last stroke.

  Yes. He was very independent.

  I seen him around, you know, when he was still getting out. He was saying you’ve been moved away a long time. Is it down south you stay?

  I live abroad, I say. I have an international career.

  Oh aye, abroad, that was it. Sorry, only your dad was saying you was retired, I remember him saying one time. You’ve lost your accent, any road, she says.

  I tell her I have never spoken with the local accent because my mother was English and never would have allowed it.

  And singers never really retire, I say. My father may have been confused. I smile to show I don’t expect her to understand.

  She looks put in her place and a little pathetic, and laughs nervously.

  I smile again. I suppose I really don’t blame her for being unused to people like me.

  I’ve lived in several European countries, I tell her. In fact these trousers came from a place in Stuttgart where Princess Caroline of Monaco was a frequent customer. I’ve bought from the finest shops in Europe. Julie Christie, she was a regular, too.

  (I never actually saw either of them but I don’t say that. They had their photographs up in the shop. While my trousers were being wrapped I told them it was my first season in Stuttgart but they didn’t ask for my picture. Perhaps because I was only buying the one pair of trousers. Or maybe because I was in the chorus.)

  Stuttgart’s in Germany, I add.

  She looks rather startled. She’s probably never been further than Glasgow. Her kind don’t go far, they hang about a place like Burnhead breeding and watching. She’s staring at me now. Maybe she sees me as the big, black, jewelled spider that’s come back to trample her under my shiny black legs and set the web swinging. No wonder she watches. In a place like Burnhead one never escapes the eyes of people like her.

  Well, lovely trousers any road, she says. So, anyway, if you’re needing a wee hand with anything I’ll be only too pleased.

  I’m very busy, I say, to get her to go.

  Funeral’s one thing but it’s the stuff, builds up when you’re in one place all your life, she says. I’m Christine, by the way. This is Paris—say hello, Paris! You’re never here on your own with the whole house to clear?

  When I tell her I am she tilts her head and clicks her tongue. I want to throttle her.

  Well, if there’s anything at all don’t hesitate, she says.

 
Actually there is something, I say. I need to know where in Burnhead I can buy tights. Proper tights.

  Tights? Oh, all over. There’s a wee Boots. And the Somerfield keeps them, there’s loads of places, plenty wee dress shops. No problem.

  I stop her. No, no, no—I’m talking about tights of very good quality, I say. Oh, never mind, I don’t suppose there’s anywhere here that sells very, very good ones. It doesn’t matter.

  Right. Well, if you’re needing a hand I’ll maybe can pop in when this one’s asleep, she says, nodding at the pushchair. You know, help you out.

  Perhaps I’ll pop up to Glasgow for the tights, I say. It’s only thirty miles and I’ve got the hire car. But oh, the parking. I don’t think I can face having to find parking. How it does spoil one, having a driver!

  Sure, well, just you feel free to chap on my door. And Steve’s back day after tomorrow so don’t go lifting anything heavy, he’ll be only too pleased.

  Steve? Is that your husband? I’m afraid I don’t know the people round here, I say. I have already noticed she isn’t wearing a ring.

  He’s my partner, aye, she says. He’s through in Edinburgh on a job next couple of days, he’s in IT. Nuisance, ’cause he’s got the car. Lucky you’ve got yours. You’d be stuck if not, the buses are useless.

  I have to smile when I say yes, I’m lucky to have the car. Do they never learn? Stuck alone in cheap clothes at Seaview Villas with a child and no way of getting out, and because she’s not married she thinks she’s keeping her independence. I get rid of her before she can start asking for lifts here, there and everywhere. I think she gets the message that I want to be left alone.

  I am undecided about the tights. I wonder if I could find my way back to that place in Glasgow—Fenwicks, is it? I think it was on Sauchiehall Street. My mother got a lot of her clothes in Glasgow.