by Morag Joss
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 curle
d 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.
Today a low winter sun slants across the street. The pavement on one side is a tunnel of cold shadow, on the other a long row of glass shop fronts burns in the fire of the reflected sun and shimmers as if furnaces blaze inside. Sew Right is no more, of course. In its window hang those vertical blinds like strips of cardboard joined by loops of thin chain, and the place now offers IT Logistics and Database Solutions.
But I’m looking for a church, of which Burnhead used to have at least half a dozen. The South Church has a new porch with a ramp and has become a Centre for Family Counselling and Child Psychology Services. Kingcase looks unchanged, colourless—its walls still craggy and black and its arched windows filled with small panes of plain glass—except that where there used to be a painted sign with Times of Worship there’s now an enormous lit-up board telling me about Opportunities for Praise and Thanksgiving. But I do not want to praise and I don’t feel grateful. It is no help to me to know that there are crèche facilities on Sundays (bring your children), a service for Young People once a month (bring an instrument!) or that Mums’ Flex ’n’ Stretch is restarting after Easter (mats provided). I walk on, thinking about the funeral. I don’t object to talk of God—what’s the alternative?—but I want it unembellished. Suddenly I decide that there will be no singing. He didn’t care for music so I think he would approve and I, certainly, would prefer there to be none. I think being here again is renewing my awareness of its power to falsify.
I know it can’t still be here after all this time but I turn off Main Street and walk down Bridge Street. It won’t be there. Even during Enid’s short spell in their clutches there was something rickety about them, her Fellowship of Sinai Gathering in His Name. I don’t mean rickety about their convictions. They were so lost in those that they had lost also all sight of themselves, that was the trouble. They were so cheerful and absorbed in their hobby they didn’t notice they looked mad to everyone else, like people at dog shows. What was rickety was their grasp of the idea that religious fervour need not preclude caring what you look like. Maybe that was one reason why Enid’s fad was so short-lived. Their clothes embarrassed her.
The place where they used to gather was rickety, too, little more than a shack with a corrugated roof and arched windows with railings round it, near the bottom of Bridge Street between the railway line and the back of the post office. It always looked shut up and in need of repainting, and nobody ever did anything about the buddleia and dock and willowherb that grew in the few feet of ground between the walls and railings. If Jesus died so that the Fellowship of Sinai might Gather in His Name, he had every right to be disappointed in how the bargain turned out.
So it is a surprise, not to find that the shack is no more but to see that it has been replaced with a red-brick building, bigger but of exactly the same shape, so new and hard that it looks as if it has not been long out of doors. The bricks have the bright colour and sharp angles of a child’s picture. The railings have gone. Instead there is a low double-sided wall that serves as a container for a line of lush phoney plants of the kind that sometimes hang outside pubs, weeping figs and palms, which seem to me appropriate choices for a biblically-inspired enterprise. There is a sign on the wall that says Evangelical Lutheran Fellowship. The windows are set very high and the building has the same shut-up and empty look that the old place had, but I try the door quietly and it opens into a space of blond wood that smells of varnish, and from deeper inside I hear two people, a man and a woman, talking as they set out chairs a
cross the floor. They have American accents, which is another surprise, and as soon as they catch sight of me they come forward beaming white porcelain smiles. Under the strip lights they look newly wakened, as if they had set some alarm clock whose ring coincided with my arrival.
They tell me they are Luke and Lucy and happy to meet me and that Luke is the pastor and Lucy is his wife. When I tell them my name and that I want to arrange a funeral for my father Luke says, Lila, hey. This must be a hard time for you.
He leads me to a chair. Lucy disappears.
This is the Fellowship of Sinai, isn’t it? I ask. Because it all seems very different and I want to be sure the funeral will have no singing. I remember the Fellowship of Sinai never had singing.
Luke tells me there has been much prayer and debate on this issue since the Fellowship of Sinai merged with Brothers and Sisters in Evangelical Lutheranism in 1987, when the brothers and sisters came over from Burnhead’s twin town, Vandalia, Ohio, to take up what he calls their ‘Scaddish outreach mission’. I move him on from giving me the entire history and back to the point. Is there singing or isn’t there?
The current position, he tells me, is that it all depends. The brothers and sisters, while neither down on nor up for singing in principle, feel that music can enhance Scripture and consequently ‘our experience of Jesus’. But it is by no means necessary and there remain a diminishing few of the original Sinai Fellows who are strongly opposed. So it’s optional. He assures me that the Divine Shepherd will hear every word taken to Him by a person with a humble heart.
So delivery method optional, I say. Kneeling in silent prayer or borne on wings of song, you’re not fussy?
He says, Lila, God will know what is in your heart however you speak to Him. In that sense, no ma’am, the Divine Shepherd is not fussy.