Puccini's Ghosts

by Morag Joss

  I might never have met Joe Foscari.

  10

  Uncle George returned the next day from the farm and told Fleur and Lila that they had ‘a space’ for the opera.

  ‘Stanley—Mr McArthur—he’s converted. All for it,’ he said, rubbing his hands, but Lila thought his jollity was forced. ‘It is a great space, isn’t it?’ he said to her. ‘Tell your mother. Isn’t it great?’

  They were in the kitchen. Fleur, perched on a kitchen chair, looked papery with exhaustion. She had pulled out the twin tub and started on a washing but then lost heart, and was now watching while Lila got on with it. Lila was used to the petering out of her mother’s energy. It came and went like matches struck in the dark—weak, random flares usually ill-directed and almost immediately extinguished. She seldom found any forward momentum for the jobs she undertook because they never acquired enough purpose for her; long before she came close to finishing anything she would succumb to a listlessness in herself that would be even deeper than before the doomed effort was made.

  ‘I’m not performing in a shed,’ Fleur said, over the droning and sloshing of the machine. ‘I want a cigarette.’

  ‘It won’t look like a shed, we’re going to whitewash it. Paint the back wall black. We’ll do the whole production very modern, almost bare. With drapes and lights and…and…shapes.’

  ‘Shapes?’

  ‘Shapes, yes…to suggest things. Scenery, buildings, you know. It’ll be sort of experimental. Though it’s been done before,’ he added quickly, ‘I mean this kind of approach. They use all kinds of spaces for opera now—it’s modern.’

  ‘I suppose he’s charging a fortune.’

  ‘I don’t want you worrying about that,’ he said. ‘You leave that to me. You need to concentrate one hundred per cent on your part.’

  Fleur sighed. ‘I’m exhausted just thinking about it. I need to lie down.’

  George looked hard at her. ‘Why are you always coming out with these statements about yourself?’

  ‘I don’t come out with statements about myself. I’m just exhausted.’

  ‘You’re only just up. It’s only eleven o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ Fleur said, yawning.

  George shrugged. ‘Well, all right. Go and lie down. I’ve plenty to do, anyway.’

  ‘You’ll manage on your own,’ she said, eyeing Lila and sniffing weakly at the wet smells of bleach and washing soap. She pushed herself up from her chair, pressed her fingers into the space between her breasts and produced a deep, solid note that after only a few seconds faded to a sigh.

  She said, ‘I’m tired,’ and let the line of her shoulders sag. ‘I don’t know where I’d be without you.’ She drifted through the door, not caring which of them she was addressing.

  Uncle George sagged a little, too, as she passed. ‘I should make some calls,’ he said to Lila, loitering. ‘I should ring the paper and get the ball rolling. If we’re going ahead.’

  Lila half-turned from the sink where she was holding the draining hose.

  ‘If? What do you mean, if?’

  Before he could answer there was a hot grunt from the twin tub and then the pump started to throb softly. The hose reared in Lila’s hand as a snake of grey water gushed from its end into the sink, wave after wave of suds raising the smells of wet wool and warm rubber.

  He said, ‘Oh, of course. It’s just…I need to make some calls. Have to ring the publisher, we’ve only got your mother’s vocal score. We need to hire all the parts.’

  He was tossing a box of matches from hand to hand and bouncing on the balls of his feet but the little dance of optimism did not fool Lila. She frowned.

  ‘Shouldn’t you get your orchestra before you get the music?’

  ‘Don’t scowl,’ he told her, throwing the matchbox high and catching it. ‘We can’t delay that long. We have to advertise in the paper for players and singers, for everybody. We’ll have to hold a meeting. If we left getting the parts till after that it’d be too late.’

  He stood neither in nor out of the kitchen, shaking the matchbox in time to some tune in his head. ‘Anyway we still need to get our Calaf,’ he said.

  ‘I thought we’d got our Calaf,’ Lila said, glaring at the diminishing trickle of water pulsing from the hose. She was disappointed. Uncle George had arrived with at least as many dirty clothes as clean ones and more than half the things in the wash were his, but he didn’t seem to notice either the hard work she was doing or how willingly she did it. This was the second load. Standing in all this steam, hauling the sodden weight of washing from tub to tub was exhausting; did he not know that? Was there a washing machine in the flat in Crouch End, or would she be taking his things to a laundry?

  ‘Calaf? Well, we have, really. It’s only a matter of getting hold of him.’

  He looked at his watch. As if he had just thought of it he said, ‘Actually I might be able to get him now. He starts work at twelve. He’s working as a waiter, just for the summer, did I say? I suppose I might…I might just catch him, before he goes.’

  Lila had now attached the filler hose to the kitchen tap and was running fresh water into the machine. She looked up. If he had calls to make then why was he sighing in the doorway? If he might catch this person before he went to work, why wasn’t he trying his number right now? He had withdrawn something from her—his conviction, perhaps—and had grown suddenly mean with his certainties. She resented it; he had handed out promises like sweeties and was gathering them all back, still in their wrappers.

  She said, ‘Well, go on then, for God’s sake,’ placing in her voice a sharp edge that belonged to her mother’s. ‘If you’re so sure he’ll want to do it, why don’t you just go and ask him?’

  She dragged the dripping clothes from one tub to the other, using the long wooden tongs. Uncle George twisted his hair in the fingers of one hand and stared at the wall.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe I will.’

  He looked at his watch again and then at Lila. Her arms were pale and slippery, the ends of her fingers tight wrinkled nubs. A weak sun gleamed through the steamed-up window behind her and illuminated her strangely. Down the thin curtains in cascading vertical lines the pattern of wine flasks, soup ladles and sticks of celery was casting patchy tints of sage and yellow and charcoal across her damp skin.

  ‘Have you…I mean, is all that nearly finished? When will you be ready to hang it out?’

  ‘Well, there’s the rinsing, two more rinses, then it’s to go through the mangle.’

  ‘You’ll be a while then?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ She smiled her forgiveness. ‘The mangle’s electric, it doesn’t take long.’

  ‘You’re a good kid. Look, I’m not sure, you see. About doing this. The opera.’

  The day lost its balance for a second, threatened to tip into chaos.

  She said, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean it’s a big thing. Your singing, are you going to take it seriously? Are you prepared to take it seriously enough?’

  Not just the balance of Lila’s day but the rest of her life lurched dangerously. With a tiny indrawn breath she caught the idea that was still as delicate as a gasp. She held it, set it upon its pivot.

  ‘But I don’t want to do just the opera. I want to be a real singer. A proper one.’ Then, quickly, she said it. ‘I want to train properly. At college in London. I want to live with you and go to a London college.’

  Uncle George looked at her. ‘Well now. Well, that is serious.’ He nodded. Lila waited for him to speak and then realised he wasn’t going to. But the nod was enough. She knew she must not ask him for any more now, but she would get what she needed. She smiled.

  ‘Hard work,’ he said.

  She wasn’t sure if he meant the singing or the laundry. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said, which was true in either case.

  ‘I’m thinking, you see. You should do some work on your voice today too, like your mother, and it’s much better done in
the morning when it’s freshest.’

  ‘Work on my voice?’

  ‘So why don’t you leave all that for now and go and do some scales while I’m on the phone? Might be easier if I’m, you know, not interrupted or anything.’

  ‘But if I leave it now I won’t get it hung out by dinnertime,’ Lila said. ‘If you’re on the phone, I won’t interrupt. I could help you with the numbers again.’

  Uncle George laughed. ‘I think I can manage!’

  ‘The rinsing’s easy, the machine does it all. I could help you and still keep an eye on it.’

  ‘No. You go and make a start in the music room. I want you to get busy on that voice.’

  ‘But any minute I’ll have to empty it again. And then it’ll—’

  George gave the matchbox a savage shake. ‘Jesus! Look. You need to realise something,’ he said. ‘This opera’s not just a little joke that we fit in round everything else. If we do it, it’s going to be done properly, you hear me?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a joke.’

  ‘It’s not too late, you know. You just have to say, “I’ve changed my mind. I want to do the washing and squabble with Enid and watch my mother going round the bend. I don’t want to sing, I don’t want to put in the work. It’s too hard.” Is that what you want?’

  ‘No,’ Lila said in a whisper.

  ‘Sure? Because you’re going to have to work hard. Starting right now.’

  ‘I don’t mind. As long as something nice happens in the end.’

  that day in the kitchen there are three voices, a trio of strands weaving around one another and each telling a separate story to which the other two are deaf, a story about what each one of us wants and loves and fears.

  Snatches of his voice, his modulated deceits: It’s only a matter of getting hold of him.

  Hers, twisting itself into a disappearing wisp of sound slipping away up the stairs: I don’t know where I’d be without you.

  My voice barges in comically. I’m the ingénue in the dreadful dress with the wet sleeves, guilelessly wielding the bawdy toys—the hose and tongs—and knowing nothing, not even how burlesque my mimicry of the adults is, for the sniggering has not yet started. As long as something nice happens in the end.

  A trio, all of us blind and expectant and for the time being only—this far in the story, in the delicate plaiting of lies—innocent, still unaware of how massive and ungainly our expectations are, how grotesque we look as we go about their concealment and how ugly, in our final disappointment, we will all be.

  I have no choice but to leave the washing in a pond of filmy grey water and be led away, placed in the middle of the music room and bullied about my posture. Uncle George shakes my shoulders, makes me breathe in and out so deeply I feel slightly faint. He talks about my spine and my shoulder blades and my diaphragm and the tip of my tongue on the floor of my mouth and keeping it out of the way; he waggles my jaw and pinches my chin and comes out with something about smiling through my ribs (most of which, I will appreciate years later, makes a sort of sense). He makes me think about the space around myself. I wave my arms. I am to claim this air and claim my sound and the right to make it. He gives me a note to start on and a page of exercises: scales and arpeggios and octave leaps to Ay, Ee, Ah, Oh, Ooo. He warns me that he will be within earshot and that if I fail to breathe properly and concentrate on the sound I am making, he will be able to tell. It always shows, he says, if a singer doesn’t mean it.

  Do I blame him? At fifteen I am a lanky, dull-eyed girl solidified by neglect and on my way to becoming hard; his arrival is pulling me out from the slow drip of my parents’ misery and inattention, under which I am gently calcifying. Starting with the singing on the beach and now, with my very first singing lesson, he is softening me up. I may start to leak feelings, but for the moment I must work on my scales.

  Even while I am singing my exercises, and in the intervals between them, I listen to him in the hall as he speaks with private urgency into the telephone.

  Joe? Look. Of course I’m not changing my tune, you know I have to stay up here.

  I do not actively decide to do it, I do not think, but by the time he rings off and comes back to tick me off about my vowels, I have decided that I have not been eavesdropping.

  Because she’s my sister. Of course I want you here! Of course it’ll be better than staying in London, there’s a beach on the doorstep, don’t forget.

  Joe? You’ve got to come, I need you to.

  I have not learned that the gift of making Uncle George happy rests with someone other than me.

  Joe, I need you here, I really do.

  I have not learned that he put me in here to make a noise of my own in order to get me out of earshot, so that I would not hear him plead. Joe will be here tomorrow, and I am having my first proper singing lesson and the attention—I have never had a lesson in anything all by myself with just one other person before—is intoxicating. That’s all I know.

  He pops out and makes another call: a man from the Burnhead & District Advertiser will be round this afternoon. My mother comes downstairs and is happier than I have seen her in weeks when Uncle George says he hopes she’s had her beauty sleep because the man from the paper is bringing a photographer. At last it is safe to reenter the day and for me to pick up my plans and dreams again.

  The sound of Uncle George’s naked begging to Joe will be sent to the now quite crowded place in my mind where I keep words that I wish I had never heard spoken. The general clutter of words already in there—the weaponry of all my parents’ rows and altercations—is a blessing; Uncle George’s entreaties can nestle there unnoticed with the rest of the spent arsenal, his collapsed dignity like a punctured breastplate under a heap of broken spikes and arrows and staved blades.

  He shows me my aria written down in my mother’s vocal score—the aria I sang on the beach, ‘Signore, ascolta!’—and goes through the words with me and tells me who is singing them and why. He asks me what I like best about singing it, and I tell him it’s the highest note, the note on which it ends, the saddest one. The most difficult, he says. Your favourite part is the most difficult part. That means you’re a real singer.

  When I sing it this time, my eyes fill with tears. I am softening, flooding on the inside; a river has started to flow in me, bearing my thoughts and my feelings and my voice along, swirling and commingled. As I come to the last note my blood bubbles up and my heart is cast free of its moorings and is afloat in clear, fast-flowing water.

  ACT II

  The Second Riddle

  It kindles like a flame

  But it is not flame.

  At times it is a frenzy.

  It is fever, force, passion!

  Inertia makes it flag.

  If you lose heart or die it grows cold, But dream of conquest and it flares up.

  Its voice you hear in trepidation,

  It glows like the setting sun!

  BLOOD.

  The ordeal begins. Turandot poses her three riddles, and inspired by love, Calaf solves them all. He has won her hand. Turandot is overcome with distress; she will belong to no man. Calaf knows he must win her heart. He gives her a chance to defeat him. She does not know his name. If she can discover who he is before dawn she will be victorious and he will die.

  11

  The next evening Uncle George stopped Lila from coming with him to meet Joe off the train. From the window she watched them arrive, George trudging up the path under the weight of two suitcases and Joe following with a holdall and a smaller case balanced on one shoulder. He swaggered, in search of an audience. Lila kept still. She could tell he was pleased she was watching and she was drawn to him for that alone, for the compliment of enjoying her eyes upon him. She liked the showmanship of the suitcase borne aloft, his display of strength behind Uncle George’s struggle with the heavier cases.

  Inside the house he took her hand and said, ‘I say, how do you do, you must be the sweet little brand-new soprano I’m he
aring about, how very delightful.’

  His voice was like no other she had ever heard. It was a little high-pitched and had a slight flouriness in it as if he spoke through a dense white cloth, and it was mesmerisingly hard to place. Any accent that might have attached him to a region or a category of person had been washed out by elocution, and to Lila’s ears the result, a controlled neutrality in the vowels, consonants quaintly pointed, was enchantment. His words floated from him unhindered by the local grunt that rendered delicate, private things unsayable; Billy with his floppy hair and sideways looks and reticence would never come out with sweet, little, delightful. Words like that would not survive in his rough Burnhead mouth to be at her disposal even half-meant when she might need to hear them. In Joe there was a hurry to put words to use. He was anxious to be known.

  ‘Well, all the way from London! You’re very welcome. I hear you’re Italian,’ Fleur said, wiping her hands down the back of her skirt. Her voice clicked oddly.

  ‘Dear lady, indeed! Indeed I am. How do you do?’

  ‘George says you had restaurants. In Glasgow.’

  ‘Ah, did he, did he now? Well, but those are past glories. Oh, how are the mighty fallen!’

  Raymond said, ‘I never heard of a Foscari’s in Glasgow. Rogano’s, yes.’

  ‘Oh, don’t!’ Joe said with a strange shudder. ‘Oh, the heyday of the Foscaris is lost in the mists of time. It’s little more than hearsay now. But I want to hear all about you. Tell me, tell me, tell me—all about yourselves.’

  Lila felt his urgency had something to do with her, that she was drawing out not just his words but setting loose inside him some thrilling notion of herself. His voice was a road to elsewhere, his words an invitation to her to shed her limitations: her name, her fear, this wrong place where she had somehow got stuck. She resolved to start talking like Joe immediately.