by Morag Joss
‘Paper’s just out. Would you take a look at that,’ he said, folding the page back for her to see. They studied it together.
She said, ‘So they’re really going ahead with it?’
‘Daft,’ Raymond said. ‘They’re dead set. We’ve the young fella up from London now, moved in for the duration. Tenor. Fancy talker.’
‘Well, what Fleur wants Fleur gets, isn’t that usually the way?’ Audrey said easily.
On and off she tried to get Raymond to stand up to his wife a little, for his own sake, but the pattern of her encouragement followed by his failure to act on it was by now reassuring and neither expected any more of it than that. It was a marker, that was all, of how things were and how things were done, like the cool paper smells of the office, tea cups washed as soon as finished with, pencils sharpened: daily, expected, approved. Raymond lived by such measures and so did she.
‘Aye, well. Well…’
His voice tailed off. Audrey waited, without expectation. He often tried to feel his way forward like this, with little murmured observances that carried no meaning. He would let the potential of words expire in a sigh of exhaled breath, compromising the moment when he might speak by letting it pass with a shrug because it always turned out to be not the right time, after all, when he might come out with a speech about what he really felt. She didn’t regret his lack of rhetoric anymore.
He said, ‘It’s not just Fleur, mind you…it’s the lot of them. They’re egging each other on. I’m to stage manage the thing, so I’m told.’
‘Stage manage it? Can you do that?’
‘I’m to get a team to build the stage. In the evenings. I’m to talk to a firm about lighting, I’m to look at drawings for the set. I’m to ask, no, I’m to tell Mr Mather I need to take my holidays to fit in with it.’
‘You’ll be busy, then.’
‘I’ve tried to tell them! I’ve tried to say I can’t do this kind of thing but George won’t hear a no. Fleur’s not listening at all, the Italian fella just smiles and swings his arms about. I mean, what’m I supposed to do?’
‘You’re not to worry. They can’t expect you to do it all by yourself, can they? They couldn’t, surely.’
‘Och, Audrey.’ Raymond hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Maybe if, how about if you come in on it, too? Maybe help with the costumes or something, just so’s maybe…maybe I’d not be so much on my own?’
Audrey took Raymond’s hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘Well, maybe I could. Though there’s John.’
Another moment passed with a faint clearing of the throat from one or both of them, and a small sigh of respect for John. The anemones on the low table that he had grown and that Audrey had brought into the office on Monday were open and curling now, the petals gaping inside out to their polished hearts, stamens purple and smoky like the remains of a private, burned-out pyre. A dusting of sooty pollen lay on the cloth under the vase. She didn’t know whether her deceiving of John was important or not, in the wide sense. Conducted so modestly that Raymond, beyond the door of the clients’ waiting room, was shy of asking anything of her at all, her infidelity felt like a discreet grace note in her life in which she was permitted to take a small and private pride, such as the filing kept up to date, the placing of cloths under vases.
‘John’d help too. He wouldn’t want to be left out. And he’s practical enough,’ she said.
Raymond murmured, then withdrew his hand from hers and hit at the folded page of the newspaper. ‘Ach I mean, look at it,’ he said. ‘How am I supposed to know what to do?’
Audrey pulled the paper away and folded it up and tucked it out of Raymond’s sight. ‘Don’t worry so much. We’ll come to the meeting, John and me.’
‘That’s good of you.’
‘And what’s Lizzie making of it all?’
‘Oh, Lizzie.’ His incomprehension became even more burdensome. ‘We’re to understand from George that Lizzie’s got this voice, a real big voice. He’s got her full of it. She wants to get properly trained.’
Audrey raised her eyebrows. ‘Like her mother?’
‘Or so I’m told. I’ve never heard her on the subject. Lizzie never speaks to me.’ He sighed. ‘She’s living in a world of her own. I think she’s away with the fairies.’
Audrey thought for a moment. ‘Well, it’s probably her nature. I was like that once.’
‘Her head’s in the clouds.’
‘She’ll be all right. As long as they’re her clouds,’ she said, ‘and nobody else’s.’
i go to bed in my old bedroom, and I dream. Though I am there in the dream, I am not doing anything except watch, nor am I utterly myself. It is some more valid person than I am who is doing the watching; through my eyes and from inside my own head she is looking out and seeing my parents and somehow me as well. This nearly-me, beside-myself person wonders if she is asleep or awake.
What she—or I—sees is a fragile picture. It comes and goes in light that is full of tricks and keeps changing and is the colour of neither night nor day; in an unsteady glow that could be from sun or moon the picture flickers and could evaporate altogether if stared at too long. In the dream I know that it is 1960, so it is another trick, then, that the dream is playing this picture back to me as if it were a memory, for it is impossible that I ever did see my parents like this in 1960, or ever. But there they are, staring as from a photograph, my mother at the end of her rope and my father dull with bewilderment. Their eyes, impenetrable circles of darkness, are larger than in life. They are standing in the garden and all around them on the ground lie the splintered remains of something they have broken, and they are sick at the loss and waste of it. They look ready to end their lives, and it seems arbitrary—a question of timing only—whether they will kill themselves or each other. But in their eyes sits the knowledge that one way or another the whole sorry business will soon be over and the hush surrounding them has something to do with respect for this fact. The waiting must be borne out with decorum.
Now I am lying down and staring through darkness towards the ceiling. I rise and take myself to the attic where at night the air smells even older than in daytime. The light of the bare bulb glares on the camp bed, which is still strewn with things piled up in a bank against the wall. I start to remove them, methodically at first, ferrying armloads to unfilled patches of floor, imagining that I am sorting things out. But all I want is the bed cleared, so I start to push stuff off and fling it around anyhow. Under all the junk, the surface of the dusty bedcover is still its original indigo blue. I ignore a fleeting, dark movement across its surface; something swift and scurrying has already vanished with the lightness of blinking. When I give the cloth a shake I find woven into the underside of its folds little silky white swellings that are powdery to the touch, the remains of ghostly, fled cocoons. Where more than forty years of light from the square skylight has fallen on the edge of the cover as it spills over the side of the bed to the floor, the colour has faded to a dim lilac.
I pull back the cover and get in and surrender to the embrace of the cloth and also to my own disgust, for it smells, and is heavy with damp and sticky with the layers of years; it feels like a coating of death. No trace of Joe remains. Not a breath or a hair nestles in the brown-stained ticking of the pillow, no memory of his skin is held in a whiff of talcum powder or aftershave between the cover and the rank mattress. Yet here is where he lies night after night while in my room below I stare upwards. I have to know how he sleeps. Is he on his back staring up too, not at the ceiling but through the skylight at the moon? On his side? Are his legs straight or scissored and are they covered or bare, does he grasp the bedcover between his thighs? Does he think of me and touch himself, imagining my hands, as I am trying to make my fingers feel like his body, opening mine? Does he listen for the sea or turn at once towards the wall and dream? It seems that I am still lying awake and burning in the dark, tormented by the heat in myself.
Now I see him. As I watched my parents so I watch Joe,
simultaneously witnessing my invisibility to him. He is here in the attic but lying in a high, carved, baronial bed, the kind of bed I imagine his family owning. Uncle George is in the doorway with his back to the room, explaining something to my parents, who are out of sight. What he says is making them unhappy. Joe sleeps. I fancy George is talking about him. Nobody sees me.
A dream and not a memory, but this is how it was that summer. My watching with nothing to do while others talk, talk, talk, stretches of time when I hesitate between rooms, unsure whether to go towards or away from the sound of voices. Spells of loitering, waiting for Joe to turn up and give shape to long, senseless hours. Days filled with the single purpose of awakening a part of him that doesn’t really see me, to bring him alive to the necessity of me. Day after day when I fail to rouse him beyond a vague, drowsy friendliness and into a revelation of what I mean to him, when I squander hours devising excuses for his being unaware that his life and mine are unbearable unless we are together.
I am wrong to try to remember that time as if I saw one thing leading to another. Memory tries to insist that there is a kind of inevitability between events but even if there is, it is hidden at the time. But that summer, we really are marooned and voiceless until Uncle George comes along. He makes everything possible, even easy; swinging to our rescue the way he does, he seems to explain to us who we are. Above all, he disguises the preposterousness of it: an amateur production of Turandot mounted in nine weeks with a cast of kids, oddities and thwarted also-rans. How blind I am not to see that Uncle George is just as blinded, and chasing just as hard after what he himself wants. But I don’t care to go over and over it.
Now I sneeze and the blue cover fills my nose with a smell like pepper and dead leaves and is rough against my face, like a prison blanket. I struggle to my feet and try to wave away the frowsty air around the bed, protesting. I feel things crawling in my scalp. My eyes water under the bright light that casts a blade of shadow along the sloping ceiling of the attic and now I really am awake, scratching at my arms and shivering on the bare floor.
13
Lila woke up with two hot patches high on her cheeks. In the bathroom she washed furtively and afterwards hid her flannel and toothbrush because there was nothing pretty about them. She kept the taps running while she used the lavatory and then she tipped bleach down it and waited ten minutes in case the next person in the bathroom should be Joe.
Back in her room, she looked at herself in the mirror. Reflected behind her she saw clothes draped over a chair and behind that the stale and wrong things that she had accrued, outgrown and stopped noticing: her old dolls’ house with painted ivy wandering up its walls, the shelf of school stories and ballet annuals, a flaking black metal tin of broken geometry tools. She owned nothing that she still wanted. Overnight she had become herself, arriving in her real life at last only to find that she had got there burdened with possessions with no point, and dressed as someone else. She had no clothes she could bear to appear to Joe in. Somehow she had been surviving under a shadow that obscured how unacceptable she looked.
But the tragedy of her clothes could not be played out now, on a Thursday morning in Burnhead. She could smell burning toast from downstairs, she heard the back door bang as her father left for work and the sound of the taps running again in the bathroom and the rippling of her mother’s voice, trilling and turning Italian phrases. A gusty wind blew outside, squeezing an ordinary, everyday draught through the window frame. She had to join the day and get dressed in something, however thwarted her changed self would be in it. She pulled on her dirndl skirt. It had a pattern that reminded her of half-beaten eggs but it was reasonably new; Enid’s mum had run it up for her at Easter at the same time as doing one for Enid in red and white stripes. (Two’s as simple as one, she said, handing it over to Lila and waving away thanks.) If she pulled her white belt in tight it looked better, but the yellow aertex shirt would not do. It would never do again. She put on her reasonable white blouse with the Peter Pan collar and bows on the cuffs, and spent a long time practising how to move: she turned sideways to the mirror, straightened her back and thrust out her chest, imagining through Joe’s eyes the combined impact of her bust and her glancing smile. He had to catch sight of her like this, bashful and skittish, just at the moment when a tiny, breathy laugh escaped her lips.
She was still barefoot. The flat sandals would also have to go, permanently, but she had little else apart from school shoes and plimsolls, only a pair of tan pumps meant for special occasions. They would have to do, with American Tan stockings. She undressed again in order to put on her suspender belt which was ointment pink and needed a wash, but at least she would not have to worry about Joe’s eyes judging it.
The stockings and smart shoes did not look right with the high colour in her face and her hair flattened childishly under Kirby grips. She damped down the pink in her cheeks with some Max Factor but it looked strange, sitting on her face by itself, so she put on mascara as well, scrubbing a paste off the surface of the flat black cake with spit and stroking it into clumps on her lashes with the little doll’s brush. She scraped her hair back hard to make her eyes look Chinesey and startled, and then she backcombed it into a thick, felted swell and tied it high at the back of her head in a yellow chiffon scarf. She was amazed at how long all this took. But she had to count herself now among those who knew the true purpose of dressing to the nines. Realising she could never again be a person who wasn’t prepared to go to such lengths, she felt initiated and dismayed.
Uncle George and Joe were in the dining room. Going in, she broke an atmosphere, as if opening the door snapped threads lately spun between them. She poured herself tea in silence, not sure if their eyes were on her or on the trickle into her cup that meant she was emptying the pot.
‘So, buon giorno, la bella!’ Joe said, loudly and suddenly.
Lila lifted a hand to the scarf in her hair.
‘So, today, la bella Liù, may I enjoin you to give me a tour of my new surroundings?’ He stretched out a hand that remained too far away for her to touch, had she dared reach for it.
‘La what?’ she asked, unconsciously dipping her head to receive the garland of her own special name. ‘La bella what?’
‘We have a great deal to do,’ Uncle George said. He sounded as if he were repeating himself. ‘We have a public meeting here the day after tomorrow. The three of you need vocal coaching every day, and on top of that you have to be able to sing your parts in your sleep. And all in a matter of weeks.’
‘Yes, Maestro, but I don’t see why that means we have to hang around all morning,’ Joe said. Lila giggled.
‘There is no need to be hanging around. You should be working on your parts, on your own. Without over-taxing your voice, naturally. Then we need to start thinking about the set, do some drawings, start thinking about materials. You said you were keen to design it. I’d have thought at the very least you’d want to go up to the farm to see the space where you’re performing.’
Joe widened his eyes. ‘Ah, may I remind you, the set’s all up here,’ he said, tapping the side of his head with his index finger. ‘I told you, that’s the way I work. I could get it down on paper in ten minutes. How you fuss! Doesn’t he, la bella Liù?’
Uncle George lit a cigarette and looked at his watch. Joe screwed up his nose and waved the smoke away. ‘Really, Maestro, I don’t know why you get so het up,’ he said.
‘At 9.15 I shall give Fleur her session. At 10.15 you will have yours, and at 11.30, after a fifteen minute break, it’ll be her turn,’ George said, nodding at Lila. He got up from the table. ‘You will each work for at least four more hours every day learning your parts. At 2.30 every day we shall meet and discuss what else needs to be done. Understood?’
‘We’re not students now, you know,’ Joe said, looking at Lila for support.
‘Exactly. You’re taking on something that even professionals would baulk at. You should also,’ he said, now fixing his attention
on Joe and dropping his voice, ‘rest for at least an hour and a half every afternoon. You need to build up stamina. I expect you all singing your parts, word-perfect without scores, in two weeks’ time.’
He set his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and left.
Joe said, ‘He’s not being fair. I just need time. I know the part already, most of it. I need to mull ideas over in my head. My…’ He spun a hand in the air. ‘My ideas for the set…they are buds. They need time to flower. You understand, don’t you?’
‘Oh, of course,’ Lila said. ‘I understand.’
‘He doesn’t,’ Joe said. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something.
‘I know. Typical.’
‘Come on,’ he said, standing up. ‘We’ll go out. We’ll just forget all about him, shall we?’
‘Out? Where?’
‘Anywhere—you choose. Take me anywhere you like,’ he said, putting on a smile and spreading his arms.
Lila’s heart thumped; he didn’t care where he went as long as it was she who took him. ‘But Uncle George, the dishes…’
George was now at the piano across the hall, stabbing out the chords of the chorus at the end of Act I:
La fossa già scaviam per te