Puccini's Ghosts

by Morag Joss

  Fleur’s two or three basic cookery books only confirmed the limitations of mince, but one line at the end of a recipe for making rissoles caught her attention: ‘Cooked, finely diced chicken may be substituted for the minced beef.’ She remembered seeing, in ‘Broadcast Suggestions for the Housewife’ (the only page she could understand) in George’s current copy of the Listener, a recipe for Summer Chicken. Chicken was too expensive, but if mince and chicken were interchangeable then she could make it with mince instead. She fetched the Listener and made a shopping list. The recipe contained a great many other things as well as the chicken, some of which she had never tasted, and it sounded different and exciting enough for Joe.

  Nobody ate quite everything that they found in their Summer Mince. Joe left the prawns and the green pepper (that Lila had had to go to four greengrocers to find), George left the pineapple and Fleur the spring onion, but only because of her breath, she said. Raymond did best, leaving only a small, generalised heap on his plate, but his lips swelled up from the paprika and chilli powder. Lila looked at Joe. She knew that her eyes were shining too hard, as if enamelled or like dolls’ eyes, because she needed his praise too much.

  ‘Did you like it, Joe?’ she said.

  He said, ‘Aah! Such splendours! The splendours of the continental kitchen! Dear Liù, what wonders you have performed, and would I could do you justice. But alas, I am not piscivorous.’

  He pushed with his finger at one of the curling grey prawns on his plate, pretending to be surprised when everybody laughed. ‘I mean only what I say. I am not piscivorous, a fish-eater. Indeed I am, you might say, not a savoury person. I am a sweet person. I have a very, very sweet tooth.’

  So Lila turned her attention to puddings. With everything else that was happening she had no time for all the weighing and mixing and baking and steaming that the proper recipes called for, so she stocked up on packets promising, at a fraction of the trouble, a blancmange or a whip, a table cream or chiffon—desserts to please the whole family. Dessert rather than pudding would be more in line with Joe’s tastes anyway, she felt, and she liked the pictures on the packets of a hostess in a perfect apron bearing to the table her trophy, an airy froth piped into minarets and studded with exotic fruits. And they were so easy! They made her feel modern and carefree.

  The packets spilled their contents in a trickle of pastel-coloured dust, dry and silky as talcum powder and smelling the same, sometimes with tiny sharp crystals of something that looked like glass. When mixed with the animating liquid—milk or water, sometimes hot, sometimes cold—and beaten, the powder burst into life, coagulating into lurid gobs that clogged the whisk and ballooned up to the top of the bowl, releasing fumes more redolent of a colour, often pink, than anything edible. Lila would feel as she placed it in the pantry to set that she was leaving it in peace to calm down.

  But her desserts, no matter what she did to them with glacé cherries and tiny silver balls and hundreds and thousands, tasted of sugar and chalk with a whiff of perfume, and were not the focus of anyone’s interest. She soon gave up telling them, as she brought one to the table in the manner of the lady on the packet, how thoughtfully she had chosen today’s flavour or how carefully she had placed the decoration that she was about to destroy with one plunge of the spoon. When Uncle George bothered to look up he was usually weary and watchful of Joe, more inclined to smoke than to eat and too busy making lists to notice what was on his plate. Her mother, humming from her latest conversation on the telephone, seldom had more than a few moments to spare. She would always be just off out; the girls would be arriving any minute in Moira’s car to pick her up for some excursion: talking to the printers, buying trimmings for the headdresses, choosing outfits for the ceilidh. Having just touched up her lipstick, she would take only a mouthful or two off the end of her spoon, gingerly and with a show of teeth. But because she was happier she was not unkind, and showed Lila some spasmodic appreciation: I don’t know where I’d be without you.

  Since her offerings were not really for them, Lila did not mind. But Joe turned out to be a shoveller. She put his apparent lack of table manners down to superior appetite and found it slightly thrilling to watch such relish. In the congealing lull afterwards she would scrape plates and let the inevitability of the coming afternoon settle on her. She tried to be at the sink with her back to him so that she did not have to see him rise to go. But she would hear the scrape of the chair and have to turn in hope of a smile or a look, and once he was gone she would stuff into the most meagre half-glance all the meaning she could make it hold and try to let it be enough. But she hated the afternoons. When, still standing at the sink, she got a glimpse of how deep her desolation might go in the space of the hours that stretched ahead, she would seek out company even if, as it usually was, it had to be Enid’s.

  enid comes round on Sundays, now, and on it goes. See Joe? What about him? You fancy him, don’t you? I do not. You do so. She seems not to be Gathered very much anymore, but I don’t want her to think I’m interested enough to ask why.

  One day we wander up to the farm, on George’s instructions. I am to get a feel for the space. I go reluctantly because Joe might be around later and I might miss him, and because I resent doing what Uncle George tells me.

  Enid gets bored early on and we walk in silence. Sherpa the dog meets us and bounces along and we talk to him instead. The yard is deserted but the yellow door of the farmhouse stands open. Sherpa lopes over the overgrown grass and stands barking into the narrow hall, his whole body twisting. I peer in. One dim, hanging bulb fails to light the place but manages to stain the air. Mr McArthur appears, holding a length of rope. He is too big and looming for the doorway and in his farm clothes and boots he seems unsuitable, generally, for indoors, even an indoors as shabby as this.

  Aye well, girls, you’re here just at the right time. Come on, he says, and turns and disappears back into the house.

  We are too sullen with each other to express any suspicion about what dire thing involving rope we might be here at just the right time for, so we follow across the mud-scented hall and through a flat door with an ochre patina of grime and smoke. Billy stands in the front room. Both his arms are stretched around one end of a tilting upright piano that is resting half-on and half-off a low platform on castors. He looks hot and fierce.

  Hiya there, Billy.

  I am showing Enid that I know him better than she does, staking my claim. Even if he is just a farm boy he is mine to say hello to first.

  He nods at me and says, I’m needing a hand. I cannae lift the back end on, the wheels keep slipping. Dad, get the rope round it again and pull from the front.

  He grunts and nods at Enid and says, You, hold the wheels steady. Don’t let it run away.

  To me he says, Here, you help me lift this end.

  I go to help him with a slight simper. With a couple of pushes and pulls we manage to get the thing up and balanced on the set of wheels.

  From what feels like a long way off I hear a noise, a small scream that even so may be coming from me, and I feel a tightening and a tugging as if a long, invisible piece of my clothing has got caught under the bottom edge of the piano. Nobody says anything.

  The space the piano leaves against the wall is brighter and cleaner than the rest of the room and shows that the flowers on the paper were once two colours, lilac and green, before they faded together and aged into shadows of themselves. On the newly exposed area of floor weightless rolls of dust eddy over the linoleum in the air disturbed by our hauling and panting. The smells of a trapped past lift into the room: camphor and book covers mix with candlewax and the old bready scent of wallpaper stuck on decades ago with flour and water. Age and neglect smell the same everywhere, I think; this place reminds me of Seaview Villas. Enid straightens up from crouching by the wheels, and claps her hands. I feel the smack of palm against palm as if they are my own.

  We’re no finished yet, Billy says. It’s going out. It’s to go in the shed yet.


  Mr McArthur says, You’re daft, Billy, I’m telling you.

  Billy glowers. It’s my piano and it’s going where I please.

  Mr McArthur turns on me. See your man, your George? After one thing and another, now it’s to be a piano. A piano for rehearsals, a bloody piano. I’ve a farm to run, I’ve no time to go shifting pianos.

  But how can he do the opera without one? I say, protective of Uncle George for the first time in a while.

  This is no a bloody concert hall.

  We just need to get it to the shed, Billy says. Pay no attention.

  It’s not my fault, I say. Or Uncle George’s.

  Mr McArthur glares back at Billy across the top of the piano. Well, you’ll no be wanting me now you’ve got the lassies here. Eh, Billy?

  He looks angry and strong enough to lift the piano single-handed and hurl it across the room. He slaps the top of it with the flat of his thick hand and strides out. We listen to the tramp of his boots, the clatter of clawed feet and a bark as he curses the dog. The front door slams.

  I can feel my hand stinging as though it were mine that slammed down on the cold lid of the piano. I raise it to my lips and stroke it across my mouth. My poor hand is sore and trembling.

  Enid tosses her head prettily. She has seen Doris Day do it exactly like this. Billy makes his eyes deliberately sleepy and looks away.

  Your dad, he’s maybe just in a bad mood, I say.

  This is how I used to explain my mother’s behaviour to myself, before Turandot. I want to tell Billy that I understand what it is to live with an unpredictable adult.

  It’s because of the piano, he says. You just need to leave him. It doesn’t last.

  I think it’s very rude, in front of us, Enid says.

  I see the effect she’s after. She thinks it’s attractive to flounce and insist on feminine privileges and nice manners. The Doris Day tricks are embarrassing the way she does them, like an overgrown child still playing in her mother’s shoes, too old to play dressing-up but fooling nobody because she clearly isn’t doing it like a proper grownup either. I seem already to have marked myself out as separate from all that where Billy is concerned. I just want to talk to him as if he were real, but I feel a sudden flush of embarrassment because what if this is what I’m like with Joe?

  Just you shut up, Billy says to Enid. You pull from the front and keep the door open.

  I half expect her to storm off but her eyes are gleaming back at him and she gives one elaborate finger brush of her hair and does as she is told. The piano rolls forward with a squeak and a boom from its insides that sounds like a guitar strummed in a cave. Enid helps the trolley over the doorjamb, while Billy and I push.

  It is extraordinary how cold I suddenly feel, although when we walked up the track it was a warm day. And how heavy the load, as if nobody else is helping. It is so heavy. I feel as if I am moving this thing all alone.

  Laboriously, slowly, we make our way down the hall, the castors sticking on the linoleum. When we ease the piano over the front step there is a wild, stray planking of jammed notes that raises a flurry of small birds out of their secret places in the garden and up they go, little frayed parcels of bone wrapped in feathers swooping over the wire fence and across the field. Away from the sick light of the hall and in the bright air of the afternoon, we pause. Billy lifts the piano top, peers in and pokes around with one hand to check that none of the hammers is stuck or broken. A fustiness belonging to the house clings to the piano; a smell of rusty strings and dead coal fires rises from the carcase like a dying exhalation. In the bleached outdoor light the shadows that hide in the corners and under the slope of the keyboard lid are revealed as simple dirt and the once polished surface is a yellowy grey as if the sulphurous air of the front room has soaked into the wood.

  I notice that Enid has not exerted herself enough to get her face shiny never mind sweaty, but she draws a hand across her forehead and widens her eyes at Billy, stretches her arms up behind her head, lifts and drops her hair, and sighs with exhaustion.

  Billy says, Keep her steady. I’m just away to get some sacks.

  I stand there keeping her steady. It is delicious following orders, and I feel a pang that it is Billy and not Joe telling me what to do. Enid tests the length of her arms and examines her nails from a distance. I lift the keyboard lid and pick out my aria with one finger until Billy comes back with an armful of sacks, head down as he walks along, assessing the ground we have to cross. The shed seems a long way away.

  We’ll put these down where it’s rough, he says, setting the pile on top of the piano.

  We trundle our load across the yard, manoeuvring the tiny castors over cracks where camomile and vibrant willowherb sprout—weeds so jaunty and bitter-smelling they seem fertilised on neglect—around dips and hollows in the concrete where slicks of rich emerald slime grow across the oily surfaces of puddles that never dry up. Billy places the sacks carefully to avoid filth and uneven patches. We go slowly, the squeak of the castors mingling with the suck of the wind in the sycamores. We are too wary of one another to pretend we are having fun, or perhaps we are all too desperate to be taken seriously to draw attention to how silly we must look.

  Still I have a lonely feeling, as if I am doing all this by myself.

  Sherpa appears and sniffs around the piano, escorting us in this way until we reach the shed. We push the piano up a ramp of ribbed concrete at the doorway. It shudders all the way, notes rattling from inside in hysterical disorder. Enid laughs. I catch a look of pain on Billy’s face.

  It’ll be all right, I whisper. You can get it tuned again.

  Billy makes a face. My mum’d kill me.

  I thought you said it was yours.

  It is now. It was hers.

  Enid is still doing Doris Day, as if everything in the world has been put there just to enliven her. She laughs and plays with Sherpa as if she’s never seen a dog before or as if Sherpa is, of the species, uniquely and irresistibly captivating. She jumps up and runs forward with him and yanks at the high sliding door of the shed. It grinds open, she disappears inside, switches the lights on and out comes a high yelp of surprise. I strain to see in but can’t. Enid comes back and I glance at Billy and dart away to the entrance myself, leaving them steadying the piano on the ramp.

  What makes me gasp is the transformation from farm shed to the cool hangar where I now stand. I take a few steps in, gazing. The breezeblock walls have been splashed with bucketloads of whitewash and are so vibrant they almost buzz. The metal spars above my head are now free of cobwebs and wisps of plastic sheeting, the floor is clear of straw, stacked timber and tarpaulins, and every trace of spilled engine oil and dirt has gone. Here and there are freshly laid concrete patches and the whole place prickles with the tang of new paint and disinfectant. And it is huge.

  I see for the first time in my life that it is possible to be excited by whiteness, by nothingness, by mere space. I want to clasp Uncle George’s hands and tell him that now I understand, and I believe. I believe in space and emptiness and the white desert in which anything can happen because here, nothing is confined and there can be no concealment. I want to run and shout and sing in all this air, in this joyful availability of air, this space that is waiting to have my sound spilled into it. I try a few scales and each note swirls and melts into the one that follows, in a rushing, ecstatic whirl of echoes. Something else, something strange is happening. If even the white space has limits, those limits surround me like mirrors. I am seeing myself from the outside, as if free of the constraint of also being me, and I think I see a person who is very nearly relevant, whose presence in this white space may even be called for. I skip into the middle of the floor and whoop. It does not escape me that reaching into this space alone and leaving Billy and Enid somewhere in the dark behind me is an important part of my excitement. I laugh back at them, too loud, to try to include them, but only as my audience. But still I cannot rid myself of the feeling that they are not real
ly there. Surely I am alone.

  Billy calls from the entrance. Come on. We’re nearly there, a wee bit further and we’re in.

  Together we shove and the piano slides over the top of the ramp, rattles down and rights itself on the floor of the shed, but I hardly notice that we have got it in safely because my foot is caught underneath. The full weight of the piano rolls over it. Enid and Billy and the cool white shed disappear.

  I hear a crash like boulders falling and a noise like a bomb going off inside the piano. But it is my head that feels like the crater, exploding with ringing notes from deepest bass to the highest, shrill and desperate. A real scream rises from my throat and I am suddenly awake with pain, standing in nightclothes outside Seaview Villas and under a dark sky. My mother’s piano is upturned and split on the patch of front lawn, its innards disgorged and vibrating with twanging sounds that mix with the pulsing glare of the streetlights across the road. In the orange light my foot is spilling bad brown blood and a cold wind flattens my dressing gown against my body.

  Hands tug at me. Christine’s. Something quilted that makes a glassy noise and smells of cigarettes is pulled around me, someone’s anorak. I hear mention of reasonable limits, of fucking four o’clock in the fucking morning. Back into the house we go.

  16

  Billy and Enid stood by the piano in the doorway and watched as Lila whooped and twirled and danced and sang.

  Enid pursed her mouth and said secretly, ‘If you ask me she’s not right in the head. She’s just showing off.’

  Billy glared. ‘No she’s not. She’s not the showing off type. Not her.’

  Then he called through the doorway, ‘Come on. We’re nearly there, a wee bit further and we’re in.’