by Paul Bailey
‘As if blown by the wind, a horde of devils crowded into the knapsack, one after another. Ivan waited until the very last devil was inside before he gave the knapsack a thorough beating. He laughed as the devils squealed and whimpered with pain.’
‘Like this?’ Virgil asked, making a squealing noise.
‘Probably.’
‘Or this?’ He pretended to wail, then stopped, remembering he had heard the desolate sound at his grandfather’s funeral. He was mimicking real misery, he understood. ‘What happens next, Mamã? I swear I won’t interrupt any more.’
‘Swear?’
‘Swear.’
‘When he had finished beating the devils, Ivan fastened the neck of the knapsack tightly and placed it beneath his head. Now he really slept. He snored. He carried on snoring until it was nearly daybreak, at which time the demons were supposed to be back with their master Scaraoski. With the approach of dawn, the Chief of Devils grew suspicious that his lackeys hadn’t returned and hastened to the boyar’s empty house, where he struck the sleeping and snoring Ivan as hard a blow as he could deliver. The old soldier jumped up in a fury and shouted, “Into the knapsack!” and into the knapsack the dumbfounded Scaraoski went, joining the imps who served him.
‘“I’ll be your judge now, you unclean spirits,” Ivan said. “I’ll knock the heresy out of you.”’
Virgil learned that Ivan was so pleased with what he had done that he stood in the courtyard and woke the boyar and the entire household with his shouting. The servants complained of the confounded Russian – ‘Begging your honour’s pardon’ – who had given them an uncomfortable night, but the boyar himself was pleased and gratified when he was told that Ivan had succeeded, where the local priests had failed, in cleansing the fated house of its devils. Was there anything that Ivan wanted? Well, first of all, Ivan required some stakes with which to finish off his business.
‘“I must make them run the gauntlet and beat them, so they remember they have met with Ivan, the servant of God.”
‘Ivan was presented with a cart full of stakes. He took as many as he needed and tied them together. While he was doing this, word had reached the village that a heaven-sent soldier was in their midst and now the villagers were gathered in the courtyard to watch Ivan chastise the demons.
‘Ivan undid the knapsack and removed each devil in turn by his horns and beat him with the stakes.
‘“We shall never come back,” shrieked the tormented devils, who were covered in weals. And away they fled, with their tails between their legs and the mocking laughter of the peasants pursuing them. The village boys laughed loudest.
‘There was only one devil left in the knapsack and that was Scaraoski. Ivan pulled him out by his beard and gave him a specially hard beating, because he was the dirtiest devil of them all. Then Ivan dashed him to the ground, and Scaraoski flew off as fast as a horse-fly …’
… And there his mother stopped, in the middle of the story. ‘Tatã’s home,’ she said. ‘He mustn’t catch me reading to a big boy of nine.’ She handed him the book. ‘Must he?’
‘No, Mamã.’
‘Tomorrow, perhaps,’ she whispered.
The following day his father lifted him out of bed and pronounced him a conquering hero. No son of Constantin Florescu was going to be defeated by illness. Virgil had fought his first real battle and emerged triumphant.
‘Yes, Tatã,’ he said, wishing himself sick again. ‘Yes, Tatã.’)
He smiled at the notion that his sickness had returned, thirty-three years too late, in a city he had never anticipated visiting. He had been restored to health a day too soon and that promised tomorrow, the tomorrow of Ivan’s most extraordinary adventures, became for ever lost to him. The happy Friday of expectation was not to be, thanks to his triumph – the triumph he might have delayed by childish subterfuge, for a morning and afternoon, if he’d had the wit.
‘Your surrogate mother is here,’ Freda Whiteside sang as she entered. ‘Time for your medicine, Virgil.’
Beautiful Kitty Crozier [she read]. I shall see you very soon, but not here. Please do not come here. I shall come to you before the week is over. I am a detestable patient because I have no patience with illness. I try not to hurt the feelings of the good and kind Mrs Freda Whiteside and have to suppress an urge to complain (bellyache) when she is ministering to me. I dislike myself for being so petty and ungrateful.
Confined as I am in this room I wonder even if I am in London. I lie here and travel back in my mind to other places, a complete slave to memory. I am rambling, Kitty. This is of interest to no one except the deranged Virgil Florescu.
Freda W has arrived with her photograph album. It is bulky. There are lots, possibly hundreds, of photographs. She is telling me I am her ‘captive audience’. She is promising me a ‘guided tour’ of her past as soon as I have finished writing this letter.
She has passed on your messages. I long to be with you. The day after tomorrow perhaps. Freda W is saying ‘Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon’ and glaring at me. I suppose I must ask her what she means by the remark. I hate not understanding what people are saying to me.
She is opening the album, Kitty, in a pointed manner. I must surrender.
Soon. Very soon.
Your Virgil.
(That same bulky photograph album would be produced when Kitty Crozier visited Freda Whiteside in the late autumn of the following year. She had gone to the house – one of six Victorian survivors on the edge of a concrete estate – to see the room in which her lover had lived briefly. It was occupied by a young New Zealander now.
‘He is studying tropical diseases, my dear. That is why those forbidding tomes on beri-beri and malaria and others we know not of are scattered everywhere. Gruesome stuff, yet Mr Mackay is a very cheerful sort with his bright blond hair and big, toothy grin.’ She squeezed Kitty’s hand. ‘There’s no trace of Virgil, is there?’
‘No, there isn’t.’
‘Have you seen what you came to see?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘What were you expecting?’
‘I can’t say. Oh, I wanted to look at the bed he slept in, I suppose. And the furniture he used. But he isn’t here any more.’
‘He removed himself completely, my dear. I don’t have a single memento of him. Not a matchstick, not a shoelace. It’s a rare lodger who doesn’t leave something behind, either accidentally or on purpose. But Virgil left nothing. Nothing tangible, that is.’
‘You were good to him.’
‘That time he was stricken with flu, he told me I was like a mother. Since he made it clear that he loathed being mothered I decided it was not a compliment. Did he ever mention his real mother to you?’
‘Yes, he did. He worshipped her. From what he said, she was exceptionally attractive. A classic beauty. Perhaps he was exaggerating. Lots of sons consider their mothers beautiful.’
‘Patrick, my husband, considered his a gorgon. He was right. She was. Her mind was as ugly as her face. Let’s go downstairs, my dear. This is Mr Mackay’s domain, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come along.’
She followed the puffing Freda Whiteside down three flights of stairs, past framed photographs of famous opera singers in costume: Enrico Caruso, Nellie Melba, Beniamino Gigli, Kirsten Flagstad, Amelita Galli-Curci, Jussi Bjorling, Lotte Lehmann.
‘I didn’t sing with any of those, my dear. I saw one or two of them, of course: the Flagstand as an over-the-hill Dido and the glorious drunken Swede as Manrico. My father, my beloved father’ – she sang the phrase ‘O mio babbino caro’ and laughed loudly – ‘caught them all in their prime. He’s the Henry Fletcher of the autographs. He was so proud of his little Freda when she gave her Nedda at Covent Garden. I did not, needless to say, rise very much higher. I ended up squawking in cattle country. Paddy once suggested, in one of his prankish moods, that I change my name to Lato-Bianco – you had to sound foreign to be anyone in opera in those d
ays – but I lacked the courage. Or cheek, or gall. No, I couldn’t pass myself off as Federica Lato-Bianco, the diva from Milano. Paddy dared and dared me to – he thought it the most wonderful wheeze – but I chickened out, abject coward that I was. I stayed plain Freda Fletcher throughout my bumpy career. My Whiteside reincarnation never happened. Come into my parlour, Kitty, and have some tea.’
A plump Persian cat – ‘Omar Khayyam minus his balls’ – was curled asleep in a battered armchair near an open fire. ‘Off with you, OK,’ Freda Whiteside commanded, clapping her hands. ‘Make way for our guest, you slothful brute.’
The cat stirred, stretched, scratched an ear with a back paw and flopped on to the carpet.
‘Several illustrious and capacious bottoms have made that chair the wreck it is today. I wouldn’t part with it if you offered me a Sheraton or a Chippendale. Sink into it, my dear. Let it swallow you up. Lapsang souchong agreeable?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘And walnut cake?’
‘Yes.’
She wanted neither tea nor cake, but found herself incapable of inventing a quick and polite excuse to leave. The necessary lie remained unsaid. She sank into the chair, into the hollow created by the loudest Briinnhilde – ‘A voice like a foghorn, my dear, in the middle of the choppy Atlantic’ – anyone would remember.
Freda Whiteside picked up the growling cat and went through to the adjacent kitchen, where she began to sing. Kitty listened to a disconnected medley of snatches of arias from operas and oratorios, identifying the more familiar tunes the old woman warbled. The Countess Almaviva languished while she filled the kettle; she summoned the bright seraphim as she set out the china and cutlery; she became a chuckling, contralto Mephistopheles when she mashed up sardines for Omar Khayyam, who howled in accompaniment; she opened the cake tin in the role of Azucena, confining the gypsy’s account of her family’s complicated lineage to the opening bars (‘I’ve forgotten the rest’); she then decided to know that her Redeemer liveth, and for a finale, merrily pouring hot water into the teapot, she was Don Giovanni and Zerlina by turns, until their words eluded her and she resorted to a series of la-la-la-las and dum-dum-di-dums.
‘Come to the table, my dear. Your nose is level with your knees at the moment. Hardly the most comfortable position in which to eat and drink. Will you require a helping hand?’
‘I think I have the strength to emerge from the crater unaided.’
The ‘guided tour’ of Freda Whiteside’s past – from the fifty years before her birth in 1919 to the death of her husband in 1968 – took place after tea. ‘It isn’t often I have a captive audience, my dear. “Captive”, of course, is just a figure of speech. This house isn’t a prison, although one of my erstwhile tenants used to describe it as Sing-Sing – not a bad joke for a man in insurance. Feel free to go, Kitty. Don’t be obliged to stay.’
‘I feel like staying.’
‘In that case, my dear, you will need fortifying.’
Freda Whiteside filled two tumblers with Irish whiskey – ‘Paddy’s favourite tipple’ – and brought them to the table. ‘Cheers, Kitty.’
‘Oh, yes, cheers.’
The sepia-coloured dead, captured in stiff or flamboyant poses, were paraded in front of her. Freda Whiteside conveyed, whenever she could, the foibles and idiosyncrasies of this peculiar great-aunt or that mysterious distant cousin; of this crotchety grandmother and that kindly uncle; of the tubercular boy holding a hoop who would be transmogrified into the obese major-general four decades on: ‘He’s wearing a corset underneath his uniform, which is why his face looks as if it is about to explode.’
Kitty stared at a succession of beards and moustaches, plaits and chignons. The dead, she thought, who were once so contentedly alive. The faces of the various Fletchers and Morlands exuded self-assurance. Any doubts or misgivings they might have possessed in regard to their earthly lot were barely reflected here. The photographers – Mr Burgess of Alton; Mr Reynolds of Lewes – were in the business of recording happy prosperity, it seemed. The Fletchers and Morlands stood on the steps of their country houses (much more imposing than modest, red-bricked Alder Court) and beamed into the future.
‘Our families were well-to-do, my dear, as you can see. They amassed their fortunes in the eighteenth century, in trade. “In trade” marked them out as arriviste. To the landed gentry in Hampshire and Sussex my grandfathers were tradesmen, because their money wasn’t old enough. Not nearly old enough. It was still tainted with work and to work was vulgar. Certain ancient doors never opened for the Fletchers and the Morlands. But that’s another story, Kitty – the story the photographs were unable to tell.’
The story of the comely, matronly Adelaide Morland was hidden from the camera, too. She was, in Freda Whiteside’s words, ‘the biggest beamer in both beaming families’, with a smile ‘as broad as the Menai Strait’. That was the public side of Freda’s mother’s mother, who spent twenty-five years in a state of almost perpetual pregnancy. ‘Twelve children, eight miscarriages and two stillbirths. The idea of it, Kitty. The sheer, terrible thought of it. Is it any wonder she became moody and foul-tempered? You’re looking at the face she put on for the outside world, not the scowl she kept for her children and the servants. My brothers and I called her Granny Grunt. She grunted, my dear, she actually grunted, like some huge unhappy sow, whenever we were pushed into her presence. She’s all smiles here, though.’
‘Is this baby you?’
‘You sound relieved. Yes, that blob is me. Freda Fletcher is born at last.’
‘And this must be your christening.’
‘It is, indeed. You will notice how the ranks have been depleted. No less than five uncles – three Morlands, two Fletchers – were killed in Flanders. One of them was married. That’s his widow lurking behind my mother. What a force of nature Chloe was. The hearts she broke are beyond counting. She was still breaking them when she was murdered, in her fifties. A crime passionnel, my dear. The lovesick Mr Parker strangled her with a silk stocking. “Quite a stylish exit,” her catty mother remarked. “Better than she deserved.” I omitted Chloe’s mother’s comment from the guided tour I gave Virgil, Kitty. I sensed that he might not be amused.’
‘“Diverted”. That was his word. He always surprised me, Freda. He might have been amused or diverted. I can’t say.’
‘I played safe. He was in an agitated condition. Molto agitato. Flippancy did not seem appropriate.’
‘You must have spent most of your childhood by the piano.’
‘That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it, my dear. Yes, my father was a real taskmaster. He was my first and fondest teacher. He ought to have been a professional musician, he had such an ear, but there was safety in soap, and he had to think of his wife and family. He had me singing at a tender age. Nursery rhymes to start with, then one or two Victorian ballads, and after that a little easy Schumann and Schubert. One magical day he took me up to London – in a first-class carriage, among the pin-striped suits – to be seen and heard by the famous voice coach Elsa Latimer. I was terrified as I entered her studio, because she was who she was. “Surprise me,” she demanded. I began to sing, but not for long. She brought me to a halt after only a couple of bars. “Where are you going?” she asked as I made for the door and freedom. “Come back and start again. And take a deep breath first, you naughty girl.” I did take a breath and I sang, I thought, like a dream, right through to the end, with my father accompanying me. I finished. Profound silence, my dear; a silence to drop pins in. “Once more, please,” spoke the oracle. “My pianist will play.” Her pianist slowed me down a bit, and I felt frustrated and not so confident. I got through it, though, somehow. “What an improvement!” she cried, banging her stick on the floorboards. “Brava, brava! Now go and sit in the corner while Mr Fletcher and I discuss your future.” Which I did and they talked for an eternity. And that is how I became a pupil of Elsa Latimer, on August the fifth nineteen thirty-five. Afterwards my father treated
me to a slap-up tea at the Ritz.’
‘The Ritz? I met most of my father’s wives over tea at the Ritz, as well as the women he didn’t get round to marrying.’
‘Wives, Kitty? Women? What is this? I should be listening to you.’
‘No, Freda. I can’t talk about him. I don’t want to talk about him.’
‘Spoilsport. But I shan’t persist. Let’s return to little Freda being winsome and pert and gemütlich. Here she is, being all three at once, during her début recital in nineteen thirty-eight. She came a bit of a cropper with “The Shepherd on the Rock”, and so did the clarinettist, whose throat was dry from nerves, but she found her voice for Hugo Wolf and ended the concert weighed down with roses.’
‘Was your teacher pleased with you?’
‘Elsa was a perfectionist, my dear, and very hard to please. She was parsimonious with the compliments she paid her students. “Adequate, Freda,” was what she said to me that evening, while everyone else, including my father, was telling me I was wonderful. She gave me a peck on the cheek and muttered, “Adequate, Freda. Mistakes galore. Post-mortem tomorrow at eleven.” And there was a postmortem, Kitty. A thoroughgoing dissection.’
‘I see you’ve written “I was adequate” under the photo.’
‘Yes. I was adequate then and adequate I more or less remained. Elsa didn’t live to catch me being adequate in opera. She died suddenly in December nineteen thirty-nine. Who knows what I might have sung – better than adequately, perhaps – if Hitler hadn’t complicated our lives. As it was, I found myself in the Carl Rosa touring company. These are the photographs that brought the flicker of a smile to Virgil’s gloomy face. This is me as Ortlinde. She’s one of the Valkyries.’
Freda, wearing a horned helmet and a breastplate made of papier mâché, was standing between two substantial women, who were similarly dressed, in front of a cardboard rock.
