by Morag Joss
George collected the orchestral parts from the station one afternoon and the house filled up even more. The number of boxes sent by the publishers took everyone by surprise; it was sobering, what quantities of music there had to be, how many volumes and pages and hundreds of thousands of notes it took to capture on paper the floating sounds of the opera that to them had been, until now, essentially airborne. Turandot, from the stereogram or sung by Fleur, Joe or Lila or played on the piano by George, sounded through the house all day long, and the music had grown easy on their ears, almost simple. Judging by the written music, Puccini had not found it simple at all.
Lila helped George unload the boxes and stack them along the wall in the front hall. Space was already running out. Gordon Black, now appointed chorus master, chief rehearsal pianist and part arranger, had borrowed twenty music stands from Burnhead Academy and they lay in a heap of folded metal just inside the door. Raymond had come home with a Chinese ornamental cutlass, on loan from the Mathiesons, carrying it in a string shopping bag slung over the handlebars; that and a brass gong lent by somebody else lay in a large box labelled ‘PROPS’. Enid’s mum had ordered thousands of yards of white muslin for the set from the wholesaler in Glasgow, who delivered it direct to 5 Seaview Villas. Bales of it were stacked in the hall waiting for somebody to come up with a way of dyeing it red. (Though he had no idea how it was to be done, there had to be red drapery, Joe said, to express Liù’s sacrifice of blood. There was also to be white drapery and a huge white paper circle to depict Turandot’s coldness and purity and the moon. The only other colour would be black. Black was for death, he said. George said he didn’t know about that but a coating of black would flatter the workmanship of the set, which was likely to be shaky.) Meanwhile 5 Seaview Villas was beginning to resemble a badly organised warehouse. Nobody swept around the accruing piles of stuff or opened a window or wiped a surface. The air was sharp with damp, tobacco and musty cloth.
Several of the chairs that had been brought into the music room for the first meeting stayed there. George said he needed them because people were coming and going all the time and he had to be able to sit them down and deal with them in one place. So the back room off the kitchen remained bare, a place where nobody could sit anymore unless they perched on a kitchen stool, not that anybody did want to settle for long. It had become no more than a space that people crossed on their way to somewhere else, adding to the sense of transit.
Visitors seemed to arrive in no obvious pattern and often without apparent purpose, and George, who tended to make arrangements without writing anything down or telling anybody else, was at times bamboozled by the traffic. They came for auditions and stayed and talked about costumes instead, or they turned up to discuss transposing the trumpet parts for coronet, or to hand in props or donations of paint, and found themselves singing one of the principal roles. Sometimes they arrived just to be friendly and to see what was going on, they brought cake and then stayed to have some. They brought their curious friends, most of whom found themselves persuaded by George into swelling the ranks, as he put it. The numbers signing up for shed painting, set building, front of house, backstage, chorus and band grew and grew. Within days, at least twenty people knew their way round the kitchen well enough to take over and make pots of tea.
The frequent arrivals and departures dislodged the already precarious domestic rhythms of the house. Fleur’s small tyrannies in the details (no drinking straight from bottles, use the butter knife and ketchup ruins decent food) masked an indifference to actual housekeeping, and now that she had the distraction of visitors coming and going, kettles on, expeditions to the farm with George, long sessions of singing, chats on the telephone, she ceased even to pretend to care. There was no discussion about it. She simply took it as read that Princess Turandot was exonerated from household responsibilities.
‘I hope nobody’s expecting me to know what’s for lunch,’ she would say around noon, to whoever might be present, ‘because I haven’t the foggiest. Just help yourselves.’
She was too busy to bother, too happy holding court amid the passing waves of new people which now included Moira Mather and Delia Hunter, who declared her a scream and whom she now called ‘the girls’. She had had no idea, she said, what a scream those girls were and how much they all had in common. Nicknames and catchphrases developed. Whenever any two of the girls were together at Seaview Villas they would telephone the absent one to make her feel included, holding the receiver out to the whole room and getting them all to shout hello.
Arrangements in the house collapsed for any or no reason: the hot water gave out because nobody had stoked the Rayburn, in the morning Raymond would iron a stale shirt and wear it again because the laundry was behind. On the day there was nothing but baked beans for tea because there was no bread left for toast, Fleur waved her arms and said, ‘Well, just have beans on beans, then!’ Her speaking voice was now a little breathy, not unlike Delia Hunter’s.
Every day they ran out of something. George made inefficient emergency excursions in the car to pick up milk or cigarettes or lavatory paper. Once or twice Raymond, acting on sudden initiative, would call in at the butchers and arrive home with an oozing parcel of mince that he would disown as soon as he got in, thumping it on the draining board as if it had come into his hands by means he preferred to forget. Sometimes when Joe was working in the music room and she knew she was not squandering any opportunity to be with him, Lila took some of the housekeeping money from the kitchen drawer and went to Burnhead, striding there and back if there was no bus, slipping quickly in and out of the shops and never succumbing to the temptation to pop into Sew Right. Away from him, she would imagine that all that needed to happen for Joe to realise he loved her was for her to walk back into his line of vision; this little break in their proximity was going to be all it took. So she would arrive back laden and breathless, only to find the disorder of the house sliding further towards chaos. A hope that she would deal with it would, in her absence, have hardened into expectation. Still there was no let-up in the flow of visitors. In the lulls between the door closing behind one lot and the sounding of the doorbell, the atmosphere could be a little accusatory.
enid says, See Joe? You fancy him, don’t you?
No.
Away, you do so.
I do not.
You do so. I seen you.
Seen what?
Seen you fancying him. See Joe?
What?
Would you let him go all the way?
I would not! Anyway, you fancy Billy.
I field these questions nearly every afternoon. I suppose she notices the change in me from pessimistic little sloth to busy household bee, from aertex and bare legs to back-combing and chiffon accessories, and jumps to the right conclusion, proving that stupid people do well, on the whole, to run with their instincts. It’s all they have. Those with more powerful brains too often distrust first impressions; they addle them with the wrong mix of qualification and interpretation until the impressions split into something useless, ideas that refuse to bind and are fit only to be thrown away, like ruined mayonnaise. That is how my mind works, now. It cannot make thoughts and feelings smooth themselves into memories that are clean and whole and assembled unselfconsciously into something that makes sense.
But at least I see what’s happening here. I see the need to get a grip on myself, oh yes. I can’t go on like this, as if a simple funeral and a houseful of junk are the stuff of opera. They’re Life and that’s all. And thank God it is only in opera that people exist in such idiotic, heightened states and not in Life, unless of course, we put quite tremendous efforts into being inconsolable. I will calm down, because with what feels like my last scrap of common sense I know I have to. My cross-stitch is coming on nicely. People die, of course they do.
Though in between bouts of embroidery I can’t just ignore what’s in these boxes. There’s this:
Burnhead & District Advertiser Thursday 14th July 1960:<
br />
BAST director says,
‘Look, we’ve borrowed a tenor!’
Giuseppe Foscari (20) as his picture reveals is the real thing, an Italian tenor with the looks as well as the voice tailor-made for Puccini’s famous heroes. Grins George Pettifer, musical director and founder of the Burnhead Association for Singing Turandot, ‘If you need a tenor and you don’t have one, you’ve got to borrow!’ Brought up from London to sing the lead role of Prince Calaf in BAST’s upcoming production of Turandot, Mr Foscari is challenged but not daunted. ‘It is every tenor’s dream to sing Calaf. I’m absolutely thrilled to have this opportunity.’ And not only is he the real thing, he’s home grown! Or almost. Born to Italian parents, his family first settled in Scotland only to abandon these shores for the South. Mr Foscari says the move down south was necessary for family reasons but it is a decision he regrets even though it was long ago. ‘I’m absolutely thrilled to be here. Scottish folk are the best in the world and Burnhead is a wonderful place.’
By Staff Reporter Alec Gallagher
Alec Gallagher makes quite a fuss of Joe. He and the photographer spend nearly a whole afternoon together. There isn’t a lot to show for it in the paper but Alec says that’s not his fault, he wrote a big piece and it got spiked. It’s his editor, who says he’s not running a fan club.
You can’t deny it’s a good face even in a blurry photograph, but what it doesn’t reveal is that Joe’s only five foot five, a good two inches shorter than my mother. When she’s in her heels and headdress she dwarfs him and he’s sensitive about that.
He’s sensitive about his voice as well. Quite often through the music room door I hear Uncle George trying to talk to him about it and then the day comes when he loses patience and shouts sarcastic things about a modicum of accuracy in pitch being a fair expectation. Afterwards he walks around conducting jerkily with his baton as if swatting flies, glowering like an animal you’d know better than provoke.
But I love Joe’s voice. I love it all through those wet days in July when rain tips down outside and we all work hard, when among all the comings and goings—the doorbell, the visitors, the telephone—there is always the sound of at least one person singing somewhere in the house. In my room I listen for Joe and I arrange my own practice to coincide with his. Even though we are singing from quite different parts of the opera most of the time, I feel close to him. I love the cloistered, dedicated feeling; even the damp makes me mellow and serious. Outside, summer pleasures that in Burnhead are at the best of times enjoyed under a sun that bestows little heat are rained off altogether; it feels like a kind of approval of our undertaking that the weather tempts nobody out of doors. Gutterings drip and ooze. I listen to the rain and the voices. On the quiet I am selecting and preparing my London clothes, though getting them dry after washing them is impossible in the wet. I filch from my mother’s cupboards, picking things I’m sure she won’t miss: nylons, a green silk blouse she’s gone off and a white sweater with a spot on it, black Capri pants, her old red patent leather belt, a nearly empty compact, old squashed lipsticks. My case is filling up. I perfect my plans.
Sometimes George summons us to sing for the visitors, to get us used to an audience.
He calls out from the piano, Liù, over here, you first. Let’s have ‘Signore, ascolta!’
Everyone is staring at me. My heart hits so hard on the inside of my throat I think I shall choke.
He whispers, Breathe. Forget them. Do it like on the beach. Remember to breathe, sing out past the room.
I fix my eyes on the field beyond the window and sing to Mr McArthur’s cows. It’s only about two and half minutes long, ‘Signore, ascolta!’, and even if you don’t know the story of Turandot you know from this pleading little lament that nothing nice is heading Liù’s way and you want to cry out and warn her. Not that it will help. It’s rather in the nature of opera that people don’t see these things in time. I do not sing it as well as I can, but there’s a burst of applause when I finish and Uncle George is on his feet too, clapping and nodding and showing me off as if I am all his own work, as if he carved me himself out of a piece of driftwood picked up off the beach. My feet are crying out in the pointy shoes but my knees are shaking with joy, because Joe is looking at me.
Now Joe sings ‘Nessun dorma’, standing with his feet splayed. Let no-one sleep, he sings. He presses one hand against his chest and offers the empty palm of the other in a turning motion, describing in the air the waves of a gentle sea.
—O Principessa,
Nella tua fredda stanza
Guardi le stelle
Che tremano d’amore
Oh, Princess, he sings, in your cold room you are looking at the stars that tremble with love.
I am only Liù the slave girl, but I know that by Principessa he really means me, not Turandot. I know the cold room is mine. He thinks of me lying there below him. Let no-one sleep. I can tell we are both thinking of the same thing, of last night, when again I heard him on the attic stairs in the middle of the night. I lay frozen and unable to breathe, wondering if my door would open. It didn’t. We both know that. I lay there while he paused on the landing, his hand just touching the handle. I see his face as he fears to come any closer and decides to retreat once more, and it is not another failure of courage but another triumph of respect for me over his true wishes. But it will not always be so. I picture him turning with manly anguish and regret from my door. Soon I am half-dreaming again for I do not follow the direction of the footsteps after that, only later I hear the soft squeal, like gagged mice, of the attic bed as his weight presses into it again.
He’s singing out of one side of his mouth and raising the eyebrow on the other as if for balance, and he girds himself for high notes and prefixes many of the words with a kind of extra half-syllable ‘huh-ynn’ that helps him locate the note. ‘Huh ynessun dorma’, he sings. At times there is a pushing quality behind the sound as if he is trying to force a small potato down one nostril. His voice cracks on the top note and although his face is already red he blushes even deeper. I think him magnificent.
My mother jumps up and joins him in their final Act III duet ‘Che è mai di me?’ and I listen with tingles running up and down my back. Calaf has kissed her and Turandot’s struggle is over; she submits, transformed by love. I marvel how opera transcends such trite considerations as the relative ages and heights of the singers: my mother at thirty-six, statuesque and striking with her powerful though unpractised voice and Joe, short, round and an eagle-faced twenty. He can’t live without her and she can’t hold out against his heroic charm. They sing combatively, locked in a duel to out-express each other. Then Joe advances on her, rises on tiptoe and holds her against his chest. He gazes over her shoulder with a look of faraway longing and then sinks his face into her neck. He’s awkward because he does not really want to be doing these things with my mother. It’s me he wants. As I watch, our music room evaporates and dawn breaks over the Imperial Palace of ancient Peking. Love conquers all.
And I’m very calm again. Christine has been organising me and now I have a list. She’s given me the name of a hairdresser who she says is the best one in Burnhead. I will want my hair tidying she says, since I’m not shampooing or doing much to it myself at the moment.
And you need a skip, she tells me. The council takes paper on a Wednesday as long as it’s in green bags. And if you ask them they’ll do a special pick up, anything at all you want rid of but they will charge, oh and keep organic matter separate, she says, tapping the list. I’ve got green bags I can loan you. I’ll leave them in the porch, will I? You just need to ring them. Or will I ring them for you?
I’ll get round to it, I say. When I’m dressed.
She leaves it at that and after she goes I think, now she’s been, there’s no hurry after all. I settle to a bit of cross-stitch. I don’t know where the time goes.
So when I do ring the number for the bin men I get an answering machine telling me to call back in offi
ce hours. And Sheena the caterer who is on the case (as Christine says) for after the funeral but who has a query about the ham sandwiches has an answering machine that starts, Hiyaaaa!!! I feel foolish leaving a message about mustard and no mustard and white and wholemeal so I ring off before I finish.
When I call the hairdresser it rings and rings and rings. Is everyone on holiday?
Now I’m in the mood to get on, though, and I won’t be discouraged. Christine’s got me fired up. Some bin bags seem to have appeared from somewhere. Not that I’m about to start just shoving papers in them. There is far too much sorting out still to be done. I don’t want to throw anything away that I might later find I need.
15
With Fleur no longer much present, let alone in charge of the kitchen, Lila seized the chance to satisfy Joe’s stomach. It would be demure and wifely and an endeavour he would surely love her for, though thanks to Raymond she found herself having to do it far too often with mince. Twice she produced it stewed in the ordinary way, serving it up in a bumpy grey slick.
The third time Raymond dumped mince on the draining board she knew she had to do something. Once they were in London they would never touch it again, but how could she convey to Joe now that mince was the last thing she would cook if she had any choice in the matter? She had to surprise him. She wanted to deliver to him on the end of a fork mince that revealed her originality and cleverness. Her cooking would make him curious about her, and having got him intrigued she would preserve the aura of mystery and feminine authority around herself by revealing none of her culinary secrets.
