by Morag Joss
‘But I don’t think they would live happily ever after,’ Lila said. ‘Not after Liù died like that. Calaf would never be able to forgive himself. Not really, not deep down.’
George said, ‘You’re running away with yourselves. The opera ends happily with the betrothal of Calaf and Turandot. There’s going to be a wedding. Love triumphs.’
Lila said, ‘But what about after the end of the opera? After the wedding. Even supposing they do get married.’
‘I don’t know what you’re driving it. There isn’t any after the end. The end is the end.’
Alec Gallagher said, ‘Aye, the triumph of love. Nothing to greet about there. Veronica and myself are looking forward to our wedding.’ Nobody heard him.
Fleur sighed. ‘It’s no good, none of you understand,’ she said. ‘Turandot just gives in. She doesn’t have a choice. She’s forced. That’s tragic. George, isn’t that tragic?’
‘I was trying,’ George said, with a soft look at Lila, ‘to talk about Liù.’
‘Yes, and we are,’ Fleur said. ‘That’s my point. The difference between Turandot and Liù is that Turandot is forced to do what she does, but Liù does what she wants. You see? And everybody’s sorry for her, and it makes Turandot look even more cruel. As if it’s Turandot’s fault that Liù’s a servile little ninny.’
‘Oh, Fleur, come on,’ George said. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Oh, all right, then, maybe not servile. Maybe…maybe Liù just knew. She knew she was never going to get Calaf to love her, so then her life didn’t matter. In any case, she wanted to sacrifice herself. And frankly, if people are able to go ahead and do what they want, why should we feel sorry for them?’
Lila looked dreamily away and said nothing.
‘Spoken like Turandot,’ George said. ‘The point is this, all of you. All of you—Turandot, Liù, Calaf, Timur—everybody. Get inside your character. Think about them day and night. You have to know your character until what they do feels like the only possible way they could behave. Think about your character till you really know and understand them. All right?’
Lila nodded.
‘You have to think about Liù,’ George continued, ‘until you know her as well as you know yourself. Will you do that?’
But Lila didn’t think. Thinking in the way that Uncle George seemed to mean was unnecessary in the world that she had now entered. She continued to practise her exercises, to wash dishes and fold laundry and even to make strangely original meals, but she had already become Liù, slipping out of Lila’s poor half-finished skin and into Liù’s, while maintaining for appearances’ sake the illusion that she was still merely Lila. In bed every night she would still calculate to the nearest minute when she would next see Joe; the creaking above her was still the last sound she heard before silence ruled the house. Then she would wait for the dreams, and in the very waiting there was something breathless and delicate, a hovering on the brink of something she could not name. Her heart ticked in her chest like a small bomb and in the welcome dark she half-felt the touch of his imagined hand until with her own, guiltily, she explored the dangerous wet tingle between her legs. Now and then in the middle of the night she would find herself wide awake, disturbed not by any noise but by a sudden sense of Joe’s wakefulness above.
These days her thoughts careened off in every direction, her mind was too slippery to hold them down. Sometimes she felt there was no knowing where they might take her next.
outwardly becalmed, I go every day to rehearsals. Apparently mellow and inattentive, I watch, listen and plan, being at the same time always elsewhere in a dream of Joe and Calaf and the future that is waiting beyond the day I am drifting through. I think little about technical matters. I do not need to be nagged about missed entries or dragging the tempo. Turandot and Calaf are much more difficult roles than Liù. They must be, because Joe and my mother are showing signs of strain.
In all our rehearsals now Uncle George makes us wear our characters’ shoes, for the practical reason that we must learn to move in them naturally. My mother clicks about on red wooden sandals with platforms and Joe plants himself firmly on stage in leather thigh boots. But I do not wear Liù’s silent, grey slippers to get used to them. I do not need to get used to becoming myself. The reunion of my feet with her shoes is a secret, the fit becoming perfect as my toes arrange themselves every day into the curves moulded by hers.
Oh, Liù and I are so alike! Liù is a dreamer, too. She also lives elsewhere, beyond the stage itself, beyond the observable world, somewhere in the wings or past the curtain in another life that is more real to her because in it is contained her love for Calaf. This is the world we inhabit, Liù and I, while we wait for our love to be returned. Maybe it is the world we inhabit after death. If Calaf does not love us in this one, then soon it will be the only one we will want.
Meanwhile we live out the relentless story. Turandot must submit to the Unknown Prince unless she can discover his name before dawn. Liù claims to be the only person who can reveal it. Turandot orders the torture to begin; Calaf pleads for Liù’s life and Turandot refuses. What does Calaf do? Does he see Turandot for what she is—the destroyer? Does he recognise the loving, brave Liù? Of course not. It is worse than that. He sees what Turandot is, and still he would rather have her.
So he sings to Liù, moved with tender gratitude:
Non piangere, Liù
Don’t cry, Liù
But it is at most a pat on the head. He will see her tortured before he will give up Turandot.
And what can Liù and I do then, outrivalled and unloved? To push a dagger in the heart is nothing now, only a twist of steel through silk, the wrenching and the spill of viscera in ropes of bubbling red and a little time, a few seconds at most, for hatred. But with the spurting of blood comes a shock, because time stops. It simply stops. The moment will never pass. We will play it out like this forever, while unimaginable pain pours through us. When at last the thud of the clock comes once more it is a kindly, fading pulse, easing us into numbness. Now there is nothing but cool sky and silence in the sweet, ever-after place where Calaf loves us. Though we make the sacrifice willingly we do not die happy. We die to become so, to reach a place beyond the one where our hopes are already dead.
Is there also, I wonder, a baser satisfaction?
I’ll kill myself and then you’ll be sorry.
They will be sorry for the rest of their stained lives. Let them marry. No exchange of vows can clean up the blood that runs over the path they took to reach this point. When they meet at the altar they will not be able to look at each other without remembering that Liù lies in her grave; though it may lie far back in their story, they are rooted forever to that patch of ground where a tangle of wormwood twists up to choke them, the happy couple.
To me it makes perfect sense.
That’s exactly how I feel, I whisper to Liù.
25
Lila waited at Sew Right until the rain stopped because there was no telling with reds, Enid’s mum said. It was only a shower but rain would go straight through brown paper and you couldn’t trust reds in the wet.
It was the afternoon of the first night. Turandot’s Act III headdress had been brought back to Sew Right for adjustments after Fleur had stopped yesterday’s dress rehearsal more than once to complain that it wasn’t dramatic enough. It needed to be more lavish if she was going to feel really princessy in it. Everyone was busy. It turned out there was nobody but Lila who could go to collect it in time for the evening. She sat on the bus, hot and shaking. For a few days now her throat had been hurting again and from time to time she was attacked by sudden shivering sweats that soaked her face and underarms, embarrassing her so much in front of Joe that she wondered if they were just an extreme, sick-making form of blushing. She walked from the bus depot in burning sunshine.
When she arrived and went through to the back shop she found Enid’s mum partially hidden behind the winged headdress on the table, still working
on it. Exhausted by the walk, Lila sank into the other chair and breathed in the humid fug. Enid’s mum felt the cold; even in August the back of the shop wasn’t warm enough for her without the paraffin stove, but when it was lit it seemed to warm not the room but the water that lay invisibly in the air. Today the atmosphere was even heavier with glue and paint and floating fibre dust; the heat sent a tang so irresistibly chemical and narcotic around the room that Lila thought she might suffocate. She cleared the table in front of her of some scraps and pots and brushes, slumped forward and rested her head on her arms.
‘I’ve just a bit more fringe to put on,’ Enid’s mum said. ‘I wasn’t going to bother, it’s just a wee bit left over, then I thought, might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Like it?’
Lila raised her head and nodded, and went on gazing. Working from a picture of Eva Turner as Turandot, Enid’s mum had cut and twisted a wire lampshade frame, possibly two, into a sort of helmet shape with lethal-looking horns, like antlers, that branched out a foot at each side and ended in sharp points. The wire had been wrapped over and over with crimson silk and contrasting shiny red raffia and Christmas tinsel, all tied off with bows of red satin. Strings of red and gold beads hung in little swags down the wire bones of the antlers. Several ropes of red and gold braid and ribbon were attached at the pointed ends, from which they swung like loose trapezes across the top; from each of these strands were suspended paste jewels that shook as Enid’s mum worked, sending tiny shivers of light to mix confusingly in the toxic, vibrant air.
‘I can see your mum in it, right enough. She’ll need to fix it on tight now it’s a bit heavier. It ties under the chin. See?’
Fantastical as it was, Lila also could see her mother in it quite easily.
‘It’ll suit her, all right,’ she sighed, laying her head on her arms again.
It was true that Fleur would wear it as a natural extension of her allure. On her, the suggestion of a Viking at a Christmas party would not cross anyone’s mind for so much as a minute. The warm air of the room fell over Lila and wrapped itself around her like layers of gauze. She yawned. Outside, rain clouds welled suddenly in the sky and covered the sun. The yard beyond the barred window of the back shop grew dark, and Enid’s mum worked on, and Lila’s eyes closed.
‘Aye, you’ll be tired,’ Enid’s mum said, jolting her awake, ‘and here you’ve your big night to come still. You’re looking a wee bit peely-wally.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘Are you feeling a wee bit nervous?’
‘Maybe a bit.’ She was too limp and tired to feel anything.
‘What did you get for your dinner the day?’
‘There was toast and leftover raspberry mould.’
‘Will you be getting your tea when you get home?’
Lila yawned again and said she wasn’t sure. Enid’s mum said she couldn’t rise to a proper tea but she couldn’t see her starve, and sent her out to the shops for rolls, ham and tomatoes and biscuits, telling her to hurry and get back before the rain came on. She was serving a customer when Lila returned, so Lila went out to the passage at the back and made ham rolls and a pot of tea. They ate with plates and cups set anyhow on the table among the scraps of material and ribbon and the pots of paint and glue. Lila could not find the energy to talk. After her tea she dozed on and off while Enid’s mum worked away, pushing herself up from the table with a sigh when the shop bell sounded. While she was busy with customers Lila listened to the scrape and ring of the till and looked forward to her reappearance and more of her soft, drowsy atmosphere. Outside, heavy, pewtery drops of rain began to fall.
Enid’s mum came back and took up the fringing again.
‘Where’s Enid?’ Lila asked, for something to say.
Enid was off out, Enid’s mum told her, looking past the needle she was threading and straight at Lila. Her and Billy, the two of them were off out in their peasant costumes, along with the Mandarin and Pung.
‘In their costumes?’
‘Aye, and the Mandarin and Pung, Norman and Sandy, they’re in those Mikado ones we got the loan of, they’re old but the silk’s lovely. More colourful than yon pyjamas the peasants are in.’
‘But what for? Off out where?’
‘Down the esplanade. They’re off handing out leaflets, for publicity. Senga and Deirdre, too.’
Lila was shocked. ‘I can’t see Billy doing that,’ she said.
‘Aye, sounds daft to me,’ Enid’s mum said blandly. ‘Still, Enid got him to go.’
‘They’ll be getting wet,’ Lila said. Now that she had Joe, how could the idea of Enid, Billy and the others larking about together leave her feeling so bleak and excluded? The shop bell sounded again. While Enid’s mum served her customer, Lila swallowed the dregs in her teacup and tried to stop her throat hurting. She tried to lose herself in thoughts of Liù and Calaf, but they would not come.
When all the red fringing had been attached they made a bulky parcel of the headdress, wrapping it in several sheets of brown paper taped together and winding it in a complicated system of strings to use as handles. Enid’s mum made more tea while they waited for the rain to stop.
The shower passed quickly. Water was drying in wafts of vapour off the pavements when Lila set off home, shaken awake by the fear that she was very late. In the steamy sunlight she felt nauseous and unhappy and her bones hurt; she had not meant to sit out the afternoon in the hypnotising air of the back shop, lulled by the to-ing and fro-ing of Enid’s mum into forgetting how urgent life was outside. Now she felt unshelled and spilt, unprotected, back into a brutal day.
Hurrying along in short running steps, she tried to squeeze even five more minutes into the calculation of how much time there was. Her mother had wanted her back with the headdress by half past three and it was already after that. The performance was to start at half past seven and she ought to be at the farm at least by six or Uncle George would be furious. These days he was always furious about something. She was supposed to be using the front room of the farmhouse as a dressing room, sharing it with her mother who would take at least three hours over her costume and makeup, but Lila knew she could never manage the transformation from Lila to Liù in front of her. She had to leave Seaview Villas as Liù, so she had to get back in time for a bath—and today a cold one might be preferable—that would wash away Lila and her sweat and soreness and the stain of a Burnhead afternoon, the running of awkward errands with lumpy parcels. Even Enid’s mum must be rubbed from her memory of the day; Liù could not breathe the homely air of Sew Right. Liù lived on a richer mix, wearing her fate like a garment to which the slightest crumb of a back-shop ham roll picnic must not adhere.
And on top of that, she was so tired. Would there be time for her to rest for even half an hour? The strings of the parcel were cutting damply into her palms and tiny, icy rivers trickled down her body. Her face and throat burned. She began to fret that the brown paper parcel would not hold. She worried that when she got home the bathroom might not be empty. Her breath was coming in jagged little gasps. She walked with her head down, praying she would not run into Enid and the others. Part of her hurry was to do with escape; Liù and Calaf waited somewhere up ahead.
Then, glancing round before she crossed the top of Station Road where it joined Main Street, she saw Joe. She took a breath to call out but he was too far away, walking away from her, striding fast. He too was laden; one arm flapped from his shoulder as he listed under the weight of the big holdall in his other hand. He hurried into the wide turning yard in front of the station and disappeared into the ticket office.
Lila watched the entrance doors swing behind him, then slow, and stop. Already the station front was still and empty again. How quickly he had been and gone, his entrance and exit no more than an agitation of its surface; he could have been made of paper, so lightly had he moved across it. Marooned on the pavement, Lila felt that she was part of the emptiness he had created simply by being no longer present. She was agha
st that he could assert his separateness from her so easily. How frail it was, the connection between them, and how invisible; to the ignorant eye she was no more than a girl in the street watching an ordinary man with short legs disappearing into the station. It appalled her to think that, beyond her sight, Joe might appear to be just anybody.
Now she could hear the thud of a train approaching from the left, the northbound Glasgow train. It lumbered under its cloud of smoke across the bridge that spanned Station Road with the ponderous chock, chock of slowing pistons and the wet sigh of steam. The smells of hot steel and burning coal punched the afternoon air.
Lila had no time to think beyond the obvious. He was leaving without her. She made off up the slope of the turning yard, running as fast as she could with the bumping parcel, tore through the empty ticket hall and up over the footbridge to the Glasgow platform where the train was still moving slowly, metal wheels screaming. The guard jumped out. Joe was a long way ahead, walking up the platform towards one of the front carriages.
‘Joe! Joe! Joe, wait!’
He did not hear. With more squealing and grinding, the train stopped. Lila, half-blinded by smoke, nearly collided with the guard as she ran up the platform. He shouted after her, ‘Hey, you! Slow down, you there! Stand clear there. You!’
As she turned at the sound of his voice, the parcel swung across in front of her legs and banged against the side of the train. She lost her balance and stumbled and with a scream went sprawling across the platform, squashing the headdress between her body and the ground.
‘Joe! Joe!’
She couldn’t get up because of a sick, swimming sensation in her head. Her mouth was full of dust; she gagged once and then gulped and had to swallow back the spoonful of bilious, hammy tea that flooded into her mouth. She coughed hard, then caught sight of the parcel and burst into tears. A moment later the guard was behind her, pulling her to her feet. Joe left his holdall on the platform and was marching towards them. She tried to stand upright as he approached, her legs trembling so hard that her skirt shook.
