by Morag Joss
I notice that Timur—Alec Gallagher—is lurking behind me in the wings, ready for our entrance about twelve minutes into the first act. My eyes are sore but I can see across the stage to the wings opposite, from where Enid sends me a large, circling wave. Billy is next to her and I also make out Senga, who seems to have opted back into the chorus and stands with her arms folded, wearing a homemade wig of black wool. I long to rub my eyes but dare not upset the makeup. My father waves across too and gives me a double thumbs-up. Then he signals to the man operating the stage lights, who nods to the lad at the shed door, who checks with Uncle George, and then switches off, one by one, all the overhead lights. The stage is in darkness. In the twilight of the shed the audience settles, murmurs, coughs, falls silent. From the very front, down the length of the shed strides Uncle George in bowtie and tails, baton in hand, nodding around in a way that prompts rapturous applause. He mounts the podium and stands swaying foolishly and bows so low he nearly loses his balance. His mouth must be very dry; when he grins his lips do not return to their proper place, they stick to his teeth.
He raises the baton. This is the cue for a slow, emerging, dawn light to bathe the walls of the great Imperial City of China. But the light comes on stickily; it stops, flickers, recedes and then floods the stage in a burst of vibrant yellow. There is a click of annoyance and a sigh from the lighting desk, from the audience come a few sniggers. George turns and scowls at the lighting man, swipes at the air with the baton and brings in the brass with the first five strident fortissimo chords. People run past me onto the stage. I am nearly knocked over. For the next ten minutes I stand dazed by the moving colours and swirl of sound. My mind is writhing with thoughts; I have a head full of snakes. Behind me Timur speaks and I hear nothing.
Stooping in our cloaks, he and I slip on stage and press our way through the crowd and straight into the white beam of the lights. Beyond the silhouette of Uncle George there is a restive darkness in which I sense people breathing and living, different from us. Up here in the glare we are not alive, we are moving figures—only puppets—in a tale of love and death, a fairy tale of something glimpsed, half understood and nearly forgotten.
I glide forward. I draw myself up very straight and tall and shed my cloak. There is a shiver from the audience as it drops to the ground because in one split second they know they both love me and must be afraid for me. Calaf in his gilded coat with his boots and cutlass is sweating hard. Even from this distance I smell the whisky off him. His pale eyes, set in the artificial ochre of his made-up face, burn colder than I have ever seen them. Now he is singing:
A me il trionfo! A me l’amore!
For me, the triumph! For me, love!
Because he is still drunk he is shouting rather than singing. From his mouth arc delicate flecks of spit whose parabolas of descent onto the stage are caught prettily in the beam of the lights. Then there is a slow fizzing noise and half the lamps over the music stands in the orchestra suddenly go out. There are whistles from the audience and cackles of laughter. Uncle George waves his arms and refuses to stop, though the strings and woodwind are already collapsing into disarray. I turn upstage, bowing my shoulders and wringing my hands with fear for Calaf. The sombre chorus parts to make way for me and I catch one or two people looking sympathetically, but whether at Liù or Lila I cannot say. With my back to the audience I vocalise almost soundlessly as Uncle George has taught me to do:
Just so there’s no frog there when you hit your first note, pick one of Timur’s fortissimo moments and sing a scale up your sleeve, less than half-voice.
As Timur finishes:
Non c’è voce umana
Che muova il tuo cuore feroce?
Is there no human voice that can move your fierce heart?
I turn and pace my way perfectly, as rehearsed, down to the very front centre stage, where I am supposed to kneel to sing the plaintive, pleading aria to Calaf, who stands a way off at the side. I am ready. Uncle George, ignoring the panic in the orchestra and grinning stupidly, nods me in and stands poised with the baton to follow my first, unaccompanied ‘Signore, ascolta!’.
I sink to my knees, open my mouth and raise my hands in entreaty to Calaf. No sound comes. Uncle George swings towards me from the podium and waves me in again. I do not sing. Not because I cannot, because I am considering whether or not I care to. Uncle George yanks the baton through the air once more and waits, darting wild looks at me. Slowly I get up from where I’m kneeling, and stare at him.
‘Signore, ascolta!’ he mouths at me.
When I take no notice, he hisses it. I turn my attention from him and gaze at Calaf and then I walk slowly towards him and place my hand on the cutlass hanging from his belt. At the best of times Joe moves on stage as if he has artificial limbs and now, rather drunk and terrified because I am not following the correct moves, he is paralysed. I seize the cutlass from the scabbard and walk back to centre stage.
I’ll kill myself and then you’ll be sorry.
Liù understands this perfectly.
‘Signore ascolta!’, for God’s sake! Come on. Nil desperandum! Uncle George says, loud enough for the first six rows of the audience to hear.
I turn back and look at Calaf. I let myself enjoy the silence. The long, long silence. There won’t be much silence for a while to come, after this.
Pointing at Joe with the cutlass, I say loudly, I saw you. I saw you. I saw you…I turn to George and raise my voice even louder. I saw you. Both of you, you and him together.
Joe steps forward and now I really shout.
He sucked your thing! You let him suck your thing! You pushed it in his mouth and he was sucking it, your thing was in his mouth!
My voice rings right to the back of the shed; the words soak in like poison. Joe strides towards me but I raise the cutlass and scream and he stops.
I’m not singing to you! I’m not singing anything to you. You were smiling! I hate you! I hate both of you!
I feel a pounding in my throat and the cutlass is shaking in my hand. Uncle George is gesturing madly to the lighting desk and suddenly the stage goes dark. Behind me, some of the chorus stand staring while others begin to surge to the wings. The orchestra are putting down their instruments, members of the audience are getting to their feet. A few people are already rounding on George. Somebody on stage strikes a match and there is a scream, people stamp out a flame that could take hold of the drapes. The overhead lights of the shed are suddenly switched on, blinding me. I look down at my tawdry, stained dress, pull a hand down my sweating face and look at my palm; it is greasy with black and red and white, the colours of the grit and blood of the afternoon. I am gasping. My fever has taken on liquid form and courses behind my eyes, flooding my head and melting my grip on what is really happening. I doubt if I can walk but I make my way to the edge of the stage and concentrate on the chaos. All around me ancient Peking falls apart, lengths of cloth are dragged down in the confusion. Everywhere is mayhem and distress although the costumes and coloured silks of the falling banners under the lights make this a very pretty kind of riot, I observe, almost coolly. Now the white clad apparition of my mother as Turandot comes into view at the far end of the shed, appearing from the farmhouse just in time to witness the collapse. She will never get on stage now. With the last extant corner of my mind I take in what I have done and am aghast at the power I wield. But all is as it should be; the only unanswered puzzle is that I should be singled out to know such power. Liù made the ultimate sacrifice for love, but I? I sacrifice love itself. I will destroy love, and myself along with it. I am watching the messy, bewildering result, the bloodbath I wade in, because I love the wrong people in wrong ways for wrong reasons. I throw the cutlass as far as I can across the stage, at which there is a new outbreak of screaming.
But for a moment the only sound I hear is a roar in my own head as though I am plunging into deep water and wish to drown. Everything slows and darkens and I become clear and separate from the world in a way t
hat I know will last all my life. I put out arms to steady myself but there is nothing to catch hold of before I faint and fall.
i’m back at the window. I’m dressed for the journey back to Antwerp. My black leather trousers have a tiny split on the inside of one leg but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. They are old now.
Is it Antwerp you stay, someone asked me at the funeral, and the answer is yes. Antwerp is where I stay. I stay and that’s all, because there’s no reason not to, but no reason to either: I’m too old to sing in any more choruses, I give lessons to no more than three or four occasional amateurs, there are lots of people I’m friendly with which is not the same as having friends. Nothing much else. Antwerp was just the last place I had a job, and when I was made to leave, I stayed. If my life had come about in a different order it would be Stuttgart, Bologna or Lille where I stay.
I liked the illusion of progress that moving from chorus to chorus every few years created in my own mind, if not in anyone else’s. I could be quite fierce about my career, aggressive in that little yapping dog way that people of some, but moderate, talent often are.
Just a few more papers and things to sort out.
Burnhead & District Advertiser Thursday 1st September 1960:
Opera Fiasco:
Opening Night in Ruins
Curtain Comes Down
As Indecency Alleged
Amid allegations of gross indecency BAST’s first performance of Turandot on Friday descended into chaos within minutes. Claims that musical director and conductor George Pettifer committed sexual offences of a serious nature involving a minor were made publicly from the stage by another minor. A shaken Mr Pettifer tried to continue the performance but was forced to leave the building after threats were made.
Shock
Members of the cast and audience were treated for shock as the performance was abandoned in front of an audience of several hundred who witnessed the startling revelations. Claims are circulating that the production was already in difficulties. Chorus member Moira Mather commented, ‘It was a shambles anyway.’ Another said, ‘A lot of people put their heart and soul into this. We’ve been badly let down.’
Breach of Trust
Mrs Mather commenting on the allegations of indecency said, ‘What kind of man does this? He had close proximity with our youngsters, it sickens me to think what was going on, he has abused our trust for his own ends.’
Death Trap
A report has been sent to the Procurator Fiscal. It is expected that Scottish police will travel to London where Mr Pettifer was believed to have travelled overnight. Police also say the performance may have been illegal. A spokesman said, ‘The premises were unlicensed for entertainment and do not appear to be covered by a fire certificate. These are serious matters that will be investigated thoroughly particularly as young people may be involved.’
By Staff Reporter Alec Gallagher
I spend two nights in hospital and then they say I can go. There’s no treatment for glandular fever; it just has to run its course. Enid’s mum brings me back to the flat over the shop and by then George and my mother are off to London and Joe has disappeared, nobody is certain where to. I don’t see any of them again.
My father calls to see me at the flat a few times and sits there, helpless. We find ourselves unable to speak. We’ve never done small talk and this certainly isn’t the time to start big talk. He embarrasses me and I pretend to be tireder than I am. Before long Mrs Mathieson comes instead but she isn’t very forthcoming, either. In my lucid patches it’s Enid, usually while her mother is busy in the shop and I am too exhausted to stop her, who keeps me maliciously supplied with the latest stories making their way round Burnhead.
Apart from Alec Gallagher being on the warpath, Mr McArthur feels taken in and out of pocket and curses the day it all began. The Townswomen’s Guild were promised their chairs back and have to pick them up themselves because Jimmy Brock isn’t having any more to do with it. The scouts and guides are interviewed by the police, one by one. The police come to talk to me too and though still feverish and upset I have to tell them exactly what I saw and heard. I am instructed to use the word ‘penis’, and I ponder the possibility of actually dying of embarrassment. But soon it is decided that Uncle George will be prosecuted in England. I don’t think they can find Joe and the police in London discover, by talking to some of Uncle George’s students, that there’s enough to go on there, anyway.
Moira Mather puts it around about my father’s prison term just after the war. This is the kind of family we are. Her husband is furious with her because it reflects badly on the firm although paradoxically—perhaps he feels guilty for telling her about it in the first place—he refuses to sack my father. So he stays on for a while, his contact with clients cut to the minimum, and Mrs Mathieson says to Enid’s mum—Enid overhears and brings it straight to me—that they’re all keeping their heads down and you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. It’s no good, though. Not long after, my father resigns and gets a job in Kilmarnock selling insurance.
Mrs Mathieson and Enid’s mum are quite good friends by now and I grow skilled in looking wan and preoccupied so that they talk in front of me as if I cannot hear. Mrs Mathieson likes to speculate on who’s keeping my mother in the manner to which she’s accustomed now that Uncle George has been suspended without pay. Enid’s mum has to lower her voice when she utters the names George or Joe. She’s sorry to say it but she can’t give the time of day to that kind.
By the time I’m well again, returning to school is impossible. It’s too late after all that’s happened for returns to anything; it’s time for me to start learning the moves I need to master on the way to appearing to be someone else.
But it turns out that all I can do is sing. The elderly owners of Sew Right and the three other Sew Rights down the coast between Burnhead and Glasgow live in a big house in Paisley next door to a widow who takes lodgers and will do an evening meal, so off I go to live in one room and to take proper singing lessons and, to be on the safe side, a course in shorthand and typing.
In the months that follow, I picture George wondering how the police will come. He’ll spend his time waiting. He’ll chain smoke and drink too much, and when he’s drunk he’ll swell with bravado. He’ll start inventing how things will be, which is what he is still best at. He’ll say ‘nil desperandum’ and make jokes about nancy boys and tease my mother that at least in prison he’ll be popular. She will try to stay calm but all she’ll do is fret away the hours between one nervous headache and the next. They’ll sleep in the afternoons and wake when another day is drawing to a bitter, unsatisfactory close.
Will the police barge in almost comically, or will they crash through the door at dawn or do they creep up with a stealth that he’s not alert enough to notice, so gentle and slow an invasion that he’s leaving the flat handcuffed before he knows what’s happening? When it comes, surely it’s a relief. For months he’ll have been studying the papers, following all the trial reports from the mundane to the most lurid. He’ll plead guilty but will that mean six months, a year, two? He will have acquired a smattering of the law but won’t be able to divine the formulae that govern mitigating, aggravating, and ‘other’ circumstances; he’ll reel off the sentences handed down but won’t understand how they’re arrived at. A lot seems to depend on the judge. What he will understand, from careful study of grainy newsprint photographs of the convicted, is what the expression on their faces means. Forgive me if you think forgiveness is what I need, and if you care to, their faces say, but I’m tired, so if you don’t care to, go away and let me sleep. He gets a year.
He’s the first of them to go. The cutting’s here.
Burnhead & District Advertiser Thursday 19th October 1961:
Jailed Opera Conman Dead
After Turandot Fiasco
Died in Prison
Fraudster George Pettifer (31), imprisoned in April under the Homosexuality Act, has died in Wormwood Scrubs
Prison following a sudden collapse. Welcomed in Burnhead last year in a bid to bring ‘opera for all’ to the town, Pettifer’s offences were exposed from the stage on opening night amid dramatic scenes that police later described as ‘a threat to public order’.
Debts Unpaid
Pettifer’s death spells the end of hope for several local traders as well as Glasgow and London firms who remain unpaid amid financial chaos following Pettifer’s disappearance from Burnhead. Several contracts including the hire of stage lighting and musical scores remain outstanding.
Family Turmoil
Florence Duncan, sister of Pettifer, who also played a major role in the opera fiasco, now resides in London estranged from husband Raymond Duncan who resigned from local firm Kerr, Mather & McNeill following further revelations concerning fraudulent trading.
By Staff Reporter Alec Gallagher
It’s Alec Gallagher’s indignation and sense of betrayal in print, I suppose, though admirably toned down to be merely judgemental and inaccurate. The editor’s interest in an old scandal is waning and this is, it turns out, the last vicious little flurry of attention from the paper. It could be worse. It could go further on the abuse of effort and goodwill of the good folk of Burnhead, it doesn’t recount the details of Ricordi’s threat to sue for BAST’s breach of copyright, unauthorised abridging of the score and libretto and withheld royalties. It doesn’t hint that our youngsters were lucky to escape George’s perverted clutches and that there was no telling how far he might have gone.
I don’t think Alec bothered to find out that George’s death was due to acute respiratory failure as a result of a collapsed lung. Who’d be interested in hearing that his tuberculosis went undiagnosed or rather ignored by the prison doctor, because the nancy boys were notorious for malingering, always trying to get themselves admitted to the hospital wing for a few days’ escape from what was done to them by other inmates?
