Puccini's Ghosts (27 page)

I’m too tired to walk, so I catch the bus that takes the stupid route round Monkton and in to the wrong side of Burnhead. The noise and motion of the bus lulls me back and forth between memory of the time I made this journey with Joe and anticipation of seeing him at the ceilidh tonight. When I meet up with Enid outside Woolworth’s she asks what that look on my face is for. We go in and edge our way around Beauty Accessories. From the tannoy next to the record counter Kenneth McKellar’s voice sounds scratchily over our heads:

The birthplace of valour, the country of worth,

Wherever I wander, wherever I rove…

A dozen of his new record sleeves are pinned in a fanlike display on the pegboard wall above the counter; a dozen pensive and kilted Kenneth McKellars, chin cupped between finger and thumb and one foot resting on a log, gaze over a purple hill.

I finger scarves and hairbands. I shake minute puffs from tins of powder and open bottles of scent, sniffing with closed eyes as I try to guess which one will drive Joe wild. I’m not inspired by any of the labels: neither a moonlit Eiffel Tower (
Nocturne de Paris
), a desert island (
Girl Friday
) nor an almond-eyed beauty in furs and diamonds (
Casino
) strikes quite the right note. The one that smells the best (
Rodeo Princess
) has the worst picture of all, a blonde girl in a pink Stetson. I put the bottle down. Kenneth McKellar’s voice sails on, chased by massed, echoing accordions:

My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go!

Enid is shoving Parma Violets in her mouth every few seconds and flipping and turning through racks of nylons on a revolving stand.

She says, See my turquoise dress? That I’m wearing tonight? I’m getting the exact right eyeshadow for it, Rimmel’s got the
exact same
colour.

Your turquoise? You said I could borrow that.

Oh, did I? When?

Wednesday. You said I could borrow it for the ceilidh.

Oh, but that was when you were not well and I thought you wouldn’t be coming. I need it now. Anyway I never promised. You can borrow the pedal pushers.

You can’t wear pedal pushers to a ceilidh, I tell her.

I turn away and look at hairnets, which I never buy, so she won’t see I am about to burst into tears. I have nothing else to wear, nothing I can stand.

See the eyeshadow? I seen it in the Ayr Woollies but I’d no money on me. They’ll have the exact same one here, not think so? Okay, listen, you can borrow something else, okay?

How can a turquoise dress, or the lack of it, produce such despair? Kenneth McKellar is singing something to a dance tune now. He has no idea. It’s so cheerful I want to lie down and curl into a ball until it stops. My ribs are folding in on themselves, like a roof collapsing.

Look, Enid says, I need the turquoise, I just do, okay? You can get it another time, that’s a promise. C’mon. You can still borrow the eyeshadow. Hey, the green skirt, want my green skirt? You can have that if you want.

I don’t want the green skirt because there’s nothing to wear with it except a white blouse that isn’t any more ceilidh-worthy than pedal pushers. It is a matter of so much more than what I will look like. It is a matter of having in my hands the turquoise dress, the means of bringing Joe to his senses, and being required to give it back. I’m getting an old feeling in my chest that I used to get a lot before this summer, like something shrinking, and I pause for a second, wondering what will happen if this time I don’t rise above it. I finger the bottle of
Rodeo Princess
and wonder what the point of rising above it is, what the point ever is.

Not think so, the eyeshadow? They’ll have the same ones in all the Woollies, won’t they?

Uh-huh. Maybe.

It’s the exact same colour, the
exact same
. It’s Rimmel. I’m not getting Evette. I hate Evette.

Right.

See after, want to go and see my mum? She was saying she’s not seen you in a while.

I want to refuse. Not just because of the dress, but because nearly everything Enid says, what anyone says these days, comes to me in another language, and I don’t want to risk Enid’s mum sounding foreign to me, too. Other people—Uncle George, my father, my mother, never mind Alec Gallagher and Mr Black and all the others—never quite stop annoying me. Even when they are being nice, there is something about their ignorance of what I am really feeling that makes me despise them and I worry that it may be the same with Enid’s mum. But the back shop of Sew Right is the safest place I know and I need safety now.

Okay, I say, feeling weak and angry. Can I borrow your white sandals, then? Enid pops another handful of Parma Violets into her mouth and crunches fragrantly.

She says, Okay, you can have the sandals.

My attention is drawn by the rattling noise of the peanut dispenser that sits next to the weighing machine just inside the entrance. It’s a rectangular metal box with a glass case on top like a fish tank, in which a greasy dune of peanuts glistens under a light bulb. It’s been here all my life and now I think it looks smaller than it used to. Two boys, brothers probably, are squabbling over who’s putting the money in, who’s pressing the button, who holds the paper cone.

Listen, Enid says, her breath coming hot and scented, we still need to get one, nail varnish. Two, hairspray. I’ll get the nail varnish, you get the hairspray, okay?

As long as I get your white sandals.

I said you could. Just for the night.

I feel too old, suddenly. I don’t want to buy hairspray. I feel weary for the lost Saturday afternoons spent bloated and parched from scoffing a coneful of peanuts, immoveable grease on my fingers, my scalp itchy, my mouth salt-puckered. I can’t remember deciding not to get peanuts anymore. I just drifted away and spent my pocket money on other things, I suppose. I watch the two boys and remember feeding the pennies in and pressing the button marked 3d. I remember the hum from inside the machine and then the thrilling part, the first sigh from deep in the nut mountain and the first movement, a mere shifting as two or three runaways trickle and settle. Then comes the tumble of nuts through the chute and into the waiting cone. Will the avalanche stop before the cone is full or will the entire hillside rattle out and bounce all over the floor, a catastrophe that will be my fault? I had no idea then that I will recall this time with the feeling that something precious came and went before I took proper notice of what it was. Not freedom from anxiety: what, then?

They’re all over the kitchen floor now, multi-coloured hailstones all over the floor, red and black and gold. The beads and buttons—Calaf’s, Timur’s, Turandot’s—they’re everywhere. I must have spilled them somehow, though it seems to me the bag practically emptied itself. I’ll be picking them up for days.

But I can’t be bothered with them now.

I feel better. I’m dressed after my bath. My hired car is an automatic and the hurt foot is my left, so I can drive. Christine will think it a bad idea but she needn’t know, she hasn’t been in today, or for a while, as far as I recall. Maybe her interest in me is waning. I have to keep my hair appointment. After that I shall go and see Luke.

19

T
he bell of Sew Right tinged and they wandered past the empty counter, through the curtain to the back shop and found Enid’s mum on the floor, sitting in the foothills of a calico mountain that billowed in peaks around her.

‘It’s yourselves,’ she said, pulling out a line of pins from between her lips and sticking them into the lapel of her cardigan. ‘Long time no see, Lizzie. If it’s a cup of tea you’re needing, away and get it,’ she said, amiably. ‘I’ve that many numbers in my head, don’t talk to me yet.’

Enid pushed past to the kettle and sink in the passage that led out to the back door.

‘What’s all this for?’ Lila whispered. Enid’s mum gave her a warning glance. Her mouth was working fast and silently as she pulled swathes of calico across her lap. Lila slid on to the floor and began gathering it up in folds and feeding it across to her hands.

Enid’s mum said, ‘Hold on, shoosh just a minute.’

Drawing out the edge of the calico between her fingers and extending one arm as a measure, she counted, ‘One yard, two, three, four, wee bit for luck,
pin
.’

Keeping the place pinched between thumb and forefinger, she pulled a pin from her cardigan and stuck it in as a marker on the selvedged edge of the material. She started again, ‘One yard, two, three, four, extra for luck,
pin
.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘—two, three, four,
pin
. I’m measuring out for the chorus costumes,’ she said. ‘See over there? There’s one made up.’

She nodded towards a hanger suspended from the door of one of the tall cupboards that lined the wall. On it was a pair of calico trousers and a jacket with no fastenings, streaked reddish brown and looking worn and crumpled, like the suit of a convict who’d been breaking rocks all day.

‘I’ve made up a pattern and instructions and done a wee drawing and the chorus get four yards of stuff and they make their own. Oh, they’ll moan, some of them, but there’s nothing to it. See? Trousers—straight up the outside leg seams, drawstring casing, up the inside leg, round the gusset, down again—done. No need for hems, even. Get me that pin off the floor there, will you? Jacket—bat sleeves, no shoulder seams, wrist up to under the arms and down the sides, no buttons, no finishing. Then they’ve to put it all in a boil wash with a pair of black socks and a pair of brown socks and then hang it to dry but not iron it. You get it good and grimy-looking that way. My idea, that. Fair enjoyed myself, thinking it all up.’ She smiled.

‘But there’s no buttons,’ Lila said. ‘How will they keep the jacket on?’

‘Everybody’s to get something of their own. They can use a brooch as long as it’s plain, or an old belt or a cord or thin rope even, or a sash if it’s not too fancy. Or they can use a sharp stick or a bit of bone and pin it through. That way, no two’s the same. Similar but not the same, like what folk are.’

‘Eh?’ Enid picked her way across the mound of calico and began fingering the suit on the hanger, lifting and peering inside it. ‘That? I’m not wearing that. It’s not
clean
.’

Lila and Enid’s mum exchanged the glance that two people share when a third person isn’t keeping up.

Enid’s mum said, ‘Och, don’t you get on your high horse. Everyone’s in the same boat. You’ve all to be in keeping.’

‘Don’t see why we’ve got to look horrible.’

‘You’re one of
la folla
. The crowd. You’re peasants,’ Lila said helpfully.

‘Don’t see why that means we have to be
scruffy
.’

‘Because you’re peasants. You’re poor.’

‘So? Poor doesn’t mean dirty. It doesn’t mean we have to be filthy—you won’t be filthy.’

Enid’s mum sighed. ‘It’s in keeping, dear, it’s China in ancient times. Ordinary folk didn’t have bathrooms then. Everyone’ll be the same.’

‘It’s true,’ Lila said. ‘Standards were different in those days.’

‘Everyone?’

‘Everyone in the chorus,’ Lila said.

Enid ignored her. ‘But not Lizzie, though. So what’s Lizzie wearing?’ she demanded. ‘What’s
Lizzie
getting?’

‘You know quite well what Lizzie’s getting, you’ve seen me making it. She’s a principal, she’s got to have something different. That tea made?’

Steam was pouring from the kettle. Enid disappeared into the cloud in the passageway and clattered about with cups. Mrs Foley glanced behind her, then leaned across to Lila and said, ‘Yours is done. Half of it, any road. Go and see, the cupboard there, just behind. Shift that awful thing out the road.’

Lila got up from the floor, lifted the hanger with the calico suit and hung it on the next cupboard handle along, and opened the door.

She could not speak. By opening the door she was interrupting something, some piece of blinding, uncompleted magic that involved the impossible: moonbeams or stars plucked from their proper places and trapped in the stock room of a remnant shop in Ayrshire. Hanging from a hook in the roof of the cupboard in front of bales of tweed and blanketing was a long, straight dress in the palest, most glossy material Lila had ever seen. It was of so luminous a shade of silvery yellow that it had the gleam of lemon pith. She reached out and touched it and just the stroke of her fingertip cast into its folds a shadow with the translucence of melted butter. She withdrew her hand and watched the surface slide back again to slippery cream. She could not take her eyes from it. The silk neither reflected nor absorbed light, it engaged it; it pulled light in and played games, it chased it across its surface and let it loose, ghostly and flippant and fugitive. A soft darkened edge ran down the length of the dress, the shadow of the time the cloth had been left folded. Here and there it was marked with tiny, rusty spots. All around Lila rose the smell of pear drops and funeral flowers.

Behind her on the floor Enid’s mum was at work again—
one yard, two, three, four, bit for luck, pin
—but Lila could tell she was watching her. Her voice was different, fluttering slightly.

She stopped counting and said, with a sigh, ‘That’s satin for you. Proper heavy pre-war satin, ordered for a wedding. Wedding never happened, aye well, so the wholesaler says. Couldn’t shift it during the war, not even after. Folk hadn’t got the coupons then, now they haven’t the money. You don’t see that quality often. Most folk round here wouldn’t know it when they saw it.’

‘Oh, so it’s
old,
then.’

Enid’s mum looked sharply at the dress. ‘Aye, I suppose to you it’s old, it’s not that long ago for others. It’s quality. Still, you couldn’t get a wedding dress out of that material now, all foxed and light damaged.’

She went back to the heap of calico. ‘It’ll be all right for a stage costume, marks won’t show from a distance. It’s a wonder the moth hasn’t had it. But the man said he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away, not satin like that, not that quality.’

‘It’s the most beautiful, beautiful material I’ve ever, ever seen.’

Enid’s mum stabbed another pin into the calico and pulled more from the bale with a series of soft thuds on the floor. ‘Like it?’ she said. ‘It’s nice stuff, right enough. That you’ve got there’s only the top. There’s to be trousers as well to go underneath, don’t ask me why, your Uncle George and your Joe what’s-his-name say it’s to be tunic with trousers underneath. I said what, frock and breeks and on a girl, and they said that’s what they’d have had in those days. I’m not arguing. You like it?’

‘Like it?
Like
it—it’s, it’s the most—’

‘It’s quite nice,’ Enid said wanly. ‘Will she get into it, though? It looks awful small.’ She turned away down the passageway and poured out their tea, singing a snippet from the opera in deliberately Scottish Italian so that

Diecimila anni al nostro Imperatore!

sounded like

Deechy Miller Annie I’ll no strimp a rat tory!

Lila glowered after her. ‘
Is
it my size?’ she whispered to Enid’s mum. ‘Are you sure it’s my size?’

Enid’s mum laughed, clambered to her feet and dropped heavily into the chair at the sewing machine. ‘Have I not run you up enough bits and pieces to know your size? I just made it a wee bit bigger in the chest. You’ve more bosom than Enid and then I was thinking you’ll be needing a bit of leeway. You’ve to take big deep breaths, haven’t you, singing? So I gave you a bit of room. Want to try it on?’

Enid, smirking, came in with their tea. ‘Go on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if it’s big enough.’

Mrs Foley nodded. ‘Go on, I’m dying to see it on. Slip it on and let’s have a look at you.’

Lila said, ‘Please. Oh please, Mrs Foley, please can I just take it home? Can I take it away to try on at home? I’ll be careful, I promise, I won’t let anything happen to it. I just want to try it on at home, is that all right? I’ll bring it straight back tomorrow.’

Enid’s mum laughed. ‘You’re a funny one. What, Lizzie, are you shy? Aye, if you want, I suppose, take it away home. It’s tougher than it looks, silk. There’s brown paper under the counter, wrap it up in that. If it doesn’t fit you, bring it back. There’s plenty more stuff.’

Lila found some brown paper and some tissue, slipped the dress off the hanger and folded it up into a parcel. Enid watched her, her bottom lip hanging loose. Lila went about wrapping it feeling big and indelicate, afraid of leaving fingerprints where she touched the dress, afraid to breathe too close in case she dulled it.

‘Er, right, that’s me away. I need to go now,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much.’

Enid’s mum inclined her head gently and told her she was welcome. Lila hesitated. She wanted to fall into Enid’s mum’s arms and declare love and gratitude but the right words were not available.

She said, ‘Thank you. It’s really, really lovely.’

The right words belonged to opera and to Joe. Not even Enid’s mum would understand if she tried to say them. Lila squeezed the parcel to her chest and her eyes filled with tears.

‘Away now, you’re welcome,’ Enid’s mum said. ‘Off you go, you try it on and let me know how it fits.’

Enid said, flatly, ‘Not want your tea? It’s poured.’

‘Er, no, I won’t bother, thanks. See you tonight.’ She paused. They had agreed that Enid would come to Seaview Villas at six o’clock so they could do their makeup together. ‘I’ll just see you there, okay? Half past seven.’

‘We’re meant to be doing our makeup. What about the nail varnish? Half’s yours, remember.’

‘Oh, no, sorry, I can’t. I forgot. I’m to be ready early. My mum says. She’s in charge. I’m to be on hand to help with refreshments, they’ll want a hand putting plates out.’

It was not a good lie and both Enid’s and her mother’s silence made that plain. Fleur was never in charge of anything, nor did she take sufficient notice of Lila to organise her movements or commandeer her help. Ashamed, Lila left them in the back shop and made her way swiftly past the counter to the door. She had almost reached it when Enid called out from behind the curtain, ‘Hey, what about the sandals?’

‘Oh.’
Lila had forgotten. ‘Oh, just bring them with you, okay? I’ll see you there and get them then.’ She pulled the door open and launched herself through it so that whatever Enid yelled in reply was lost in the clanging of the bell.

i
find my way to the hairdresser’s all right, on Main Street not far from Woolworth’s, although Woolworth’s is now a Pet Supplies & Aquatic Centre, which seems odd. It’s a very big place for selling Winalot and goldfish.

They’re a bit surprised to see me at the hairdresser’s, I can tell, maybe even impressed; I bet it’s not every freezing day in January that a woman with a walking stick and one foot bare but for some bandages (which I admit are a little grubby now) keeps an appointment. They are not very well organised and seem to have lost any note of my appointment but they have a stylist free, they tell me, as if I should be grateful. The girl who does me doesn’t see
me,
of course. She gawps in the mirror and addresses my reflection. She lifts my hair in strands and asks what I want. I can’t find the words, and she’s bored already.

She sighs at the mirror, So will I just give it a shampoo and trim and a tidy and a blow dry and finish, then?

She asks me how my hair has ‘been’ lately and is disappointed by what I say. She washes at least three kinds of shampoo into it and rinses them all back out one after the other. She tells me there’s a Senior Citizens’ discount before she asks if I’m retired. But her movements are gentle. When she takes the weight of my head in her hands and her fingertips travel into my hair and over and over my wet skull I feel soothed as if by a lover. She snips in silence, smoothes my hair into an acceptable coating for my head and by then it is almost dry. She wets it again with a spray and dries it herself. At the very end she sprays something on it. Across my forehead, when I leave, there’s a tight hot band of bright pink from the blow drying and my head is buzzing with perfumes and my neck prickles.

Next to the hairdresser’s is a tiny shop, no more than a stall really, selling hot doughnuts and cookies and I think that perhaps Luke, being American, might like a doughnut, and I am slightly peckish myself. I buy six.