Puccini's Ghosts (6 page)

Today a low winter sun slants across the street. The pavement on one side is a tunnel of cold shadow, on the other a long row of glass shop fronts burns in the fire of the reflected sun and shimmers as if furnaces blaze inside. Sew Right is no more, of course. In its window hang those vertical blinds like strips of cardboard joined by loops of thin chain, and the place now offers IT Logistics and Database Solutions.

But I’m looking for a church, of which Burnhead used to have at least half a dozen. The South Church has a new porch with a ramp and has become a Centre for Family Counselling and Child Psychology Services. Kingcase looks unchanged, colourless—its walls still craggy and black and its arched windows filled with small panes of plain glass—except that where there used to be a painted sign with Times of Worship there’s now an enormous lit-up board telling me about Opportunities for Praise and Thanksgiving. But I do not want to praise and I don’t feel grateful. It is no help to me to know that there are crèche facilities on Sundays (bring your children), a service for Young People once a month (bring an instrument!) or that Mums’ Flex ’n’ Stretch is restarting after Easter (mats provided). I walk on, thinking about the funeral. I don’t object to talk of God—what’s the alternative?—but I want it unembellished. Suddenly I decide that there will be no singing. He didn’t care for music so I think he would approve and I, certainly, would prefer there to be none. I think being here again is renewing my awareness of its power to falsify.

I know it can’t still be here after all this time but I turn off Main Street and walk down Bridge Street. It won’t be there. Even during Enid’s short spell in their clutches there was something rickety about them, her Fellowship of Sinai Gathering in His Name. I don’t mean rickety about their convictions. They were so lost in those that they had lost also all sight of themselves, that was the trouble. They were so cheerful and absorbed in their hobby they didn’t notice they looked mad to everyone else, like people at dog shows. What was rickety was their grasp of the idea that religious fervour need not preclude caring what you look like. Maybe that was one reason why Enid’s fad was so short-lived. Their clothes embarrassed her.

The place where they used to gather was rickety, too, little more than a shack with a corrugated roof and arched windows with railings round it, near the bottom of Bridge Street between the railway line and the back of the post office. It always looked shut up and in need of repainting, and nobody ever did anything about the buddleia and dock and willowherb that grew in the few feet of ground between the walls and railings. If Jesus died so that the Fellowship of Sinai might Gather in His Name, he had every right to be disappointed in how the bargain turned out.

So it is a surprise, not to find that the shack is no more but to see that it has been replaced with a red-brick building, bigger but of exactly the same shape, so new and hard that it looks as if it has not been long out of doors. The bricks have the bright colour and sharp angles of a child’s picture. The railings have gone. Instead there is a low double-sided wall that serves as a container for a line of lush phoney plants of the kind that sometimes hang outside pubs, weeping figs and palms, which seem to me appropriate choices for a biblically-inspired enterprise. There is a sign on the wall that says Evangelical Lutheran Fellowship. The windows are set very high and the building has the same shut-up and empty look that the old place had, but I try the door quietly and it opens into a space of blond wood that smells of varnish, and from deeper inside I hear two people, a man and a woman, talking as they set out chairs across the floor. They have American accents, which is another surprise, and as soon as they catch sight of me they come forward beaming white porcelain smiles. Under the strip lights they look newly wakened, as if they had set some alarm clock whose ring coincided with my arrival.

They tell me they are Luke and Lucy and happy to meet me and that Luke is the pastor and Lucy is his wife. When I tell them my name and that I want to arrange a funeral for my father Luke says, Lila, hey. This must be a hard time for you.

He leads me to a chair. Lucy disappears.

This is the Fellowship of Sinai, isn’t it? I ask. Because it all seems very different and I want to be sure the funeral will have no singing. I remember the Fellowship of Sinai never had singing.

Luke tells me there has been much prayer and debate on this issue since the Fellowship of Sinai merged with Brothers and Sisters in Evangelical Lutheranism in 1987, when the brothers and sisters came over from Burnhead’s twin town, Vandalia, Ohio, to take up what he calls their ‘Scaddish outreach mission’. I move him on from giving me the entire history and back to the point. Is there singing or isn’t there?

The current position, he tells me, is that it all depends. The brothers and sisters, while neither down on nor up for singing in principle, feel that music can enhance Scripture and consequently ‘our experience of Jesus’. But it is by no means necessary and there remain a diminishing few of the original Sinai Fellows who are strongly opposed. So it’s optional. He assures me that the Divine Shepherd will hear every word taken to Him by a person with a humble heart.

So delivery method optional, I say. Kneeling in silent prayer or borne on wings of song, you’re not fussy?

He says, Lila, God will know what is in your heart however you speak to Him. In that sense, no ma’am, the Divine Shepherd is not fussy.

Then I want a funeral without singing or music of any kind. That is what I would prefer.

Luke tells me I have come to the right place. He is dying to talk more but I write out my address and number, and the undertaker’s.

I tell him, As long as there’s no singing it’ll be fine. Please just fix the time to fit in with what the undertakers are arranging with the crematorium and let me know.

He asks if I’m sure I’m comfortable with that. Don’t I want more input?

I say, No I don’t, and you needn’t come up with much to say. He was eighty-five and there won’t be many there. His name was Raymond Duncan.

He says, Lila, I mean this is kind of a hard call. I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing your father.

I know it’s hard, I tell him. I didn’t either.

I say goodbye and leave, though I have to accede to being prayed for.

4

N
othing changed. Fleur played
Turandot,
Enid did not come, Raymond cycled through the rain between 5 Seaview Villas and Kerr, Mather & McNeill. He and Lila spoke like prisoners, as if speech were circumscribed and the overuse of words punishable in some way.

Milkman’s wanting paying, it’s three and eight.

There’s five, get the change.

Fleur was still camped out in the music room. She had become nocturnal, timing her forays to the kitchen and bathroom at night whenever she could. Occasionally in the daytime, looking displaced and pale and wafting her green folds after her, she would meet Lila on the stairs and pass without a word. Perhaps to show that she was not utterly mad she would sometimes try to ruffle her hair or pat her backside as she went by, but in brash daylight her gestures were gawky. They carried too much force; she could not help a pulse of aggression entering her hands.

At night Lila would go upstairs leaving her father staring at the television in the back room off the kitchen, or wiping round the sink, stoking the Rayburn, cleaning his shoes. Lying in bed she would hear over the blaring of
Turandot
the slam as he left the house by the back door and sloped off across the garden, through the door in the wall and down to the shore.

On Friday as he left for work he said, with a tired glance at the music room door, ‘Aye well, Lizzie. She’s gone too far this time. Stereogram’ll overheat. It’ll blow a valve in the end. Can’t be long now.’

It was his longest speech of the week. Lila looked away in case even meeting his eye might make him think she was on his side. Not that she thought her mother was in the right; she simply never knew whose colours to wear. The choice was too stark, nor did it matter. Her parents argued over real things: the damp, the Premium Bond, but over unreal ones too, such as whether the ants’ nest at the back door step was in the same place this year as last or not. They were not interested in the difference, nor in whether Lila agreed with one or the other.

‘Then maybe we’ll get a wee bit of peace. Eh, Lizzie? Hear it and tremble.’

Lila studied his face and wondered why, when she might be kinder to him, she wasn’t. Maybe it was simply that kindness was too embarrassing in a house where endearments were never heard, and too risky, for what if she created in him an expectation of future kindness? She didn’t know how much she had.

‘The noise isn’t the point,’ she said.

She meant it. In their house it was the silences that made her head ache with watchfulness; she was alert always to the danger of lips pressed together, an unknowable distance in the eyes, the cardigan adjusted pointlessly over the shoulders. In a perfect copy of her mother’s manner, she stood up from the table and with a single, slow blink turned her head to gaze past Raymond through the window. She couldn’t deny herself the sting of pleasure it gave her to dismiss him, and what difference would a little more unkindness make?

A few minutes later she watched him cycle off in the rain towards Burnhead. She continued to stand, the remnants of his breakfast behind her.
Turandot
sounded to her now no more than a slanging match. She knew that the opera ended—how else?—in the triumph of true love, but there was a lot of wailing at the moon to be got through before that happened. People had to waste themselves; in the name of love they had to lie down and be trampled on and vow to tear out their hearts, and the idea exhausted her.

By lunchtime she had not moved from the dining room.
Turandot
had been played all the way through and started over again; Act I came to an end with the crashing of gongs. She waited for Act II. Nothing came, then the music room door opened and she heard the clip-slap, clip-slap of Fleur’s mules along the hall. The sound faded to a sweet, sudden silence; Lila waited, listening. Only then, as if her other senses had just been allowed to waken, did she take in the crumby table, the used plates and cups and ashtray. She began clearing up, faintly puzzled. Surely breakfast had been days ago.

It was while she was drying the cutlery she began to feel something else lurking under the silence. The atmosphere had changed. The rain had stopped; maybe things were about to get better, maybe some transformation was even now taking place. In a minute her mother would come downstairs and she would be happy. A tingle started in Lila’s chest. Such yearning was dangerous, and she tried to catch hold of the fantasy and tie it down. She wouldn’t, for instance, ask for her mother to become like Enid’s mum. Fleur could carry on being conspicuous and English, she could even go on playing her records and dressing in her youthful and expensive way that was unlike any other mother in Burnhead. But if she could be cheerful, not occasionally hilarious and alarming, but cheerful in a daily sort of way you could rely on. If she could only laugh things off a little bit and keep some good mood over in reserve.

Lila let herself imagine how it would be. Her mother was in her bedroom now. She was washed and dressed, looking in her dressing-table mirror and clicking her tongue at herself, while sun slanted in through the window. The frivolous dressing gown—what had possessed her to buy that?—was cast on the floor ready to be thrown away. A white, solid, motherly kind of dressing gown was folded on the bed. She was about to turn and hurry downstairs; she would appear in the doorway with a dimply smile and take the tea towel from Lila’s hands. She would say, Oh here, Lila, give me that, I’ll finish up. You pop the kettle on and let’s think about what to do this afternoon.

While Lila made tea she would put the dishes away, humming an easy tune, not one of her tragic ones. The day would open out like a story, filled with friendly talk, mellow with hope.

Now it’s a rainy old day but that’s not going to stop us, she would say. There’s time to get into Ayr and back before your Dad’s home. You need some summer clothes. Hourston’s have some lovely new things in.

Lila gulped. If they were not getting the car then there was, after all, the Premium Bond to spend. Her daydreams varied in the details but they all featured her mother growing kind, her father in the background but vaguely included in the new warmth, and ended with her getting new clothes. And the daydreams failed her every time, returning her to her life unchanged unless a little more tainted and empty. Would she never learn? She tried to concentrate on something unselfish.

We’ll make Dad his favourite supper, your poor dad always comes home tired on a Friday.

Lila would look up and see her mother smiling. She would be as striking as ever with her carved mouth and large eyes, the shapely waist and ankles. But her beauty would be safer to look at. The edges would be softer; she would look warmed up, less easily broken.

She finished drying the spoons and started on the collection of dirty ashtrays next to the sink. Still no music. She peeped into the hall. The door stood ajar as her mother had left it. She stood with the sink cloth in her hand and waited for a sound; it was impossible to move upstairs without making the floor creak. The quiet was absolute. A new thought ticked through her head. How quickly and quietly could a person commit suicide? In an opera you could see it coming and even then it took forever and could be heard five streets away but what if, in real life, it could be accomplished as unobtrusively as popping upstairs for a minute, in no more time than it took to brush your hair? Could pills or razor blades or a noose work that fast? She held her breath and listened again for a cough or footstep, afraid that she might not hear such little sounds over the thudding of her heart. It could not, surely, be happening just over her head. She returned to the kitchen and took up another ashtray. It could not be happening. There would be crying and pain and mess, she reasoned, and there was only silence. At the same time her mind was working guiltily, trying to devise a scale on which to calculate just how desperate her mother was.

She rubbed at the ashtray over and over, raising its sharp, dirty smell. Suppose it could be even more modestly done, without drawing blood or stopping airways or poisoning the heart? It might be possible simply to slip away in the manner of her mother’s tragic sopranos—like Mimi, Violetta—who could expire without having to do very much apart from singing about it. Suppose the creeping illness whose symptoms never seemed all that distressing, or the betrayed heart, or the selfless renunciation (or the Last Bloody Straw) were enough to see you off, if that was what you wanted, without the need for anything as crude as a suicide method? Lila threw down the cloth and made for the stairs.

Her mother was not in her own bedroom, nor Raymond’s, nor Lila’s, nor the bathroom nor the small spare bedroom. Lila paused on the landing and gazed up the attic stairs. Nobody ever went up there. The two attic rooms were full of junk that nobody wanted, and suddenly she knew. Her mother had taken herself off to die in the attic, among the old and useless and broken things. She took the stairs slowly, noticing the smell grow thicker as she went. At the top, she halted. The two doors in front of her were closed. Silence was embedded here like silt, laid down in the dust. Motes swam in the beam of light that shone from the skylight in the roof. She checked both rooms. Empty.

She clumped back down to her own room, her heart tilting uncomfortably. She needed to hide; she needed the secrecy of a confessional that would absorb her disappointment at not having come across her mother dead. To think that she might want her mother to die just so that life would be different made her feel warped and ashamed; she had to rearrange her mind so that the idea never crossed it again. Life was going to continue in the same way. There was going to be more of it: more being afraid to move from one room all day, more loneliness in her parents’ company, more nights lying in bed with her breath trapped in her throat.

She looked out across the waste ground behind the house, now a lurid patchy green after the rain, to where the sea writhed into the shore. Though her curiosity about her mother’s whereabouts was diminishing now that she was not dead in the attic, she wondered again where she was. Had she got dressed and taken herself off for a walk? But Fleur hated the beach, and there was nowhere else to walk unless you roamed along the road and it was impossible to do that without looking stray and half-witted. Lila’s eye was drawn from the distance to something almost immediately below. The front double doors of the garage were closed as usual, but the side door into the garage from the back garden was open. Above it, the garage roof seemed to be swaying slightly. When she looked properly she saw that it was the drift of a soft line of smoke rising from the joins between rows of slates that made it appear to move.

She turned and ran downstairs, out through the kitchen and across the grass. Soft rasping noises and whining grunts were coming from the open door; inside, her mother was crouched and weeping, striking matches and tossing them into a high mound of twisted newspapers and sticks set in the middle of the floor. As she moved, the skirt of the dressing gown, gauzy and flammable, floated and sank over the edges of the heap; from her wrists the long sleeves were already waving like smoke. Lila stared at the drifting folds and the crossed sticks of firewood hazy beneath the green shadow and reaching up like open beaks, pulling at the material. She couldn’t help waiting to see what would happen.

The paper was refusing to catch properly. With each dropped and extinguished match Fleur cursed, leaned forward and blew hard. Some paper crackled and the pile settled a little.

‘
God!
Oh, for God’s sake! Oh, this bloody place!’ she moaned. She paused and swallowed, crouched deeper and blew and blew again.

‘Might have…known…too…oh, bloody
typical
…damp…bloody
burn,
damn you…Oh,
God!
’

She poked at the sticks in the centre of the fire and a cloud of smoke bulged out from the papers and into her face. Weak glimmers of flame flared and subsided. She threw in another match, leaned forward and blew again. A curl of flame gusted at her and she leapt to get away, snatching her dressing gown and pulling out several sticks that clung to the hem.

She wiped her eyes and nose with her sleeve, bringing away a trail of sooty slime, and glared at Lila.

‘What do you want? What are you staring at?’

For a moment Lila could not speak. Her mother’s face had shrunk to a tiny white mask in which her lips opened and closed over teeth that seemed smaller and sharper than before. Her frayed sleeves hung over her hands; she was like a creature from a fable, a fairy wrecked and grounded after some calamity, her ruined wings in shreds. But the effort of blowing had made her look younger; her eyes were hard and bright.

‘Well?’

‘What—what are you
doing
?’

‘Oh, for God’s
sake
! For God’s sake, I am so sick and tired, have you no idea? You and your damn father, the bastard, the bloody
bastard
.’

‘But why are you…’

‘Him and his precious bloody garage! I’ve had enough, I’ll bloody show him!’

She barged past her out to the garden. Lila was too frightened to follow and besides, there was the fire; the smoke behind her was already thick and sulphurous. She stepped to the doorway for a lungful of air and turned back but there was so much smoke she could hardly see. Shielding her eyes, she stamped at the edges of the pile on the floor until her breath gave out, then she sucked in another and her throat filled with hot smoke. She stumbled to the door, retching and dizzy. Several more times she ventured back in and tried to stamp out the fire, retreating each time to the door for breath and returning to find that the flames had encroached further. Her eyes were almost blinded by streaming tears and when she coughed she doubled over with stinging, zig-zagging pains in her chest. There was now heat coming off the fire and she could hear ominous crackling noises from deep inside it. Licks of orange brightened the gloom of the smoke. She ran to the outside tap on the back wall of the house and found a watering can already half-f of rainwater, filled it to the top and lurched back with it, water slapping over the sides and drenching her. With the first canful the fire hissed and collapsed a little. She came and went from the tap several times, dousing the flames until all that was left was a wet, burning stink in the air and a sulking heap from which trickles of water snaked out into black pools on the concrete.