Free Puccini's Ghosts by Morag Joss Page B

billowing cycling cape. He set his bicycle against the wall and stared at the garage for a while, then he marched round to the back door, pulling the cape over his head. A few seconds later
Turandot
stopped. From downstairs Lila heard raised voices, and resigned herself. But not long afterwards the shouting stopped, too. A door opened and was closed. A hush settled over the house, but it was too early to tell if the Last Bloody Straw might be capitulating to Gone Too Far This Time. The silence was of the kind that occurs when an engine cuts out but might at any moment be kicked once more into combustible, raging life.
    When she had waited for as long as she could, Lila crept across the landing to the top of the stairs. Would she always be like this, afraid to walk through the house? After her parents’ rows she was always embarrassed at how long it took her to get used to being in the same room with them again; she didn’t understand how they could be so unaffected, why for days afterwards only she remained wrung out by the things they’d said. She waited till she heard conversation before opening the kitchen door, believing that to arrive in the room during an exchange of words would make her entrance less conspicuous.
    Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with a burning cigarette in an ashtray and a cup of tea in front of her. She was wrapped in a thick dressing gown that didn’t belong to her and she looked cleaner but bedraggled and nervy, as if she’d been recently plucked from a hideous predicament—pulled out of a pothole maybe, or winched from a shipwreck. She sent in Lila’s direction, without catching her eye, the fluttery smile of someone rescued but not yet quite able to believe it. Raymond was leaning against the sink stroking his moustache and smoking, from time to time drinking from a bottle of beer—Fleur’s authority in the matter of drinking straight from bottles (boorish,
typical
) having for the moment lapsed. He rose forward on his feet when Lila came in, gave her a nod and went over to the Rayburn. Setting the beer bottle down, he began cracking eggs into a bowl and beating them, holding the cigarette between two fingers as he worked, another of Fleur’s strictures flouted.
    ‘I’ve rung your Uncle George in London,’ he said, not turning round. ‘He’s coming up to stay.’
    Lila gasped as a shudder of pleasure and fright ran through her. ‘
When?
When’s he arriving? How long for?’ She hadn’t seen him for more than two years. He’d be amazed to see that she was no longer just a little girl. He might think her pretty. He had to think her pretty.
    ‘How long’s he staying?’
    Raymond was melting butter in a saucepan. He tipped in the eggs, set the pan back on the stove and began stirring.
    ‘That depends,’ her mother said flatly, drawing on her cigarette and looking at Raymond’s back, ‘on your precious father,’ from which Lila guessed that she expected Uncle George to take her side about the car and to stay until her father caved in.
    ‘Och, Fleur…’
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake…’
    ‘That’s enough. We’ve all had enough now.’
    Both their voices were wary. Fleur drank some of her tea, her eyes still fixed on Raymond as he stirred at the stove. Just the prospect of Uncle George’s presence seemed to create between them, if not harmony, then a slight benefit of the doubt.
    ‘Eliza, make some toast, will you? Give your father a hand.’
    ‘You leave Lizzie be, I’m managing. Want another cup?’
    Lila went to the dining room to lay the table, not wanting to test the strength of the truce. A little later they sat down to eat, her parents grudgingly. Lila, between them, kept watch.
    ‘You’ll have to do something about the door. Before he comes. That spare room door won’t close. It swings open.’
    ‘It’s holding moisture. You just need to push it hard so it clicks. I’ll tell him he just needs to push it hard.’
    ‘You’d better open the window.