Personality Read online

  ANDREW O’HAGAN

  Personality

  to India

  Note to the Reader

  This is a work of fiction. Though it bears a relation to the lives of several dead performers, it has no relation at all to any of their families, or to any real person associated with their careers. Showbusiness personalities enter the narrative under their own names, and several actual television programmes are named for reasons of verisimilitude, but any words spoken in the novel are imagined by the author, and the particular productions are invented by him.

  We need applause. That’s how we live. When you don’t have a lot of noise around you, the noise inside you becomes overwhelming.

  Judy Garland

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Note to the Reader

  Epigraph

  5 July 1940

  PART ONE

  1: Suppers

  2: Jubilee

  3: Glorious

  4: Broadcasting

  5: The Girl’s World

  6: Sugar

  7: Migration

  8: The Athletic Bar

  9: Rosa

  10: Devotions

  11: Giovanni

  12: Kelvinator

  13: Alfredo

  14: Tales

  15: All That Move in the Waters

  16: Kalpana

  17: Chorus

  PART TWO

  1: Mr Green

  2: Primrose Hill

  3: Nutrition

  4: The Evolution of Distance

  5: Marion

  6: Personality

  7: The Palladium

  8: America

  9: Lucia

  10: Mirror

  11: Home

  12: Shopping

  PART THREE

  1: Michael Aigas

  2: Wogan

  3: They

  4: Light Entertainment

  5: Mr Green

  6: The Hunger Artist

  7: Skin

  8: Kevin Goss

  9: Static

  10: Alfredo

  11: This Is Your Life

  12: Michael

  13: Kevin

  14: Tomorrow

  15: Maria

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  5 July 1940

  The body of Enrico Colangelo lay on the beach. Dressed in a gabardine suit, the man had rolled for three days in the Atlantic, before the Isle of Barra came out of the dark and the tenor landed at Traig Iais. He was subject to the violence of the open sea and the awful eclipse of God’s mercy. He was dead now, but in the cold chambers of Enrico’s heart there remained a final certainty: he could swim to the lifeboats, he’d find her there.

  He came in the night with a quantity of teacups and wreckage, and in the morning the sea was blue, the perfect blue of an Italian sea. Enrico Colangelo might have imagined the waves had brought him home again, yet the drowned man was a stranger to the Hebrides. No one knew him. His suit was foreign, so were his shoes, and he lay on the white beach with the water lapping at his legs. Some boys were playing in the marram grass over the strand. They loved it there when the wind was strong; the grass whipped at their legs and it was frightening to hear the crash of the waves and feel the rush of the sand that would sting your face and push you back to the dunes. From the top you could look across the sound to South Uist and the place where Charles Edward Stuart met Flora Macdonald at midnight.

  The boys put their jumpers over their heads and ran through the spray and the sand. The wind that morning was fierce and the sand prickled their hands and made them go red as the boys ran down, still laughing, arms spread out, their voices making the noise of fighter planes as they turn and dive. Once down on the strand they pulled their jumpers from their faces, and that’s when they saw Colangelo’s body. None of them had seen a dead person before. One of the boys wanted to cry and without saying anything he ran back over the dunes to get somebody. There was no movement among the others, no sound from them.

  What are children in the eyes of a dead man? The boys came close and stared, but there was nothing. Years later two of Neil MacInnes’s brothers would be lost off Polacharra; only then, as a man of sixty-two, would Neil remember the fingers of the washed-up man at Traig Iais, the whiteness of the finger wearing a silver ring, and the fascination in Lachlin MacKinnon’s eyes. The boys wished they knew the story of the man lying dead, but soon a pair of crofters came running over the sandhills and the children stood back, paying no attention to the sea and the things that happened out there, and only sorry to have lost possession of their treasure so quickly. They looked over their shoulders at Marton McDougall, the boy weeping on the dunes.

  One of the crofters went through the dead man’s suit, and was pleased to find his wallet; from a tight leather pocket inside the wallet he drew out a card, barely damp.

  ENRICO COLANGELO

  Tenor from Rome, Naples Opera Houses,

  London Coliseum, BBC

  Address: 15 York Road, London SE1

  Telephone: Waterloo 4485

  When the police came from Castlebay they put a blanket over the body and built a fence of flotsam around him, and after some questions the children had to retreat to the grass to see what would happen next. But nothing happened except it got dark and the Atlantic boomed. Neil MacInnes put his arms inside his jumper and kept spying from the dunes. He thought the sea after dark might give a clue or say something or send more dead people in with the waves. But no. Enrico Colangelo lay silent and secret on the beach, everything behind him, the black water, the world beyond.

  The next day Mrs Mackenzie, the wife of the Commander of the Home Guard, came with the news that London had been on the phone. They now had permission to give Enrico Colangelo a Catholic burial. And so the adults and the Home Guard took the body away from the long beach and it was carried in a box to be prepared by some women in Castlebay and then buried in the graveyard on the other side of the island.

  The three churches of St Barr’s were in ruins on top of the hill at Eoligarry. The burial site wasn’t large, but you could easily tell the dead generations apart in that field: the oldest gravestones were made of the same stone as the walls of the first church, and they surrounded those broken walls, whilst the other graves, more modern and flat, marking the dead of succeeding generations, were positioned sparsely on the slopes of the hill, trailing down, more sparsely still, to a part of the field where the grass seemed green and fresh. The sun shone the day Enrico Colangelo was laid to rest; from the graveside, the sea of Barra Sound glinted like the waters of Monte Cristo, and the assembled people, for whom he was nobody in particular, uttered Hail Marys to the open air.

  The boys watched as the prayers were said and when the soil was put down they scrambled over the hill making the sound of aeroplanes. The sun was high over Eriskay, and you could see other beaches, giant footsteps to the mainland, across the Minch towards the skyline. In an instant, the boys were off the hill that stands over the graveyard, their sudden laughter, their quick eyes, gone now as wind comes and goes in the grass.

  PART ONE

  1

  Suppers

  Business was slack, so the pubs closed early and the ferry came in for the night. A brown suitcase was left standing on the pier; it stood there for hours and nobody came for it and nobody complained. It was out all night, and in the morning somebody took it along to Lost Property.

  The sky was pink above the school and at eight o’clock the high tide arrived and later the promenade was quiet except for the barking of a dog. From out in the bay you could see lights coming on in the window
s of Rothesay, the main town on the Isle of Bute. Inside the rooms there were shadows moving and the shadows were blue from the televisions. It had been a rough winter. First the swimming baths were closed down and then a fire destroyed the railway station at Wemyss Bay. In January, the winds got up to seventy miles per hour, interrupting ferry services to the islands, and then Rothesay’s assistant harbourmaster died, and then Mr McGettigan the butcher died. Two elderly men in blue blazers were standing along from the harbour talking about these and other matters, one man smoking a pipe and the other a roll-up, leaning against the sea-railing, the water lapping on the pebbles beneath them, the gulls overhead.

  ‘Good chips depends on getting a hold of the best tatties‚’ one said. ‘It’s the tatties that make the difference. They used to have them all the time. Nowadays, the chip shops are buying in rubbish tatties that should never have been planted in the first place.’

  ‘Aye‚’ said the other. ‘You need Ayrshires or Maris Pipers. This lot are using spuds you wouldn’t feed to the pigs.’

  ‘And the state of the lard …’

  ‘Aye, the lard. Thick wi’ crumbs and decrepit wi’ use. Terrible mess. I wouldny go near their chips, no, I wouldny thank you for them.’

  ‘Lard. You wouldny feed it to the pigs.’

  ‘A good poke a chips, Wully. They wouldny know them if they came up and took a bite oot their arse.’

  ‘Oh aye. Don’t get me started. The fish they’re using …’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘They’re lettin the fish lie half the week. You need to put a fish straight into the fryer – fresh as you like, nae bother.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘A good bit of fish for your tea, Wully. Oh aye. There’s plenty of them oot there swimming aboot.’

  ‘Well, good luck to them. The cafés will sell a fair few fish suppers come the morra morn. The world and its neighbour’ll be oot for the Jubilee the morra.’

  ‘Right enough. I dare say there’ll be drink.’

  ‘Oh, there’ll be drink all right.’

  They paused a moment.

  ‘They were few and far between‚’ said the first man, ‘but I’ll tell you, Wully, the best chips ever seen on this island was during the war.’ The men fell quiet at that, they looked over the water, and a dog came past barking and chasing seagulls along the promenade. Not for a long time had an evening on the island been so warm and so still.

  *

  Maria Tambini lived at 120 Victoria Street. The family café and chip shop was downstairs, its front window filled with giant boxes of chocolates covered in reproduction Renoirs; also, here and there in the window, on satin platforms, were piles of rock that said ‘Rothesay’. No matter where you broke it, that’s what it said inside: ‘Rothesay’. Her mother spread Maria’s hair on the pillow and combed it one last time before closing the window to keep out the night. Just a minute before, she had been sitting on the edge of the bed, a silver spoon glinting in her hand, as she fed Maria from a tin of Ambrosia Creamed Rice.

  ‘There‚’ Rosa said. ‘Go to sleep now. Nothing will happen.’

  ‘Tomorrow‚’ said the girl. Mrs Tambini straightened the edge of the Continental quilt and wiped the mirror with a yellow duster.

  ‘It will all be great‚’ she said, thinking of things she still had to do. ‘Try to keep your head out the quilt, it’s nicer for your face.’

  Maria closed her eyes. She had never known her father, and his name was never mentioned in the house, but she knew he lived somewhere in America. Sometimes, in the moments just before falling asleep, she would imagine his smiling face under the sun. All her life he remained just that: a picture in her head that appeared in the dark before sleep.

  Her mother went from the room and stood for a while at the top of the stairs. Through the open window in the bathroom she could hear Frances Bone, the woman who lived at the top of the next stairwell over, listening to the shipping forecast. Mrs Bone listened to the forecast every night and often in the day too, if she caught it. Standing there, Rosa admitted to herself that it was not so annoying as she often made out: she actually liked the sound of the words coming from the radio – ‘Forties, Cromarty, southeast, veering south or southwest 4 or 5, occasionally 6. Rain then showers, moderate or good’ – and after Maria was asleep she stood there and listened.

  People were laughing down in the shop and Rosa wished someone would go and bring that dog inside. She caught the look of the Firth of Clyde through the glass over the front door. For a second the sea and the distant lights were for Rosa alone. She remembered she needed Hoover bags, and passing over the last stairs she thought of an old song belonging to her father. She remembered her father most clearly when she thought of those old Italian songs he sang, and at the same time, without much fuss or grief, she thought of him coughing blood in the hours before he died.

  Giovanni was slapping fish in a tray of batter and then laying them in the fryer. He caught himself in the silver top and immediately thought about his hair; it had always been the way with Giovanni: several times an hour he would go into the backshop and take a comb through his black hair. When he smiled and showed his good teeth, the women at the tables would look up and in that moment some would consider whether they hated or pitied their husbands. Giovanni rattled a basket of chips in the fryer and went through the back with a sort of swagger.

  Rosa was scouring the top of the freezer with pink detergent paste. She looked over her shoulder as Giovanni came through, and she tutted. ‘This place is pure black so it is‚’ she said, scrubbing now in circles, her head down, the paste going under her fingernails. ‘I work myself to the bone in here to keep this place clean and nobody else seems to bother their arse. It’s bloody manky so it is. Why people don’t clean after theirselves I don’t know.’

  She paused. Mention of the efforts she made in life always caused tears to come into her eyes.

  ‘All we need now is a visit from the men, that would just suit you all fine to sit there and for the men to come in and see all this. Hell slap it into you, I say. I try my best and I just get it all thrown back at me. There’s no a bugger gives a shite. I’d be as well talking to the wall. If the men come and shut down this café for dirt then hell slap it into you. I could run a mile so I could. I could just put on my coat and run a mile.’

  Giovanni moved the peelings from the big sink and ran the cold water over his hands. When he’d dried them he went to put his hand on Rosa’s shoulder but she pulled away. ‘See what I mean‚’ she said, picking up the dish-towel. ‘Everything’s just left lying about for me to pick up.’ But when Giovanni turned to go back into the shop she was shaking as she stood at the sink and she put her arm behind her and stopped him. She turned and buried her head in his chest and he sighed. ‘Come on Rosa‚’ he said. ‘You’re just tired. There’s that much on your mind.’

  Rosa cried so often and so predictably that no one really noticed she was crying. Her eyes were always red. People seldom asked what was wrong or if they could help; she was the type, they said, who would cry at the drop of a hat. For all the years they’d known her she had been in a state of moderate distress. She cried eating her dinner and running a bath. She cried watching television. She cried at her work and even in her sleep.

  When Giovanni leant back, Rosa pressed the dish-towel against her eyes in a familiar way, then put her mouth on his chin and let her lips settle and breathed with her mouth open and ran her tongue along the bristles. Then she drew her bleachy fingers down his jawline and suddenly dug her nails into him. A line of blood ran from his chin onto his white coat. He flinched a little, made no noise, but in his eyes, staring down, anger had taken him miles away. ‘Rosa‚’ he said, lifting the towel and wiping his chin, ‘I am fucking tired in here. I’m so tired of this, even if you’re not. I don’t know what the fuck’s the matter with you.’

  Just in from a meeting of the Scottish Friendly Assurance Society at the Glenburn Hotel, some customers were waiting fo
r suppers at one of the tables. Giovanni went back and began lifting fish out the fryer and organising plates; he juggled a tub of salt and a lemonade-bottle full of vinegar. Meanwhile Rosa came through and took the duster from her pocket and climbed on a chair to clean the trays that held the cigarettes. After that she got a damp cloth and did the sweetie jars. She was quite composed and seemed quickly to lose herself in the wiping and cleaning.

  There was laughter at the tables as the customers ate their fish suppers and pie suppers, their single black puddings, half-pizzas with a pickled onion. George Samson, the oldest man on the island, who drove a turquoise three-wheeler car, sat at one of the tables reading a story from The Buteman. He occasionally shook his head and licked his thumb. ‘“Although it might seem rather early in the season‚’” he read, ‘“a swarm of bees invaded a house in Castle Street, Rothesay, at the weekend and the police had to be called in to deal with it. A swarm – whether the same or another one – was seen over Castle Street on Tuesday afternoon and appeared to come to rest at the gable walls of Messrs Bonaccorsi and Humphrey’s Store Lane building, formerly the De Luxe Cinema.’”

  George Samson put down the paper and took a dud lighter to his roll-up. Giovanni smiled over. ‘They say you’ll be lighting the bonfire for the Jubilee tomorrow, George.’

  ‘Aye‚’ said George, coming up to the counter to pay for his tea, ‘the Marquis of Bute is otherwise detained – did you hear that, detained – it seems, at a very posh do in the grounds of Holyrood Palace.’ He bowed his head as if the matter was now clear. ‘So I suppose you’d better move your arse and give me a box of Swan Vestas‚’ he said.

  2

  Jubilee

  The next day the tables for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Party were end-to-end down Victoria Street, from the Esplanade Hotel to the doors of the Bute Amusements, and each table was decked in Union Jacks and spread with cut sandwiches, hats on paper plates, sweets of all kinds. The glossy jellies lay there in mounds, and dozens of children sat waiting for the order and the gun salute. Overnight a battleship had arrived in the bay. You could see its long strings of bunting fluttering out there, and the ship’s radar turning in the heat.