Personality Read online

  ‘I can’t believe it, that will be you soon, Maria,’ said Rosa coming in with the Hoover. ‘Don’t bite your nails.’

  ‘Oh mum,’ said Maria, ‘what will I wear?’

  ‘Mrs Gaskell the agent,’ said Rosa, ‘remember she came to Largs to see you the other week? We went to Nardini’s?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Well London Weekend Television gave her your tape and that’s why she came up. We signed the paper. You’re going to stay with her and her husband in London for a wee while. She’s talking to a stage school. She’s got people working out a costume and everything.’

  ‘Oh mum,’ said Maria.

  ‘I know, soon we won’t know you.’ The credits were rolling on the television and the rain was driving against the living-room window. ‘Mrs Gaskell said the show is just the beginning. She said people who don’t win can still make it if they’re as good as you.’

  Maria was wide-eyed. She put her arms around Rosa’s neck. ‘Do you think I will get to be on the programme for real? Will you all watch me?’

  ‘Yes. We hope so.’

  Maria pressed her cheek against her mother’s and giggled.

  ‘Pyjamas,’ said Rosa.

  Maria jumped up and made for the door. On the way she grabbed the Hoover. She pressed the release button with her foot and freed the arm, and then, beaming, she sang the first few lines of a song, ‘Rockaby’. The thing about Maria was that she always sang at full pelt; even when she was nine or ten she had all that power in her voice; it seemed to rear up from nowhere in her tiny frame wherever she was. Even for thirteen she was small, but her singing voice never was.

  Rockaby your baby with a Dixie melody

  When you croon, croon a tune

  From the heart of Dixie.

  Rosa turned and plumped the cushions on the sofa and smirked with pleasure towards the dusky window. ‘You’re off your head,’ she said to Maria and then said the same to the empty room. When Maria had gone upstairs her mother stared at the television screen for ages without blinking.

  *

  As Dr Jagannadham never tired of telling his patients, the range of the temperature on Bute is narrower than in any other place in Scotland; the hydros and spas so favoured by earlier holidaymakers had honoured the fact, and people travelled on steamers to enjoy the soft air and to eat ices. Once it was called the Montpellier of the North. There are palm trees on the seafront, and, though the people have gone, though the seafront is quiet, a stream of soft air still comes down from the lochs.

  Maria often kept her window open at night. She lay on top of her quilt with a record down low on the dansette. Mrs Bone was going deaf and was playing the shipping forecast louder and louder; you could hear it at all hours through the wall. When Maria had been in bed for ages and she heard those strange words – Dogger, German Bight – she knew it had to be around one o’clock. Lying in her bed, the radio’s London voice coming through the wall, the lights of Ardbeg glowing orange, her imagination would dance on the window-ledge, and she clenched her fists as she thought of different singers and the way they sang. She said her prayers, often more than once over the course of the night, and would open her fist to find sugar-lumps she’d stolen from one of the tables in the café, and she’d eat them.

  She had thought the same things at night for as long as she could remember. She imagined there was a camera way out there. It had wings and she knew it was looking for her. It took photographs as it flew overhead but really what it wanted was her. It came from Glasgow and tore down the River Clyde. It passed hotels and shipyards and the Erskine Bridge and Dumbarton Rock. It came low out of the mouth of the Clyde and then skirted the tops of the churches and the new computer factories at Greenock. It almost skipped over the water of the Firth of Clyde to Dunoon. It rose over the roofs of the houses there and skirted the cinema, then plunged sharply into Innellan and past the craft shops and over the Cowal Hills. The camera could see in the dark. It took pictures of Cumbrae in the distance. Then it swept in low over the sea, clicking all the while: a fishing boat out in the bay trailing foam and seagulls. Now the lights of Rothesay were obvious and the camera raced ahead. It passed over the pebbles on the narrow beach. It passed over the promenade and the putting green. It crossed Victoria Street above the cars and then the strange camera-bird stopped and hovered at Maria’s window. It just hovered there. She created a look on her face and turned her head on the pillow once again to the open window.

  Maria knew the boards that squeaked on the landing; she stepped over them and carefully began to descend the stairs. Part of the way down she noticed a strange blue light coming through the window over the front door. It was very blue and fell on the staircase; it made her feel alone and bright in the dark. A trace of the blue light was picked up by the gloss-painted banister, yet looking up at the wall she saw the light was hopelessly faint, though it began to illuminate a photograph hanging there, an old one of granny Lucia and dead Mario. She leaned in closer to look at their faces. They were barely smiling. Lucia wore a ruffled blouse and her dimpled face was pretty. Grandad Mario had sticky-up hair. The photograph was in a round frame and at the bottom it said ‘Lucca’.

  Maria walked to the kitchen at the back of the café. A pile of newspapers sat on the table, fish-and-chip paper; she put her hand on top of the pile and noticed how small her hand was and how cold the papers. The headline said, ‘Heart Broken: Maria Callas Died Yesterday of a Broken Heart’. Bending the papers back she found one for Friday 19 August 1977: ‘The Heartbreak Farewell: Thousands Turn Out to Bury Elvis’.

  She stood in her nightie and felt sleepy. The kitchen was dark but when she felt the top of the fridge with her fingers she found the grooves Giovanni’s cigarettes had burned into the plastic rim. He was always balancing cigarettes there when he was peeling potatoes or stirring the broth. She opened the fridge door. Yellow light beamed out. She sat on the linoleum with her knees pulled up and enjoyed the light that flooded from the fridge. Inside it was white and the brightness went on for ever.

  She reached forward with a finger and touched the cold glass of a milk bottle. There was a plate with butter on it; she drew two fingers over the top and brought them to her mouth. She tasted the salt and then leaned back on her hands, looking at the chicken and lettuces and tins of peas that were stored in the fridge for no good reason. She took out a cold egg and licked the shell.

  The light from the open fridge was fantastic. Maria spoke a few words to the audience under her breath.

  13

  Alfredo

  One of the first things I remember is my mother drawing back the red blanket on my bed and lifting me out. She said I always spoke of a bad dream, the same dream over and over: a bird had come in the night and was flicking my lips with the feathers of its tail. My mother said there was no bird on the island to do such a thing as that, but I remember waking up and thinking the bird was real.

  She was always there when I opened my eyes. My mother would stand at the end of the bed with a bottle or a towel for me. Rosa and I are twins, but years ago my mother would never leave us by ourselves in a room. If we sat on the stairs or lay on the landing she would sit beside us. Before I went up to the Academy there wasn’t a day I can think of when my mother wasn’t there: she watched over us; all the time she watched over us, and when it was time to say goodnight my father would have to come and take her from the room.

  She had no rings on her fingers. Not even a wedding ring. As time passed my father would say things out of the blue. He just spoke up and then went quiet again. Once he had a few bottles of beer and he told me –I was about twenty then – that my mother had given up her rings for the Fascists. At one time, he said, she was involved with St Peter’s Italian Church in London – the church supported the Fascists in the 1930s and my mother was involved. She went there for the Fiornata delle Fedi, when Italian women gave their rings. ‘It is our job,’ my mother said, much later, speaking of other matters, ‘to make people believe thing
s are possible. Do you know that? The power of belief. You have it, Alfredo. We all do.’

  My father wasn’t good-looking and he just worked in the icecream parlour and never said much. She adores him very much now he is gone, but I remember my mother, the way she looked at him, the disappointment on her face when he spoke to her of things he didn’t understand. He told me she had loved him for a night in Lucca. He could always remember the evening and the look of the town from the walls. She did love him that night he said, and afterwards she merely spoke well of him to others. But all these years in Scotland she mostly lived alone in her own head. My father said she should have married Beniamino Gigli.

  My mother can’t tell the truth. She spends her days making up stories about the past. Speaks of a time she never really lived through, or not in the way she claims. She knows I know. She always said my face was a clock. ‘You’re neither use nor ornament, Alfredo,’ she’d say back then, ‘but your face is a clock. You better buck your ideas up, Alfredo, or you’ll spend your days just ticking away up there on the shelf.’ These were my mother’s words to me. I suppose I have disappointed her as my father did, but even the unblessed have their blessings. She knows I know her true story and will guard her against it.

  In the chapel the other day she told me a suitcase had come on the ferry and she hadn’t opened it. An old suitcase. It might be a lie. I wouldn’t put it past her to make up such a lie. But there was pain in her voice as she spoke in the church. She thinks it all matters now and it doesn’t matter, except that the rest of them get it into their heads that she’s punishing them. Not Maria though. She looks at our lovely Maria and she sees a wee bit of the Gigli magic – she hears music and she hears applause. When she looks at Maria she thinks everything was for a purpose.

  ‘You gave me a fright.’

  My mother falls asleep sometimes when I’m doing her hair. I put down the scissors and comb and feel the shape of her head and look into the mirror standing on the sideboard against the wall opposite. I run my fingers over her head and can hardly believe the hardness of her skull, and yet it’s fragile and her shoulders slope away so weak underneath. She continues to sleep in her chair. My fingers travel over my mother’s scalp and I put the palm of my hand on her forehead. I say to myself: this is where she lives; this is where my mother lives her life, and where she knows more than she admits.

  ‘You gave me a fright,’ she says. My hands are on my mother’s head and my fingers are meshed in her hair and I know it must seem to her an affectionate thing to be caught doing. And that is true also. She peers into the mirror and I begin to tease the curls and look back at her. ‘You’ve always been good at making people look nice,’ she says.

  My mother told us that famous people are different from other people. ‘They glow in the dark,’ she said. It was no ordinary life she wanted for us: Sofia, so I gather, was meant to sing for the world and live larger. In the end she didn’t get to live larger or even to live at all. She died, didn’t she, mammo? Holy Jesus and Mary the Mother of God and all the Saints. She didn’t sing for all the world, mammo, did she now? My wee sister didn’t do that. She heard your stories of Mr Gigli. She sang at the end of the pier down there. But no, no, Sofia, bless her soul. She drowned, mammo. She drowned on a ship filled with men. How was that, mammo? How did a wee lassie of nine get to be on that boat?

  Make a straight way for the Lord. The Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. All my life I have kept watch for openness and love. We can live, mammo, with our disasters, is that not right and is that not true? You smiled from your seat when I was only ten and reading from John’s Gospel. My hair was wetted with water and slicked down. ‘Take all this out of here and stop turning my Father’s house into a market. Then his disciples remembered the words of scripture, words which confirm the faith of the son: “Zeal for your house will devour me.”’ Jesus never needed evidence about any man’s life mammo. You know that. He could tell what a man had in him. Be at peace with yourself. Our secrets are nothing much. Make a straight way for the Lord.

  My father’s café was open every day of the year except Christmas Day. He worked into the night: peeling potatoes, talking to himself, sweeping up, frying, mixing, forever working to hold on to the life he had made. He never went on holiday my father and he never missed a delivery. A clean white overall every day. He came from La Spezia with a hundred pounds and two pairs of shoes. My mother was much more interested in the world than my father. It wasn’t just the politics: she wanted to play a larger part in everything, in the daily affairs of Rothesay and in the café, and, just as much, in her husband’s thoughts. My father’s greatest extravagance was always his devotion to my mother; he forgave her everything. He silenced himself on her behalf. Glad to be alive, my father. Glad to have survived.

  The shop was nice then. There was no Formica: it was porcelain barrels and glass sweet jars in those days. Competition came from Vittorio Gazzi’s West End Café and Coia’s Fish and Chips. But they all got along. My father had sweets and chocolates that people had never heard of. They would queue up to taste the new things: twisted sugars, printed rock. My father was Italian to the ends of his fingertips, but he loved Scotland, he thought the country had been good to him, and he had a gift for inventing comestibles that chimed with Scotland. Nobody had a bad time at Mario’s café in Rothesay. Ice drinks. Music. Give them the good food and the nice time and they come back, my father said. They always come back. The people love it here.

  God bless you where you are.

  My father would stand at the door of his café and feel the sea breeze. ‘It will be a busy day today,’ he said. ‘You smile on a day like today. The weather it is so beautiful and the hills they are beautiful, Alfredo. Come and breathe all the good air before you work. Business is good, Alfredo, and soon you will make money over the road. People want to be having the nice hair and the smart cut. You are a clever man. Have to smile on a day like today, Alfredo.’

  God bless you where you are, Mario.

  In those days Rothesay was popular and the excursion steamers brought more customers than you could serve; he fought not to turn them away. The promenade was full of people. Men would go into the water there with their trousers rolled up and children would shout their heads off running about on the putting green. For years we rushed back and forth to the café tables with ices and pies and plates of chips. Giant glasses of ginger. That was before the island went quiet, before the days of jet engines, Thomson Holidays and Lloret de Mar.

  We wanted to be famous pop singers, so we did. We wanted to be actors with champagne and the world at our feet. My father’s café was a meeting place in the 1950s; even when I wasn’t working there I’d go with my friends and smoke cigarettes and listen all night to the jukebox. For a while I was in charge of the jukebox. We had good shoes and suits. Nothing but the best. All the Italian boys at Mario’s – there we were, the wind at our back, and thinking of the big break that was sure to come, of being the new Victor Spinetti, the new Dean Martin. My father put pictures of the great modern Italians around the walls of the café. There was blue neon running round the window and it shone at night time. If you were out in the bay it was the first thing you saw.

  Mario’s café. We always thought it would be one of the Italian men who would make it. It would be me, singing or driving a big car, or it would be Eduardo Gazzi, Eduardo down the road, whose father had made ceramic figurines in Manchester before coming to Bute and opening the café. Eduardo, bright, smart, was becoming a sculptor and would surely light up the world soon enough. One of us would be famous like Frank Sinatra. But soon we just worked and some had families and we forgot. Rosa didn’t forget though and neither did my mother. Right up to today – this very second – they want the whole world to listen.

  My father always combed his hair at the mirror in the back shop and he covered his grey with black dyeing cream. I used to buy it for him in Glasgow at Salon Services: he would take the box and put his finger to his
smiling lips saying sshh. I never once heard my father say the word Mussolini. The man was never mentioned in the house or in the shop, only sometimes you’d hear my father tell my mother to be quiet, usually when she tried to speak about some terrible family on the island or some old event. He would tell her to stop. Somehow my parents’ experience of the war coloured every day of our lives. But it wasn’t mentioned, no, it wasn’t mentioned in front of us.

  I was upstairs in their house one day. In my mother and father’s bedroom I was looking for a needle and thread. (She always stuck used needles into the wallpaper. It was the only way to keep them from getting lost, she said.) On my father’s side of the bed the pillows were cloudy. She was always washing them, but they were cloudy still, the black hair cream coming off in the night and staining the fabric. I tell you something about families, always there are things never spoken of and never mentioned, like my father’s head turning on the pillow slips and leaving them dark, and my mother, every once in a while, taking them away to be washed.

  Mussolini was a dead word, banned. But, yes, in the last few days of my father’s life he finally did speak about it. Il Duce. With some clarity at the end he spoke of the Fasci. In June 1940 people my father and mother had known for years came running down the seafront smashing the windows of the Italian cafés and raising their voices. A group of men took all the records from the cafés and broke them one by one on the front step. My father remembered the black vinyl lying smashed on the pavement. Carlo Buti. Caruso. Beniamino Gigli. He could see them as he spoke. A torn label on a record, ‘Porta un Bacione a Firenze’, lay on the pavement and was picked up by the wind and blown to the Firth of Clyde.

  Sofia was the only child then. When the smashing of the cafés began my father just sat in the parlour with my mother and my sister and he said a prayer and kept still. ‘Not until you’ve lived through something like that can you know what the world is all about,’ he said to me. ‘All the jars were smashed. Down there in the old café the floor was thick with sweets. All kinds of sweets and the bottles were broken. Alfredo, it was a very bad day to see all the good things lying on the floor. Your mother shouted out the window but I took her back from there. It was the only time I had to slap your mother, Alfredo, and it made me vomit at the sink to be the one to do that.’