Thursday, February 28, 2008

Chapter One (continued)

3.

Bella McAlpine stood in the doorway of the Belvedere Hotel and watched the lumpy black chimney of Bart O'Shaughnessy's hat n cart combo proceeding down Main Street towards her. The town of Scopas was T-shaped, like a steakbone, and the hotel stood at the middle of the horizontal and at the top of the vertical stroke, as though inviting horse and rider to gallop straight through its front door, up the staircase, and into the bridal suite -- an invitation which had been taken up by more than a few riders, and occasionally by an enthusiastic horse, travelling solo. This tended to elicit a mixed response from the residents. It was, as she had explained countless times to her husband, Gavin McAlpine, not a very comfortable place to stay. His retorts tended to follow a theme.

‘Stay? I dinnae gee a fuck if they stay, darlin, jist as lang as they pay. There's plenty mair puntirs whaur they come from; this country's fillin up quicker than a hure on a Setterday nicht.’

The Belvedere formed the centrepiece of the McAlpine's entertainment complex. The White Arms Saloon, Bella's especial domain, flanked it on its left, while the Gaiety Theater, Gavin's toy, sat to its right. Two doors connected each establishment with the lobby of the Belvedere, allowing each partner access to the other's realm. They could often be found whispering together in front of the hotel's aspidistra, splitting apart quickly and vanishing as you approached.

As Bart O'Shaughnessy approached she turned to read the sign Gavin had plastered on the Gaiety. Its pseudo-baroque lettering on cheap canary-yellow paper effortlessly hit the McAlpine high note of entrepeneurial delicacy:

‘MOZARTUs Et SOn FILS! LEGENDARy DOUBLe ACt FRESh FROm EUROPE! SPECIALLy IMPORTED!! LATESt TUNEs BLINDFOLD!! ONLy THREe YEARs OLD!!!’

That should get them out again as soon as it had got them in -- how he expected anyone to take that seriously for more than five minutes? It was obviously a dwarf. And Gavin had given them the bridal suite, which she had been saving for Sylvie Parker's engagement. She was confidently expecting this to follow shortly after Sylvie's mother had been informed who the bastard was who'd got her like that. Which she had been planning on revealing that very day.

Bella had been especially looking forward to explaining to Ma Parker the shameful occurrence had actually taken place in her own home on that same hot summer evening the old woman had been in the saloon, holding onto her full house like an enormous terrier whilst laying out Constancy Brown with a pint mug. It had turned out to be a big night for her in more ways than one. Bella McAlpine firmly believed in mixing business and gossip, and resented Gavin's interference in her schemes.

In fact, now her brain had focussed on these Mozarts, hadn't he paid Seth Blackspine good money to tune the Gaiety's piano? Maybe Gavin McAlpine didn't know it, but Seth, his favourite lackey, had been deaf in one ear for six years now, ever since that Hogmanay when Davie Agnew thought he saw the Duke of Cumberland crawling down the stairs. Seth Blackspine's eardrum had been just one of the innocent bystanders -- a wooden cupid over Bella's bar had contracted a bad case of peppershot acne on the same occasion. Sometimes she wondered if her husband had any business sense at all.

‘Evenin Bella, got the Deutschers' gear.’

‘Evenin Bart, you can take it on up to the Lavender Room.’

‘Uh, Gavin told me the Bridal Suite.’

‘Well they ain't married, are they? The Lavender Room and less lip about it.’

‘Uh, Gavin told me he wants them set up real purty.’

‘Well Gavin can just set up a bed on the stage of the Gaiety and get you and Seth to wear yore frilly negligees and sing carols. This is my hotel and they go in the Lavender Room!’

‘Uh, Gavin ain’t gonna like that...’

‘Open yore mouth any further and there'll be tooth-marks on the Deutschers' luggage. Gavin ain't gonna like that neither.’

Having reached the limits of his courage and the outskirts of Bella's patience at around the same time, Bart crumbled, and, with the ghost of a gesture towards the ghost of his forelock, he began heaving down box and bag with gusto. A small mountain formed by her large but lissome foot, which tapped gently, ominously.

‘Don't travel light, do they,’ she commented.

‘Well, none of these is heavy -- can't say what's in them,’ Bart answered, swinging down one box which hit the heap at an angle and burst open. A luxurious slow stream of papers was picked up as if on salvers and borne off down the street.

‘Shite and onions!’ declared Bart, a former Irishman.

‘Get after them, piss-for-brains!’ yelled Bella, hitching up her skirts and adding the erotic interest of generous pale calves to the pursuit.

Like Atalanta lapping a particularly unappealing suitor, she passed Bart after the bright flock of dismembered butterflies, the thin apple-peels of paper. She snatched them in screwed-up handfuls, as though she was carrying a white cabbage to the barber's. This establishment began emitting sploshes and a high thin note like the memory of a nightingale

‘My opera! My opera!’

A naked wet child emerged, wig jammed on half-askew, shrieking in German and grasping at the papers as they rose up to greet him, an insubstantial pack of hounds acknowledging the master of their hunt. He rounded on Bart as that worthy lurched up, gasping and grabbing futilely for the manuscripts as if trying to clutch up smoke.

‘Bum-face! Shitty whiskers! Bogie of the moon! My opera! My opera!’

A tall unhealthy-looking man appeared behind the child in a similar state of undress but clutching a towel to his loins. He saw Bella still frozen in an attitude of snatching and recoiled into the shop's shadows. His hiss slid forth:

‘Wolfgang! Get dressed! What opera is this? What are you talking about?’

‘It's my pretty opera, and shit-snot's gone and lost it!’

Leopold pushed past his son and ripped the paper cabbage from Bella's outstretched hand:

‘What is this? What is this?’ he murmured. ‘'The Haunting of Belgasguardo'? What is this?’

‘Oh it's a lovely story Papa,’ the child said hurriedly. ‘It's about the ghost of a poet who visits an Italian count to enquire about a woman he once met on the estate because he has written a sonnet to her from Limbo where the classical poets are and the nobleman looks everywhere then finds it is his own wife and then he...’

‘Be quiet Wolfgang, be quiet!’

‘But it's so charming Papa, he kills himself because they were lovers and she was supposed to have joined the poet in a suicide pact but her father stopped her and married her off to him and...’

‘Will you be quiet!!’ Leopold was shaking with annoyance and the cold of the coming evening, reading this new thing desperately, checking it for signs of originality, flickers of talent.

Meanwhile Bella was recoiling from her pose which, due to the height of the sidewalk, had brought her nose into close proximity to the younger Mozart's rosy genitalia. Thanks to the excitement of the occasion, the child's equipage had not been entirely quiescent, and though she was now amply convinced he was a real child, this small pointer to the contrary combined with the tenor of his conversation to nonplus her momentarily. This, an extraordinary event in Scopas's short history, meant she silently accepted Bart's paper offerings and passed them onto their creator. He, as though noticing her for the first time, bowed formally and thanked her in German.

Without taking her eyes off any aspect of the spectacle (this included that brainless beanpole Arthur miming convulsions through the shop window), she hooked one of Bart's ample nostrils with one sharp finger and said amiably:

‘Take the Mozarts' luggage to the Bridal Suite.’

At this Leopold became aware once more of his position. He bundled the child back into the barber's, rearranged his towel in toga fashion and, the opera clutched rigidly in one wet fist, addressed her:

‘You must be Mrs McAlpine. Your husband wrote to me indicating we were to have a suite of three rooms, one of which was to contain a piano for the personal use of my son. Mr O'Shaughnessy here...’ (Bart immediately vacated the ‘here’ position for something closer to ‘there’) ‘tells me these especial stipulations of mine are unlikely to be met. Yet I have here...uh, in my coat, a contract with your husband's signature upon it. What precisely is the case?’

Bella, having already drawn herself up to her full and formidable height, drew herself up some more. A merciless glance skelped the man's grey extremities and the tone of the justified hotelier rounded out her rich contralto.

‘I have a copy of this contract in my office. It mentions a suite and a room in which your...son can practice. It nowhere suggests these rooms have to be adjoining. Your son can practice in the theater among the other...performers. As to your room, it's been had by many a couple before you, and they've had no grounds for complaint.’

Safe in the shop, a young O'Shaughnessy whispered to a small Mozart: ‘That's cause they're too busy humpin!’ Momentarily linked by their mutual grasp of adult taboo, both boys guffawed.

‘If I have the word with your mother that I intend to have, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, the only thing you'll be humpin is buckets of water! I've seen you letchin over that simpleton of a girl when she gets her blouse wet. She oughta have her skirts tied at the ankle to stop snakes like you – and yore uncle – from slidin up em!’

‘Madam!’ Leopold exclaimed, recoiling from this last blast as Arthur vanished down a metaphoric plughole and Sarah gasped and Wolfgang, enthroned once more on the barber's chair, gave vent to a merry scale of giggles.

‘If it's a Madam you require, the whorehouse is on the left end of Pole Street. If it's my hotel you want to stay in, you'd better get off yore high horse and into some clothes.’

With this, Bella swept round in a volcanic flounce and marched back down the street to the mindless laughter of Sarah and the tiny clapping and ‘Brava!’s of Leopold's son, the composer.


4.

A slow movement of cutlery striking china filled the darkening dining-room. Forks flashed dully like distant lightning. There was half an hour till the performance, and Wolfgang's ears had been boxed for his refusing to finger the hotel's jangled piano. Gavin McAlpine had hurried through, puffing on an unpleasant stogie as if a portent of iron horses yet to come.

He was stockier than the soup they had been served by wall-eyed waitresses, and he was balding, equipped with a spade beard not quite sharp enough to cut through his accent. This was a Glaswegian close enough to Low German for Wolfgang to imitate it back to him. This had ice-breaking results, with McAlpine feeling able to deliver some home truths to Leopold Mozart about his position on the bill, with an inference as to the proximity of his son's talents to those of a performing troupe of pekingese. He had then stalked off, leaving Leopold marvelling at the degrees of familiarity and contempt the Scotch seem to feel will promote good relations, and Wolfgang yapping and attempting to consume his gravy by lavish lappings.

‘What a ridiculous little man! If only that Bergonese Count had settled in cash instead of...what was that thing?’

‘A gold barometer, Papa.’

‘...which no Jew would make a decent offer for unless we melted it down ourselves. As I say, we should've had sufficient funding for another English trip, instead of relying on one Hiram T. Schwartz.’

‘Papa, he was the only one to offer an advance.’

‘An advance to nowhere, as in checkmate. Well, you can revive that movement for bagpipes for Mr McAlpine's sake. Perhaps that will put him in a better temper. I'll transcribe it for piano tomorrow.’

‘Oh Papa! That was the most appalling piece!’ The child lolled back in his seat, waving a fork expansively. ‘I couldn't have done worse if I'd been scoring for a cat suffering from constriction of the urethra.’

‘You must take account of your audience, Wolfgang. This opera, for instance -- who will follow such extended arias? You need more recitative to get such a complicated story across. I'll write you it.’

‘You're welcome! Rectum-ative-a-tumty-tee! And the arias are not extended, they're exalted.’

‘Don't be arrogant. It's bad enough having to accept what amounts to charity from that charlatan -- free passage in exchange for twenty dates of his choosing – only to be passed on to another charlatan ten times worse…

McAlpine shouted from the door of the dining-room, ‘If that wee man's no oan the stage o my theatur in ten minutes you'll be sleepin in the airms o Jehovah the nicht, no my hotel!’

‘Bumpkins!’ whispered Leopold, gripping the sides of the table in an agony of placelessness.


5.

Scopas was settling into darkness in its customary haze of spirits and gunshots from the hills. Boots scuffed boards as gamblers shuffled between loans, and the bare feet of children slapped down like trout into streams. Horses broke wind as they shifted in the street, bobbing opalescent as gondolas tethered together. Lights blared from curtainless windows, and the profiles of the ramshackle shopfronts looked like so many bleary coxcombs raised to the enormity of the sky. Washes of blue contested on high with the first soft stabbings of the stars.

Arthur Marshall Courtney O'Shaughnessy was out the back of the barber's shop with Sarah the maid engaged in a serious business discussion.

‘Iffen you take me to the concert I'll let yuh see ma knees.’

‘Concert's fifty cents each and anyhow it's only Daisy Carmichael n some dawgs.’

‘Taint. It's that boy on his fiddle too. Maybe there'll be dancin.’

This was an important consideration. Last time there had been dancing he'd got his hand into the back of her dress ‘to let the air blow thru.’

‘Where'm I gonna get a dollar? I aint been paid nuthin for months.’

‘I knows where yore maw keeps her housekeepin. She's got four dollars saved.’

‘An when she's sees it's missin we'll get our asses lathered good.’

‘Not iffen you get tips from them foreigners all the time they're here. I hear they was pretty loose-handed with their cash. Anyrate the littlun is. I hear he gave Lettie Shumacher fifty cents just like that fur liftin up her dress.’

‘His paw won't let him get his hands on any cash, he's only some kid,’ said Arthur, mentally logging the amount for future reference. He'd no idea Belvedere maids were so...reasonable.

‘He got it for Lettie. Anyhow, he's smart -- I saw him puttin his hand in his paw's pocket while he was jawin with Mrs McAlpine. He put somethin up his wig.’

‘Wasn't that the dumbest thing you ever saw, him out there in the street with nuthin on but his wig.’

‘You wouldn't think it so dumb if it was me out here in the back with nuthin on but a hairband.’

Arthur blinked. He'd had no idea their voyage toward adulthood had advanced this far, let alone that Sarah's negotiating powers were up to the transition. There was a certain inescapable logic to her statements, and toadying to the Mozart boy for a week or so didn't seem too terrible a price to pay for...for...

The moon hung over them like the face of his Uncle Bart. a delicious scent seemed to creep over the scrubby garden, and suddenly that phrase was upon him again: ‘smooth fannies.’ The moonlight was caught in Sarah's eye and trickling in a cold lardy way down her neck which, he realised, was pretty darn smooth in itself. All boyish reason departed from him in that moment.

‘Where's the housekeepin kept?’