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tell myself it makes sense to change the plan, to start here at the top of the house and in the scene of greatest chaos and decay, but that’s not it. It’s the sight of the camp bed and a glimpse of the papers stuffed into the tea chests that make me admit that this is what was waiting all along.
    And maybe it should, but it does not surprise me that stuff from the
Turandot
summer is still here, though it doesn’t look deliberately kept, and certainly can’t have been cherished. On the morning after that unforgettable first night it must have been unbearable for him to see it: cuttings and scraps of paper and lists and sheets of music and props and bits of costume and the rest of it all over the empty house, so I guess he bundled it up and just stuffed it up here, maybe for my mother to collect later, which of course she never did. It doesn’t look as if anyone has touched any of it since. I wonder if he forgot about it. I can only hope so.
    I bring the tea chests down, scratching my shins on the way, and start them in no particular order—my eye caught first, I suppose, by the cutting from the
Burnhead & District Advertiser
on the top of one of them.

3
    I t was Wednesday and
Turandot
still raged from the music room. Fleur’s voice had deteriorated to a rasp and now she was singing along with Callas only in short bursts. It seemed to Lila that everything sung by one person to another in an opera was a complaint of some kind—too heartless, too cruel, too jealous, too beautiful, too young to die—and also a waste of breath. It was all supposed to be about love. But wasn’t it obvious that nothing would be settled before there was blood on the floor?
    And now an old man was singing:
             
    Abbi di me pietà!
    Non posso staccarmi da te!
             
    Lila had been put through enough books with titles such as
Opera Tales for Children
to know the
Turandot
story. It was Timur, the deposed and exiled king of Tartary, roaming disguised and unwanted somewhere through Act I, alone but for his loyal slave girl Liù. Have pity, he sings to his son, I can’t separate myself from you. Have pity. I cast myself moaning at your feet.
    She remembered. Timur has just come across his lost son, Prince Calaf, also exiled and in disguise. But joy is short-lived because no sooner are they reunited than Calaf glimpses the Princess Turandot, falls in love instantly and vows to solve the riddles that will win her in marriage. Timur begs him not to try.
    Lila sighed. The story was a fairy tale, full of people who were not very real, yet Timur’s frail plea to Calaf brought her own father to mind. Not that
I cast myself moaning at your feet
was the kind of thing Raymond would ordinarily come out with, but Timur sounded more tired than he ought to be and her father, too, cranked his voice into speech with difficulty, as if winding up words in a bucket from a brackish, underused well. By contrast her mother’s words were always waiting in her mouth, ready. Lila began to listen as though her father, no less deposed or exiled or royal for being a lawyer’s clerk rather than the king of Tartary, were across the hall on his knees in front of the Decca stereogram, beseeching her mint green nylon dressing-gowned mother to have pity on him. Casting aside his disguise of grey cycling cape, her wandering, exhausted father would beg:
             
    Pietà! Pietà! Non voler la mia morte!
    Pity! Pity! Do not wish my death!
             
    It wouldn’t work. Anything sung from the heart would sound out of place in 5 Seaview Villas; the house was too damp for heroics. It was one of a row of five built in the 1930s, between two wars. There were meant to be more of them; Seaview Villas were to have been the start of a new suburb—high-class, according to Raymond—between Burnhead and Monkton, but for some reason the others never got built. So the five stood detached and shabby along the road in plots too small for them,