Behind the Scenes at the Museum (16 page)

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Authors: Kate Atkinson

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The baby had only been dead an hour but already it seemed to have shrivelled into a deflated thing, yet Rachel nursed her corpse child as if it were still alive. ‘Shall I run and get t’parson?’ Lawrence offered after they’d sat in troubled and guilty silence for a long age. noone had even stirred to put a log on the fire.
‘I’ll go,’ Ada volunteered quickly, and slipped and slid across the icy yard in her clogs and stumbled along the track to the village, praying for forgiveness all the way for although he had died of a seizure without a chickenpox spot in sight, there was no doubt in Ada’s mind that Samuel had been murdered by her wishes.
Diphtheria
. She could hear the word being whispered outside the door. It was a pretty word –
diphtheria
, like a girl’s name. Rachel had sent for old Dr Simpson, who smiled at Ada from behind his mutton-chop whiskers and looked down her throat and said, ‘A-ha, I see, a-ha,’ when he smelt the dreadful odour of her breath and saw, across her throat, the membrane that looked like chamois leather. Then Dr Simpson held her hand and said, ‘We’ll soon have you running around again, Ada,’ and thought how pretty the child was, just like her mother.
When he left the room Ada could hear snatches of his conversation with Rachel, ‘You must keep the other children away from her . . . a rapid deterioration . . . in cases like this one . . . be over.’ Rachel said something shrill but Ada couldn’t make out the words, then there were footsteps going down the stairs and silence broken only by the tick-tocking of her mother’s mantel-clock which she’d asked to have in the room and which Rachel, numb and penitent in the face of death, had agreed to. After a minute or two, Ada heard the hooves of Dr Simpson’s big bay in the yard below. As he rode off into the glimmering winter light he found himself thinking about Alice Barker’s curls, a thought which kept him happy until the bay shied at a hare as they went past the home farm and he nearly lost his seat. Ada listened as the clip-clopping grew fainter and fainter and then the snow began to fall.
Ada could hear the rattling sound in her throat, which may as well have been her death rattle, for she knew that when you heard that it meant you weren’t going to get better. The sister of a schoolfriend had died of diphtheria last winter so she knew what happened. Death wasn’t such a dreadful thing when you got close to it. The church bells were ringing a muffled peal as if they knew she was coming, although really it was for a local lord who had died a few days ago and was being buried today. Christmas had come and gone without the sick-room even knowing about it. The cold weather that had helped to carry off the infant Samuel had intensified and the ground was as hard as iron and cold as lead. They had dug his grave but they would have to use picks to break the ground for Ada.
There had been a blizzard, ‘A white over,’ Rachel said, trying to get her to drink barley water but her throat hurt too much to swallow. The light coming through the window was dazzling, reflected off the snow, and it seemed to shiver and wave like water. Albert and Lillian and Nell were playing in the snow outside and their high voices broke the deep silence that snow brings.

It began to snow again, lightly at first, but gradually the flakes got bigger and bigger until they were like the downy feathers off the breasts of soft birds, or angels’ wings. Ada was standing outside, her bare feet in the crisp, sugary snow and only her white shift on, but she wasn’t cold. She looked around to see where the little ones were but there was no sign of them. When she looked at the trees she could see that the snow-heavy branches were full of white birds and even as she looked at them they all rose in the air at once, with a great
shoosh shoosh
of wings, dislodging feathers that drifted and turned into big, lazy snowflakes. Ada watched them in the air, snowflakes melting on the cheeks of her upturned face. The snowy flock wheeled round and flew back overhead, so that Ada could hear their wings beating through the air and from somewhere far off the noise of muffled bells and, nearer, the tick-tock of her mother’s clock and the sound of Dr Simpson’s big bay horse, trotting across the yard.

Then the birds described great descending circles in the air as they came down towards her and the next moment without her knowing how it happened she was flying with them towards a bright Arctic sun and there at the heart of it was her mother, her arms outstretched to welcome her.

Lawrence disappeared two years later, slipping out of the house one summer morning to run away to sea. Tom was hysterical, convinced that his brother had been removed by some supernatural force. ‘Tha daft bugger,’ Frederick said, cuffing him on the side of the head. Tom, however, continued to believe that Lawrence had been spirited away into thin air, infecting the younger children with the idea so that for ever afterwards when they remembered Lawrence they remembered him as a mystery, for they never heard from him again, although he did try to write but the family had moved on by then. He landed up in Hull, his shoes worn out and his stomach shrunk to nothing, and he was standing in the middle of the Land of Green Ginger wondering what kind of a place it was to have streets called names like that when an old sailor took pity on him and took him aboard his tramp steamer. For the next two years Lawrence wandered up and down the east coast and across the North Sea to Holland and Germany before taking a job as a stoker on a boat bound for South America. He stayed on that far-flung continent for some fifteen years before home-sickness drove him back to England. By the time he reached home waters the Great War had begun. Home itself was a place he never reached though, as he was blown up in the North Sea by a German mine just as the English coast was sighted.
A year later, one freezing February night, Frederick died of hypothermia, outside his own cottage door – too drunk to reach up to the latch to let himself in. Rachel decided that she’d had enough of country living after this and decamped back to urban civilization. For preference she would have gone back to the coast but she was offered a position as a cook in York by the vicar’s sister-in-law and thought she’d be a fool not to take it. First they rented rooms in a slum in Walmgate, but once she’d got the family back on its feet, they had a decent terrace in the Groves. The children went to church, had clean handkerchiefs, had lost their broad accents and had almost forgotten about the country.
When Nell came back from her Lake District honeymoon and discovered that Rachel was dead and buried (‘I saw no sense in spoiling your honeymoon by telling you,’ Lillian said reasonably), Lillian had already thrown out most of her things, but not the silver locket which she knew had belonged to their mother because in the one and only known photograph of her, which their brother Tom had, the locket was clearly visible. Lillian gave the locket to Nell because, she said, ‘You were just the baby, she never even held you,’ and they both wept over the empty locket and other things too. They didn’t know, of course, that even as they sat together in the parlour in Lowther Street, crying over the locket, their mother was screaming and throwing a vase across a bedroom in Whitby, a vase which had the misfortune to hit Monsieur Jean-Paul Armand square on the temple so that a maid had to be sent for to bring hot water and cold compresses for the huge bruise, growing like a flower on his head.
CHAPTER FIVE
1958
Interlude
B
UNTY AND THE PARROT WENT MISSING ON THE SAME
night and it was only later when they were both safely returned that we realized this was a coincidence and that Bunty had not run away with the Parrot. Or, for that matter, the Parrot hadn’t run away with our mother, an idea firmly lodged in my own mind because Patricia had recently been reading the
Tales of a Thousand and One Nights
to me and I imagined the Parrot flying through the skies with Bunty hanging grimly, like Sinbad, onto one of its scaly, reptilian legs. The extreme unlikelihood of the Parrot being the only thing that Bunty would choose to take with her when she ran away from home did not, somehow, occur to our childish minds.
It takes us some time to realize that Bunty is missing at all. She is our living alarm-clock and when she doesn’t go off we all simply sleep on. We don’t wake in fact until a quarter-past nine when a customer, anxious for his Sherley’s conditioners, bangs loudly on the Shop door below, waking all the Pets, who have also overslept, and a furious Patricia who hates being late for anything (Patricia is the kind of girl who arrives at school before the caretaker). The information trickles down the house – Patricia wakes Gillian, Gillian wakes me – by bouncing on top of my sleeping body and screaming that I’ve purloined her Rosebud doll, Denise (Denise has ousted a dejected Sooty and Sweep from her affections), and I wake George by running into the parental bedroom in hysterical tears, displaying the rapidly blooming bruise on my cheek where Gillian’s foot has caught me. This is all too much for George who lurches out of bed in a daze, picks up the clock by the side of the bed, stares at it uncomprehendingly, stares at the empty space on the other side of the double bed where Bunty should be and then flops back into bed and mutters, ‘Go and find your mother.’

Not such an easy task, as it turns out. We all three of us play ‘Hunt the Mother’ for at least half an hour before returning to George to admit our hopeless ineptitude at this particular game. ‘What do you mean you can’t find her?’ He is by this time up and shaving with his electric razor while standing guard at the toaster. Occasionally the Shop bell clangs and he has to go through and serve. Although he has his trousers on, he is still in his vest and pyjama jacket and we can hear the usual sophisticated level of Shop humour being exchanged, ‘Overslept then, Mr Lennox? Ha, ha, ha.’ ‘Well, well, George – find something to keep you in bed, then? Ha, ha, ha.’ This last being the unmistakable smutty East London of Walter, buying a cuttlefish for his mother’s budgie. Even this purchase is transformed into an occasion for a lewd joke, but George it appears is in no laughing mood.

‘How’s Doreen?’ Walter asks, making a peculiar gesture as if he was pushing up a large, invisible bosom. George mutters something dark about Bunty. ‘Lost the wife?’ Walter repeats incredulously, ‘You jammy bugger, mate!’ The expression on George’s face does not reveal jamminess as he casts a glance around the Shop – discovering two things almost simultaneously – an absence of Parrot and a presence of Ruby. ‘Get some clothes on!’ George says instantly as if I was performing a striptease rather than standing in nightdress and slippers forlornly holding aloft a piece of charred toast.

‘Little pitchers,’ Walter says, fingering one of his ears.

‘What’s a pitcher?’ I ask Patricia, who, back in the kitchen, is burning slice after slice of toast. ‘How the hell should I know,’ she says viciously and pushes her hair back from her head before screaming in frustration at the toaster. Gillian fetches a box of cornflakes from the cupboard and pours herself a bowl. ‘
Bambi
,’ she says, sprinkling two huge spoonfuls of sugar on her flakes, ‘
Snow White, Cinderella
– they’re pictures.’
The Shop bell announces Walter’s departure and George storms back into the kitchen, ‘Where the bloody hell is she?’ he asks, looking wildly round at each one of us. ‘Perhaps she’s left a note,’ Patricia says, carefully aiming one of the blacker slices of toast at the waste bin. ‘A note?’ George repeats. He looks stunned. The idea of Bunty having left us, as opposed to having mislaid herself somewhere about the house, hasn’t occurred to him. ‘Yes, a note,’ Patricia says as she accurately lobs the toast into the bin (she’s a relentless goal attack in Queen Anne Grammar School’s Junior Netball team). ‘You know, a note.’

‘I know what a bloody note is,’ George says angrily and stomps out again. I sigh and reach for the cornflakes box. They spill everywhere but at least some go in the bowl. Patricia butters a piece of smouldering toast and bites into it with a certain grim enjoyment. We are eating standing up, leaning against whatever kitchen counter is available. This liberation from the dining-room tastes of furtive pleasures and we make quite a good breakfast of it in the end, enjoying not only the burnt toast and oversugared cornflakes but also some daring eggy-toast-fingers that we make in a joint effort around the frying-pan. This spirit of co-operation doesn’t extend to getting to school. Once we’ve eaten our leisurely breakfast Patricia packs her satchel and says, ‘Right, I’m off then.’

‘What about me?’ Gillian wails, quickly shoving the last piece of eggy-toast into her mouth. (Bunty usually accompanies Gillian and me on our long walk to primary school.)

‘What about you?’ Patricia asks in just the kind of belittling tone that’s guaranteed to drive Gillian mad. ‘How am
I
getting to school?’ Gillian shouts at her, jumping up and down (there’s no ‘us’ in this, I notice).

Patricia shrugs, ‘
I
don’t know,’ she says scathingly. ‘It’s nothing to do with me – anyway you’re nearly ten years old, surely you can get yourself to school?’ and with that slight on Gillian’s maturity she slings her satchel over her back and disappears. Gillian begins to boil over with indignation but returns to a seething simmer when Patricia suddenly reappears. ‘I’ll get my satchel,’ Gillian says hurriedly.

‘Don’t bother, I haven’t come back for
you
,’ Patricia says dismissively. ‘I forgot to write a note, that’s all.’ Patricia is writing a note too? ‘Are you running away as well, Patricia?’ I ask, horrified. ‘No, stupid,’ she snaps, ‘a note because I’m late.’ She tears a page from her French jotter and writes, in a perfect counterfeit of Bunty’s handwriting –
Dear Miss Everard, I’m sorry Patricia is late coming into school this morning, I’m afraid our dog was run over. Yours sincerely, Mrs G Lennox
.

‘What dog?’ Gillian asks – we are both hanging over Patricia’s shoulder watching her write. ‘We don’t have a dog.’

‘Yes we do, we’ve got loads of dogs,’ Patricia says, folding the note neatly into a square.

‘Yes, but they’re
Pets
,’ Gillian says, confused. ‘And one hasn’t been run over. Has it?’

‘
Gillian
,’ Patricia says, looking at Gillian in disbelief. ‘You lie
all the time
, so I don’t know why you’re getting so worked up.’ Gillian
is
getting worked up, her cheeks have gone that funny mottled-pink way – a bit like a trout – that they do when she’s about to have a tantrum. ‘I’m definitely off this time,’ Patricia says, ignoring her and then turning to me she says nicely, ‘I’ll see you tonight, Ruby,’ so I repay this favouritism by going to the Back Yard gate to wave goodbye to her, something Bunty never does. In the background I can hear a wail like an air-raid siren starting, ‘I want Mummy!’

Well, ‘I want doesn’t mean I get,’ as ‘Mummy’ never ceases from telling us. We never do get to school that day but spend our time well away from George, mostly in Gillian’s bedroom where she takes it upon herself to run an alternative school – all her pupils sitting on the floor while she sits on her bed. I am forced to cram myself into a desk with Denise. Gillian’s main duties seem to be handing out punishments and when I venture to complain that when Patricia used to play schools we had lessons, I am put in the corner for over an hour, only let out to go and forage for something to eat. Even then, I fail to make myself teacher’s pet as all I can find are a few cream crackers and half a Soreen malt loaf. Occasionally, George shouts up the stairs and asks us if we’re all right to which we shout down a resounding, ‘Yes!’ because we can’t imagine what he would do with us if we weren’t.

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