Behind the Scenes at the Museum (39 page)

Auntie Mabel has put on an unseasonable salad for our dinner and even the sight of the round lettuce leaves and pale icy green cucumber discs is enough to make you shiver and I say, ‘We had a tongue salad,’ to Dr Herzmark and laugh and tell her about Gillian tucking into the thick slice of cold tongue that Auntie Mabel has just carved – from an ox tongue that she has pressed herself especially for our visit. Gillian takes a big bite and, swallowing quickly (I think in a former life she died of starvation), she says to Bunty, ‘Why can’t we have this? I like it,’ and then watching Auntie Mabel carving another piece, adds, ‘What is it?’ Auntie Mabel smiles, ‘Tongue, Gillian.’

Gillian’s forehead creases in a little frown as she digests this information – both literally and otherwise – and she repeats the word, ‘Tongue,’ to herself and then ‘Tongue,’ again, feeling the word on her own tongue as it touches her palate, more uncertainly this time, before laying down her knife and fork and staring at half a tomato on her plate. Patricia laughs cruelly at the expression of discomfort on Gillian’s face and Pearl joins in even though she doesn’t know what Patricia’s laughing at. Pearl likes to laugh, she is all light and sunshine to my dark brooding. ‘That’s enough,’ Bunty says because the sound of laughter worries her, touching some deep, unhealed part of her soul. ‘You can play in the snow after dinner,’ George says. ‘We put your wellingtons in the boot.’

‘And make a big snowman?’ Pearl asks excitedly, and Uncle Tom laughs and says, ‘You can take some coal from the scuttle for his eyes.’

Bunty and Auntie Mabel are buttoning us into duffle-coats and scarves and mittens. Pearl and I have little woollen bonnets – mine is red, hers is blue – with white pom-poms on top. Pearl is so excited by all the snow that she paddles her feet up and down impatiently and can hardly stand still long enough to get her wellingtons on. ‘Stand still, Pearl!’ Bunty says, thrusting a boot awkwardly onto her foot. Bunty finally decides that we all have enough clothes on and Auntie Mabel opens the back door and we stream out into the cold, our voices ringing like bells in the clear air. ‘Mind you don’t go near the duck pond!’ Auntie Mabel shouts after us as we flounder in the virgin field and her words echo across the whiteness.

‘That’s enough.’

‘Awful,’ I agree, munching my way through a Russian caramel. A siren sounds from the roof of Rowntree’s and we both start but Dr Herzmark says, ‘It’s only a fire drill.’

All I can do is stand there with my mouth open wide, one long, unwavering scream of hysteria coming out of it, and although I’m aware of the dreadful ululating noise that’s coming from inside me, and aware of Gillian on the island screaming at Patricia to hurry up and Patricia herself sprinting round the pond towards us, despite this cacophony – joined now by all the geese – all I can really hear are Pearl’s words which have found a home inside my skull, creating dreadful ricocheting echoes –
Ruby, help me! Ruby, help me!

Patricia dives into the water and comes up again almost immediately, retching with the cold, her stringy hair plastered to her head, but she blinks like a strange amphibian and forces herself under the water again. By this time the commotion has reached not only Uncle Tom’s cottage but the neighbouring farm as well and people seem to come running from everywhere churning up the smooth white snow. Someone drags a shivering, blue Patricia out of the water and wraps her in a rough, dirty jacket and carries her away and one of the farm labourers wades confidently into the water but has to start swimming almost straight away, gasping with shock, because the duck pond is unexpectedly full.

But Pearl has floated away under the ice somewhere and refuses to be found. It is only several hours later when the men have brought hooks and long sticks to fish for Pearl, that she agrees to come out of hiding. One of the men, big, with pocked skin and a heavy jaw, carries her in his arms, holding her away from his body as if she was something immensely fragile and important, which she is, of course, and all the way across the trodden snow of the field his body judders with the sobs he’s trying to suppress.

And my heart is breaking, breaking into great jagged icy splinters. I breathe in big noisy gulps because I’m drowning on air, and if I could cast a spell to stop time – suspend it for ever and ever, so that the cobwebs grew over my hair and the ducks stopped in the middle of their circles and the feathers lay still on the air, drifting through time for ever – then I would do it.

I shrug. ‘Both, I suppose. Poor Bunty – losing two children. And poor Patricia too; we expected her to do something, to save Pearl. And she couldn’t. And poor Gillian too,’ I add with some surprise. ‘If anyone was to blame it was her. And she’s dead. And poor Pearl because she’s dead too.’

‘And so,’ Dr Herzmark says with a smile, ‘shall we go through every person in the world, dead or alive, and say “poor so and so” and “poor so and so” and will we ever come to “poor Ruby”?’

And I try the words out to feel how they fit, ‘Poor Ruby’, but hardly have they formed in my mouth before I am crying and crying until I almost drown in my own pool of tears.

She listened, in a sleepy, abstracted kind of way, to the
creak-creak
of a cart and heard the dog barking its alarm. She knew it added up to something but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what and then she heard that peculiar voice saying something to one of the children –
Bonzjoor
– so that she almost dropped the sleeping baby as she buttoned up the front of her dress in dismay. Jean-Paul Armand! He darkened the door majestically and then invited himself to sit at the kitchen table, saying many extravagantly sentimental things about the small, mousy baby almost lost in the depths of the big wooden crib. ‘’Appy muzzair!’ he said in his exotic accents. ‘What a pity ze little one missed having ’er photograph taken!’ On the matter of the photographs, Alice’s mind was working furiously – had she put her signature to an agreement? Committed herself to paying money she could not possibly find? (Her entire material wealth could be measured by six silver sixpences in a tea-caddy on the mantelpiece.) How could she possibly know the answers to these questions when her mind was a permanent sieve of maternal amnesia?

From a large black leather Gladstone, Monsieur Armand produced the fruits of his work. He had framed three of the prints to demonstrate to his customer how much she needed to pay the extra cost of framing in order to display her progeny to the best advantage – although one of the framed photographs (framed, it has to be said, in a much more expensive frame than the other two) was Monsieur Armand’s own personal favourite and not of her progeny at all, but the one of Alice hiding her fertile bulk behind the
chaise-longue
and pouting enigmatically at the camera.

Belle
, he murmured appreciatively, pushing the sepia portrait across the pine table. Alice regarded it indifferently, but she stretched out a hand to gather in the photographs of her children – they seemed much more attractive somehow when frozen into immobile poses and her eyes grew slightly moist at the sight of them and she sniffed quietly. Monsieur Armand produced an enormous (clean) silk handkerchief from one of his many magician’s pockets and handed it over with a flourish so that Alice was able to blow her nose in a rather unladylike way. She got up abruptly from the table after the nose-blowing and fetched the tea-caddy savings bank from the mantelpiece, opened the lid and in a melodramatic gesture emptied the contents onto the table, scattering the coins over the images of her children. ‘There,’ she declared tragically. ‘That is my entire worldly wealth. I am at your mercy,’ she added and promptly burst into tears.

Monsieur Armand was momentarily at a loss – he frequently had customers unable to pay, indeed he’d got into the habit of expecting it, but none of them was usually so histrionic, so emotional, so, well – foreign – about it and it was several seconds before he collected himself together and reached for her slim little hand across the rustic table. ‘Dear lady,’ he said. ‘Dear, dear lady, you must not upset yourself, I will not take your money.’ Alice was startled. She could not recollect anyone having said this to her before; generally the only thing people ever did was to take the money from her purse and she regarded Monsieur Armand suspiciously. ‘What will you take then?’ she asked, holding her chin high in defiance in case he bartered for her virtue. ‘Nothing, dear lady – I want nothing but you ’appy will.’ The schoolmistress in her moved to correct his grammar but was overcome by his unexpected kindness which primed the pump for a torrent of weeping and wailing from her until Monsieur Armand began to grow quite worried for her sanity.

All this had not gone entirely unnoticed and Alice’s three-dimensional offspring were now hovering silently on the threshold. ‘Mother,’ Ada ventured, ‘is summat up?’ and Alice sobbed even louder at the rural accents of her eldest and best child, especially when compared with the rococo exotica of Monsieur Armand’s vowels.

Eventually emotions were quieted and children dispersed and Monsieur Armand himself made ready to remount his
creak-creaking
chariot. ‘I feel,’ he said, tapping his left breast, ‘I feel in my ’art, dear lady, your un’appiness, your grief. You—’ Here he swept his arm around to indicate both the farm cottage and the entire county of Yorkshire – ‘You were not meant for this ’orrible life!’ Alice, still red-eyed from sobbing, nodded her head in mute agreement as he had just voiced her own thoughts exactly. His ancient pony, trapped between the shafts of the equally ancient cart, arched its neck and snorted and, under cover of his transport’s restlessness, Monsieur Armand bent down so that his thin lips were only an inch from my great-grandmother’s ear and his whiskers tickled her cheek. What passed between them in this intimate moment? An invitation to disaster, loss, hair-tearing grief and downright ruination which my silly great-grandmother misread completely as an opportunity for her true nature – so stifled and suffocated by drudgery and penury – to escape and fly free. ‘I wait,’ said Monsieur Armand, ‘at the end of the track – at midnight. I wait all night for you to come to me and run away to a better place.’

‘
Shall
wait,’ Alice was driven to correct his tenses. ‘Or possibly, in this case, “will”.’

‘Whatever.’