Behind the Scenes at the Museum (4 page)

Suddenly, without modifying her Madonna-like expression in any way, the girl picks up a stone and throws it at her brothers, hitting the younger, Tom, on the head. They jump apart in a state of genuine shock and run yelling into the field, united in mutual disgust at their sister’s behaviour. Ada remains impassive, returning her gaze to the doll-baby. The sun stands at midday, white-hot with anger. In the kitchen of the cottage a woman is making bread, slamming down the dough onto a wooden table, picking it up, slamming it down again, picking it up, slamming it down. A child of, as yet, indeterminate sex is sitting underneath the table, hitting wooden blocks with a wooden hammer. (So it’s probably a boy.) It has the same angelic curls as its eldest sister.

The woman, flushed with the heat from the kitchen range, pauses every now and then to straighten her back and run her hand across her forehead. She kneads the small of her back with her fists. She has a toothache. Her belly, swollen with the next child, keeps getting in the way of the breadmaking.

This woman is Alice. This woman is my great-grandmother. This woman is lost in time. This woman has beautiful fair hair that is scraped and pinned into a sweaty bun. This woman has had enough. This woman is about to slip out of her life. One of those curious genetic whispers across time dictates that in moments of stress we will all (Nell, Bunty, my sisters, me) brush our hands across our foreheads in exactly the same way that Alice has just done. A smudge of flour powders her nose.

Alice is thirty-one years old and pregnant with her seventh child (she has already lost one – William, Ada’s twin, dead of some unknown fever at three months). Alice came from York originally. Her mother, Sophia, had married a man much older than herself and her father was delighted at the good match she had made, especially as her elder sister, Hannah, had caused a shameful scandal by running away with a man who had been court-martialled out of the navy. At the time his daughters’ fortunes couldn’t have seemed more different – one living amongst wealth and privilege, the other in dishonour and poverty. Sophia’s husband’s money had come from buying and selling railway land, vast profits made quickly and, as it turned out (before he hung himself), fraudulently. So while Alice had been born in a gracious house on Micklegate, with a sunlit nursery and more servants than were necessary, by the time she was fourteen the family’s fortunes had tumbled and the family’s name was disgraced. Alice had been the only child, doted on by her mother, but Sophia never recovered from the scandal of her husband’s death, her mind wandered and she ended up taking so much laudanum that she accidentally killed herself.

Poor Alice, brought up to play the piano and look pretty, was an orphan and – worse – a schoolteacher by the time she was eighteen, with nothing to her name except her mother’s clock and a silver locket that her grandfather had given her when she was born.

She was twenty-one when she met her husband. She had been in the village of Rosedale almost a year, having taken the position of head teacher at the local school. It was a small rural school with one other teacher and a big wood-burning stove. The children were culled from the local farms, most of their parents were farm hands and attendance was poor as the children were often needed to work on the land. Alice hated teaching and missed the urban charms of York, so different from the green dales. She had begun to slide into a state of melancholic gloom when destiny trotted up behind her one Saturday afternoon in May.

My great-grandmother had gone out walking along the country lanes. It had started off as a beautiful day, the wild lilac and the hawthorn that lined the lanes had just blossomed, and everything smelt fresh and new – which only succeeded in plunging her further into melancholy. Then, as if to match her mood, a thunderstorm boiled up from nowhere and my great-grandmother, equipped only with her stout boots and no umbrella, was woefully unprotected from the rain. She was half drenched when Frederick Barker bowled up in his dog-cart and offered her a lift back to the school-house.

He owned a small farm locally, a flat, fertile strip of land at one end of the Rosedale valley with a pretty honey-coloured farmhouse, a herd of Devon Reds and an orchard where his father William had espaliered peach trees along one wall, although the fruit they produced was hard and sour. My foolish great-grandmother was charmed, although by what we can never be sure – his easy banter perhaps, or his solid-looking farm or his peach trees. He was twelve years older than she was and courted her assiduously for a whole year with everything from curd cheese and peach jam to logs for the school-room stove. There came a point sometime during the spring of the following year when she couldn’t avoid the choice any longer – to go on teaching (which she loathed) or accept Frederick’s offer of marriage. She chose the latter and within a year she had given birth to the twins – Ada and William.

During his courting of Alice, Frederick struggled to show only his better side, but once he’d secured her in marriage he was relieved to be able to reveal the less savoury aspects of his character. By the time William was being carried in his tiny coffin-cradle to the cemetery Alice knew what everyone else in Rosedale had known for years (but never saw fit to tell her) – that her husband was a sullen drunkard with an insatiable appetite for gambling on anything, not just horses, but dog fights and cock fights, how many rabbits he could shoot in an hour, how many crows would take off from a field, where a fly would land in a room. Anything.

Eventually, inevitably, he lost the farm, land that had been in his family for two hundred years, and moved Alice and the children – Ada, Lawrence and brand-new baby Tom – across to Swaledale where he got a job as a gamekeeper. There have been two more children since then and another one on the way. Not a day passes when Alice doesn’t imagine what life would be like if she hadn’t married Frederick Barker.

Alice cuts up the dough, shapes it, puts it in the tins, covers the tins with damp cloths and places them to prove on the range. It won’t take long in this weather. Underneath her white apron she’s wearing a thick, dark-grey serge skirt and a washed-out pink blouse with pink glass buttons shaped like flowers. Daisies. She can feel the sweat trickling down her skin beneath the blouse. Alice has dark-blue shadows under her eyes and a buzzing noise in her head.

She takes off her apron, rubs her back again and moves dreamily towards the open doorway. Leaning against the doorpost she reaches out a hand towards her daughter, Ada, and gently strokes her hair. Ada shakes her head as if a fly had landed on it – she hates being touched – and resumes her tuneless lullaby to the doll-baby while the true baby, Nell, begins to thump Alice from the inside. Alice rests her unfocused eyes on the marigolds by the back door. And then – and this is the really interesting bit of my great-grandmother’s story – something strange begins to happen to Alice. She’s about to enter her own private wonderland for she suddenly feels herself being pulled towards the marigolds on a straight, fast trajectory; it is automatic and entirely beyond her control and she has no time to think as she is sucked on her giddy journey towards the heart of a flower that looks like the sun. As she accelerates closer and closer to it, every detail of the flower becomes clear – the layers of elongated oval petals, the maroon pincushion of the central stamens, the rough, hairy green of the stems – all speed towards her and then engulf her so that she can actually feel the surprisingly velvet texture of the petals on her skin and smell the acidic perfume of the sap.

But then just as the whole world begins to fizz and hum alarmingly, the floral nightmare ends. Alice experiences a cool rush of air on her face and when, with an effort, she opens her eyes, she finds herself floating in a forget-me-not blue sky, some thirty feet above the cottage.

The oddest thing is the silence – she can see Lawrence and Tom shouting at each other from opposite corners of the field, but no noise rises towards her. She can see Ada singing to her doll, but no tune falls from Ada’s lips and, most peculiar of all, she can see herself – still by the cottage door – speaking to Ada, but although her mouth is clearly forming words, no sound issues from it. The birds – swallows and swifts, a skylark, two woodpigeons, a sparrow-hawk – are equally voiceless. The cows below are dumb, as are the sheep sprinkled on the fields. The air is visibly alive with insects of every kind yet their wings remain silent.

What the world has lost in sound, it has gained in texture and Alice floats through a shimmering, vibrating landscape where the colours that were previ-ously washed out by the sun have been restored with a vivid, almost unnatural depth. The fields below are a plush quilt of emeralds and golds and the hedgerows between them are shooting with dog roses, yarrow, nettles, honeysuckle – the perfume mingling and rising until the heady scent reaches Alice and sends her reeling off in the direction of a river that flows like silver between a dark-green border of trees.

Alice is enjoying herself, floating like thistledown on the wind, wafted from one place to another – one minute wreathed in the smoke from her own cottage, the next hovering over the home farm and marvelling at the chestnut-bronze plumage of the rooster. Every-where she looks, the world is opening out and un-folding. Alice experiences a huge fullness of the heart. Looking at the corporeal Alice she has abandoned down below, a thought shapes in her mind –

‘Why,’ thinks my floating great-grandmother, ‘I have been living the wrong life!’

With these magic words she accelerates again, away from the ground, upwards into the thin brilliant air towards where it is darkening into indigo.

Alice knows a threat when she sees one. She can feel herself being pulled back, and tries to resist, screwing up her eyes and concentrating on returning to the silence when – the child under the kitchen table (whom we’d forgotten about) chooses this moment to hit his finger with the wooden hammer (yes, it is indeed a boy) and lets out a bloodcurdling yell that would bring the dead inquisitively out of their graves let alone a mother back from an out-of-body experience.

His brothers rush whooping into the house to see if there is any blood, the dog in the yard wakes up and starts barking in a demented way and the child in a cradle in the corner of the kitchen that we hadn’t even noticed, wakes up with a start and adds its screams to the chaos.

Poor, hypomanic Alice finds herself being sucked back into her life, through the bluebird-blue sky and the molten-gold marigolds, until she’s thrown back against the kitchen doorpost. Slam! The invisible baby Nell kicks in sympathy with the howling child under the table who, when Alice picks him up to try and comfort him, tangles his fingers in her hair and pulls three pink glass buttons from her blouse.

Finally, as the culmination of this cacophony, the horse and cart arrive in the yard of the cottage rendering the dog hysterical. A lanky, foreign-looking man with a hooked nose and a whiff of Edgar Allan Poe about him – the old-fashioned frock-coat, the melancholy hands – dismounts and approaches the open door. With a theatrical sweep he removes his hat and makes a low bow. ‘Madame,’ he announces, straightening himself, ‘Jean-Paul Armand at your service.’

He was a magician, of course, the mysterious shapes in his cart were his strange props – the collapsible Mediterranean back-cloth, the ornate brass plant-pot holding a palm with stiffened-cotton leaves, the velvet drapes, the extraordinary camera – only the
chaise-longue
wasn’t provided by him, but was dragged by Ada and Lawrence out into the back yard. ‘The light’s better there,’ he explained.

‘Nothing to pay until I return with the photographs’ was how he ensnared Alice who, in an uncharacteristic burst of optimism, believed she would indeed somehow acquire the money in the intervening period. So the children were scrubbed and brushed and generally transformed. Albert’s tears (the child under the table) were assuaged by a barley-sugar twist from Mr Armand – he always had a pocketful with him to persuade his small, recalcitrant sitters. He took photographs of Alice’s children in different permutations – Ada with Albert on her knee; Albert, Tom, and Lawrence together; Ada holding the real baby Lillian (the neglected child in the crib) instead of her doll, and so on. Lillian hasn’t celebrated her first birthday yet and just succeeds in slipping it in before her mother disappears from her life for ever.