Behind the Scenes at the Museum (27 page)

Patricia has a bad cold and her eyes are red but I don’t think it’s Nell she’s crying for. Our grandmother looks much the same dead as she had done in the last weeks of life, her skin a bit more yellow perhaps and an uncanny resemblance to Christine Roper’s tortoise. I feel very sorry for her but also very guilty that I’m not wracked by grief the way we were when the Pets died.

The viewing is a leisurely affair, front row, no peppermint creams. ‘Had enough?’ Bunty asks after a while and we agree that we have. As we’re leaving, Bunty turns to look back and after a slight pause says, ‘That was my mother,’ and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, just like June Allyson’s in
The Glenn Miller Story
on television the previous Sunday afternoon, because I knew, with the certainty of premonition, that one day I will say exactly the same thing.

Perhaps George is vaguely aware that he is losing his wife to another man and that is why he decides to tempt her back with an exotic outing to a faraway place – the Chinese restaurant in Goodramgate. This is his first mistake, for Bunty does not like foreign food. She has not actually tasted any foreign food but nonetheless she knows she doesn’t like it. His second mistake was to invite me and Patricia.

‘Well,’ Bunty says, sitting down at the table and staring at the red tablecloth, ‘this is different.’ Glowing red paper lanterns with golden tassels hang from the roof where you would expect normal lights to be. I point out the lanterns to Patricia and she smiles indulgently at me. High-pitched string music twangs plangently in the background. ‘This place is decorated like a you-know-what,’ Bunty says, nibbling suspiciously on a prawn cracker. She fishes a flower out of her little porcelain cup of jasmine tea and examines it critically in the dim crimson light. George orders for us – the
Three-Course Meal for Four
– prawn cocktail, beef chop-suey, sweet-and-sour-pork, chicken chow-mein, followed by tinned lychees and coffee. ‘You’ve been here before!’ Bunty says accusingly, and George laughs and says, ‘Don’t be daft.’ But he obviously has because the waiter gives him an inscrutable wink.

George draws on his Shopkeeper’s stock of small-talk to keep Bunty amused (‘Well, how does this weather suit you, then? We’ll pay for this sunshine, eh?’) but Bunty is not seduced. ‘How long are they going to take?’ she demands impatiently after ten seconds. The prawn cocktail arrives, more lettuce than prawn; in fact it’s hard to find any prawns at all in the jungle of leaves. ‘I found one!’ I say triumphantly, ‘I’ve found a prawn!’ and George says, ‘Don’t be clever, Ruby.’ Patricia counts her prawns, putting them on the side of her plate where they lie like fat, pink commas. ‘They’re shrimp, not prawn,’ she says, prodding them with a toothpick like an earnest marine biologist. ‘Oh for heaven’s sakes!’ George says, ‘Shrimp, prawn – does it matter?’

‘It does if you’re a shrimp wanting to reproduce,’ Patricia says mildly, and Bunty says swiftly, ‘We won’t have any of that kind of talk, thank you, Patricia – it’s to be expected from you, isn’t it?’

The next course arrives. ‘Chopsticks!’ I say excitedly, twirling them in Patricia’s face and she fends me off with a napkin. ‘You don’t expect me to eat with those, do you?’ Bunty says, looking in amazement at George.

‘Why not? Millions of Chinese do,’ he says, scissoring his own ineptly in the direction of a strip of beef. Who would have known he was so cosmopolitan? Bunty lifts a limp and lanky beansprout from her plate. ‘What is this?’

‘Why don’t we just eat?’ Patricia says. She looks uncomfortable, even more pale than usual and rather edgy as if she can’t sit still in her seat. The pallor of her skin begins to change dramatically, turning to a flushed prawn-pink and – just as Bunty holds up a bit of pork and says, ‘What does dog taste like, do you think? Like this?’ – Patricia begins to shake and return from rosy-red to snow-white before falling awkwardly off her chair.

‘Well, at least now you know you’re allergic to prawns,’ I comfort her, as she lies stranded on her high, white hospital bed.

‘Shrimp,’ she reminds me and offers me a fruit gum.

I take to grammar school like a duck to water – the rigour of fifty-minute lessons, the discipline of the dinner queue, the petty alignments and re-alignments of new friendships – these are all a great release after the continual melodrama of home life. The only unnerving thing is how after every time any teacher reads out my name from a register they look up, slightly fazed, and say, ‘Patricia’s
sister
?’ as if they’ve never imagined Patricia having a family. Luckily, noone seems to remember Gillian.

Patricia, despite her poor exam results, is now an
habituée
of the Lower-Sixth Common Room and I rarely encounter her in the mellow oak of the corridors. When we do, she completely ignores me, which is rather galling, especially as other senior girls with new sisters in the school make a great fuss of them and show them off like pets to their friends.

Time trots, canters and gallops towards the end of term and I work hard at producing contour maps and diagrams of Roman central-heating systems and writing sentences in French – another language! The French teacher says I am a natural linguist and I practise the lovely new language of French at every opportunity.
Je m’appelle Ruby. Je suis une pierre precieuse
. Sometimes Patricia can be persuaded to converse with me but this makes Bunty paranoid because she thinks we’re talking about her. ‘
Notre mère
,’ Patricia remarks sweetly, ‘
est une vache, n’est-ce pas?
’

Thereafter I spend a lot of time perfecting my Twist for the end-of-term party that the Sixth Form traditionally throw for First Formers. Patricia, never much of a party-goer, does not turn up but I am honoured by the Head Girl choosing me to lead off with her in a spirited Gay Gordons. After the sandwiches and jelly we play several games, including musical knees (the kind of game I imagine Mr Roper and my mother would be good at), and then dance to pop records, but alas, no Twist; instead people do shapeless, formless dances, their feet shuffling chaotically, their hands grasping at invisible ropes.

The end of the year is turned into the Twilight Zone by the arrival of the freshly-bereaved Daisy and Rose on New Year’s Eve. They sleep in Nell’s now empty bed and are never seen to cry. Auntie Babs – hopefully reunited with her missing parts – has surely sent them a message from the world of Spirit, but if she has, they never divulge it. Bunty never stops going on about how well behaved the twins are but I think what she means by that is that they never speak.

I am in bed and asleep long before the bells but am woken by Patricia just before midnight, drunk, but eager to reminisce on the passing year. She has an almost empty bottle of Bristol Cream Sherry with her, from which she takes an occasional slug. I decline. She had planned to see the New Year in on the Knavesmire, in the back of Howard’s old Zephyr, but they have had a falling out. ‘He’s decided he’s going to be an accountant,’ she says, the words an alcoholic slurry. She struggles to light a cigarette, an expression of disgust on her face.

‘And what are you going to be, Patricia?’ I ask cautiously. She blows out a stream of thoughtful smoke and knocks ash everywhere. ‘Dunno,’ she says finally, and then after a while, ‘I think I’d just like to be happy.’

Of all Patricia’s ambitions that somehow seems the most outrageous. ‘Well,’ I say to her, as the nearest church bells begin to welcome 1964, ‘if I had Aladdin’s lamp for the day, Patricia, that’s exactly what you would be.’ But when I look closely I can see that she’s fallen asleep and so I remove the burning cigarette from her hand and carefully stub it out on the last picture of Ye Olde England calendar – a pretty thatched and timbered cottage with roses round the door and smoke curling from the chimney.