We spend the next few days attending to post-funeral business, putting the house on the market, sending off insurance policies and bagging clothes up for the PDSA shop. We go through the jewellery and the photographs, dividing them up between us. I get my great-grandmother’s photograph, the one that Tom had, and the silver locket; Patricia takes the clock, and – after some hesitation – the rabbit’s foot, which she plans to bury in the garden.
The day before she leaves we go for a long walk around the heart of York; the Minster overlooks us wherever we go. There won’t really be anything to bring us back to York now – perhaps we’ll never come here again. It seems like a fake city, a progression of flats and sets and white cardboard battlements and medieval half-timbered house kits that have been cut and glued together. The streets are full of strangers – up-market buskers, school parties and coach parties and endless varieties of foreigner.
We walk under the long wooden sign for Ye Olde Starre Inn that stretches from one side of the street to the other. The Roman
via praetoria
. The whole place has been turned into an upmarket shopping-mall; there are no more Richardson’s and Hannon’s, no more Walters and Bernards, no more barbers and bakers or stained-glass makers – it’s like one big, incredibly expensive souvenir shop.
Slowly and inevitably we make our way to the Shop. It’s ten years since Bunty sold up and now the premises are occupied by an expensive men’s clothing store; a rail of Harris tweed hangs where the rabbit cages once were; a carousel of silk ties has taken the place of the Parrot. There isn’t a single timber or floorboard or pane of glass that is recognizable, not an atom or molecule remains. Upstairs, in Above the Shop, there is now a café – a ‘tea-room’ – and Patricia and I spend a long time debating whether or not we should go up there. But eventually we do, and sit at a lace-covered table and drink fantastically-priced tea in exactly the same spot where our television set used to stand. ‘Spooky or what?’ Patricia says with a shiver.
There are more tables on the next floor and on our way out we loiter at the foot of the stairs for a long time but neither of us is able to even put a finger on the banister-rail. The tinkle of spoons on saucers and the polite murmur of foreign voices, American, German, Japanese, floats down the stairs. I close my eyes. If I concentrate I can just hear an older murmur, equally foreign but less polite – Latin, Saxon, Norman-French. They are all still here, swishing and clanking. And then the most extraordinary thing happens – the building begins to shake as if a small earthquake has the Vale of York in its grip. The street itself vibrates and all the delicate cups and saucers rattle and clatter on the tables of the tea-room. From one of the newly-genteel lace-curtained windows I can see a wild scene in the street below – the stomping, disciplined marching of thousands of feet as a Roman army marches up from the river, through the
porta praetoria
and along the street. The plumes on the centurions’ helmets tremble, the standard bearers hold their standards proudly aloft. And there at the front, burnished and gleaming in the sun, is the magnificent brass eagle of the great Ninth Hispana. Perhaps if I watch them I will see where they disappeared to, but at that moment a waitress drops a jug full of milk and the Ninth Legion is reduced to a fading echo of footfalls. ‘Ruby, Ruby!’ Patricia gives me a little shake. ‘Ruby, what are you staring at? Come on, it’s time to go.’
We collect ourselves on the street outside. ‘That was horrible,’ Patricia says, over the noise of an
al fresco
string quartet on the pavement. ‘A tea-room, for heaven’s sakes.’ The string quartet come to a tasteful crescendo and people throw money into an empty violin case. But not us, we scurry away, past St Helen’s, the Shopkeepers’ church, along Blake Street and towards the Museum Gardens, chased all the way by the teasing, cruel chatter of the household ghosts.
In the Museum Gardens, now entirely free to the public – no sixpence needed – we pick our way through the peacocks and squirrels and tourists that litter the grass and make our way down to the path by the river and walk the length from Lendal Bridge to Queen Anne’s and back again. We pause at the foot of Marygate and watch a train crossing Scarborough Bridge. The water level in the Ouse is very low for this time of year, exposing the different strata of earth and mud which line it. Everyone has left something here – the unnamed tribes, the Celts, the Romans, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Normans and all those who came after, they have all left their lost property – the buttons and fans, the rings and torques, the
bullae
and
fibulae
. The riverbank winks momentarily with a thousand, zillion, million pins. A trick of the light. The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
And finally to our last farewell – the cemetery. We buy bunches of spring flowers from a stall in the Newgate Market and replace the withering wreaths on Bunty’s still unmarked mound with daffodils. We leave fat yellow tulips for Gillian, a few rows away, but for Pearl we bring lilies, white as new snow. Pearl’s grave is in the midst of a whole knot of children, tiny gravestones poking up like broken baby teeth in one corner of the cemetery. Like Gillian, Pearl is ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus’. Both Patricia and I agree that this is somehow highly unlikely and, anyway, we prefer the idea that she is inside the skin of another life now – perhaps the robin that flies from headstone to headstone as we walk towards the gate, stopping every so often to wait for us to catch it up. Although the way it cocks its head on its shoulder suggests the Parrot. A breeze ruffles the grass in the cemetery and moves the clouds faster across the stretched canvas of sky above. Patricia lifts her face up to the pale sun so that for a second she looks almost beautiful. ‘I don’t think the dead are lost for ever anyway, do you, Ruby?’
‘Nothing’s lost for ever, Patricia, it’s all there some-where. Every last pin.’
‘Pin?’
‘Believe me, Patricia, I’ve been to the end of the world. I know what happens.’ The breeze turns suddenly chilly and we turn up our coat collars and link arms as we pick our way amongst the sleeping dead.
We part on York station, in a suitably dramatic thunderstorm. Patricia isn’t going straight back to Australia, her family and her veterinary practice will have to wait for her return, for she is off on a quest – to find her own lost child, the one she parted from so long ago in Clacton. We have counted up the years, ‘Just think, Patricia – you might be a grandmother and not even know it,’ and Patricia makes that funny noise again, which I now know is laughter. She’s carrying our great-grandmother’s clock (her finally-retrieved panda cushioning it) in Nell’s ancient leatherette shopping-bag, trying not to unbalance its insides, but by the time she finally gets back to Melbourne it will have stopped for good.
Patricia embraces me on the station platform. ‘The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,’ she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. ‘Nonsense, Patricia,’ I tell her as I climb on board my train. ‘The past’s what you take with you.’
I am about to retrace my journey, take in reverse the train, plane and two boats that brought me to York. I have a life to go back to. I have been away long enough. I’m going back to far away Shetland, beyond which there is nothing but sea until the northern ice-cap. I belong by blood to this foreign country. I know this because Patricia (of all people) has paid someone to draw up our family tree – a huge, chaotic arboretum that has brought to light the true Scottishness of the Lennoxes. Patricia has taken this thirst for genealogy farther and has been busy writing to the sawn-off branches – corresponding with Auntie Betty’s daughter, Hope, in Vancouver and Tina Donner, a half-cousin by marriage, in Saskatchewan. Tina came over last year and in York she discovered Edmund Donner’s name scratched in the famous mirror, downstairs in Betty’s café, just next to the ladies’ toilets. Tina Donner came up to visit me as well, bringing with her a copy that she’d had made of Lillian’s photograph of Ada and Albert, the one that she took with her on the
Minnedosa
’s Atlantic crossing so many years ago. My copy sits in its frame on my desk and I like to look at it and wonder about my links with these people. Monsieur Armand’s photographs are scattered around the world now – with Hope, with Tina, with Patricia. Adrian has one of Lawrence and Tom with baby Lillian, but I have the one of Alice – the foolish mother, the missing wife, the woman lost in time.
Those little nut-brown girls, my own Alice and Pearl, are grown up now. They are both at university, one in Glasgow, one in Aberdeen, and I live on my own, on an island where the birds outnumber the people. Where I live you can find the red-throated diver and the eider duck, the curlew and the plover. There, there are puffins and the black guillemots, ravens and rock doves, nestling on the summer cliffs while above the moorland rise the merlin and the great skuas.
And there I am too. And what became of me? For a living I translate English technical books into Italian, so my marriage to Gian-Carlo Benedetti was not entirely wasted. I enjoy this work, methodical and mysterious at the same time. I can lay claim to be called a poet too – I have had good reviews for my first volume of poems – published by a small press in Edinburgh, and any day now I intend to begin work on a grand project – a cycle of poems based on the family tree. There will be room for everyone – Ada and Albert, Alice and Rachel, Tina Donner and Tessa Blake, even the contingent lives of Monsieur Jean-Paul Armand and Ena Tetley, Minnie Havis and Mrs Sievewright, for they all have a place amongst our branches and who is to say which of these is real and which a fiction? In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
I have caught the slow train that stops everywhere – Darlington, Durham, Newcastle, meandering its way along the Northumberland coast to Berwick. As we cross the Tweed the air seems to lighten and the sky begins to dry a little and, like a watermark, the pale sheen of a rainbow welcomes our train over the border. I’m in another country, the one called home. I am alive. I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox.
HUMAN CROQUET
Kate Atkinson
‘Wonderfully eloquent and forceful . . . brilliant and engrossing’
Penelope Fitzgerald,
Evening Standard
Once it had been the great forest of Lythe – a vast and impenetrable thicket of green. And here, in the beginning, lived the Fairfaxes, grandly, at Fairfax Manor, visited once by the great Gloriana herself.
But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of Trees. The Fairfaxes have dwindled too; now they live in ‘Arden’
at the end of Hawthorne Close and are hardly a family at all.
But Isobel Fairfax, who drops into pockets of time and out again, knows about the past. She is sixteen and waiting for the return of her mother – the thin, dangerous Eliza with her scent of nicotine, Arpège and sex, whose disappearance is part of the mystery that still remains at the heart of the forest.
‘Vivid, richly imaginative, hilarious and frightening by turns’
Cressida Connolly,
Observer
9780552996198
EMOTIONALLY WEIRD
Kate Atkinson
‘Funny, bold and memorable’
The Times
On a peat and heather island off the west coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother Nora take refuge in the large mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear, like who her father was – variously Jimmy, Jack, or Ernie. Effie tells of her life at college in Dundee, the land of cakes and William Wallace, where she lives in a lethargic relationship with Bob, a student who never goes to lectures, seldom gets out of bed, and to whom the Klingons are as real as the French and the Germans (more real than the Luxemburgers). But strange things are happening. Why is Effie being followed? Is someone killing the old people? And where is the mysterious yellow dog?
‘A truly comic novel – achingly funny in parts – challenging and executed with wit and mischief’
Meera Syal,
The Express
‘Sends jolts of pleasure off the page . . . Atkinson’s funniest foray yet . . . it is a work of Dickensian or even Shakespearean plenty’
Catherine Lockerbie,
The Scotsman
9780552997348
Kate Atkinson
‘Moving and funny, and crammed with incidental wisdom’
Sunday Times
What is the real world? Does it exist, or is it merely a means of keeping another reality at bay?
Not the End of the World
is Kate Atkinson’s first collection of short stories. Playful and profound, they explore the world we think we know whilst offering a vision of another world which lurks just beneath the surface of our consciousness, a world where the myths we have banished from our lives are startlingly present and where imagination has the power to transform reality.
