Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  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.

  Then, suddenly, sound returns to the world. A noise imposes itself on Alice’s consciousness. It’s the steady creak-creak of an old cart’s suspension and the sound of horses’ hooves moving slowly on a dry track. After a few seconds the source of this noise becomes visible and a horse and cart, loaded with mysteriously-shaped objects, moves slowly across the edge of Alice’s visionary landscape. The cart makes an odd, intrusive silhouette on the brow of the hill and Alice follows the movement of this creeping two-dimensional caravan with irritation. It continues to plot its resolute course on the hill track, a course which will inevitably bring it to the cottage.

  Sure enough, it curves away from the brow of the hill and progresses along their own track. Already the countryside is beginning to lose its colour. Alice’s children have also seen the horse and cart and stand quietly watching as it by-passes the home farm and moves inexorably towards the cottage. The man driving the cart tips his hat at the boys as he passes them in the field but they return his greeting with scowls. The cart passes through the open five-bar gate and turns into the yard. Ada stands up, half in fear, half in excitement and the doll-baby drops unheeded to the ground.

  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.

  Alice has crammed her overblown figure into her best dress for Mr Armand and brushed and pinned up her hair in plaits. The weather is far too hot for the dress and she has to stand for a long time in the heat while he messes around under the black canopy which makes Alice think of the carapace of a beetle. Perhaps her enigmatic expression is merely the result of the heat, the waiting, the kicking. Mr Armand thinks she is beautiful, an unexpected rural Madonna. When he returns with her photographs, he thinks, he will ask her to run away with him (he is eccentric).

  Flash! An explosion of chemicals and my great-grandmother is consigned to eternity. ‘Lovely!’ Mr Armand says in the parlance of photographers down the ages.

  The fate of the three glass buttons was as follows –

  The first one was found the same evening by Ada and thrust into the pocket of her pinafore. Before the pinafore was washed she transferred it to a little box of treasures and trinkets she kept (a length of red ribbon, a piece of gold wire found on the way to school). When Alice was finally lost for ever Ada took the button out of the trinket box and threaded it on silk floss and wore it round her neck. Months later, the evil stepmother Rachel tore the offending button off Ada’s neck, infuriated at the sight of her defiant, tear-stained face. Try as she might, Ada could not find the button and sobbed her heart out that night as if she had lost her mother a second time.

  The second button was found by Tom who carried it around in his pocket for a week along with a conker and a marble, intending to return it to his mother, but before he could he lost it somewhere and then forgot all about it.

  The third was found by Rachel, during a vigorous cleaning session not long after she moved into the cottage. She prised it out from between the two flagstones where it had lodged and placed it in her button box, from where, many years later, it was transferred to my grandmother’s button box, a presentation tin of Rowntree’s chocolates – and from there to Gillian’s stomach of course, and from there – who knows? As to the fate of the children – Lawrence left home at fourteen and nobody ever saw him again. Tom married a girl called Mabel and beca
me a solicitor’s clerk and Albert died in the First World War. Poor Ada died when she was twelve after a bout of diphtheria. Lillian led a long, rather strange, life and Nell – who on this hot day is unborn and has all her life ahead of her – will one day be my grandmother and have all her life behind her without ever knowing how that happened (another woman lost in time).

  CHAPTER TWO

  1952

  Birth

  IDON’T LIKE THIS. I DON’T LIKE THIS ONE LITTLE BIT. GET ME out of here somebody, quick! My frail little skeleton is being crushed like a thin-shelled walnut. My tender skin, as yet untouched by any earthly atmosphere, is being chafed raw by this sausage-making process. (Surely this can’t be natural?) Any clouds of glory I might have been trailing have been smothered in this fetid, bloodstained place.

  ‘Get a move on, woman!’ an angry voice booms like a muffled fog-horn. ‘I’ve got a bloody dinner party to go to!’

  Bunty’s reply is inarticulate and indistinct but I think the general gist of it is that she’s just as anxious to get the whole thing over with as our friendly gynaecologist. Dr Torquemada, I presume? The midwife angel sent to preside at my birth creaks with starch. She raps out her orders – ‘PUSH! PUSH NOW!’

  ‘I am bloody pushing!’ Bunty yells back. She sweats and grunts, all the while clutching onto something that looks like a small shrunken bit of mammal, a furry locket round her neck (see Footnote (ii)). It’s a lucky rabbit’s foot. Not very lucky for the rabbit, of course, but a talismanic charm of some potency for my mother. I’ve gone off her actually. Bunty that is, not the rabbit. Nine months of being imprisoned inside her hasn’t been the most delightful of experiences. And recently there’s been no room at all. I don’t care what’s out there, it has to be better than this.

  ‘PUSH, WOMAN! PUSH NOW!’

  Bunty screams convincingly and then all of a sudden it’s over with and I slip out as quietly as a fish down a stream. Even Dr Torquemada is surprised, ‘Hello, what have we here?’ he says as if he wasn’t expecting me at all. The midwife laughs and says, ‘Snap!’

  I’m about to be shipped off to the nursery when someone suggests that Bunty might like to have a look at me. She takes a quick glance and pronounces her judgement. ‘Looks like a piece of meat. Take it away,’ she adds, waving her hand dismissively. I suppose she’s tired and emotional. She didn’t specify what kind of meat. Rolled brisket? Spring lamb? Hand of pork perhaps or something unnamed, raw and bloody. Well, there you go – nothing surprises me any more. After all, I’m surely not a novelty – she’s already produced pale Patricia and cross-patch Gillian from her loins, and I’m so well behaved in comparison with the latter. Gillian was born angry, bustling out of the womb, little arms and legs angling furiously while she screamed her head off, just in case nobody had noticed her. Fat chance.

  My absent father, in case you’re wondering, is in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster where he’s just had a very satisfactory day at the races. He has a pint of bitter in front of him and is just telling a woman in an emerald green dress and a ‘D’ cup, that he’s not married. He has no idea that I’ve arrived or he would be here. Wouldn’t he? In fact, my gestation has neatly spanned the old and the new, for I’ve arrived just after the King’s death, making me one of the first babies born into the new Queen’s reign. A new Elizabethan! I’m surprised they haven’t called me Elizabeth. They’ve called me nothing. I’m ‘Baby Lennox’, that’s what it says on my label anyway. The midwife, who has red hair and is very tired, carries me through to the night nursery and deposits me in a cot.

  It’s very dark in the night nursery. Very dark and very quiet. A dim blue light shines in one corner, but most of the cots are just black coffin-like shapes. The darkness stretches out to infinity. Space winds whip through the icy interstellar spaces. If I reached out my tiny, wrinkled fingers that look like boiled shrimp, I would touch – nothing. And then more nothing. And after that? Nothing. I didn’t think it would be like this. It’s not that I expected a street party or anything – streamers, balloons, banners of welcome unfurling – a smile would have done.

  The midwife goes away, the neat tip-tapping of her black lace-up shoes on the linoleum of the corridor gradually fades and we are left alone. We lie in our cots, wrapped tightly in white-cotton cellular blankets, like promises, like cocoons, waiting to hatch into something. Or little baby parcels. What would happen if the little baby parcels lost their labels and got mixed up? Would the mothers recognize their babies if they pulled them out of a baby bran tub?

  A rustling of starched wings and the red-haired nurse reappears with another baby parcel and puts it down in the empty cot next to me. She pins a label on its blanket. The new baby sleeps peacefully, its top lip curling with each small inhalation.

  There are no more babies this night. The night nursery sails on into the cold winter night freighted with its delicate cargo. A milky vapour hangs over the sleeping babies. Soon when we’re all asleep, the cats will creep in and suck our breath away.

  I will disappear in this darkness, I will be extinguished before I’ve even got going. Sleet spatters in gusts onto the cold glass of the nursery window. I’m alone. All alone. I can’t stand this – where’s my mother? WAA! WAA! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! ‘The little bastard’s going to wake them all.’ It’s the red-haired nurse, I think she’s Irish. She’s going to save me, she’s going to take me to my mother. No? No. She takes me to a little side room, behind the sluice. A kind of cupboard, really. I spend my first night on earth in a cupboard.

  The maternity-ward ceiling above our heads is painted in apple-green gloss. The upper half of the walls are magnolia and the lower half of the walls look like minced-up mushrooms. I would prefer a celestial ceiling of azure with golden, fiery-edged clouds, and peeping out from the clouds I want smiling, fat, rosy cherubs.

  Bunty’s settled in well in the maternity ward. The mothers all lie beached on their beds complaining all the time, mostly about their babies. We’re nearly all being bottle-fed, there’s an unspoken feeling that there’s something distasteful about breast-feeding. We’re fed on the dot, every four hours, nothing in between, no matter how much noise you make. In fact the more noise you make the more likely you are to be relegated to some cupboard somewhere. There are probably forgotten babies all over the place.

  We’re fed by the clock so that we don’t become spoilt and demanding. The general feeling amongst the mothers is that the babies are in a conspiracy against them (if only we were). We can scream until we’re exhausted, it won’t make any difference to the ceremonial feeding ritual, the time when all the little baby parcels are fed, winded, changed, laid down again and ignored.

  I am nearly a week old and still nameless, but at least Bunty now takes a cursory interest in me. She never speaks to me though, and her eyes avoid me, sliding over me as soon as I enter her field of vision. Now that I am outside my mother, it’s difficult to know what she is thinking (nor am I any longer privy to the fertile inner world of her daydreams). The nights are still the worst time, each night a dark voyage into uncertainty. I do not believe that Bunty is my real mother. My real mother is roaming in a parallel universe somewhere, ladling out mother’s milk the colour of Devon cream. She’s padding the hospital corridors searching for me, her fierce, hot, lion-breath steaming up the cold windows. My real mother is Queen of the Night, a huge, galactic figure, treading the Milky Way in search of her lost infant.

  Sometimes my grandmother, Nell, comes to visit in the afternoon. Hospitals make her nervous, reminding her of death, which she feels she doesn’t need any reminding of at her age. She perches on the edge of the hard visitor’s chair like a sickly Pet Shop budgerigar. She already has several grandchildren who all look alike to her so I can’t blame her for not being very interested in me. George brings Gillian and Patricia. Gillian peers mutely at me over the side of the cot, her expression inscrutable. George doesn’t have very much to say. But Patricia, good old Patricia, touches me with a wary finger and says, ‘Hello,
Baby,’ and I reward her with a smile. ‘Look, she’s smiling at me,’ Patricia says, her little voice choked with wonder.

  ‘That’s just wind,’ Bunty says dismissively. I am not very happy, but I have decided to make the best of things. I’ve been given the wrong mother and am in danger of embarking on the wrong life but I trust it will all be sorted out and I will be reunited with my real mother – the one who dropped ruby-red blood onto a snow-white handkerchief and wished for a little girl with hair the colour of a shiny jet-black raven’s wing. Meanwhile I make do with Bunty.

  Bunty’s sister, Babs, comes to visit, all the way from Dewsbury, with her twins – Daisy and Rose. Daisy and Rose are a year older than Gillian and are spotlessly clean. They’re exactly alike, not a hair nor a fingernail to choose between them. It’s uncanny, almost frightening. They sit on their chairs in complete silence, their dainty little legs dangling above the bile-green linoleum. Bunty lies in queenly splendour under her lily-white sheets and salmon-pink bedspread. Daisy and Rose have hair the colour of melted lemon-drops.

  Bunty knits continuously, even when she has visitors. She’s knitting my future in the colours of sugared almonds. ‘Elizabeth?’ Auntie Babs suggests. Bunty grimaces.

  ‘Margaret?’ Auntie Babs tries. ‘Anne?’

  They could call me ‘Dorothy’, or ‘Miranda’, that would be nice. ‘Eve’ would have a certain resonance. Bunty’s ack-ack eyes search the ceiling. She takes a deep decisive breath and pronounces the name. My name.