Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  Ted had just left the Merchant Navy after twelve years and this week in the boarding-house in Kendal was supposed to help him find his land-legs. Nell hadn’t wanted to come. She didn’t like leaving home any more, not that she ever had left it very much.

  Ted closed the door of her room quietly as if she was an invalid and Nell wondered how long she had to go before she died. Death was a terrifying thing and yet more and more Nell found herself thinking that she’d be glad when it was all over.

  It was warm in the bedroom although the sash window was open at the top and the nets billowed out gently in the breeze. There was the hard narrow bed, a dressing table, a wardrobe, a bedside table and a clock on the little cast-iron mantelpiece. The clock said ten to four but Nell didn’t know if it was right. ‘I’ve been to the Lakes before,’ Nell said suddenly as they had driven into Kendal and Ted crashed his gears in surprise because he never thought of his mother having been anywhere farther than York Market on a Friday morning.

  ‘Really? When?’

  ‘On honeymoon.’

  ‘Honeymoon?’ While Ted tried to imagine his mother on something as self-indulgent as a honeymoon, Nell was thinking what a strange word that was, honeymoon, so soft and sweet, like violet creams and rosewater and that Valentine card that Percy Sievewright had given her that was all covered in lace. Inside he’d written, in his big, round policeman’s script, l am yours forever and the funny thing was that it was true, for nobody else would want him now, would they?

  1919: Nell knew she must be dreaming because she was no longer in the room in the boarding-house in Kendal that Ted had booked with such a fuss. Now she was in her honeymoon bed in that gloomy hotel Frank had taken her to, overlooking a lake. It was a hot, stuffy night, the last of several. All day long Nell had felt as if the heavy weather was a physical force, crushing the top of her skull down. ‘There’ll be a thunderstorm tonight, Nelly,’ Frank had said to her as if it was a personal promise to cheer her up. But how could she be cheered when he was on top of her like a lead weight, heavier than the weather, pressing her down. Would he do this every night of their married life? Would there be no relief from his thick cotton pyjamas and his prickly little moustache and that other part of his anatomy that she had to turn her eyes away from because it was so embarrassing.

  There was a strange buzzing noise in the room and it took Nell a long time to realize that the noise was in the room and not in her head. She gave Frank a little shake to wake him so he could deal with it. He was already snoring very gently by her side. She didn’t understand how sleep could come so easily to a person. Lillian was the same; every night she just turned over like a small animal getting comfortable and fell into a sleep as sweet as a baby’s, while Nell used to lie next to her, staring at the ceiling and knowing she would take hours to find sleep. She was almost glad when Lillian moved out of their room after Albert died. Without a word of explanation or farewell she’d taken all her things and moved into his room and the only reference Lillian made to this decision was next morning over breakfast, when she said, ‘Oh, Nelly, I wish we hadn’t changed his sheets when he went back to the Front.’ Rachel had thrown a teaspoon at Lillian and said she was disgusting but Nell knew what she meant, if they could just have touched something of his once more, smelt his scent like dogs trailing something lost.

  She pinched Frank on his arm but he brushed her away as if it was her that was the insect rather than the angry little sawmill buzzing at the window. Nell felt for the matches on the bedside table and struggled to light the candle so that she could see what the creature was.

  When she saw the insect she gave a shocked little scream and hit Frank hard because, flying across the room – straight towards the honeymoon bed – was a huge monster of a wasp, a great mutant black and yellow thing droning steadily like a Zeppelin. Frank took a few seconds to come to but when he did he said, ‘Bloody hell, it’s a hornet!’

  Nell reached down and picked up a slipper from the linoleum and flapped it around her head. The hornet darted off and did a circuit of the gas light hanging from the centre of the room. ‘Kill it! Kill it!’ Nell screeched at Frank as he slid cautiously out of his side of the bed and felt for his own slipper. He crept towards the hornet which was still furiously circling the gas light and tried to bat it with his slipper. The hornet made a feint at Frank and he ducked and twitched and held onto his hair and Nell surprised both of them by laughing out loud. ‘It’s not bloody funny, Nell!’ he said crossly, keeping his eyes fixed on the hornet that was going up and down like a lift at the window.

  Nell slid down the bed and pulled the covers over her head. He was right, it wasn’t funny at all. That hornet really had him worried, he was dancing around the room like a real namby-pamby; you wouldn’t think a man could go through the whole of the Great War and still be a coward. Percy would have dealt with the hornet no bother – firmly, like a policeman. And Albert, Albert would have tried to set it free; she could see him as if he were there, turning to her with a big grin. She remembered a time he’d caught a bee, a big bumble, in his cupped hands and turned to her with his lovely smile and said, ‘This is a right big lad, Nelly, d’you want to see it?’ and then he’d opened his hands and let it go.

  She could hear Frank grumbling through the covers. ‘You’d think it would be able to see that the bloody window’s open,’ he said, but she ignored him. And Jack, what would Jack have done with the insect, she wondered? Nell didn’t think she’d ever really known him. Sometimes she thought it was just as well he was dead because she couldn’t imagine what their marriage would have been like. He would have soon tired of her; she could see the way he’d looked at her on his leave after the Somme, doubtful-like, as if he couldn’t believe what a wet dishcloth she was.

  Sometimes in the honeymoon bed, when Frank slipped off her ribbon-decked trousseau nightdress and touched her shoulders and moaned as if he was ashamed of what he was going to do to her, then Nell thought about Jack and his beautiful skin, like polished walnut – skin that would be all rotted away now. Soon there’d be nothing but clean bone left, and that would be the end of Jack Keech. It didn’t seem right that a person could cease to exist like that. Like Percy, like Albert. Like their mother.

  Frank’s voice was triumphant. ‘I’ve killed the bugger, Nelly! Nelly? Why are you crying, what’s wrong? It’s all right now, lass – I’ve killed it.’ Frank put his arms round her and patted her back cautiously; he had no idea what to do when people cried and certainly didn’t know what to do when Nell made a horrible choking noise and wailed, ‘I want my mother!’ In the distance, the thunder began to rumble.

  1958: ‘Mother! Mother? Are you all right?’ Ted was standing in the doorway, knocking on the doorpost and regarding her uncertainly. ‘Aren’t you coming down? They’ve already served the soup – it’s brown Windsor. You’ll like that. Won’t you?’ he added doubtfully because Nell didn’t look much like a woman who had the soup course on her mind.

  His mother sighed and sat up on the bed. ‘I’ll be down in a minute, all right?’ When Ted had gone, Nell got up awkwardly from the bed and struggled back into her corset. She stood in front of the mirror to brush her hair and put a dab of powder on her nose and tried to remember the smell of Jack Keech’s skin and the feel of his hair, but it was so long ago now that she couldn’t even remember what he looked like. It began to rain, a light summer shower, and the smell of the rain on the new June grass made Nell feel suddenly wretched.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1959

  Snow Feathers

  GILLIAN’S LAST DAY. IT’S CHRISTMAS EVE WHEN GILLIAN pays the price of all those golden-blond curls, so there’ll never be much chance of forgetting the anniversary of her death. It will put a blight on Christmas this year, and for quite a few Christmasses to come, I bet. We’re going to the pantomime this particular Christmas Eve. I like to think this is some kind of compensation for Gillian (‘At least she had a good time before she died’ kind of thing), but in fact it’
s the very fact that we’re going to the pantomime that kills her.

  ‘Ruby!’ This is George shouting up the stairs, competing with the rain hammering on the window.

  ‘RUBY!!’

  He doesn’t really want anything. I know that tone of voice. He’s walked into the kitchen and found Bunty doing her impression of the Martyred Wife (she should have taken it up professionally) and he’ll be so irritated by this that he’s looking for the nearest person to take it out on. Me.

  Although it’s cold in the bedroom – there is no heat in any of our bedrooms – I am warm after having just completed a vigorous hula-hooping session in the rather confined space between the beds. Now I’m curled up happily on my pink candlewick bedspread with an old copy of Gillian’s Judy. My bedspread is the exact match of Gillian’s on the other side of the room, except that Gillian’s is peach because she got the first choice of colours. I have to share Gillian’s bedroom nowadays because Nell has left her house in Lowther Street and moved in with us. This is because, according to George, she’s ‘not the full shilling’, a phrase I don’t entirely understand although you only have to spend a couple of hours in her company to see that she is undergoing a metamorphosis of some kind. She gets very confused (so do I but not about things like what century it is), not confused enough to be ‘put away’ (which is what George wishes for when it’s his turn for the wishbone), just serious enough to get on Bunty’s nerves all the time. But then what doesn’t get on Bunty’s nerves?

  As you can imagine, Gillian is furious about this new arrangement and in order to placate her I have to creep around pretending I’m not really here. I spend a lot of time placating Gillian and yet Patricia (a teenager now!) spends no time at all on this task. But then Patricia isn’t really in the same space-time continuum as the rest of us any more (if this is what being an adolescent’s like then I do not want to be one).

  ‘RUBY!!’

  He isn’t going to forget about me, is he? Guiltily, I unruffle the candlewick. Lying on the beds after they have been made is strictly against Bunty’s domestic rules. I think life would be tidier for her if we didn’t sleep in our beds at all. She can hardly wait to get us out of them in the morning, yanking back the curtains and tweaking us out from under the covers so that she can eradicate our warm shapes from the sheets as quickly as possible, like an odd form of child cruelty.

  Our bedroom (Gillian never uses this plural pronoun. ‘My bedroom,’ she says pointedly. As if I could forget.) has a carpet on the floor and pink flowers growing on trellises on the wallpaper and a narrow oak wardrobe that smells like the inside of old suitcases. The most important piece of furniture is a kidney-shaped dressing-table with a frill round it that matches the curtains. Gillian regards this as hers as well, even though it was bought for ‘us’, along with the candlewick bedspreads, after I moved into the bedroom. One of the (many) reasons that Gillian loathes having to share a room with me is because I still walk in my sleep and she’s petrified that I’m going to do something nasty to her when she’s fast asleep and unable to defend herself. Hah! If only.

  I check my face in the dressing-table mirror for signs of guilt, not just over the bedspread – who knows what else I might be doing wrong? You never can tell, not with George and Bunty who have all kinds of unwritten rules; sometimes I think they’re running some kind of secret society of Masonic complexity, although not always in full agreement with each other – just to make it even more difficult for their poor children. Some of these rules are well known, others less so, and I’m constantly being trapped unawares by the more mysterious ones. These are revealed haphazardly – only yesterday I learnt that girls shouldn’t sit with their legs crossed (this from George) and that the Labour Party is more dangerous than the Catholic Church (from Bunty).

  ‘Ruby! Come downstairs and give your mother a hand!’ I bet a ‘hand’ is the last thing Bunty wants. I go down the stairs very reluctantly, especially the last flight down to the kitchen, where the more truculent of the ghosts plot and conspire their come-back. There is a faint sound of puppies whimpering and kittens snoring in the Shop and underneath that a different stratum of quiet noise as the ghosts get ready for their festival celebrations. These are the last days of living Above the Shop – Bunty already has her eye on a ‘nice little semi’ out on the wilder suburban shores of Acomb and our progress thither is considerably accelerated by Gillian’s death which is the prime cause of the Great (and truly terrible) Pet Shop Fire. So some good will come out of Gillian’s death for Bunty. And for me, of course, because I will take full possession of the kidney-shaped dressing-table (slightly smoke-damaged).

  I pause outside the kitchen door and listen before going in. It seems peaceful enough. It’s important to me that everyone remains in a good mood because of the pantomime. I have been on outings before with George and Bunty when they were fighting, and it’s not pleasant, believe me. The fact that we were going at all on Christmas Eve is a source of some confusion. We don’t usually go until January but I think Bunty has got it into her head that it shows more style to go on the opening night – Christmas Eve. So really she’s responsible for Gillian’s death.

  Cautiously, I open the door. The kitchen feels warm but it doesn’t fool me. Frost glitters everywhere, on the new English Electric washing machine, on the humming refrigerator and the Kenwood Chef mixer. You can almost see the atmosphere in here like thick, cold smoke spreading out from George and Bunty, figures of icy sovereignty in their Kingdom Above the Shop.

  ‘Your mother could do with some help.’

  This is clearly an exercise of power on George’s part – he can’t get any over Bunty, so he’s wielding it over the most helpless member of the family – me. Ever since coming back from my mysterious exile in Dewsbury I have been the scapegoat in this house. It is quite obvious from the set expression on Bunty’s face that she is doing very nicely without any help, thank you. She is standing at the sink peeling potatoes with demonic fury, every arc and bone of her body stretched taut. (Sometimes I try to imagine Bunty as a child but for some reason this makes me unbearably sad – see Footnote (vi)). Raw undercurrents of feeling bubble and break on the surface of her skin. Sparks of bitter static fly from the tips of her baby blond hair. Something particularly horrible is happening between these two, something, we suspect, to do with The Floozy.

  George is sitting at the little kitchen table shaking the icy rain off his moustache like a dog. I wonder why he has been out? He ought to be in the Shop at this time of day. Maybe he was buying last-minute Christmas presents for us all. Maybe he’s been having a secret meeting with The Floozy. The Floozy is a new addition to our family life. Only Bunty speaks about her as such, George never refers to her at all but behaves as if Bunty had invented her from an overheated imagination. For example, a typical exchange about The Floozy goes something like this:

  BUNTY: (to George) Do you know what time it is? Where have you been? (silence) With your Floozy I suppose?

  GEORGE: (scathingly) Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve been having a pint in The Punch Bowl with Walter.

  BUNTY: I can’t imagine what she sees in you – it can’t be your looks, and it’s certainly not your money. What do you do – pay her?

  GEORGE: (mildly) Have you seen The Evening Press anywhere?

  We, the Innocents, are a bit confused as to what The Floozy actually is, although we know she’s bad. Patricia says she’s a Jezebel but that’s the name of the next-door shop’s cat, for heaven’s sake.

  George’s face is as cold and wet as the kitchen window and he is making a performance out of putting on his slippers and lighting a cigarette so it will seem he’s very busy. George takes up a lot of room. Bunty’s always saying that there isn’t enough room Above the Shop, usually in the same sentence that she mentions the ‘nice little semi’, but I think it’s mainly George that takes up the room. True, Above the Shop does seem very crowded but I think it’s an illusion. Patricia, for example, hardly ever leaves her bedroom nowada
ys and Nell takes up less space than the ghosts.

  It would be better for Bunty if George stayed in the Shop all the time – she could push his meals across the passage to him and he could push his washing back.

  ‘Any chance of a cup of tea, Bunt?’

  George is trying to imitate the way he thinks happily married couples speak to each other. He often does this when Bunty is in a bad mood (or at any rate, worse than usual) and it’s so patently artificial that all it does is make her even crosser. If we all know this, why doesn’t he? Bunty stops peeling potatoes, wipes her hands and sighs noisily. Putting the kettle on the stove, she lights the gas with the same look on her face as the Virgin Mary has, standing at the foot of the cross in the painting in the Catholic church that my new friend Kathleen Gorman has recently introduced me to. (Nobody, not even Patricia, knows I have been in there.) I didn’t like it, it was full of dripping hearts and pictures of people doing horrible things to other people. Bunty would have liked the Catholic church if she had given it a chance.

  ‘The child can do that,’ George says, indicating the abandoned potatoes in the sink.

  ‘No, she can’t,’ Bunty snaps, much to ‘the child’s’ relief. Bunty looks like she’s willing to defend her potato peeler to the last King Edward. She pushes her hair back from her forehead in a centuries-old genetic gesture of suffering. The life of a woman is hard and she’ll be damned if anyone is going to rob her of her sainthood. There’s a tremendous battle of wills going on in the kitchen, in which I am clearly the hapless pawn. George keeps sizing up for a real ding-dong and then backing down because he doesn’t really want to risk the consequences of an argument. He’s been in Bunty’s bad books since we opened the first door on the advent calendar (or rather since Gillian did, as she has done nearly every day. Patricia has got round this by making her own personal advent calendar out of a cornflakes box). I haven’t discussed with anyone this new phase of the Cold War (more of an Ice Age really) between our parents but then Gillian and I rarely ‘discuss’ anything – she shouts, I ignore her. And Patricia, since entering adolescence, is incommunicado. I don’t have the right words anyway – I won’t have the right vocabulary for several years.