Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  That was just before I had a phone call that took me by surprise. ‘Eez the phone – yours!’ Gian-Carlo Benedetti shouted (his English had improved very little under my uxorial tutelage), but when I picked up the phone I was greeted by a familiar silence – it was Mr Nobody. ‘Well, you haven’t called for a long time,’ I reprimanded him, but there was no answer, no word, no heavy breathing, no breathing at all in fact, and I listened to the silence very carefully in case it was a message in itself and discovered that it had a soothing quality, like listening to the sea in a shell, full of invisible rhythms and waves and I might have sat listening to that silence for ever but then my caller from the ocean floor suddenly spoke – a hesitant, ‘Hello?’ and the mysterious noise of spiritual ether resolved itself into antipodean static as the voice repeated, ‘Hello? Hello? Ruby?’ It was not Mr Nobody, nor some long-distance mermaid, it was Patricia. ‘Where are you, Patricia?’

  There’s an odd, contorted noise, like someone learning to laugh, ‘Australia!’ she shouted. ‘I’m in Australia, Ruby!’ (Forfar paled into insignificance compared to the lengths Patricia went to remove herself from the family’s broken circle.) ‘You couldn’t have got much farther away, could you, Patricia?’ I chastised her, but she just made that funny noise again.

  Not long after that phone call, when I was loading the ever-open mouth of the tumbling potato-peeling machine, I experienced a personal epiphany – looking up from a peeled pile of misshapen King Edwards I saw a tremendous flash of blue light and every hair stood up on my head for a second. The potato-peeler had blown itself up and in that electric moment I had seen everything clearly – I was leading the wrong life! This wasn’t my life – it was someone else’s and the sooner I found the right one the better, judging by the murderous look on Gian-Carlo’s face when I told him about the peeling machine. ‘You’ve got the wrong wife,’ I muttered to him over the pile of potatoes I had to peel laboriously by hand. I waved the potato-peeler at him. ‘I know, without a shred of doubt that this is not what I’m supposed to be doing.’ I am the goose girl, I am the true bride, I am Ruby Lennox still.

  I left the next morning, early, long before Gian-Carlo was awake. I took nothing with me except the little nut-brown girls, putting as much distance as I could between me and whoever’s life it was I had been falsely inhabiting. We rapidly became connoisseurs of timetables – British Rail, Bluebird coaches and eventually a huge Coastlines ferry that sailed us away to Ultima Thule, and in our first summer, during the endless Shetland nights, I would stand guard, watching over the sea to make sure that the black heads bobbing on the waves belonged to the seals and not to the vengeful Benedettis.

  Once Patricia and Bunty and I had become three points on a far-flung family triangle our relationship was closer. We all went together to Australia – Bunty, myself, and the two nut-brown children, whose names were (and still are, of course) Alice and Pearl. Bunty spent the entire flight worrying that our plane would be shot down by an Argentinian Exocet – it was 1982 and we were in the middle of the Falklands War, and Alice had to hold her hand for most of the flight. We landed on Australian soil unscathed and Patricia introduced us to her new life – a white clapboard house with a fig tree in the garden in an affluent Melbourne suburb. She was married to a mild-mannered Jewish dentist several years older than her and they had two children, Ben and Naomi, and when we arrived she had just graduated from veterinary college. ‘Your dreams have come true then, Patricia,’ I said to her, but she said she couldn’t remember having any dreams. I think she’d forgotten the past.

  Patricia had become a Buddhist and meditated every morning at sunrise underneath her fig tree. It was almost impossible for us to believe that this person, glowing with sun and energy, could possibly be Patricia. But it was.

  Under the pale skies of the southern hemisphere Bunty is a changed person too; she even allows Louis to probe delicately amongst her fillings and tidy up her bridgework. Surrounded in the sun by her four half-English grandchildren she relishes this sudden role as the Lennox matriarch and I feel sorry for her when I return her to the semi in Acomb and leave her behind there. (‘She could always come and live with you, Patricia,’ I say cheerfully to my sister as we’re waiting to board our Qantas flight, and the look on Patricia’s face is worth waiting fifteen years to see.)

  This was in the future, as was The Rest Of My Life – but that’s another story (Ruby 2 – The Sequel, What Ruby Did Next!) and so when Gian-Carlo Benedetti says in his broken English, ‘Ruby – I will marry you yes?’ I nod my head and, unable to think of any other answer, say, ‘Why not?’ and for seven years, three months and eighteen days I am the oddly-named person, Ruby Benedetti, before I am restored, courtesy of the Court of Session in Edinburgh and the even more oddly named Lord Ordinary, to my true self and I am Ruby Lennox once more.

  Footnote (xii) – 1914 Home

  LAWRENCE TUGGED AT THE WHISTLE ON THE LITTLE PUFFER as it approached the wooden pier. The captain of the boat, a grizzled, kindly man called Robert Jenkinson, was yelling in his pidgin Portuguese to one of the Mission Church brothers on the pier and Lawrence laughed. The old man had been plying up and down this tributary of the Amazon most of his life but he still couldn’t speak the lingo. Lawrence could, Lawrence delighted in the lilting cadences of this strange Portuguese language. ‘You have a gift for it, Lawrence,’ Father Domingo had said and Lawrence had felt ridiculously proud.

  Once the boat was moored they began unloading their cargo – flour, coffee, paraffin, candles, fish hooks, ink, sugar, heavy flat bolts of calico and half a dozen wyandottes. Beyond the pier, in a wide swathe of cleared trees, the new Mission Church rose white and straight-edged. But it was not as inviting as the natives’ huts – spindly open platforms with thatches over them. Lawrence would stay in one of them tonight, friendly faces, a supper of fish and rice and farinha and a night spent fighting off the river mosquitoes.

  When he’d hauled the last sack onto the Brothers’ cart, Lawrence stopped for a rest. He sat on the pier, his back against a strut, and rolled a cigarette.

  It was late afternoon and the sun was hotter than it had been all day, glinting like gold amongst the many different greens of the vegetation on the river bank. The water in the river was a gleaming, shining black, like polished coal. Lawrence inhaled deeply on his cigarette and breathed in the river smell of fish and rotting vegetation and heat.

  Lawrence was thinking about home. He thought about home a lot these days – the cold, northern home of his childhood. The plain fields and clean, bare hills where the plants and animals had to struggle to grow and survive, where fertility was something that had to be worked at and not something that swamped everything in a hot, steamy stew. Lawrence pulled at the front of his thin cotton shirt and bellowed it in and out to try and cool himself. He’d been happy here for a long time, but all of a sudden he was stricken with the desire to go home – at least for a visit if nothing more.

  He thought about his sisters, Lily and Nelly, and wondered what kind of women they had grown into. He thought about his brothers, Tom and Albert, and the evil Rachel, and he thought about his pretty dead sister, Ada. But most of all he thought about his mother, whom he’d seen running away, a ghost among the shadows of the night.

  He had been out at the privy that night, the result of a dreadful potato and cabbage stew his mother had cooked for tea, and he’d been about to cross the yard back into the house when he’d seen Alice slipping out of the door, fully clothed in her rusty black dress, a short travelling cape and a bonnet. In her hand was a small Gladstone. What was his mother doing with bag and bonnet at three in the morning? Lawrence tried to follow to find out, but he was in his bare feet and the track was laid with sharp stones. His mother, fully shod in her little black boots, moved swiftly, lightly, and Lawrence had the curious impression that she was floating a few inches above the track. She disappeared over the brow of a hill and by the time Lawrence had stumbled to the top all he could see was the black cart, bla
cker than the night itself, trundling off with his mother’s bonneted silhouette sitting aloft next to the Frenchman.

  When he woke next morning he thought it must have been a dream for his father said his mother was dead. ‘I saw her,’ he said later to Ada (white-faced, with blue cups of grief under her eyes from sobbing her heart out).

  ‘Saw ’er?’

  ‘On t’Frenchman’s cart.’

  ‘You mun seen her ghost, Lawrence. Mother wouldn’t leave us,’ his sister said, and Lawrence thought no, she wouldn’t do that.

  Lawrence threw his cigarette stub into the black water where it sizzled for a fraction of a second and made him feel suddenly hot. He ran a handkerchief round the back of his neck to mop up the sweat. Lawrence still saw his mother in dreams sometimes – her lovely blond curls, her little white teeth, pointed like a cat’s. When he dreamt about his mother he always woke up afterwards feeling happy, as if he had warm sugar in his veins, and then he remembered she’d gone and he could weep, did weep sometimes, unmanly, racking sobs that made him feel ashamed.

  ‘I’d like to go home,’ he said to Robert Jenkinson, who was walking along the pier towards him with a bottle of whisky in his hand. The captain sat down next to Lawrence and passed him the bottle and laughed. ‘Home, you don’t want to be going there lad, there’s a war coming.’

  Lawrence took a silver coin from his pocket and threw it as high as he could. A bird shrieked in the jungle and a streak of primary-coloured plumage flashed amongst the creepers and vines and Lawrence suddenly realized how much he wanted to see a lapwing rise or a lark sing its way towards heaven in the pale blue sky above the hills of home. The silver coin fell through the air, turning over and over and winking as it caught the sun. Lawrence reached out his hand to catch the coin and slapped it over onto the back of his other hand. He held it out for Robert Jenkinson’s scrutiny. ‘Home,’ Lawrence said. ‘I shall go home.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1992

  Redemption

  I’VE COME BACK TO DISPOSE OF THE REMAINS OF MY mother, a task made more complicated by the fact that she isn’t dead yet.

  ‘She’s lost her personality,’ Adrian whispers as he opens the front door. ‘She’s nothing like her old self.’ Well, surely any change can only be an improvement? Adrian has been holding the fort for the last few days while I have travelled back to York. Come home, although this is not my home any more.

  ‘Any word from your Pat, then?’ Adrian says cheerfully, mixing up scrambled eggs in a bowl. He is perfectly at home in Bunty’s kitchen, while Bunty herself is now an exile from her own kingdom. She’s sitting at the table arranging and rearranging knives and forks but somehow she can’t get them into the pattern that she wants. She looks surprised when she sees me and asks, very politely, ‘Who are you?’ (When I arrived she welcomed me with open arms and a big kiss which was how I knew this wasn’t really my mother any more.) I give her a bright reassuring smile (her smile) and say, ‘It’s just Ruby.’

  ‘Patricia’s fine – I haven’t told her about any of this,’ I say, waving a hand vaguely while Bunty looks at me with an interested smile on her face, as if I was a small child doing a charming party-turn.

  Adrian offers to stay on for a few days and I gratefully accept. He has his own salon now and lives with an architect called Brian. They have a dog, a chihuahua called Dolores, that Adrian has brought with him. In these circumstances Adrian is the next best thing to a sister – he’s quite happy to trail round nursing-homes with me, poking into their toilets and bedside lockers, and he flits round the house in Bunty’s second-best pinny doing the housework with a lighthearted touch that would have galled my mother if she’d been herself. But she isn’t.

  Bunty’s prognosis, according to the young Dr Haddow, who is a less genial version of his father, is thus – she will grow steadily more demented, but will probably live a long time because she’s got a remarkably sound constitution. So that’s all right then. ‘Demented?’ Bunty echoes with a puzzled little frown, and Dr Haddow and I smile stoutly and pretend we didn’t hear her.

  ‘Who was that man?’ Bunty asks when he’s gone. Much of her confusion centres on people’s identities, as if she’d suddenly become a keen sceptical empiricist. Sometimes she knows who I am and sometimes she doesn’t, and because I find this fascinating I spend a good deal of time asking, ‘Do you know who I am?’ One day when I’m doing this, Adrian, jaunty yellow duster in one hand, chihuahua in the other, looks at me shrewdly and says, ‘Do you know who you are, Ruby?’ (I do, I’m Ruby Lennox.)

  Our days together speed past, eaten up by house-work, shopping, cooking, little trips to the park. Bunty and I stroll around immaculately clipped bowling-greens and sit on benches wistfully watching small children being pushed on swings and she’d be quite happy to stay there all day but when I say, ‘Come on, it’s time we were getting home,’ she gets up obediently and trots by my side.

  The evenings are spent in a companionable kind of domesticity, discussing where would be the best place to incarcerate Bunty, working our way through stacks of nursing-home brochures that all seem to have rooms with modern facilities and pleasant views.

  Bunty’s replacement personality is a much nicer model than the old one. Her lost self, incapable of enjoyment, would have balked at the amount of time we waste every day. I’ve waited forty years to play with my mother and now at last we spend long sunny afternoons in an endless state of make-believe on planet Alzheimer. In her confusion, Bunty has her whole family round her skirts again and, being the only corporeal child available, I must understudy for them all, prepared to answer to Pearl, Gillian, Patricia (sometimes even Ruby). Gillian is still Bunty’s favourite, I notice. (Shall I make your favourite pudding for tea, Gillian? Would you like to come shopping with Mummy, Gillian? and so on.) It’s most peculiar to be surrounded by my invisible sisters and sometimes when I walk into a room it surprises me with its emptiness.

  I leave Bunty in the living-room unsupervised for a few minutes one afternoon and when I come back in the room she’s in the middle of a billowing cloud of grey dust, emptying the Hoover-bag onto the living-room carpet. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I ask her, but she just looks at me with a serene smile and says, ‘I’m scattering your father’s ashes, of course.’

  ‘Did he want them scattered in the living-room?’ I ask her as I pick my way gingerly across the carpet (for the life of me I can’t remember what we did with them after his cremation). I can feel something sticking to the soles of my feet and wonder if it’s little bits of my father. Later when I’ve hoovered George back up again, Bunty accosts me with a puzzled little frown. ‘You haven’t seen my mother have you? I can’t find her anywhere.’

  ‘I think this might be the one,’ I whisper to Adrian as we drive up in front of an impressive neo-Gothic pile. ‘The one what?’ Bunty demands – she has developed the hearing of a bat as if to compensate for the percolation of cells from her brain. ‘How would you like to have a little holiday here, Auntie Bunty?’ Adrian asks, giving her a smile in the rear-view mirror. Bunty says nothing; perhaps she knows it’s a trap, but when I finally find the nerve to turn round and look at her she is smiling happily to herself. Our inspection of Silverleas is a satisfying one. No scent of disinfectant or boiled cabbage around the gleaming mahogany of the huge entrance hall – only lavender polish and the smell of warm baking. ‘This is lovely, isn’t it?’ I say enthusiastically to Bunty and she nods in agreement. ‘Lovely – how long are we booked in for?’ We investigate the bedrooms, both single and shared, with their matching bedspreads and curtains and good quality carpets, and the lounges where there are newspapers and board-games and the kitchens where the food looks delicious and you really would think it was a quite good hotel (somewhere between two and three stars) if it weren’t for the encounters with the residents – like the two little old ladies, joined at the hip and shopping basket, who tell the matron in very earnest tones that they can’t find mattress-ticking any
where and I’m all set to take them round more shops to look for some, but Adrian lays a restraining hand on my arm.

  When it’s time to leave, Bunty is reluctant to go but Adrian promises her that we’ll be coming again and then she can stay for longer. The matron shakes our hands warmly but her voice drops to a murmur as Bunty starts down the steps. ‘But do please remember,’ she says, ‘that Silverleas can only take people who don’t need nursing care, so if your mother became ill in some way we wouldn’t be able to keep her here.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I tell her cheerfully. ‘My mother has a remarkably sound constitution.’

  ‘Shall we get you all trim and ship-shape for your visit then?’ Adrian smiles, rubbing her head with a towel. He pulls out a pair of scissors from his trouser pocket and twirls them impressively around Bunty’s damp head. I notice how thin her hair is now. She has liver spots on the back of her hands and a funny red mark at the corner of one eye as if a cat’s claw had caught her. I’m suddenly overwhelmed with pity for her and I loathe her for making me feel like that.

  When we approach Silverleas for our final delivery Bunty seems less keen on the idea. She has already had a fit of near-hysteria as we crawled through York’s permanently bottle-necked traffic, under the delusion that we were hopelessly late for a train we were trying to catch, and as we drive past the station and leave it behind she sets up a formidable wail.