Behind the Scenes at the Museum Read online

  ‘Bloody Parrot!’ George holds his bitten finger up for inspection. Bunty tut-tuts indifferently. (Injury, as I said, is not really her forte.) She’s up to her elbows in suet and flour and her stomach is heaving again. She watches George in disgust as he picks up one of the fairy cakes we’ve spent half the afternoon making, and swallows it in one bite, without even looking at it.

  The afternoon has been a bit of a disappointment. We went shopping again but only for some dun-coloured wool from a shop kept by a timid old woman who made me appreciative of Walter’s shopkeeping-as-performance technique. I hoped we might visit a florist and celebrate my arrival with flowers, a garland or two, a bouquet of joy and roses, but no. I keep forgetting that noone knows about me.

  We went and picked up Patricia from school, but that wasn’t very interesting either and her day seemed rather boring, viz:

  ‘What did you do today?’

  ‘Nothing.’ (Said with a shrug of the shoulders.)

  ‘What did you have for dinner?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’ (Shrugs again.)

  ‘Did you play with any friends today?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t shrug like that all the time, Patricia!’

  Bunty chops up the blood-glazed kidney, the idea of testicles never far from her mind. She hates cooking, it’s too much like being nice to people. Here she goes again – I spend my entire life cooking, I’m a slave to housework – chained to the cooker . . . all those meals, day after day, and what happens to them? They get eaten, that’s what, without a word of thanks! Sometimes when Bunty’s standing at the cooker her heart starts knocking inside her chest and she feels as if the top of her head’s going to come off and a cyclone is going to rip out of her brain and tear up everything around her. (Just as well she didn’t go to Kansas.) She doesn’t understand why she feels like this (Go ask Alice – see Footnote (i) again) but it’s beginning to happen now, which is why when George wanders back into the kitchen, takes another fairy cake, and announces that he has to go out and ‘see a man about a dog’ (even tapping his nose as he does so – more and more I’m beginning to feel that we’re all trapped in some dire black-and-white film here), Bunty turns a contorted, murderous face on him and lifts the knife as if she’s considering stabbing him. Is a torch being put to the great city of Atlanta?

  ‘I have some business to do,’ George says hurriedly, and Bunty thinks the better of things and stabs the steak instead.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, what’s wrong with you, what do you think I’m doing – meeting another woman for a riotous night on the tiles?’ (A clever question, of course, as this is exactly what my father-of-a-day is going to do.) Will Civil War rage in the kitchen? Will Atlanta burn? I wait with bated breath.

  No, it’s saved for another day. Phew, as Bunty’s brother Ted would say if he was here; but he isn’t, he’s in the Merchant Navy and is being tossed on the South China Seas at this moment. Bunty loses interest in the skirmish and returns her attention to her steak and kidney pudding.

  Well, my first day is nearly over, thank goodness. It’s been a very tiring day for some of us, me and Bunty in particular. George isn’t home yet but Bunty, Gillian and Patricia are fast asleep. Bunty is in dreamland again, dreaming of Walter, who’s fumbling with her buttons with hands of pork and kneading her flesh with fingers that look like sausages. Gillian is snoring in her sleep, in the middle of a Sisyphean nightmare where she must pedal endlessly uphill on her tricycle. Patricia is deep in sleep, her pale face drawn and her panda clutched to her chest. The spectral wraiths wander at will making puny efforts to create domestic disorder – souring the milk and sprinkling dust on the shelves.

  I’m wide awake too, turning somersaults and floating in the ocean of Bunty. I tap my tiny naked heels together three times and think, there’s no place like home.

  Next morning George is in an uncharacteristically good mood (his night on the tiles – with Walter – was satisfying) and he prods my sleeping mother awake.

  ‘How’d you like breakfast in bed, Bunt?’ Bunty grunts. ‘How about a bit of sausage? Black pudding?’ Bunty moans, which George takes to mean ‘yes’ and he saunters off down to the kitchen while Bunty has to run to the bathroom. For a second she thinks she sees Scarlett smiling in the bathroom mirror in full Technicolor, but the image disappears as she vomits. Leaning her hot, prickling forehead against the cold tiles, a terrible idea forms in Bunty’s head – she’s pregnant! (Poor Bunty – throwing up every single morning at every pregnancy. No wonder she was always telling us that she was sick of us.) She sits abruptly down on the toilet and mouths a silent Munch-like scream – it can’t be (Yes, yes, yes, Bunty’s going to have a baby! Me!). She throws the nearest thing (a red shoe) at the mirror and it breaks into a million splintery pieces.

  I’m hanging like a pink-glass button by a thread. Help. Where are my sisters? (Asleep.) My father? (Cooking breakfast.) Where’s my mother?

  Still, never mind – the sun is high in the sky and it’s going to be a beautiful day again. The crowds will be flocking into the Exhibition Halls and the Dome of Discovery, craning their necks at Skylon and the shimmering emerald city of tomorrow. The future is like a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door. Bluebirds fly overhead, singing. What a wonderful world!

  Footnote (i) – Country Idyll

  THE PHOTOGRAPH IS IN A SILVER FRAME, PADDED WITH red velvet with an oval of glass in the middle from behind which my great-grandmother regards the world with an ambiguous expression.

  She stands very straight, one wedding-ringed hand resting on the back of a chaise-longue. In the background is a typical studio backdrop of the time, in which a hazy Mediterranean landscape of hills drops away from the trompe-l’oeil balustraded staircase which occupies the foreground. My great-grandmother’s hair is parted in the middle and worn in a crown of plaits around her head. Her high-necked, satin dress has a bodice that looks as trimmed and stuffed as a cushion. She wears a small locket at her throat and her lips are half-open in a way that suggests she’s waiting for something to happen. Her head is tilted slightly backwards but she is staring straight at the camera (or the photographer). In the photograph her eyes look dark and the expression in them is unfathomable. She seems to be on the point of saying something, although what it could be I can’t possibly imagine.

  I had never seen this photograph before. Bunty produced it one day as if by magic. Her Uncle Tom had just died in the nursing-home and she had been to collect his few belongings, all of which fitted into a cardboard box. From the box, she took the photograph and when I asked who it was she told me it was her grandmother, my great-grandmother.

  ‘She changed a lot, didn’t she?’ I said, tracing the outline of my great-grandmother’s face on the glass. ‘She’s ugly and fat in that photograph you’ve got – the one taken in the back yard at Lowther Street with all the family.’

  This was a photograph Bunty had with ‘1914, Lowther Street’ written on the back in watery-blue ink and it shows my great-grandmother with her whole family gathered around her. She sits, big and square, in the middle of a wooden bench and on one side of her sits Nell (Bunty’s mother), and on the other is Lillian (Nell’s sister). Standing behind them is Tom and squatting on the ground at Rachel’s feet is the youngest brother, Albert. The sun is shining and there are flowers growing on the wall behind them.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Bunty said dismissively. ‘The woman in the Lowther Street photograph is Rachel – their stepmother, not their real mother. She was a cousin, or something.’

  The woman in her padded frame – the real mother, the true bride – gazes out inscrutably across time. ‘What was she called?’

  Bunty had to think for a second. ‘Alice,’ she pronounced finally. ‘Alice Barker.’

  My newly discovered great-grandmother, it appears, died giving birth to Nell, shortly after which my feckless great-grandfather married Rachel (the unreal mother, the false bride). Bunty had a vague,
handed-down memory that Rachel came to look after the children and act as a poorly-paid housekeeper. ‘Six children without a mother,’ she explained in her death-of-Bambi’s-mother voice. ‘He had to marry someone.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?’

  ‘I forgot,’ Bunty said defiantly.

  The forgotten Alice stared straight ahead. Carefully, I removed the photograph from its frame and more of her artificial sepia world was revealed – a large parlour-palm in a brass pot and a thick curtain draped across a corner of the set. On the back of the photograph, in printed copperplate, it says J.P. Armand. Travelling Photographer. And in faded pencil underneath, the date – 20th June, 1888.

  ‘Twentieth of June, 1888,’ I told Bunty, who snatched the photograph back again and scrutinized it carefully.

  ‘You would never have noticed, would you? The way she’s standing behind that couch hides it.’

  ‘What? Noticed what? Hides what?’

  ‘My mother was born in 1888. On July the thirtieth. Alice is eight months pregnant in this photograph. With my mother, Nell.’

  Does that account for that impenetrable gaze? Can she feel her own death coming, sniffing around her sepia skirts, stroking her sepia hair? Bunty was still inspecting the photograph. ‘She looks just like you,’ she said, her tone accusing, as if the lost Alice and I were fellow members of a conspiracy, intent on stirring up trouble.

  I want to rescue this lost woman from what’s going to happen to her (time). Dive into the picture, pluck her out –

  Picture the scene –

  A hundred years ago. The door of a country cottage stands open on a very hot day in summer. In the yard outside, two small boys are kicking and wrestling in the dust while a pretty girl of about nine years old, older than the boys, sits on a stool by the back door, apparently oblivious to the noise her brothers are making. This is Ada. Her long, pale gold hair falls in a mass of curls and is held back from her face by a ribbon which is limp with the heat. Around her feet a few chickens scratch aimlessly. She is crooning to a doll lying cradled in her arms and her face has assumed an expression of maternal piety rarely seen outside the Nativity. A farm dog sleeps in the shadow of a barn across the yard, and a black cat sits on a wooden plough lapping up the blistering heat and occasionally washing itself in a random, lazy way. Beyond the fence are fields, some with cows, some with sheep. Some empty. On the south side of the cottage a garden has been dug out of the unpromising chalky soil and rows of undersized cabbages and carrots can be seen, wilting in the dry earth. By the door of the cottage, marigolds and cornflowers droop in the bleaching glare of the sun.

  The whole effect is as if someone had taken an idyllic rural scene and set it slightly off-key – the sun is too hot, the light too bright, the fields too arid, the animals too thin. The cottage, although charmingly pastoral from the outside, has a suspicious gingerbread and walking-stick candy air about it. Who knows what’s inside?

  Suddenly, without modifying her Madonna-like expression in any way, the girl picks up a stone and throws it at her brothers, hitting the younger, Tom, on the head. They jump apart in a state of genuine shock and run yelling into the field, united in mutual disgust at their sister’s behaviour. Ada remains impassive, returning her gaze to the doll-baby. The sun stands at midday, white-hot with anger. In the kitchen of the cottage a woman is making bread, slamming down the dough onto a wooden table, picking it up, slamming it down again, picking it up, slamming it down. A child of, as yet, indeterminate sex is sitting underneath the table, hitting wooden blocks with a wooden hammer. (So it’s probably a boy.) It has the same angelic curls as its eldest sister.

  The woman, flushed with the heat from the kitchen range, pauses every now and then to straighten her back and run her hand across her forehead. She kneads the small of her back with her fists. She has a toothache. Her belly, swollen with the next child, keeps getting in the way of the breadmaking.

  This woman is Alice. This woman is my great-grandmother. This woman is lost in time. This woman has beautiful fair hair that is scraped and pinned into a sweaty bun. This woman has had enough. This woman is about to slip out of her life. One of those curious genetic whispers across time dictates that in moments of stress we will all (Nell, Bunty, my sisters, me) brush our hands across our foreheads in exactly the same way that Alice has just done. A smudge of flour powders her nose.

  Alice is thirty-one years old and pregnant with her seventh child (she has already lost one – William, Ada’s twin, dead of some unknown fever at three months). Alice came from York originally. Her mother, Sophia, had married a man much older than herself and her father was delighted at the good match she had made, especially as her elder sister, Hannah, had caused a shameful scandal by running away with a man who had been court-martialled out of the navy. At the time his daughters’ fortunes couldn’t have seemed more different – one living amongst wealth and privilege, the other in dishonour and poverty. Sophia’s husband’s money had come from buying and selling railway land, vast profits made quickly and, as it turned out (before he hung himself), fraudulently. So while Alice had been born in a gracious house on Micklegate, with a sunlit nursery and more servants than were necessary, by the time she was fourteen the family’s fortunes had tumbled and the family’s name was disgraced. Alice had been the only child, doted on by her mother, but Sophia never recovered from the scandal of her husband’s death, her mind wandered and she ended up taking so much laudanum that she accidentally killed herself.

  Poor Alice, brought up to play the piano and look pretty, was an orphan and – worse – a schoolteacher by the time she was eighteen, with nothing to her name except her mother’s clock and a silver locket that her grandfather had given her when she was born.

  She was twenty-one when she met her husband. She had been in the village of Rosedale almost a year, having taken the position of head teacher at the local school. It was a small rural school with one other teacher and a big wood-burning stove. The children were culled from the local farms, most of their parents were farm hands and attendance was poor as the children were often needed to work on the land. Alice hated teaching and missed the urban charms of York, so different from the green dales. She had begun to slide into a state of melancholic gloom when destiny trotted up behind her one Saturday afternoon in May.

  My great-grandmother had gone out walking along the country lanes. It had started off as a beautiful day, the wild lilac and the hawthorn that lined the lanes had just blossomed, and everything smelt fresh and new – which only succeeded in plunging her further into melancholy. Then, as if to match her mood, a thunderstorm boiled up from nowhere and my great-grandmother, equipped only with her stout boots and no umbrella, was woefully unprotected from the rain. She was half drenched when Frederick Barker bowled up in his dog-cart and offered her a lift back to the school-house.

  He owned a small farm locally, a flat, fertile strip of land at one end of the Rosedale valley with a pretty honey-coloured farmhouse, a herd of Devon Reds and an orchard where his father William had espaliered peach trees along one wall, although the fruit they produced was hard and sour. My foolish great-grandmother was charmed, although by what we can never be sure – his easy banter perhaps, or his solid-looking farm or his peach trees. He was twelve years older than she was and courted her assiduously for a whole year with everything from curd cheese and peach jam to logs for the school-room stove. There came a point sometime during the spring of the following year when she couldn’t avoid the choice any longer – to go on teaching (which she loathed) or accept Frederick’s offer of marriage. She chose the latter and within a year she had given birth to the twins – Ada and William.

  During his courting of Alice, Frederick struggled to show only his better side, but once he’d secured her in marriage he was relieved to be able to reveal the less savoury aspects of his character. By the time William was being carried in his tiny coffin-cradle to the cemetery Alice knew what everyone else in Rosedale had known fo
r years (but never saw fit to tell her) – that her husband was a sullen drunkard with an insatiable appetite for gambling on anything, not just horses, but dog fights and cock fights, how many rabbits he could shoot in an hour, how many crows would take off from a field, where a fly would land in a room. Anything.

  Eventually, inevitably, he lost the farm, land that had been in his family for two hundred years, and moved Alice and the children – Ada, Lawrence and brand-new baby Tom – across to Swaledale where he got a job as a gamekeeper. There have been two more children since then and another one on the way. Not a day passes when Alice doesn’t imagine what life would be like if she hadn’t married Frederick Barker.

  Alice cuts up the dough, shapes it, puts it in the tins, covers the tins with damp cloths and places them to prove on the range. It won’t take long in this weather. Underneath her white apron she’s wearing a thick, dark-grey serge skirt and a washed-out pink blouse with pink glass buttons shaped like flowers. Daisies. She can feel the sweat trickling down her skin beneath the blouse. Alice has dark-blue shadows under her eyes and a buzzing noise in her head.

  She takes off her apron, rubs her back again and moves dreamily towards the open doorway. Leaning against the doorpost she reaches out a hand towards her daughter, Ada, and gently strokes her hair. Ada shakes her head as if a fly had landed on it – she hates being touched – and resumes her tuneless lullaby to the doll-baby while the true baby, Nell, begins to thump Alice from the inside. Alice rests her unfocused eyes on the marigolds by the back door. And then – and this is the really interesting bit of my great-grandmother’s story – something strange begins to happen to Alice. She’s about to enter her own private wonderland for she suddenly feels herself being pulled towards the marigolds on a straight, fast trajectory; it is automatic and entirely beyond her control and she has no time to think as she is sucked on her giddy journey towards the heart of a flower that looks like the sun. As she accelerates closer and closer to it, every detail of the flower becomes clear – the layers of elongated oval petals, the maroon pincushion of the central stamens, the rough, hairy green of the stems – all speed towards her and then engulf her so that she can actually feel the surprisingly velvet texture of the petals on her skin and smell the acidic perfume of the sap.