Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Ruby.’

  ‘Ruby?’ Auntie Babs repeats doubtfully. ‘Ruby,’ Bunty confirms decisively. My name is Ruby. I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox.

  Footnote (ii) – Still Lives

  THIS IS THE STORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER’S CONTINUALLY thwarted attempts to get married. When she was twenty-four, Nell became engaged to a policeman, Percy Sievewright, a tall, good-looking man and a keen amateur footballer. He played for the same Saturday league team as Nell’s brother, Albert, and it was Albert who had introduced the pair of them. When Percy proposed, down on one knee and very solemn, Nell’s heart had buoyed up with happiness and relief – at last she was going to be the most important person in someone’s life.

  Unfortunately, Percy’s appendix burst and he died of peritonitis not long after they’d set the date for the wedding. He was only twenty-six and the funeral was one of those wretched ones that rubs the grief raw instead of pouring balm on it. He was an only child and his father was dead so his mother was beside herself, sinking into a faint at the graveside. Nell and Albert and another man ran forward and lifted her up from the soaking-wet grass – it had been raining for two days and the ground was like mud – and then Albert and the other man stood one on either side of her like pillars and supported her for the rest of the service. The raindrops that were clinging to the black net of Mrs Sievewright’s veil trembled like little diamonds every time her body convulsed in anguish. Nell felt her own grief was dull in comparison to Mrs Sievewright’s. The lads from the football team carried the coffin and Percy’s fellow policemen formed an honour guard. It was the first time Nell had seen grown men with tears running down their faces and it seemed especially awful to see a uniformed policeman crying. Afterwards, everyone kept saying what a grand bloke Percy was and Nell wished they wouldn’t because it made it worse somehow – knowing he was a grand bloke and only being his fiancée and not his widow. She knew it shouldn’t make any difference, but it did. Lillian sat next to her at the funeral tea and kept squeezing her black-gloved hand in dreadful, mute sympathy.

  Nell thought her life was over, and yet to her surprise it carried on much as before. She’d been apprenticed to a milliner in Coney Street when she left school and her days were still spent curling feathers and swathing chiffon as if nothing had happened. It was the same at home, she was still expected to wash pots and darn stockings while Rachel, her stepmother, watched her from the rocking-chair that she was growing too fat for and said things like, ‘Employment is nature’s physician’ which was the epigraph to her Everyman’s Book of Home Remedies. Nell kept her face turned away from her stepmother and tried not to listen because she was afraid if she did she would hit her with the big, cast-iron stew-pot. Now that she no longer had Percy to rescue her it seemed as if she would be trapped in the little house on Lowther Street for ever. To have been ‘Mrs Percy Sievewright’ would have given her a shape and identity that seemed to be denied to plain Nell Barker.

  Nell was surprised at how quickly Percy faded from everyday life. She got into the habit of visiting Mrs Sievewright every Friday evening, knowing that she was the one person who could be relied upon not to forget Percy, and the two of them would sit over a pot of tea and a plate of bloater-paste sandwiches, talking about Percy as if he were still alive, imagining a life for him, that now would never be – Just think what Percy would have said about that . . . Percy always liked Scarborough . . . Percy would have loved to have had sons . . . but they couldn’t conjure him back, no matter how hard they tried.

  Sheepishly, because he thought it might seem a bit daft, Albert knocked and came into Nell’s bedroom one evening and gave her the team photograph that they’d had taken the previous year, the year they’d almost won the challenge cup. ‘And we would have done if Frank Cook hadn’t missed that shot, daft bugger-excuse-my-language. Jack Keech sent him a perfect cross, it was an open goal,’ Albert said, shaking his head in disbelief, even now, a year later. Nell asked, ‘Which one was Frank then?’ and Albert told her the names of all the players and stopped abruptly when he came to Percy, and finally said, ‘Death’s awful when it happens to somebody young,’ which was what he’d heard someone say at the funeral and not what he thought at all because Albert didn’t really believe in death. The dead had just gone away somewhere and were going to come back sooner or later – they were waiting in a shadowy room that no one could see the door to, and being ministered to by his mother, who was almost certainly an angel by now. Albert couldn’t remember what his mother had looked like, no matter how hard he screwed up his eyes and concentrated. But that didn’t stop him missing her, even though he was nearly thirty years old. Alice, Ada, Percy, the lurcher he’d had as a boy that fell under a cart – they were all going to jump out from the waiting-room one day and surprise Albert. ‘Well, night-night, Nelly,’ he said finally, because he could tell from the way that she was staring at the photograph that she thought the dead were gone for ever and weren’t hiding anywhere.

  Nell found it strange looking at Percy in the photograph because in real life he had seemed so distinctive and different from everybody else, but here he had the same vague, slightly out-of-focus features as the rest of the team. ‘Thank you,’ Nell said to Albert, but he’d already left the room. Frank Cook looked like anyone else, standing in the middle of the back row, but Jack Keech was recognizable, he was the one crouched down at the front with the ball. She knew he was a good pal of Albert’s but it was only when Nell came home from work one evening and found the pair of them together in the back yard that she recognized Jack Keech as the man who had helped them with Percy Sievewright’s mother when she’d collapsed at the graveside.

  The sun trapped in the back yard at Lowther Street was hot even though it was only May and Nell paused for a second on the threshold, feeling the warmth on her face. ‘There you are, Nell,’ Albert said as if they’d both been waiting for her. ‘Brew up a pot of tea, there’s a good lass – Jack’s fixing the bench.’ Jack Keech looked up from wrenching out a nail and smiled at her and said, ‘Tea’d be grand, Nell.’ Nell smiled back and went into the house without saying anything and filled the kettle.

  She put the kettle to boil and then walked back to the stone sink under the window and rested her hands on the edge and watched Albert and Jack Keech through the window. While she waited for the kettle she moved her toes up and down inside her boots and felt her ribcage moving as she breathed and when she put the back of her hands up to her cheeks she could feel how hot they were.

  The bench was an old wooden one that had been in the back yard ever since they moved into the house. There were several slats missing from the back and the arm had begun to come away. Jack Keech was kneeling on the paving-slabs of the yard, sawing a block of clean, new wood with a stubby saw, and through the open door Nell could smell the resin from the pine. A lock of Jack’s thick, dark hair kept falling over his forehead. Albert was standing over him laughing. Albert was always laughing. His angelic blond curls had never gone away and his baby-blue eyes looked too big somehow under the sweep of pale gold lashes so that he still didn’t look grown up. It was hard to see how he was going to stop looking like a boy and start looking like an old man, never mind all the years in between.

  There was always a flock of girls after Albert but there was never one he chose to be special. His brother Tom was married and away from home but Albert said he didn’t think he’d ever get married and both Lillian and Nell agreed that this was a daft thing to say because you could see that he’d make a grand husband, and in private they agreed that if he wasn’t their brother they would have married him themselves.

  The way things were going they’d probably all end their days together anyway. Neither Nell nor Lillian seemed capable of catching a husband, they’d both had broken engagements, Nell’s broken by death and Lillian’s by an act of betrayal, and one day Rachel would die and leave them alone. ‘If only . . .’ Lillian would say as she plaited her hair at night in Nell’s r
oom, and Nell, pressing her face into her pillow, wondered, for the millionth time, why their mother had been taken away and they had been given Rachel in exchange.

  Nell rinsed the teapot with hot water from the kettle, swirling it round and round before emptying it down the sink. Jack Keech had taken his braces down so that they hung around his waist and had rolled up the white sleeves of his shirt so that she could see the muscles in his forearm flexing as he sawed the wood. The skin on his arms was the polished walnut colour that came from working outdoors. Albert looked like a guardian angel standing over him and Nell watched both of them, holding the teapot to her breast and wishing that this moment would go on longer.

  When she went out again with the tray of tea and plate of bread and butter, Jack was marking off a piece of wood with a pencil and with a tremendous effort Nell said shyly, ‘It’s very good of you, mending the bench like this,’ and he looked up and grinned and said, ‘That’s all right, Nell.’ Then he straightened up for a minute and, rubbing the small of his back, said, ‘It’s a nice yard you’ve got here,’ so that both Albert and Nell looked round in surprise because neither of them had ever thought of the back yard in Lowther Street as being ‘nice’; yet now that Jack said so you could see how sunny it was and Nell wondered how they could have lived here for five years and never really noticed the dusty-pink clematis that was climbing all over the wall and the back door.

  ‘Jack’s a chippy,’ Albert said admiringly (although Albert was a train driver which Nell and Lillian agreed must be a wonderful thing to do). Jack knelt down again and started hammering a nail in and Nell found the nerve to stand and watch him for nearly a whole minute and all she could think about was what high, sharp cheekbones he had, like razor-clam shells.

  Jack didn’t stop and drink his tea until he’d finished, by which time it was cold. Nell offered to brew a fresh pot but Albert said he fancied a beer and suggested the Golden Fleece. Jack gave Nell a rueful smile and said, ‘Another time, maybe,’ and she could feel a blush rising up from her chest to her cheeks, so that she had to look away quickly while Albert helped Jack to pack up his tools.

  Nell was left alone to deal with Rachel when she came back from a temperance meeting at the church. She was in a foul mood because no one had put the tea on to cook and they ended up eating bread and butter without speaking because Lillian didn’t come in until later and said she was working a late shift (she worked at Rowntree’s) which Nell knew wasn’t true. Albert didn’t roll in until past midnight; she heard him pause and sit on the bottom stair to take his boots off so he wouldn’t wake anyone and then creep up to his room.

  The next time Nell saw Jack was a few Sundays later when he stopped in with Frank to pick up Albert for the football team’s annual outing. Frank was wearing a tweed cap and carrying a fishing rod (they were going to Scarborough). Frank was a draper’s assistant but neither Albert nor Jack ever let on to Frank that they thought being a draper’s assistant wasn’t much of a job, especially when they could see that he knew that well enough for himself without being told.

  Jack leant against the back yard wall and smiled a lazy smile at noone in particular. He had a straw boater on and Albert laughed and said, ‘He looks like a real toff, eh, Nelly?’ and gave her a wink so that she didn’t know where to look. Underneath the hat his black hair was slicked back from his forehead and he was so cleanshaven that Nell wanted to reach out and touch his skin just above where it met the whiteness of his collar. She didn’t of course, she could hardly bring herself to even look at him as they stood in the yard, waiting for Albert. ‘We’ll miss the train if he doesn’t hurry,’ Frank said, and Lillian said, ‘Here he comes!’ as they heard their brother’s boots on the stairs, and then Lillian smiled at Jack with her cat-green almond eyes and gave Nell an invisible prod in the back and hissed, ‘Go on, Nellie – say something,’ because she knew how sweet her sister was on Jack.

  But then Albert came out and said, ‘Come on, we’re going to be late,’ and all three turned to go and were half-way along the lane at the back of the house before either Nell or Lillian remembered the lunch they’d packed for them. Lillian shouted, ‘Wait!’ so loudly that an upstairs window across the way shot open, the sash rattling, and Mrs Harding looked out to see what the fuss was about. Nell ran back into the kitchen and grabbed Tom’s old haversack off the kitchen table and ran back out into the lane.

  The packed lunch had been the subject of much discussion between Lillian and Nell because originally they were only going to do enough for Albert, but then it struck them that Frank didn’t have any family so maybe he wouldn’t make himself a good lunch – if any at all – and then they thought about Jack and decided it wouldn’t be right to leave him out, and in the end Lillian laughed and said they were going to end up making lunch for the whole football team if they weren’t careful. Eventually, inside Tom’s old knapsack they placed – a dozen ham sandwiches wrapped in a clean tea-towel, six hard-boiled eggs in their shells, a big piece of Wensleydale, a slab of parkin, a bag of cinder toffee, three apples and three bottles of ginger beer (even though they knew there’d be crates of beer going with the lads). Needless to say, Rachel knew nothing of this largesse.

  Jack broke away from the other two and walked back towards Nell and, taking the haversack from her said, ‘Thanks Nell, that was right good of the two of you, we’ll think about you when we’re sitting up on the Front eating this lot.’ Then he gave her his boyish, cheeky smile and said, ‘Maybe one evening next week you’d like to walk out with me?’ and Nell nodded and smiled and kicked herself because he must think she was a deaf-mute for all she ever said anything to him, and eventually she managed to say, ‘That would be nice,’ with a tremulous little smile.

  She almost ran back to Lillian at the gate and the two of them stood, framed in pink clematis, watching the three men walk to the top of the cobbled lane where they all turned and waved. The sun was behind them so you couldn’t see their faces, but Lillian imagined their smiles and she had to put her hand to her mouth and blink away the tears that had formed because she was thinking what fine young men they were and how afraid she was for them, but all she said was, ‘I hope they’re careful if they go out on a boat.’ Nell said nothing, she was thinking how sad Percy Sievewright’s mother would have felt if she’d been here at that moment, seeing his three pals going off to Scarborough and knowing Percy couldn’t go with them.

  Nell didn’t know whether she’d never loved Percy properly or whether she simply couldn’t remember what it was like to love Percy, but either way, what she felt now for Jack seemed nothing like anything she’d known about before. Just the thought of him made her feel hot and alive and she prayed every night that she’d be able to carry on resisting him until their wedding-night.

  She kept on visiting Percy’s mother, although she changed the night to Monday because she saw Jack on Friday nights now. She didn’t tell Percy’s mother that she was in love with someone else because it was hardly a year since Percy had died and they continued to talk about him over the endless cups of tea – only now he felt like a person they’d invented between them rather than a man who had ever been flesh and blood. If she looked at the photograph of the football team it was with a sense of guilt because her eyes skimmed over Percy’s lifeless face and fixed on Jack’s impudent smile.

  Albert was the first to join up. He told his sisters it would be ‘a bit of a lark’ and a chance to see something of the world. ‘A bit of Belgium, more like,’ Jack said sarcastically, but nothing would have put Albert off and they hardly had time to say goodbye to him properly before he was on his way to Fulford Barracks to join up with the 1st East Yorkshires and be transformed from a train driver into a gunner. They had a photograph taken though, that was Tom’s idea. ‘Whole family together,’ he said, perhaps having a premonition that there would never be another time. Tom had a friend – a Mr Mattock – who was a keen photographer and he came one sunny afternoon and posed them all in the back yard at Lowther Stree
t, with Rachel, Lillian and Nell sitting on the newly mended bench, with Tom standing behind and Albert bobbed down in the middle at Rachel’s feet, just like Jack in the team photograph. Tom said what a shame it was that Lawrence wasn’t with them and Rachel said, ‘He might be dead for all we know.’ If you look very closely at the photograph, you can see the clematis growing along the top of the wall, like a garland.

  Frank joined up the day that Albert crossed the Channel – Frank knew he was a coward and was terrified other people would find out as well so he thought he’d join up as quickly as possible before anyone noticed. He was so scared that his hand wouldn’t stop shaking when he was signing his papers and the commissioning sergeant laughed and said, ‘I hope you’ve got a steadier hand when it comes to shooting the Hun, lad.’ Jack was standing right behind Frank. The last thing Jack wanted to do was fight a war, privately he thought it was all a piece of nonsense – but it seemed wrong to let Frank just go off like that, so he went along with him and signed his name with a flourish. ‘Well done, lad,’ the sergeant said.

  Lillian and Nell went to the station to wave them off but there were so many people crowded onto the bunting-decked platform that they only got a glimpse of Frank at the last minute, waving at nobody in particular from a carriage window as the train passed beneath the vaulting cathedral arches of the station. Nell could have wept from disappointment at not seeing Jack amongst this flag-waving, kit-toting mêlée and she was only glad that she’d given him that lucky rabbit’s foot the previous evening when they had said their fond farewells. She’d clutched onto his arm and started crying, and Rachel, moved to disgust, said, ‘Leave off that noise,’ and thrust the little rabbit’s paw into her hand and said, ‘Here’s a good luck charm for him,’ and Jack laughed uproariously and said, ‘They should make them standard issue, eh?’ and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket.