Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Let’s see,’ he grinned. ‘You must be Auntie Nell’s daughter?’

  ‘Auntie Nell?’ Bunty repeated, trying to work out this relationship. The man stuck out his hand towards her. ‘I’m your cousin, Edmund.’

  ‘Who is it?’ Frank yelled from the living-room in chorus with, ‘Shut that bloody door!’ from a female air-raid warden in the street, and Bunty yanked the man into the passage and shouted, ‘It’s our cousin Edmund!’ Nell came hurrying out of the living-room and stood, quite transfixed at the sight of the stranger. He held out his arms and walked towards her, ‘Auntie Nellie?’ and Nell fell down in a dead faint.

  ‘What the bloody hell’s going on, Jerry landed or something?’ Frank grumbled, coming into the passage. The man tried again, holding out his hand to shake Frank’s. ‘Uncle Frank? It’s Lillian’s boy.’

  ‘Edmund?’ Frank whispered, a look of wonder on his face, as if he were witnessing a miracle. Edmund pumped his hand up and down vigorously for a few seconds before they turned their attention to Nell, still prone on the floor. Bunty and Betty helped her into a sitting position and their cousin Edmund squatted on the floor next to her. ‘Auntie Nellie?’ he said, with a beautiful smile. ‘Lillian sends her love.’

  Their cousin Edmund was quite something – a handsome, brave bomb-aimer stationed at Croft and delighted to meet his English cousins. Cousin Edmund, Frank said, was the ‘spitting image’ of Nell’s brother Albert, and he laughed and said he’d thought it was a ghost walking in the door when he saw him. Nell hadn’t heard from her sister Lillian for twenty years and the last time had been a cryptic postcard from Vancouver saying, ‘I am doing well, don’t worry about me,’ which naturally made Nell worry because she didn’t know there’d been anything not to worry about. There had been no address to reply to and she’d never heard from Lillian again and so she worried even more. In fact she’d decided her sister was dead and now that she’d discovered she was alive she was furious with her for not keeping in touch. ‘She promises to write,’ Edmund said. Lillian, it appeared, was married to a man called Pete Donner and was living on a farm on the prairies and Edmund had a ‘kid brother’, called Nathan.

  ‘Nathan?’ Frank asked suspiciously. ‘Is that a Jewish name?’ and Edmund laughed and said, ‘I don’t know, sir.’ At ten, he got up to leave, saying, ‘Mustn’t miss the lift back to the base, eh?’ which, they all noticed, was a Canadian kind of ‘eh?’ rather than a Yorkshire one. He wasn’t really going back to his base that night, he was going to Betty’s Bar where he had a rendezvous with a nice little Irish nurse but he didn’t want to say that in front of his English relatives. He promised to return and visit again as soon as he had some leave and he laughed but he didn’t tell them he was laughing because he fully expected to be dead before his next leave came up, seeing as he was well into his second tour of duty.

  That night, Bunty and Betty had a long whispered conversation about Edmund. Betty declared her intention to marry him, but Bunty wasn’t so sure about Edmund – there was something knowing about the way he looked at you with those laughing blue eyes as if he could see into you and knew there wasn’t very much inside. He made Bunty think of a lion – a great golden-velvet lion. ‘What colour would you say his eyes were?’ Betty asked. ‘Sky-blue? Sea-blue?’

  ‘Forget-me-not blue,’ Bunty said, thinking of the saucer that Totty got his food in, with the faded forget-me-nots and scratched gold rim. They both fell asleep thinking about Edmund and grateful to have something to pin all their romantic feelings on.

  Edmund, unfortunately, never did come back, he was shot down on his very next sortie.

  ‘Hellish bad luck,’ Ted said, and everybody was too upset to tell him off.

  Not as hellish as Frank’s luck. In December he was walking home and took a short cut down a long narrow alley with high brick walls on either side. Just as he entered the alley, the siren went so he tried to trot along a bit faster but he got out of breath because, although he hadn’t told Nell, he’d been having a bit of trouble with his ticker. Then a strange feeling began to take hold of him and as he walked along the alley he was taken back all those years to walking across No Man’s Land on the first day of the Somme, and before he knew what was happening, he was in the grip of all those old fears. He clutched his heart – he was going to die – and spoke out loud, ‘Dear God, let me see it coming,’ just like he had all that time ago in the trenches. He wished he hadn’t given the lucky rabbit’s foot to Clifford.

  He was about half-way along the alley when he heard the whining noise of a sick engine, quite low overhead. Then, suddenly, there it was – shockingly low, one engine streaming black, oily smoke – in the narrow ribbon of sky above the alley, but by then it had already dropped the bomb that engulfed Frank in one last blinding crack of light. Bad luck because it hadn’t been aiming at Frank at all, of course. The crew of the Heinkel had overshot their target (the railway yards) and decided they’d better dump their bombs before they tried for a crash landing. They were shot down before they made it and their relatively intact bodies buried in the cemetery. Frank was buried there as well, although the undertaker had to piece his bits together as best he could.

  Bunty had really had enough of the war by now. Things were made worse by the arrival of Babs, bombed out of Burton Stone Lane and full of her own way of doing things, but improved considerably by her acquaintance with an American, called Buck, who was stationed at Grimsby. They met at a dance – Bunty and her friend Vi had quite a social whirl now; they were out all the time at dances at the de Grey Rooms and the Clifton Ballroom and became regulars at Betty’s Bar (which was nothing to do with her sister Betty, of course, Bunty would joke. This was Bunty’s only joke) – where it was the thing for all the forces to scratch their names on the big mirror there, and Bunty was sorry for Edmund because he hadn’t been in York long enough to even have a drink in Betty’s, let alone scratch his name in the mirror (she was wrong on both counts).

  Still, things were looking up – Bunty was being courted by Buck, who was a great big, bear-like sergeant from Kansas and Vi had got herself a Canadian radio operator. Betty, who was just seventeen, was also being courted by a Canadian and spent a lot of time at Uncle Tom and Auntie Mabel’s cottage in EIvington because her Canadian (Will) was stationed at Elvington aerodrome. Buck wasn’t quite everything Bunty had dreamt of, although, unlike Sandy, he was quite handsome – but not unbelievably so. Whenever things started to get steamy between them he’d say things like ‘Aw, shucks,’ and look embarrassed and it turned out that he was quite a serious Baptist and had been brought up by his widowed mother who’d instilled good manners and a respect for women in him. Eventually, after much humming and hawing, he asked Bunty to marry him and tied a little piece of thread around her finger and said, ‘When I get you back home to Ma, I’ll buy you a real expensive ring,’ and they all had quite a little tea-party in Lowther Street to celebrate.

  It was not long after that he blew his foot off in a stupid accident. ‘Anything for a lark these Yanks,’ Clifford said so that Betty gasped and Bunty hit him so hard that she hurt herself. He was home on leave, but, thankfully, they weren’t his home any more as he’d married a girl called Gladys who’d been in the ATS and was now very pregnant with their one and only child. Buck got shipped back to the States to his ‘Ma’, promising he’d send for his little Bunty but he never did.

  Bunty met George towards the end of 1944; he was a corporal in the catering corps and was stationed at Catterick. They had a sporadic kind of courtship and became engaged just before the war finished. She wasn’t entirely sure about this, but, with the war now drawing to a close, the possibilities were beginning to fade and all those coins tossed in the air were falling back to earth with a clatter in rather dull and predictable positions.

  Not for Betty though; she announced she was going to Vancouver. Betty and Bunty searched the atlas for a map of Canada to see where Betty was going to be living. But they both knew that Betty wasn’t
really going to Canada, she was going to a new life. ‘So are you Bunty,’ she said, tapping Bunty’s engagement ring, but Bunty didn’t really think so.

  Clifford was demobbed, unharmed, thanks to the rabbit’s foot, and became a slightly nicer person under the influence of Gladys. He gave the lucky rabbit’s foot to Bunty on her wedding-day. He reckoned she was going to need a lot of luck with a man like George. Babs and Sidney waited until 1948 before having the twins, Daisy and Rose.

  Betty, the war-bride, divorced her husband twenty years later, but stayed in Vancouver and only came back to England for a visit once, in 1975, and, as she reported to her daughter, Hope, once was quite enough, even though it had been nice to see Bunty.

  It wasn’t until years after the war that Bunty learnt what happened to Mrs Carter and Mr Simon. When the shop and flat were bombed out (the barber was wrong – they had been in it) they went to stay with Mrs Carter’s sister in Leeds and never came back to York. In the dreadful winter of 1947, while Mrs Carter’s sister was marooned in Newcastle on a visit to her daughter, they gassed themselves in her little kitchen. Mr Simon (who suffered a lot for his accent during the war) had lost a son in Dachau – which really surprised Bunty because he’d never mentioned him – and of course, Mrs Carter had already lost her son, so Bunty could see why they’d done it, but she wished they hadn’t.

  They went to Liverpool to see Betty off on her Atlantic crossing. Like nearly everybody else standing on the quay, Bunty cried as the big ship eased away. Betty was a happy-go-lucky sort, always willing to see the bright side of things, and Bunty didn’t realize how much she was going to miss her until she saw her waving from the deck.

  In the end, Bunty’s war had been a disappointment. She lost something in the war but she didn’t find out until it was too late that it was the chance to be somebody else.

  Somewhere at the back of Bunty’s dreams another war would always play – a war in which she manned searchlights and loaded ack-acks, a war in which she was resourceful and beautiful, not to mention plucky and where ‘String of Pearls’ played endlessly in the de Grey Rooms as a succession of unbelievably handsome officers whirled Bunty off into another life.

  Before her marriage to George, Nell gave Bunty her mother’s silver locket. She had meant to leave it, after she was dead, to her eldest, Babs, but Bunty’s spirits seemed so low, considering she was about to get married, that Nell gave it to her instead.

  Bunty took one other thing to her marriage from the house in Lowther Street – Nell had kept Ena’s teaspoon on the mantelpiece as a strange, silent memento mori. She didn’t seem to regard it as odd when, the night before her wedding to George, Bunty asked her if she could take it with her to her new life. Bunty always polished Ena’s spoon regularly and kept it as clean and shiny as a new coin.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1956

  The Naming of Things

  IDON’T THINK THIS IS KANSAS, TEDDY. BUT WHERE ON earth is it? What’s that you say, Teddy? Dewsbury? Oh my God, let him be wrong. But he’s not – this is Dewsbury, Shoddy Capital of the north.

  But why? Why are we in Dewsbury – and worse, not just in Dewsbury but in the attic bedroom of Number Twelve, Mirthroyd Road – the den, the lair, the pod of the twins from hell – Daisy and Rose!

  They regard me with their solemn little eyes. They are perched on the edge of the double bed they share while I am installed in the corner by the window on an old camp bed constructed out of green canvas and rusting tubular metal. It’s covered in a dark, grey blanket that reeks of moth balls. The guest bed.

  But how I got here or why I am here – these are mysteries, for I remember nothing about the journey. In fact, if I think hard – which is not easy to do with the twins staring at me – I can’t remember anything much at all. I confirm my existence to myself with a growing sense of panic – my name is Ruby Lennox, I have a mother, a father, sisters. These are not my sisters. Perhaps Daisy and Rose really are an alien life form and they sucked me up on board their spacecraft while I was innocently playing in the Back Yard and are now going to conduct a series of barbaric experiments on me. The twins begin to glow a funny shade of green—

  ‘Ruby! Are you all right?’ Auntie Babs squeezes into the bedroom – it’s clear that the guest bed is taking up much needed space – and looks at me doubtfully. I can see that the only way for a guest to behave in these circumstances is very politely. ‘Yes, thank you, Auntie Babs,’ I reply in a clear, firm voice.

  ‘Why don’t you play with Ruby, girls?’ Auntie Babs says, looking at her offspring. I shrink a little farther into the corner, I’m not at all sure I want to be initiated into their games. Auntie Babs turns back to me with a bright, artificial smile that I recognize because it’s Bunty’s. I wonder where they got it from? (See Footnote (iv)) ‘Can you tell them apart yet, Ruby?’ she asks. Perhaps they are like those quizzes in Gillian’s Beano where you have two ‘identical’ pictures and have to Spot the Difference!. Perhaps one twin will have six fingers, no ear and a ribbon in her hair. ‘Look up to the ceiling,’ Auntie Babs commands one of them and points out a small freckle under its chin. Is that all? Spot the Difference? Hardly any. ‘This one is Rose.’ Rose stares blankly at the ceiling until Auntie Babs says, ‘It’s all right now, Rose, you can put your head down.’ Rose looks at me as blankly as she did at the ceiling. They have a very limited range of facial expressions. Already I’m beginning to miss the startling variety of emotions that scud like clouds across Gillian’s face, or even the sombre, yet subtle, palette that Patricia draws from.

  ‘A game? A toy?’ Auntie Babs prompts my little hosts. Reluctantly, Daisy slides off the bed and produces a box of Fuzzy Felts. If I have a quick game of Fuzzy Felts with them, will I be allowed home? Somehow I don’t think so.

  I have with me a small suitcase which contains a pair of winceyette pyjamas, a toothbrush and flannel, a pair of ruby-red slippers, five pairs of knickers, a vest, a liberty bodice, two Viyella blouses, a kilt, a corduroy pinafore-dress, a pair of tartan trews, two hand-knitted jumpers (one white, one Fair Isle), a cardigan (bottle-green, round-neck, raglan sleeves), a petticoat and four pairs of socks. Plus, of course, what I was wearing when I arrived – one vest, one liberty bodice, one pair of knickers, one pair of socks, one petticoat, one pair of shoes, one blue woollen skirt with straps, one yellow jumper, one winter coat, one pair of gloves, one scarf, one woollen hat (Tam o’ Shanter style). If there was one thing we were good at as a family it was dressing properly for the great outdoors.

  Reviewing the amount of clothes, it seems as if I might be in for quite a long stay. On the other hand, there is the anomaly of only one pair of pyjamas – are the clothes really there to impress Auntie Babs while the pyjamas tell the real story? Who knows? Not me. And why am I here? Is this a holiday? It doesn’t feel like a holiday. As well as Teddy, I also have with me Gillian’s Ladybird book Puppies and Kittens which she must have given to me in an extraordinary and unprecedented act of generosity.

  I have been here nearly a week. I don’t think the twins sleep at night. I think they just lie very, very still. I can’t sleep if I think they’re awake and if I do drop into sleep it’s always to wake in a state of terror. I clutch Teddy tightly under the covers. His hot little body is a great source of comfort to me, I can feel his furry little chest rising and falling with his breathing. The eiderdown that covers Daisy and Rose does not move at all, however, confirming that they do not have normal, human lungs. I have seen the way they look at Teddy and I do not think their intentions are good.

  In the dark, the furniture takes on a new malevolence – the bedroom is crowded out with furniture – big, heavy pieces that don’t belong in a child’s bedroom at all, not just the Arctic waste of their double bed, but the huge, double-fronted wardrobe and matching dressing-table that’s big enough to stow a corpse in. In the blackness of night, the furniture-shapes possess a profound ultra-blackness that hints at anti-matter.

  Over in the other corner is thei
r doll’s house, a big four-storey Victorian one. It has pictures the size of postage stamps and postage stamps the size of dots; it has gilded chairs fit for a fairy queen and chandeliers like crystal earrings and a kitchen table groaning under the weight of plaster hams and plaster-moulded blancmanges.

  This doll’s house is much coveted by Gillian who has frequently tried to persuade the twins to make a will and leave it to her. I doubt very much that they have. If it were willed to me (which is even more unlikely) I would refuse to accept it. There’s something eerie about it, with its microscopic plumbing (tiny copper taps!) and little, little leather-bound books (Great Expectations!). I would be frightened – I am frightened – of getting trapped in there and becoming one of the tiny ringletted and pinafored little girls up in the nursery who have to play with teeny-weeny dolls all day long. Or worse – the poor scullery maid, for ever consigned to blacking the kitchen range.

  Perhaps the twins, with their galactic powers, will miniaturize me in the night and Auntie Babs will come in this room one morning and find the guest bed empty and the guest bed in the doll’s house (much nicer than the camp bed) full of a doll-like Ruby Lennox clutching a teddy bear the size of an amoeba.

  The stairs are the worst – both in the doll’s house and in Mirthroyd Road. Auntie Babs and Uncle Sidney’s house reminds me of Above the Shop, the same thin, tall dimensions and the same abundance of staircases – although in Mirthroyd Road there’s really only one room on each floor and to get to the attic bedroom involves a long, long climb up the dark, narrow staircase, which is full of bends and twists and unexpected corners which harbour vast quantities of Unknown Dread. The amiable ghosts Above the Shop have been replaced by something that crackles with evil.