Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  Home! Sweet Home. There Is No Place Like It. Keep Its Fires Burning. It’s Where The Heart Is. My ordeal is over at last. Patricia is my welcoming committee, standing in the hallway to greet me. ‘Hello, Ruby,’ she says, a soft, forgiving smile on her face. In the kitchen, Bunty offers me milk and biscuits. Her eyes are rimmed in red and she has a slightly mad air about her. She looks at me, or rather a point slightly to the left of me and with a visible effort says, ‘Now, Ruby – we’ve decided that we’re all going to try and carry on and put the accident behind us.’ Well, that’s fine by me, seeing as I have no idea what ‘accident’ she’s talking about. And anyway noone appears to be hurt – apart from Teddy who has a small gash in his leg where the wolves took a little of his stuffing and Patricia sews him up very neatly with silk embroidery floss. She will make a very good vet one day.

  Before I go to bed that night I harass Patricia into helping me translate Puppies and Kittens. I regret ever having doubted her talents as a teacher, for the way she explains it now it all suddenly makes sense and, as if by magic, I am able to unlock The Mysteries – ‘Here is a Puppy, Here is a Kitten, Here are Puppies and Kittens.’ I am powerful! I have the key to the Temple of Knowledge and there’s no stopping me – we get out crayons and form letters. No need for Puy and Ktn any more, now there are enough letters to make all the Puppies and Kittens we want, enough letters to make everything. Slowly, with a red crayon, I create my own hieroglyphics – R-U-B-Y spells Ruby! My name is Ruby. I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox.

  I go to sleep in my own bed for the first time in what seems like a long time. It’s strange to be alone in my bedroom and I have a distinct feeling that something – or somebody – is missing. There is a space in the room that wasn’t there before, not a vacuum but an invisible cloud of sadness that drifts around, bumping into furniture and lingering at the foot of my bed as if the domestic phantoms had been joined by a raw recruit. The fur on Teddy’s neck stands up and he growls nervously.

  My night-time perambulations do not stop when I’m home and Bunty often wakes me from my parlous state in order to tell me how annoyed she is at being woken by my ghostly odysseys. But what of the times when she doesn’t wake me? Why do I have such unquiet sleep?

  Something has changed Above the Shop. Patricia, for example, has definitely taken a turn for the worse, there is a look of troubled confusion in her eyes that’s quite distressing to behold. On my first night back, as I race to the end of Puppies and Kittens (‘Puppies and Kittens are sleeping’), I can see she’s trying to say something. She bites her lip and stares at the picture of sleeping puppies and kittens. Then she speaks in an urgent, ferocious whisper – ‘Was it Gillian, Ruby? Was it Gillian’s fault?’ – but I just look at her blankly because I haven’t the faintest idea what she’s talking about.

  And as for Gillian herself – Gillian is being nice to me! She says I can keep her Puppies and Kittens and have untrammelled use of Mobo (not much good as I’ve outgrown him and he’s on his way to the knacker’s yard. Outgrowing the Mobo is a kind of rite of passage and I can now understand Gillian’s feelings when it happened to her.) Furthermore I can borrow Sooty or Sweep – I am even given a free choice and I choose Sweep because he has a voice. Of sorts. For a brief, pleasant period of time, Sooty and Sweep have a friendly relationship, until Gillian’s natural animosity reasserts itself and with one last Izzie Wizzie let’s get busy she breaks Sooty’s wand over Sweep’s head and reclaims him by pulling him violently off my hand. I don’t really care – I still have Teddy and an Alexandrian library of books, in the form of the Children’s Section of the York City Library, is waiting to be deciphered by us.

  In dreams, Teddy and I fly down the stairs of our own house on the magic carpet – we have perfect control and manoeuvre skilfully on landings, outwitting the wolves who skitter off into the Outer Darkness and neatly avoiding the Unnamed Dread (whose collective name is Fear) and the Sioux and Apache braves who stick out their feet in a vain attempt to trip us up. Ahead of us rides Patricia, dressed in Lincoln Green, on a horse called Silver. Hi-ho! We gather speed at every turn, zoom, zoom, zoooooom, zooooooooooom – we are all-powerful. We reach the last flight of stairs, the scary one, but accelerate triumphantly down and glide along the hallway at the bottom like hypersonic owls. The front door stands open and as we fly towards it, it changes into a rainbow arch and – we are free! We are in the open air, no longer in the street but on the open plains beneath an endless sea of stars. Teddy laughs in exultation and ahead of us Patricia’s hair streams out like a banner of gold.

  Footnote (iv) – Bonny Birds

  FREDERICK LAUGHED AS HE CAME INTO THE KITCHEN. ‘Tha’s a reet workhoss, lass,’ he said, looking approvingly at Rachel’s huge backside, tilted towards him as she knelt washing the stone floor. Rachel turned as red as a beetroot but didn’t look round from her meditation, moving the scrubbing-brush up and down on the stone flags, up and down, up and down, the muscles on her powerful arms moving as she worked to clean the cottage of the lingering spirit of Alice Barker.

  ‘’Appen it’s not such a bad little place, eh?’ Frederick said. He was carrying a pair of dead rabbits by their ears and laid them down on the draining-board, leaving a thin trail of blood on the newly-scrubbed and bleached wood. ‘I’m doing my best, Mr Barker,’ Rachel said, feeling the blush spread uncomfortably down her body. Mr Barker, sir, ‘t’master’ – Alice Barker’s husband. Alice Barker, the wife. ‘And a grand job it is,’ he said, and she could hear the sly chuckle in his voice. Rachel smiled, keeping her eyes on the flags. He’d be hers soon enough. She’d take Alice’s place – be a second wife, or near enough anyway. She’d have a man of her own, a household to be mistress of, a readymade family. They needed her because they were weak and she was strong. ‘I’m off to see to t’traps on Pengill Crags,’ he said.

  Rachel sat back on her heels and wiped the sweat from her face with the back of her hand. She nodded in the direction of the table. ‘I’ve made snap for you.’

  Frederick picked up the bread and cheese that was wrapped in a cloth. ‘Tha’s a grand lass, Rachel.’

  And so I am, thought Rachel. A grand lass, who will set this lot right. And they’d be grateful to her, whether they liked it or not. She was all they’d got in the end, now that their dizzy, idle mother was gone. Their only kin too, for Rachel was no hired servant, but cousin to Alice Barker. Their family tree had been split down the middle, a bifurcated trunk – Alice’s mother, Sophia, and Rachel’s mother, Hannah, were sisters but Sophia had married up in the world and Hannah had married down and been disowned by her father. So while Rachel had gone into service as a scullery maid at the age of ten, little Alice was still brushing out her blond curls and having piano lessons. And where had all her fancy ways got her? A clarty midden, that’s where, Rachel thought, pausing for a moment to look round the kitchen. Hadn’t she ever dirtied her pretty, white, schoolteacher fingers in this place? Not to judge by the amount of soot and grease in the kitchen, the lamp-black on the walls, the unswept dust on the floors, the unmended, unpatched linen. Now ‘t’master’ had been forced to send for Rachel from Whitby because he had very carelessly lost his pretty wife.

  And as for her children! They were a disgrace, unruly and sullen, ignorant of their Bible, their hems hanging down, their handkerchiefs filthy – if they had them at all, that is. The girl, Ada, had hair that was so tangled that the first thing Rachel had to do was shear half of it. She’d screamed like a stuck pig when she’d seen her curls falling around her feet. She was so like her mother it was uncanny. Those children might resent her now but in another few months they’d be thankful for the order she’d brought into their lives, something clever, silly Alice Barker could never do.

  From upstairs came the thin whine of the baby, followed by the more articulate cry of an older child. Rachel ignored both, they were going to have to learn that she wasn’t there to dance attendance on them all the time, she had a floor to scrub
for a start. Something glinted in the weak November sun and Rachel tweaked it out from a crack in between the flags – a button. Pink glass, fancy like a flower – Alice’s no doubt. Rachel slipped it into her pocket, it would go in her button tin. All Alice Barker had in her button tin was an old George IV coin and a violet cachou. That was the kind of woman she was.

  A little lead soldier skidded across the flags and Albert clapped his hands and laughed. He was watching her from the passage where he was playing with his soldiers and bricks, tied by makeshift reins to the newel-post of the stairs. ‘Aye, you can wipe that smile off your face,’ Rachel said, pocketing the soldier as well. Out of all of them, he got on her nerves the most, always trying to suck up, putting his arms around her and kissing her. He was like a little girl, the mirror of his sister and his mother.

  Rachel threw the bucket of dirty water out into the yard and left the door open to try and dry the flags, but the sun was already a fading bruise beyond the hill. She went back to the sink and picked up a limp rabbit, and was about to get about skinning and paunching when she stopped and fetched the cleaver that hung by the range and smartly chopped off a paw. It was luck, a rabbit’s foot, everyone knew that, and tonight she’d turn a silver threepence under the new moon and, all in all, that should take care of the future, please God. A great clattering of pattens on the cobbles of the yard announced the arrival of the older ones, home from school. They hardly seemed to be out of the house in the morning before they were back in it again.

  They all three stood framed by the door, like a sentimental photograph, and then Ada pouted and said, ‘Yon bairns are roarin’, can tha not hear them?’ and, kicking off her clogs, broke free from the frame and marched across the wet floor. When she spotted Albert tied up to the stairs she went pink and yelled at Rachel, ‘Tha’ve got yon poor bairn tied up like a dog, it’s you that should be tied up!’ and while she was untying him she kept saying, ‘Poor wee Bertie, poor wee Bertie, Addie’s here,’ and when Rachel told her to leave him be she turned to her and said, ‘Tha’s not Mother, tha canst tell me nowt,’ and then smiled that artificial smile that nearly split her face like a big sliver of moon and Rachel picked up a discarded clog and bowled it overarm so that it bounced off Ada’s shorn curls. Even that didn’t stop her, and she stood there with a heavy Albert hoisted awkwardly in her arms, a patch of blood no bigger than a button staining her hair and her face white with shock, and screamed hysterically, ‘Tha’s not Mother!’ over and over again until Frederick’s shadow suddenly darkened the kitchen and he bellowed, ‘Frame thissen, yer tyke!’ and then he brayed each and every one of them in turn except for baby Nelly. ‘Yon childer need a mother,’ he said to Rachel when he’d finished. ‘Aye, they do that, Mr Barker,’ she agreed, trying to look as solemn and righteous as she could so he would appreciate the contrast to her cousin.

  A warm September sun washed the cottage like honey. Rachel was in the kitchen, salting beans, snapping them and packing them down in their layers of salt into the big stone crock. She’d grown the round beans herself, and runners too, with scarlet flowers on a vine on the gable-end of the barn that faced south and it had taken off like something from a fairy story. She’d got Frederick to make sure that the night-soil from the privies went on a muck-heap and now she had a real garden going with potatoes and brown onions, rhubarb and carrots, and dark-green crinkled savoys. She’d never have believed she had such a country woman inside her.

  This was her kitchen now, her cottage, her life. A stranger chancing by the cottage (a rare occurrence) would never have known about Alice, although they might have queried how a wet lump of dough like Rachel could have produced such a pretty clutch from her loins.

  She put up the photographs of the children on the mantelpiece each side of the clock that – like the children – the foolish wife had left behind. These photographs were a queer thing. Frederick never had understood where they had come from. ‘T’Frenchman came and took ’em,’ Ada said with her surly pout, but was unforthcoming about the details. Two of them were already framed – by ‘t’Frenchman’ presumably – and those were the two that Rachel put on the mantelpiece. One was of the three boys together and the other was of Lawrence and Tom with the baby Lillian. The rest, the unframed ones, were put at the back of a drawer. None of the children ever looked at those photographs on the mantelpiece, they remembered only too vividly that they had appeared on the last day they ever saw their mother. ‘I wish there were a photograph of Mother,’ Ada said miserably one day and Lawrence said, ‘Rachel ’ud throw it in t’fire if there were,’ but later Tom took them both upstairs and showed them the treasure he had purloined from the kitchen table on the morning of his mother’s death and for a full half-hour the three oldest children exclaimed over the photograph of Alice – the beautiful (albeit ambiguous) expression on their missing mother’s face and the plush extravagance of the silver and red velvet frame.

  The children were improved a little, in appearance if not in temper – they were brushed and patched and scrubbed, and had their allotted tasks. They read from the Bible and said their prayers and the whole family went to church on a Sunday, Frederick in his smart jacket with the braided trim and a bowler on his head.

  The door to the outside was wide open and Rachel could see Albert playing with that stupid little lurcher that Frederick had given to him, he was soft as lard to let him have that dog. Ada was sitting on the grass by the fence telling Lillian and Nell stories, making extravagant gestures with her hands and Rachel knew exactly what kind of stories they were. When she’d sealed the crock of beans she put it on the low shelf in the pantry. The pantry, cool and dark, was the heart of Rachel’s new life – the shelves were weighed down with her clever housewifery – jams and pickles and chutney, big glass jars of raspberry jewels and gooseberry globes, a fat leg of ham, a bowl of brown eggs, flagons of rhubarb wine, puddings, both sweet and savoury, wrapped in cloths.

  Rachel surveyed her garnerings with satisfaction, unconsciously twisting the gold ring on her finger round and round, trying to loosen it. She knew when he put it on her finger that it was Alice’s ring – with a piece put in to accommodate her thick finger – but she hadn’t said anything, a wedding-ring was a wedding-ring, after all, no matter how you came by it. ‘To make thee respectable,’ Frederick said when he put it on her finger, as if that were enough. Rachel had her own harvest to come now, respectable or not, she was so swollen up with this child that he must be a prize-fighter in the making. He was going to be as strong as an ox, she could feel it, not like these spindly, sickly children, never one without a cough or a streaming nose.

  Lawrence and Tom clattered across the yard, Albert trailing behind them with his dog. There was not one of them doing anything useful. ‘Right, Lawrence, hold back!’ she roared, because when they saw her standing in the doorway they had wheeled round like a flock of birds and headed for the field. ‘There’s jobs to be done, Saturdays aren’t just for laiking – the privies need emptying.’ Lawrence turned his face on her, tutored into sullenness by Ada’s example. ‘Now?’ It was unfortunate for Lawrence that his mouth turned down in a natural kind of sneer; it infuriated Rachel even more than Ada’s false smile.

  ‘Yes, now, Lawrence-me-lad, or you’ll have the soil bucket over your ugly head!’

  Rachel reached for the leather strap that was hung on a peg behind the door and measured its weight in her hand. ‘Are you going to do as I say? Or do I have to make you?’ She advanced on him and the rest of the children scattered like chickens, all except for Lawrence who just stood looking at her.

  He stood his ground even though he knew what it meant and screamed at her, ‘Shift for yerself, yer great stirk!’

  He couldn’t get away from her because the first thwack from the strap knocked him off his feet and it was all he could do to lie there screaming with his arms over his head and if Ada hadn’t sent Tom running for the pump to draw a bucket of water to throw over their stepmother she probably wouldn’t have s
topped until he was unconscious, even dead maybe. It wasn’t just the water that stopped her though, because suddenly, just as she raised her great arm up for a really good blow, she doubled over with pain and clutched her stomach, hissing, ‘The baby, the baby’s coming.’

  Frederick locked Lawrence and Tom in one of the outbuildings for two whole days and nights without food or water to teach them a lesson for that and they missed the arrival of their new brother. ‘’Appen yon bairn doesn’t want to be born,’ said Mrs May, who’d come from the village to help with the confinement. ‘But there’s no going back on t’road once tha’ve started,’ she added with a sigh. She wasn’t very taken with this Rachel. Say what you like about Alice Barker, and plenty was said about her after she went, but she always had a pleasant word and her confinements were easy which was a great thing to Mrs May. When she came out of the room she nearly fell over Albert, playing with his soldiers outside the door, ‘Art tha going to be a soldier when tha’s grown, Albert?’ she asked, and the little boy smiled.

  ‘Well, Albert, ’appen tha’s got a new brother,’ Mrs May told him as a tiny cry came from the room behind them and Mrs May had a sudden memory of handing the newborn Albert to Alice Barker. She could see her as clear as day, lifting out her arms for Albert and saying, ‘Welcome, my bonny bird,’ and Mrs May had laughed because that was a famous song about a baby that was one too many for a poor household.

  Tha’rt welcome, little bonny bird,

  But shouldn’t ha’ come just when tha did

  and Alice Barker smiled too because he was one of the prettiest babies either of them had ever seen, like a little cherub in her arms.

  ‘It’s as yellow as butter,’ Frederick said, when he first saw his new son. ‘He,’ Rachel said. ‘He and his name is Samuel.’ Mrs May had brought spice with her for the children and later, when Albert woke up and wouldn’t go back to sleep, Ada gave him a piece of the toffee that was the colour of marmalade and gold and he sat happily on her knee, while she told him the story of Snow White and her wicked stepmother, and many other stories too in which the new usurping mother had to dance for ever in red-hot iron clogs. ‘And then their mother came back, and they were all happy for ever after.’