Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  Still, following the Ropers in this blind slavish fashion is infinitely preferable to being subject to Bunty’s navigation which is either hit and miss – B125, B126 – what’s the difference? or defensive – How should I know what the sign said. You’re the driver! If she had an AA man on one shoulder and a spirit guide on the other she’d still get us lost, although at the moment Mr Roper doesn’t seem to be doing a much better job, taking us spiralling around the suburbs of Carlisle like a plane on a death spin (see Footnote (ix)).

  ‘What the bloody hell is he doing?’ George splutters as we whirl round a roundabout that we’ve circled at least twice already. ‘There’s that fish and chip shop again!’ Bunty says.

  ‘And that garage – what’s he playing at?’ George shakes his head. ‘I knew we should have come by Newcastle,’ he says with the bitterness of hindsight.

  ‘Well then, clever dick, if you thought that, you should have said something to him, shouldn’t you?’ I don’t think it’s very wise of our mother to defend her lover in public in this way. I cast a sideways glance at Patricia to see what she thinks but she’s busy committing the Kama Sutra to the steamy window. Rather childish behaviour in my opinion (which is worth nothing, of course – I am under no illusion) but not as childish as Bunty’s; she is demanding that George stop the car and let her out. It’s amazing how an argument can escalate when you take your eyes off it for just a second.

  ‘Oh, and what are you going to do –’ George sneers, ‘walk home from Carlisle?’ But he doesn’t get an answer because Mr Roper’s indicator suddenly starts flashing and Bunty has to alert George to this fact. ‘He’s slowing down! He’s stopping!’ she shrieks, and George applies the brakes so fast that my brain almost comes loose from its moorings. ‘For God’s sake,’ Patricia says nastily to noone in particular. Sometimes I would like to cry. I close my eyes. Why weren’t we designed so that we can close our ears as well? (Perhaps because we would never open them.) Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?

  George and Mr Roper have a hurried consultation on the pavement, turning the map this way and that until they come to some kind of agreement. Bunty fumes in the passenger seat, fulminating indiscriminately about the stupidity of both husband and lover. Christine puts her head out of the side window and waves. Two weeks with no time off for good behaviour in the company of Christine Roper is not a prospect to relish, she treats me like a slave – if we were in Ancient Egypt I would be building a pyramid for her single-handed. I wave back obediently. There’s no sign of the baby-David, perhaps he’s strapped to the luggage-rack.

  We’re off! again. ‘When are we going to eat?’ I ask plaintively.

  ‘Eat?’ Bunty asks in disbelief.

  ‘Yes, eat,’ Patricia says sarcastically. ‘You know – eat, food, ever heard of it?’

  ‘Don’t talk to your mother like that!’ George shouts into the rear-view mirror and Patricia sinks down in her seat so she’s out of sight of the mirror and mutters, ‘Don’t talk to your mother like that,’ again and again. Patricia now wears her hair in two thick curtains that hang drably down either side of her face – she has already discovered Joan Baez, ahead of the Top Ten, which I regard as very avant garde of her – and talks a lot about things like ‘injustice’ and ‘racial prejudice’ (in America, that is, we don’t really have coloured people in York, to Patricia’s disappointment. Every single face in assembly at Queen Anne’s each morning is a pasty white. The nearest thing we have is Susannah Hesse, a very clever German girl on an exchange year. Patricia is always cornering her and asking her if she feels discriminated against). Naturally, Patricia has my complete support in her campaign against injustice, but George says she should pay more attention to her A Levels. She has recently ‘chucked’ Howard which may account for the appearance of a previously unmined seam of moodiness. Although it may just be a further refinement in her character.

  We play ‘Spot the . . .’ for a while – Spot the red cars, Spot the telephone boxes – Spot anything really. Somewhere south of Glasgow we leave the main road and stop at a hotel for lunch. Usually when we’re out in the car we take a hastily-made picnic and eat it as we drive along, so this is indeed a sophisticated departure from the norm. Bunty preens herself before stepping out of the car; she is after all, about to have lunch in a hotel with her lover, which is quite a romantic thing to do, even with the drawback of two spouses and five children. Hang on a minute – there’s something missing from this inventory, isn’t there? I turn a puzzled face to Patricia. ‘What did we do with Rags?’

  ‘Rags?’

  We both look at the back of our mother’s head; she’s peering into her powder-compact so we can see not only the back of her head but also bits of her face moving about in the little mirror. ‘What did you do with Rags?’ we chorus.

  ‘The dog?’ She’s got her off-hand voice on – always a danger sign. ‘Don’t worry about him, he’s taken care of.’

  Patricia’s suddenly very alert. ‘What do you mean “taken care of”? Like Hitler took care of the Jews?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Bunty says in her don’t-be-a-fusspot voice and paints on the dazzling smile of a scarlet woman. This conversation is fatally interrupted by George banging on the car window, telling us all to hurry up because we haven’t got all day. ‘Ah, but we have,’ says Patricia. ‘We have all day today, and then all day tomorrow and so it goes on until the crack of doom, believe me.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Patricia,’ Bunty says, snapping her compact shut. ‘Just get a move on, will you?’

  I will draw a veil over lunch, suffice to say that the ‘Homemade Tomato Soup’ was redolent with the savour of Heinz and that Bunty and Mr Roper exchanged a wide range of flirtatious looks – from prim to downright lustful – without apparently anyone apart from me noticing. Bunty and I have never talked about the fact that I have caught her in flagrante with Mr Roper in the garage, which I find quite understandable – after all, what could she say? Nor have I talked about it with Patricia, you can’t talk to Patricia about anything any more, so I’m not sure whether or not she knows about our mother’s adultery.

  We scramble back into our old Wolseley, and we’re off! A bit of a false start, as we pull up almost immediately (Why is he indicating? Stop! Stop!) so that Kenneth can vomit on the verge – an unattractive pink mélange which owes a lot to the tomato soup, but then finally we’re off! again.

  Unfortunately, our brains are still trying to digest Iunch when we hit the outer circle of Glasgow, which must account for our erratic progress towards the inner circle, a hellish journey on which hope and good manners are both abandoned. ‘I thought he was supposed to be a bloody RAF pilot,’ George hisses with disgust as the Ropers’ left indicator goes on – and then off – followed by the same behaviour from their right indicator – until we’re weaving crazily along Sauchiehall Street as if we’re harpooned onto Moby Dick rather than a 1963 Consul Classic. ‘How did he find Dresden? He couldn’t find his way round bloody Woolworth’s.’

  ‘Neither could you,’ Bunty says, her lips moving like a pair of scissors. The real crisis occurs when we are separated by a traffic light at the top of Sauchiehall Street and Bunty lets out a wail of despair, ‘We’ve lost them, we’ve lost them now!’ I think it’s at this point that I decide to play dead. Patricia, I see, is already faking a coma.

  Things improve a little on the other side of Dumbarton, a highway of tranquillity lies ahead of us until Crianlarich. Patricia entertains us by reading aloud from Tristram Shandy. Bunty shifts uneasily in her front seat because all eighteenth-century prose sounds smutty to her and she has trouble believing it’s on Patricia’s A-Level reading list. Every so often she glances behind to check we’re not sniggering at something dirty – completely missing the Stone Age genitalia with which Patricia has adorned the rear window. Patricia seems to be quite obsessed by human biology.

  Crianlarich passes in a blur of raindrops and it’s only several mil
es up the road that we discover we’ve gone right when we should have gone left: What’s he doing? He’s turning, he’s turning!

  Where is Scotland? What is Scotland? Is it rain solidified into the shapes of houses and hills? Is it mist, carved into roadside cafés with names like The Crofter’s Kitchen? (Don’t give that to the baby, Christine – he’ll be sick. There – what did I tell you?) Who knows? We are going to a place that sounds like it’s called ‘Och-na-cock-a-leekie’. The Ropers and our parents have been seduced by a brochure temptingly entitled ‘Scottish Farmhouse Holidays’ and their brains are awash with hot bannocks and griddle scones dripping with salty sun-yellow butter and thick porridge in a pond of cream, warm from the cow.

  I’ve just fallen into a fitful doze on Patricia’s uncomfortable, bony shoulder when we screech to a halt yet again. What’s he stopping for now? ‘Pit-stop!’ Mr Roper yells, making helpless, apologetic gestures with his hands as ‘Harriet’ yanks the baby-David out of the car and holds him over the grass verge. A stream of liquid like weak tea emerges from his nether regions. ‘I don’t see why she has to put things like that on public display,’ Bunty says with distaste. ‘She [she means Mrs Roper] may have a posh accent, not to mention having been to boarding-school (‘Send me,’ mutters Patricia. ‘Please.’), but really she’s just a slattern.’

  Slattern! What a wonderful new word. ‘Slattern,’ I murmur appreciatively to Patricia.

  ‘Yes, slattern,’ Bunty says firmly. ‘That’s what she is.’

  ‘Not a slut like you then?’ Patricia says very quietly. Loud enough to be heard, but too quiet to be believed. There is a starched silence for a while and then somewhere around Dalmally Patricia breaks it by embarking on the Patricia Lennox Songbook, which is full of songs about tender maidens, dead union officials, unfaithful lovers and a lot of people hanging their heads and weeping and wailing and generally having a great deal of ‘trouble’, which we rollick along to in fine spirit. We’ve just reached a wailing crescendo (‘ve-ey-ey-ey-al’) when Bunty’s nerves finally snap (Had we not realized it was about adultery?) and she shouts, ‘Shut up the pair of you!’ and gives us cheese and onion crisps to prevent us singing any more.

  The road grows narrower. The weather grows wetter. The air seems darker – although whether this is due to the evening or the rain, it’s hard to tell. We plough slowly on through the gloaming, as if it was a tangible force slowing us down. We jolt gracelessly to yet another halt (I don’t believe it!) and sigh as Kenneth trots off into a clump of gorse bushes, unbuttoning the flies on his grey flannel shorts as he goes. ‘Why didn’t he go when they stopped before? Doesn’t she have any sense?’ Bunty blows air out of her mouth like a carthorse. Christine gets out of the car and follows her brother into the bushes while Mrs Roper holds out the baby-David-teapot again. ‘They went at the hotel, didn’t they?’ Bunty asks, snorting with incredulity at the slack state of the Roper bladders. (Ours, under Bunty’s tutelage, are made of cast-iron.)

  ‘It’s not the destination that’s important,’ Patricia says in a dreamy way, ‘it’s the journey.’ (She’s reading On the Road as well as Tristram Shandy so it’s hardly surprising that she’s turning a bit zen.) But finally we’re off! yet again, following the yellow brick road, or rather, a dubious single-track. ‘Does this road have a number?’ George asks, huddling over the steering-wheel to see better. ‘I wish he’d put his bloody lights on!’ he adds, flashing his own headlights furiously.

  Then a new hazard presents itself on the road without name or number – sheep! ‘They’re bloody everywhere!’ George exclaims in horror. Bunty has to go on sheep alert (There’s one! Mind that one! That one’s going to cross! Keep an eye on that one on the left!)

  Tired of Tristram Shandy, Patricia and I play ‘Spot the . . .’ again but really there isn’t anything to Spot except for sheep.

  Then disaster strikes – not as expected from the sheep slalom but a flat tyre on the Consul Classic. ‘See!’ George says triumphantly because Bunty’s been rattling on for weeks about how nice the Ropers’ car is compared to our own (which it is), but Bunty just tosses her head and says tartly, ‘A flat tyre can happen to anyone.’

  ‘That’s the road of life for you,’ Patricia says, the smile of the Buddha playing on her features.

  Reluctantly, George gets out of the car and helps Mr Roper change the tyre – or rather Mr Roper changes the tyre and George hands him things, like a nurse assisting at an operation. Bunty also gets out and stands around observing George’s incompetence with spanners and nuts and Mr Roper’s manly grace under pressure. (‘Well done, Clive!’) All the while, Kenneth buzzes around with his arms out, pretending to be an aircraft, or a fixed-wing insect, or perhaps both. ‘Thank God I’ve got girls,’ Bunty says when she climbs back into the car (the only statement she ever produces indicating gratitude for our existence), and when George has sighed his way back into the driver’s seat, we’re off! again.

  We are approaching our Mecca, there’s no doubt about it; we pass through several ‘Och-na-cockna’ villages and finally arrive at the right one. We take a left turn, double back, take a right turn, double back again and take the original left. ‘Oh fucking hell,’ George says wearily as he executes yet another three-point turn, and Bunty flaps her hands at him in disgust. But then, at last, we’re off! for the final time, splashing and rocking our way along a dirt track until we arrive in a muddy yard amongst a flurry of angry chickens. On one side is a long, low outbuilding, on another a dilapidated barn, and on the third is a big, square, grey-stone building – our Farmhouse. The Hammer Holiday from Hell is about to begin!

  The occupants of the farm, our hosts for the next two weeks, are called von Leibnitz, which doesn’t seem like a very Scottish name to me. Wouldn’t we have done better to have chosen a Farm from the Farmhouse Brochure that was run by a McAllister, a Macbeth, a McCormack, a McDade, a McEwan, a McFadden – even a McLeibnitz – in fact anyone whose name began with a ‘mac’ rather than a ‘von’? Mr von Leibnitz (‘Heinrich’), we discover later on, was a German POW who was sent to work on the farm and stayed on, marrying the farmer’s widow – Mrs von Leibnitz – or Aileen McDonald as she was before her husband died in North Africa and was substituted by the enemy. This, together with the fact that Mrs von Leibnitz came originally from Aberdeen, makes them a pair of total outsiders in Och-na-cock-a-leekie, which perhaps accounts for their stern character. ‘So it was old McDonald’s farm then?’ George jokes, on hearing this story, but is met with stony countenances from the von Leibnitzes. They have no sense of humour whatsoever – even Bunty has a sense of humour compared with our hosts. They have united Prussian gloom and Presbyterian dourness in an awesome combination. Spare and tall, straight-backed and solemn, they clearly regard holidaymakers as frivolous, weak creatures. Perhaps they’re right.

  There is a lot of fuss about bedrooms, reminiscent of the dilemma over taxonomies in the Spirit World. How will we be permutated? Boys with boys, girls with girls? Roper with Roper, Lennox with Lennox? And what of the adults – husband with wife? Or not? Mrs Roper dispatches us with efficiency, while Bunty exchanges lingering looks with Mr Roper. ‘Shall I carry that for you, Bunty?’ he asks soulfully, and, reaching for a suitcase, their fingers meet for an achingly long time, until, in fact, they are bodily separated by Patricia, barging up the stairs between them and grabbing the suitcase on her way.

  Mrs Roper puts all the girls together in an attic bedroom that reeks of must, and Patricia makes a dive for the single bed, leaving me to share the double with Christine, who spends half of every night telling me to move up, even though I’m already sleeping on the edge, and the other half grinding her teeth and muttering in her sleep.

  For our first breakfast, seated at a long, dark-oak table in a gloomy, cold dining-room, we are served plates of lukewarm, salty porridge (to Patricia’s dismay) with neither milk nor sugar, and afterwards a strip of bacon each and a little pile of cold baked beans. This is prison food, not holiday food.


  ‘Cold baked beans?’ Bunty puzzles.

  ‘Maybe that’s how the Scots eat them,’ Mr Roper suggests, ‘or the Germans,’ he adds as an afterthought. I think it was at this moment that Patricia lurched from the table, informing everyone that she was going to be sick and indeed was as good as her word, throwing up before reaching the door (‘Heinrich, fetch a clout – the lassie’s boaked!’) And she hasn’t even eaten any breakfast yet! We have been on holiday less than twenty-four hours and three people have vomited already. How many more times will this happen? (Many.)

  And from there it’s downhill all the way. There isn’t very much to do on the farm; you can look at the five cows, whose milk goes straight to the dairy, not to our porridge, and you can annoy the four chickens, whose eggs go straight into a tarred barrel of water-glass, and you can survey a couple of damp, rain-flattened fields of barley, but after that there isn’t much left, apart from the sheep, scattered like little limestone outcrops over rolling, humpy hills of brown-green grass and bracken.

  In the distance, over those hills and far away, at the outer barriers of the von Leibnitz property, is where the real Scotland seems to be (I have read Rob Roy and Waverley and The Heart of Midlothian in preparation for this trip), a swathe of purple and lilac rising up to the horizon and melting into the sky, cloaked on one side by a forest of bristling, bottle-green trees. ‘Aye,’ says Mr von Leibnitz, in a more forthcoming mood than usual, ‘dat’s partov di ancient Caledonian Vorest,’ and my heart leaps because this sounds more like Scott’s Scotland. (‘It’s funny, isn’t it, that he was called Scott, when he was a Scot,’ I venture conversationally to Mrs von Leibnitz when I’m abandoned to her care on Black Tuesday – of which more later, unfortunately – but she responds, ‘You’re a gey peculiar wee lassie, are you no?’ because she doesn’t read anything except The People’s Friend.)