Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  CHAPTER TEN

  1966

  Wedding Bells

  ‘SHOP!’ BUNTY HAS TURNED HERSELF INTO A BAG LADY. She is carrying so many smart paper bags that she can’t see where she’s going and almost falls through the Shop door, dislodging part of the hearing-aid battery display as she sinks down with a grateful sigh into the nearest wheelchair and kicks off her shoes. ‘It’s murder out there,’ she informs us. It’s going to be murder in here when George finds out how much money she’s just spent.

  ‘What the heck have you been buying?’ he asks as she fishes out a hat and sticks it on her head. The hat is pea-green satin and looks like a drum. George stares aghast at the drum-hat. ‘Why have you bought that?’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ she says, swivelling her head round just like the Parrot used to. Her tone of voice indicates that she hasn’t the faintest interest in whether George likes it or not. She conjures a pair of shoes from nowhere. ‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ They’re wickedly narrow with long stiletto heels, in the same shade of green as the hat. You know from looking at them that they’ll be worn once and never again. She crams a foot into one of her new shoes with all the determination of an ugly sister. ‘You could cut your toes off,’ I suggest helpfully.

  The number of as yet unplundered bags at Bunty’s feet implies that she might have been buying things to wear in between the extremities of hat and shoes. She wrestles with a particularly large Leak and Thorp’s bag – ‘And . . .’ Bunty says, like a magician’s assistant, ‘Ta-ra!’ and produces a matching dress and coat in a slightly darker shade of soupy pea-green, in a heavy, artificial shot-silk. ‘Why?’ George asks with a pained look on his face.

  ‘For the wedding, of course,’ Bunty holds up the dress against herself, in a sitting position, like an invalid. She turns to me, ‘What do you think?’

  I sigh and shake my head in envy and longing, ‘It’s lovely.’ (Extracts from Ruby Lennox’s school report, summer term, 1966 – Ruby has a real talent for acting . . . Ruby was the star of the school play.)

  ‘The wedding?’ George is thoroughly baffled now. ‘Whose wedding?’

  ‘Ted’s, of course, Ted and Sandra’s.’

  ‘Ted?’

  ‘Yes, Ted. My brother,’ she adds helpfully as George stares blankly at her. ‘Ted and Sandra. Their wedding’s on Saturday – don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?’

  ‘This Saturday?’ George seems to be having a mild apoplectic fit. ‘But . . .’ he splutters and flounders, ‘they can’t get married this Saturday – it’s the World Cup Final!’

  ‘So?’ Bunty says, weighting the one little syllable with a heavy mixed cargo of disdain, indifference and wilful misunderstanding, not to mention twenty years of marital antipathy. Even a Mandarin-speaking Chinaman would be floored by the subtleties of Bunty’s intonation.

  George is stunned. ‘So?’ he repeats, staring at her as if she’d just grown a second head. ‘So?’

  This could go on for ever. I cough politely, ‘Ahem.’

  ‘Have you got a cough?’ Bunty asks accusingly.

  ‘No, it’s just I have to get back to school . . .’ It’s a Monday lunchtime and Janice Potter has persuaded me to sign out with her (you can only leave school in pairs and you’re supposed to stick like glue to each other in case you’re raped, robbed or lost), so she can go to the Museum Gardens to smoke and snog with her boyfriend. Cast adrift at the gates, I have washed up at the Shop.

  Bunty suddenly drops her bags and leaps from the wheelchair like a Lourdes miracle and says ‘Mind the Shop!’ to me and hustles a hapless George out to help her ‘choose’ (that is, pay for) a wedding present for Ted and Sandra.

  And so, here I am, abandoned to mind the Shop – sometimes I feel like Bunty, a discomfiting thought, to say the least. Will I turn out like my mother? Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? I’m fourteen and already I’ve ‘had enough’. Bunty was nearly twice my age before she started saying that. I’m an only child now with all the advantages (money, clothes, records) and all the disadvantages (loneliness, isolation, anguish). I’m all they’ve got left, a ruby solitaire, a kind of chemical reduction of all their children. Bunty still has to run through all our names until she reaches mine – ‘Patricia, Gillian, P—Ruby, what’s your name?’ Luckily, I now know that all mothers do this as soon as they have more than one child – Mrs Gorman, Kathleen’s mother, has to run through an astonishing litany of children – Billy-Michael-Doreen-Patrick-Frances-Joe – before she arrives at ‘Kathleen-or-whatever-your-name-is.’

  Being a Monday, business is slack so I occupy my time by deputizing for one of Bunty’s prime functions – wrapping the Durex. I take up my position by the huge roll of brown paper that’s bolted on to the wall behind the counter and patiently pull and rip, pull and rip, until I’ve got a good supply of big square pieces. Then I take the pair of ‘Nurses’ Surgical Steel Scissors – Best Quality’ that are chained to the counter and set about cutting up the big squares into smaller squares, like a particularly dull Blue Peter demonstration. When I’ve done that I get out a new box of Gossamer from the storeroom at the back (which was once the dining-room) and wrap the individual packets of three, neatly folding and sellotaping each end of the little brown paper envelopes. Now the Durex can be handed over like gifts (‘Here’s one I prepared earlier’), rapidly and discreetly, to our valued customers. Not by me, of course. I have not yet managed to sell one packet while I’ve been left in charge of the Shop; noone seems keen to buy their rubber johnnies (‘A planned family is a happy family’) from a fourteen-year-old child, and when they charge into the shop, change at the ready, and see me, their eyes immediately shift to the nearest likely object and they shuffle out in dissatisfaction, clutching a packet of corn plasters or a pair of nail-clippers, and in this way I am probably personally responsible for a great many unplanned families.

  I have wrapped an entire gross box of Durex and still they’re not back. How long does it take to choose a present? Perhaps they’ve run away from home. I slump disconsolately into an electric wheelchair and push the control stick to ‘Slow – forward’ and trundle round the Shop pretending to be a Dalek, I am a Dalek I am a Dalek. For my Dalek gun, I use the dismembered dummy leg that models an Elastanet two-way stretch stocking and exterminate a stand of male urinals, a shelf of Dol’s Flannel and two miniature Bakelite torsos, one male, one female, who face each other across the Shop – Greek and mutely tragic – displaying their little surgical corsets to each other.

  Restoring the male urinals to their former positions – balanced on top of each other like a circus tightrope act (‘And now the fantastic, death-defying, one-and-only Male Urinals!’) – I think about how I miss the Pets. For one thing, they were a less embarrassing stock to carry. It’s not just the contraceptives – the Durex, the mysterious jellies and foams and the Dutch caps – there’s a high snigger factor to nearly everything we carry. The glass counter is full of jock straps and incontinence pads; there’s a shelf full of prosthetic breasts like small conical sandbags, another of trusses that look more like something you’d put on a horse; then there are the colostomy bags and this month’s special offer is on rubber sheeting, thick red stuff that George cuts from a heavy roll that smells like car tyres. They might have given some thought to the effect that this has on my social life. (‘And what exactly do your parents sell, Ruby?’)

  I even miss the Parrot. It’s hard to believe that this is the same Shop it was before the fire. I often go upstairs, into the empty rooms where we once lived, and try to call the past back. Above the Shop has fallen into a rapid decay – it’s never really been put back to rights since the fire. Whitewash balloons off the ceiling where Patricia once slept and the bedroom I shared with Gillian has an odd smell in it, the aroma of something decaying, like a dead rat concealed behind the wainscot. It seems now as if Above the Shop was just a trick of lath and plaster and light – and yet sometimes, if I stand on the stairs and close my eyes, I can hear the voices of the hou
sehold ghosts being carried hither and thither on a current of air. Do they miss us, I wonder?

  Sometimes I think I hear the Parrot, a ghostly squawk echoing around the Shop. Sometimes I think I can hear it on the other end of the telephone, all the way out in Acomb. We don’t only have telephone calls from spectral parrots, we also have calls from nobody at all, a mute phantom phoner who manifests himself as crackling static down the wires. When George answers these silent calls, he stares for a few seconds at the receiver as if it personally was to blame and then slaps it back down in the cradle and walks off in disgust. Bunty persists a little longer, trying to coax a response by repeating her normal phone greeting, ‘Hello, this is the Lennox residence, Bunty Lennox speaking, how can I help you?’ which is enough to put off all but the most determined caller and our poor spook is anything but robust. ‘Mr Nobody again,’ Bunty says, as if he was a personal friend.

  But when I answer, I hang on for the longest time, waiting and hoping for a message. I’m sure it’s Patricia on the other end of the phone – we haven’t heard from her for well over a year and surely she’ll be in touch soon. ‘Patricia? Patricia?’ I whisper urgently into the receiver, but if it is her, she doesn’t answer. Your sister says not to worry would do (see Footnote (x)). Bunty must still expect Patricia home because she has left her room untouched, and as Patricia was not the tidiest of girls and her room was always littered with dirty clothing and food crumbs, it has by now taken on a Miss Havisham-air of decay and will probably soon revert to primordial slime.

  Perhaps it isn’t Patricia at all, but our Gillian, wandering in limbo and trying to phone home. But can spirits make telephone calls? Are there call-boxes beyond the veil? Do you need a coin or could she reverse the charges? Is it somebody else entirely? Perhaps I’ll be able to corner Daisy and Rose at the wedding and get some satisfactory answers to these questions.

  ‘Shop!’ George says perfunctorily. ‘There!’ Bunty says, very pleased with herself as she winkles a china figure out of its box – a woman in a crinoline. ‘It’s called “The Crinoline Lady”,’ Bunty says, turning it this way and that to examine its porcelain flounces. George snorts, ‘It looks like a toilet-roll holder.’

  ‘That’s exactly the kind of remark I would expect from you,’ Bunty says, putting the offended Crinoline Lady back in her box. ‘And you need a new tie for this wedding, in fact you can come out with me now and choose one.’

  ‘No!’ I wail, struggling back into blazer and beret, ‘I have to get back to school.’ The afternoon bell will have gone by now (Late again, Ruby?). George looks at me. ‘Are you going to this wedding?’ he asks suddenly.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sakes!’ Bunty says, her eyebrows taking off in exasperation. ‘She’s the bridesmaid!’

  ‘You?’ George says incredulously.

  ‘Me,’ I confirm with a helpless shrug of the shoulders. I’m not insulted by his disbelief, I’m even more amazed than he is.

  Not merely a bridesmaid, but chief bridesmaid, heading an unruly gaggle of miniature bridesmaids. They are all from Sandra’s side of the family, but wedding etiquette decrees that she must have a representative of Ted’s family in her train. When it came to choosing from the spear-side, however, Sandra was beset by doubt – all the potential bridesmaids on the groom’s side are either corpses, runaways or spiritualists, none of whom, Sandra rightly judges, are fit to strew rose petals at her feet (although, disappointingly, no strewing takes place). Certainly, if I were in her shoes (white satin pumps, size 6) there would be something very unsettling about having Daisy and Rose at my bridal back. I am the default choice – she should have searched beyond blood-relatives and trawled the in-law pool – Lucy-Vida, for example, would make a quite splendid bridesmaid. Our cousin has been transformed from an ugly duckling into an extraordinary, mini-skirted swan, with Twiggy’s make-up and Sandie Shaw’s hair. Her white stockings cover her shapely, bony legs that are too long for the stiff Methodist pew in which they are imprisoned. Every so often the discomfort forces her to untwine and stretch them and when she recrosses them, twisting them round each other like two-ply wool, the minister trips over the words of the marriage service and his eyes glaze over.

  The Methodist chapel on St Saviourgate is huge and cavernous, like a cross between a Masonic temple and a municipal swimming-baths. Apparently they’re all Methodists on Sandra’s side and there is an uneasy rumour circulating on ‘our’ side (we are already almost on a war footing) that this is going to be a ‘temperance do’. The marriage service seems to be going on for ever and if it wasn’t for the catacomb-cold of the chapel and the bad behaviour of my juvenile flock I could quite easily fall asleep on my feet, especially as, in lieu of breakfast, I downed two of Bunty’s tranquillizers before posying-up. The little bridesmaids shuffle and giggle and bicker, drop their posies, yawn and sigh, but every time I turn round to glare at them they freeze into positions of ineffable goodness. It’s like playing Statues and I’m just waiting for one of them to tag me so that I can knock it unconscious with the bride’s heavy bouquet of scentless roses that I’m holding for her. I am in far too bad a mood of black adolescent bile to be in charge of small children and if I had known that this was to be part of my duties (this is my first wedding) I would have resisted even more fervently when Bunty begged me to accept the job.

  The bride and groom, from the back anyway, display a remarkable similarity to the little figures on top of a wedding cake. The bride is in white and is reliably reported (by Ted) to be a virgin. Indeed, it is only my uncle’s extreme sexual frustration which has finally driven him up this nuptial cul-de-sac. He has delayed getting married as long as possible – from his first Odeon date with Sandra to this final altar rendezvous has taken him eight years. When finally forced to set a date for the event by a touchingly romantic ultimatum from Sandra (‘If you don’t name the day they’re going to be shovelling your brains up in Coney Street’), Ted put the date as far in the future as he could. How could he know then that 30th July 1966 would turn out not only to be the final of the World Cup, but that England would be playing – and not only that, but that she would be playing against our family’s sworn enemy – the Hun!

  The bridesmaids are in pale peach polyester-satin and our dresses, like the bride’s – big, round, puffy dresses with big, round, puffy sleeves – make us all into Crinoline Ladies. Our satin slippers are dyed to match our dresses, as are our carnation posies, and on our heads we wear artificial peach-coloured rosebuds on vice-like Alice-bands.

  I stifle one yawn after another but unfortunately there is no stifling the deep embarrassing rumble that my stomach gives out every now and then – precipitating a rash of parrot-squawks and giggles from the bridesmaid clutch.

  The minister asks if anyone has a good reason for the marriage not to go ahead and everyone looks at Ted as he is the most likely person to object, but he stiffens himself manfully and the service proceeds with only the slightest falter on the part of the minister as Lucy-Vida tries to pull her skirt down to cover her crotch.

  My first wedding is turning out to be rather disappointing. When I get married it won’t be a peach polyester affair. The church I get married in will be a very old one – they’re two-a-penny in York, of course – perhaps All Saints on Pavement with its lovely lantern tower – or St Helen’s – our very own Shopkeeper’s church! The church will have the musty smell of old timbers and the stonework will be like Belgian lace and the windows will be jewelled lozenges of colour. The church will be illuminated by banks of tall white candles and all the pews and side chapels will be decorated with gardenias and trailing dark-green ivy and waxy-white lilies like angels’ trumpets. My antique-lace dress will fall in drifts of snow and it will be garlanded and swagged with rosebuds as if the little birds who helped Cinderella dress for the ball had flown round and round me, nipping and tucking and pinning. There will be peals of bells ringing the whole time and I will be spotlighted by a single, dusty shaft of sunlight. The congregation will be
drowning in rose petals and all the men will be in elegant morning dress (Ted has not even bought a new suit for the occasion). And there will be no bridesmaids.

  One of the little polyester bridesmaids is scuffing the back of my shoe with her satin foot and another one is poking her nose and wiping the resultant slimy grey crop on her dress. I hiss at them to stop but they make faces back at me. Will this ever end?

  At last, the bridal pair vanish into the vestry and someone plays Bach, very badly, on a tired organ while the divided congregation – his and hers – whisper frantically to each other about what they think of it so far. Finally, ‘The Wedding March’ bleats triumphantly and we sweep down the aisle while everyone grins like idiots at us, not so much from pleasure as relief. ‘Flippin’ heck, my bladder’s killing me,’ Auntie Eliza says to noone in particular, as I pass by, while the extraterrestrial floral pair swivel robotically in their pew so that their eyes can follow the bride who rejected them and Auntie Gladys can be heard sighing gratefully, ‘Well, at least noone fell over.’

  The photographs on the steps of the church seem to take longer than the service and it’s only when the next wedding party arrives and both sets of guests mill around outside the church and get mixed up, that any attempt is made to move on to the reception and the wilting bridesmaids are allowed to droop into the big black Austin Princess that’s tied up with white ribbons in the street below. I sulk unattractively in the back of the car – I feel like Alice when she grew tall, a huge outsize girl crammed in amongst identical smaller ones. I’ve just fallen into a fitful and disturbing doze when we draw up at the hotel and are disgorged from our car. The ‘do’ is not temperance and the bar of the hotel in Fulford fills up rapidly as if we had just crossed the Sahara instead of York city centre.