Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘No, it bloody isn’t!’ Ted yells at her. ‘She’s my niece!’

  ‘She’s my chief bridesmaid!’ Sandra counters furiously, and a whole new fight develops about whose colours I should be supporting. I struggle to the exit on the TV Lounge side, losing my hair-band and a shoe in the process. I’m looking forward to the relative calm of the TV Lounge. For a second I’m not sure what it is I’m looking at but then the complex, struggling black-and-white heap in the middle of the floor, which at first sight resembles an epileptic penguin, resolves itself into something even more distressing – George and one of the buffet waitresses deep in sexual congress. ‘Oh bloody, bloody Nora!’ my father exclaims in the throes of ecstasy and collapses in a sated heap on top of her. Underneath him, the waitress looks like a squashed insect, arms and legs waving helplessly. She suddenly sees me and the look of horror on her face is well-nigh indescribable. She’s struggling ineffectually to escape from my father but his dead weight remains slumped on top of her. I have never witnessed an orgasm before but even in my ignorance I feel that by now my father should at least be lighting a post-coital cigarette and sighing with satisfaction instead of lying there speechless. With one great heave, the waitress manages to push her way out from underneath and George rolls onto his back, open-mouthed and motionless. His last words seem to linger in the fetid air of the TV Lounge. I’m about to ask the waitress if by any chance her name actually is Nora when I think better of it. This hardly seems the right time and place for introductions. She, meanwhile, is struggling to adjust her uniform, never taking her eyes off George, a dreadful expression of dawning realization on her face. We both drop to our knees, either side of George, and look at each other in dumb horror – it is quite apparent to both of us by now that George is not in a stupor of satisfaction but is quite, quite dead. Kenneth Wolstenholme carries on regardless. This great moment in sporting history as Bobby Moore goes up to get the World Cup . . .

  The waitress leans over and listens to his soundless chest. ‘Do you know who he is?’ she whispers, and when I say, ‘He’s my father,’ she gives a little yelp of horror at the new ramifications that this adds to the scenario. ‘I don’t usually do this sort of thing,’ she says helplessly, but whether she means casual sex with wedding guests or inadvertently killing them in the process, isn’t entirely clear, and there’s no opportunity to pursue this as Bunty suddenly appears in the doorway and we both flinch at the sight of her, now hatless as well as shoeless, and even more intoxicated than before. She stares in mute astonishment at the tableau in front of her. Poor George cuts an undignified figure, lying there sprawled on his back with his flies still gaping – but zipping them up doesn’t really seem like an appropriate last rite. ‘We think he’s had a heart attack,’ I say loudly to Bunty, trying to break through the haze of alcohol surrounding her. ‘Can you call an ambulance?’

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ the waitress says flatly, and Bunty gasps and lurches over towards him. ‘Did you know him?’ the waitress asks tenderly, her tenses already adjusted to the event. ‘He’s my husband,’ Bunty replies, dropping down on her knees to join us and the waitress has to suppress another little yelp. ‘I’ll get an ambulance,’ she says hastily and removes herself from the TV Lounge as swiftly as she can. ‘We have to do something,’ Bunty says agitatedly and, taking a deep breath, she leans over and starts giving George artificial respiration. Where did she learn this? Dr Kildare, probably. It’s strange to watch her trying to give him the kiss of life – while he was alive I never saw her kissing him and yet here she is, now he’s dead, kissing him with all the passion of a new bride. To no avail. Finally she sits back on her heels and gazes blankly at the TV screen which is by now an ocean of triumphant Union Jacks.

  The funeral, held the following Friday, is like a negative of the wedding – many of the same guests, much the same food but, thankfully, a different church and hotel. It’s a perfunctory sort of service. The duty vicar at the crematorium tells us what an ‘upstanding member of the community’ George was and what ‘a loving husband and devoted father’ he had been. Bunty, freed now to reinvent the past, quivers in agreement with this eulogy. Bad daughter to the last, I stare, dry-eyed and numb, as the coffin slides through the curtains and George disappears for ever. My mouth goes suddenly, uncomfortably dry at this point and my vision blurs into a thousand dancing spots. My heart starts knocking like a pile driver and I summon all my resources to suppress the rising tide of adrenalin-fuelled panic – this is my father’s day, after all, and I shouldn’t be spoiling it with my own drama. But it’s no good, a wave of sheer terror sweeps inexorably over me and I don’t even make it to the end of the row of chairs before passing out.

  In the days following the funeral I find myself reliving the ceremony again and again. I am haunted by the vision of the coffin sliding beyond the doors like a ship being launched into nothing. I want to run after it, drag it back. I want to lift the lid and demand answers from my father to questions I don’t even know how to ask.

  On the night of George’s funeral Bunty and I went to bed late. She was in the kitchen making Ovaltine when the phone rang and I said, ‘I’ll get it.’ Bunty said, ‘It’s after midnight, it’ll be Mr Nobody I expect,’ but when I lifted the receiver in the hall I knew it would be George and I sat down on the stairs with the phone cradled against my neck, and waited for him to say all the things he’d never said. I waited for the longest time. ‘Who is it?’ Bunty asked, turning off the light in the kitchen and handing me a cup of Ovaltine. I shook my head helplessly and put the phone back in its cradle. ‘Just Mr Nobody again.’

  Footnote (x) – Lillian

  AFTER THE WAR, LILLIAN GOT TAKEN BACK ON AT Rowntree’s. To explain the existence of Edmund she passed herself off as a war widow and said her married name was Valentine. ‘Valentine?’ Nell screwed up her face in disapproval and Lillian thought how odd it was that sometimes Nell reminded her of Rachel. ‘Well,’ Lillian said, ‘I thought if I was going to give myself a name it might as well be a pretty one.’

  ‘Lily Valentine,’ Frank said with distaste. ‘It sounds like a music hall turn.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure I’m sorry if it doesn’t meet with your approval, Frank,’ Lillian said sarcastically, and Frank thought how his uppity sister-in-law had it coming to her but his anger was deflected by Edmund, being jiggled on Lillian’s hip, who giggled at him and reached out a finger so that, despite himself, Frank smiled and took the finger.

  ‘I don’t see what difference it makes anyway,’ Nell said with a peevish look on her face. ‘Everyone in the Groves knows you were never married. What must people think? I don’t know how you can hold your head up when you go out on the street.’

  ‘You’d rather I didn’t go out at all, wouldn’t you? What should I do – hide Edmund like a nasty secret?’

  ‘It’s not the bairn’s fault,’ Frank said, trying feebly to make peace.

  ‘It might be something if you knew who his father was,’ Nell said tartly and Frank’s spirits sank. Why couldn’t she just let the subject drop?

  ‘I know who his father is all right,’ Lillian said, and it would have been so much better if she’d just turned on her heel and marched out of the room the minute she said that rather than waiting an uncomfortable length of time staring Nell down.

  When Lillian finally went upstairs with Edmund, Nell stomped off into the kitchen muttering darkly and Frank sighed; it was right what they said about two women in the house. He’d never seen a cross word between them before he and Nell were married; now they were on each other’s nerves all the time. He felt like a man caught in a siege. He, for one, didn’t want to know who little Eddie’s father was. He’d never believed it was Jack; there was no resemblance at all – and Jack had been such a striking, handsome man, the kind that would coin a son in his own image; and whoever Edmund’s father was he ‘hadn’t made much of an impression’ on him. So said Rachel when he was born, after she’d been forced to accept the fact that he
r roof was sheltering a fallen woman. She’d even gone so far as to produce a photograph they’d never seen before – of Albert, sitting on Ada’s lap. Lillian and Nell pored over the photograph, holding it right under the lamp and exclaiming at the uncanny likeness of the young Albert to the infant Edmund. But it was the image of their long-dead sister which excited them most for they had almost forgotten Ada and it was a dreadful shock to suddenly see her, pretty and beribboned and scowling at the photographer. Perhaps she knew he was about to steal their mother. Lillian, her eyes damp with tears, jerked her head out of the lamplight and looked accusingly at Rachel, creaking on her rocking chair in the corner. ‘Have you got any more photographs hidden away?’ and Rachel looked suddenly shifty but pretended to laugh and said, ‘Don’t be daft,’ so that Nell and Lillian knew that she had more. They didn’t find the rest of the photographs until after she was dead. Lillian went through all Rachel’s things while Nell and Frank were on honeymoon and discovered the unframed photographs that Monsieur Jean-Paul Armand had taken. They finally had the full set – including the one Tom had of their mother – and in some small way the family was reunited. Later, just before Clifford was born, Lillian had these photographs framed at some expense.

  She had wept for half a day over a photograph of her own infant self being cradled in Ada’s arms (like a little girl with a doll), but when Lillian left the house on Lowther Street it was the photograph of Ada and Albert that she took with her because, of all the photographs, that was the one that aroused her tenderest feelings.

  Sometimes Frank found himself wondering if Albert might have fathered Lillian’s child; he could remember only too clearly how both sisters used to hang around Albert and joke that he ‘was the only man in their lives’. But the idea of brother and sister together was so disgusting that Frank thought himself twisted to even think such a thing.

  Lillian laid Edmund down in his little bed. His eyes were already half-closed, his long, pale lashes drooping on his cheeks. While she was at work she left him with a Mrs Hedge on Wigginton Road who doted on him so much that she played with him all the time and never let him sleep during the day. She was a widow who’d had three sons, all fine strapping lads, all taken in the war, and she rattled around now in her big end-terrace house like a lonely pea in a pod. Edmund, she said with a sad smile, gave her something to hold again.

  Lillian had never even asked Nell to look after him. She didn’t want to be beholden. It was bad enough being in the house with the pair of them. You would never think it was her house as much as Nell’s. The minute she was married Nell behaved as if she and Frank were the rightful owners. Now that Nell was pregnant it was worse. Every week as her belly got bigger the more she seemed to seethe with resentment against Lillian, and the more stubborn Lillian grew.

  ‘He’s a natty dresser, our Frank,’ Lillian said, slicing the top off Edmund’s breakfast egg. They could see Frank out in the back yard pumping up his bicycle tyre before setting off to work. He had a job now in a gents’ outfitters and was always turned out very smart. Lillian’s attempts at pleasantry fell on stony ground. Nell was brushing the crumbs off the table, with the fancy electro-plated brush-and-pan set that Minnie Havis next door had given her as a wedding present. She was brushing around Edmund’s plate with little short stabbing movements as if she’d like to brush him away as well. ‘Why don’t you just leave it, Nelly?’ Lillian said mildly. ‘And I’ll do it when Eddie’s finished.’

  ‘Because breakfast’s over with,’ Nell said, avoiding Lillian’s eye. ‘But breakfast’s not over with,’ Lillian said, trying to sound reasonable even though she felt like pinching her sister. ‘Edmund’s only just started his and I’m going to make another pot of tea. Do you want a cup?’

  ‘No thank you,’ Nell replied self-righteously. ‘I’ve had my breakfast.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had only one sitting like a cheap hotel,’ Lillian said crossly.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about hotels – cheap or otherwise,’ Nell said with an arch little smile on her face because it wasn’t often she could think of a clever rejoinder to anybody.

  Lillian ran out of patience and snapped unkindly, ‘Don’t try to be clever, Nell – it doesn’t suit you,’ and an angry Nell flicked the little horsehair brush so that it accidentally knocked one of the forget-me-not cups off the table and when she saw that it had broken she screamed and threw the brush across the room. Which set Clifford off crying upstairs and Nell wrapped her arms round her head so she couldn’t hear him because he was the kind of baby who only stopped crying long enough to feed and was driving her to distraction; but it didn’t stop her from hearing Lillian say, ‘There goes that gurning baby of yours, does he never stop?’

  Clifford was an ugly baby, especially when you saw him against Edmund – Edmund who was as placid a baby as a mother could wish for. Nell felt quite sick sometimes when she saw Lillian cooing and singing to Edmund as if he was a toy. ‘That child is spoilt rotten,’ she said to Frank. ‘Heaven knows what he’s going to grow up like.’

  ‘He does well enough on it,’ Frank ventured because he thought Edmund a ‘great little chap’.

  ‘She’ll smother him with kisses one of these days, if you ask me,’ Nell said. ‘And what’s more—’ but whatever else she was going to say was interrupted because she accidentally stuck a nappy pin into one of Clifford’s rare moments of peace and he went very red and started to scream and scream until poor Nell shook him before bursting into tears herself and exclaiming to Frank, ‘I didn’t know it was going to be like this.’

  Lillian left the house in Lowther Street one fine hot July morning, striding up the road towards Rowntree’s great red-brick land-going ship, and before she turned into Mrs Hedge’s gate, she decided what she was going to do. She yanked on Mrs Hedge’s bell-pull. Edmund, in her arms, pointed up into the summer-blue sky where a swift was climbing. ‘Yes, it’s a birdie,’ Lillian smiled and held him close and smelt his delicious smell of milk and soap and sleep. She couldn’t stand another minute in that house. They were such a small-minded pair, mealy-mouthed and small-minded, that’s what they were, and if Lillian stayed with them she would shrink and tighten and Edmund would grow up suffocated, listening to Frank and Nell blethering on of an evening in the little parlour about the price of stewing-steak and the carrot-fly on Frank’s allotment and how dreadful the Bolsheviks were. It wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all. ‘Well, here’s my bonny young lad,’ Mrs Hedge said, opening the door as they came up the short path. Edmund put out his arms and hung them round Mrs Hedge’s neck and she placed a big kiss on his ripe apple-cheeks and Lillian said, ‘I’m going to emigrate,’ and all morning Mrs Hedge cried every time she looked at Edmund.

  Lillian felt a reckless need to leave the future completely up to chance so she tore a piece of writing paper into neat squares and wrote all the possibilities she could think of on them – New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, Canada – and then put them inside her best hat – a dark blue straw toque with a white silk camellia – then she closed her eyes and pulled out the future. Thus it was that one cool autumn day she left Liverpool, Montreal-bound on the Minnedosa, of the Canadian Pacific Overseas Service. Lillian, wearing the same best hat on her head, hoisted Edmund up high to say farewell to the country of his birth. On the quay, Frank and Nell waved goodbye with big exaggerated arm movements so that Lillian could see them – Frank with one arm because he was holding Clifford aloft to say goodbye to his only cousin. Edmund wriggled and squirmed with excitement at the coloured streamers and the brass band playing and the overwhelming sense of something happening. Nell spoilt it all with her tears; from the lower decks Lillian could see her quite clearly, sobbing dreadfully. It broke Lillian’s heart to see her sister like that and she wished that she could have left without a word, just slipping away in the night; perhaps if Nelly hadn’t grown so cold she never would have left. When the ship began to slip away from the dock Lillian buried her wet face in Edmund’s pudgy neck.r />
  Lillian stayed for two years in Montreal, in the French district, living in one room above the baker’s shop where she worked for a gentle, fat man called Antoine who begged her to marry him from the first week she was there. Lillian liked the friendliness of the neighbourhood, liked to hear little Edmund chattering away to his playmates like a native in French, and she loved the smell of baking bread that woke her up in the mornings, wafting up from the ovens below where Antoine was sweating. But in the end it seemed a pity to have come so far to end up in one little room and the baker’s proposals were becoming tiresome and she was frightened that she might say yes. Having already left everything behind once it was easy to leave again and one day Lillian packed a small trunk and bought them a ticket on the Canadian Pacific, and when the booking clerk said, ‘How far are you going, ma’am?’ she didn’t know what to say because she hadn’t considered this question, so in the end she shrugged and said, ‘All the way, please.’

  Ontario rolled endlessly under the wheels of the train, mile after mile of water and trees so that it seemed that the whole vast continent must be made of nothing else, then, just as Lillian said to Edmund, ‘I didn’t know there were so many trees in the whole world,’ the trees started to thin and the water to dry up and in no time at all the prairies began and the huge ocean of wheatfields lasted even longer than the trees and water of Ontario. As the train moved through Saskatchewan into Alberta in the night, Lillian sat up in the observation car and saw the moon hanging over the infinite prairies like a huge yellow lantern and thought of the house in Lowther Street. All the time that she’d been in Montreal Lillian had the feeling that she would get pulled back to England, but now as they travelled farther and farther from the east coast she realized she would never return, not to Montreal, not to England, and above all not to Lowther Street and she felt so guilty that she resolved to write to Nell first thing in the morning because all this time she had written nothing. But somehow she never managed to get beyond, Dear Nell, How are you? and eventually abandoned all attempt as they had passed through Calgary and suddenly a foaming green tract of glacier water was framed in the window of the carriage, like a coloured postcard. And then the mountains began.