Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  They had to get off the train in Banff because Lillian couldn’t bear any longer just to look at the Rockies and not taste and breathe them too. And right there on the station platform at Banff, she flung her arms wide and twirled round and round laughing out loud until Edmund was afraid she was going to fall on the track.

  They stayed a whole week in Banff in a cheap little boarding-house and they hiked in the foothills of Sulphur Mountain and paid a man to take them in a dog-cart all the way to Lake Louise where they looked at the glacier and walked around the green lake, and Lillian might have stayed there for good, but in the end they boarded the train again because there might be something at the end of the line that would be even better.

  In Vancouver, Lillian got a job in the post office and the sight of hundreds of letters passing over the counter every day made her feel dreadfully guilty again and she started several more letters to Nell. Once, she even got as far as enquiring whether Clifford had any brothers and sisters now, before tearing it up and throwing it on the fire, because why waste a letter when any day she might get restless again and leave and then Nell’s reply would travel a whole continent and not find her and Lillian was too conscientious a postal worker to encourage lost letters. So she put it off again. Lillian thought that perhaps she’d written so many letters during the war that she didn’t have any left inside her. In the end she sent a telegram, I am doing well. Don’t worry about me, which hardly seemed adequate but was the best she could do.

  After she’d sent the telegram off she suddenly remembered the telegram that had arrived telling them about Albert’s death and worried that Nell would have a fit at the sight of another telegram, but by then it was too late and Lillian had other things on her mind anyway. She had agreed to marry a Saskatchewan farmer, a handsome widower who had travelled to Vancouver for a friend’s wedding and had come into the post office for a stamp to put on a postcard to send to his mother back at the farm. ‘She never gets any post,’ he explained shyly. ‘noone she knows ever goes away. She’s never been farther than Saskatoon.’ Then Lillian said, ‘Saskatoon?’ and the conversation went from there, as conversations do, until Lillian’s supervisor came over and said, ‘Mrs Valentine, if I could just remind you that you are not paid to chatter,’ so that Lillian had to suck in her cheeks to stop herself from laughing and the handsome farmer tipped his hat at her and smiled and walked away from the queue that had built up at her counter.

  When Lillian left work in the early evening the streets were slick and shiny with rain and the lamps flared yellow giving her the melancholy feeling that always came with the rain and the dark. She’d just struggled to push up her umbrella when the farmer from Saskatchewan came out of the shadows and tipped his hat again, very politely, and said could he escort her home? She put her small hand on his broad arm and held the umbrella over both their heads (he was very tall) and he walked her all the way back to her lodging-house where the landlady, Mrs Raicevic, looked after Edmund after school. By then, Lillian had learned the farmer’s name and she said, ‘Edmund, this is Mr Donner,’ and Pete Donner squatted right down and said, ‘Hello there, Edmund, you can call me Pete.’ Although he never did, preferring to call him ‘Pop’ almost from the day his mother married him.

  Pete Donner was surprised at how quickly his new wife took to life on the farm; even that first harsh winter didn’t get her down and in the summer she was up at sunrise, feeding their chickens and milking the cow and humming while she cooked breakfast for Pete and his farmhands Joseph and Klaus who lived in a big cabin beyond the vegetable patch. The railway ran right through the Donner property and once or twice the next summer he’d found her down by the track watching one of the great wheat trains that ran across the prairies in a never-ending chain of trucks. Secretly, he worried that she might just up and leave again, she had such a dreamy look on her face when she watched the trains go by. In the evenings of that summer they would sit together on the porch of the big, clapboard farmhouse under a summer moon that was like one of the fat squashes that his mother grew on the vegetable patch and Lillian told him about Rachel and Nell, and about Edmund’s father and why she’d kept him a secret. Pete Donner grew afraid then because his wife seemed so strong and although nothing she told him about England made it sound as if she ever wanted to go back there, he still had to ask and she hooted with laughter and said, ‘Don’t be daft.’ The following winter, at the age of thirty-six, she gave birth to a son, whom they called Nathan after Pete Donner’s father.

  Nathan looked nothing like his half-brother – the only feature they had in common was a bottom lip that pouted like a girl’s and which had belonged to Ada and before that to her mother. The two boys were close and when Edmund was younger they talked all the time about how one day they would work the farm together, but when Edmund went away to university in Toronto to do an English degree Nathan fretted that he might not come back. When they got the news that he was missing in action Nathan went quite crazy for a few weeks because he couldn’t imagine a future that didn’t contain Edmund.

  But the future came about anyway and in due course Nathan married and had two children. The eldest, Alison, qualified as a lawyer and moved to Ottawa to work in the government. Just after she left for university, Nathan was killed in an accident on the farm. Pete Donner had already died of lung cancer in the fifties. Alison always laughed and said she would never get married and never live on a farm again, but her younger brother, Andy, did both, running the farm after his father died and marrying a girl from Winnipeg called Tina.

  That was 1965 and by then Lillian had moved out to Klaus and Joseph’s old cabin that Andy had done up for her. She said she was getting ready to die but it took a long time, another ten years in fact, by which time arthritis had bent her into an awkward and uncomfortable shape.

  Andy’s wife, Tina, often came over in the evening to sit with Lillian. She’d had three little boys one after the other – Eddie, the eldest, named after Edmund, and then twins, Nat and Sam, and now a fourth one was on the way. She joked that she only came to see Lillian to get away from her noisy children, although both of them knew that wasn’t true. Lillian liked Tina better than anyone – she was a statuesque girl with clear eyes and blond hair that she scraped back in a ponytail most of the time so you could see how strong the bones in her face were. In the summer she had freckles all over as if she’d been splattered with gold paint but in winter her skin went as white as milk and she had so much energy that sometimes it seemed to spill out of her and get left behind when she’d gone back up to the farmhouse. It seemed to Lillian that, like Albert, Tina contained more light inside her than most people.

  One morning in spring, when Tina was heavily pregnant with her fourth and last baby, she looked out of the kitchen of the farmhouse and saw smoke rising up from the cabin. She shouted to Andy’s mother, who lived with them, to mind the boys and set off in a lumbering run to the cabin, but when she got there she found Lillian feeding a brazier with paper from a cardboard box at her feet. A scrap of charred paper flew up from the fire and floated on the breeze to land at Tina’s feet. She picked it up and read, I’ve been meaning to write, but the rest was burnt away.

  ‘I’m clearing out before I die,’ Lillian shouted cheerfully to her.

  ‘I hope you’re not planning to go before this baby’s born,’ Tina said disapprovingly, but Lillian just laughed and said, ‘Don’t bet on it.’ Then she stoked the brazier with more paper and smiled against the sharp spring sun and said, ‘I’ve lived too long anyhow and when I’m dead I’ll be with my children and that’s the only place a mother really wants to be,’ and Tina laughed and said, ‘Not always.’

  When Lillian had finished they went inside the cabin and Tina made them both hot chocolate. Lillian said, ‘I’ve got something I want to give you,’ and took the photograph that always sat in its pretty silver frame on her dresser and put it into Tina Donner’s hands. Tina had been often moved by the poignancy of this photograph of dead siblings �
�� her own brother had been killed in a childhood accident – and she had to squeeze back the tears when Lillian gave it to her, not just because the dead children made her sad but because she knew it meant that Lillian wasn’t kidding when she said she was going to die.

  When Tina got up to leave she patted her stomach and said, ‘I just know it’ll be another boy, I wasn’t meant to have girls. What shall I call him, d’you think?’ and Lillian thought for a while and said, ‘Why not call him after Edmund’s father?’

  Tina Donner cried her eyes out at the funeral service and people said it was heartening to see a young woman so close to an old lady, although it was mainly the old ladies who said that. ‘I really loved her,’ Tina said, shaking her head, and Andy Donner put his arm round his wife and said, ‘I know, honey.’ They laid on a great spread back at the farm and people said they hadn’t seen so many people together, not even at a wedding. The funeral tea was a cheerful affair because, after all, Lillian had been very old and compared to most people she’d had a pretty good life. And there was a new baby to celebrate in the Donner house as well and Andy Donner raised a glass and toasted his grandmother and his sister Alison raised one as well, to the new baby, Jack.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1968

  Wisdom

  MY FUNERAL IS A VERY MOVING OCCASION. MY COFFIN rests in the aisle of a beautiful old church – Holy Trinity, Goodramgate with its box-pews and pack-saddle roof – and is surrounded by grieving mourners. Birdsong floats in through the open door, through which can be seen a magical vista of green hills and English woodland, unfolding as far as the eye can see, and then a little bit farther. The open coffin is strewn with heavy-scented lilac and branches of snowy hawthorn so that I look like the Queen of the May. People tiptoe up to me and gaze reverently at my alabaster skin and raven hair – hair that in death has mysteriously grown darker and more luxuriant so that its curlicues of gleaming jet tumble over my lavendered coffin pillow. ‘She was so beautiful,’ a mourner murmurs, shaking his head in wonder. ‘And so misunderstood,’ someone else says. ‘If only we had realized how incredibly special she was.’ ‘And don’t forget how talented,’ another voice adds, and the people standing around the coffin nod to each other in regretful agreement.

  The church is filled, not just with friends and family, but even people I have never known – an admiring Leonard Cohen and a soulful Terence Stamp, for instance. In the background, Maria Callas sings ‘J’ai perdu mon Eurydice’. Bunty sits at the end of the pew, shaking her head in contrition – ‘Perhaps if she hadn’t been swapped at birth this would never have happened,’ she says softly to Mr Belling, who is sitting next to her—

  ‘Ruby!’ Mr Belling says, startling me dreadfully so that I almost fall off my bed. ‘Your mother and me thought we’d take a run out to Castle Howard. You don’t want to come with us, do you?’ He pats his little fat stomach, full of Bunty’s Sunday chicken, and looks at me anxiously in case I jump up in eagerness to inspect Vanbrugh’s arches and astragals. I raise my hand, limp and dismissive, ‘No, you go, I’ll just stay here,’ for I have learnt from experience that three’s a crowd on these occasions. At the beginning, when I was a novelty to Mr Belling (‘Sweet sixteen’), he was prepared to make an effort towards me. Now he doesn’t regard me as sweet at all but an unfortunate by-product of Bunty that he has to put up with. Only last week I went with them to Knaresborough to visit Old Mother Shipton’s Dropping-Well and found myself quite surplus to requirements. They twitterpated away to each other while I moodily surveyed the eccentric array of articles left to drip-drop dry at the soothsayer’s well, everyday objects turned into stone by the limestone water – teddy bears, a boot, an umbrella, a dishcloth. Afterwards we sat outside a pub called the World’s End and over half a beer-shandy and a ‘cheese ’n onion’ sandwich, Mr Belling looked at me morosely and asked, ‘How long until you leave home then, Ruby? Eh?’

  I return to my corpse meditation on the ceiling. (How like Patricia I have become!) I am practising Millais’ Ophelia for when the River Foss recovers from its unseasonably low level. I have tested its depths and found it sadly wanting – wading out into its murky-dark channel, only to find it hardly reached the hem of my Etam mini-dress. Lacking pebbles, not to mention cardigan pockets to put them in, I had to resort to clutching a brick, discovered amongst the maze of tree roots along the bank. Could a person drown in such shallow water? Ever the optimist, I tried to squat down on the muddy river-bed and force myself to drown – but, as luck would have it, a noisy, enthusiastic spaniel upset this plan. It would be much easier to drown in the Ouse, but it’s a broad, brown river and nowhere near as romantic as the Foss – especially the dank stretch beyond the gasworks where the very air is green and choked with rush and reed and pond weed and brave little yellow flag irises.

  I can hear Mr Belling’s Rover revving noisily in the drive and then crashing away in a spurt of gravel. He will probably buy Bunty afternoon tea out somewhere and then bring her home and she’ll come in the house laughing and saying, ‘Now, now Bernard I’m a respectable widow-woman, you know,’ and he’ll pinch her bottom and say, ‘Not for long, Bunty.’ I suppose I should be grateful that she’s not being courted by Walter, who had a very good try, tempting her with slabs of liver, loins of lamb and even, on one occasion, a naked, shiny-pink rabbit that looked like something from a pornographic magazine. (I have seen one – I have also found out what a Durex is for. These are the days of my lost innocence.) Needless to say, we did not eat the rabbit and Walter has been vanquished by Bunty’s Prince Valiant – Bernard Belling, who has a plumbing supplies business somewhere in the nether regions of Back Swinegate. His warehouse is like a cathedral dedicated to sanitary ware – serried ranks of lidless toilets gleaming in the half-light like secular fonts and stacks of martyred tapless sinks, their amputated u-bends bandaged in sticky brown paper.

  Mr Belling is nearly bald and wears things he calls ‘slacks’ topped off with Val Doonican sweaters and he’s constantly telling me what a wretched life my ‘poor mother’ has had. Bunty runs the Shop now, with the help of a school-leaver called Elaine. ‘Fancy,’ Bunty says, ‘Elaine’s your age and yet she’s got a steady boyfriend and is saving up for her bottom drawer.’ So, more alarmingly, is Kathleen, who has recently become engaged to a boy called Colin from Archbishop Holgate’s Grammar School who is hoping to go into his father’s ironmongery business. Kathleen wears her diamond engagement ring on a chain round her neck, hidden under her school blouse.

  Kathleen and I mull over the contents of her bottom drawer. What does she have in it? Four Irish Linen tea-towels, a basket-weave lampshade and a set of stainless-steel cake forks. Is this enough to found a marriage on? I buy her a chopping-board to boost the drawer’s contents.

  ‘She’s a very sensible girl,’ Bunty says. ‘You don’t want me to go to university then?’ I ask her. ‘Yes, yes, of course I do,’ she says, flustered. ‘Your education’s very important, obviously.’ But really you can tell that she’d rather I would just get married and belong to someone else.

  ‘What is the point of a bottom drawer?’ I question Kathleen. ‘To save things for the future,’ she says promptly.

  What would I put in my bottom drawer if I had one?

  I’m in the grip of Sunday afternoon lethargy, lying on my bed, incanting over and over again the battles of the Peninsular War – Vimeiro, Corunna, Oporto, Talavera de La Renna, Ciudad Roderigo, Badajoz, Salamanca – like a magic spell, but to no effect as I cannot remember a single one after five minutes, which is a pity because my O Levels begin next week. I wonder if my results will be as bad as Patricia’s were. Where is Patricia? Why doesn’t she come and rescue me from this stultifying life?

  I give up my revision and wander downstairs to the kitchen where I make myself a piece of toast and eat it lying on the living-room carpet where the sun, coming through the patio doors, is baking-hot. I bask for a while like a lizard taking in heat then fall asleep and when I wake up again, feel qu
ite disorientated. I try to recite my prepared oral for French but cannot remember a word of it beyond, ‘Paris – une ville très belle et intéressante.’ As for German and Latin, good-at-languages Ruby cannot string a single sentence together. Even English, my native tongue, can get the better of me sometimes and when I try to speak in class I find my syntax all jumbled and my vocabulary turned into gobbledegook.

  Beyond the patio window, out in the garden, I can see a neighbourhood cat stalking a thrush which is plucking a worm from a bed of petunias, blithely unaware of its approaching nemesis. I crawl over to the patio door and bang on it to alert the thrush. The cat stops in its tracks and the thrush flies off, snapping the worm in half as it goes. And then a curious thing happens – I keep on banging on the glass, very hard with the side of my hand because what I want to do – what I have a sudden, overwhelming urge to do – is to smash the glass and saw my wrist against the broken edge, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, like Lockwood did to poor Cathy’s ghost – until the blood pumps out, smearing the clear view of the patio and the tidy flower beds beyond. The glass is double-glazed and won’t break, but I still keep on hammering – although, unlike Cathy, I think I want to be let out, rather than in.

  Why does nobody notice how unhappy I am? Why does nobody comment on my bizarre behaviour – the recurring bouts of sleepwalking that still erupt from time to time, when I wander the house, indeed very much like a little ghost-child, one that is searching futilely for something it’s left behind in the corporeal world. (A toy? A playmate? Its heart’s desire?) Then there’s the inertia – lying lifelessly on my bed for hour after hour, doing nothing and apparently thinking nothing either. (Bunty thinks this is normal behaviour for a teenager.) Worst of all is the panic – since the first attack at George’s funeral, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to run from cinemas, theatres, libraries, buses, dinner queues, department stores. The symptoms of panic are terrifying – my heart feels as if it’s on the brink of exploding, my skin turns pale and clammy when my blood drops to my shoes – all of which, naturally enough, leaves me in fear of imminent death. If somebody made a television programme about me and ran it at a time when Bunty would be certain to be watching – instead of This is Your Life, for example, so it wouldn’t look too out of place, by the time the credits were rolling she’d be shaking her head and tut-tutting and saying, ‘That child needs help,’ but because I’m under her nose, eyes and feet, she doesn’t seem to notice.