‘Because you reminded her of Pearl, not because she hated you,’ Dr Herzmark suggests.
I shrug. ‘Both, I suppose. Poor Bunty – losing two children. And poor Patricia too; we expected her to do something, to save Pearl. And she couldn’t. And poor Gillian too,’ I add with some surprise. ‘If anyone was to blame it was her. And she’s dead. And poor Pearl because she’s dead too.’
‘And so,’ Dr Herzmark says with a smile, ‘shall we go through every person in the world, dead or alive, and say “poor so and so” and “poor so and so” and will we ever come to “poor Ruby”?’
And I try the words out to feel how they fit, ‘Poor Ruby’, but hardly have they formed in my mouth before I am crying and crying until I almost drown in my own pool of tears.
I have been to the world’s end and back and now I know what I would put in my bottom drawer. I would put my sisters.
Footnote (xi) – The Wrong Life
ALICE, SITTING IN A SHAFT OF SEPTEMBER SUNSHINE IN her rocking-chair in the kitchen of the cottage, nursed the newly-christened Eleanor. Baby Nell had fallen asleep at the breast and Alice herself was dozing miserably, quite unable to face the unwashed clothes, unfed children and unsatisfied husband that comprised her lot in life.
She was thinking, in a glumly metaphorical way, that she felt as if a great stone had been laid on her breastbone and she was being slowly suffocated by it, like one of the martyrs of old, although – a godless woman at the best of times – she couldn’t work out what on earth she was suffering for.
She listened, in a sleepy, abstracted kind of way, to the creak-creak of a cart and heard the dog barking its alarm. She knew it added up to something but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what and then she heard that peculiar voice saying something to one of the children – Bonzjoor – so that she almost dropped the sleeping baby as she buttoned up the front of her dress in dismay. Jean-Paul Armand! He darkened the door majestically and then invited himself to sit at the kitchen table, saying many extravagantly sentimental things about the small, mousy baby almost lost in the depths of the big wooden crib. ‘’Appy muzzair!’ he said in his exotic accents. ‘What a pity ze little one missed having ’er photograph taken!’ On the matter of the photographs, Alice’s mind was working furiously – had she put her signature to an agreement? Committed herself to paying money she could not possibly find? (Her entire material wealth could be measured by six silver sixpences in a tea-caddy on the mantelpiece.) How could she possibly know the answers to these questions when her mind was a permanent sieve of maternal amnesia?
From a large black leather Gladstone, Monsieur Armand produced the fruits of his work. He had framed three of the prints to demonstrate to his customer how much she needed to pay the extra cost of framing in order to display her progeny to the best advantage – although one of the framed photographs (framed, it has to be said, in a much more expensive frame than the other two) was Monsieur Armand’s own personal favourite and not of her progeny at all, but the one of Alice hiding her fertile bulk behind the chaise-longue and pouting enigmatically at the camera.
Belle, he murmured appreciatively, pushing the sepia portrait across the pine table. Alice regarded it indifferently, but she stretched out a hand to gather in the photographs of her children – they seemed much more attractive somehow when frozen into immobile poses and her eyes grew slightly moist at the sight of them and she sniffed quietly. Monsieur Armand produced an enormous (clean) silk handkerchief from one of his many magician’s pockets and handed it over with a flourish so that Alice was able to blow her nose in a rather unladylike way. She got up abruptly from the table after the nose-blowing and fetched the tea-caddy savings bank from the mantelpiece, opened the lid and in a melodramatic gesture emptied the contents onto the table, scattering the coins over the images of her children. ‘There,’ she declared tragically. ‘That is my entire worldly wealth. I am at your mercy,’ she added and promptly burst into tears.
Monsieur Armand was momentarily at a loss – he frequently had customers unable to pay, indeed he’d got into the habit of expecting it, but none of them was usually so histrionic, so emotional, so, well – foreign – about it and it was several seconds before he collected himself together and reached for her slim little hand across the rustic table. ‘Dear lady,’ he said. ‘Dear, dear lady, you must not upset yourself, I will not take your money.’ Alice was startled. She could not recollect anyone having said this to her before; generally the only thing people ever did was to take the money from her purse and she regarded Monsieur Armand suspiciously. ‘What will you take then?’ she asked, holding her chin high in defiance in case he bartered for her virtue. ‘Nothing, dear lady – I want nothing but you ’appy will.’ The schoolmistress in her moved to correct his grammar but was overcome by his unexpected kindness which primed the pump for a torrent of weeping and wailing from her until Monsieur Armand began to grow quite worried for her sanity.
All this had not gone entirely unnoticed and Alice’s three-dimensional offspring were now hovering silently on the threshold. ‘Mother,’ Ada ventured, ‘is summat up?’ and Alice sobbed even louder at the rural accents of her eldest and best child, especially when compared with the rococo exotica of Monsieur Armand’s vowels.
Eventually emotions were quieted and children dispersed and Monsieur Armand himself made ready to remount his creak-creaking chariot. ‘I feel,’ he said, tapping his left breast, ‘I feel in my ’art, dear lady, your un’appiness, your grief. You—’ Here he swept his arm around to indicate both the farm cottage and the entire county of Yorkshire – ‘You were not meant for this ’orrible life!’ Alice, still red-eyed from sobbing, nodded her head in mute agreement as he had just voiced her own thoughts exactly. His ancient pony, trapped between the shafts of the equally ancient cart, arched its neck and snorted and, under cover of his transport’s restlessness, Monsieur Armand bent down so that his thin lips were only an inch from my great-grandmother’s ear and his whiskers tickled her cheek. What passed between them in this intimate moment? An invitation to disaster, loss, hair-tearing grief and downright ruination which my silly great-grandmother misread completely as an opportunity for her true nature – so stifled and suffocated by drudgery and penury – to escape and fly free. ‘I wait,’ said Monsieur Armand, ‘at the end of the track – at midnight. I wait all night for you to come to me and run away to a better place.’
‘Shall wait,’ Alice was driven to correct his tenses. ‘Or possibly, in this case, “will”.’
‘Whatever.’
Later that afternoon, if you had been watching, you might have seen Alice high up, aloft in the hay loft, its upper doorway framing her spreadeagled figure, standing like Pythagorean woman and contemplating the height/weight implications of a fall. She had dressed herself suitably in black for the occasion, an ancient grosgrain, spotted with rust on the frills, and she gazed down at the ground below with a certain kind of wretched delight that would not be manifest again in our family until the advent of Patricia.
However, even a woman in Alice’s mental condition was capable of calculating that the fall would simply not be long enough or hard enough to guarantee much beyond a broken limb – an injury which would merely make her life much worse rather than affording any kind of escape, so she was really not too put out when Ada appeared down below, her pretty pouting mouth agape in horror. ‘What yer doing, Mother?’ she shouted, and her mother, a black, rusty angel, merely sighed and shrugged her shoulders as if to say she really didn’t have the slightest notion what she was doing.
Later still, after they had suppered on an unappetizing potato and cabbage stew and squabbled and pinched and pulled and generally frayed Alice into a tattered heap, the children were shepherded reluctantly upstairs, and Alice dropped into a weary sleep in her chair by the empty grate until Frederick crashed into the house, so much the worse for drink that in the dark kitchen he started at the sight of his wife in the rocking-chair and said, ‘Who’s that?’ and looked
as if he might attack her until she lit a candle and said, ‘It’s me, you daft fool,’ and he said, ‘Oh aye,’ and collapsed on the settle.
Alice squinted in the flickering candlelight at a wet, red patch on his arm. ‘Been fighting again?’ she asked with very little interest, and Frederick stared at the blood for a few seconds trying to recollect how he had come by it and then snorted and said, ‘Some great stupid lummox in cart at t’end of t’track – I fell into it.’
His wife offered no word of sympathy, she was in too thrilled a state of shock; she had quite forgotten Monsieur Jean-Paul Armand – the potato and cabbage stew, the attractions of suicide, the demands of children – these things had all conspired to drive him from her aerated brain. Frederick tripped his way up the stairs and fell – she knew without needing to observe – into a deep, deep alcohol-saturated sleep.
Alice remained downstairs, arguing with herself about the future by the light of a melancholy tallow candle. What were her alternatives? Certainly she could kill herself – this possibility still exerted a considerable attraction despite the aborted attempt earlier in the day. But what of the consequences? Wouldn’t the lives of her children be riddled henceforth with horror, scandal, guilt? Would they not be better off if they woke up in the morning and discovered that their mother had simply disappeared into the night rather than waking up to discover her body splattered all over the yard or foaming at the mouth from fly-paper poisoning? The ‘better place’ offered by Monsieur Armand would undoubtedly be a course beset with problems and surprises but surely it was better than death by her own hand?
And having come to this conclusion it was only a matter of minutes before she was packing a small bag and giving poor little Nelly a last cuddle. Then she kissed the soft, damp foreheads of Ada, Albert and Lillian, lingering long enough to stroke Albert’s golden, downy cheek and suppress a sob, and to take her mother’s little silver locket from her neck and slip it under Ada’s pillow. Ada moaned in her sleep and brushed her mother’s farewell kiss away with her hand. There were no goodbyes, though, for poor Lawrence and Tom as they slept up in the attic where the floorboards were all creaks and Lawrence was such a light sleeper that Alice decided not to risk it. She lived to regret this unmotherly omission, but then she lived long enough to regret more or less everything. Her very last act was to take off her wedding-ring and lay it on the pillow next to her drunken husband’s snoring head. When he awoke to find it there the next morning in place of his wife, he understood, with an insight quite unusual for him, that she was gone for good.
Alice found Monsieur Armand waiting patiently at the end of the track and he showed no surprise when she clambered up beside him and said, ‘Right then,’ which seemed somewhat uninspiring words with which to embark on a new life.
Monsieur Armand, anxious at the prospect of being pursued by an angry husband, made straight for the north and the pair settled, or tried to settle, in Glasgow for a while. But although Monsieur Armand managed to scrape by as a travelling photographer he didn’t seem to have the same luck once he was ensconced in a stationary studio, and certainly Glasgow was awash with photographic studios at the time and could get by perfectly well without the addition of Monsieur Armand’s talents. With the failure of this venture they uprooted themselves within a year. By this time, certain doubts had begun to display themselves in Alice’s heart but nonetheless she was willing to decamp the country and travel to Marseilles, Monsieur Armand’s native town, on the understanding that it would be a short visit after which they would come back to Yorkshire and – well, she didn’t know quite what followed the ‘and’ of this sentence, but somehow or other she would work out how to get her children back. She did, of course, have the photographs, because Monsieur Armand still had the plates and she was able to persuade him to print up a whole new set for her when they were in Glasgow, which she made him frame in expensive tooled-leather travelling frames that closed securely, enabling Alice to hug her children – fixed for ever in time – to and fro across the Continent.
Things did not go according to plan and the sojourn lengthened into years. Almost immediately on returning to Marseilles, Monsieur Armand made the unfortunate mistake of sinking every penny they had into a disastrous business venture. He was a man with no judgement in business affairs, as the Glasgow enterprise had demonstrated, and if Alice had known what he was doing she would have put her foot down and saved them from what followed – Monsieur Armand’s conviction for bankruptcy. He was even jailed for a short time and his poor wife was left destitute. (They had married bigamously with startling ease – although by now, Frederick was dead so technically Alice was a widow.) For a time Alice was even reduced to taking in washing, rubbing soap bars on the sullied linen of the bourgeoisie of Marseilles, and bitterly questioning a non-existent God as to whether this was really what he had intended for her.
When Monsieur Armand was released from prison, still surprisingly cheerful, another misfortune befell them in the shape of a bout of pneumonia to which Alice succumbed, leaving her weak and exhausted for many months afterwards. In between nursing his wife Monsieur Armand managed to earn a little money from his itinerant photography (knocking on doors was one thing he was good at) and eventually took her to the country to convalesce. Alice would have preferred to remain amongst Marseilles’ urban squalor rather than be buried in a pastoral idyll again, but, for once, Monsieur Armand was insistent. Then the money ran out again so that they were stranded in the country for quite some time just as Alice had feared and then when they returned to the city several more setbacks followed of the kind that Alice had come to expect, and so it went on.
On the morning of Alice’s forty-seventh birthday, she got out of bed, flung back the shutters on the bedroom window to reveal a flood of clean sunshine and, looking out of the window rather than at the inert Gallic shape under the bedclothes, declared to Monsieur Armand that she had absolutely and categorically had enough and that they had to return to England to recover her children that very instant even if she had to sell her body on the streets in order to raise the fare. Monsieur Armand mumbled something to the effect that she would only be able to sell her body if her lips were sewn together, forcing her to hurl both jug and washbasin at the bed.
Unhappily, this was also the fine summer’s morning that Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife set off to drive through the streets of Sarajevo, thus setting in motion a train of events which would conspire to keep Monsieur Armand and his wife in France for another four years.
During the war, Alice had a curious experience, the kind that other people might have taken as evidence of some mental disturbance; but she was so used to feeling disturbed that she didn’t think this at all and came to the even more outlandish conclusion that it demonstrated the existence of God. This transformatory experience occurred in 1916, on the night of 1 July, when Alice was woken suddenly from a very deep sleep. When she opened her eyes she saw a figure at the end of her bed – an angel, or at least an apparition that conformed to her idea of what an angel should look like – gauzy white robes, snowy wings, incandescent halo, golden curls, forget-me-not blue eyes – and she waited for it to speak to her but it, or rather he – for it was clearly a male figure – did not speak, but simply smiled and raised a hand heavenward in a gesture remarkably like that of the cheap plaster statues of saints and madonnas and Christs with which France was infested. Then it vanished. Next morning, Alice scoured every corner of the room to see if any angelic remnant had been left behind but there was nothing, not even a feather; but his fleeting presence had been enough to convert Alice to Catholicism and she became quite zealous, as all good converts do.
However, the bead-counting and candle-lighting did nothing to stop Alice’s search for her abandoned children and the second that the armistice rang out over Europe she packed Monsieur Armand onto a train bound for Calais. She began her search in the logical place – the little cottage she had left behind so hastily thirty years ago – only to find that, this
time, it was her children who had vanished into thin air. Several families had lived in the cottage since Rachel and the one presently incumbent knew nothing about any Barkers who might have once been there. Down in the village – where her reappearance caused something of a stir – the older inhabitants remembered the family quite clearly – Ada’s death, Frederick’s death, Rachel’s baby, Lawrence’s disappearance – these events were narrated dispassionately to Alice. It was, after all, a very long time ago, although not unfortunately to Alice who took these blows in anguish. And where had they decamped to? Here there was only a general shaking of heads. For the life of them noone could remember.
Monsieur Armand and his wife caught a train at the nearest railway station, heading for Whitby as Alice conjectured that Rachel might well have behaved like a homing pigeon, and for the entire journey she raved about Rachel coming to take her place and wept at the death of Ada and agonized over Lawrence’s disappearance until Monsieur Armand dearly wished that he had never set eyes on his wife. Frazzled, unravelled and fat, she was driving Monsieur Armand into an early grave, in Monsieur Armand’s opinion. Neither her temper nor her spirits improved with their arrival in Whitby where Alice spent several gaunt and dishevelled weeks traipsing up and down the narrow little streets like a demented woman asking every passer-by if they had ever heard of a Rachel Barker or a Rachel Storm (which was the name Rachel was born with, appropriately enough). She darted down every yard, calling out the names of her lost children, Tom, Albert, Lillian, Nelly, but they did not answer her call. In the evenings she was to be found standing on top of the West Cliff staring mournfully out to sea like the mother of a drowned sailor, before coming back to the cheap rooms they had rented to curse Jean-Paul Armand and the day she met him. After one of these tirades, when she had hit him on the head with a vase, he changed into his pyjamas and lay down on the thin, tired mattress of their double bed and closed his eyes with a sigh, never to open them again.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum Page 34
