Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  Now a widow twice over, Alice continued her search everywhere she could think of – Scarborough, Hull, Leeds, Bradford, Middlesborough; she even tried her own birthplace of York, the last place she expected Rachel to have chosen. All Alice’s own relatives were dead by this time and she knew noone in York so she stayed only a couple of weeks before resuming her quest elsewhere, never knowing that she had passed Nell with Clifford, Babs and Bunty in tow, in Davygate, and not even noticed them. Finally she washed up in Sheffield, quite penniless, living in a terrace slum and taking in, not washing but other people’s children, the irony of which was not lost in her.

  My great-grandmother died, an old lady surrounded by her photographs and a collection of plaster saints, in 1940 during one of the worst wartime raids on Sheffield. She was pulled out from a pile of rubble the next morning by a policeman and an air-raid warden and, held protectively against her body, they found an old-fashioned photograph of five children. The glass on the photograph wasn’t even broken. The policeman took it tenderly from her dead hands and said, ‘Ee, they’ll be sad when they hear how their old mam died.’ (He was a sentimental man, too sentimental for the job he’d had to do that night.)

  Coincidentally, the bombing of Sheffield had been witnessed by the eldest survivor of that photograph – Tom, a man who was under the impression that his mother had died fifty-five years previously, and who was visiting a pal in Doncaster. On a long, meandering journey back from the pub they climbed a hill to watch the raid, clearly visible even from that distance. ‘By ’eck,’ his pal said, ‘that’s Sheffield burning, lad,’ and then, ‘Poor folk,’ and then, ‘Sod Hitler!’ But Tom just shook his head sadly and felt grateful that he wasn’t in Sheffield that night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1970

  Broken English

  KATHLEEN TRIES THE IRON BED IN THE CONDEMNED CELL for size.

  ‘How is it?’

  ‘Pretty uncomfortable. You’d think they’d give condemned people a mattress or something.’ We are in the cell where Dick Turpin spent his last night, sans mattress. I lie down next to Kathleen on the hard black iron slats. ‘Mattressless – do you suppose that’s a word?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Kathleen shrugs, a difficult thing to do on an iron bed. We’ve just finished our A-Level exams and are filling the empty time by behaving like tourists, spending the morning in the Castle Museum amongst the stuffed horses and fire buckets, muskets and period shops that make up the past. Once, I had a dream about the Castle Museum – it was the middle of the night and I was the only person in the museum and while I watched everything came to life – the fires flamed up in the Victorian fireplaces, the delicate eighteenth-century harpsichords began to play, all on their own, and a carriage-and-four began to trundle along one of the cobbled streets. The secret museum at night was much more interesting than the daytime one where visitors keep shuffling into Dick Turpin’s cell and disturbing the peace.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ Kathleen says, suddenly rising from her condemned bed. ‘Let’s go and get an ice-cream.’

  Outside the museum we wander aimlessly around the grassy mound on which Clifford’s Tower sits, eating our 99s and breathing in the smell of new-mown grass. My head is still buzzing with Racine and Schiller and the mystifying questions on the European History paper, but Kathleen has her mind on different things. ‘Why don’t we work in a hotel for the summer?’

  ‘A hotel?’

  ‘Mm. I think it would be good for us to get some experience before we get on with the rest of our lives.’ (Only when Kathleen says it, it sounds like The Rest Of Our Lives.)

  ‘Some experience of what exactly?’

  Kathleen looks bemused. ‘Well . . . anything, I suppose.’ Kathleen isn’t going to university, she’s joining the Civil Service. I have been offered a choice of university places to do a degree in modern languages and I’ve chosen one of the farthest away on the map (Exeter) and if there had been a university in the Scilly Isles then I would have applied there. After Dr Herzmark returned the past to me, free of obscure fears, things returned to much how they had been before – I took my O Levels at a second sitting and for a while Bunty treated me as if I was a delicate piece of china, but before long we had more or less settled back into our old ways, apart from the absence of Bernard Belling who made a hasty exit from our lives after my flirtation with the world of Spirit. I have surprised myself with how dutiful I have been, but then I am all the daughters of my mother’s house now, and it does put you under a certain obligation. On tedious Christmases or harrowing birthdays I have cursed Patricia for wriggling so successfully out of her responsibilities.

  Now that I’m going to university Bunty has begun to take a bit more interest in my academic progress and talks about me in that sickly way that other mothers do – Did you know that my daughter’s got a place at university? – the very same way in fact that Mrs Gorman, Kathleen’s mother, does – Did you know my daughter’s getting married to a very nice boy?

  We climb the steps to Clifford’s Tower and walk round its white quatrefoil walls. Suddenly set free from everything that has previously imprisoned us (school) we are in a strange, listless limbo. We stare down into the courtyard below. In the twelfth century hundreds of Jews locked themselves in here and burnt themselves to death rather than face the mob outside, baying for their blood. Now its clover-shaped walls are open to the blue sky but the air is still tainted with the scent of immolation and it makes me uneasy. There’s too much history in York, the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there’s no room for the living.

  We wander aimlessly across St George’s Field and down to the river. Here, the Vikings once established their trading capital but there is no river trade any more and the big old warehouses stand empty now.

  My immediate future (Exeter) appears to be more dependent on my A-Level results than Kathleen’s does, as The Rest Of Her Life looks as if it will be defined by marriage to Colin. I’m not at all sure that Mrs Gorman is right in her judgement of Colin – he doesn’t seem a particularly ‘nice boy’ at all to me and I think Kathleen is making a big mistake. In these circumstances helping her to get some ‘experience’ seems like the decent thing to do and so I say, ‘Why not?’ in that careless way people do when they’re not aware that they’re making momentous, fateful decisions.

  I thought Kathleen meant a hotel in York, or perhaps London, where we have been only once, on a school trip – both Kathleen and I are keenly aware of how hopelessly provincial we are – so I was quite taken aback when she informed me that she’d found jobs for us as chambermaids in The Royal Highland Hotel in Edinburgh.

  ‘Edinburgh?’

  ‘Yes, Edinburgh, you know – history, culture, the Castle, the Festival, anything, something . . .’

  So I have come to Scotland a second time and if I knew how long I was going to stay (for ever) I expect I would do some things differently – bring more clothes, for example. But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country – The Rest Of My Life.

  The first surprising thing about Edinburgh is that we have arrived here without going over the Forth Bridge. I’m still waiting for it to appear beneath our wheels when the train draws up alongside the platform at Waverley. Kathleen is busy hauling down suitcases from the luggage-rack and worrying about getting left on the train, but I’m in my seat puzzling over the disappearance of the Forth Bridge. I’m not as bothered as Kathleen is about getting off; I would be quite happy to stay on the train and find out where it’s going (Haymarket, Inverkeithing, Kirkcaldy, Markinch, Ladybank, Cupar, Leuchars, Dundee, Arbroath, Stonehaven, Aberdeen).

  The second surprise is that Edinburgh is all hills. York is a flat town where the air hangs quietly and the sun sets behind houses, not horizons.

  We hover uncertainly in the foyer of The Royal Highland Hotel which smells of roast meat and rice pudding. The Royal Highland is really an amalgamation of several houses on a sweeping New Town crescent. This trans
formation has been cobbled together with veneered plywood and concealed light fittings like a trick box. A figure glides out from nowhere and speaks in a foreign accent which I recognize (Scottish), ‘Hello gurruls, I am Marjorie Morrison, the housekeeper, and I hope you’ll be using the back door in future.’ Marjorie Morrison is as thin and as straight as a pencil. She has widowed eyes and black braided hair and looks like a near-relation of Mrs Danvers.

  Once we have been shown to our room in the attic, Kathleen begins to unpack methodically but I clamber up the chair and stick my head out of the little window in the roof into the evening sunlight and breathe deeply. The attic window is better than the camera obscura on the Royal Mile will be, for a panorama of Edinburgh shimmers below in silvery watercolours, stretching far away to the Salisbury Crags and the Pentland Hills.

  Being a chambermaid turns out to be housework under a different guise, much of which seems quite unnecessary to me. I can never polish up my mirrors the way Kathleen can or get my baths free of their grainy deposits. My Hoover clogs up, my sheets wrinkle, my coathangers disappear – clearly I have not inherited the housework genes from Auntie Babs and Bunty. I spend a lot of time dozing on unmade beds in empty rooms, contemplating the uneven, beige plaster on the walls of the Royal Highland and listening for the approach of Marjorie Morrison’s sharp little heels. If this is ‘experience’ then I’d rather skip it and get on with The Rest Of My Life.

  Edinburgh, when I venture onto its streets, is both exotic and friendly at the same time – but I must explore its charms alone for – astonishingly – I have lost Kathleen. Almost as soon as we arrive she appears to completely forget about The Rest Of Her Life with Colin and takes up with a student called Martin who is working as a porter for the summer at the same hotel. Martin wears wire-rimmed spectacles and a purple grandad vest and a skimpy ponytail that Marjorie Morrison insists he has cut, threatening him with a little pair of silver scissors dangling from a chain at her waist. Martin is studying electronic engineering and is heavily into drugs and Marshall McLuhan and if you searched the length and breadth of the country you couldn’t find anyone less like hapless, ironmongering Colin. I make friends with two Irish girls working as waitresses for the summer. Niamh and Siobhan are also waiting for The Rest Of Their Lives to start, but are a poor substitute for Kathleen.

  But my future is still as promising as railway tracks. I don’t know that I am doomed by Janet Sheriff, our history teacher who fell in love at the beginning of our A-Level History course and forgot to teach us large chunks of the European syllabus. Only when we were sitting our exam did we discover that there had been terrible battles and bloody revolutions of which we knew nothing.

  In the evenings, Niamh and Siobhan and I sit in Benedetti’s, an Italian café off Leith Walk which seems warm and inviting with its red Formica-covered tables and steaming chrome machines. The Benedettis themselves are living opera, a brooding and melodramatic Italian family in which relationships are indecipherable – an endless succession of grandmothers and sisters and cousins replacing one another behind the counter, all of them tossing mysterious words at one another like flowers. Sometimes behind the counter there is a beautiful boy with green eyes and black-satin hair tied back with a shoelace so that you can see that his cheeks are as sharp as knife blades. His nut-brown skin looks as if it will smell of olives and lemons. This is Gian-Carlo Benedetti and you would never think from looking at him that he would turn out the way he does.

  On the walls of the café are hung posters of Pisa and Lucca and Barga, posters with pictures of huge quattrocento towers and blue Tuscan skies and sometimes when old Mr Benedetti is in charge and waiting idly for custom he stands and looks at these posters with a faraway look in his eye and I know he’s thinking about home (see Footnote (xii)). Later, when we have the chip shop in Forfar, we too will have one of these posters on the wall and sometimes when Gian-Carlo Benedetti is waiting for the fat to reach the right temperature I catch him gazing at it with the same vacant expression. But by then I know he isn’t thinking anything at all and I scream at him in Italian, in words that sound as if they are embroidered with blood.

  Kathleen and I phone up Queen Anne’s to get our exam results and discover that we have both failed our History A Level. A curtain falls across the wide open vista that was my future – all of a sudden I have no idea what’s going to happen to me. Que sera sera says Kathleen with a smile and a shrug. She doesn’t care – she’s in love with Martin.

  But it’s not to be. Colin must have sensed that Kathleen was re-ordering The Rest Of Her Life for he comes storming up to Edinburgh, hammering on the bell in reception and calling down Marjorie Morrison’s wrath on his head. He shuts himself up with Kathleen in a linen cupboard until he’s talked her round and within a matter of hours they are back on the train to England. I see them off at Waverley and watching the tail-light of their train disappear into the darkness I wish Kathleen a happy future, but, unfortunately, I know that it takes more than wishes to secure that.

  Her subsequent grudge against Janet Sheriff, our history teacher, will be greater than mine, for it is, after all, Miss Sheriff’s amnesic love life which is directly responsible for our failing our History A Level and for Kathleen joining the Civil Service at clerical rather than administrative grade, which in turn will result in her bottom drawer expanding on credit. This will put pressure on the marriage and lead to Colin drinking, losing the family business, going bankrupt before he’s forty and shooting the family dog. So in a way I was lucky that all that happened to me was that I married Gian-Carlo Benedetti and ran the chip shop in Forfar.

  Martin is heartbroken and leaves Edinburgh the next day. We will keep in touch sporadically for the next few years. Martin will get into computers and move to California and I think it’s safe to say that poor Kathleen has just made the wrong decision.

  A week or so later, I’m staring vacantly out of the window of Room 21, when Marjorie Morrison sweeps in and glares at the twin beds I’ve just finished making. ‘Your pillows,’ she declares, ‘look as if they have been in the Battle of Vienna!’ But this statement produces in me, not contrition, but a storm of helpless weeping and I collapse on one of the poorly-made beds and in between hiccuping sobs I tell her woefully that I have never heard of any Battle of Vienna. Perhaps sensing that my grief comes from a deeper source than mere ignorance of military history, Marjorie Morrison bends her stiff form and sits next to me on the bed and like an awkward, angular insect, unfolds her arms and puts them gingerly around my heaving body. ‘Lennox,’ she muses after a while, ‘you must have Scottish blood in you, dear.’ Over her scrawny, musty shoulder I notice for the first time a watercolour hanging on the wall of the Forth Bridge, its blood-rust girders dark against a blue sky. ‘No,’ I say, weeping and shaking my head. ‘No, I don’t think I do.’

  The Irish girls are packing, getting ready for grape-picking in France; they invite me to go with them but I decline. I try to wash away my torpor by climbing Arthur’s Seat. It’s a soft, gentle evening and when I reach the top I can see bridges and water and hills in abundance and above my head wheels a flock of satin-black birds making prophetic patterns in the air and when I walk into Benedetti’s the beautiful boy, who will indeed smell like olives and lemons, looks up from the floor he is sweeping and smiles hugely at me and says, Ciao, come sta? And later that night, when the café is closed, he proposes to me over a seething cappuccino in dreadful, halting English. I wilfully misinterpret all the signs and believe that a magnificent kind of destiny has revealed itself to me (unaware then the reason he asks me is because he is only a distant cousin Benedetti and about to be deported – this faint kinship is the reason why we can’t have the café in Kirriemuir or the ice-cream parlour in Dundee and must make do with the fish-and-chip shop in Forfar).

  On my way back to the Royal Highland I ring up Bunty from a call-box outside Princes Street Gardens, surrounded by midnight revellers from the Festival. She answers wearily and I can almost see he
r blue rollers and pink hair-net. ‘It’s just Ruby!’ I shout down the phone at her. ‘Guess what – I’m getting married!’ The shocked silence that greets this news goes on for ever – at least until my money runs out. ‘I’ve found someone who wants me at last!’ I yell into the phone, but it has already gone beepbeepbeepbeepbeep and my words fall into nothing. ‘Congratulations, hen,’ a man says as I come out of the phone-box. ‘I hope you’ll be very happy,’ and I must make do with his whisky-laced epithalamium for the only person we invite to our hasty register-office wedding is Marjorie Morrison and we have to borrow a witness from the previous wedding. Bunty refuses to speak to me for over a year and I am horrified to find that I miss her.

  And so I married Gian-Carlo Benedetti and finally found the Forth Rail Bridge. I crossed the Forth and then the Tay and found out what would have happened if I had stayed on the train (Haymarket, Inverkeithing, Kirkcaldy, Markinch, Ladybank, Cupar, Leuchars, Dundee) and in doing so condemned myself to some truly wretched years in which Gian-Carlo Benedetti’s charms melt into the air along with his fine cheekbones and radiant smile. Not only that, but he grows unattractively plump on all the chip-fat and acquires such a taste for grappa that sometimes I think about throwing a match at him to see if he’ll ignite like a well-doused Christmas pudding.

  Once I caught a train to Cardenden by mistake. I was on the way to Forfar (it was near the end of my marriage to Gian-Carlo Benedetti) and the train was in the wrong place, alongside the number 17 platform at Waverley where the Dundee train should have been, and the guard was already slamming the doors and raising his whistle when I ran up, one small, nut-brown child under each arm, their black curls bobbing as I ran and jumped aboard. The train had meandered through half of Fife before I realized we were going the wrong way (my state of mind was not good at the time). When we reached Cardenden we got off and waited for the next train back to Edinburgh. I was very tired and if Cardenden had looked more promising I think I would have simply stayed there. And if you’ve ever been to Cardenden you’ll know how bad things must have been.