Behind the Scenes at the Museum

by Kate Atkinson

  We have to coax her out of the car and the nearer we get to the huge, baronial front door, the slower her footsteps become. As we start on the flight of stone steps she clutches my hand suddenly and for the first time I realize that she’s smaller than me. I can still remember when she was twice as tall; now she’s like a doll. How did she shrink so fast? My step falters. I’m not sure I can do this. Perhaps I could take this new doll-mother home with me and look after her, at least for a while?

  ‘Don’t even think it,’ Adrian mutters under his breath, but anyway the matron already has Bunty’s arm and is leading her along the corridor to her room with its modern facilities and pleasant views. Just before she disappears she turns and waves sadly, like a child on its first day at school. ‘That was my mother,’ I say with a sigh, and Adrian laughs rather grimly and says, ‘She still is, our Ruby, she still is.’

  When we visit Bunty the next day, however, she seems happier and tells us that the room service is wonderful. ‘How big a tip do you think I should leave?’ she asks, a worried little frown creasing up her features. We take her for a walk around the grounds, Dolores snapping at our ankles. Silverleas is set in a parkland of beautiful trees – weeping elms and Spanish walnut, glossy holly bushes and clumps of brooding yew. It is sheltered here and spring flowers sprout everywhere. The grass rolls out of view, green and fresh, and it strikes me that this is an excellent place to play horses and it’s almost a shame that Christine Roper isn’t here because I think it’s the kind of game I’m ready to play now. We pause in our promenading and take a seat on one of the many sturdy benches presented by grateful people. Our bench is in memory of Fred Kirkland 1902–1981 and all three of us sit formally on Fred’s bench – straight backs, hands clasped on knees – and gaze at a little group of fritillaries, bobbing and waving in the gentle breeze like fairies’ skirts. ‘Would you like to stay here?’ Adrian asks, and Bunty’s whole body twitches like a startled rabbit’s.

  ‘Stay?’ she echoes quietly. ‘For ever?’

  ‘Well,’ I demur, ‘perhaps not for ever . . .’

  ‘Why can’t I go home?’ Bunty says, looking from one to the other of us in a rapid, panicky way that makes me wish I was anywhere but here. ‘Why can’t I go home?’

  Adrian and I are eating sandwiches in front of the television, Bunty’s television-snack trays perched on our knees. We’re watching the Antiques Roadshow, with the religious intensity of people who’ve got nothing better to do. Tomorrow we’ll have to start packing the house into boxes and disposing of everything. It seems strange to be getting rid of everything when Bunty isn’t dead but there’s nothing she has a use for any more. Then the phone rings.

  Perhaps it will be Mr Nobody. It’s not, it’s the matron of Silverleas telling me that Bunty has had a stroke.

  ‘How did she shrink so much?’ Patricia is awe-struck by the change in Bunty. The three of us – Patricia, me and Adrian (four if you count Dolores who is stuffed inside Adrian’s jacket) – sit around Bunty’s hospital bed and talk in subdued whispers. Patricia got on the next flight when she heard about Bunty’s imminent demise. Bunty’s bed is in a side room of the new District Hospital, having been promptly ejected from Silverleas after her stroke (she did not, after all, leave a tip). A cerebral haemorrhage, not big enough to kill her, but enough to send her spinning deeper into limbo. Her tea has come and gone, uneaten, the leftovers picked at by Dolores.

  The night-shift sister, Sister Blake, pops her head round the door, and asks us if we’re all right. Sister Blake’s tone of voice – solemn and supportive – combined with the way we’ve been side-lined off the ward – suggests that Bunty is not expected to last much longer, and when the sister’s gone we debate whether we should go home tonight or not. I draw the curtains at the window, curtains that have big colourful shapes on them as if we were in the children’s ward. Bunty’s room overlooks the Scarborough line and a short diesel train toots as it passes below. Patricia and I decide to go and ask Sister Blake if she knows the details of Bunty’s terminal timetable. It’s after nine o’clock and the last straggling visitors have gone and the lights have been dimmed. We find Sister Blake and a student nurse in one of the six-berth wards soothing a tiny old man who is trying to throw himself out of bed with remarkable determination. Sister Blake and the student struggle with the cot-sides while the old man, no bigger than a schoolboy, keeps up a stream of ferocious invective against them.

  ‘I think she’s busy,’ Patricia says doubtfully. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ and we wander off around the maze of new staircases and corridors, arm in arm like the walking wounded whom we see perambulating in their dressing-gowns during the daytime. They are all safely tucked up now, as are the little electric trains that buzz along with the meal-trucks in tow. We walk along corridors with plate-glass walls beyond which we can see ducks roosting around a concrete pond, lit by small floodlights. The slight hum of a motor vibrates softly in the air as if the hospital was a huge ship ploughing confidently through the darkness. We sit for a while in reception in the big vinyl chairs and watch the revolving doors before going outside and taking a turn around the empty visitors’ car-park, laid out like a huge hop-scotch. We’re only a few hundred yards from where Bunty was born. And now she’s dying. Farther up the other side of the road we can see the lights blazing on Rowntree’s factory – that other great ocean-going liner.

  When we get back to Bunty’s bedside Sister Blake is there, holding one of Bunty’s hands while Adrian holds the other. Adrian gives us a worried look and Sister Blake says softly, ‘I think she’s taken a turn for the worse.’

  Our bedside vigil lasts all night. When you’re waiting for death, instead of being surprised by it (as we usually are in our family), it can take a long time to come. Sister Blake (Tessa) is in her late forties and has two grown-up sons called Neil and Andrew. Neil is married and has a new baby daughter called Gemma. We know these things (and many other things) about Sister Blake for we swap stories over Bunty’s living corpse. With her tired blue eyes and fading blond curls, Sister Blake looks like a plump and weary angel.

  ‘I never knew my real mother,’ she says in a low voice. ‘I was adopted. Not knowing your real mother, it sort of nags at you, you know?’

  Patricia flinches and asks, ‘Didn’t you try to find her?’ and Sister Blake says, ‘Oh yes, I did, but she was dead by then. She came from Belfast, that’s all I know about her really, except she was a nurse too, that’s funny isn’t it? I was a war-baby.’

  ‘We were all war-babies,’ Patricia says enigmatically.

  ‘She’s hanging by a thread,’ Sister Blake whispers, and we all watch Bunty’s face with a curious inten-sity. I don’t think I have ever looked at my mother so much as I have looked at her this night and now that I come to study her I feel as if I have no idea who she is. Patricia is watching this stranger in the bed with an oddly ferocious expression on her face and I am reminded for a second of the old Patricia.

  There is a dull feeling inside me that is growing all the time. I had expected something different from Bunty’s rite of passage – I had expected her to have some meaningful last words, pearls of wisdom, a death-bed confession (‘I am not your real mother’) but now I recognize the disappointing truth – she’s not going to say anything, not even goodbye.

  ‘I think she’s gone,’ Sister Blake says quietly and it’s just as well we have a nurse with us, because none of us would ever have realized Bunty was dead, so quietly has she slipped behind the veil. I wish I was the kind of daughter who could rend her clothes and tear her hair out but I’m not, and neither is Patricia, who is sitting by the bedside with a kind of stunned look on her face as if the last thing she was expecting from a death-bed was death itself. Adrian is crying, and the only one who seems to have any idea how to behave on these occasions is Sister Blake, who gently smooths the sheets and touches Bunty’s forehead as if she were tucking in a small child frightened of the dark. I am gripped by a wholly inappropriate urge to shake B
unty back to life and make her be our mother all over again – but do it better this time.

  ‘Well, that’s over with,’ Patricia says, as we sit back in the taxi that’s taking us away from the hospital. York speeds by in the flickering frames of the taxi windows. ‘You know, Ruby, we loved her really.’

  ‘Did we? It’s not what I would call love.’

  ‘Maybe not, but it’s love just the same.’ I check Patricia’s face to make sure she’s not looking smug or sentimental when she says this, but she’s not, she’s looking quite troubled, so I refrain from kicking her. Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps my concept of love – as wide as the sky – isn’t big enough to encompass Bunty’s autistic mothering.

  Patricia and I hold broad black ribbons either side of the coffin and pretend that we’re lowering it into the grave. The other ribbon-bearers in this symbolic act are Uncle Ted, Uncle Clifford, Adrian and Lucy-Vida. The handful of dry soil hitting the coffin-lid makes me twitch. There’s something dark and primitive about burying someone in the ground. I half expect Bunty to push the lid off in irritation and sit up and say to us, ‘You should be careful, you could bury someone alive like that!’ But she doesn’t. Patricia and I have had a considerable debate about whether Bunty should be cremated or buried and finally, perhaps because we still had memories of the Shop fire, we decided on burial. Now I’m not so sure. I really don’t think she would like it here. If only there was a pair of angels to raise their blazer-wings over her.

  The graveside business is cursory, as was the funeral service. Bunty has hardly been inside a church since she left St Denys’ Sunday School so the vicar of the local church doesn’t put himself out too much. Despite our advice to the contrary, he insists on calling her Berenice throughout so I keep having the uneasy feeling that we’re burying the wrong person.

  Afterwards we go back to the house. Adrian has spent all morning making sandwiches and quiches and a fruit cake, and a newly-divorced Kathleen circulates round the house with trays of food, like a waitress, her mascara smudging under her eyes because she can’t stop crying. She’s crying about her divorce from Colin, not my mother, but not knowing that several people mistake her for a grieving daughter. The true daughters remain uncomfortably dry-eyed. There’s an odd emptiness at the heart of Bunty’s funeral, it’s like being at a party without the noise and without waiting for something to happen, because it already has. The person at the centre of it all is missing.

  I had thought that when she died it would be like having a weight removed and I would rise up and be free of her, but now I realize that she’ll always be here, inside me, and I suppose when I’m least expecting it I’ll look in the mirror and see her expression or open my mouth and speak her words. ‘Well, you know, Ruby,’ Patricia says, picking at the slice of broccoli quiche on her plate, ‘people are given the mother they need for a particular incarnation.’ But then she shrugs helplessly because neither of us can think why we needed Bunty.

  ‘Do you believe in that stuff? Karma and all that?’ Lucy-Vida asks. We’re sitting on the stairs, sharing a bottle of wine with Lucy-Vida, twisting out of the way occasionally to let people pass to go upstairs to the bathroom. ‘Patricia’s a Buddhist,’ I tell her. ‘I’m coming back as a cat,’ Lucy-Vida says, stretching out one of her ridiculously long, feline legs so that the hole in her black tights, shored up with shocking-pink nail varnish, suddenly expands and sends a ladder shooting up under her skirt. She has four children now but only her eldest is with her today. Wayne is a strapping twenty-five-year-old with thighs like York hams and is proudly wearing his army uniform. This is the very same Wayne that Lucy-Vida was pregnant with at Sandra’s wedding and makes an unfortunate contrast to Sandra’s two weedy boys, Dean and Todd. Sandra has put on a lot of weight in the intervening years and is throwing most of it about. ‘Bossy cow,’ Lucy-Vida remarks mildly as Sandra bellows at Uncle Ted.

  Uncle Bill is dead but Auntie Eliza, who is waiting for a hip replacement, hobbles around on two crutches with Wayne carrying her glass and lighting her cigarettes. ‘Game old bird,’ Adrian says, dishing up quiche. Disappointingly, Daisy and Rose do not come to the funeral. It is some time since anyone has seen either of them – neither have married and they live together in a high-rise block in Leeds and Auntie Gladys says that they never go out of the house. ‘They must go out some time,’ Sandra says dismissively, ‘or how would they eat?’ (But Daisy and Rose probably don’t need to eat.) ‘Nah,’ Wayne says, ‘Mum sent me to check on them last year – they think aliens are talking to them through the television.’ He screws a finger into the side of his head. ‘Totally fucking barmy!’ and Lucy-Vida slaps him hard on the other side of his head and says, ‘Language, Wayne!’

  In the kitchen, Brian, Adrian’s lover, is wearing Bunty’s pink rubber gloves and washing up for all he’s worth. Uncle Clifford, his teeth removed, is sitting at the table eating a piece of pork pie, and holding forth on the subject of repatriating the ‘blacks’, to Africa preferably, and Brian nods and smiles in the tolerant way of people who know they can go home whenever they want and never have to see you again.

  ‘Well,’ Auntie Gladys says as she leaves, ‘that was a right good send-off; your mother would have enjoyed it.’

  ‘No she wouldn’t,’ Patricia says, closing the front door behind the last funeral guest. ‘She hated things like that.’

  We spend the next few days attending to post-funeral business, putting the house on the market, sending off insurance policies and bagging clothes up for the PDSA shop. We go through the jewellery and the photographs, dividing them up between us. I get my great-grandmother’s photograph, the one that Tom had, and the silver locket; Patricia takes the clock, and – after some hesitation – the rabbit’s foot, which she plans to bury in the garden.

  The day before she leaves we go for a long walk around the heart of York; the Minster overlooks us wherever we go. There won’t really be anything to bring us back to York now – perhaps we’ll never come here again. It seems like a fake city, a progression of flats and sets and white cardboard battlements and medieval half-timbered house kits that have been cut and glued together. The streets are full of strangers – up-market buskers, school parties and coach parties and endless varieties of foreigner.

  We walk under the long wooden sign for Ye Olde Starre Inn that stretches from one side of the street to the other. The Roman via praetoria. The whole place has been turned into an upmarket shopping-mall; there are no more Richardson’s and Hannon’s, no more Walters and Bernards, no more barbers and bakers or stained-glass makers – it’s like one big, incredibly expensive souvenir shop.

  Slowly and inevitably we make our way to the Shop. It’s ten years since Bunty sold up and now the premises are occupied by an expensive men’s clothing store; a rail of Harris tweed hangs where the rabbit cages once were; a carousel of silk ties has taken the place of the Parrot. There isn’t a single timber or floorboard or pane of glass that is recognizable, not an atom or molecule remains. Upstairs, in Above the Shop, there is now a café – a ‘tea-room’ – and Patricia and I spend a long time debating whether or not we should go up there. But eventually we do, and sit at a lace-covered table and drink fantastically-priced tea in exactly the same spot where our television set used to stand. ‘Spooky or what?’ Patricia says with a shiver.

  There are more tables on the next floor and on our way out we loiter at the foot of the stairs for a long time but neither of us is able to even put a finger on the banister-rail. The tinkle of spoons on saucers and the polite murmur of foreign voices, American, German, Japanese, floats down the stairs. I close my eyes. If I concentrate I can just hear an older murmur, equally foreign but less polite – Latin, Saxon, Norman-French. They are all still here, swishing and clanking. And then the most extraordinary thing happens – the building begins to shake as if a small earthquake has the Vale of York in its grip. The street itself vibrates and all the delicate cups and saucers rattle and clatter on the tables of the tea-room.
From one of the newly-genteel lace-curtained windows I can see a wild scene in the street below – the stomping, disciplined marching of thousands of feet as a Roman army marches up from the river, through the porta praetoria and along the street. The plumes on the centurions’ helmets tremble, the standard bearers hold their standards proudly aloft. And there at the front, burnished and gleaming in the sun, is the magnificent brass eagle of the great Ninth Hispana. Perhaps if I watch them I will see where they disappeared to, but at that moment a waitress drops a jug full of milk and the Ninth Legion is reduced to a fading echo of footfalls. ‘Ruby, Ruby!’ Patricia gives me a little shake. ‘Ruby, what are you staring at? Come on, it’s time to go.’

  We collect ourselves on the street outside. ‘That was horrible,’ Patricia says, over the noise of an al fresco string quartet on the pavement. ‘A tea-room, for heaven’s sakes.’ The string quartet come to a tasteful crescendo and people throw money into an empty violin case. But not us, we scurry away, past St Helen’s, the Shopkeepers’ church, along Blake Street and towards the Museum Gardens, chased all the way by the teasing, cruel chatter of the household ghosts.

  In the Museum Gardens, now entirely free to the public – no sixpence needed – we pick our way through the peacocks and squirrels and tourists that litter the grass and make our way down to the path by the river and walk the length from Lendal Bridge to Queen Anne’s and back again. We pause at the foot of Marygate and watch a train crossing Scarborough Bridge. The water level in the Ouse is very low for this time of year, exposing the different strata of earth and mud which line it. Everyone has left something here – the unnamed tribes, the Celts, the Romans, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Normans and all those who came after, they have all left their lost property – the buttons and fans, the rings and torques, the bullae and fibulae. The riverbank winks momentarily with a thousand, zillion, million pins. A trick of the light. The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.