Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Page 38
And finally to our last farewell – the cemetery. We buy bunches of spring flowers from a stall in the Newgate Market and replace the withering wreaths on Bunty’s still unmarked mound with daffodils. We leave fat yellow tulips for Gillian, a few rows away, but for Pearl we bring lilies, white as new snow. Pearl’s grave is in the midst of a whole knot of children, tiny gravestones poking up like broken baby teeth in one corner of the cemetery. Like Gillian, Pearl is ‘Safe in the Arms of Jesus’. Both Patricia and I agree that this is somehow highly unlikely and, anyway, we prefer the idea that she is inside the skin of another life now – perhaps the robin that flies from headstone to headstone as we walk towards the gate, stopping every so often to wait for us to catch it up. Although the way it cocks its head on its shoulder suggests the Parrot. A breeze ruffles the grass in the cemetery and moves the clouds faster across the stretched canvas of sky above. Patricia lifts her face up to the pale sun so that for a second she looks almost beautiful. ‘I don’t think the dead are lost for ever anyway, do you, Ruby?’
‘Nothing’s lost for ever, Patricia, it’s all there some-where. Every last pin.’
‘Pin?’
‘Believe me, Patricia, I’ve been to the end of the world. I know what happens.’ The breeze turns suddenly chilly and we turn up our coat collars and link arms as we pick our way amongst the sleeping dead.
We part on York station, in a suitably dramatic thunderstorm. Patricia isn’t going straight back to Australia, her family and her veterinary practice will have to wait for her return, for she is off on a quest – to find her own lost child, the one she parted from so long ago in Clacton. We have counted up the years, ‘Just think, Patricia – you might be a grandmother and not even know it,’ and Patricia makes that funny noise again, which I now know is laughter. She’s carrying our great-grandmother’s clock (her finally-retrieved panda cushioning it) in Nell’s ancient leatherette shopping-bag, trying not to unbalance its insides, but by the time she finally gets back to Melbourne it will have stopped for good.
Patricia embraces me on the station platform. ‘The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,’ she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. ‘Nonsense, Patricia,’ I tell her as I climb on board my train. ‘The past’s what you take with you.’
I am about to retrace my journey, take in reverse the train, plane and two boats that brought me to York. I have a life to go back to. I have been away long enough. I’m going back to far away Shetland, beyond which there is nothing but sea until the northern ice-cap. I belong by blood to this foreign country. I know this because Patricia (of all people) has paid someone to draw up our family tree – a huge, chaotic arboretum that has brought to light the true Scottishness of the Lennoxes. Patricia has taken this thirst for genealogy farther and has been busy writing to the sawn-off branches – corresponding with Auntie Betty’s daughter, Hope, in Vancouver and Tina Donner, a half-cousin by marriage, in Saskatchewan. Tina came over last year and in York she discovered Edmund Donner’s name scratched in the famous mirror, downstairs in Betty’s café, just next to the ladies’ toilets. Tina Donner came up to visit me as well, bringing with her a copy that she’d had made of Lillian’s photograph of Ada and Albert, the one that she took with her on the Minnedosa’s Atlantic crossing so many years ago. My copy sits in its frame on my desk and I like to look at it and wonder about my links with these people. Monsieur Armand’s photographs are scattered around the world now – with Hope, with Tina, with Patricia. Adrian has one of Lawrence and Tom with baby Lillian, but I have the one of Alice – the foolish mother, the missing wife, the woman lost in time.
Those little nut-brown girls, my own Alice and Pearl, are grown up now. They are both at university, one in Glasgow, one in Aberdeen, and I live on my own, on an island where the birds outnumber the people. Where I live you can find the red-throated diver and the eider duck, the curlew and the plover. There, there are puffins and the black guillemots, ravens and rock doves, nestling on the summer cliffs while above the moorland rise the merlin and the great skuas.
And there I am too. And what became of me? For a living I translate English technical books into Italian, so my marriage to Gian-Carlo Benedetti was not entirely wasted. I enjoy this work, methodical and mysterious at the same time. I can lay claim to be called a poet too – I have had good reviews for my first volume of poems – published by a small press in Edinburgh, and any day now I intend to begin work on a grand project – a cycle of poems based on the family tree. There will be room for everyone – Ada and Albert, Alice and Rachel, Tina Donner and Tessa Blake, even the contingent lives of Monsieur Jean-Paul Armand and Ena Tetley, Minnie Havis and Mrs Sievewright, for they all have a place amongst our branches and who is to say which of these is real and which a fiction? In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
I have caught the slow train that stops everywhere – Darlington, Durham, Newcastle, meandering its way along the Northumberland coast to Berwick. As we cross the Tweed the air seems to lighten and the sky begins to dry a little and, like a watermark, the pale sheen of a rainbow welcomes our train over the border. I’m in another country, the one called home. I am alive. I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox.
HUMAN CROQUET
Kate Atkinson
‘Wonderfully eloquent and forceful . . . brilliant and engrossing’
Penelope Fitzgerald, Evening Standard
Once it had been the great forest of Lythe – a vast and impenetrable thicket of green. And here, in the beginning, lived the Fairfaxes, grandly, at Fairfax Manor, visited once by the great Gloriana herself.
But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of Trees. The Fairfaxes have dwindled too; now they live in ‘Arden’
at the end of Hawthorne Close and are hardly a family at all.
But Isobel Fairfax, who drops into pockets of time and out again, knows about the past. She is sixteen and waiting for the return of her mother – the thin, dangerous Eliza with her scent of nicotine, Arpège and sex, whose disappearance is part of the mystery that still remains at the heart of the forest.
‘Vivid, richly imaginative, hilarious and frightening by turns’
Cressida Connolly, Observer
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EMOTIONALLY WEIRD
Kate Atkinson
‘Funny, bold and memorable’
The Times
On a peat and heather island off the west coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother Nora take refuge in the large mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear, like who her father was – variously Jimmy, Jack, or Ernie. Effie tells of her life at college in Dundee, the land of cakes and William Wallace, where she lives in a lethargic relationship with Bob, a student who never goes to lectures, seldom gets out of bed, and to whom the Klingons are as real as the French and the Germans (more real than the Luxemburgers). But strange things are happening. Why is Effie being followed? Is someone killing the old people? And where is the mysterious yellow dog?
‘A truly comic novel – achingly funny in parts – challenging and executed with wit and mischief’
Meera Syal, The Express
‘Sends jolts of pleasure off the page . . . Atkinson’s funniest foray yet . . . it is a work of Dickensian or even Shakespearean plenty’
Catherine Lockerbie, The Scotsman
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NOT THE END
OF THE WORLD
Kate Atkinson
‘Moving and funny, and crammed with incidental wisdom’
Sunday Times
What is the real world? Does it exist, or is it merely a means of keeping another reality at bay?
Not the End of the World is Kate Atkinson’s first collection of short stories. Playful and profound, they explore the world we think we know whilst offering a vision of another world which lurks just beneath the surfa
ce of our consciousness, a world where the myths we have banished from our lives are startlingly present and where imagination has the power to transform reality.
From Charlene and Trudi, obsessively making lists while bombs explode softly in the streets outside, to gormless Eddie, maniacal cataloguer of fish, and Meredith Zane who may just have discovered the secret to eternal life, each of these stories shows that when the worlds of material existence and imagination collide, anything is possible.
‘I can think of few writers who can make the ordinary collide with the extraordinary to such beguiling effect . . . left me so fizzing with admiration’
Observer
‘Exceptional . . . sharp, witty and completely compelling’
Daily Mail
‘An exceptionally funny, quirky and bold writer’
Independent on Sunday
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CASE HISTORIES
Kate Atkinson
‘Not just the best novel I read this year but the best mystery of the decade’
Stephen King
Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet – Lost on the left, Found on the right – and the two never seem to balance.
Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge, and has a failed marriage to prove it. Surrounded by death, intrigue and misfortune, his own life haunted by a family tragedy, he attempts to unravel three disparate case histories and begins to realize that in spite of apparent diversity, everything is connected . . .
‘An astonishingly complex and moving literary detective story . . . the sort of novel you have to start re-reading the minute you’ve finished it’
Guardian
‘Triumphant . . . her best book yet . . . a tragi-comedy for our times’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Part complex family drama, part mystery, it winds up having more depth and vividness than ordinary thrillers and more thrills than ordinary fiction . . . a wonderfully tricky book’
New York Times
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ONE GOOD TURN
Kate Atkinson
‘Very funny . . . that rarest of things – a good literary novel and a cracking holiday read’
Observer
It is summer, it is the Edinburgh festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident – a near-homicidal attack which changes the lives of everyone involved: the wife of an unscrupulous property developer, a crime writer, a washed-up comedian. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander – until he becomes a murder suspect.
Stephen King called Case Histories ‘the best mystery of the decade’: One Good Turn sees the return of its irresistible hero Jackson Brodie. As the body count mounts, each character’s story contains a kernel of the next, like a set of nesting Russian dolls. Everyone in the teeming Dickensian cast is looking for love or money or redemption or escape: but what each actually discovers is their own true self.
‘The most fun I’ve had with a novel this year’
Ian Rankin, Guardian (Books of the Year)
‘Delivers everything a good book should have. It’s a fantastic detective story and a wonderful piece of writing . . . has taken the crime genre to another level’
Daily Express
‘Thrillingly addictive . . . quite unique in her ability to fuse emotional drama and thriller’
The Times
‘A detective novel packed with more wit, insight and subtlety than an entire shelf-full of literary fiction’
Marie Claire
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WHEN WILL THERE
BE GOOD NEWS?
Kate Atkinson
‘Genius . . . insightful, often funny, life-affirming’
Sunday Telegraph
In a quiet corner of rural Devon, a six-year-old girl witnesses an appalling crime. Thirty years later the man convicted of the crime is released from prison.
In Edinburgh, sixteen-year-old Reggie, wise beyond her years, works as a nanny for a G.P. But her employer has disappeared with her baby, and Reggie seems to be the only person who is worried. Across town, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is also looking for a missing person, unaware that hurtling towards her is a former acquaintance – Jackson Brodie – himself on a journey that is about to be fatally interrupted.
‘Funny, bracingly intelligent . . . Kate Atkinson is that rarest of beasts, a genuinely surprising novelist’
Guardian
‘An exhilarating read. Her wry humour, sharp eye and subtle characterisation are a constant joy’
Daily Mail
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Table of Contents
Cover
Synopsis
Table of Contents
Copyright
Critics wrote about Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Also by Kate Atkinson
Dedication
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Other books by this author