Behind the Scenes at the Museum (5 page)

The second button was found by Tom who carried it around in his pocket for a week along with a conker and a marble, intending to return it to his mother, but before he could he lost it somewhere and then forgot all about it.

The third was found by Rachel, during a vigorous cleaning session not long after she moved into the cottage. She prised it out from between the two flagstones where it had lodged and placed it in her button box, from where, many years later, it was transferred to my grandmother’s button box, a presentation tin of Rowntree’s chocolates – and from there to Gillian’s stomach of course, and from there – who knows? As to the fate of the children – Lawrence left home at fourteen and nobody ever saw him again. Tom married a girl called Mabel and became a solicitor’s clerk and Albert died in the First World War. Poor Ada died when she was twelve after a bout of diphtheria. Lillian led a long, rather strange, life and Nell – who on this hot day is unborn and has all her life ahead of her – will one day be my grandmother and have all her life behind her without ever knowing how that happened (another woman lost in time).

Bunty’s reply is inarticulate and indistinct but I think the general gist of it is that she’s just as anxious to get the whole thing over with as our friendly gynaecologist. Dr Torquemada, I presume? The midwife angel sent to preside at my birth creaks with starch. She raps out her orders – ‘PUSH! PUSH NOW!’

‘I am bloody pushing!’ Bunty yells back. She sweats and grunts, all the while clutching onto something that looks like a small shrunken bit of mammal, a furry locket round her neck (see
Footnote (
ii
)
). It’s a lucky rabbit’s foot. Not very lucky for the rabbit, of course, but a talismanic charm of some potency for my mother. I’ve gone off her actually. Bunty that is, not the rabbit. Nine months of being imprisoned inside her hasn’t been the most delightful of experiences. And recently there’s been no room at all. I don’t care what’s out there, it has to be better than this.

‘PUSH, WOMAN! PUSH NOW!’

Bunty screams convincingly and then all of a sudden it’s over with and I slip out as quietly as a fish down a stream. Even Dr Torquemada is surprised, ‘Hello, what have we here?’ he says as if he wasn’t expecting me at all. The midwife laughs and says, ‘Snap!’

I’m about to be shipped off to the nursery when someone suggests that Bunty might like to have a look at me. She takes a quick glance and pronounces her judgement. ‘Looks like a piece of meat. Take it away,’ she adds, waving her hand dismissively. I suppose she’s tired and emotional. She didn’t specify what kind of meat. Rolled brisket? Spring lamb? Hand of pork perhaps or something unnamed, raw and bloody. Well, there you go – nothing surprises me any more. After all, I’m surely not a novelty – she’s already produced pale Patricia and cross-patch Gillian from her loins, and I’m so well behaved in comparison with the latter. Gillian was born angry, bustling out of the womb, little arms and legs angling furiously while she screamed her head off, just in case nobody had noticed her. Fat chance.

My absent father, in case you’re wondering, is in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster where he’s just had a very satisfactory day at the races. He has a pint of bitter in front of him and is just telling a woman in an emerald green dress and a ‘D’ cup, that he’s not married. He has no idea that I’ve arrived or he would be here. Wouldn’t he? In fact, my gestation has neatly spanned the old and the new, for I’ve arrived just after the King’s death, making me one of the first babies born into the new Queen’s reign. A new Elizabethan! I’m surprised they haven’t called me Elizabeth. They’ve called me nothing. I’m ‘Baby Lennox’, that’s what it says on my label anyway. The midwife, who has red hair and is very tired, carries me through to the night nursery and deposits me in a cot.

It’s very dark in the night nursery. Very dark and very quiet. A dim blue light shines in one corner, but most of the cots are just black coffin-like shapes. The darkness stretches out to infinity. Space winds whip through the icy interstellar spaces. If I reached out my tiny, wrinkled fingers that look like boiled shrimp, I would touch – nothing. And then more nothing. And after that? Nothing. I didn’t think it would be like this. It’s not that I expected a street party or anything – streamers, balloons, banners of welcome unfurling – a smile would have done.

The midwife goes away, the neat tip-tapping of her black lace-up shoes on the linoleum of the corridor gradually fades and we are left alone. We lie in our cots, wrapped tightly in white-cotton cellular blankets, like promises, like cocoons, waiting to hatch into something. Or little baby parcels. What would happen if the little baby parcels lost their labels and got mixed up? Would the mothers recognize their babies if they pulled them out of a baby bran tub?

A rustling of starched wings and the red-haired nurse reappears with another baby parcel and puts it down in the empty cot next to me. She pins a label on its blanket. The new baby sleeps peacefully, its top lip curling with each small inhalation.

There are no more babies this night. The night nursery sails on into the cold winter night freighted with its delicate cargo. A milky vapour hangs over the sleeping babies. Soon when we’re all asleep, the cats will creep in and suck our breath away.

I will disappear in this darkness, I will be extinguished before I’ve even got going. Sleet spatters in gusts onto the cold glass of the nursery window. I’m alone. All alone. I can’t stand this – where’s my mother? WAA! WAA! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! ‘The little bastard’s going to wake them all.’ It’s the red-haired nurse, I think she’s Irish. She’s going to save me, she’s going to take me to my mother. No? No. She takes me to a little side room, behind the sluice. A kind of cupboard, really. I spend my first night on earth in a cupboard.

We’re fed by the clock so that we don’t become spoilt and demanding. The general feeling amongst the mothers is that the babies are in a conspiracy against them (if only we were). We can scream until we’re exhausted, it won’t make any difference to the ceremonial feeding ritual, the time when all the little baby parcels are fed, winded, changed, laid down again and ignored.

‘That’s just wind,’ Bunty says dismissively. I am not very happy, but I have decided to make the best of things. I’ve been given the wrong mother and am in danger of embarking on the wrong life but I trust it will all be sorted out and I will be reunited with my real mother – the one who dropped ruby-red blood onto a snow-white handkerchief and wished for a little girl with hair the colour of a shiny jet-black raven’s wing. Meanwhile I make do with Bunty.

Bunty’s sister, Babs, comes to visit, all the way from Dewsbury, with her twins – Daisy and Rose. Daisy and Rose are a year older than Gillian and are spotlessly clean. They’re exactly alike, not a hair nor a fingernail to choose between them. It’s uncanny, almost frightening. They sit on their chairs in complete silence, their dainty little legs dangling above the bile-green linoleum. Bunty lies in queenly splendour under her lily-white sheets and salmon-pink bedspread. Daisy and Rose have hair the colour of melted lemon-drops.

Bunty knits continuously, even when she has visitors. She’s knitting my future in the colours of sugared almonds. ‘Elizabeth?’ Auntie Babs suggests. Bunty grimaces.

‘Margaret?’ Auntie Babs tries. ‘Anne?’

They could call me ‘Dorothy’, or ‘Miranda’, that would be nice. ‘Eve’ would have a certain resonance. Bunty’s ack-ack eyes search the ceiling. She takes a deep decisive breath and pronounces the name. My name.

‘Ruby.’

‘Ruby?’ Auntie Babs repeats doubtfully. ‘Ruby,’ Bunty confirms decisively. My name is Ruby. I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox.

Nell thought her life was over, and yet to her surprise it carried on much as before. She’d been apprenticed to a milliner in Coney Street when she left school and her days were still spent curling feathers and swathing chiffon as if nothing had happened. It was the same at home, she was still expected to wash pots and darn stockings while Rachel, her stepmother, watched her from the rocking-chair that she was growing too fat for and said things like, ‘Employment is nature’s physician’ which was the epigraph to her
Everyman’s Book of Home Remedies
. Nell kept her face turned away from her stepmother and tried not to listen because she was afraid if she did she would hit her with the big, cast-iron stew-pot. Now that she no longer had Percy to rescue her it seemed as if she would be trapped in the little house on Lowther Street for ever. To have been ‘Mrs Percy Sievewright’ would have given her a shape and identity that seemed to be denied to plain Nell Barker.

Nell was surprised at how quickly Percy faded from everyday life. She got into the habit of visiting Mrs Sievewright every Friday evening, knowing that she was the one person who could be relied upon not to forget Percy, and the two of them would sit over a pot of tea and a plate of bloater-paste sandwiches, talking about Percy as if he were still alive, imagining a life for him, that now would never be –
Just think what
Percy would have said about that . . . Percy always liked Scarborough . . . Percy would have loved to have had sons
. . . but they couldn’t conjure him back, no matter how hard they tried.

Sheepishly, because he thought it might seem a bit daft, Albert knocked and came into Nell’s bedroom one evening and gave her the team photograph that they’d had taken the previous year, the year they’d almost won the challenge cup. ‘And we would have done if Frank Cook hadn’t missed that shot, daft bugger-excuse-my-language. Jack Keech sent him a perfect cross, it was an open goal,’ Albert said, shaking his head in disbelief, even now, a year later. Nell asked, ‘Which one was Frank then?’ and Albert told her the names of all the players and stopped abruptly when he came to Percy, and finally said, ‘Death’s awful when it happens to somebody young,’ which was what he’d heard someone say at the funeral and not what he thought at all because Albert didn’t really believe in death. The dead had just gone away somewhere and were going to come back sooner or later – they were waiting in a shadowy room that no one could see the door to, and being ministered to by his mother, who was almost certainly an angel by now. Albert couldn’t remember what his mother had looked like, no matter how hard he screwed up his eyes and concentrated. But that didn’t stop him missing her, even though he was nearly thirty years old. Alice, Ada, Percy, the lurcher he’d had as a boy that fell under a cart – they were all going to jump out from the waiting-room one day and surprise Albert. ‘Well, night-night, Nelly,’ he said finally, because he could tell from the way that she was staring at the photograph that she thought the dead were gone for ever and weren’t hiding anywhere.

Nell found it strange looking at Percy in the photograph because in real life he had seemed so distinctive and different from everybody else, but here he had the same vague, slightly out-of-focus features as the rest of the team. ‘Thank you,’ Nell said to Albert, but he’d already left the room. Frank Cook looked like anyone else, standing in the middle of the back row, but Jack Keech was recognizable, he was the one crouched down at the front with the ball. She knew he was a good pal of Albert’s but it was only when Nell came home from work one evening and found the pair of them together in the back yard that she recognized Jack Keech as the man who had helped them with Percy Sievewright’s mother when she’d collapsed at the graveside.

The sun trapped in the back yard at Lowther Street was hot even though it was only May and Nell paused for a second on the threshold, feeling the warmth on her face. ‘There you are, Nell,’ Albert said as if they’d both been waiting for her. ‘Brew up a pot of tea, there’s a good lass – Jack’s fixing the bench.’ Jack Keech looked up from wrenching out a nail and smiled at her and said, ‘Tea’d be grand, Nell.’ Nell smiled back and went into the house without saying anything and filled the kettle.

She put the kettle to boil and then walked back to the stone sink under the window and rested her hands on the edge and watched Albert and Jack Keech through the window. While she waited for the kettle she moved her toes up and down inside her boots and felt her ribcage moving as she breathed and when she put the back of her hands up to her cheeks she could feel how hot they were.

The bench was an old wooden one that had been in the back yard ever since they moved into the house. There were several slats missing from the back and the arm had begun to come away. Jack Keech was kneeling on the paving-slabs of the yard, sawing a block of clean, new wood with a stubby saw, and through the open door Nell could smell the resin from the pine. A lock of Jack’s thick, dark hair kept falling over his forehead. Albert was standing over him laughing. Albert was always laughing. His angelic blond curls had never gone away and his baby-blue eyes looked too big somehow under the sweep of pale gold lashes so that he still didn’t look grown up. It was hard to see how he was going to stop looking like a boy and start looking like an old man, never mind all the years in between.

There was always a flock of girls after Albert but there was never one he chose to be special. His brother Tom was married and away from home but Albert said he didn’t think he’d ever get married and both Lillian and Nell agreed that this was a daft thing to say because you could see that he’d make a grand husband, and in private they agreed that if he wasn’t their brother they would have married him themselves.

The way things were going they’d probably all end their days together anyway. Neither Nell nor Lillian seemed capable of catching a husband, they’d both had broken engagements, Nell’s broken by death and Lillian’s by an act of betrayal, and one day Rachel would die and leave them alone. ‘If only . . .’ Lillian would say as she plaited her hair at night in Nell’s room, and Nell, pressing her face into her pillow, wondered, for the millionth time, why their mother had been taken away and they had been given Rachel in exchange.

Nell rinsed the teapot with hot water from the kettle, swirling it round and round before emptying it down the sink. Jack Keech had taken his braces down so that they hung around his waist and had rolled up the white sleeves of his shirt so that she could see the muscles in his forearm flexing as he sawed the wood. The skin on his arms was the polished walnut colour that came from working outdoors. Albert looked like a guardian angel standing over him and Nell watched both of them, holding the teapot to her breast and wishing that this moment would go on longer.

When she went out again with the tray of tea and plate of bread and butter, Jack was marking off a piece of wood with a pencil and with a tremendous effort Nell said shyly, ‘It’s very good of you, mending the bench like this,’ and he looked up and grinned and said, ‘That’s all right, Nell.’ Then he straightened up for a minute and, rubbing the small of his back, said, ‘It’s a nice yard you’ve got here,’ so that both Albert and Nell looked round in surprise because neither of them had ever thought of the back yard in Lowther Street as being ‘nice’; yet now that Jack said so you could see how sunny it was and Nell wondered how they could have lived here for five years and never really noticed the dusty-pink clematis that was climbing all over the wall and the back door.

‘Jack’s a chippy,’ Albert said admiringly (although Albert was a train driver which Nell and Lillian agreed must be a wonderful thing to do). Jack knelt down again and started hammering a nail in and Nell found the nerve to stand and watch him for nearly a whole minute and all she could think about was what high, sharp cheekbones he had, like razor-clam shells.

Jack didn’t stop and drink his tea until he’d finished, by which time it was cold. Nell offered to brew a fresh pot but Albert said he fancied a beer and suggested the Golden Fleece. Jack gave Nell a rueful smile and said, ‘Another time, maybe,’ and she could feel a blush rising up from her chest to her cheeks, so that she had to look away quickly while Albert helped Jack to pack up his tools.

Nell was left alone to deal with Rachel when she came back from a temperance meeting at the church. She was in a foul mood because no one had put the tea on to cook and they ended up eating bread and butter without speaking because Lillian didn’t come in until later and said she was working a late shift (she worked at Rowntree’s) which Nell knew wasn’t true. Albert didn’t roll in until past midnight; she heard him pause and sit on the bottom stair to take his boots off so he wouldn’t wake anyone and then creep up to his room.

The next time Nell saw Jack was a few Sundays later when he stopped in with Frank to pick up Albert for the football team’s annual outing. Frank was wearing a tweed cap and carrying a fishing rod (they were going to Scarborough). Frank was a draper’s assistant but neither Albert nor Jack ever let on to Frank that they thought being a draper’s assistant wasn’t much of a job, especially when they could see that he knew that well enough for himself without being told.