Behind the Scenes at the Museum (13 page)

Over in the other corner is their doll’s house, a big four-storey Victorian one. It has pictures the size of postage stamps and postage stamps the size of dots; it has gilded chairs fit for a fairy queen and chandeliers like crystal earrings and a kitchen table groaning under the weight of plaster hams and plaster-moulded blancmanges.

This doll’s house is much coveted by Gillian who has frequently tried to persuade the twins to make a will and leave it to her. I doubt very much that they have. If it were willed to me (which is even more unlikely) I would refuse to accept it. There’s something eerie about it, with its microscopic plumbing (tiny copper taps!) and little, little leather-bound books (
Great Expectations
!). I would be frightened – I am frightened – of getting trapped in there and becoming one of the tiny ringletted and pinafored little girls up in the nursery who have to play with teeny-weeny dolls all day long. Or worse – the poor scullery maid, for ever consigned to blacking the kitchen range.

Perhaps the twins, with their galactic powers, will miniaturize me in the night and Auntie Babs will come in this room one morning and find the guest bed empty and the guest bed in the doll’s house (much nicer than the camp bed) full of a doll-like Ruby Lennox clutching a teddy bear the size of an amoeba.

The stairs are the worst – both in the doll’s house and in Mirthroyd Road. Auntie Babs and Uncle Sidney’s house reminds me of Above the Shop, the same thin, tall dimensions and the same abundance of staircases – although in Mirthroyd Road there’s really only one room on each floor and to get to the attic bedroom involves a long, long climb up the dark, narrow staircase, which is full of bends and twists and unexpected corners which harbour vast quantities of Unknown Dread. The amiable ghosts Above the Shop have been replaced by something that crackles with evil.

I am sent to bed first and have to negotiate this treacherous journey entirely on my own. This is manifestly wrong. I have adopted certain strategies to help us in this ordeal. It’s important, for example, that I keep my hand on the bannister rail at all times when climbing the stairs (the other one is being clutched by Teddy). That way, nothing can hurtle unexpectedly down the stairs and knock us flying into the Outer Darkness. And we must never look back. Never, not even when we can feel the hot breath of the wolves on the back of our necks, not when we can hear their long, uncut claws scrabbling on the wood at either edge of the staircarpet and the growls bubbling deep in their throats.

Terrible, apocalyptic images rise before my eyes as we undertake our ascent – images of Teddy being ripped to pieces, torn limb from limb and tossed from wolf to wolf as great gobbets of saliva drop from their jaws. Finally, his little body is held down under a stinking, matted paw and his stuffing is pulled out. He turns his pleading amber eyes towards me—

‘Who’s that?’ A hoarse, thick voice rasps out this question – we are on the landing outside ‘Grandpa’s’ bedroom, not my grandfather (they have both under-gone their genetic fate by now – one run over, one blown up) but the twins’ grandfather – Sidney’s father – who lives in the room beneath ours. ‘Just Ruby!’ I shout back to him – although I don’t think he has the faintest idea who ‘Just Ruby’ is – and carry on up the stairs. Now we’ve reached the really tricky bit – getting into bed.

We linger on the threshold of the bedroom for a while – thresholds are safe, but unfortunately you can’t stay on them for ever. Also, the wolves that live on the stairs can’t cross them (or they’d be all over the house), which is good, but the bed is on the other side of the room, which is bad. There are things living under the camp bed. There are a handful of crocodiles and a small dragon but mainly they are nameless things without clear definition or taxonomy. But one thing is certain – all the things that live under the bed, named, or unnamed, have teeth. Teeth that will snap vulnerable little ankles when they try to get into bed.

Speed is the only stratagem here. Ready, Teddy – steady, Teddy – Go! Little slippered feet patter across the linoleum, little hearts go thud, thud, thud, as we get near the danger zone – two feet from the bed – we launch ourselves onto the camp bed, which nearly collapses, but we are safe. Safe, that is, as long as we don’t fall out of bed during the night. I stuff Teddy down the front of my pyjamas, just in case.

I want to go home! I want Patricia. I want
Watch with Mother!
This is still a televisionless household and every afternoon I feel a hollow sense of deprivation when I realize that my friends – the biggest spotty dog in the world, Little Weed, Rag, Tag and Bobtail – are playing their games without me.
Time to go home! Time to go home! Ruby and Teddy are waving goodbye! Goodbye!
If only.

I resolve that I will use
Puppies and Kittens
as my escape plan. I will learn to read! I’ve been trying to read for a long time, I’m due to start school after the summer and I would like to get off to a flying start. I have absorbed as much as I can when I’ve been roped in to help Patricia play schools (to tell the truth, I don’t think she’s as good a teacher as she thinks she is) but although I know the alphabet inside out, back to front, and upside down, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

If I learn to read and then to write – because I know one thing leads to another – then I will be able to write a letter to the outside world, to Patricia, and she will come and rescue me from Mirthroyd Road. Auntie Babs is my unwitting ally in this because she gives me Daisy and Rose’s old alphabet cards to play with – I am ‘under her feet’ (not as much as I would be if I shrank to doll’s house size) all day long. The twins are at school and Auntie Babs is obviously peeved at suddenly finding herself with a child in the house, especially as she already has ‘Grandpa’ to look after. This is more evidence that I have been sent as a terrible punishment rather than a holiday; if I was here on holiday she would put herself out to make sure I had a good time. But then again, perhaps not.

Everything runs like clockwork in Auntie Babs’ house. For example, there’s a strict rota for the bathroom in the morning, with Auntie Babs going first, then Uncle Sidney, then the twins (together) and then me. The order is reversed in the evening. There is none of the bleary-eyed grumpiness that George, Bunty and Gillian taint the morning with. I wouldn’t say Patricia was exactly chirpy in the mornings, more phlegmatic and resigned, but that’s a great improvement on Gillian who doesn’t even speak in the morning and usually communicates via her Sooty and Sweep glove-puppets. Sooty can be particularly unpleasant at the breakfast table.

Auntie Babs is also a slave to housework, I know this because she tells me so. Often. On Monday she does the washing. She has an antiquated boiler that she has to heat up (her domestic appliances are all more primitive than her younger sister’s) and the whole house ends up a soapy, sudsy Turkish bath by the time she’s finished. She makes me play next to the frightening boiler because I have a croupy cough and tells me that ‘I should count myself lucky that’s all I have.’ Auntie Babs, you notice, has the same cryptic ways of communicating as Bunty. If the Germans had used Bunty and Babs instead of the Enigma coding machine they would probably have won the war. On Tuesday Auntie Babs irons all the clothes she washed on Monday. On Wednesday she does low dusting, on Thursday, high dusting. On Fridays she washes paintwork and floors and sweeps the carpet with her Ewbank. On Saturday she does the shopping. This is exactly the same housework timetable as her fellow housework slave – Bunty!

Meals are regular and wholesome; Uncle Sidney never has to wait for more than two minutes for his tea when he comes home at night. Auntie Babs prides herself on being a good cook and suffers none of the Strindbergian gloom that Bunty experiences when cooking. (Or perhaps it’s Ibsenesque – perhaps Bunty is also trapped in a doll’s house? Just a thought.) Uncle Sidney is a great encouragement to Auntie Babs’ culinary talents. He talks about ‘Babs’ Yorkshire Pudding’ and ‘Babs’ Onion Gravy’ as if they were fellow members of the family – ‘Hello, hello, here comes Babs’ Shepherd’s Pie’ – I’m surprised he doesn’t ask it if it enjoyed itself at the end of the meal. And Auntie Babs is the Queen of Puddings – every night a new one – treacle sponge pudding, jam roly-poly (which Patricia calls ‘dead baby’ but I think it best not to mention this at Auntie Babs’ table), lemon meringue pie, rhubarb crumble, rice pudding – what will we have on Sunday, I wonder? What will we
do
on Sunday? In our house it’s a no-housework day, so presumably it will be the same here.

Mr Wedgewood then proceeds to ask Spirit to come and talk to us and that’s the signal for all kinds of strange things to happen – the dead pop up all over the place – a woman’s husband who’s been dead for twenty years tells her there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Then there’s the father of another woman who ‘passed into Spirit’ last year and reports to her that he misses going to the cinema. Somebody’s mother comes back just to tell her ‘how to get rid of that scratch in your coffee table’ (linseed oil) and one woman has an entire family of six people materialize behind her chair (to Mr Wedgewood’s eyes, anyway) who turn out to have been next-door neighbours who died in a house fire thirty years ago. Clearly, there is no escape from the dead. Their message to their ex-neighbour is to ‘batter on’, to the end of the tunnel presumably. The world of spirits seems a rather mundane place to me, like a doctor’s waiting-room full of people trying to top one cliché with another.

I’m just beginning to droop into sleep in the overheated atmosphere when I realize Mr Wedgewood is standing at the end of our aisle and looking at
me
. I swallow with difficulty and stare at my feet, perhaps he knows I was only pretending to sing the hymn. But he smiles benignly at me and says
Your sister says not to worry about her
and Auntie Babs gives a little gasp, but before I can work any of this out the little organ strikes up another hymn identical to the last one (all the hymns in the Church of the Spirit are exactly the same – a phenomenon that, interestingly, nobody seems to notice).

I puzzle over my experiences in church for the rest of the day, even Babs’ Roast Beef and Babs’ Apple Pie – our guests for Sunday dinner – cannot allay my fears that Patricia or Gillian are dead. I try and bring this subject up with Auntie Babs – to a background accompaniment of ‘Willow, Tit-Willow, Tit-Willow’ – but she just says, ‘Don’t try to be clever, Ruby – it doesn’t suit you’ (I think it suits me very well, actually) and refuses to talk any further about it.