Behind the Scenes at the Museum (18 page)

Patricia capitulates, impressed by the quality of tender care afforded to her injury by Auntie Doreen –
Does it hurt when I do that, Patricia? Oh, I am sorry . . . You’re a brave girl, Patricia, so you are
. . . The contrast with Bunty is unavoidable. There are many other areas where a comparison with Bunty can only work in Auntie Doreen’s favour. Her cooking for example – with no fuss whatsoever, she produces big, hearty meals of the stew-and-dumpling variety, ‘Heavy food to weigh you down, Patricia, so you won’t run away,’ she laughs – and, astonishingly, Patricia laughs along with her! Nor does she have any qualms on the pudding front and dishes up apple and rhubarb pies from Botham’s or sticky custard slices – in fact anything we care to choose on our daily visits to the shops. (Auntie Babs, Auntie Gladys and Bunty – the invisible Greek chorus in our heads – throw their hands up in horror, exclaiming, ‘Shop-bought!’ but do we care? No, we don’t.) What’s more we have fish and chips for dinner
nearly every single day
as well as frequent trips to the Rock Shop and the candy-floss stalls and many, many ice-cream cornets, because, as Auntie Doreen says, adjusting her large, bouncing bosom, ‘We
are
on holiday, after all, so we are.’

This is not to say she is generally lax or slovenly. Quite the contrary, there is order and harmony in everything she does and she is as calm and unflappable as the harbour-wall when confronted by the high-tides of Gillian’s emotions. She has a strange gift for persuading us into thinking that the mundane tasks of self-catering life – the washing of pots, the making of beds – is yet another occasion for orderly fun and games so that Gillian actually fights to get her hands on the carpet-sweeper before anyone else. ‘Ee our Gillian,’ Lucy-Vida marvels, ‘I didn’t know you ’ad it in you, kid.’ We have many things in us that we didn’t know about and under Auntie Doreen’s guidance they struggle to see the light of day. Even my sleepwalking seems to be in abeyance under Auntie Doreen’s watchful night-time care. (‘It’s because she doesn’t wake you up that you don’t know about it,’ Gillian says scornfully. Thank you, Gillian.)

Auntie Doreen orchestrates games on the beach from which noone marches off in a huff; she organizes little pedestrian expeditions – up the 199 Steps to the Abbey, along the beach to the café at Sandsend – on which we sing things like ‘Ten Green Bottles’ and ‘One Man Went to Mow’. We make sandcastle after sandcastle, their little turrets proudly stuck with paper Union Jacks and rampant-red Scottish lions, and when we’ve had enough of the sand and sea we dawdle around the quaint streets of Whitby, admiring the funny street names, almost as funny as York street names – ‘Dark Entry Yard’, ‘Saltpanwell Steps’ and ‘Arguments Yard’ (George and Bunty should have lived there).

Auntie Doreen knows more card games than I knew existed in the world (Patricia is overjoyed to learn there are so many different varieties of Patience) and on the rainy afternoons, of which there are several, she actually
enjoys
playing games with us, sitting on the carpet amongst us and passing round chocolate digestives and orange squash. She even manages to persuade Gillian not to cheat, something noone else has ever been able to do – although Gillian draws the line at not screaming when she loses. Patricia usually just hits her when she does this, but Auntie Doreen leads Gillian away to the bedroom and shuts the door on her and says ‘Now then, let the poor child get it out of her system.’

Schooled by the week in Bridlington we have brought a lot of games with us and as well as the ubiquitous rounds of Snap we also play draughts, Ludo, Snakes and Ladders and endlessly exciting games of Buccaneer, on whose azure board, figured with compass-points and treasure-maps, our little wooden pirate ships plough the main, laden with little barrels of rum, small gold bars, tiny rubies (!), and pearls like bird-seed. We are much better at Buccaneer than we are at ‘Hunt the Mother’. But our favourite game of all is Astron, a thrilling game in which our little spaceships move on a celluloid grid that is scrolled across outer space. Our spaceships have to dodge hazards – showers of meteorites, asteroid belts, rogue comets and so on – and, before we can achieve our goal (the Heart of the Sun) we must negotiate one last, awful menace – the huge, gaseous Rings of Saturn. The Rings of Saturn are Deadly, we know that because it says so on the Astron board and they’re always catching Auntie Doreen’s spaceship out. ‘Oh, there I go again!’ she says with a little scream as she explodes in a cloud of space dust. I think Patricia sometimes plays Astron in her sleep because I’ve heard her calling out, ‘Watch out for the Rings of Saturn, Ruby! – they’re Deadly!’

Lucy-Vida asks Auntie Doreen if she’s got any children of her own and Auntie Doreen’s face turns very sad and she says, ‘No dear, I had a little girl but I lost her,’ and when Patricia says softly, ‘What was she called, Auntie Doreen?’ Auntie Doreen regards her with bleak eyes and shakes her head. ‘I don’t know.’ How odd not to know the name of your own child! Or perhaps not, as Bunty has to run through all our names before she comes to the right one and I’m always at the end of the list –
Patricia, Gillian, P— Ruby, what’s your name?
Perhaps if Bunty doesn’t come back we can have a new mother, Auntie Doreen for preference, a mother that will remember my name.

‘Mummy!’ we all gasp in amazement because it seems years since we’ve even thought about her. ‘Bunty,’ George says, and adds, somewhat unnecessarily, ‘you’re back.’ There’s an awkward silence which should have been filled with us all running towards Bunty and kissing her – or perhaps (a better version), Bunty running towards us – but we remain rooted by the Shop door until finally George says, ‘Well, I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’ but Bunty says, ‘It’s all right, I’ll do it,’ and walks quickly away in the direction of the kitchen as if she’d just come back from a trip to the hairdresser’s rather than having run away from us for over a week.

The smile on George’s face fades Cheshire-cat like, as he watches Bunty’s retreating back, and the moment she’s finally out of view he spins round and faces us all, a desperate look on his face, as if he can hear the guillotine blade being sharpened. ‘Listen,’ he whispers urgently, ‘you weren’t on holiday with Doreen – do you understand?’ We nod our heads, although we don’t really understand at all. ‘Who were we on holiday with?’ Patricia asks, intrigued. George stares at her, an expression of fixed madness on his face – you can actually see the workings of his brain etched on his retina. ‘Who?’ Patricia prompts insistently, to an accompaniment of the unnerving sound of a guillotine being raised. ‘Who, Daddy? Who?’

Bunty’s muffled voice drifts from the kitchen. ‘By the way, who looked after the Shop all week? It was closed when I got back.’

‘What time was that?’ George shouts with a forced kind of nonchalance.

‘About half an hour ago.’

George breathes a sigh of relief and shouts, ‘Walter’s mother – I told her to knock off early, she gets a bit tired in the afternoons.’ ‘Walter’s mother?’ Not surprisingly, Bunty doesn’t sound convinced. Walter’s mother is almost as batty as Nell. No doubt, with a little prompting from Walter (Walter owes George a favour), his mother can be convinced that she actually
did
mind the Shop all week.

George bobs down so that he’s at eye-level with all of us except Patricia. ‘I was with you, in Whitby.
I
was looking after you all week, right?’

‘Right,’ we murmur in another round robin. Bunty comes through and tells us that the tea’s mashed.

‘Remember,’ George says to us, ‘no Doreen.’ He taps the side of his nose with his finger. ‘Mum’s the word.’ A wholly inappropriate phrase, given the circumstances.

‘Let’s have a treat for tea,’ Bunty suggests as we sit upstairs, rather stiffly, drinking our cups of tea.

‘Oh good,’ Gillian says. ‘What?’

‘Fish and chips, of course,’ Bunty says, beaming at us.