Behind the Scenes at the Museum (40 page)

Later still, after they had suppered on an unappetizing potato and cabbage stew and squabbled and pinched and pulled and generally frayed Alice into a tattered heap, the children were shepherded reluctantly upstairs, and Alice dropped into a weary sleep in her chair by the empty grate until Frederick crashed into the house, so much the worse for drink that in the dark kitchen he started at the sight of his wife in the rocking-chair and said, ‘Who’s that?’ and looked as if he might attack her until she lit a candle and said, ‘It’s me, you daft fool,’ and he said, ‘Oh aye,’ and collapsed on the settle.

Alice squinted in the flickering candlelight at a wet, red patch on his arm. ‘Been fighting again?’ she asked with very little interest, and Frederick stared at the blood for a few seconds trying to recollect how he had come by it and then snorted and said, ‘Some great stupid lummox in cart at t’end of t’track – I fell into it.’

His wife offered no word of sympathy, she was in too thrilled a state of shock; she had quite forgotten Monsieur Jean-Paul Armand – the potato and cabbage stew, the attractions of suicide, the demands of children – these things had all conspired to drive him from her aerated brain. Frederick tripped his way up the stairs and fell – she knew without needing to observe – into a deep, deep alcohol-saturated sleep.

Alice remained downstairs, arguing with herself about the future by the light of a melancholy tallow candle. What were her alternatives? Certainly she could kill herself – this possibility still exerted a considerable attraction despite the aborted attempt earlier in the day. But what of the consequences? Wouldn’t the lives of her children be riddled henceforth with horror, scandal, guilt? Would they not be better off if they woke up in the morning and discovered that their mother had simply disappeared into the night rather than waking up to discover her body splattered all over the yard or foaming at the mouth from fly-paper poisoning? The ‘better place’ offered by Monsieur Armand would undoubtedly be a course beset with problems and surprises but surely it was better than death by her own hand?

And having come to this conclusion it was only a matter of minutes before she was packing a small bag and giving poor little Nelly a last cuddle. Then she kissed the soft, damp foreheads of Ada, Albert and Lillian, lingering long enough to stroke Albert’s golden, downy cheek and suppress a sob, and to take her mother’s little silver locket from her neck and slip it under Ada’s pillow. Ada moaned in her sleep and brushed her mother’s farewell kiss away with her hand. There were no goodbyes, though, for poor Lawrence and Tom as they slept up in the attic where the floorboards were all creaks and Lawrence was such a light sleeper that Alice decided not to risk it. She lived to regret this unmotherly omission, but then she lived long enough to regret more or less everything. Her very last act was to take off her wedding-ring and lay it on the pillow next to her drunken husband’s snoring head. When he awoke to find it there the next morning in place of his wife, he understood, with an insight quite unusual for him, that she was gone for good.

Alice found Monsieur Armand waiting patiently at the end of the track and he showed no surprise when she clambered up beside him and said, ‘Right then,’ which seemed somewhat uninspiring words with which to embark on a new life.

When Monsieur Armand was released from prison, still surprisingly cheerful, another misfortune befell them in the shape of a bout of pneumonia to which Alice succumbed, leaving her weak and exhausted for many months afterwards. In between nursing his wife Monsieur Armand managed to earn a little money from his itinerant photography (knocking on doors was one thing he was good at) and eventually took her to the country to convalesce. Alice would have preferred to remain amongst Marseilles’ urban squalor rather than be buried in a pastoral idyll again, but, for once, Monsieur Armand was insistent. Then the money ran out again so that they were stranded in the country for quite some time just as Alice had feared and then when they returned to the city several more setbacks followed of the kind that Alice had come to expect, and so it went on.

On the morning of Alice’s forty-seventh birthday, she got out of bed, flung back the shutters on the bedroom window to reveal a flood of clean sunshine and, looking out of the window rather than at the inert Gallic shape under the bedclothes, declared to Monsieur Armand that she had absolutely and categorically had enough and that they had to return to England to recover her children
that very instant
even if she had to sell her body on the streets in order to raise the fare. Monsieur Armand mumbled something to the effect that she would only be able to sell her body if her lips were sewn together, forcing her to hurl both jug and washbasin at the bed.

Unhappily, this was also the fine summer’s morning that Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife set off to drive through the streets of Sarajevo, thus setting in motion a train of events which would conspire to keep Monsieur Armand and his wife in France for another four years.

During the war, Alice had a curious experience, the kind that other people might have taken as evidence of some mental disturbance; but she was so used to feeling disturbed that she didn’t think this at all and came to the even more outlandish conclusion that it demonstrated the existence of God. This transformatory experience occurred in 1916, on the night of 1 July, when Alice was woken suddenly from a very deep sleep. When she opened her eyes she saw a figure at the end of her bed – an angel, or at least an apparition that conformed to her idea of what an angel should look like – gauzy white robes, snowy wings, incandescent halo, golden curls, forget-me-not blue eyes – and she waited for it to speak to her but it, or rather he – for it was clearly a male figure – did not speak, but simply smiled and raised a hand heavenward in a gesture remarkably like that of the cheap plaster statues of saints and madonnas and Christs with which France was infested. Then it vanished. Next morning, Alice scoured every corner of the room to see if any angelic remnant had been left behind but there was nothing, not even a feather; but his fleeting presence had been enough to convert Alice to Catholicism and she became quite zealous, as all good converts do.

However, the bead-counting and candle-lighting did nothing to stop Alice’s search for her abandoned children and the second that the armistice rang out over Europe she packed Monsieur Armand onto a train bound for Calais. She began her search in the logical place – the little cottage she had left behind so hastily thirty years ago – only to find that, this time, it was her children who had vanished into thin air. Several families had lived in the cottage since Rachel and the one presently incumbent knew nothing about any Barkers who might have once been there. Down in the village – where her reappearance caused something of a stir – the older inhabitants remembered the family quite clearly – Ada’s death, Frederick’s death, Rachel’s baby, Lawrence’s disappearance – these events were narrated dispassionately to Alice. It was, after all, a very long time ago, although not unfortunately to Alice who took these blows in anguish. And where had they decamped to? Here there was only a general shaking of heads. For the life of them noone could remember.

Monsieur Armand and his wife caught a train at the nearest railway station, heading for Whitby as Alice conjectured that Rachel might well have behaved like a homing pigeon, and for the entire journey she raved about Rachel coming to take her place and wept at the death of Ada and agonized over Lawrence’s disappearance until Monsieur Armand dearly wished that he had never set eyes on his wife. Frazzled, unravelled and fat, she was driving Monsieur Armand into an early grave, in Monsieur Armand’s opinion. Neither her temper nor her spirits improved with their arrival in Whitby where Alice spent several gaunt and dishevelled weeks traipsing up and down the narrow little streets like a demented woman asking every passer-by if they had ever heard of a Rachel Barker or a Rachel Storm (which was the name Rachel was born with, appropriately enough). She darted down every yard, calling out the names of her lost children,
Tom, Albert, Lillian, Nelly
, but they did not answer her call. In the evenings she was to be found standing on top of the West Cliff staring mournfully out to sea like the mother of a drowned sailor, before coming back to the cheap rooms they had rented to curse Jean-Paul Armand and the day she met him. After one of these tirades, when she had hit him on the head with a vase, he changed into his pyjamas and lay down on the thin, tired mattress of their double bed and closed his eyes with a sigh, never to open them again.

Coincidentally, the bombing of Sheffield had been witnessed by the eldest survivor of that photograph – Tom, a man who was under the impression that his mother had died fifty-five years previously, and who was visiting a pal in Doncaster. On a long, meandering journey back from the pub they climbed a hill to watch the raid, clearly visible even from that distance. ‘By ’eck,’ his pal said, ‘that’s Sheffield burning, lad,’ and then, ‘Poor folk,’ and then, ‘Sod Hitler!’ But Tom just shook his head sadly and felt grateful that he wasn’t in Sheffield that night.