Behind the Scenes at the Museum (5 page)

‘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.