Behind the Scenes at the Museum (43 page)

‘That’s all right,’ I tell her cheerfully. ‘My mother has a remarkably sound constitution.’

We have to coax her out of the car and the nearer we get to the huge, baronial front door, the slower her footsteps become. As we start on the flight of stone steps she clutches my hand suddenly and for the first time I realize that she’s smaller than me. I can still remember when she was twice as tall; now she’s like a doll. How did she shrink so fast? My step falters. I’m not sure I can do this. Perhaps I could take this new doll-mother home with me and look after her, at least for a while?

‘Don’t even think it,’ Adrian mutters under his breath, but anyway the matron already has Bunty’s arm and is leading her along the corridor to her room with its modern facilities and pleasant views. Just before she disappears she turns and waves sadly, like a child on its first day at school. ‘That was my mother,’ I say with a sigh, and Adrian laughs rather grimly and says, ‘She still is, our Ruby, she still is.’

When we visit Bunty the next day, however, she seems happier and tells us that the room service is wonderful. ‘How big a tip do you think I should leave?’ she asks, a worried little frown creasing up her features. We take her for a walk around the grounds, Dolores snapping at our ankles. Silverleas is set in a parkland of beautiful trees – weeping elms and Spanish walnut, glossy holly bushes and clumps of brooding yew. It is sheltered here and spring flowers sprout everywhere. The grass rolls out of view, green and fresh, and it strikes me that this is an excellent place to play horses and it’s almost a shame that Christine Roper isn’t here because I think it’s the kind of game I’m ready to play now. We pause in our promenading and take a seat on one of the many sturdy benches presented by grateful people. Our bench is in memory of
Fred Kirkland 1902–1981
and all three of us sit formally on Fred’s bench – straight backs, hands clasped on knees – and gaze at a little group of fritillaries, bobbing and waving in the gentle breeze like fairies’ skirts. ‘Would you like to stay here?’ Adrian asks, and Bunty’s whole body twitches like a startled rabbit’s.

‘Stay?’ she echoes quietly. ‘For ever?’

‘Well,’ I demur, ‘perhaps not for ever . . .’

‘Why can’t I go home?’ Bunty says, looking from one to the other of us in a rapid, panicky way that makes me wish I was anywhere but here. ‘Why can’t I go home?’

‘I think she’s busy,’ Patricia says doubtfully. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ and we wander off around the maze of new staircases and corridors, arm in arm like the walking wounded whom we see perambulating in their dressing-gowns during the daytime. They are all safely tucked up now, as are the little electric trains that buzz along with the meal-trucks in tow. We walk along corridors with plate-glass walls beyond which we can see ducks roosting around a concrete pond, lit by small floodlights. The slight hum of a motor vibrates softly in the air as if the hospital was a huge ship ploughing confidently through the darkness. We sit for a while in reception in the big vinyl chairs and watch the revolving doors before going outside and taking a turn around the empty visitors’ car-park, laid out like a huge hop-scotch. We’re only a few hundred yards from where Bunty was born. And now she’s dying. Farther up the other side of the road we can see the lights blazing on Rowntree’s factory – that other great ocean-going liner.

When we get back to Bunty’s bedside Sister Blake is there, holding one of Bunty’s hands while Adrian holds the other. Adrian gives us a worried look and Sister Blake says softly, ‘I think she’s taken a turn for the worse.’

Our bedside vigil lasts all night. When you’re waiting for death, instead of being surprised by it (as we usually are in our family), it can take a long time to come. Sister Blake (Tessa) is in her late forties and has two grown-up sons called Neil and Andrew. Neil is married and has a new baby daughter called Gemma. We know these things (and many other things) about Sister Blake for we swap stories over Bunty’s living corpse. With her tired blue eyes and fading blond curls, Sister Blake looks like a plump and weary angel.

‘I never knew my real mother,’ she says in a low voice. ‘I was adopted. Not knowing your real mother, it sort of nags at you, you know?’

Patricia flinches and asks, ‘Didn’t you try to find her?’ and Sister Blake says, ‘Oh yes, I did, but she was dead by then. She came from Belfast, that’s all I know about her really, except she was a nurse too, that’s funny isn’t it? I was a war-baby.’

‘We were all war-babies,’ Patricia says enigmatically.

‘I think she’s gone,’ Sister Blake says quietly and it’s just as well we have a nurse with us, because none of us would ever have realized Bunty was dead, so quietly has she slipped behind the veil. I wish I was the kind of daughter who could rend her clothes and tear her hair out but I’m not, and neither is Patricia, who is sitting by the bedside with a kind of stunned look on her face as if the last thing she was expecting from a death-bed was death itself. Adrian is crying, and the only one who seems to have any idea how to behave on these occasions is Sister Blake, who gently smooths the sheets and touches Bunty’s forehead as if she were tucking in a small child frightened of the dark. I am gripped by a wholly inappropriate urge to shake Bunty back to life and make her be our mother all over again – but do it better this time.

‘Well, that’s over with,’ Patricia says, as we sit back in the taxi that’s taking us away from the hospital. York speeds by in the flickering frames of the taxi windows. ‘You know, Ruby, we loved her really.’

‘Did we? It’s not what I would call love.’

‘Maybe not, but it’s love just the same.’ I check Patricia’s face to make sure she’s not looking smug or sentimental when she says this, but she’s not, she’s looking quite troubled, so I refrain from kicking her. Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps my concept of love – as wide as the sky – isn’t big enough to encompass Bunty’s autistic mothering.

Afterwards we go back to the house. Adrian has spent all morning making sandwiches and quiches and a fruit cake, and a newly-divorced Kathleen circulates round the house with trays of food, like a waitress, her mascara smudging under her eyes because she can’t stop crying. She’s crying about her divorce from Colin, not my mother, but not knowing that several people mistake her for a grieving daughter. The true daughters remain uncomfortably dry-eyed. There’s an odd emptiness at the heart of Bunty’s funeral, it’s like being at a party without the noise and without waiting for something to happen, because it already has. The person at the centre of it all is missing.

I had thought that when she died it would be like having a weight removed and I would rise up and be free of her, but now I realize that she’ll always be here, inside me, and I suppose when I’m least expecting it I’ll look in the mirror and see her expression or open my mouth and speak her words. ‘Well, you know, Ruby,’ Patricia says, picking at the slice of broccoli quiche on her plate, ‘people are given the mother they need for a particular incarnation.’ But then she shrugs helplessly because neither of us can think why we needed Bunty.

‘Do you believe in that stuff? Karma and all that?’ Lucy-Vida asks. We’re sitting on the stairs, sharing a bottle of wine with Lucy-Vida, twisting out of the way occasionally to let people pass to go upstairs to the bathroom. ‘Patricia’s a Buddhist,’ I tell her. ‘I’m coming back as a cat,’ Lucy-Vida says, stretching out one of her ridiculously long, feline legs so that the hole in her black tights, shored up with shocking-pink nail varnish, suddenly expands and sends a ladder shooting up under her skirt. She has four children now but only her eldest is with her today. Wayne is a strapping twenty-five-year-old with thighs like York hams and is proudly wearing his army uniform. This is the very same Wayne that Lucy-Vida was pregnant with at Sandra’s wedding and makes an unfortunate contrast to Sandra’s two weedy boys, Dean and Todd. Sandra has put on a lot of weight in the intervening years and is throwing most of it about. ‘Bossy cow,’ Lucy-Vida remarks mildly as Sandra bellows at Uncle Ted.

Uncle Bill is dead but Auntie Eliza, who is waiting for a hip replacement, hobbles around on two crutches with Wayne carrying her glass and lighting her cigarettes. ‘Game old bird,’ Adrian says, dishing up quiche. Disappointingly, Daisy and Rose do not come to the funeral. It is some time since anyone has seen either of them – neither have married and they live together in a high-rise block in Leeds and Auntie Gladys says that they never go out of the house. ‘They must go out some time,’ Sandra says dismissively, ‘or how would they eat?’ (But Daisy and Rose probably don’t need to eat.) ‘Nah,’ Wayne says, ‘Mum sent me to check on them last year – they think aliens are talking to them through the television.’ He screws a finger into the side of his head. ‘Totally fucking barmy!’ and Lucy-Vida slaps him hard on the other side of his head and says, ‘Language, Wayne!’

In the kitchen, Brian, Adrian’s lover, is wearing Bunty’s pink rubber gloves and washing up for all he’s worth. Uncle Clifford, his teeth removed, is sitting at the table eating a piece of pork pie, and holding forth on the subject of repatriating the ‘blacks’, to Africa preferably, and Brian nods and smiles in the tolerant way of people who know they can go home whenever they want and never have to see you again.

‘Well,’ Auntie Gladys says as she leaves, ‘that was a right good send-off; your mother would have enjoyed it.’

‘No she wouldn’t,’ Patricia says, closing the front door behind the last funeral guest. ‘She hated things like that.’