Behind the Scenes at the Museum Kate Atkinson

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Footnote (v) – Rain

1958: TED PUT HIS MOTHER’S SUITCASE DOWN ON THE FLOOR of her room in the boarding-house and then lingered, running his finger along the mantelpiece and humming tunelessly. Nell couldn’t wait for Ted to go away so she could take off her corset and stockings and lie down on the bed. ‘Well, I’m going to unpack, Mother, I’ll see you down at the tea table?’ Ted said, hovering in the doorway, and Nell looked at him vaguely. What did he want exactly? Nell’s youngest child was nearly thirty, yet whenever she looked at him she could only see a little boy. Ted used to be her favourite but now she found him distracting, disturbing, he gave her the impression that she had something he wanted but she hadn’t the faintest idea what it might be. She shooed him away with her hands. ‘Right then, at the tea table, Ted.’

Ted had just left the Merchant Navy after twelve years and this week in the boarding-house in Kendal was supposed to help him find his land-legs. Nell hadn’t wanted to come. She didn’t like leaving home any more, not that she ever had left it very much.

Ted closed the door of her room quietly as if she was an invalid and Nell wondered how long she had to go before she died. Death was a terrifying thing and yet more and more Nell found herself thinking that she’d be glad when it was all over.

It was warm in the bedroom although the sash window was open at the top and the nets billowed out gently in the breeze. There was the hard narrow bed, a dressing table, a wardrobe, a bedside table and a clock on the little cast-iron mantelpiece. The clock said ten to four but Nell didn’t know if it was right. ‘I’ve been to the Lakes before,’ Nell said suddenly as they had driven into Kendal and Ted crashed his gears in surprise because he never thought of his mother having been anywhere farther than York Market on a Friday morning.

‘Really? When?’

‘On honeymoon.’

‘Honeymoon?’ While Ted tried to imagine his mother on something as self-indulgent as a honeymoon, Nell was thinking what a strange word that was, honeymoon, so soft and sweet, like violet creams and rosewater and that Valentine card that Percy Sievewright had given her that was all covered in lace. Inside he’d written, in his big, round policeman’s script, l am yours forever and the funny thing was that it was true, for nobody else would want him now, would they?

1919: Nell knew she must be dreaming because she was no longer in the room in the boarding-house in Kendal that Ted had booked with such a fuss. Now she was in her honeymoon bed in that gloomy hotel Frank had taken her to, overlooking a lake. It was a hot, stuffy night, the last of several. All day long Nell had felt as if the heavy weather was a physical force, crushing the top of her skull down. ‘There’ll be a thunderstorm tonight, Nelly,’ Frank had said to her as if it was a personal promise to cheer her up. But how could she be cheered when he was on top of her like a lead weight, heavier than the weather, pressing her down. Would he do this every night of their married life? Would there be no relief from his thick cotton pyjamas and his prickly little moustache and that other part of his anatomy that she had to turn her eyes away from because it was so embarrassing.

There was a strange buzzing noise in the room and it took Nell a long time to realize that the noise was in the room and not in her head. She gave Frank a little shake to wake him so he could deal with it. He was already snoring very gently by her side. She didn’t understand how sleep could come so easily to a person. Lillian was the same; every night she just turned over like a small animal getting comfortable and fell into a sleep as sweet as a baby’s, while Nell used to lie next to her, staring at the ceiling and knowing she would take hours to find sleep. She was almost glad when Lillian moved out of their room after Albert died. Without a word of explanation or farewell she’d taken all her things and moved into his room and the only reference Lillian made to this decision was next morning over breakfast, when she said, ‘Oh, Nelly, I wish we hadn’t changed his sheets when he went back to the Front.’ Rachel had thrown a teaspoon at Lillian and said she was disgusting but Nell knew what she meant, if they could just have touched something of his once more, smelt his scent like dogs trailing something lost.

She pinched Frank on his arm but he brushed her away as if it was her that was the insect rather than the angry little sawmill buzzing at the window. Nell felt for the matches on the bedside table and struggled to light the candle so that she could see what the creature was.

When she saw the insect she gave a shocked little scream and hit Frank hard because, flying across the room – straight towards the honeymoon bed – was a huge monster of a wasp, a great mutant black and yellow thing droning steadily like a Zeppelin. Frank took a few seconds to come to but when he did he said, ‘Bloody hell, it’s a hornet!’

Nell reached down and picked up a slipper from the linoleum and flapped it around her head. The hornet darted off and did a circuit of the gas light hanging from the centre of the room. ‘Kill it! Kill it!’ Nell screeched at Frank as he slid cautiously out of his side of the bed and felt for his own slipper. He crept towards the hornet which was still furiously circling the gas light and tried to bat it with his slipper. The hornet made a feint at Frank and he ducked and twitched and held onto his hair and Nell surprised both of them by laughing out loud. ‘It’s not bloody funny, Nell!’ he said crossly, keeping his eyes fixed on the hornet that was going up and down like a lift at the window.

Nell slid down the bed and pulled the covers over her head. He was right, it wasn’t funny at all. That hornet really had him worried, he was dancing around the room like a real namby-pamby; you wouldn’t think a man could go through the whole of the Great War and still be a coward. Percy would have dealt with the hornet no bother – firmly, like a policeman. And Albert, Albert would have tried to set it free; she could see him as if he were there, turning to her with a big grin. She remembered a time he’d caught a bee, a big bumble, in his cupped hands and turned to her with his lovely smile and said, ‘This is a right big lad, Nelly, d’you want to see it?’ and then he’d opened his hands and let it go.

She could hear Frank grumbling through the covers. ‘You’d think it would be able to see that the bloody window’s open,’ he said, but she ignored him. And Jack, what would Jack have done with the insect, she wondered? Nell didn’t think she’d ever really known him. Sometimes she thought it was just as well he was dead because she couldn’t imagine what their marriage would have been like. He would have soon tired of her; she could see the way he’d looked at her on his leave after the Somme, doubtful-like, as if he couldn’t believe what a wet dishcloth she was.

Sometimes in the honeymoon bed, when Frank slipped off her ribbon-decked trousseau nightdress and touched her shoulders and moaned as if he was ashamed of what he was going to do to her, then Nell thought about Jack and his beautiful skin, like polished walnut – skin that would be all rotted away now. Soon there’d be nothing but clean bone left, and that would be the end of Jack Keech. It didn’t seem right that a person could cease to exist like that. Like Percy, like Albert. Like their mother.

Frank’s voice was triumphant. ‘I’ve killed the bugger, Nelly! Nelly? Why are you crying, what’s wrong? It’s all right now, lass – I’ve killed it.’ Frank put his arms round her and patted her back cautiously; he had no idea what to do when people cried and certainly didn’t know what to do when Nell made a horrible choking noise and wailed, ‘I want my mother!’ In the distance, the thunder began to rumble.

1958: ‘Mother! Mother? Are you all right?’ Ted was standing in the doorway, knocking on the doorpost and regarding her uncertainly. ‘Aren’t you coming down? They’ve already served the soup – it’s brown Windsor. You’ll like that. Won’t you?’ he added doubtfully because Nell didn’t look much like a woman who had the soup course on her mind.

His mother sighed and sat up on the bed. ‘I’ll be down in a minute, all right?’ When Ted had gone, Nell got up awkwardly from the bed and struggled back into her corset. She stood in front of the mirror to brush her hair and put a dab of powder on her nose and tried to remember the smell of Jack Keech’s skin and the feel of his hair, but it was so long ago now that she couldn’t even remember what he looked like. It began to rain, a light summer shower, and the smell of the rain on the new June grass made Nell feel suddenly wretched.

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