Behind the Scenes at the Museum Read Online Free PDF Page A

head. Her high-necked, satin dress has a bodice that looks as trimmed and stuffed as a cushion. She wears a small locket at her throat and her lips are half-open in a way that suggests she’s waiting for something to happen. Her head is tilted slightly backwards but she is staring straight at the camera (or the photographer). In the photograph her eyes look dark and the expression in them is unfathomable. She seems to be on the point of saying something, although what it could be I can’t possibly imagine.
    I had never seen this photograph before. Bunty produced it one day as if by magic. Her Uncle Tom had just died in the nursing-home and she had been to collect his few belongings, all of which fitted into a cardboard box. From the box, she took the photograph and when I asked who it was she told me it was her grandmother, my great-grandmother.
    ‘She changed a lot, didn’t she?’ I said, tracing the outline of my great-grandmother’s face on the glass. ‘She’s ugly and fat in that photograph you’ve got – the one taken in the back yard at Lowther Street with all the family.’
    This was a photograph Bunty had with ‘1914, Lowther Street’ written on the back in watery-blue ink and it shows my great-grandmother with her whole family gathered around her. She sits, big and square, in the middle of a wooden bench and on one side of her sits Nell (Bunty’s mother), and on the other is Lillian (Nell’s sister). Standing behind them is Tom and squatting on the ground at Rachel’s feet is the youngest brother, Albert. The sun is shining and there are flowers growing on the wall behind them.
    ‘Oh, no,’ Bunty said dismissively. ‘The woman in the Lowther Street photograph is Rachel – their stepmother, not their real mother. She was a cousin, or something.’
    The woman in her padded frame – the real mother, the true bride – gazes out inscrutably across time. ‘What was she called?’
    Bunty had to think for a second. ‘Alice,’ she pronounced finally. ‘Alice Barker.’
    My newly discovered great-grandmother, it appears, died giving birth to Nell, shortly after which my feckless great-grandfather married Rachel (the unreal mother, the false bride). Bunty had a vague, handed-down memory that Rachel came to look after the children and act as a poorly-paid housekeeper. ‘Six children without a mother,’ she explained in her death-of-Bambi’s-mother voice. ‘He had to marry someone.’
    ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?’
    ‘I forgot,’ Bunty said defiantly.
    The forgotten Alice stared straight ahead. Carefully, I removed the photograph from its frame and more of her artificial sepia world was revealed – a large parlour-palm in a brass pot and a thick curtain draped across a corner of the set. On the back of the photograph, in printed copperplate, it says J.P. Armand. Travelling Photographer . And in faded pencil underneath, the date – 20th June, 1888 .
    ‘Twentieth of June, 1888,’ I told Bunty, who snatched the photograph back again and scrutinized it carefully.
    ‘You would never have noticed, would you? The way she’s standing behind that couch hides it.’
    ‘What? Noticed what? Hides what?’
    ‘My mother was born in 1888. On July the thirtieth. Alice is eight months pregnant in this photograph. With my mother, Nell.’
    Does that account for that impenetrable gaze? Can she feel her own death coming, sniffing around her sepia skirts, stroking her sepia hair? Bunty was still inspecting the photograph. ‘She looks just like you,’ she said, her tone accusing, as if the lost Alice and I were fellow members of a conspiracy, intent on stirring up trouble.
    I want to rescue this lost woman from what’s going to happen to her (time). Dive into the picture, pluck her out –
    Picture the scene –
    A hundred years ago. The door of a country cottage stands open on a very hot day in summer. In the yard outside, two small boys are kicking and wrestling in the dust while a pretty