Five Boys (23 page)

As he prized the hive’s stacked boxes apart with his tiny crowbar each one gave a sharp creak of dissent, until he had worked his way right down to the basement, and the shell of the hive was piled up on the lawn to his right and the inner boxes were piled up to his left. When he opened that last box he seemed to concentrate his efforts, tapping and tinkering like a mechanic under the bonnet of a motor car. He squeezed some more smoke across its surface, peeled away a thin metal cover, dug his little lever into the box’s perimeter and released one end of a long rectangular strip. Got his fingers and thumbs under each end, gently lifted it and brought out a living block of bees.

He examined one side, then the other and took it over to the Boys in their observation shed.

“First of all,” he said, lifting the bees up to the window, “we must learn how to read the frame.”

He asked the Boys what they thought they should be looking for, but they were too busy watching the bees as they knitted and fretted—feeling the same peculiar combination of fascination and revulsion stir in them as the day they saw the naked ladies in the magazine.

“Brood and food,” the Bee King said.

He brushed his hand across the bees as if clearing the froth off a glass of ginger beer. Some bees moved aside, some took flight, some clung to his fingers. But the comb was revealed, the color of cinder toffee and punched full of hexagonal holes. The surface undulated, like a saturated
sponge, and here and there it was stained a darker brown, as if it had been singed by the heat of the hive.

“The queen lays her eggs,” the Bee King said, spreading his fingers across the middle of the frame, “to keep the hive in workers.” He pointed to the corners of the frame. “The workers put away their stores for a rainy day.”

For such a quiet man the Bee King was being unusually forthcoming.

“We do some maintenance as we go,” he said. “And if we come across the queen, all well and good. But as long as she keeps laying and the workers keep foraging then the hive is happy.”

He lowered the comb and for a moment the sun managed to penetrate his veil.

“And what do the bees store away that we’re so fond of?” he said.

Harvey piped up before he could stop himself.

“Honey,” he called out from the shed.

The Bee King jabbed a blackened finger at him.

“Exactly,” he said.

In all his years under Miss Fog’s formidable tuition Harvey had never been so quick off the mark and, almost in spite of himself, he felt a smile spread across his face—felt his whole body prickle with pride.

“Honey,” he whispered again.

T
HE BOYS
had always found life to be a slow and exhausting business. When they weren’t lumbering up and down the lanes in mud-heavy boots they were slumped by the war memorial—impossible to wake first thing in the morning and hard to budge last thing at night—but from their first encounter with the bees they sensed a momentous change in them, as if a yoke were being lifted from their shoulders or a layer of darkness stripped away.

This transformation was no more apparent than in Harvey. His early rising and newfound sunny disposition baffled his parents and was, frankly, enough of a worry without the rest of the village reporting back every time he and the other Boys were seen filing into the Bee King’s place. Things came to a head one Tuesday evening when he got up and put on his jacket without so much as a by-your-leave, and his father was still calling after him when he heard the front door slam shut.

Maggie and Arthur Noyce sat by the fire and a bitter silence slowly enveloped them. Arthur turned on the wireless, but the reception kept coming and going and when his wife said, not for the first time, that Harvey had been just fine when it was just the two of them, Arthur finally snapped and stormed out of the house, slamming the front
door behind him, just as his son had done ten minutes before.

The streets were silent except for Arthur’s footsteps and the odd word that spilled out of him as he continued to argue with his wife. He marched up the hill at quite a pace, but whatever propelled him suddenly gave out about twenty yards short of Askew Cottage. He stopped. Looked over both shoulders. And when he set off again he crept forward on the tips of his toes.

A seam of amber light burned between the curtains, as if they contained something hot, something molten. Arthur could hear children’s voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying, so he slipped down the side of the house and ducked through the garden gate. The smell of the damp earth and the foliage seemed to calm him. He tucked himself away behind a bush and realized that he had become someone more likely to have an explanation demanded of him than the person demanding one.

He crept over to the window on all fours, but it was just as heavily curtained as the one around the front, so he sat on the ground with his back against the cottage and let the voices wash over him. It was the idea of his son being happy in the house behind him and the miserable atmosphere in his own that troubled him. And as time passed he thought less and less about the Boys and the Bee King—thought less and less, in fact, about anything at all—and sank into a pleasant, almost nonexistence in which he was almost no one, almost nowhere in the night.

He might have sat there for as little as twenty minutes or the best part of an hour, but suddenly came to, feeling cold and uncomfortable and wanting to be back home in front
of his own fire. He crept over to the gate, slipped back down the alleyway and was passing the window when a great roar of laughter erupted inside. And all his anger suddenly boiled back up in him and before he knew it he was hammering at the door.

The laughter stopped. Arthur pictured the children listening. A light went on in the hall. He could hear footsteps—a bolt clatter back—then the Bee King was standing before him, like a gatekeeper to a whole cottageful of heat and light.

“Mr. Noyce,” said the Bee King.

Arthur was having trouble remembering what he wanted to say to the fellow and for a while the two men just stood there looking at one another.

“We’ll not be long,” said the Bee King.

Arthur was half inclined to be happy with that.

“I want to see my son,” he managed to say.

The beekeeper stared at him for a moment—nodded—then turned and went back down the hallway. There were some whispered words in the living room and as Arthur waited two other boys stepped out into the hall to have a look at him. One held a piece of toast between his finger and thumb—took an elegant bite out of it. Then Harvey came sauntering down the hall, with the Bee King not far behind.

He must have been drinking milk. The tiny hairs on his upper lip were dashed white with it.

“What is it?” said Harvey.

Arthur couldn’t understand how such cold words could spring from such a tender, milky mouth.

“Your mother,” he said. “She’s worried.”

Harvey waited to see if his father had anything else to say. Apparently, he didn’t.

“Go home,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

The door closed in Arthur’s face. He stared at it for a second. Then he turned and headed home. The words were still ringing in him. It was as if, somehow, he had become the son and his son the father. He wondered how that might possibly have happened and how he could even begin to explain it to his wife.

If it had been allowed, the Boys would have opened up the hives on every visit, but the Bee King was quite insistent that the bees should not be too frequently disturbed, and in order to distract them one night he pulled out an old slide projector from one of his tea chests and showed the Boys how to set it up.

Half an hour later the lights were dimmed, the Bee King slid a rack into the projector and the first slide appeared on the living room wall. It was of a man with a huge beard of bees hanging off his chin—a wild-looking fellow with both hands clamped on his thighs, taking the strain of what the Bee King assured the Boys was many thousands of living, breathing bees.

The Boys sat and stared at the bee beard.

“Is it heavy?” said Aldred.

“About eleven or twelve pounds,” the Bee King said.

Harvey wanted to know what kind of weight that was and when the Bee King told him its rough equivalent in bags of sugar the Boys began to appreciate just how heavy (and sweet) a beard it was. Why the fellow had wanted to coax so many bees onto his chin in the first place and how
he had achieved it were secrets the Bee King was not prepared to divulge, but of all the slides they saw that night and at all the subsequent slide shows it was by far the most popular.

The next slide was one of the dullest. A couple of straw baskets sat on the ground in an orchard—about the same size as lobster pots. The only thing that could have been said in their favor was that they looked like the sort of baskets from which snakes have been known to be charmed. They were called “skeps,” the Bee King said, and were old-fashioned bee houses, which didn’t make them any more interesting but helped explain, in Aldred’s mind at least, why the swarm the Bee King knocked out of the tree in the graveyard had been so at home in Mr. Mercer’s wheelchair.

These slide shows soon developed their own little ritual in which the Boys would set up the projector, while the Bee King took his boxes of slides off to a corner and worked his way through them, picking each one out and holding it up to the light, like tiny frames from a beeless hive.

The whole collection must have consisted of several hundred slides, and could roughly be divided between the more general ones of hives and beekeeping equipment and the close-ups of bees carrying out their various tasks. In one, a bee stood on its own small patch of comb with several other bees gathered around it. The bee in the middle was slightly blurred, as if it was vigorously moving. A black dotted line had been superimposed over it in a figure of eight.

“What do you think this is?” said the Bee King.

“Is it a map?” said Aldred.

“That’s right,” the Bee King said. “A bee will fly for miles in search of nectar, and use the sun as a compass.
When it gets home it performs the ‘waggle dance’ to show the other bees where the nectar is.”

Some of the slides had cracks across the corner and one or two were ridged with the contours of vast fingerprints, but every row of pupae bulged in their cells in an orderly fashion and even the man with the bee beard seemed to pose as if taking part in some scientific experiment. In one slide, three bees lined up alongside one another. A wooden ruler had been placed to their right, as if they were about to race along it. These three bees, the Bee King told the Boys, were the only variety in any hive: the
queen
, the
worker
and the
drone.

The Boys were rather put out when they heard the workers were actually female, and further disturbed when the Bee King described how the drones treated the hive like a gentlemen’s club, only to be ejected when autumn came around. What worried the Boys was the fact that they had begun to treat the Bee King’s cottage like their own little clubhouse. Here was a place, after all, where their presence was not merely tolerated but positively welcomed and their opinions given the sort of consideration they never received at home.

But the only time the Bee King’s hospitality threatened to waver was when Lewis spotted a child among the hives in one of the slides. He was all dressed up like a junior beekeeper.

“Who’s the little boy?” said Lewis.

He went over to the wall, as if he might climb right in beside him, and turned to face the projector.

The sunlit hives washed right over him. He shielded his eyes from the light.

“Who’s the little boy?” he said again.

But the Bee King didn’t answer—just pulled the rack back out and carried on and that particular slide was never seen again.

The heat of the projector filled the room with its own stifling climate. Its shaft of light picked out each dancing speck of dust. But just as the Bee King took care not to trouble the bees too often, every slide show had at least one intermission to ensure the bright white bulb deep in the projector didn’t overheat, and it was during these intervals that the Boys heard their first bee stories, which, had they come from anyone but the Bee King, might have been suspected of embellishment.

The governor of the Bank of England, apparently, had a hive on the bank’s roof in the heart of the city, so that the prudent bees stored away their honey just as their master stored away the gold in the vaults below.

Honey was good for coughs and burns and fevers. Royal jelly and propolis had between them more medicine than you’d find in any doctor’s black bag. Even a bee’s sting, apparently, would ease an arthritic joint—a fact which Aldred told himself he must remember to pass onto the Reverend Bentley.

Striking a pan with a metal key or spoon, as the Bee King had demonstrated soon after his arrival, was known as “tanging,” a traditional way of rounding up a swarm, which alerted the neighbors to the fact that their master was after them, and sent out calming vibrations which encouraged the bees to settle in a tree.

“Pugfoist” was just a weird old word for puffball, which could be sliced and fried like any mushroom, or dried and used to smoke the bees.

There seemed to be no end to the bee world’s quirks and peculiarities and it was the Bee King’s opinion that this, along with the meditative nature of beekeeping, tended to attract the more solitary type. But one profession, he said, seemed to find bees particularly irresistible. He slid the rack into the projector and the sepulchral figure of a monk bent over an open hive was cast against the wall.

“Men of God,” said the Bee King. “Monks … vicars … Methodist ministers—all are drawn inexorably to the harem in the hive.”

T
HE VILLAGERS
had always made full use of Nature’s bounty—trapped rabbits, shot rooks and pigeons and stripped the hedgerows bare. But no matter how profound the war’s privations, mushrooms and their close relations were always left well alone. Every fungal bloom was considered to be a danger, as if evil itself was slowly spewing up from the earth, and whenever the Five Boys went near them it was only to kick them into oblivion.