Five Boys (25 page)

The day eventually broke, but with none of the fanfares with which daybreaks are often credited. It was, in Miss Pye’s opinion, an almost painful procedure, in which the dead of night was slowly superceded by the dead of day. There was too much cloud for the sun to make any kind of entrance and there was not much birdsong to be heard, but when her path to the vicarage was finally bathed in a pale gray light she told herself that she simply
refused
to spend the rest of her life in an outside lavatory, pulled her coat around her and charged out into the day.

When the Reverend Bentley opened his front door he looked about as disheveled to Miss Pye as she did to him. His quilted dressing gown might have cut quite a dash on a different fellow, but as far as Miss Pye was concerned he looked as if he had just jumped out of a window and brought the curtains along with him. She couldn’t help noticing the couple of inches of rumpled long johns tucked into his stockings and the fact that he wasn’t wearing any slippers, but could hardly berate a man for his lack of decorum when she’d just hauled him out of his bed, and she’d bundled past him and was halfway down the hallway before he’d finished asking if there was anything wrong.

There were tears before and tears after, with great waves of emotion in between. But through all the upheaval, and the handkerchief clamped to her face, Miss Pye finally got around to articulating what it was she’d seen stalking the streets of the village and had kept her locked in her outside lav for hours on end.

“It was … a
mummy,”
she said, and buried her face back in her handkerchief.

She sobbed deeply for a while and when she finally managed
to pull her hands down from her face it was only to thrust them out before her.

“Coming down the road,” she whimpered, “with his arms out …”

She shuddered.

“… like mummies do,” she said.

She told the reverend how she had woken in the middle of the night with a bit of an “upset” and had decided that a visit to the WC might set her straight. How she had crept downstairs, got her coat, tramped out into the garden and locked the door behind her, only to spend the next five minutes watching the moths flit about her lamp. She had given up, she said, and was about to open the door when, out of nothing but modesty’s habit, she peeped through the spy hole and beheld a mummy limping down the lane.

The reverend shifted in his armchair.

“And what was he up to?” he asked.

Miss Pye stared out of the reverend’s bay window. “Walking,” she said, as if she could still see him. “Walking about as if he owned the place.”

The reverend nodded. Picked a speck of lint from his sleeve and examined it. “And did you happen to see where he was headed?” he said.

Miss Pye raised an arm and pointed it feebly toward the window. Her finger followed the mummy’s journey around the vicarage walls, step by monstrous step, until the Reverend Bentley himself swung into her sights and a look of even greater horror filled her face.

“Good God,” she said and started choking. “The
graveyard …
He must have been going back to his
tomb.”

As she wept, the reverend considered his options. He
was well aware that he was meant to be a comfort to his parishioners rather than the cause of their distress, but there was simply no knowing into whose parlor the woman might next be spilling her tears.

“Miss Pye,” he said, “I have a confidence I should like to share with you.”

She looked up at him from behind her crumpled handkerchief.

It was possible, the reverend informed her, that a man in his position might make a behind-the-scenes representation.

Miss Pye wanted to know what a “representation” was.

“A
representation
,” he went on, “which would put an end to these little … walkabouts.”

There was a moment’s baffled silence.

“How?” she said. “How can you do that?” Her face suddenly slackened. “You
know
him?” she said. “You
know
the
mummy?”

The Reverend Bentley nodded, which only conjured up in Miss Pye’s mind a vision of the vicar and the mummy, side by side, at the bar of the Malsters’ Arms.

“But you must promise,” the reverend insisted, “not to mention this incident to a soul. Or we’ll have the whole village in a state.”

Whatever state the village threatened to get itself into was, Miss Pye felt, never going to amount to more than a fraction of the mortal terror she had recently endured, and nothing would have given her more satisfaction than having some of her horror spread about the place. Besides, secret-keeping went against everything she stood for. Her village post office was the clearinghouse for every scrap of tittle-tattle worth the name. How on earth was she meant
to keep a mummy to herself? It was enough to make a woman burst.

She looked up. The reverend’s eyes were on her.

“No more mummies?” she insisted.

“You have my word,” he said.

Over the years the reverend had noticed that, when troubled parishioners were offered a way out of an apparently inextricable predicament, they would often experience, at the very brink of release, an irresistible urge to turn and remind themselves of the torment which was about to draw to a close. So it was with Miss Pye. As the Reverend Bentley escorted her to the front door she stopped and looked him in the eye.

“The mummy …” she said, before the words snagged on her emotions. “He had flies buzzing all around him.”

The reverend rested a hand on her shoulder and gently encouraged her toward the door. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

The Reverend Bentley had managed to keep a great tide of pain at bay by solemnly promising to return his attention to it just as soon as his caller was out of the way, and as he crept back up to his bedroom it suddenly took him at his word. A nauseous heat flooded through his body. He felt feverish, pestilent. The teaks and mahoganies of the banisters and the hall’s grand paneling were a jungle, and by the time he slumped onto his bed and peeled away his socks and long johns he was halfway toward delirium.

His hips, usually as skinny as a monkey’s, looked as if they’d been packed with marbles. His knees were so tautly bloated they were almost elephantine. The flesh around both wrists was solid and senseless and his ankles looked
like old Mrs. Mornay’s, which spilled over the tops of her shoes.

When he held the palm of one hand over his misshapen shoulder he could feel the heat coming off all the stings which were buried there. He had been invaded—hardly recognized himself. And during that first malarial morning there were times when it was possible for him to observe his own unfamiliar body and witness some of its sensations without being wholly involved in them. Then all at once the cadaver was returned to him, the pains and rages re-erupted and all the nerves and senses crackled back to life; agonies which could last for minutes or even hours—certainly long enough for him to imagine that they might have no end.

When Aldred had first mentioned the curative property of bee stings he had dismissed it, but the idea must have taken root for, a week or two later, the reverend turned up what appeared to be confirmation in a book from the library by a fellow called Lippincott. If he had known how much pain he would have to endure from the bee stings in the hope of relieving some of the pain of his arthritis he might have thought twice, but planning his raid on the hives the previous evening his only worry had been how to expose his joints for the bees’ attention while protecting the rest of him.

He considered cutting holes in an old pair of overalls, but the only pair he could find were so baggy that they would have filled up with bees in no time at all. He thought he might scoop up a couple of pints in a jug and administer them in the privacy of his own backyard, but the possible hitches in this and, indeed, every other scheme easily out-numbered
the points in their favor and vexation was setting in when he had a rush of blood to the head.

He found a couple of old bedsheets in the linen cupboard and began ripping them into strips. Took off his trousers and wound them around his legs. Did the same with his arms and torso, taking care to leave a slight crack in the binding at his hips and knees and wrists. For a man who had trouble with his knife and fork, all the tearing and the fiddling with the scissors and safety pins was a fuss he could have done without. His only comfort came from the fact that he had had the foresight to go to the lavatory before he began.

The whole venture was almost scuppered at the very last minute when he realized that he had made no provision to protect his eyes. He sat in his armchair, bandaged up to his neck, cursing, as the temperature slowly rose. Salvation finally arrived in the form of a pair of spectacles which had belonged to his mother and, once they were bound up in the bandages, created two windows to hide behind. They reduced everything to a blur, which was something of a blessing, but obliged him to walk with his arms out in front of him.

As soon as the first few dozen stings were in him his regrets came thick and fast.

“That’s enough,” he said. “Enough.”

But the bees wouldn’t stop and when he fell to the ground he was convinced he would never get up again.

C
ONSIDERING HOW
rarely the Bee King was to be found around the village and the speed with which he usually moved, Aldred was a little surprised to come across him standing by the church notice board, studying a poster for an auction of agricultural equipment.

“Badly set,” said the Bee King, without turning. “Badly printed. Some people take no pride in their work.”

Aldred stared at the poster and nodded as if he understood what the Bee King was talking about. Then he led him over the road and showed him the bullet holes in the war memorial. Told him all about the Focke Wulf coming up the valley and how he and the evacuee had had to jump into a ditch.

For a while they just stood and looked at the memorial. Aldred asked the Bee King if he had ever visited Cleopatra’s Needle. The Bee King said that he had, many years ago, which Aldred found absolutely staggering, and said that if
he’d
ever visited Cleopatra’s Needle he’d be going around telling everyone in sight. He privately wondered what the chances were of the Bee King’s visit having coincided with that of his father. It was quite possible, he thought, that the two of them could have stood side by side before that great monument, just as he and the Bee King now stood before the war memorial.

He watched the clouds creep by behind the tip of the obelisk and asked the Bee King if he happened to notice any names on the Needle.

“What sort of names?” said the Bee King.

“Well, the men who drowned in the Bay of Biscay,” said Aldred. But the only thing the Bee King remembered seeing on the actual monument was hieroglyphics.

Aldred withdrew into a deep meditation, until the Bee King asked if he knew what hieroglyphics were. He had to admit that he didn’t. Hieroglyphics, the Bee King told him, were an ancient language—a way of writing using pictures instead of words. Aldred wanted to know what sort of pictures they were talking about and the Bee King said he seemed to remember there being a couple of lions on the Needle somewhere, as well as several honeybees.

Neither spoke for a minute, but when the Bee King noticed Aldred looking at the tablet at the base of the war memorial he asked if he’d known any of the men whose names were cut into the stone. Aldred bent down. There were two lists—one for each of the two great wars—and he placed his finger on the more recent one. Drew it down, over the names’ beveled edges, until it came to rest on the words “Bernard Crouch.”

“Is that your father?” the Bee King asked him.

Aldred nodded.

He said he used to think that the bones of the men on the memorial were actually buried beneath it. But that he now knew that not to be the case. And when the Bee King asked where his father was buried Aldred explained how he had died defending the pyramids and that he now had his own tomb among them, somewhere down Egypt way.

T
HE MAN FROM
the ministry was hunched right over his steering wheel. When he wasn’t staring out through the windscreen he was glancing down at the map on the passenger seat. Getting lost in the lanes around Duncannon should have been one eventuality he could have foreseen, but with each baffling mile he became more and more frantic and after each gear change his finger returned to the map’s lanes and contours with less and less certainty.

The blood-red arterial roads were far behind him and even the yellow B-roads had trickled away. The maze of lanes in which he’d got himself tangled was so faintly marked, so insipidly colored, they barely seemed to exist at all. A single signpost would have given him a hook on which to hang some hope. But if there had been road signs he’d be dozing back at his desk in Whitehall instead of driving ever deeper into the wilderness.

The hedges continued to narrow around him and the lanes began to incorporate such uncompromising bends and fearful gradients that the next time he found himself in first gear he decided to stay there and kept his finger glued to the map, even though that finger was now as thoroughly disoriented as the rest of him.

Miss Minter was picking wild garlic from the hedgerow when the car came lurching down the lane. It pulled up and
the occupant wound down the window. He looked deeply agitated and lifted his hat to reveal a bald head, covered with a sheen of sweat.

“I’ve lost my bearings,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to know a Piatt’s farm, would you?”

“Well now,” said Miss Minter. She wasn’t quite sure how to break the news to him. “I’m afraid Mr. Platt died a month or two ago.”

“I’m aware of that,” he said, which made Miss Minter wonder what a bald little man was doing calling in at the homes of dead farmers.

She had a good look at the fellow and thought she detected, beneath all the upset and anxiety, the same arrogance as the type who were always getting themselves lost just before the Americans arrived.