Five Boys (26 page)

“Are you from the ministry?” she said.

The man from the ministry’s mouth dropped open. He nodded.

“You’ve still not replaced my letter box,” Miss Minter said.

He tried to wince with genuine regret. “Different department, I’m afraid,” he said.

Miss Minter kept her eyes on him. “And I don’t think that rat catcher ever got paid for all his poisoning,” she said.

The man from the ministry hadn’t a clue what the mad old trout was talking about, but did his best to look even more contrite.

“Different department again,” he said.

By the time he pulled up in Piatt’s farmyard it was well past midafternoon. He hadn’t had a bite to eat since breakfast and, at this rate, wouldn’t eat again until he got to Plymouth
that night, so to be met by a man whose face was so profoundly involved in a meat pie and whose shirt bulged out between his waistcoat and trousers like an unmade bed, stirred up in him all sorts of resentment before he’d even turned the engine off. The man with the pie heaved himself off the bonnet of his own motor, ambled over and laid a proprietorial arm across the roof of the man from the ministry’s car. He peered inside. Looked at the dashboard, the upholstery, the fittings and finally the driver, as if he was about to make him an offer.

“I believe we said two o’clock,” he said.

“I do apologize,” said the man from the ministry. “I lost my way.”

The man with the pie straightened up, tossed the crust into the bushes and brushed the crumbs from his hands. “Well, it gets me out of the office,” he said.

The man from the ministry dragged his briefcase off the floor and emerged, backside-first, into the yard. The air was fresh—excruciatingly so—and when he stretched he could feel his drenched shirt drag across his back. He asked his companion to lead the way.

“The executor called us in for a valuation,” said the pie man as they stepped between the dried cowpats. “We’ve got the sale on Thursday week.”

When he reached the barn he paused and let the man from the ministry catch him up.

“Personally,” he said, “I reckon someone dropped a file down the back of a cabinet up at your place.”

“It has been known,” the man from the ministry said.

One of the hinges on the barn door was broken and it took both men all their strength to heave it back. The sunlight
flooded in as if a curtain was being opened and illuminated several hundred signposts, all lying on their side.

“Hell’s teeth,” said the man from the ministry.

“Yes, indeed,” said the other man.

It was like the site of some terrible slaughter—an elephants’ graveyard. The signpost nearest them still had a clump of dried red earth attached to its base. The sign at the other end read,

H
ARBERTONFORD 3½
m
DITTISHAM 5
m

and pointedly assuredly up at the roof.

The man from the ministry shook his head as he gazed across the fallen signposts. “You found no paperwork,” he said.

“No, sir,” said the auctioneer. “You neither?”

“Not a jot,” he said.

He had a momentary vision of someone trying to locate every last junction from which these signs had been uprooted—saw the nightmare of that afternoon’s journey multiplied a thousand times.

“How are the locals coping without them?” he said.

“I shouldn’t think they mind a bit,” said the auctioneer.

The man from the ministry took a few tentative steps into the barn. Some of the posts were rotten. Some of the signs had been removed and stacked against a wall like roof tiles.

“I think Mr. Platt must have used some of the timber for fencing,” said the auctioneer. “You probably passed some on your way in.”

This seemed to settle things with the man from the ministry. The auctioneer was standing a yard or two behind him but could see him slowly nod his head.

When he turned there was a look of resolution on his face. “Do you think you could get rid of them?” he said.

“I’m sure of it,” said Jessie Braintree.

“We wouldn’t want to see them turning up,” he said.

“Of course not,” Jessie Braintree said.

Dexter Fadden was only too happy to work out of doors after nightfall. He regularly removed fish which were under strict instructions not to leave the river and was forever pouncing upon the animals along its banks. On certain evenings in particular public houses he could be found negotiating the sale and exchange of some of those creatures unfortunate enough to have crossed his path—the Morleigh Arms on a Monday night could be as ripe as a menagerie—and, like most men around about, he kept an open mind when it came to offers of unusual but well-paid work.

Raybe’s pig had first fired up his enterprising spirit, and his commissions since had included all manner of surreptitious removal and delivery, but none was quite as strange or, frankly, strangely sinister as that offered him by Jessie Braintree, the auctioneer. It took him all of Tuesday to hack the signs off and most of Wednesday just to stack the posts. By the time he’d finished, the blisters on the heels of both hands were as thick and white as raw potato. It was, he thought, an odd sort of butchery, hacking away the names of all those villages which were so familiar, but he kept it up and the floor of the barn slowly emptied until all that was left was a covering of sawdust, like a circus ring.

Jessie showed up in his van on Wednesday evening and helped Dexter load the dismembered signs. The posts, Jessie said, would be taken care of by a third party, and when Dexter dropped him off at his house Jessie handed him an envelope, told him to be careful and sent him on his way with a slap on the back of the van.

Dexter found the field down by Bow Bridge, where he was to dump them, without any problem and left the van’s engine running so that the headlights lit the scene. Most of the smaller signs were wooden, with the names chiseled into them, but some of the bigger ones were cast iron, weighed a ton and made a terrible clanking sound when they went into the hole. Dexter couldn’t help but think of the effort that must have gone into those signs’ creation, and as he carried each load from the van and threw it into the pit it rubbed him up the wrong way to be showing someone’s work such scant respect.

Jessie had told him to be sure to shovel at least a couple of feet of earth over the signs—had said that he’d be around to fill the hole in the following morning but didn’t want anybody finding them in between. Dexter was getting enough money to understand the consequences of not doing the job properly, but as he dug his shovel into the mound of earth, threw it into the darkness and heard it clatter over the signs, he had a terrible feeling in his stomach, as if he was somehow burying the villages along with their names.

He’d once heard a story about a gardener who kept putting the name tags next to his plants and vegetables, only to find them gone the following day. The plants weren’t touched but their names went missing. This went on for months and nearly drove him around the bend. Years later,
when a chimney was being swept in a derelict cottage nearby, all the missing tags came tumbling down into the grate, with a jackdaw’s nest on top.

Dexter wasn’t sure what the moral of the story was. He wasn’t even sure why it had come to mind. But he couldn’t help thinking that, at some point, perhaps in hundreds of years’ time, somebody was going to come across all these road signs and wonder what on earth had been going on.

B
Y THE
time the Bee King added cake baking to their curriculum the Boys’ defection was just about complete. As far as they were concerned, the food heaped on their plates at home in the evening was only going to take up space better filled with butterfly buns and macaroons.

It seemed their mothers had long been neglecting their confectionery duties. They might produce the occasional stiff, gray pie or bricklike fruit loaf, but these hadn’t a chance against the Bee King’s incredible strudels, and the longer the Boys spent in his company the more keenly they felt their years of neglect.

By midsummer, mealtimes hung heavy with resentment. The Boys pushed their food around their plates and looked forward to the chimes of wooden spoons in mixing bowls. But just as the Bee King had gradually introduced them to the business of beekeeping he now slowly revealed to them the mysteries of baking a cake. Showed them how to sieve the flour to lighten the mixture, how to fold egg whites into a meringue, how to sink the blade of a knife into a sponge to see if it was ready—how to clamp a hot tray with a tea towel without burning your hand. And as they learned, the Boys unwittingly began to collaborate. While one was rolling out the pastry another would be greasing the scalloped molds of the baking tray. They
cracked eggs, measured milk and pressed out pie lids until they were dusted from head to toe in flour and began to appreciate all the brushing and crimping necessary for their pastries to look properly bronzed and ornamented when they were finally turned out onto the wire racks.

After their first few sessions the Boys took their cakes out into the garden, but so many inquisitive bees came up from the hives that it became a necessary custom for them to eat indoors, then retire to the garden with their mugs of milk, just as gentlemen retire after dinner to drink port and smoke cigars. One evening, the Boys were lounging on the back steps and congratulating one another on a particularly successful Genoa cake when Hector noticed a bee buzzing around the Bee King, as if carrying out some reconnaissance, before finally landing on his cheek and locking onto a fleck of icing sugar at the corner of his mouth.

The Bee King didn’t seem the least bit bothered—just let the bee work away at the sugar and continued what he was saying when it took off again. He took a sip of his tea. That bee, he told the Boys, would now be back at her hive telling her fellow workers all about her little discovery.

“And how does she tell them where to look?” he asked the Boys.

“The waggle dance,” said Hector.

The Bee King nodded, and within a minute a dozen bees were circling his head, like tiny planets around their sun.

That particular incident reminded the Bee King of the story of Plato, who apparently had a bee land on his mouth when he was a baby, bestowing on him his gift for sweet talk later on in life. Several other poets and philosophers allegedly found their vocation under similar circumstances.

The Bee King seemed to know every last bit of bee lore
and the Boys couldn’t help but notice just how much of it seemed to be tied up with death. Bees were regarded either as death’s harbinger or a talisman against it. If there was a death in a beekeeper’s family each hive had to be told and shrouded in black for the period of mourning or the bees would abandon the apiary, prompting Lewis to say that, despite the white hives and veils, a bee’s favorite color was probably black—and cited the dark insides of the hive, the black of the funerals and the black pram he imagined the baby Plato in when the bee kissed him on his lips.

If the most frequently requested slide was of the man straining under the weight of a bee beard, by far the most popular bee story was that of Samson, another strongman, who had lived in biblical times. The weather seemed to have been a good deal warmer back then—Aldred always pictured Samson strolling through the olive groves in nothing but his sandals and swimming trunks—and if the story’s particulars tended to vary with each telling, it was due to the Boys’ insatiable appetite for detail as much as the Bee King’s tendency to digress. The bare bones of the story, at least, were always much the same …

It was always a big disappointment when the Philistines managed to solve the riddle, and even though Samson went on to have further adventures, including having his hair shorn off, his eyes put out and pulling a temple of Philistines down around his ears, as soon as the bees and the lion’s carcass were out of the way the Boys’ attention began to wane.

All five Boys were very fond of the story, but Aldred in particular seemed to take it to heart. Riddles, he saw, were
like locks and keys. The right combination of words turned the chambers and opened doors. And while he knew that the answer lay with the bees in the lion, he was convinced that another, more complicated riddle was tucked away somewhere.

One Wednesday evening, as they waited for an apple turnover to cool, he asked the Bee King if he would write the riddles out for him, and where he might find them in the Bible, and later that evening he took the key from its hiding place and slipped in through the back door. He lit a candle and as he crept past the organ, shielded it with his fingers, imagining the three flames the Ecclesiastical Insurance Company was always warning him about. He climbed the steps up to the pulpit. The Bible sat on the lectern, as if the whole church had been built around it. He held his candle up, undipped the big brass clasps and began hauling the pages over.