Tell it to the Bees (16 page)

‘Mentioned why?'

‘He was dressed up smart, natty tie, those narrow trousers they're wearing now, the young men, hair slicked up, shoes polished. Said he didn't want any tea thanks, Ma, so I asked him where he was off to and if he'd be late in. He said it was a double date. He said Annie was in the other half.'

‘Annie?' Lydia said.

‘Turns out she's walking out with Dave's workmate, George Pemble. Been going on a while, but very hush-hush on account of her mother.'

‘The note,' Lydia said. ‘I knew it was something like that.'

‘Does Pam know?'

Lydia shook her head.

‘If she did, she'd move heaven and earth to stop it. Annie's the only decent creature to come out of that house, poor love.'

They'd reached the corner that marked the parting of their ways and Dot turned to go.

‘George is a good type,' she said. ‘Got a bit of mouth with a few pints in him, but he'll look out for Annie. Do
what he can with her mother, too, though he's young to be much of a match.'

Lydia nodded, but her thoughts had turned again; she was weary to the core and longed to be alone.

‘Thanks Dot,' she said, and she rode away.

The cat lay out in the bars of sunlight, limbs extended, eyes down to a sliver. Only her ears made any move, twitching slightly as Jean came in.

She ran her fingers through the soft fur, felt the slight arch of pleasure. She touched a paw, lifted a claw with her fingertip, drawing it from its soft sheath, and felt it tip at her skin, almost painful. The early summer had turned hot and Jean basked with the cat, sprawling her legs out on the floorboards in the study, loving the wood warmth on her skin.

She was excited, but she didn't know why. Her appetite, usually strong, had deserted her and for the last few nights even sleep had been hard to come by. Sometimes she got up and sat in an armchair with a mug of tea and Sarah Vaughan on the gramophone. Others she lay on her bed, eyes wide to the dark. Then night-time call-outs came as a relief, and she had to check the enthusiasm with which she answered the telephone, casting the worried and the fearful into the electric charge of her strange mood.

Mrs Sandringham chastised her daily for not clearing her plate and then wanted to make her sit still a while, or take her temperature.

‘I'm a doctor, Mrs S,' Jean said impatiently, but it was true that she couldn't diagnose this condition.

This time of year, Jean's list was always lighter. She didn't know why it was. Perhaps people simply felt better
and got ill less often when the sun shone. It could be as simple as that. Anyway, it meant more time, and so these summer months she was in the habit of slipping further into her friends' lives, making herself part of their family, a kind of fair-weather part, Jim teased her. Doing the shopping with Sarah, meeting Meg and Emma from school occasionally, taking them to the town pool for the afternoon, or into the country for a weekend picnic.

So Jean was on errands with Sarah when she saw Lydia Weekes again one Saturday afternoon, standing on the far side of the bustling street. But unlike every other woman, Lydia seemed to have no purpose. She held a basket like everyone else, and probably she had a list too. On the back of an envelope, Jean imagined, or hastily scribbled on the margin of the evening news. But she was doing nothing. In fact, she looked as if she'd been arrested midway to somewhere, her slight body lifted up and dropped there, inside a yellow shift dress, with her back to Marshall and Coop's, arms by her sides, neither standing nor walking quite, her head bowed, her face closed in, closed off.

It was a busy time of day on the high street and women shoved past, impatient, wielding baskets like battering rams, pushing prams like tanks. Jean watched as Lydia was pushed forward towards the gutter, and then back, till she stood hard up, back against the plate glass window, out of which a vast pair of spectacles glared at passers-by.

Standing outside the butcher's, waiting for her friend, Jean watched this woman, Charlie's mother, and her heart went out to her.

‘What on earth?' Sarah said, setting down her basket and looking over to the far pavement.

Jean started. Her mind had gone elsewhere and it took her a moment and a careful look at Sarah's basket of meat to remember where she was.

‘What are you looking at?'

‘Nothing. A patient,' Jean said. ‘I must visit her later.'

‘You were miles away.' Sarah hefted up the basket. ‘Miles and miles.'

As they walked off, Jean stole a last look and, though she barely knew what she was thinking, it crossed her mind how beautiful Lydia was, and how sad she looked.

They were nearly back to the house when Jean ventured an unfamiliar kind of comment.

‘They're pretty, the dresses being worn, with the big buttons and open necks. The sleeves like that.' She shaped what she meant with her hands and Sarah laughed outright.

‘Now this I don't believe. Dr Jean Markham commenting on ladies' fashion.'

Jean was put out.

‘Just because I'm voicing my thoughts,' she said.

‘Is there a reason you want a dress with big buttons? Or maybe some higher heels.'

‘I don't want to wear them. I was only noticing what's being worn.'

But she saw her friend's shrug and her smile, as though Sarah knew something that she didn't.

A few days later, Jean was on her way across the park with her black bag and certain stride, making good time, almost to the west gate, when she saw Lydia again. It was late in the afternoon of a sunny day and the air was full of children's shouts, shrill by now and weary with the heat. People were spread like washing over the grass, the mothers with their jam sandwiches, the lovers, newly-met after work, still coy with one another, fingers full of daisies, marking the distance between their knees. But the bright colours were dulling at the edges, the flowers scuffed with their long day out, the grass crumpled. Already two men in clipped grey uniforms and resentful shoulders were laying out hoses for the evening's recovery, one eye to the park
clock so that they could ring out the end of the day, expel the mothers and the lovers, lock the gates and have their park back to themselves.

Jean's thoughts that afternoon were as busy as her feet, worrying over Mrs Sandringham's departure in the autumn, which would come up sooner than she knew, and about how to refuse the rash of summer evening parties. Her mood was strange, she knew that, and she simply couldn't bear the prospect of so much gregarious obligation. So it was chance; or a familiar perfume; or some strange motion somewhere – a thing she had no faith in, but that Jim might call the gods – that meant she looked up just as her path approached Lydia's, at one corner of a bed of pink dahlias.

Lydia, still with her hair up tight from the factory, walked with her bicycle, a plastic mackintosh piled into the front basket, and her thoughts adrift. Jean watched her. She walked like a dancer. Jean hadn't noticed it before. Her spine was arched and her shoulders back and she held her hands almost slack on the handlebars. Even her feet were turned slightly, as if she were returning from a rehearsal, not from a day on the production line.

There were things Lydia should be thinking about, like how to make ends meet, and Charlie, and a comment thrown her way at work about Annie, and what to say next time Robert came home. But she couldn't bear to think now. Her mind strayed, and she stared at the lovers, their glances playing tag across the grass, as if they were from another country.

Jean watched Lydia walk towards her slowly, carelessly, eyes down, shoes catching at the gravel, and she felt her heart jump. She had learned to keep other people's grief at bay, but now she didn't want to. Though she was unused to hesitation, this knowledge, this certainty, gave her pause.

‘Mrs Weekes,' she said, and perhaps if she hadn't spoken, Lydia would have passed by, unseeing.

But Lydia stopped walking and looked up.

‘How are you?' Jean said, and then, because this seemed too much to the point, ‘How are the books?'

Lydia knitted her brow. ‘Dr Markham,' she said finally, and she pursed her lips as though pleased to have made the connection. ‘Yes, I like one of them. The thriller.'

Jean nodded. ‘Good. That's good,' she said, more as though Lydia had told her that her leg no longer hurt, than that she'd enjoyed a novel.

Now that she had stopped, Lydia seemed planted there, at that point on the path, as if her key had unwound its spring entirely, as if the world had stopped in its tracks, the birds in the trees, the children and the lovers.

‘It's a lovely afternoon,' Jean said, a little too loud. ‘I like being able to walk through the park. I'm so often in my car,' she said, hefting up her black bag as if to explain.

Lydia looked across to where the grass rose in a slight hill. On the far side, behind the crest of trees, the pond lay, and even now distant shouts reminded her of Charlie and his triumphs on that small circle of water.

‘But you're always on your way to other people's misery,' she said. ‘Isn't that hard?'

‘The cost of the job,' Jean said simply. ‘Somebody needs to do it.'

Lydia looked back at the doctor, and her words came out in a rush.

‘I'm sorry. That was very rude.'

‘Well, sometimes I leave them with less misery than they had before,' Jean said, ‘and sometimes I don't.'

‘I really did like that book,' Lydia said.

‘It was a guess, on my part.'

‘I tried the other too …' Lydia paused and gestured to Jean's bag. ‘But you're in a hurry. Ill people.'

‘No, no, actually I'm not. In fact …' Jean cast around for anything she could offer, a way to make Lydia stay.
Inside the gate the ice-cream van gleamed. ‘In fact, would you like a cone?'

She could see Lydia shy at this, begin to leave, but as if to back her up, the van tolled its bell and Jean grinned.

‘All right then. Thank you,' Lydia said.

The women walked towards the trees. Lydia spread her plastic mackintosh on the grass and they sat down with their cones.

‘How is the garden?' Lydia said.

Jean looked up, surprised.

‘Hasn't Charlie said anything?'

Lydia shook her head slowly, but Jean, watching her face, noticed a slight fret to her eyes.

‘I don't think he has,' Lydia said finally, ‘but I've been preoccupied recently. So perhaps I simply don't remember.'

She put a hand to her cheek and stared down at the grass. Then, as if a thought had just come to her, she looked straight at Jean.

‘Why have you stopped here with me? Is it because of Charlie? Something I should know?'

‘No, only because I wanted to,' Jean said. ‘As a matter of fact, I enjoy your company.'

Lydia looked at Jean, eyebrows raised.

‘You enjoy my company?' she said slowly.

Jean nodded, serious, and then Lydia threw back her head and laughed.

‘You find that funny?' Jean was nonplussed, and then she smiled, because it was a grand thing, to see this woman laugh.

‘I must go now,' Lydia said.

‘Come soon and choose another book,' Jean said as they got to their feet, and Lydia smiled this time and went on her way.

Charlie had left the books with Mrs Sandringham. They were carefully parcelled in brown paper and, when Jean unpacked them, she found the note.

Thank you for the novels. I am sorry to have been so long with them. Charlie has promised to return them safe. I walked in the park at the same time this Thursday, but perhaps more of your patients were ill this week. Anyway I did not see you
.

Yours gratefully,

Lydia Weekes

Jean put the note away in her desk. She wished the books were not returned, because then she could imagine Mrs Weekes coming with them herself, and now she would not. She cursed herself for being far the other side of town at five o'clock today, when Mrs Weekes had walked again in the park. But something made her glad, too, though she couldn't put her finger on it, and she stood still in the room and shut her eyes to be calmer.

Jean sent Lydia two more packages of books in the weeks that followed, tying them round with string so that Charlie could carry them home. She wrote the briefest of notes each time, since Mrs Weekes clearly had enough on her plate without Jean calling in each time.

But as busy as she made her life, packing it so full that there was no time to ponder, once her head touched the pillow she would think of Lydia, wondering over her sadness and bemused by her own pleasure in the other woman's company.

She was in the garden the evening that Lydia came to find her. It was a Wednesday and she was digging hard, the grit cut of the blade striking down through the drying summer soil, breath and effort filling her thoughts.

The garden bell rang loud enough to raise the evening birds from the lawn. Jean opened the gate swiftly, efficiently, ready to reassure, to calm, ready to wash the soil from her hands and change her shoes, gather her black bag and go. But it was Lydia she found standing there; Lydia, her body half-turned to go, her face uncertain, holding a string bag jutting with Jean's books.

‘I'm sorry to disturb you this time of an evening.'

‘Is everything all right?' Jean said.

‘I've brought back your books,' Lydia said, lifting the bag slightly. ‘Seemed rude to have Charlie always bring them this way and that. I thought all of a sudden … it was a nice evening for a walk anyway.'

‘I'm glad you've caught me. I'm on call tonight. I thought you were a call-out,' Jean said.

‘You're gardening,' Lydia said, pointing to Jean's hands.

‘Digging,' Jean said.

‘Must be annoying. To have to drop everything when someone rings the bell.'

‘Sometimes. Jean leaned against the gatepost. ‘But I fought a battle with my parents and then studied very hard for the right to have my evenings and my nights interrupted.'