Tell it to the Bees (2 page)

The woman shook her head, as if to break some connection. Picking up the Gladstone bag, she left the bench and took up her stride again, away and off. She stopped at the top of the rise, before the pond was out of sight, turned and looked, but the boy and his mother were gone.

Charlie Weekes sat at the table and waited for his mother. It was late in the day and the air in there was warm and old. The room was nearly empty, which suited Charlie, but still he'd been waiting for ever and he wanted to go now.

The library stood on the north side of the high street and although the sky was clear and the sun shone in on other places, it had long since gone from here. So the lights were turned on and they hung above Charlie's head like dull yellow planets.

The librarian leaned to her books and a couple of old men slept over old news. Hidden among the novels, his mother pulled out spines and shushed them in again, a slight shuffle of sound that Charlie knew like he knew the rattle of a box of matches in his father's pocket.

He had a book propped up on his lap, its covers opened flat against the table edge. The corners dug into his midriff. He stared across at the clock on the wall. In the stilly warmth, the pages gave off a faint musty smell that Charlie recognized from his mother's books.

He looked down. Leant against the table leg, out of its bag, his blue fish leaped into the dead air. He pressed his finger to the tip of the mast. It had been good when his boat came in first, and his mother there to watch his triumph. His mother there to see him. Now he waited for her
in the library; a promise made. But he was getting to an age where waiting for your mother is no longer a simple thing to do.

A fly swung lazily above him, knocking against the light. He got to his feet, leaving the book on the table. He could see the lamp curve crusted inside with the husks of so many others, and he wondered how they got in there. He shut his eyes. They'd be going home soon. Home to where the heart is. That's what his mother said, but he wondered about it.

‘Can we go now?' he whispered, too quietly for his mother to hear. But she must have because then she was there, at the desk, handing over her tickets.

Lydia Weekes swung her basket as she walked, the wicker brush-brushing against the pleats of her skirt. She walked lightly, her toes peeping red in her slingbacks, turning slightly with each step as if on the point of dancing. She was smiling, or dreaming, Charlie didn't know which, but he thought of it as her Friday face. He glanced up at her, seeing the point of her chin, her brown eyes and her summer freckles, like his. Dot had told him, when he was smaller, that his mother was very pretty and now he felt a thrill of understanding.

She hummed a tune, something she had heard on the radio, something unobtrusive and catchy that she couldn't have named. Beside her, Charlie walked in that quickstep children must adopt to keep up with an adult: three strides and a skip, three strides and a skip. He carried his boat in an old satchel of his father's, the strap fastened to its shortest hole. The mast, jutting up, caught his ear as he walked, and the hull banged against his hip. When he could, he watched the walls, kept what his dad called a weather eye out for what he might see. But they were walking too briskly for him to glimpse anything. And besides, he couldn't stop and look.

Charlie had a question for his mother. It was a question that he'd carried about with him for a few days. Walking alongside her, he tried it out in his mouth again, felt the words form and bulge against his tongue. He didn't really understand why it should be so, but he knew that it was a question she wouldn't want to hear. They'd said as much, the ones who'd told him it, and so he hadn't been able to ask it yet. If he could, he would forget the question altogether and just ask her what was for supper, or whether he could listen to Dick Barton on the wireless. But he had heard it too often now to get rid of it, and so he would have to say it to her.

There was a group of girls in the playground that all the boys kept a distance from. They were older than Charlie, but not a great deal older, and though they were bigger than him, it wasn't their size that made them alarming. He'd tried just the once to describe them, but his mother hadn't understood.

‘They don't like you,' he'd said. ‘They don't even like the other girls.'

She was chopping onions, her eyes streaming.

‘Well, you can't like everyone,' she'd said. ‘Anyway, they're only girls,' and that had made him look at his mother wide-eyed. Because she'd been a girl once, he supposed, and surely she knew what he meant.

Now the question was like a feather in Charlie's throat. It tickled and scratched and he couldn't quite catch hold of it.

Charlie knew the name of the tune she was singing, and if she asked him for it, then maybe he could ask her his question in exchange. A trade. But before they were home. It had to be before they were home.

The fish for supper shifted in Lydia's basket, the smell of it catching in the air with each back swing.

‘Poached or fried?' she said.

‘It hasn't got a head, has it?'

‘It used to. That's as bad, surely?' she said, in a voice that wasn't meant to, but which nevertheless carried a touch of disparagement.

Charlie shrugged.

‘Is Dad having it too?'

‘When he gets in, yes.'

Charlie swallowed. His heart banged in his chest.

‘Is he out, then? Now, I mean?'

He knew the answer.

‘Football practice,' she said. He looked up at her carefully, sidelong. There was no other thought in her face.

‘And then the pub. He'll have a good appetite when he gets in.'

The question loomed in Charlie's mouth. Lydia was thinking on something, lips puckered with concentration.

‘Mum, what's it mean, when …'

‘I could make a crumble,' she said, as if he wasn't there. ‘There's apples galore. His favourite.'

‘Mum?'

She looked down at him, her face bright, eager, unwilling to let in anything else.

‘Shall I do that? Put cloves with the apple. Sugar on top and brown it under the grill. For when he comes in.'

Charlie nodded. The boat had been good. The park had been good, and his mother on the hill there, watching. She was looking at him now. He squeezed her hand, something he wouldn't do often now in public.

‘Charlie?'

They were nearly home. He'd wanted to ask her something but he wouldn't say it. No need. It was Friday, he wouldn't be at school till Monday. He could see the tree outside their house, half empty of leaves already.

‘I'll help you,' he said. ‘I'll peel the apples.'

‘Peel them carefully and you can toss the skins. Find out the letter of your love.'

He grimaced. ‘I'm not going to marry. I don't like girls very much.'

Lydia laughed. ‘Everyone says that at your age.'

‘So what do they say at yours, then?'

‘Don't be so rude,' she said, and she cuffed him gently on the ear and then they were home.

Jean Markham wanted no more that evening than to sit for twenty minutes and watch her bees. There was nothing she needed to say, but she'd have liked just to sit. Then she'd put Peggy Lee on the gramophone and pour herself a Scotch. But she was late and there was no time for any of that. The house was quiet. Mrs Sandringham had gone a couple of hours earlier, home to her large boys and their impossible appetites, so nothing now disturbed the empty spaces.

She stopped in the hall and stood still, listening, waiting for the noises of her arrival to subside – the door slam, her footsteps on the tiles, the bump of her heart in its cavity, the dull echo from her dropped bag. The silence gathered itself around her shoulders, warm and possessive, and she put a hand to it as you might to a cat that had settled there, then climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

It was five years since Jean took on this house but it hadn't yet let her take possession. Built for a different cast and at a different time, with its breakfast room and dining room, servants' bells, maids' attic rooms papered in faded flowers, it seemed still to resist her efforts and her living. She occupied properly only a few rooms: her bedroom, the kitchen, sitting room. Her father's books in what she called, for a joke, her library. For the rest, the house rebuked her and her solitary state, needling her in vulnerable moments with things still
found, left behind in corners and cupboards, children's things especially – a marble under the doormat, a tin car mysteriously high up on the pantry shelf, a rubber duck in the airing cupboard, its dusty rump leaving a tideline in the basin when she rinsed it clean. It seemed to Jean as if these things had a will to be hidden. They had escaped her first-time clearing and cleaning and then come to light as if by their own volition, catching her unawares later.

Strangest of all to find was the lock of hair. She had been reading in a small room at the back of the house that caught the last of the late summer sun. The room was empty save for an old armchair, just bare boards and dust flowers in the corners, and two faded rectangles on the papered walls – tiny pink buds in green tracery – where two pictures must have once hung.

The cat had sat for a while on her lap, arranging herself, as cats do, to absorb the sun as best she could, till Jean had got too hot and lifted her down. She'd gone back to her reading then, till some odd movement had caught her eye and she'd looked up to see the cat across the room sitting back on her furry haunches, cuffing a paw in the air, as if half playing, half annoyed. Something was caught on her claw and, kneeling to her, Jean saw a snatch of red. Holding the cat firm, she unhooked a bow of dusty ribbon, shot with a thread of silver, and tied within it, a lock of fine, blond hair.

Probably the slip of hair and its ribbon had been caught between the floorboards. Probably that was what it was. But still, this particular scrap of other life unnerved her, as if she'd been playing peeping Tom to the strangers living here before her. As if she'd seen something she shouldn't.

It was Friday night and Jean was tired. Her neck hurt. She arched her shoulder blades back and round, hoping for some ease. A bath would have been nice, but she was invited for supper at eight so it would have to wait.

Perhaps because she looked so much at other people's bodies, Jean wasn't usually interested in her own. But tonight, changing out of her working clothes, she undressed entirely, dropped her underwear on the rug, and stood naked before the wardrobe glass. She looked at all the length of her.

‘Too tall to find a husband easily,' she said out loud with that rueful tilt of the mouth that even those who knew her well found so hard to read. The words had the status of an old truth, like other things understood in her family: that her grandmother had died without saying farewell to her daughter; that her mother had married beneath her; that they'd rather Jean had been born pretty than clever.

Wheeling her bicycle the short distance to supper, Jean paced her mood against the trees spreading high over the road. Their leaves shushed her feet, brittle and soft, and the clear, darkening sky was visible through their branches. Laying down her worries like this was an old trick, learned from something Jim had told her about, a Russian who couldn't stop remembering things and had made it into his trade. He'd remember lists of words by placing them in his mind up and down the streets of his home town, until his head was so full that he'd have to do the same thing to forget them, walking round the streets in his mind till he'd cleared the words away again.

So Jean leaned her worries up against the trees as she walked her way to supper, and by the time she had reached the twelfth elm, she had shrugged herself free, for now.

In the normal way of things, supper with Jim and Sarah Marston was as close to a family affair as Jean came. Jim opened the door to her before she could turn the handle, and held out a glass.

‘It's a weak one now; been waiting for you so long, the ice's melted.'

Jean shrugged off her coat and swapped him the glass for her bag.

‘You know not to put ice in my whisky,' she said.

‘You likely to be out tonight?'

She took a long sip. ‘No, but you never know.' She pointed up the stairs. ‘Are they?'

‘Waiting for you. Go and send them off.'

‘Them or me.' She blew him a kiss and went up the stairs.

The children smelled sweet and warm in their beds, doeeyed with near sleep.

‘Buzzz, buzzz,' Meg murmured as Jean took the book from the shelf. She kissed each of them on the forehead and sat on the chair between the beds.

‘From where we stopped before,' she said. ‘You remember, there's Wild Man and Wild Woman in their cave and Wild Dog has gone to them on account of the delicious smell of the mutton. You both listening?'

The two little girls nodded their heads into their pillows, and Jean began to read:

‘… Wild Horse stamped with his foot and said, “I will go and see and say why Wild Dog has not returned. Cat, come with me.”

‘“Nenni!” said the Cat. “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me. I will not come.” But all the same he followed Wild Horse softly, very softly, and hid himself where he could hear everything.'

She read on until the Cat went far, far away and then, with another light kiss for each sleeping girl, she stopped, put the book back in the shelf and turned off the light.

‘Sleep tight,' she said.

Jim watched Jean as she told them how their children slept. She spoke to the pair of them, but in truth she spoke
only to Jim. He took his time, as she talked, watching her, gauging how she was. He saw that she had changed her clothes for the evening. She wore stern two-piece suits for doctoring, but now she wore a summer dress that Sarah would probably tell him later had gone out of fashion several years ago. She had on the earrings her grandmother had left her, and her curly hair was getting long, so that she had to push it from her eyes more than once.