Tell it to the Bees (23 page)

Lydia didn't know how long they stood like that in the
silence, in the dark hall, while she traced Jean's face with her fingers – around her jaw, her straight nose, feeling her smile, which came out of one side of her mouth when she was nervous. She ran a finger over her eyebrows feeling for, but not finding, the fine scar cut through above her left eye from a childhood fall. She touched her cheeks, the skin and the handsome cheekbones. This woman with her waiting face, her waiting body.

It seemed that she had waited all her life to be here. This time, when they kissed, there was nowhere else to go, no other place to be. Jean took her arms from the wall and closed them around Lydia, her fingers pressed into the small of her back and Lydia felt something she had never felt before, the curve of another woman's breasts against her body.

So close they were, so still, the force of Jean's heart beat in with her own. Gently, slowly, she kissed Jean's mouth again. She tasted Jean's lips with her tongue, their slight roughness giving way to something so smooth.

Lydia paused, suddenly unsure, and lowered her head away and down. What if Jean didn't want this? What if she didn't know how to say? But then Jean's fingers were on her face, touching, stroking, and under her chin, lifting her head, and Jean's mouth was on hers. They kissed again, thirsty, mouth on mouth, tongues exploring, hands restless with desire. Till Lydia couldn't bear it and she pulled away.

Around them, the house slept; the old pipes and the floorboards, the high, dusty ceilings over empty rooms. Lydia listened.

‘Is it Charlie?' Jean said. ‘Or is it what we've just done, kissing, do you think, that …'

Lydia shook her head and wiped her eyes.

‘I never imagined,' Jean said. ‘I've heard about such things but still I never let myself imagine.' She turned to
Lydia. ‘You walked through the night and rang the doorbell and then …'

‘I didn't know, don't know what I'm doing,' Lydia said. ‘When I dance, it's you I dance with. I think about you all the time. I don't understand, but I'm so tired with keeping it in.'

‘Is it about me, or Charlie? Or your husband?'

Lydia nodded. ‘Everything. But please not now. I don't want to talk about it all now.'

‘Why don't you sleep a little,' Jean said, ‘and then I could drive you home?'

Lydia shut her eyes. ‘No. I can't leave Charlie alone any longer.'

‘Then I'll take you straight home. He won't even know you've been out.'

Lydia had never been so hungry before. She'd never felt this clamour, this need. In the weeks since that nighttime walk, she made her way through her days with a constant nag in her side that pulled at her thoughts and marked out the time till she could next see Jean. She wanted this woman. She wanted to be naked before her, to feel Jean's hands on her skin, wanted Jean to kiss her; not only her mouth and her face and her neck, but further, and harder. Sitting on the assembly line, shopping, cooking, playing cards with Charlie or chivvying him, and most especially when she lay down to sleep, her longing bruised her eyes and flushed her skin.

‘You're not listening, Mum,' she'd hear Charlie say, and she'd shake her head to clear it, blushing as though he could see what she'd been thinking, and she'd ask him to repeat himself. At work she felt as if an invisible wall separated her from the other women. She could see their lips moving, their hands gesturing, could see their heads go back as they let out a laugh, but they sounded as if they were in a different room from her.

When they met, Lydia and Jean talked with the same hunger that they kissed with, urgently, as if to make up for lost time. Each wanted to know what the other had experienced – what they felt, thought about, hated, desired.

‘We had a stray cat for a while,' Lydia said. ‘My mum
took to feeding her and she moved in. She slept on my bed. But my father didn't like it and she disappeared. He said she'd got run over, but I think he drowned her.'

‘That's horrible.'

‘That's how he is. Always puts things out of sight that he doesn't like. Kills them off, if he can. What about you?'

‘We had cats and dogs, and I loved the dogs especially. Barney and Bruno. They went right through my childhood. Lived outside, used to get fed by the kitchen door. Every couple of weeks the cook would boil up a sheep's head, which stank the whole way down the back corridor.'

‘Sheep's head. But just for the dogs, surely?'

Jean laughed. ‘Yes, for the dogs. But we got fed in the kitchen as children, and if the cook had been boiling the head that day, the smell used to make me retch.'

‘You didn't eat with your parents?'

‘Not till I was about fifteen. I'd still much rather have stayed in the kitchen.'

‘Is that why you eat in there now?' Lydia said.

‘Perhaps,' Jean said. She ran her finger down Lydia's cheek. ‘Come and eat there with me soon. I'll make you my one-pot wonder. I invented it when I was a medical student and hadn't money for much of anything. But it's delicious.'

Lydia nodded, listening out for any noises – Charlie was long tucked up, but they must be careful – and then she stroked Jean's hair.

‘I will,' she said.

Sometimes their talk would take a different turn, and one or the other would speak of their fear. What if someone found out about them? What then?

‘But we've only kissed each other,' Lydia said.

‘When I was a medical student, I read books that said that what we've done is the sign of a condition, or an illness.'

‘Something you catch?' Despite her dismay, Lydia laughed.

Jean nodded. ‘Or something you're born with, like a club foot.'

Lydia drummed her fingers. ‘But you don't think that, do you? Besides, I've been married ten years. I've got a son. I never dreamed I'd want to kiss any woman, not till I met you.'

‘Inverts. That's what the books call us.'

‘You were engaged once.'

‘We often like cigars …'

‘What?'

‘… and the colour green.'

‘I don't like cigarettes very much,' Lydia said.

‘Maybe you're not one then,' Jean said. ‘I don't like there being a word for what I feel. A medical word. It makes it sound unnatural and joyless, and it isn't like that. I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know what to do. Except that I want to do it with you.' She laughed. ‘I would never have dreamed of kissing Jim the way I want to kiss you.'

‘Did you go out with him then?'

‘He wanted to marry me and I knew that I didn't want him to.'

‘Jean, what would happen if someone found out about us? What would happen to you?'

Jean shut her eyes. ‘I'd probably lose my job. People would go to other doctors. Nobody would ask me for supper. Except maybe Jim, because we're such old friends. I'd have to leave the town, I think.'

‘If we were men, we could go to prison. Those men got convicted last year and whatever they did, it was inside their own homes,' Lydia said.

‘I remember there were two women who graduated the year before me, and they were going to set up in general
practice together. I'm sure they were … I heard them talking about it. But I didn't think anything of it.'

‘Are they all right?'

Jean nodded. ‘So far as I know.'

Lydia thought of Charlie, asleep upstairs. Then she pictured all the women at the works, imagined walking into the canteen.

‘I wouldn't want people to think anything of us, either,' she said.

As she cycled to and from work, Lydia travelled in her mind. Her fears fell away, anything seemed possible, and she got lost in her thoughts. So she was still worlds away on the afternoon that Charlie came running out of the back door with a letter in his hand.

‘I don't know where it's from,' he said eagerly, impatient for her to open it.

She stood her bike against the yard wall, lifted out her groceries and handbag, and smiled at her son.

‘Let me get inside, Charlie, then I'll look at the letter.'

With Charlie at her elbow, Lydia examined the envelope. She couldn't decipher the postmark, except that it wasn't their town, and she didn't recognize the handwriting. Opening it, she took out the single sheet of Basildon Bond.

The letter was typewritten and short. It began with the heading:
Notice Seeking Possession
. Lydia's sight blurred. She put a hand on the chair back to steady herself. Then, lifting the letter out of Charlie's reach, she read quickly.

She'd known this would happen, though she'd put it out of her mind. But still the news came as a shock. Folding the letter, she sat down.

‘Mum?' Charlie said. ‘What's happened, Mum?'

‘I need a few minutes on my own. Leave me be for a bit.'

Lydia closed her eyes. She crossed her arms, drew up her shoulders and tucked her hands into her armpits. Once, when she'd been very small, on a winter day, her uncle had carried her home from the fair inside his jacket, buttoned up so close that her hands were pressed into her sides. She remembered how it felt, to be held so firm she couldn't move.

Nauseous with panic, Lydia walked to Dot's. She kept Charlie close to her, calling him back to heel like a puppy, each time he strayed away. He didn't ask any more questions, but every few minutes he'd look up at her, and she'd glimpse his worried face. Every bone of her ached to keep him safe, and as they walked she struggled with unruly fears that taunted her and picked at her skin. Somewhere in her thoughts, Jean stood, smiling but uncomprehending. She couldn't know this kind of terror, coming from her order of life.

‘Just looking at you I've got the kettle on,' Dot said when she opened the door. ‘Get in here, girl.'

She patted the back of Charlie's head, and fished a couple of pennies out of her apron.

‘Charlie, go on up and find Janie. These need spending. Don't disturb us till you're shouted for.'

In the kitchen, two more children were squabbling over a cat. Shushing them out and shutting the door, Dot sat Lydia down and put a finger to her lips. It was only when she had sipped from a cup of sweet, strong tea that Dot allowed her to speak.

‘I know the answer to this,' said Dot, after Lydia had showed her the letter, ‘but I've got to make sure so I'll ask anyway. Robert won't pay anything towards the rent. Is that right?'

Lydia nodded.

‘There's nothing I can do to make him. I know you say
I can take him to court to make him pay up, but I don't think I could do it.'

‘Bloody men. Think they've a God-given right to be better off than the women. Work, marriage, divorce, the lot. They do less, get paid more and act like they own the place. And we let them.'

‘Dot,' Lydia said. ‘Please.'

‘Anyway, taking him to court would take an age and you've only got a month,' Dot said.

‘If it came to it, Robert would leave town rather than pay me anything.'

‘I'd say good riddance.' Dot gave a fierce poke at the contents of the pot on the stove. ‘But it doesn't solve your problem. Got any savings? Anything on the divi?'

Lydia shook her head.

‘You never mention your family. What about them?'

‘My mother's dead. My father cut me off when Charlie was born. Said I'd married beneath me. Said it wasn't what he'd intended for me. I had an uncle who would have gone to the ends of the earth for me, but he died in the war.'

Dot sat down and took Lydia's hands in her own.

‘Why didn't you say something before?'

‘Wasn't going to change anything. I've been working all the hours I could.'

‘But a problem shared … you know.'

‘I had enough on my plate already. Didn't want to think about it. So I thought I'd just wait for the worst to happen and then decide what to do.'

They ate tea at Dot's and walked home in the last of the evening light. Buoyed up by her friend, Lydia played cards with Charlie and kissed him goodnight with a smile he didn't question.

Then she wrote a list:

1. Father

2. Classifieds

3. To sell?

4. Take in ironing?

Her father wouldn't have much he could spare her. Besides which, she didn't even know if he was alive. But she must write and tell him of his grandson – how his eyes were like his grandfather's and how he had his quick, strong fingers. She must write as though she believed he still loved her and she must ask him to help her. Though, unless he'd won the pools, his help wouldn't make the difference between staying and having to go.

Then on Thursday she would buy a paper and look in the Classifieds. Better to know the worst. Better to know where they might be living the month after next, though the thought of Charlie – her clear, bright boy – in some horrid, festering place made her face hot with anger.

Despair sat like a fiend at her shoulder, ready to lurch out if she should let go her concentration. The room grew cold as Lydia sat with the pencil in her fingers. Night climbed in through the uncurtained windows and a brisk autumn wind played its havoc down the chimney. She stared at the table and willed her mind to be still. She corralled crumbs into a heap with one finger, pressing it down to gather them up, then flicking them away. She did it again, watching them scatter and fleck.

‘Remember what Dot said,' she murmured. ‘Just think in little bits. Not all at once. Little bits.'

Somewhere in the room she could hear a song being sung and it was Robert's voice, keening and sweet: ‘The trees they grow so high / And the leaves they do grow green …'

But he was somewhere else, singing to another woman. Too tired for rage, Lydia cried quietly.

She must have been sitting at the table for a good while when Jean knocked on the window. She got up cold and stiff.