Tell it to the Bees (29 page)

‘I hate him. He's dead. Now you know.'

He had his own bedroom in Dr Markham's house, and his own name on the door, carved in metal like the doctor's name on her door. He had his own desk, and shelves on the wall that went up higher than he could reach. All the things he'd ever found could go there. For the best things, the smallest, most special ones, Dr Markham had given him a wooden box. It was a box that used to be hers, for her most special things. It had gold lines set into the wood and tiny drawers. There was a tiny shell still in the corner of one of the drawers. Dr Markham had told him it was for luck. It was pink, like his finger, and ridged like a washboard. He kept the box on the table by his bed, and some of the drawers he left empty for the future.

Charlie thought the shell had already brought him some luck. When he went to school in the morning, his mother stood on the doorstep and smiled and blew him a kiss that he pretended not to see. She didn't go to the factory and then come home in the dark so tired that he was frightened, when she fell asleep, that she wasn't going to wake up.

It was odd, how happy she was in Dr Markham's kitchen, in Dr Markham's house, but Charlie was glad of it.
Glad that she sang songs again; glad she didn't cry any more; glad she had her book propped open with a weight again. He didn't need to worry any more, when he wasn't there.

Sometimes in the evening, if it could be early enough, they all ate supper together and that made him happy too. His mother would tell stories about the factory to make them laugh, and Dr Markham would tell stories about doctoring so that his mother put her hands over her ears. But most often he ate his tea on his own; though his mother often sat with him, he felt sad.

‘Are you happy, Charlie?' his mother would ask, and he always said yes, because he wanted to see that look on her face, made for him and no one else. But perhaps if it had been dark, then he'd just have shrugged.

Charlie's bedroom was next to the study, and then there was the bathroom. There were big tiles around the bath in blue and white and if Charlie pinched his eyes nearly shut, they looked like the sea. When you ran the water, it made the walls groan.

‘Sounds like your grandfather,' his mother said, but he'd never met his grandfather, so he didn't know if that was true.

The bath was long, so long, he could lie with his head back and float and listen to his heartbeat till the water was tepid and his skin was white at the edges.

His mother's bedroom was across the landing, next to Dr Markham's. It was only a little room, with a bed like his, so that her counterpane had to be folded to fit. Dr Markham said it used to be a dressing room, where all the clothes were kept, and that's why it had such a big wardrobe, and two doors: one out on to the landing, and the other through to Dr Markham's bedroom. His mother put her chair against this door because there wasn't anywhere else to put it, and her clothes left half the wardrobe empty.

The first day they moved into Dr Markham's house, Lydia had told Charlie to come and find her if he needed to, night or day, it didn't matter. She'd gripped his shoulders so he'd know she meant it. Since they moved there, Charlie had woken in the night a few times. Twice he'd heard Dr Markham go out to a call, the motor car pulling away into silence, but the other times he couldn't have said what it was that woke him. Except that it wasn't nightmares and he wasn't upset, so he'd lain there with his eyes open, listening to the dark, till sleep had caught him up again.

But the night of the thunderstorm was different. Charlie was deep under when the first clap of thunder dug him from his dreams and flung sleep against the bedroom wall. It woke him so suddenly that for a minute he didn't know where he was, or whether he was sleeping or waking and he lay rigid against the sheets, eyes seeing nothing, hands over his ears, heart pounding, while the darkness echoed. Then the noise died away and there was silence. No rain, no wind, no nothing. Turning on to his side, he tucked his hands beneath his head, safe between the pillow and the cool sheet, and closed his eyes again.

Years ago, frightened by another storm, Charlie had scrambled down the stairs and found his parents on the sofa. Snuggled between them, head on his mother's lap, feet snug beneath his father's elbow, he'd fallen back to sleep, cradled in the sound of their conversation, cocooned against the storm.

And when the lightning broke now from the sky, cracking Charlie's eyelids open, filling the room with its blue dance, he was scared again, fear chasing up and down his body, and he longed to be there, tucked inside his parents' voices.

‘Mum,' he cried out, but his voice was small inside the weather.

Heart racing, he got out of bed and opened his bedroom door. The storm had its eye on the house and the landing shook with thunder; the windows rattled with rain.

Charlie tugged open Lydia's door and made for the bed.

‘Mum,' he said, his voice calmer now he was here, now he was close to her, and he reached down to the covers to put his hands on her shoulder, to shake her awake. But the bed was unslept in, the counterpane pulled tight over the pillows.

Charlie froze and for a second everything felt far away from him and he stood quite alone. Then he cried out again into the chilled, hard air for his mother.

Seconds later, Lydia was there with him, her arms around him, holding him tight to her. Charlie buried his head against her, dug his fists into her sides.

‘I was scared,' he said, ‘and then you weren't there.'

‘But I am now. Sshh, sshh, it's all right,' she said, sitting down on the bed with him and rocking him in her arms. She smelled of sleep.

‘Don't walk under pylons when there's lightning,' she murmured.

‘Dad,' Charlie said sleepily. ‘It's what Dad says.'

They stayed like that till he was drifting and then she picked him up to take him back to his bed. In this half-sleep, his eyes heavy, Charlie saw that the chair with his mother's clothes over was moved and the door to Dr Markham's room open.

‘Is Dr Markham there?' he said, as Lydia tucked him into his bed and she stroked his hair and shushed him back to sleep.

The roads were empty and Jean drove fast to get home. Her mind ran with the wheels, steering tight to the straightest, fastest route. She was a woman in love. There was no point in taking the corners gently or pretending any different, not to herself at least.

The last visit on her list that day had taken Jean out beyond the edge of town, and she was tired now, her eyes weary. As she drove along the narrow lanes, the trees dipped in at her, their empty branches veering into the headlights, and she glimpsed strange creatures that slipped away beyond the spoons of light from the headlamps.

The visit hadn't been easy and, until recently, Jean would have played it over in her mind afterwards, working out what she could have done differently, defending herself from all her self-accusation. But tonight she left the patient where she was; and instead her thoughts travelled, light and slender, strong as a spider's thread, up over the roofs and gardens, over the factory and the park, across the pond with its first glint of ice, to home.

As she pulled into the garage, the headlamps lit up Charlie's bike leaned against the near wall, and the small trestle table covered with bits of rock and pebble, set up for his fossil hunt. A trowel and a sieve were lined up at one end together with a notebook and pencil. She picked up each thing, and then put each back in place. Charlie
was careful in his arranging of things, and half of it was play and half of it was deadly serious. She knew because she recognized the same trait in herself.

So good, this was. This was what it was to be happy. Friday, home, tired, the lights on in the house and somebody else here. Rocks and oddments and Lydia's bucket of bulbs in a corner, ready for their winter soil, and a kiss to be snatched in the pantry and the promise of this woman's love.

Charlie nearly toppled Jean with his sense of importance as she came in, running up close before she'd had a chance to put down her bag.

‘They're coming round now. I thought I could help with it, because she needs honeycomb for her homework, but you're back so that's better …'

He paused and took in Jean, still in her coat and scarf, still holding her black bag.

‘If you didn't mind, I thought I could help her out,' he went on, more slowly.

Jean nodded. ‘Good idea,' she said. ‘Who's coming round now?'

‘And Bobby's going to come over at the weekend,' he said, his thoughts in their own gauge. ‘We're going to make things for the den.' He paused. ‘Who?'

‘Charlie, who's coming now?'

‘Meg and Emma and Mrs Marston. Maybe Mr Marston later …' but he was already running on, away into the house, marshalling his equipment for the girls, ready to instruct them, to play.

Jean watched as he ran off and wondered what he understood. The night of the storm, Lydia had been terrified and so angry with herself.

‘If he'd seen me in your bed. Imagine if he had.'

‘He wouldn't have understood,' Jean said, but she knew he understood something already, despite their care and restraint.

*

Jean closed her eyes and listened to the noise. Voices, clutter, the flurry of more than one life in the house. The meal was impromptu, a casserole filled out with carrots, potatoes, swedes, to feed the extra mouths, apples stewed up with sugar and raisins to keep the little girls going a while longer.

Charlie had presented the jar of honeycomb, together with a detailed drawing of a portion of a hive.

‘That's how I met Dr Markham,' he said. ‘Because I'd hurt my ribs and there was the wooden honeycomb in her surgery.'

‘But it wouldn't help your ribs, would it?' Emma said.

‘No, silly. But he asked about it. Didn't he?' Meg said, turning to Jean.

‘He did, and we discovered that some great minds have the same passions, and now look where we are,' Jean said, her swift glance catching Lydia's cheek, and Sarah's eye.

‘So tell us, Charlie, how the bees make their comb,' Jim said, and as Charlie told, Jean looked at the faces around the table and basked.

The conversation turned and turned about. The children got down from the table, Charlie leading the way upstairs. The adults lit cigarettes. Jean brought out the whisky.

She described a house she'd been to for the first time, and how she'd walked through three rooms between newspapers piled almost to the ceiling to find her patient.

‘Corridors made of newsprint and somewhere down them the voice of my patient, telling me to hurry up and to shut the door firmly. She can't have thrown away a newspaper for decades. Every now and then I'd get a headline in the eye – the top page of a dusty stack – and there were some that took me straight back to my childhood. The General Strike. My mother thought the leaders should be shot, usually over her breakfast coffee.'

She laughed. ‘When I finally found the patient, we had quite a nice chat and then I examined her, wrote a prescription and left, thinking, well, it's not how I want to live, but I don't think she's mad.'

Then Sarah told a story about an old lady she'd visited as a child, carrying the basket of groceries for her mother, and Jim asked could he please have some of the stewed apple, now the children had finished with it.

Lydia fetched Jim a bowl for his fruit.

‘So how are you finding it, working here?' Sarah said as Lydia passed her some apple. ‘She's not playing her jazz records at all hours I hope?' Sarah said, and before Lydia could reply, Jim interrupted.

‘Anyway, if she causes you any trouble, you'll have to give me a call. I'm her oldest friend, and that comes with certain privileges and responsibilities.'

‘Jim,' Jean said, his words touching and exasperating her. But Jean knew that there was another, unspoken conversation going on here, a quizzing of this unusual friendship. She often forgot about their differences now; Lydia a factory worker and herself a doctor, middle class to the marrow. She forgot that in the normal scheme of lives, even their friendship was unusual. Housekeepers didn't sit down to supper with their employers. Not like this.

Lydia took a sip of her whisky and Jean watched her wince. It wasn't a taste she was used to and she put the glass down with a degree of certainty that suggested to Jean she might be a little drunk. Then she grinned, as if resolved upon something.

‘She is a good employer,' Lydia said. She put a hand to her neck and turned to find Jean's eyes. ‘Only,' she said, tapping a finger to the table, her expression serious, or was it mock-serious, ‘only she does have this habit.'

Jean broke in, banging her glass on the table in melodramatic fashion.

‘I need more whisky, if my housekeeper is going to give away my trade secrets,' she said, pushing the glass towards Jim. ‘Come on then, what is it that I do?'

Lydia frowned slightly, as if running through a list of recollections. ‘I'll mention the gravest,' she said, ‘and leave the minor ones for another time.'

‘Which is?' said Jim, grinning.

‘You're enjoying this too much,' she said.

‘Which is that she's very good with her patients. Diligent, attentive, thorough, never turns anyone away, even if she's about to shut up shop. But she will overfeed the fish. Every time she walks through the waiting room, she dips a finger in the fish food and sprinkles it over. I've seen it happen a dozen times. I swear, those fish swim to the top when they see her coming now.'

‘That's outrageous,' Jean said, smiling. She loved this edge of humour that surfaced in Lydia nowadays.

Lydia raised her hands, palms upwards, affecting a disingenuous shrug. ‘The fish will simply sink under their own weight soon,' she said.

‘And that's simply not true, my love,' Jean said, laughing. ‘It's an atrocious lie.'