The Language of Bees (7 page)

M
Y HAND WAS STILL BRACED ON Holmes’ ARM, where I had steadied myself after walking into him, and I felt the shudder of effort run through him: Being controlled is nowhere near the same as being unfeeling.

But he could not control his voice, not entirely; when he spoke he was hoarse as a man roused from a long sleep. “God, boy. I thought you were dead.”

“Yes,” Damian said simply. “I’m sorry.”

Holmes started towards him, his hand coming out; instead of taking it, Damian stepped forward and embraced him. After the briefest hesitation, Holmes returned the greeting, with a fervour that would have astonished all but a very few of his intimates. Indeed, one might have thought Holmes had instigated the gesture, with Damian its more reluctant participant.

I moved towards the house, so as to leave them to their greetings, but the two men broke apart and Damian turned in my direction.

“And, Step-Mama,” he said, coming forward to plant a very French kiss on my cheek.

“Call me Mary,” I said firmly.

“I’ve come from London,” he said to his father, by way of explanation. “Uncle Mycroft caught me up on your news. When he told me you were
en route
from New York, I decided to come down last night and wait for you—he sent along a note to your helpful young housekeeper, so she wouldn’t set the dogs on me.”

I’d heard precisely five words out of him at our first meeting, but I found now that his accent was as charming as the easy flow of his words—there was French at its base, overlaid with American English and something more clipped: Chinese? His clothing was a similar mélange, the canvas jacket homespun and local whereas the shirt had travelled a long, hard way from its beginnings. His shoes were, I thought, Italian, although not bespoke.

The dogs were a figure of speech—Mycroft knew we had no dogs. The housekeeper, however, was not, and I thought the reason Damian mentioned her was that he had noticed her standing in the door to the house: Lulu had her strengths, but silence and discretion were not among them, and it would not take a long acquaintance with her to realise that it was best to watch one’s tongue when she was near.

“Pardon the interruption,” she said, “but I’ve fixed supper. Would you like to eat, or shall I put it into the ice-box?”

I spoke up, overriding Holmes’ wave of dismissal. “Hello, Lulu, how are you? Dinner would be greatly appreciated, thank you. Shall we come now?”

“If you like,” she said gratefully. And as the table had been laid and the food already in its serving bowls, it would clearly have been a vexation had we said, No, thank you.

Mrs Hudson would have marked our homecoming with Windsor soup, a roast, potatoes, gravy, three vegetables, and a heavy pudding; she would have been red of face, and waves of heat would have pulsed
from the kitchen doorway. Lulu, on the other hand, began with an interesting cold Spanish soup of finely chopped tomatoes and cucumber, then set down paper-thin slices of cold roast beef dressed with mustard and horseradish, a bowl of Cos leaves tossed with a light vinaigrette, and a platter of beetroot slices drizzled with pureed herbs—Lulu’s aunt ran the nearby Monk’s Tun inn, and the aunt’s teaching was why I, for one, was willing to put up with Lulu’s tendency to gab.

The two men ate what was before them, although I doubt either could have described it later. I, however, took second helpings of most, winning a beatific look as Lulu passed through with another platter.

In the presence of food and servants, conversation went from the summer’s weather to Mycroft’s health and then London’s art world. Of Mycroft, Damian knew little, apart from finding his uncle looking well, but it seemed that he had been in the city long enough to converse knowledgeably about the last.

As he sat at our table and held up his end of the small-talk, I began to sense that somewhere beneath his deliberate ease and charm lurked the edginess we had seen before. On reflection, this would hardly be surprising: Their first meeting had ended on a note of pure animosity, and if neither of them was about to bring it up, nor were they about to forget it.

I decided that what Damian was doing with his friendly shallow chatter was to illustrate that he had grown up, to show Holmes that the natural resentment of a boy whose father had failed him had been replaced by a man’s mature willingness to forgive, and to start again. That it was being done deliberately did not necessarily mean it was insincere.

Thirty-five minutes of surface conversation was as much as Holmes could bear. When my fork had transferred the last morsel of salad to my tongue, he waited until he saw me swallow, then stood.

“We’ll take our coffee on the terrace, Miss Whiteneck, then you may go home.”

“And thank you for that fine supper, Lulu,” I added.

“Er, quite.” Holmes caught up three glasses and a decanter on his way out of the door.

I followed with a pair of silver candelabras that I set on the stones between the chairs; the air was so still, their flames scarcely moved. The summer odours of lavender and jasmine combined with the musk of honey from the candles and after a minute, with the sharp tang of coffee. Lulu set the tray on the table, then retreated to the kitchen to do the washing-up. By unspoken agreement, while she remained within earshot, we sat and drank and listened to the rumour of waves against the distant cliffs.

I watched our visitor out of the corner of my eye, as, I am sure, did Holmes. The years had brought substance to the man, while the beard, and the candle-light, transformed his fragile beauty into something sharp, almost dangerous. More than mere weight, however, he had gained assurance: Bohemian or no, this was a man that eyes would follow, both women’s and men’s.

Lucifer, I’d thought him earlier, and I sat now with my coffee and mused over the idea. Originally, Lucifer was the name of Venus at dawn (Vesper being the planet at dusk). The prophet Isaiah had used the morning star’s transient brilliance as a metaphor for a magnificent and oppressive Babylonian king who, once the true sun rose across the land, would fade to insignificance. Jewish and Christian thought elaborated on Isaiah’s passage, building up an entire mythology around the person of Lucifer, fallen prince of angels, beloved of God, brought low by pride. Lucifer is, one might say, a failed Christ: Where Jesus of Nazareth bowed willingly to Pilate’s condemnation, accepting crucifixion as the will of God, Lucifer refused to submit: Subjecting himself to his inferiors, he declared, would be to deny the greatness of the God who made, loved, and chose him.

The story of Lucifer was, I reflected, a window on fathers and sons that Sigmund Freud might spend some time investigating.

The kitchen clatter had ceased. We now heard the sound of the front door opening, and closing; in response, Damian stood up and shrugged his coat onto the back of the chair, dropping his cravat over
it and turning up his sleeves as he sat again. His left forearm bore a dragon tattoo, sinuous and in full colour. He hadn’t had that when we had seen him before, I thought. He also hadn’t had the muscle that rippled beneath it.

Holmes set his empty cup on the table. “You’ve been in the East,” he said. “Hong Kong?”

“Shanghai. How
…?”

“The cut of your trousers, the silk of the cravat, the colour in that tattoo. How long have you been there?”

“Years.” He took out an enamelled cigarette case and a box of vestas: If he was anything like his father, tobacco signalled a lengthy tale.

The match flared and was pulled into the tobacco, then he shook it out and dropped it in the saucer.

“You remember meeting Hélène?” he asked us.

“Mme Longchamps, yes. The gallery owner.”

“She was a great deal more than that. She was my saviour. She died, just after Christmas 1919. I was … I had been going through a bad time. They ran in a kind of cycle, the bad times did, usually lasting two or three months before I grew sufficiently disgusted with myself to crawl back and let her nurse me to health. I no doubt contributed to her death—she was ill, with the influenza, but when I sent her a message to say I wanted to come home, she nonetheless got into a taxi and came to get me. A week later, I was sober and she was dead.

“I stayed for her funeral, and then I simply walked away. I knew that if I remained in Paris, I wouldn’t last the year. And although a part of me felt that might be for the best, to remove my sorry self from the world, at the same time I felt I owed Hélène a life. So I saw her into the ground and then I turned and walked across town to the Gare de Lyon, and boarded a train for Marseilles.

“The sort of ship that will take on a man with neither suitcase nor identity papers is fairly primitive, but I found one, the
Bella Acqua
, and signed on to work my way across the globe. No drugs, no parties, no paints, nothing but hard work, bad food, sea air, and a drawing pad for entertainment.

“I grew brown, I grew muscle, and at night—you can’t imagine the
dreams I’d had, before, but under that regimen, I’d fall into my bunk and sleep like a baby. Do you know what a blessing sleep can be?”

“Yes,” Holmes said.

Damian’s question had been rhetorical, but at Holmes’ answer he paused to squint at him through the smoke, then gave a thoughtful nod. “So, six months: across the Atlantic, working our way down the coast of Brazil, taking on rum and coir in one place, trading the rum for timber in another, buying hides farther down, transporting the odd passenger who might have needed to leave a town quickly and without notice—whatever took the Captain’s fancy. We rounded the Horn and worked our way up Chile to Mexico and San Diego, then set off across the Pacific. The Hawaiis, Japan.

“Finally, we came to Shanghai. Have you been there?”

“Once, briefly.”

“A seething mass of corruption and vice—I think you’d enjoy the straight-forward criminality of the place. I found it filled with temptation, which you’d have thought a poor choice for a man in my position, but I was hungry to join the world again.

“With nothing to spend my pay on, I’d accumulated enough to take a small room in a … well, I thought at first it was simply one of the compounds they have in the city—
Wong
houses, they’re called, with a number of units set into a series of courtyards, and a single entrance from the street. Within a day or two I couldn’t help noticing that there were rather a lot of young girls living there who had a series of older male visitors. The whole
Wong
was one pleasure-house compound. I eventually found out that my landlord had three such, and made a habit of installing one or two large young men in each to help keep the peace. He may have expected that I should eventually become a client myself, but in fact his girls were little more than children, and my taste has never run in that direction. I became a sort of brother to them, and they could practice their English and come to me with problems. I took a job in the afternoons, washing dishes in a noodle shop. It paid a pittance—I still had no identity papers, so my choice was limited—but it gave me two meals a day and mornings free.

“The mornings I needed for the light, because I’d started to paint again. Er, I think you knew, that…?”

For the first time, the young man’s self-assurance faltered, with the question of what his father had or had not known. Holmes rose and walked into the house; Damian gave me a sharp look that called to mind his father’s hawk-like arrogance, but I could only shrug.

Holmes came back carrying a flat object a foot wide and eighteen inches tall. He set it on the stones, propping it upright against an unoccupied chair.

“That’s his?” I exclaimed. “That’s yours?”

The unsigned painting had hung for years on a wall of Holmes’ laboratory upstairs, a puzzle to me, although I’d caught him studying it from time to time. Holmes owned little art, and had showed no interest, before or since, in a thing as jarringly modern—weird, even—as this one.

Damian picked it up to examine it by candle-light; his expression softened, although I could not tell what he thought of the painting, or of finding it here. “Yes, this is one of mine. From before the War.”

“I was told 1913,” Holmes agreed.

“I would have been nineteen. Imagine, being nineteen. It’s not bad, considering. How do you come to have it?”

“It came on the market in March 1920.”

Damian turned his hawk-gaze on Holmes. “It was one of Hélène’s?”

“Yes.”

Damian put the painting down again, and we all three studied it.

The canvas showed a bizarre dream-image of the sort that came to be called Surrealism. In technique it was masterful, closely worked and as detailed as a photograph. Its background was an English landscape: neat fields set inside hedgerows, a lane with a bicycle, a cow in the distance. On the horizon, white lines described the chalk cliffs where the South Downs fell into the Channel—not far from where we sat. In the foreground was a table, the weave of its spotless white cloth clearly shown, and on the cloth rested an object from a madman’s nightmare: Its front half was an everyday English tea-pot, blue and
white porcelain, but the back of it became a huge, distorted honeybee, every hair painted with precision, its wings set to quiver, its stinger exaggerated into a tea-pot’s handle, throbbing with menace.

I’d thought it an oddity, but now it was a revelation: At nineteen, a year after his mother’s death, Damian had definitely known who his father was. He had known of Holmes’ beekeeping avocation in his so-called retirement. He had painted this as a portrait of the famous man who had, to his mind, coldly abandoned mother and child. He had painted it with the consummate skill of a man, impelled by the fury of a scorned adolescent.