The God of the Hive (9 page)

I opened my mouth to pursue this oddity, but a small groan brought me back.
Focus
, I told myself:
Your brains have been knocked about and all the world looks odd
. “His injuries want attention,” I repeated.

The hairy man dropped into an easy squat, and a pair of surprisingly clean hands gently pushed aside the larger man’s blood-stained fingers. He looked into the pilot’s eyes and asked, “The bone’s not broken?”

“No,” Javitz answered through clenched jaws.

“This didn’t happen here.”

“I was shot.”

The green eyes travelled from Javitz to me and over my shoulder to Estelle, who had turned her back, literally, on the adults and was laying out a tea-party, supplementing the porcelain cup with acorn-caps and leaf-plates. He frowned, then jumped up and walked around to face her. She raised her head, and the green eyes went wide.

I found I had got to my feet and taken a step towards him, but he did not notice. Slowly, he lowered himself to his haunches. I watched, uncertain, as the two of them studied each other for the longest time. I could see his face clearly, but I could not begin to guess what he was thinking. He studied her face as if its features contained a message coded just for him.

Eventually, his gaze shifted, and he turned to scrabble at the leaf-mould, a small noise that startled my ears into noticing that the incessant engine noise was gone, that the noise of the flames was dying, that the ringing in my ears had given way to silence, blessed and profound.

He found what he was looking for, and held it out for Estelle’s approval: an acorn cup. After she had accepted it and added it to the others, he broke the stillness with a question. “Would you like to come to my house?”

“Yes, please,” she answered, without hesitation.

“Put those in your pocket, then. We’ll make some tea to go in them.”

“Thank you, Mr …”

“Goodman,” he supplied, and held out a hand to her. “But you can call me Robert.”

“My name is Estelle Adler,” she announced, and gave his hand two solemn shakes.

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Adler,” he said, and helped her to her feet.

Then he came back to us, with Estelle trailing after. He told Javitz, “If it’s not broken, there’s no point in a splint. Grit your teeth, friend.” And without so much as a grunt of effort, the small man slid his hands under the big American and lifted him like a child.

Goodman took half a dozen steps and vanished among the trees. I retrieved the fur coat, helped Estelle stash the last of the acorn cups in her pockets, and led her to the place where the men had disappeared. The narrow path between the trees would have gone unnoticed unless one had seen them go in. I glanced back at the now-smouldering wreck and took Estelle’s hand.

Three steps inside the green, she dug in her heels. With an ill-stifled groan, I bent to pick her up. She was not, in fact, heavy, and my tired arms forgot their bruises to welcome her.

Perhaps that was the answer to my earlier question, of how parents survived.

“It will be all right, Estelle,” I said. “I’m here.”

“But,” she piped in a worried voice, “shouldn’t we leave crumbs, so we can find our way out again?”

So it hadn’t been just my concussion: It would seem that we were actually setting forth into a fairy-tale.

Chapter 17

T
he fairy-tale impression only grew stronger as we followed our rescuer, whom my abused brain insisted on calling Mr Green. I had not known that England still possessed areas of ancient woodland such as this. The light, here in what could only be called a forest, was so dim that I followed him more by sound than by the occasional glimpses I caught of his back. Once, when the child in my arms grew heavy with sleep, I stopped to wrap the fur more securely around her; when I stood again, the noise ahead of me resumed.

It began to rain lightly, more a background susurration than actual drips through the leaves. We travelled through the green nowhere, never seeing more than a few feet to either side, following the rhythm of firm footsteps. The journey was timeless, the landscape featureless, my companions noisy ghosts.

Then the noise ceased. In moments, I stepped into a clearing, and glanced involuntarily upwards to check the sky: yes, still cloudy, which meant it was the real England. And despite the heavy grey, I thought no more than an hour had passed since the crash.

Goodman’s home confirmed the sensation that Hansel and Gretel could not be far away—or perhaps Titania and Oberon. The structure—hard to think of it as a house—stood off-centre in a lush meadow encircled by forest and punctuated by one magnificent oak tree. Once upon a time, the dwelling may have been a woodman’s hut, but was now a gallimaufry
of elements: A yellow-brick shed leant against a lichen-blotched stone hut butting up against a red-brick shack that was in turn held upright by a wooden lean-to that might have been built yesterday, the whole variously roofed with old moss-covered tile and slick new black slate and two sheets of rusted corrugated iron. The water tank perched on top looked like a joke, or a nesting-place for herons. The huge oak rose up thirty feet from the door, and might have been the home of fairies. At a slight remove stood another shed, this one wooden and apparently windowless, with a wired chicken-coop leaning to its side.

The faint aroma of wood-smoke in the air was the most real thing about it.

He had left the front door open, and I looked through into an unexpectedly light room of colour and wood. As I stepped in, I caught sight of Javitz’s legs, stretched out on a neatly made bed through an inner doorway. The Green Man—no, he had a name: Goodman—was in the act of spreading a thick duvet on the floor beside it. I followed him, going down on one knee to ease my sleeping burden onto the down pad; she made a faint protest in the back of her throat, then curled onto her side and was still. I left the fur around her and stood, kneading my upper arms and wondering why mothers didn’t resemble stevedores.

From the outside, the building had suggested an uncomfortable series of cramped spaces, but on the inside there were only two rooms. The bedroom was scarcely twice the size of the narrow bed it held, but the main room was spacious—or would be for a single inhabitant. It had a fireplace faced by two highly civilised soft chairs, a window with a long, padded window-seat at its base, a simple but sturdy wooden table, and a small kitchen consisting of a sink with a tap, a tiled work-surface, and a small wood-burning cook-stove.

As a whole, it resembled a windowed cave furnished by a jackdaw—or a child. One wall, floor to ceiling, was a collage of bright paper and small shiny objects, many of which looked as if they had been dug up in the woods: blue medicine bottles, bright labels from food tins, cut-out colour illustrations from ladies’ magazines, coins so old the features were worn away, bits of broken mirror glass, two mismatched hair-combs. In the centre was a spray of half a dozen feathers; around the wall, a wide
arc of horseshoes from pony to draught-horse traced a path through the jumble. The rest of the room was similar: a Japanese tea-pot without a spout held a handful of wildflowers; none of the curtains matched; the original upholstery of the chairs was hidden beneath a length of brilliant orange-flowered curtain and a blue and green Paisley, respectively. Still, it was surprisingly clean and smelt sweet, as if the floor had been strewn with rushes until an instant before we walked in.

Our host had tossed sticks onto the fire and set a kettle over the heat, and was now divesting himself of his outer garments. When hat and coat were on their hooks—a randomly arranged nest of sawed-off antlers—he finally turned to me, a short, slim man showing no effects of having carried over thirteen stone of man through the woods for three quarters of an hour.

It was difficult to know how old he was. Even without all that disguising hair, he had the kind of skin that conceals a man’s age until he turns eighty overnight. He moved like a man of thirty but spoke like someone twice that; when his face was still, he had the ancient gaze of a trench soldier; when he grinned, his teeth were uneven and slightly oversized, like an adolescent who had yet to grow into his mouth.

“Thank you for coming to our rescue,” I told him. “I’m Mary Russell. That man you’ve been carrying is my pilot, Cash Javitz. He’s an American. The child is my husband’s granddaughter, Estelle.”

“Robert Goodman,” he said.

It was on the point of my tongue to say,
Not Robin Goodfellow?
but that was the concussion speaking.

Oddly, a twinkle in his emerald eyes suggested that he guessed the fanciful direction of my thoughts. I shook off the idea: stick to facts. “We started this morning in Orkney. I think Mr Javitz had hoped to make it to Manchester, but the machine rather came to pieces around us.”

“So I saw. Something to eat, then?”

“I think—”

But he had already snatched two large onions and a handful of carrots from a basket under the work-table, and set them beside a small knife and a heavy iron pan. “Chop these while I see to your pilot.”

I eyed the proceedings dubiously—I am no cook—and instead followed
Goodfellow to the bedroom. There he gently removed the half-conscious man’s remaining boot before pulling a long, well-honed knife from somewhere about his person and, with one deft motion, slit the blood-soaked remnants of the trousers from cuff to belt.

He looked over the leg without touching it, then picked up a flowered bowl and bar of soap and pushed past me to spill water into it from the heating kettle. I was encouraged to see him scrub his hands. He even poured that water into the sink and refilled the bowl before bathing Javitz’s wound.

It was messy, a ten-inch furrow up the outside of his thigh. Because of the circumstances, it had bled a lot, but bar infection, I thought it would heal without permanent effect.

“Would stitches help?” I asked my host.

He shook his head. “They’d pull.”

I watched him work, cleaning the wound and examining the portions that were still bleeding, but those stubby hands knew what they were doing. “You’ve done this sort of thing before,” I remarked.

“He … A friend …” He stopped to concentrate on the wound.
“I
was an ambulance driver in the War. Lent a hand in the dressing stations when I was needed. One picks things up.”

It was a peculiar idea, Ariel strolling through the fourth act of
Henry V
—then I pushed the thought away, hard: Clearly, it would take a while for my brain to settle.

I left our unlikely medic to his repairs, and went to address the problem of the onions and carrots, about which I will say only that I succeeded in not giving my host another major wound to dress.

Chapter 18

T
he remainder of Saturday passed in snippets of memory, cut from whole cloth and rearranged by the blow my head had taken:

After we ate, I lay dozing on a surprisingly comfortable if much-repaired deck chair beneath the big oak tree. The late-afternoon sun had broken through; someone had put a warm wrap over me.

Estelle and Goodman were sitting on a pair of upended firewood rounds, a third round between them as a table. On it the child had arranged an impromptu tea-service. The participants were Estelle, Goodman, and a bedraggled once-purple stuffed rabbit lifted from his sitting room wall, with a fourth setting for the fawn he had told her might come by. The plates were mismatched saucers from Goodman’s kitchen, the cups were two acorns, a small tea-cup, and her treasured porcelain dollies’ cup. The tea-pot was a creamer lacking a handle, decorated with the Brighton Pier and a generous stripe of gilt. A silver salt bowl and spoon made for a scaled-down sugar bowl. A clean khaki-coloured handkerchief was the tablecloth.

Goodman solemnly stirred a spoonful of nonexistent sugar into the dollies’ cup, which was scarcely larger than the salt spoon. He raised it to his lips and sipped noisily, then held it out to admire.

“This is very pretty,” he remarked.

“I have the others, at home,” she informed him. “That’s in London.”

“You only brought the one?”

“Mary brought it. She found it where I’d left it, at a friend of my Mama’s.”

“That was thoughtful of Mary.”

“Papa bought it for me in Shanghai, before we left. He gave it to me so I would have a reason to remember how beautiful the city was. But I don’t, really.”

“Still, it was a nice thought.”

“Mr Robert, do you think the baby deer will come out? Or should we give his serving to the bunny?”

Later that afternoon: I was now on a settee before the fireplace, while Estelle helped prepare supper, scrubbing potatoes while our host kneaded bread on a board.

“There’s a lot of potatoes,” she said in mild complaint.

“You can stop if you’re tired.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“Sometimes when I’m doing a tedious job, I keep myself busy by singing.”

“I like to sing.”

“I thought you might. Do you want to sing something for me?”

She happily launched into a merry song with Chinese words. Despite the foreign tonality of the melody, her voice was pure and precise, skipping up the half tones without missing a one. At the end, Goodman clapped in an explosion of flour. I joined him, although the impact reverberated through my skull.

“Ha!” he laughed. “That was very fine. You must teach it to me one day.”

“You sing now,” she ordered.

Perhaps the task at hand or the demands of the kneading rhythm brought the song to mind: Goodman threw back his head and, in a rich and unexpected baritone, began to sing.

There were three men came from the west their fortunes for to try,
And these three made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die
.

I stirred and tried to catch his eye, but he was well launched into the song and beat his bread dough with gusto. I subsided; surely the child was too young to understand the words?

It is a rousing tune, to be sure, and he did skip over the more adult verses—it is a very old song, and whether it is a paean to fertility sacrifice, an evocation of Christian Transubstantiation, or simply a drinking song, John Barleycorn is put through the wringer—hacked, beaten, ploughed, sowed, and buried—before he is reborn as beer, and finally sprouts up anew. Goodman sang and thumped his bread, raising a fine mist of flour in the room.