Tell it to the Bees (11 page)

He was stood in the middle of the hall with an expression she didn't immediately recognize.

‘Mum,' he said in a fierce whisper, and Mrs Weekes looked across at him.

‘Aren't they lovely, Charlie?' she said, and it was only when he nodded – a small, reluctant nod – that Jean understood. He was embarrassed.

‘Charlie, will you show your mother round the garden? And remind me to cut a bunch of irises for you before you go.'

Jean watched mother and son through the kitchen window, Charlie taking his mother by the hand, tugging at her to be quicker. They were down by the pond by the time she'd taken out the tea things, Charlie pointing at the rushes. He picked something off a stem and held it in his palm for his mother to see, and she looked down at his hand and said something that made him butt her softly at the waist, like a calf with its mother.

Jean paused, walking down. She had seen these two together somewhere else and she stood absolutely still, trying to place the memory. But it wouldn't come, and so she carried on towards them, feeling like an extra, a walk-on part. She had an odd sensation that she didn't quite recognize, and if Charlie or his mother had turned round at this point, they would have seen a scowl on her face. She waited for Charlie to bend to the pond again before joining them.

The two women stood watching the boy, until Jean felt she should make conversation.

‘Charlie said he's always lived in the town. But I'd hazard a guess that you're not from round here,' she said.

‘I met Charlie's father in London during the war. It's him who comes from the town.'

‘So Charlie's got family here?'

‘Yes,' Mrs Weekes said, and her tone made Jean look round, but she didn't add anything more. ‘We had an allotment, growing up,' she said instead. ‘I loved it there. I've got pots in the yard now. They're pretty, but it's not the same.'

‘I'm very lucky,' Jean said. ‘I don't really have time to keep it under control, though I think Charlie likes this wild part best.'

Charlie stood up, hands cupped, elbows dripping pond water.

‘Look, Mum,' he said.

She lifted his covering hand, and in his palm a tiny green frog sat. She looked at the frog, and the frog looked back.

She smiled. ‘Reminds me of you.'

‘Why?' Charlie said. ‘It's an amphibian and it lives in a pond.'

‘Because it's new and very small. When you were barely born you already had fingernails and eyelashes. Tiny but perfect.'

Charlie winced and wriggled his shoulders, then ducked under her arm and crouched back at the pond's edge.

Watching this easy intimacy, Jean knew what the earlier feeling was. She was jealous. Jealous that Charlie showed the small frog in her pond in her garden to his mother first. Jealous because if Mrs Weekes hadn't been here, he'd have shown it to her. Uncomfortable with the feeling, she became cheery.

‘Come on now. The lemonade will be getting warm.'

Afterwards, Jean couldn't recall what they talked of during tea. She gave Charlie his beekeeping things – gloves, suit, veil – and his eyes went wide with pleasure.

‘It's Mrs Sandringham you have to thank,' she said.

Thinking back afterwards, she fancied that Charlie did a lot of the talking. His mother told him he was like a king
sitting there, and they his courtiers, and he laughed with pleasure and Jean smiled to herself, seeing her guests so at ease.

Later, the two women watched Charlie run full tilt the length of the lawn and disappear from sight, and at some point Mrs Weekes owned to being an avid reader.

‘Detective novels mostly,' she said. ‘But I'll try anything. Sometimes there's nothing new in the library, so I'll pick books out of the General Fiction.'

‘Anything you don't like?' Jean said.

‘The girls all swap romances at work.'

‘Charlie told me you work at the wireless factory.'

‘Nearly ten years there.'

‘It must be the biggest employer in the town. For women.'

‘Not many other places to get work. They know that too. No sick pay, and they're very tight if you've got a child sick, anything like that.'

‘I've seen a fair few accidents from there,' Jean said. ‘Soldering burns, wire cuts. That kind of thing.'

‘I've been lucky so far with accidents,' Lydia said. ‘It's dull work, but you need to concentrate. I've always been able to do that. Not get distracted.'

‘Is that how you read books as well?'

Lydia laughed.

‘I suppose so. How I do most things. Something Charlie's got from me. He gets lost in things too.'

She looked at Jean, such a direct look that Jean felt herself blush slightly.

‘What about you? Do you like reading?'

And Jean confessed to having a whole library of books and never reading any of them.

‘My father left them to me. Because, even if I didn't read them, he knew I wouldn't sell them.'

‘And you haven't?'

Jean shook her head.

‘They have a room all to themselves in the house. Only the cat sometimes for company, when the fancy takes her.'

They must have talked for quite a while, because eventually Charlie returned, impatient to try his new equipment.

Putting his mother in the best place to watch, he lit the smoker and puffed it gently to quieten the bees, as Jean had shown him.

‘It's how I got my first stings,' Charlie said. ‘Annoying the bees.'

‘Annoying them?' Lydia said.

‘I didn't do it on purpose.' Charlie's tone was a little weary, a little wise. ‘I just didn't know how they liked things then. The smoke helps, if you've got to interfere with them.'

Opening the hive, Jean checked the queen, and they looked for any queen cells, and at the pattern of brood growth. They repeated this for each of the other three hives. Jean would nod for more smoke, or lift a hand to signal enough.

They were in the hall and nearly leaving when Charlie remembered the irises.

‘You told me to remind you,' he said.

Jean found a pair of scissors. ‘Cut the stems long, and at an angle,' she said.

The two women stood waiting, somewhat awkward, in the hall.

‘Your husband might like some cake?' Jean said, and Mrs Weekes gave a shrug.

‘He's a lovely boy. An unusual boy,' she said.

‘Yes.' But Mrs Weekes seemed to have left already.

Afterwards Jean went into the garden. Charlie's switch of wood lay on the lawn. She picked it up and whipped it through the air. She remembered his excitement at the beekeeping things, and the way he had left the table and just run. She remembered that he had his mother's eyes.

And then she ran. Down across the grass, past the hives and through the rough tangle, till she reached the gate in the bottom wall and stopped, panting and scratch-legged, and leaned a palm against the warm, flaked paint.

She was laughing, elated, her breath catching in her chest, her eyes wide. Perhaps she had caught something of Charlie's pleasure, his exuberance, but she wanted to leap and shout out.

It might have been five minutes or fifty before Jean walked back to the house. She didn't know why, but as she carried the tea tray in, she could feel a pulse of exhilaration beating out beneath her ribs.

She had intended to cook herself an omelette and then do some paperwork that evening, but her appetite had gone and she couldn't settle to working. Instead she put Dinah Washington on the gramophone, poured herself a deep Scotch and stretched out on the sofa.

Later, before bed, she opened the door to her father's books. The room was dusty, warm with the stored heat of the day. She had grouped the books roughly by subject – history, science, literature, philosophy – but never got further. Now she ran her finger over the titles of old novels. Eventually the telephone put an end to it, but even a late-night callout and the demands of an anxious and querulous patient couldn't entirely cover the pulse she still felt, and she slept finally, in the small hours, with a hand to her breast, nursing this new beat.

They didn't speak of the tea in the doctor's garden, either Lydia or Charlie. It was understood between them that it would be better if Robert did not know of it.

The day following, the Sunday, they went to eat dinner at Pam's house. They had done this almost every other Sunday since Lydia had moved to the town. It would take a bullet to stop Robert visiting his sister. Or something bigger even. An earthquake, or an H-bomb. Not such a bad idea, Lydia thought. But she winced.

It was a fifteen-minute walk. When Charlie was smaller, Robert would fret at the pace and hoist him up on his shoulders. Now it was Charlie who chafed at the speed, and ran on ahead. There was a patch of waste ground on Pam's street and Lydia knew they'd find him there when they arrived.

Robert walked in front and Lydia carried a bowl with trifle, her best Coronation tea towel keeping it decent. She watched Robert nod his greetings in the street, charming, genial. People would be thinking them such a fine pair, so well-suited.

The sun hid as they walked and a fine drizzle began to fall. It was humid. Lydia watched the tea towel darken and her arms mist with rain.

Since their conversation last week, he had stopped talking to her, answering her questions only with a yes or a no,
or the shortest alternative. She wondered what people knew when they smiled at him, and greeted her.

He'd been out all Saturday evening and she found him asleep on the settee in the morning.

‘I think it would be better if you and Charlie went to Pam's for lunch on your own,' she said. ‘She'll wonder what's going on between us. She'll say something.'

‘She'll wonder more if you don't turn up.'

‘She doesn't even like me,' Lydia said.

‘You're still coming.'

‘You could make an excuse. I've got a headache. A cold. She doesn't like other people's sickness.'

‘No,' he said.

So they walked together through the streets, each on their own, and when Robert went on to his sister's house, Lydia went to find Charlie.

The waste ground was in the space between number 19 and number 29. Four houses' worth. The council had said they would rebuild but the wind had seeded trees there now and it was green with wild growth, the bricks' torn edges softened by moss and elder. Charlie had seen a fox here once at twilight, and there were often hedgehogs. The woman at number 31 regularly called the council man about the rats.

Trails made by children, or tramps, or lovers, cut in and around the tangle, and there was the usual furniture – dead mattresses, a signboard for something, rusted wire, an armchair sprung with ferns.

Charlie was leant against a bit of wall, his back to the street, staring off into the waste ground, and he didn't see her approach. For a second Lydia saw him as the older boy he was becoming, slouched and lean, the softness in his body gone, his gaze off and out, away from her.

‘Charlie?' she said.

She saw the start in his shoulders before he turned, as though she'd caught him out. It was Sunday dinnertime
and she'd thought there was nobody about. But then beyond him, she noticed three bigger boys, huddled round something.

Charlie came towards her, eyes to the ground, scratching at his ear.

‘Time to go,' she said.

They walked back towards the street in silence. The air smelled sweet, rising off the warm ground. As they reached the pavement, Charlie looked up.

‘It was a cat,' he said, lengthening his stride to walk ahead.

Lydia couldn't make out his tone. She stopped and turned. The boys were laughing, their adolescent voices chopping high and low. One raised his arm and swung a small dark bundle high, then brought it back towards him, cradling it, then setting the bundle to the ground. He bent to it, then the three boys stood away, watching, waiting, silent now and expectant.

She couldn't tell, from her distance, whether the cat was standing on its legs, or whether it was lying down. Perhaps it was dead. It seemed very still. The boys moved away a step, almost in unison as if their action were choreographed, beautiful even, in the washy, wet light. Then the cat moved, and suddenly it was running, jolting and urgent over the waste ground, and three tin cans tied to its tail tossed and pitched in their own squall of sound.

They stood outside Pam's house and Lydia found she was shaking. She handed Charlie the trifle.

‘You give it to her. Don't mention the cat.'

‘I know that,' he said.

Annie opened the door. She grinned at Charlie, bearing the trifle before him like a tribute, and feinted a jab at his ribs.

‘You can't touch me,' he said, ‘else I'll drop your dessert.'

‘What kind?'

‘Trifle.' He spoke it like a trump card.

She tossed her head and winked at him.

‘I'll have to get you after dinner, then,' she said, and Lydia saw her son bridle with pleasure.

In the kitchen Pam and Robert stood at the cooker together. The room was hot with whispered words and cabbage water.

‘Dinner smells lovely,' Lydia said.

Pam put a quick hand to her brother's shoulder. She turned, her eyes sharp.

‘You crept in very quiet. Didn't hear you.'

‘Annie let us in. Charlie's got dessert.'

‘It's trifle,' Charlie said.

Pam put her hand on his head. ‘Isn't your mother marvellous?' she said, and Charlie flinched and was gone.

‘What can I do?' Lydia said.

Pam shook her head. ‘Annie's seen to it all.' She turned away with a disapproving mouth.

Ten years Lydia had been coming here for Sunday lunch, and still it brought her out in a sweat. Her blouse was sticking under her arms and the back of her neck prickled. Years back she'd tried to explain it to Robert, but he hadn't understood, only told her that Pam was a proud woman, and mother and father to him, all of which Lydia knew already.