Tell it to the Bees (12 page)

Head bent to the gas, Robert lit himself a cigarette and stepped out of the back door, sucking the flame hard against the drizzle.

Lydia watched the door close. He'd always just walked out when he felt like it. Films, conversations, washing up. And in these last years after making love even. Didn't ask anybody, didn't wait to find out, just left. Now Lydia was waiting for him to walk out of their marriage, both dreading it and hoping he would do what he'd always done and simply go.

She turned back into the kitchen. She didn't know what to say to Pam, or what to do. She always put herself wrong, said or did something that changed the colour of the air, something she couldn't see beforehand. She looked at Pam's back, the hard angles of her hips and shoulders pushing at the nylon housecoat, the widowed grudge that clipped her movements and cast her voice with a fine mesh of grievance.

‘Busy at the works, this last week,' Lydia said. ‘We've been nearly frantic on our line. Mrs Levin's had our noses pressed down at the belt.'

Pam took the cruets from the shelf and put them on the table.

‘Mrs Levin. Wouldn't expect anything else from her sort.'

‘It's the new four-valve T110 model,' Lydia pressed on. ‘It's in the magazines now. I saw an advertisement. There's a rush for them, so Mrs Levin is saying.'

Lydia hated the sound of herself. She didn't want to talk about the factory; it bored her rigid. But they both worked there, and it was safe to mention. Safer than most things.

‘Mrs Levin can say as she likes. I haven't found it any different to the usual,' Pam said.

Through the window Lydia could see her husband's head, his curls tight in the damp air. She should say something now about how hard Pam worked and about how everyone at the factory knew it, name some names. That was her usual route back; that was the way to curry favour.

Robert flicked his wrist and Lydia caught the shift of his shoulders, so familiar, as he ground his cigarette butt into the concrete. That was what he did to her, she thought, and she shook her head, angry.

‘Robert might not be so hungry. He wasn't back till the small hours,' she said, and she'd timed it well. Pam had time to turn but none to say a word, because a moment later Robert pushed open the back door.

‘Dinner ready then?' he said.

‘Hungry are you?'

He shrugged and kicked a foot against the table, making the forks and spoons ting. It irritated Lydia. He only behaved like this, like a boy, when he was with Pam, and where Lydia found it pathetic, Pam thought it charming. ‘Plenty of women would give their eye teeth …' she'd told Lydia more than once.

‘No,' Robert said, ‘not very.'

Lydia stared at the blue Formica. It shone back at her; uniform, shiny. Her eyes swam and she blinked. Now there were tiny flecks of other colours; suspended, random.

‘Smells delicious,' she said. ‘I'll call them down.'

It was on their third date that Robert seduced her with his bringing up. He was late arriving at the café and she was angry, mashalling crumbs around the oilcloth with a finger. She was angry with him, and angry with herself for wanting him so badly. When he came through the door finally, she was on her second, slow cup and wishing she was with her girlfriends and on to her second gin and French instead of tea.

He hadn't apologized or made an excuse, and back then, though still angry, she'd been impressed by this. Even in that early time she hadn't thought he was much to look at. She'd been on the rebound from her lovely Yank with the gentle smile who danced like a dream and who'd gone away promising the earth, which he said was the best in the world, if she'd ever heard of Minnesota. He didn't turn her stomach over, didn't make her pulse jump, but he was so handsome and he treated her so well, until he left.

Robert was the first thing in trousers to say hello. Unlike her American's smile, Robert's seemed to take him by surprise. Unlike her American he didn't promise her the earth. He didn't promise her anything, but somehow that was a stronger lure. He didn't seem to care what anybody
thought, and he didn't go away.

‘I was just about to leave,' she said that day. ‘I've been drinking this tea for an age. I'm getting looks.'

He sat down opposite and chafed at his hands.

‘Thought you might have gone round to my digs,' she said, ‘till I remembered you don't know where they are.'

‘I'll get my hands warm and then I'll be here,' he said, and something in the way he said it made her look at his hands then, and stroke his knuckles, his fingers.

‘No gloves,' she said, and he shook his head. ‘Poor boy,' with only a little mockery in her voice and then, at last, he'd looked hard at her, frowning.

‘I could knit you some. Like I did for my uncle. He's serving on a ship too, somewhere he says is very cold, and he gambled his gloves.' She looked down at Robert's hands, pink on the yellow oilcloth. ‘He says it's like gambling away your future, what with frostbite. Silly man.' She laughed. ‘Perhaps you'll meet him one day.'

Robert made no reply and she looked up. His gaze was over her shoulder, so intent that she thought God, perhaps a pretty girl had sat down behind her. She waited for him to look away, back to her, and when he didn't, she turned to see. But there was only an empty table and another bit of wall like theirs, with grubby silk flowers hung up in a vase.

Then he looked at her again and got to his feet.

‘Shall we go somewhere else?' he said, and he took her hand and kissed her on the lips as she stood up.

I was so easy, she thought, standing at the bottom of the stairs, calling the children to dinner. Like jelly when he kissed me. I'd have killed to get inside his trousers. Then dead parents and a sister like a mother to him so there I was, nearly pleading to look after him.

*

He told her his tale in the first pub they came to, warming
his hands against the stove, and afterwards they'd walked all the way to her digs and his story had flowered in her breasts. When he sat down on her bed and looked away beyond her shoulder again, his gaze faced this time by the shelf beside the basin with its Colgate and Ponds, this time she didn't need to turn, but she felt such a heat inside that she held his head between her hands and pulled his gaze back and then found his mouth with her mouth, while her fingers touched his young man's hard belly and traced the thick line of hair downwards.

Then she sat down on her bed, stood him before her as a mother stands a child, and undressed him. Lifted things over his head, pulled them down around his ankles and off, till he stood, before her. She stared, wondering.

‘I've never seen a naked man before,' she said. She touched his hip, ran her finger up to his nipple and he covered her hand and, gently, led it down.

Afterwards while she lay still, her fingers sticky with him, her skin growing cold in the grey light of wartime winter, he pulled his coat around his shoulders, and sang. She watched him, the sharpened profile of his nose, the curl of his hair breaking round his head, eyes invisible, looking out – she knew the view so well – to the flats across, beyond the plane tree, and dim-lit scraps of other lives made out between the branches. The unlit room grew dark and she climbed inside the counterpane and slept inside his voice.

They had only three more dates before he returned to his boat, and each time she asked him questions and he told her a bit more about himself and they came to her room and made love. Each time afterwards he sat and sang beyond the window while she lay beneath the covers and drifted. By the time he returned to his ship, she'd heard his favourite songs, especially all the thirties tunes, and she knew all about him. About his family and his old loves;
about the work he'd left for the war, and his plans for after it ended. She knew about his scorn for people who thought themselves better, and she loved that because her father was one of those people and it had left him with a bitter spirit.

She even knew something of his orphan heartsickness, and she didn't notice how little he wanted to know of her, didn't think about it. Not much more than her name, and that she was happy to listen to him. By the time he returned to his ship, Charlie was seeded in her womb, and now she was here, calling up these stairs for him to come for dinner, and the end of it all was pressing up close behind her.

They stood in their usual places; Robert at the table's head, Lydia and Pam at either side, Charlie and Annie opposite one another, a space at the foot where John would have been. Lydia noticed how pretty Annie looked, like a flower in its early flush. The food steamed and Charlie said grace with his eyes open.

‘Bless thou this food dear Lord that we are about to eat …'

Lydia watched him, his crown of dark hair, the parting slender white. He lifted his head and glanced at Annie.

‘… We thank thee for thy mercies.'

Annie winked at him, her face still held solemn.

‘Amen.' Charlie's voice cracked slightly, and Pam's eyes were open, her glance like a claw, but he had his eyes down again, and Annie's were shut, and they sat down to eat with grace unchallenged.

Lydia made herself eat dinner like someone with an appetite. She would give Robert no quarter to think he had her sad. Roast pork slicked with gravy, potatoes, vegetables. The food caught in her throat, hurt her ribs, sat like lead in
her stomach. Robert was solicitous, passing her the condiments, refilling her water, offering her more potatoes, more cabbage, keeping an eye out for his sister. She saw his hands – the veins proud, jutting, the square line of his fingertips. They would touch another woman's face tonight, and his mouth would kiss her lips. Another woman would hold the curve of his shoulder that she had once. Some other woman. Not Lydia. It would never be her again. She didn't want him, she didn't want to hold him, touch him as the other woman would, but this minute here, with Pam's coach clock ticking her days away on the mantelpiece, she couldn't bear the sadness of it. She couldn't bear the fury.

I don't want this, she said to herself. Everything in her tightened and she pressed her nails into her palms so fiercely that later she saw she had broken the skin.

Her father had cut her off when he found out about Robert.

‘You come to me like this,' he said, butting his head towards her belly. ‘I'm glad your mother's not alive to see it.'

‘But I love him,' she said.

‘It's not love's the question, and it's not the war,' he said, banging the table hard enough to make the cutlery jump. ‘You think you can have your own way on everything, no mind for the family. Same as over your schooling, same as over your future.'

‘I'm doing what's best for me,' Lydia said.

‘You don't know what's best.' He was on his feet now. ‘You barely know the man. You've said so yourself. You couldn't control yourself, girl. What does he know of you? Of your prospects? At least before you marched out of school and into the factory.'

‘There's a war going on,' she said. ‘They need girls in the factories.'

‘But that's not why you went, is it. Not really.'

He leaned back against the wall and waited. She hated him doing this. She hated the waiting. He had everything so measured, so planned. That was how he lived, how everyone had to. Her schooling, her marriage, her prospects. Her children even. Her unborn children. He had their lives planned into his schedule already. If it was a girl, then she'd inherit her grandmother's sewing machine and marry someone with a good trade. If it was a boy, he'd go to the grammar and get a proper education.

‘Dad,' Lydia said, ‘please.'

‘You did it on a whim, like everything else you do. You've got no staying power,' he said. ‘So now you can live with it. I want respectability, family and what's right. He's not the man I intended for you, and I want nothing to do with him, or what he's got on you.'

‘The baby,' she said, but her father had come round the table and taken her by the elbow.

She could still remember the feel of that; her father in his steely rage.

Lydia had never mourned her mother as hard as when her baby was born. Her father had been right, by more than a grain. She had acted on a whim, almost, and that was a sin in his eyes. Maybe falling in love was acting on a whim. But her mother would have forgiven her for the baby's sake, would have held him and looked at his eyes and told her how they looked like his grandfather's. Her father was unrelenting, and her letters were returned unopened.

It was so strange this Sunday, how everyone behaved as if nothing had changed. Pam went on talking about the church and her curtains and where John was now, only four months left to his National Service. She spoke of Annie as if the girl wasn't there, sitting at the table. And Lydia and Robert sat so close at that small table that their chair legs
touched – so close, but with something sliced so cold between them that Lydia chafed her hands for warmth.

‘Those young girls at the factory,' Pam said. ‘The way they carry on.'

Lydia nodded. She had seen them. That was all her nod meant. They were girls doing what girls do. She liked it. Liked watching them, their puppy energy, their curves and turns, their laughs and cries.

‘And their skirts! Have you seen their skirts! They'll be there in the small hours, foot on the treadle of their mother's machine and she asleep in bed and none the wiser. Then in the morning parading in the corridors as if there's not an inch more than before.'

‘I hadn't noticed that,' Lydia said.

Pam looked to Robert for support, but he shrugged and got up from the table. He'd go for a cigarette in the yard instead of dessert. Lydia felt a bubble of laughter rise in her throat.

‘Well,' Pam said after a pause. ‘Annie knows proper obedience. She's got her girlfriends, but there's none of that carrying on. I'm her first port of call, and she obeys me. As does John – but being the boy, well, it's not the same.'