Tell it to the Bees (20 page)

Mrs Sandringham turned and studied Charlie's face.

‘I'm going to live with my sister on her farm, help her out, with her husband died. As for the doctor, you keep your nose to yourself, young man.'

‘But you'll be sad leaving, won't you? No more lemonade and cooking storms.' He dug a spoon into the table. ‘I'm going to be sad.'

Mrs Sandringham shook her shoulders in a way that reminded Charlie of a dog beginning to shake off water.

‘You just get on with what you're good at,' she said, ‘and I'll get on with what I'm good at.'

‘But Dr Markham –'

‘No more about it now, thank you.'

Charlie knew how adults were sometimes, so Mrs Sandringham's brusque manner was no more than he expected and he didn't take it amiss. But she hadn't answered his question about the doctor, so he thought he would go down to the bees.

Jean watched Charlie from her bedroom window. He walked with such a boy's stride, swiping at the air with his gauntlets, kicking at a loose pebble. But the way he held himself and the turn of his head – he did those things just like his mother.

She had never been kissed like that before. They walked
into the woods and down to the stream. They found a flat rock with a strip of sunlight across it where they sat and ate sandwiches. Jean rolled her shirtsleeves up above her elbows and leaned back on her arms, lifted her face to the slant of sun. She shut her eyes.

I don't know where I am, she thought. I could be anywhere in the whole world.

Lydia had taken off her heavy shoes and socks and was dangling her feet in the stream.

‘How strange they seem under the water,' she said.

Jean looked at Lydia's feet. They were two pale fish below the surface. She put her hand out and touched Lydia's hair, warm with the sun.

‘You love this place, don't you?' Lydia said.

They barely spoke after that, and they didn't touch, but as they walked through the woods, up out of the valley and back to their starting point, the space between them was so charged that every move, every gesture Lydia made tugged at Jean.

Only once they were driving back and the town lay close below did a distance reassert itself and they spoke again, in oddly formal tones, about the weeks ahead. Jean was going to join Jim and Sarah at the seaside for a few days. Lydia would still be working all the hours she could. They spoke briefly of Charlie. Lydia didn't mention Robert and Jean didn't ask. Neither spoke of what had happened, or when they might see one another again.

Standing in her bedroom, pulling on old trousers and buttoning her shirt, Jean felt a surge of excitement. She loved this day; she loved the honey harvest, the process of it. After extracting, filtering and filtering again, she loved filling the jars with the pale, clear honey from her bees. From the weight of the frames she knew it was a good crop this year, and she'd already telephoned Sarah to have her bring more jam jars.

But she was kidding herself that the feeling in her belly was about the honey.

Jean hadn't spoken to Lydia since the walk. She could have taken her another book, or asked her for tea, and she hadn't. But Lydia's kiss had up-ended the world and Jean didn't know how to go on. Things were altered in a way she couldn't understand. Finally she had left it to Charlie: ‘Your mother would be welcome to join us, if you think she might like to,' she'd told him, her voice steady and her heart beating a tattoo, and this morning he'd mentioned, like an afterthought, that she would come when her shift was ended.

Jean wondered whether Lydia was possessed by the same confusion. Waking up in the early morning, she imagined Lydia in her bed, maybe still asleep. Her head in profile on one pillow, hair caught across her cheek. On the other pillow a novel still open like a bird. Getting dressed, she'd see Lydia by the stream, pulling on her socks and boots, her shoulders curved down, fingers fiddling with laces.

Seated before Mrs Sandringham's cooked breakfast, she thought of Lydia snatching her own, chivvying Charlie, making sure he had his uniform straight, then pulling her bike round in the yard, leaning it into her hip to get the gate open, pedalling to the factory. And so it went on through her day. She conjured Lydia everywhere – her face, her neck, bent towards the stream, her shoulders, her breasts, her hands as she spoke, telling stories in the air, her laugh, her mouth – but she didn't know how to see her.

Uncapping was a messy business. Charlie had been told this a dozen times by Mrs Sandringham and he was taking his duties seriously. While Jean was seeing her patients, he had got things ready. The shed floor was covered with sheets of classified ads and minor news that lifted in the draught, and a bucket of water and one of Mrs Sandringham's
clean rags stood by the worktop.

The bread knife, to be used for uncapping the cells, shone dully in the shed's half-light and a galvanized washtub was ready to take the cappings. Beside this stood the extractor.

‘You any good at arm wrestling, Charlie?' Jean had asked him a few days ago, and they had sat at the garden table and tried their strength.

‘You're strong for a lady,' he said, after Jean had pushed his arm down flush with the table. ‘Stronger than my mum. But nowhere near as strong as my dad.'

Then Jean had showed him the extractor and explained how it worked. The frames of uncapped comb got spun inside the barrel so that the honey came spattering out against the sides and was then drawn off through the small tap at the base. It would be Charlie's job to turn the handle that made the barrel spin, but it was a tricky process. The handle needed turning gently at first and then faster. But turn it too slowly and the honey wouldn't come out. Turn it too fast, and the comb would break up. He would need to be strong and measured to do it well.

‘That's why the arm wrestling,' Jean had said gravely. ‘To be sure that you're strong enough for the job.'

A few bees, fellow travellers in the full frames, dunned on the shed window. Charlie had left an inch open at the top for them and soon enough they would find it and make their escape. Otherwise, the shed was quiet and still.

Jean was back from her calls; he had seen her return. He opened the extractor tap and imagined the honey running from it in a clear, slender stream. He imagined it running on and on, filling all the jars they had and then the bottles, and the bowls, and the cups and the pans, just the finest, slender thread that never stopped, like a wish in a fairy story his mother had told him as he dropped to sleep when he was smaller. Tilting the nearest frame towards him, he
ran his finger down the wax cappings. A thimbleful of honey. That's how much each one held. That's how much a single bee could make in the whole of her lifetime, so Dr Markham said.

This would be something to tell Bobby about. This was better than the seaside.

Charlie rested the frame on the board and leaned it over the washtub. Beginning at the bottom, as Jean had done with hers, he began to saw at the wax cappings. The knife cut through them cleanly and the honey began to well up and drift down, heavy and slow. The top eighth of an inch, she had said, so he kept the bread knife as flat to the comb as he could. Honey dripped down from the frame, mixing in the washtub with the cappings. Anxious to finish quickly, Charlie started to saw faster, but Jean put a hand on his arm.

‘Keep it steady. No rush.'

When he had taken the cappings off both sides of the frame, Jean slotted it into the extractor. Charlie turned the handle and the honey was tugged from the comb, spraying the sides in a viscous sheen.

The two of them worked slowly but steadily through the end of the morning, first uncapping, then extracting. They were happy at their task, absorbed, and when Mrs Sandringham knocked on the shed door and called them out for sandwiches, they emerged into the sunshine sticky and blinking, as if they had been away from the world a long while.

Harvesting the honey had quietened Jean's heart. But the day was half gone now and soon, very soon, Lydia would be here, seated at this table.

‘The Marstons are coming this afternoon. Sometimes in the past Jim has helped me out with the harvest.'

‘Does he like the bees?'

‘No.' Jean grinned. ‘Not really.'

‘I've been good at helping you, haven't I?'

‘You have.' Jean wondered how much she liked him because he reminded her of herself. This small determined boy who had become her friend. She looked down the garden, her mind's eye running on.

‘Charlie, what would you like to do when you're older?'

She watched him study the table, pick at a flake of paint. His face was fierce when he looked up.

‘Not what my father does,' he said.

‘What does he do?'

‘Works on the roads, keeping them good for vehicles. Different things, depending.'

‘Why not?' Jean said.

‘I'm going to be an insect man when I grow up.'

‘An insect man?'

‘I heard the word at school. We had it for a spelling test. When I told my mum the word, she smiled because she didn't think I knew what it meant.'

‘And your father?'

‘I'm not telling him. Besides which –' Charlie stopped.

‘Do you want to be an entomologist?' Jean said. ‘Was that the word?'

Charlie nodded. ‘Our teacher tells us what they mean, the words, and it's what I want to do. Look at insects, how they live.'

‘You'd be good at it, Charlie. You look at things very closely and you don't give up.'

For which she was glad. Because his passion gave the alibi for hers.

And Charlie gave Jean a smile that cut her straight to the quick – the way it took his eyes, the way it drew his lips – so she had to turn away and be busy with her sandwich again.

*

By the time the Marston family arrived, Jean and Charlie had finished extracting the honey. They had piled the supers ready for the bees to clean later and Charlie was down the garden, hunched by the pond. He was watching the water-boatmen skedaddle over the surface, each of their legs in a pool of its very own on the water, and every now and then putting his finger in to see them scarper. He didn't hear the girls until they were almost with him. He didn't have time to be ready.

They were dressed in pretty dresses; their socks were white and their sandals were white. They had pink knees and hair in ribbons.

‘Jinjin said to us there was a boy down here,' the taller one said and she stood, arms folded, as if waiting for him to confirm himself.

When Charlie didn't reply, she went on.

‘She said we were to come and say hello and play.'

‘Hello,' Charlie said. He didn't want to share the garden with these girls; he didn't want to be polite.

‘Why are you looking at the water?' said the smaller girl.

‘Because there's things to look at,' he said.

‘We've got a pond in our garden,' the taller one said.

‘There's water-boatmen here, and frogs and dragonflies,' Charlie said, despite himself.

‘We have fish. We don't like frogs,' said the smaller girl.

‘I've been doing the honey harvest with Dr Markham,' Charlie said. ‘All morning. I was in charge of the extractor.'

‘Show me what you're looking at,' said the smaller girl.

She crouched down and Charlie pointed to the water-boatmen.

‘Spiders,' she said.

‘No,' he said. ‘They're bugs. Not the same at all.'

‘Are they clever then?' she said. ‘Like Jinjin says the bees are?'

‘They don't make honey or anything, and they live on their own. You watch long enough, you'll see one dive. It's how they get their food. Like tadpoles. Then they suck them empty.'

‘You're called Charlie,' the smaller girl said, changing the subject. ‘Jinjin told us. But you need to ask us our names.'

‘Do I?' Charlie said.

‘It's good manners,' she said, shuffling her knees closer to his.

‘What's your name then?'

‘Emma. My sister's called Meg.'

‘Are you in special clothes, for doing the bees?' Meg said. She was standing a little way off now, not looking at the pond.

‘No,' Charlie said. ‘Ordinary ones. But I've got a bee suit and bee gloves. They're in Dr Markham's cloakroom.'

‘Your sandals don't look very new,' Meg said. ‘Emma gets my cast-offs, but we both get new sandals for the summer. Otherwise our feet might not grow well. We don't get cast-off sandals, or last year's.'

Charlie looked down at his last-year's sandals. They were a bit tight, but it was the end of summer now. He'd be needing new shoes for the winter, so these would have to do.

‘What else can you see in the pond?' Emma said.

Charlie shrugged. ‘Look for yourself. I'm going back to see about the honey,' he said, getting to his feet and brushing off his knees.

‘Jinjin's talking to our parents. Our father is one of her oldest friends,' Meg said. ‘Is she a friend of your parents?'

‘My mother will be here soon,' Charlie said. ‘She's invited for tea.'

‘Isn't your father coming too?' Meg said.

Charlie strode away across the grass, his cheeks burning. But Emma caught him up and tugged at his shirt.

‘Show me where you did all the honey-making. Please, will you?'

And by the time they had reached the honey shed, he striding and she walk-skip-walking to keep up, he had relented. He opened the shed door with all the ceremony needed for induction into a sacred rite and conducted her inside.

‘He seems a nice boy,' Sarah said. ‘Where did you come across him?'

‘He came into the surgery a few months back. His mother was worried about him. I think he'd been in a fight.'

‘And so he ends up helping you with the honey harvest?'

‘He was fascinated by my honeycomb, Jim. The one you made for me. So I invited him to see the hives.'