Tell it to the Bees (27 page)

‘Go,' she mouthed, and he was out of the car and away, running at the sand, scrambling and falling, his feet sinking, his fingers scrabbling in the wiry grass, till he reached the top where the dunes sloped steep down to the beach, and there was the sea and the beach so long there was no end to it, just as Dr Markham had said. Charlie stood on the dune top with his arms spread wide and leaned into the wind. He filled his mouth with it and let it run tears from his eyes and whip his hair back on his skull. Then, taking off his shoes and socks and throwing them behind him, he stood tiptoed on the edge, and dropped, sinking into the fall of sand.

*

Leaning into the back of the car, Jean spoke softly. ‘Lydia, we're here,' she said. She waited, and at last, as if these words had had to make a journey too, Lydia murmured and shifted under the blanket. Leaving Lydia to wake properly in her own time, Jean pushed the car door to and walked over to the cottage. She stood beneath the porch and put her hand up into the eaves for the key. Inside was the clean, musty smell she recognized, and she breathed it in as deep as her lungs would allow. There was a fire burning in the grate and fresh bedlinen stacked on the kitchen table. She grinned. Her telephone message had got through. There would be groceries in the pantry, and a new canister of gas, and plenty of dry wood.

Jean had been coming to the cottage since she was a young girl. It was the place she came home to in her dreams and, in bringing somebody else here for the first time, she felt a knot of anticipation. She put water on to boil and found the fresh tea among the groceries. Then she went to find Lydia.

Jean brought Lydia into the cottage and sat her on a kitchen chair, wrapped her round with a blanket and put a mug of tea between her hands. Lydia was pale and tired, but it wasn't illness that hung in her eyes now.

‘Charlie's on the beach,' Jean said, before Lydia could ask. ‘I couldn't see him for smoke. The minute we arrived.'

‘Good,' Lydia said. ‘He's been too much a man recently.' She stared into the tea. ‘He was crying when I was sick, but I couldn't help him.'

‘So he can be a boy here,' Jean said quickly. ‘Nothing else for him to be.'

Lydia looked around the room, at the flagged floor and the cupboards with their red gingham curtains, at the walls three-foot deep and the oil lamps. ‘It's nice. Old and snug,' she said.

‘My mother always hated it. Being so far from other people, no electricity, the scruffiness, too much weather. It's exactly what I love. It's always been a place where I could go unwatched.'

Lydia nodded, but Jean could see her thoughts were somewhere else.

‘It'll be good for Charlie,' Lydia said. ‘But I'm better now. Only very tired.'

‘And so?'

Lydia looked at the square of pale sky, all she could see through the small window formed to keep the weather out. ‘We've been through this,' she said. ‘I can't afford not to be back at work and I don't want your charity. There's nothing more to say.'

‘Just for now, just for this time, put those worries away. For your sake, to get strong, because you're not well enough to work; and for Charlie's.'

‘And for yours?'

Jean got up and started to unpack the groceries. Sausages, bread, bacon, butter, eggs.

‘Yes, for mine too,' she said, angry with Lydia, angry with herself, and she busied herself noisily with the food.

When Charlie came in from the beach, it was as if he'd been coming here all his life, tugging the front door because it always stuck a bit in the sea air, catching a finger to the porch bell as he went past so that it sounded a soft, deep toll, just as Jean used to do as a child. Barefoot, his hair thick with sand, he came in with the sea and the wind still clinging and put his hands, cupped together, down on the table.

‘Guess what,' he said, looking round at Lydia.

‘You're full of sand,' she said, putting a hand to his hair. ‘And where are your shoes and socks?' but her voice was pleased.

Charlie looked round at Lydia and uncupped his hands.
On his palm lay a large, shiny bean and a rectangular, brown sac from each corner of which a brittle tendril whisked into the air.

‘Found them washed up,' he said, and he placed them carefully on the mantelpiece, between a lustre jug and an empty vase, as though he knew, Jean thought, that that was where she'd always placed her childhood finds. Then he hitched himself up on to the deep sill below the window as if that, too, were simply his place, leaned back against the wall, arms around his knees and looked back at Lydia.

‘Can I sleep in the tent?'

Somehow Charlie's return dissolved the mood between the two women, as if their argument was done now. Jean scythed a square of grass in the orchard behind the house and together they helped Charlie put up the tent, and build a fire for his sausages.

‘There's a bed made up too. In case of a hurricane or something,' Jean said, and she showed Charlie the little bedroom behind the kitchen.

‘You know where your mum is sleeping?' she said and the boy nodded, impatient, hardly listening. Only when Lydia came to say goodnight did he clutch her arm hard, his face full of shadows in the torchlight.

Jean slept deeply that night and woke slowly into the day with a bridling of pleasure as she recalled where she was and who was sleeping in the room next door. Downstairs, there were small footprints on the kitchen flags and the bread looked as if a beast of some description had attacked it, but there was no other sign of Charlie. Jean made tea and poured two cups. She took one up to Lydia's room and knocked. No sound. Lifting the latch, she went in. Autumn sunlight blanched the room, but Lydia still slept. The doctor in Jean was at ease. Lydia's colour was normal, her fever was gone and with a few days' rest, her
fatigue would lift. The patient was convalescing well; she wouldn't wake her, and she turned to go. But something else gave her pause, so that she looked again.

Lydia lay with one arm flung above her, her face turned to one side, though it wasn't her sleeping face that made Jean turn back. It was the sight of one breast, visible where the bedclothes had got flung off, visible beneath her nightdress, the nipple tight, which burned itself into Jean's mind. Suddenly all the force of her desire, put away this last week while Lydia was ill, came flooding through her so powerfully that it was as much as she could do to stand there in the middle of the room.

‘Lydia,' she whispered. Every particle in her body longed to draw close, kneel down, touch, and perhaps she would have done just that, but there was Charlie's voice downstairs so she turned away again and shut the door on her desire.

The tide rose and fell across a perfect day. Charlie was as busy as a boy can be; raking for cockles, catching eels, hiding in the dunes till the sun fell below the sea. He made forays back to the cottage, always for a good reason – to fetch scissors, or string, or a towel. But each time he'd seek his mother out, make sure of her, before running off again.

For the two women, the day passed in a strange kind of calm. The air was charged with relief and anticipation, as if they were living in the calm before and beyond a storm. Lydia spent the day reading, moving with the sun around the cottage. The story was quiet and secluded and she was glad to keep to its path and away from her own. Charlie came to find her now and then and once she went with him, over the dunes and down to the endless beach. But the sea unnerved her, she didn't know why, so smooth and full, tipping over, breaking its bounds, and she soon returned to the stillness of the cottage.

It was only just dark when Jean saw Charlie into his tent. He climbed into the sleeping bag and laid back, his whole body stilled with exhaustion.

‘Tomorrow,' he said. Jean paused to see what tomorrow held, but already he was halfway to dreaming and, raising her fingers to him in a kind of benediction, she closed the tent.

She walked up the sand hill to look at the sea, now just a darker space below the dark sky, stood there as she'd stood on so many other nights in so many other years, then turned and walked slowly back.

The lights were extinguished by the time she came inside, and in their place a dozen candles lit. Lydia sat on the sofa with her legs tucked up and a book spread open on her lap.

‘Bet he was asleep fast,' Lydia said, her smile wavery in the flickering light.

‘Before he was in his sleeping bag, almost.' Kneeling on the hearth, Jean spread her hands to the last of the fire. ‘It's warm in here. Beautiful. I didn't know we had so many candles.'

‘I'll have to tell him soon,' Lydia said. ‘About the house. That Robert's left us.'

‘He knows about Robert,' Jean said.

‘Yes, but not from me. He needs to know from me.'

‘Don't tell him while we're here. Let him have his holiday first.' She turned to Lydia. ‘You need yours, too.'

Jean wanted to touch Lydia's face, to put her hands in her hair. She wanted to run her finger along her collarbone, unbutton her blouse and feel the swell of her breasts. She longed to take Lydia's hand and lead her up the narrow stairs, across the creaky boards, along past the cupboard she'd hidden in as a child, into her bedroom. But she knew that Lydia needed to lie Charlie down in her mind, settle him and say goodnight before she shut the door.

‘Jean?' Lydia's voice broke across her thoughts. ‘You're in a trance. Come here.'

As Jean kissed her, she knew that Lydia was here now, in this place, to be with her.

They kissed as if the universe began and ended there; as if nothing else existed but their two bodies, their two mouths, and the desire between them. Jean was breathless and there was an urgency in her she had never known before. She wanted to eat and drink this woman. Her body danced on a million points, and at the same time it felt so heavy, her desire lurching and churning like a broiling sea. She drew back from her own force, burying her head in Lydia's shoulder and clutching her hands to Lydia's sides. Breathing deeply, she tried to calm herself. She felt Lydia's fingers in her hair, stroking, soothing, and for a moment the earth was still.

‘Touch me,' Lydia said, and she lifted Jean's hand to her breasts.

Jean undid the buttons on Lydia's cardigan, then her blouse. She'd never opened a blouse from the outside and it felt awkward, as if this were a different skill to learn. She fumbled a little, pressing at the buttons' pearly edges. Freeing the last of them, suddenly impatient, she pulled it open and off, tugging the arms away, in one movement. How often in her doctoring life had she stood before an undressed woman? But this was so different. This was for the very first time. Holding her breath, she ran her hands up Lydia's stomach, feeling the gentle swell of her woman's belly, her ribs, and then the soft give of her breasts. She traced the lines of Lydia's brassière, around from under her arms and over her shoulders.

Lydia was perfectly still, eyes closed. But as Jean's fingers travelled down towards her breasts again, she opened her eyes and watched.

Jean's heart thudded in her ears. Beneath the lace, she could feel Lydia's nipples sharpen and, unable to hold back any longer, she ran her tongue over.

‘God,' Lydia said, her voice rough and dry.

Jean reached and unhooked the brassière, slipping it down, lifting it free. Pushing herself back and away, she stared at Lydia, bare-chested, her breasts heavy, nipples dark. She hadn't known how it might feel to bend towards a woman and find her rising, arching, for her. She'd never before felt this wish to enter and be entered; to be laid bare, exposed. She'd never felt such ferocity and such tenderness.

‘You're beautiful,' she said. ‘So beautiful.'

But Lydia was reaching around, gathering her clothes, getting to her feet.

‘I can't,' she said. ‘Not here.'

Jean looked at her bewildered and Lydia took her hand, pulled her up.

‘Take me to your bed,' Lydia said.

‘Is it Charlie?'

‘I want to make love to you up there.'

They locked the door on Lydia's fear and thought up an excuse to give her boy, should he come searching for his mother that night, and slowly they made their way to one another, undoing and easing from their clothes, brushing and touching each other's skin, till they lay naked beneath the counterpane, looking up at the patterns on the ceiling that formed and unformed in the guttering candlelight.

Jean turned and cupped Lydia's breasts in her hands. It was miraculous to be here now. Even in these last weeks she'd never allowed herself to imagine this. Tenderly she kissed her. Then she took Lydia's nipple tight in her mouth and this time Lydia cried out in a voice so free, so wild, it sent a shock across Jean's scalp. Lydia's hand was on her wrist, pulling it down, across ribs and belly, past the points
of Lydia's hips, till Jean felt the first turn of hair. Lydia reached high behind her, gripping the headboard, her breath coming harder, faster.

‘Please,' she said, ‘please God.'

Now Jean's fingers ran away with her, down through the coarse rise of hair, down and into the turns and soft equivocations of another woman's sex. Lydia's desire was slick as oil between her fingers and Jean dipped deep, circling and returning, her fingers wet, her movements steady, as Lydia rose and rose and then broke at last and cried out like a bird. Afterwards, soft and quiet, she curled herself inside Jean's arms.

‘My body's singing,' Jean said. ‘I never knew. Never knew it could …' But Lydia put a finger to Jean's lips. ‘Sshh,' and then her mouth where her finger had been. Jean closed her eyes and found out what she had never known, that she could give herself up to someone else. When Lydia kissed between her legs, Jean looked at her there, at this woman making love to her, and laughed out loud in wonder.

They had two more days and two more nights before returning; the days they spent with Charlie and the nights they spent with each other. As Lydia's strength returned, she put her book aside and demanded that they go exploring, so they made an expedition to the eel smokery in a town by the sea and another to the church with the wooden angels. Charlie came to see the eels hanging from the roof, but he didn't want to visit the church. So Lydia and Jean went alone and looked up at the pairs of angels flying high from the beams.