Tell it to the Bees (3 page)

He watched her roll her shoulders and sweep her hands over her face. He noticed her put her fingers to her neck and rub. Her gestures were as familiar to him as his own children's. He stroked the side of his glass, the smooth, sheer cool. Jean told how Emma had nuzzled into her pillow and pretended to be Wild Horse, her child's soft hair as his wild, long mane, and he laughed, and saw how now, when Jean smiled, the wrinkles round her eyes were strong. He hadn't noticed them before.

‘Shall we eat, then?' Sarah was taking the food to the table, her forehead puckered, busy.

He asked Jean about her bees, and she talked as she ate, her speech and her eating cutting across each other.

‘The queens have gone out of lay and nearly all the brood combs are covered. Not much more to do now till spring. I'll creosote the hives in the next week or so and there's a few knot holes to plug. Keep the weather out.'

‘Slow down! You're getting faster,' Jim said. ‘Isn't she, darling?'

‘You always say that,' Sarah said.

‘I don't,' Jim said. ‘Do I?'

The two women exchanged a look, and Jim leaned across to his wife and cupped a hand to the back of her head, a gesture so habitual to him, he didn't know he'd made it.

‘I don't,' Jim said again, stroking his wife's hair.

Sarah pressed her head back against his hand. ‘My love, since our first date, almost.'

Jean laughed. ‘Such a gooseberry I was. Only your mother could have made me do it.'

‘Which first date?'

‘Eating ice creams, by the beach. Jean was talking about medicine, I expect. You got out your watch. Timed her speech.'

Jim put his hands up. ‘My oldest friend and my wife. What chance do I have?'

They knew the colour of old jealousy, each of them at the table. Their stories were like incantations, to keep it at bay.

It was one of Jean's few real regrets, that she couldn't have married Jim. But when, all those years ago, he had put a proprietorial hand to her head, cupped it to him, his fingers in her hair, she had felt caged, possessed, and she had fought wildly, cruelly perhaps, against him.

Yet even now, eating supper in his house, with his children asleep above, she couldn't help a twist of desire. Not for this man who was her closest friend, but for the life here that she could only ever visit.

And so the three of them talked on, chewing the fat until the warm light of the kitchen was cut by a ring on the doorbell.

Mrs Sandringham's boy was pink with exertion and he spoke in bursts, so that the message came out like small gusts of wind, the vowels and consonants tossed about inside it.

‘Robson's worse … missus says noise you told her … it's there.'

Mrs Sandringham had been housekeeper and factotum to the doctor years before Jean became the doctor in question and inherited her, and she was a stickler for certain kinds of etiquette. Young John had been coached from a young age on how to deliver these messages, but
the fact was that he was more at ease with crankshafts and inner tubes than he ever would be with people. All this Jean understood, and so she thanked him gravely before taking Jim's car and setting off into the November dark to see the dying man.

It wasn't much over the half-hour before she returned. Jim had kept the pudding warm for her. Jean put her spoon into the hot apple.

‘These first cold nights,' she said. ‘They take bodies by surprise.'

‘Anything you could do?'

‘It was really his wife that needed me. To tell her there was nothing she could do. That you can't stop a dying man from dying, not with all the will in the world.'

‘That's what you said to her?'

‘Course not. I gave Mr Robson a shot of morphine, told her the lemon cake was delicious and that he'd smiled when I said I'd been well looked after.'

‘Had he smiled?'

‘Then I reminded her that the world and its wife would be through her parlour very soon paying its last. So we sat back, she and I, and talked about food and wakes, and who could be counted on for what, daughters and sisters and such. She made a list; and told me how there were those who said her baking had brought them back from death's door, and her man upstairs more than once even.'

Jim smiled. ‘Clever.'

Jean shook her head. ‘So little I can do. Ease the pain for a moment, hers as well as his. That's all.'

‘Eat your pudding.'

‘But he has what he needs,' Jean said, the spoon of apple in her hand. ‘You know.' And she made a small gesture with her free hand which took in this whole dense knit of the world she had just left – the small house and the dying man and his wife; her cake and the parlour; children,
grandchildren, relatives and friends; the list just begun of all those who were part of this man's living and now of his dying.

She stood again, the apple still untasted.

‘I'm tired, Jim. Say goodnight to Sarah for me. And come and drink tea tomorrow, if you can.'

Charlie hadn't meant to walk so far. It was only that he'd been intent on following things and they'd taken him on and on. It never started like that. But then one thing became something else and now, here he was, looking up at last to find himself on a broad road he didn't know, where the town seemed about to give out on itself altogether.

He could see a couple of houses ahead and then beyond only fields, black and featureless in the darkening of the afternoon.

‘The first field, just touch a gate,' he told himself. ‘And then go back.'

So he walked on, past a cat in a lit window looking out, pert and unimpressed, and then in the next house a mother's voice calling a girl's name, a tinny, small sound in the freezing air. There was the mother, too – her head moving across the window, a yellow scarf like his mother's, and wild eyes to the boy outside as she called again in this tired afternoon hour.

Charlie hurried. He must be quick.

The grass at the roadside was long and wet, limp with the weariness of the old year. His shoes glistened as he stepped up to the gate, and he felt the cool damp of it through to his skin.

‘Touch,' he said, and he put his hand out to the wooden bar. It was icy cold and his fingers made trails on the wood.

‘Frosty Jack'll be here soon,' he said, and he gave the smile his mother gave, of a secret known.

Charlie found the river on his way home. He crossed over on the blue bridge and walked the other side from the factory, along the towpath, being careful with his feet as best he could in the half-dark, because you got a pile of broken glass and dog dirt along here. He ran past the dark barges lying low against the bank – they had dogs that hated boys – and was almost beyond the factory when the hooter went off.

‘Dead trouble now, Charlie,' he said, which was a phrase he liked, because now he knew what time it must be.

But he stopped, there on the other side, and stood watching. Everything was quiet, really quiet, and Charlie almost held his breath. Then doors opened in the walls, making drifts of light, and the girls came out, like a flood. So many of them. Somewhere in there was his mother. Their voices crossed the water, tumbling, released. He pictured her, head down and leaning forward as if walking in a wind, tying on her scarf as she went, her bag banging against her side. She'd be heading for her bike, rushing, he'd guess, because she was always rushing, to be home and on with the tea.

The street lights were on by the time Charlie reached the marketplace, dropping small pools of light through the darkness. Cats skulked round the edges and every now and then one would flit across a pool with a fish-head or some tattered wrapper, then disappear again into the dark.

He liked the market when it was empty like this, the tarpaulins sagged and flapping. The air was acrid with new fires lit, and he took shallow, short breaths to keep it out as best he could. He was thinking hard, looking for an excuse for where he'd been. It wasn't that his mother
wanted him indoors all the time, but she always seemed to know when he hadn't just been playing out.

He'd pushed the sounds a long way off now. The whispers that snatched at his skin; the singsong voices that ran up the back of his neck, calling after him, the jeer that winded him, beating up his fear, till he had run and run, and finally come to the sombre fields and the cold gate.

You've been to another boy's house. There's a boy with new Meccano, or he's got some insects. Collected them. He shook his head. He didn't know any boys that collected insects. Cigarette cards, marbles, matchboxes. But not insects. Anyway, he didn't collect those things so his mum wouldn't believe him.

Down the high street and they were locking the doors and pulling the shutters across, snapping the light from the windows. Charlie's feet were sore, chafing with the wet from the grass. He was tired now, and very hungry.

His mother would be angry with him and rough like she was when she was angry, pulling his jacket off and putting his shoes by the fire. She'd point to the footprints on the lino and tell him to change his socks for dry. Then she'd ask him what he'd eaten since school and maybe make him bread and jam, or bread and dripping if he was lucky, stand over him while he ate it.

He hurried on, his thoughts striding ahead of his feet, and for now, all worry of how to account for himself was put away.

‘Tide you over,' she'd say, giving him the bread and jam, and she'd put her hand through his hair. Which he'd half wriggle from, but part of him loved it when she did that. ‘Tide you over till your father's back.'

Charlie stopped. His skin prickled. Words came back to him. He didn't know where to go. He stared at his shoes. A leaf was stuck to one heel.

An old man in a brown coat was sweeping the pavement
with a broom as wide as a table. Charlie looked at him unseeing. The man swept his day away in long, straight strokes, down towards the road and into the gutter. Twice he swept to the gutter and Charlie still stood. Then the man leaned on his broom and looked at the boy. When Charlie lifted his head, he wagged his finger.

‘Out of my way,' he said. ‘Won't be as bad when you get there.'

And Charlie nodded, though he hadn't heard, and walked home.

The wireless was on when Charlie let himself in and his father was home already, his coat and hat on the hook, his shoes in the hall. His father was back, so no bread and jam. Charlie headed for the stairs and his satchel caught the hung coat and he smelled his father's smells of smoke and sweat and something else.

Kicking off his shoes, he lay on his bed for a bit, his tummy rumbling, picking at the ridges in the counterpane, rolling the cotton fray between his fingers. It was Christmas in another month and he wanted the earth. That's what he'd told Bobby for a joke. The earth. It was what he meant. But he wouldn't get the earth, so he was hoping for a fish tank.

He'd taken Bobby to see an ants' nest once, a really good one he'd found down the side of the allotments. Lifted these slabs and shown him.

‘Look there, and there. See the tunnels and chambers? For food, and there's the egg chambers, see, and they're going berserk because we've lifted their roof off.'

The two boys had watched the ants rushing with the white oval eggs in their jaws, tugging them below and into the earth, out of sight, away from the terrible light and the threat.

‘They're gossiping,' Bobby had said. ‘Heads together, just like my ma and my aunts, heads together.'

‘D'you see it now?' Charlie had said.

‘They're a bit like us, then. Humans. With the gossip and the bother and them all worked up, getting fierce over the eggs.'

But it wasn't that at all for Charlie. It was just exactly not that. It was because they were so far from him that he watched them. Because they lived in another world from his. But Bobby was his best friend, so Charlie didn't answer him.

It was cold on his bed and he was nearly tempted to climb in under, feel the slow warming through and the slip towards sleep. But that would bother his mum, and his dad might clip him. He didn't like it when you did things out of turn. Charlie stared at the wall, eyes wide as they'd go, willed himself to see the wallpaper, the line where the roses didn't meet, petals flying into stems.

‘Why've you got roses in your room if you're a boy?' Bobby had said when he saw it. Charlie didn't know, but he liked them.

He couldn't smell the fish on, which was odd, but he could see it on its plate, done over in flour, ready. He'd go downstairs now. His mum would be glad to see him, and he'd like that, even without the bread and jam. Fish would be a halfway house. Fish would do for now.

Pushing open the door to the living room, Charlie saw his mother and his father. His father sat at the table, fingertips resting on the evening paper, a beer bottle running rings around the headlines. He'd have been in the pub already. He didn't look up when Charlie came in, and this was just the same as always. His mother was there too, hands wedged into the small of her back against the length of day. Her apron strings made a butterfly at her waist and there was a dark patch on her left calf where she'd darned the stocking. She didn't hear Charlie there and this was not the same as always.

He wondered if they had been speaking before he opened the door, because after a moment with him still saying nothing and his father picking up the beer bottle and drinking from it, his mother crossed the room to the kitchen.

‘Hello,' Charlie said, because otherwise she'd be gone into the kitchen and she still wouldn't know he was there, and she turned and gave him a bright, bright smile, like he didn't know what.

He waited for her to ask him where he'd been, to be cross, to put her hands on his cheeks to feel for the outdoors on him and then put a hand through his hair; to tell him that supper was all but ready and didn't he know how worried she got, and who had he been with out so late, and was it that Bobby again, she'd have to talk to his mother, and his supper nearly ruined, and would he go and wash, please, look at his nails. But she only walked to him, dropped a peck on his cheek and then went into the kitchen so quickly, to her cooking and the jolly wireless sounds, and pushed the kitchen door to so hard that he turned to his father to see if he'd noticed.