Tell it to the Bees (38 page)

Robert flicked the cigarette stump towards the ashtray and looked his son in the eye.

‘You left, your mother left. Pam, Irene. Everybody's bloody left me.'

Pushing his chair back, he crossed his arms as if he'd made his speech now and that was the end of it.

‘You're talking bollocks. Annie's still here, though God knows why. And Pam didn't leave you. She brought you up. Thought the bloody sun shone from you,' Charlie said.

‘When the children get born, then the women leave you,' Robert said. ‘Every time.'

Charlie shook his head impatiently. ‘You came and got me, you told me we'd have fun and then you sent me back again.'

Robert took another cigarette from his packet. ‘You come back to tell me you didn't have fun?'

He was watching Charlie like a boxer in the ring when he gets his man down.

Rage struck Charlie like an electric bolt. He stepped forward and lifted his fist to punch his father. Hard in the face. Half a step, that was all he took, and he saw Robert's fear.

‘That's what I came back for,' Charlie said.

He flicked his fingers open, grazing the air an inch from Robert's face and he saw his father flinch.

‘You're scared of me,' Charlie said in wonder, and he
leaned back against the sink and laughed, a hard, electric laugh.

‘But it's more civilized to talk than fight,' he said. ‘You haven't asked about my mother.'

Charlie pictured Lydia with her coffee and her book, waiting for him in the Café Nazionale. He hadn't told her about the trip, and he'd meet her there in two days' time and tell her nothing. Jean had made him promise not to.

‘It was our choice to leave, not yours,' Jean said. ‘But this life has been too hard-won. Leave her with her peace.'

‘I don't want to upset her,' Charlie said. ‘But I want to see my father for myself. As an adult.'

‘I know you need to. But it will change things. Wait a while before you speak to her, till your feelings have settled a little,' so he had he agreed that he would say nothing for now.

Robert didn't speak, only watched him with wary eyes.

‘You haven't asked, so I'll tell you about her,' Charlie said, because now he understood Jean's fear and he wanted to hurt this man.

What he said to Robert then was true, but it wasn't the only truth; things had been hard at the start for Lydia and Jean and they'd struggled. People aren't nicer somewhere else. He had felt this as a boy, though not much was said; but he knew it as a young man because they had spoken to him about what it had been like.

‘She's happy and they're still together. They're still sleeping in the same bed.'

Robert put the cigarette to his lips and rummaged in his pocket for matches.

Charlie watched the suck of his cheeks and the pull of the flame and pity washed through him. He wondered what the hell he was doing here, a thousand miles from home, stuck in this hopeless conversation with this old man who didn't want to be his father.

His throat ached and his eyes throbbed, as though he'd
been crying for hours. He felt like someone who has sleepwalked their way into somewhere and then woken up.

‘I thought it would be different,' he said to his father.

In the late afternoon sun a boy in trainers and scruffy jeans bent to the pond's edge. He pressed his finger to the black box beside him, its antenna waving slightly at his touch, then stretched out his arms like a small god. Lifting his boat out, he turned and stood proud. Above, on the hill, Charlie stood watching.

Placing the boat and its black box on the grass, the boy wiped his hands on his T-shirt and was off, shouting to a friend, running to the far side.

The town was still full of boys, Charlie thought, though he was twenty years away. His memory reached across, like the boy's dancing shadow in the water, etiolated, awkward.

He stood perfectly still, unseen, barely there.

The minutes passed and the wind arrived to whip the surface of the water. The boy returned for his boat and Charlie looked at his watch. It was time to go.

FIONA SHAW
lives and works in York. After giving birth to her two daughters, she suffered a postnatal breakdown – an experience she chronicled in her acclaimed non-fiction debut,
Out of Me
, shortlisted for the MIND prize. She is the author of two previous novels,
The Sweetest Thing
(2003) and
The Pictures She Took
(2005).

I would like to thank the Royal Literary Fund for their financial assistance during the writing of this novel. Ledig House in New York State offered me a sanctuary within which to finish the novel: I am grateful to D.W. Gibson and the wonderful staff there, and to my fellow writers, with whom it was a pleasure and an inspiration to spend those weeks.

My thanks to Elizabeth and John Horder and Peter and Sue Tomson for their reflections on what it was like to be a GP in the 1950s; and to Danielle Walker Palmour for giving me a taste of beekeeping.

Thank you to Karen Charlesworth, Jean Downey, Anna Maria Friman, Sandy Goldbeck-Wood, Liz Grierson, Susan Orr, Adam Phillips, Martin Riley and Dave Tomson for all their backing in so many ways.

Thanks also to the following for their kind permission to reprint short extracts from other works: A.P. Watt for John Buchan's
The Thirty-Nine Steps;
and Pan Macmillan for Eric Ambler's
The Mask of Dimitrios
.

‘Roses of Picardy', words by Frederick E. Weatherly, music by Haydn Wood © Chappell Music Ltd (PRS). All rights administered by Warner Chappell Music Australia Pty Ltd. Reproduced by permission.

Many thanks to Alan Mahar and Emma Hargrave at Tindal Street.

Above all, my thanks to Clare Alexander for her unstinting support.