The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (5 page)

We might not have been here, Kay thought.

In the kitchen, Nita dropped the lid of the kettle and the sound went on reverberating on the tiled floor, even after she had bent impatiently to pick it up.

Rain poured off the roofs of the houses they walked past and the early blossom lay in sad, sodden little heaps in the gutter. Spring had retreated behind banked, swollen clouds and a cold wind.

‘Perhaps it is time for us to leave home,’ Kay said into the umbrella with which she was trying to shield her head and face. Nita stopped dead and lifted her own umbrella to stare at her sister and the rain flowed off it down her neck.

‘Even without . . . well, there will surely be changes. Perhaps we should institute our own.’

‘Why must there be changes?’

‘Aren’t we rather too old to be living at home still?’

Kay was thirty-five, Nita about thirty-seven. They looked older. Felt older.

‘But wherever would we go to? Where would you want to go?’

‘A flat?’

‘Do you like flats?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘We are perfectly happy and comfortable as we are.’

‘Yes.’

They turned the corner. Each had had a private inner glimpse into the rooms of a small flat, and looked quickly away.

‘Besides.’

The rest was unspoken, and perfectly understood. Besides, Nita would have continued, now that she has come to the house there is all the more reason than ever for us to stay.

Every afternoon since that first day when they had stepped into the garden and seen their father sitting with Leila Crocker over the blue ribbon teapot, they had dreaded coming home and finding her there again. Twice already they had done so. Once, the two of them had been seated in exactly the same place in the garden, the table and the tea things between them so that they might never have moved at all.

The next time, Leila Crocker had been coming along the passage from the downstairs cloakroom as
they opened the front door. None of them had known what to say.

Now, Kay turned her key in the lock, pushed the door slowly and waited. They both waited, listening. But the house was empty, they could feel at once. It felt and sounded and smelled empty. The clock ticked. Nita took both umbrellas out to the scullery.

At the end of the television news, when Kay had switched off the set, their father had not come home.

‘He has never said anything.’

‘Perhaps he has nothing to say.’

‘He has told us nothing about her. Wouldn’t it be usual – to tell something?’

‘What is “usual”? I don’t think I know.’

‘No.’

It was not that he had behaved secretively, or evasively, or avoided them. Things had gone on exactly as before. Except that in some vital, deep-rooted way, they had not. Because always, no matter how he behaved, the woman was between the three of them.

The taxi came for him each morning. He went out, returned, sometimes very late, opened his letters, read
the newspaper, worked at his desk, smoked his single late cigar. When they were all together, he ate with them. When he was not at home, they had no idea of where he was and could not ask.

The house seemed suddenly imbued with meaning, redolent of their past and precious to them. Every door handle and window-pane and cupboard. Every book and curtain and step on the stairs. The mirror in the hall and the clock and the blue ribbon teapot, all seemed to hold the life of their family within every atom, to be infinitely more than household objects made of wood and glass and metal and china and paint. Every touch and footstep, the echo of every word spoken, was part of the fabric and substance of the house. At night they lay and wrapped it round themselves and held it to them.

They were possessive, passionate and jealous of it and everything it contained. The feeling they had for it was as strong and vital as their love for their father and the memory of their mother. They were shocked by the power of it.

They could not say that they liked Leila Crocker. They could not say that they disliked her.

‘Her hair is very tightly permed,’ Kay said.

‘But her shoes are good.’

At the department store during one lunch hour Kay had suddenly told the other fitter about it. Anne McKay’s hirsute face had lit up.

‘Oh, Kay, that is so very nice! Isn’t that nice for him? I think that’s lovely.’

What is ‘lovely’? Kay thought, panicking. I have told her that he brought a woman to tea. Her face betrayed her terror. Anne McKay reached out and touched her arm. They were seated in the old broken-down basket chairs in the dusty little staffroom.

‘I meant how lovely for him to have some companionship. I know you miss your mother, of course you do, but life has to move on.’

Does it? Why does it? Why can it not stay as it is? Kay took a bite from her sandwich but could not swallow it.

‘You won’t be at home for ever, will you? Either of you.’

Won’t we? Why not? Why should we ever leave? Who could make us?

Kay jumped up, and went to the cloakroom and there spat the piece of sandwich violently into the lavatory basin.

‘I suppose,’ Nita said, hearing about it later, ‘that companionship is important.’

‘He has us. He isn’t alone.’

‘We should try to be fair.’

‘What is “unfair”?’

‘We are – well, isn’t it quite different?’

‘From what?’

‘I mean, it is just a different kind of companionship – friendship. Of course it is, Kay.’

But what the nature of the friendship or companionship was they could not have said.

It had been raining for almost a week, but now, as they walked the last hundred yards down the avenue, the sun came out and shone in their faces and reflected watery gold on the wet pavement and the house roof.

‘We must try to be fair,’ Nita said again.

They quickened their steps.

But the house was empty, as it was empty every evening for the next week, and after that, it seemed, was never empty again. It was the speed of it all that horrified them, the speed which was, Kay said, unnecessary and unseemly.

‘And rather hurtful.’

But their father was now oblivious to everything except the woman he was to marry. For he would marry Leila Crocker, he said, telling them, with neither warning nor ceremony, the next time he spent an evening at home with them.

‘I should like you to know,’ he had said, laying down his soup spoon, ‘that I have asked Leila to be my wife.’

The room went deathly silent and, it seemed to Kay and Nita, deathly cold. A chill mist seemed to creep in under the door and the window frame, curling itself round them so that they actually shivered. They could not look at him or at one another. They could do nothing.

‘I have found a very dear companion, a very fine person with whom to share the rest of my life. Your mother – her illness and her death – were – very difficult. I had not imagined – of course you hardly know Leila, but you will come to know her, and to love and admire her, I am quite certain of it. Quite certain.’

He beamed innocently from one to the other.

‘This is going to be a very happy home once more.’

It was like their bereavement all over again but in a way worse, because death was the final certainty, and this was uncertain, this would go on and on. Their whole lives would change but they did not know how. Their future would be entirely different but they could not picture it.

That first night, after he had told them, the silence had been so terrible, his eager, beaming face so open and expectant, that Nita had prayed to die, then, there, rather than have to face any of it and Kay had wished her tongue cut out, for any words she might feel able to utter would be wrong and false and surely choke her.

In the end, after what might have been a minute or a lifetime, their father said, ‘I hope very much that you are pleased.’

Kay swallowed.

‘Of course, your mother –’

Nita leaped up, pushing her chair back with such force that it toppled and crashed over behind her. ‘She – Mother has nothing to do with this – please do not talk about Mother.’

‘Perhaps –’ Kay heard her own voice, strangled
and peculiar. ‘Perhaps you may be able to understand what a shock this is.’

‘But you
are
happy for me? You do share this happiness with me?’

His face was that of a child anxious for approval, and their feelings as they looked at him were impossible, confused, painful.

‘She has given me a new life.’

They fled.

The next morning Nita woke Kay up before seven o’clock.

‘I am going to the service. Will you come?’

Kay turned onto her back. They had not been to church since the Sunday after the funeral.

‘What will you pray for?’

‘Guidance.’

‘For him?’

‘For ourselves.’

‘For it to end – for this – this thing to be over.’

Nita sat down on her sister’s bed. ‘I think,’ she said carefully, ‘that it will not.’

‘No.’

‘And I find I cannot cope with – I have never felt like this in my life.’

‘What do you feel?’

‘I think it is hatred. And anger. Great anger.’

‘Betrayal.’

‘Is it?’

‘But not us – it is not us he is betraying.’

‘No.’

‘It is indecent. He is an old man.’

‘Perhaps if it had been in a few years’ time.’

‘That is the worst, isn’t it? Think of all those tears. All that – and now to think it was all lies and falseness.’

‘Oh I don’t think it was. He did –’

‘Love Mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then how could he?’

‘If I don’t deal with this terrible hatred it will become destructive of everything. I hardly slept.’

‘Burrowing.’

‘Yes. It’s like that. A canker. Will you come?’

‘No.’

‘We have to try. We must try.’

‘For her sake?’

‘No, for him. Of course for him.’

‘Do you like her?’

‘We barely know her. I only say we should try.’

‘You are too good.’

Kay turned over and pressed her face hard into her pillow. Her mother seemed to be somewhere in the depths of it, as she was everywhere now, smiling, patient. Betrayed. ‘You will have to go by yourself,’ Kay said, tears pouring down her face.

The city restaurant had been full at ten minutes past one and so they had been obliged to share a table. That was how they had met.

‘I suppose she had been on the lookout for just such a man, eating alone.’

‘Kay –’

‘Unfair?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is all unfair.’

‘She is very nice to us.’

‘Why should she not be?’

‘We have not been altogether nice to her – we have perhaps been rather unwelcoming.’

‘Of course we have. She is unwelcome.’

Though so far Leila Crocker had behaved impeccably. She had been reserved, friendly but never effusive. Pleasant and careful.

‘It really is difficult to dislike her,’ Nita said.

‘I don’t care for her clothes.’

‘Well they are perfectly good clothes.’

‘Oh yes.
Good
clothes.’

Leila Crocker wore smart suits in plain colours, alternating them week by week, cherry-red, ice-blue, camel, mauve. She was, she said, personal assistant to a managing director. The second time she came to the house, she told them that she was forty-four.

‘Why did she suppose her age was of any interest to us? It is no business of ours.’

Their father was almost thirty years older. They could not talk to him.

‘I hope that things will go on as they always have,’ he said.

‘How can they? How can anything ever be as it was?’

Kay ran her finger over and over the closed lid of the piano.

‘He is destroying all of it.’

‘Do stop doing that.’

‘Do you suppose he ever thinks – thinks of Mother?’

‘Surely he must.’

‘What? What can he think?’

‘You will take off the veneer.’

‘There is no one else left to defend her memory.’

‘Is that what we are for?’

‘What else?’

‘It is almost as though thirty-seven years had somehow –’

‘Well they have not.’ Kay spoke in a raw, furious whisper.

‘Do stop doing that. I think I shall go mad,’ Nita shouted, then went quite silent. They stared at one another fearfully.

‘Look,’ Kay said after a moment. ‘Look what is happening, what it is making us do. Everything is cracking and splintering and being destroyed. Even us.’