The Language of Bees (19 page)

The eyes did their downward glance. “Frankly, you don’t look like one of the Adlers’ friends.”

I stifled a sigh, but the child cut in. “She’s just come from visiting her parents and she’s afraid of being cut off so she has to dress like that, just like us and Grandmama.”

There was humour in the woman’s face at that, the sort of humour that indicates a degree of wit.

“I haven’t worn the skirt since last year, and I didn’t have time to adjust the hem,” I admitted. “But it’s true, I’ve known Damian for years. I met him in France, just after the War.”

The claim either sounded real or contained a fact that she knew to be true, because she looked down at her daughter and said, “You run along and pour the tea for your dollies, Virginia. I’ll be there in a moment.”

Reluctantly, the child withdrew to trudge, shoulders bent, for the stairway. When her feet were on the steps, her mother turned back to me.

“There was a gentleman here the other day, asking after Yolanda.”

I could hear the accusation in her tone, and scrambled hastily to assemble a harmless explanation. “Tall, older man?”

“Yes. You know him?”

“My father. Or rather, step-father. When I knew I’d be coming up, I asked him to call by and tell Damian and Yolanda. They weren’t answering their telephone, and she’s a terrible correspondent. When he didn’t find them, I hoped perhaps he’d just missed them.”

“I see,” she said, accepting both the explanation and the insider’s comments about the Adlers. “Normally on a Saturday evening I’d say you could find Yolanda in church, but I haven’t seen either of them for some days. They may be out of town.”

“When did you last see them?”

“Let me think. You know, I don’t believe I’ve seen
her
for quite a while, although I saw him more recently. Sunday, was it? Yes, he walked down the street with a valise as we were leaving for dinner at my mother’s. He said hello to the children. But I haven’t seen either Mrs Adler or the child since … oh, I know, we met in the park perhaps ten days ago, just after the rains stopped. Our daughters enjoy playing together.” I thought it unlikely that the bright-eyed child I had just been speaking to would share too many interests with an infant less than half her age. More likely their “playing together” was a
convenient pretext for their mothers to linger on a park bench, chatting.

“That would have been, what, Wednesday?”

“I think so.”

“And Damian, you saw him Sunday afternoon?” With a valise-leaving for Sussex?

“That’s right.”

“You said Mrs Adler goes to church on Saturday night. Where is that?”

“Well, I don’t know that it’s church, exactly. It’s one of those meeting hall places full of odd people.”

“Is it nearby?”

“I think so—it’s my husband who told me about it, let me ask him. Jim? Jim, could you come here for a moment, there’s a lady looking for the Adlers in number seven. My husband, Jim,” she said when a rotund man of forty came to the door, pointedly carrying a tea-cup. Distant voices indicated other children, under the supervision of a nanny. And the presence of an undistracted wife at the door at a time when cooking odours filled the house indicated a cook on the premises as well: no Bohemians, these.

“Mary Russell,” I said, holding out my hand first to him, then to her.

“Jim, can you tell Miss Russell where that meeting hall was that you saw Mrs Adler going into, some weeks back?”

Jim was not the brains of the family, and had to hunt through his memories for the event in question. After a while, his round face cleared. “Ahr, yais. Peculiar types. Artistic, don’t you know?”

“That sounds like the Adlers,” I agreed merrily. “Do you remember where the hall was?”

He stirred his tea for a moment, then raised the cup to slurp absently: The act stirred memory. “It was coming back from the cinema one night. Harold Lloyd, it was. Wonderful funny man.” I made encouraging noises, hoping I was not to hear the entire plot of whatever picture it was.

Fortunately, his wife intervened. “Which cinema house was it, Jim?”

“Up the Brompton,” he answered promptly.

“Not the Old Brompton?”

“Nar, up near the V and A.”

“Isn’t that the Cromwell Road?” I asked.

“Thurloe, for a time,” she corrected me.

“Not Thurloe,” he insisted. “Below that.” This, my mental map told me, did indeed put us onto the bit of the Brompton Road that jogged to join the Fulham Road. I did not know how a stranger ever found his way around this city, where a street could be called by five names in under a mile.

“So was the meeting hall along the Brompton Road?”

“Just this side.” Between them, they narrowed it down for me, and although I knew the area well enough to be certain there was no true meeting hall in that street, there were any number of buildings that could have a large room above ground-floor shops, and his description of “atop the stationers’ with the fancy pens in the window,” was good enough to start with. I thanked them and wished them a good evening.

Jim left, but the wife stepped out of the door and lowered her voice. “You said you’re a friend of his? Mr Adler’s?”

“Originally his, yes,” I said carefully.

“But you know her a little?”

“Not as well as I do him, but a little.” One photograph and a husband’s description might better be described as a
very
little, but the woman wished to tell me something, and I thought she was asking for encouragement.

“Is she … That is to say, is Mrs Adler dependable?”

An interesting word. “Dependable?”

She looked to be regretting the question, but she persisted. “I mean to say, Mr Adler seems a nice enough sort, for an artist, that is. Polite and so very good with the little girl, but the wife … well, she’s a bit queer.”

“Hmm,” I said, desperate for a hint as to Yolanda’s particular type of oddness. “She does strike one that way, it’s true. Perhaps it’s just that she’s foreign.”

“True. But you’d say that, deep down, she’s a good wife and mother?”

Ah. “She loves the child a great deal,” I said, with somewhat more assurance.

“Oh yes, no doubt about that. It’s just, well, they’ve had three different nannies in the few months they’ve been here, and the agency-it’s the agency I use, when I need anyone—they told me that word is getting out that it’s not an easy post. Nice people, don’t you know, but… foreign. They don’t understand the proper way things are done. In any case, this means that Damian—Mr Adler—seems to care for the child on his own rather more than one might expect.”

“Yolanda does go away from time to time,” I offered.

“Exactly!” the non-Bohemian wife and mother said.

“Well,” I said. “You know artists. They live differently from other people. I believe Damian rather enjoys being a … daddy.”

She took no note of my hesitation, which was less at the idea of Damian’s pleasure in fatherhood than it was a matter of the unfamiliar vocabulary:
Mummy, Daddy
, and the language of the nursery did not come easy to my tongue. Her face softened with relief. “That’s very true, he loves little Estelle to death. So you’d say he takes her to the park because he enjoys it, not because his wife, well, abandons them?”

I did my best to assure her that Damian enjoyed nothing better than to spend his every daylight hour with the child while his wife flitted around doing God knew what, then I thanked her again and left her to supervise the dollies’ tea-party.

As I walked down the steps, I reflected that a woman who did not think to offer her name to a visitor might not be the best judge of a woman whose interests lay outside of the home.

I found no help from the three remaining houses, and considered: Branch out through the adjoining streets, or head for the Brompton Road meeting hall?

I decided that a further canvass of the more distant houses held little hope of striking gold, so I re-traced Jim’s steps, out of Chelsea along the Fulham Road and along the crooked tail of Brompton.
There I found a doorway next to a stationers. The shop was open, the door was not, although a hand-lettered sign tacked to its centre read:

Children of Lights meeting, 7:00 p.m. Saturdays

I let my gaze stray to the reflection in the stationers’ glass. The young woman there did not resemble a potential child of light-lights, I corrected myself, although I had to wonder if the plural was an error. If I had anywhere near the right impression of Yolanda Adler, my dowdy skirt and sensible shoes would not serve to ingratiate myself into her circle. In any event, there was no doubt that I should have to do something about my appearance before entering the venue that would come after.

Some years before, I’d kept a flat in the city, but the married couple I’d hired to keep it up had since retired, and the bother of maintaining it outweighed its occasional usefulness. Now, on the rare occasions I was in Town without Holmes, I would either stay with his brother or in my women’s club, the whimsically-named Vicissitude. Or, in a pinch, one of Holmes’ bolt-holes.

It was the latter that held the wherewithal to transform me from drab chrysalis to full-blown butterfly; as it happened, there was one very close to hand.

I continued along the commercial streets until I came to the department store in which Holmes had built a concealed room. I let myself in by a hidden key and invisible latch. Of his various hidey-holes across the city, this was one of the more oppressive, as dim and airless as the wardrobe it resembled. But it was packed to the brim with costumes, and in minutes, I had an armful of likely garments to hold up before the looking-glass.

Or perhaps
unlikely
garments might better describe the raiment I wrapped myself in: a diaphanous skirt with a deliberately uneven hem-line, a gipsy-style blouse whose yoke was stiff with embroidery, a scarlet leather belt with a buckle fashioned from a chunk of turquoise, and a soft shawl that might have been attractive in a less
garish shade of green. Everything on me apart from my spectacles and shoes was eye-catching, everything was bright, all the colours clashed.

I traced a line of kohl around my eyes and added a peacock-feather bandeau to my hair, then on second thought changed the half-dozen glass bangles on my right wrist for a silver chain to which were attached various tiny and esoteric shapes. As a piece of jewellery it was both ugly and uncomfortable, but on previous occasions I had found it to offer great opportunity for conversation. I studied the result in the glass, then checked the time on my lamentably mundane wrist-watch.

Twenty minutes to seven. I could by-pass the Children of Light, or Lights, as may be, ignoring the wife’s interests to plunge directly on the trail of Damian himself. On the other hand, this church of hers would appear to hold very limited hours, as the other place I was headed did not.

No, I decided: I would stop briefly at the meeting hall, then go on. I could only pray that, in neither place would I meet anyone who knew me.

Of course, I could always claim I was dressed for a costume ball.

Reward (2):
Through his Guide’s embrace
,
the man found himself possessed of gifts both profound
and primitive, insights human and divine:
what men call clairvoyance
.
Testimony, II:2

T
HE NARROW DOORWAY BESIDE THE STATIONERS’ was now attracting people. Three young women in very ordinary dress went in, causing me to question my costume, but then a man in a dramatic black velvet cape that must have been roasting stepped out of a cab and swept inside, the woman left behind to pay the driver wearing garments only fractionally less outrageous than my own, so I kept coming.

The doorway led to a narrow, unadorned stairway, with the sound of a crowd coming from above. I climbed, and found a room twice the size of the stationers’ downstairs, half the chairs filled by fifty or sixty or so professional Seekers, poetic undergraduates, bored young women, and earnest spinsters. I was by no means the most colourful.