Tell it to the Bees

by Fiona Shaw

  ‘Peel them carefully and you can toss the skins. Find out the letter of your love.’

  He grimaced. ‘I’m not going to marry. I don’t like girls very much.’

  Lydia laughed. ‘Everyone says that at your age.’

  ‘So what do they say at yours, then?’

  ‘Don’t be so rude,’ she said, and she cuffed him gently on the ear and then they were home.

  3

  Jean Markham wanted no more that evening than to sit for twenty minutes and watch her bees. There was nothing she needed to say, but she’d have liked just to sit. Then she’d put Peggy Lee on the gramophone and pour herself a Scotch. But she was late and there was no time for any of that. The house was quiet. Mrs Sandringham had gone a couple of hours earlier, home to her large boys and their impossible appetites, so nothing now disturbed the empty spaces.

  She stopped in the hall and stood still, listening, waiting for the noises of her arrival to subside – the door slam, her footsteps on the tiles, the bump of her heart in its cavity, the dull echo from her dropped bag. The silence gathered itself around her shoulders, warm and possessive, and she put a hand to it as you might to a cat that had settled there, then climbed the stairs to her bedroom.

  It was five years since Jean took on this house but it hadn’t yet let her take possession. Built for a different cast and at a different time, with its breakfast room and dining room, servants’ bells, maids’ attic rooms papered in faded flowers, it seemed still to resist her efforts and her living. She occupied properly only a few rooms: her bedroom, the kitchen, sitting room. Her father’s books in what she called, for a joke, her library. For the rest, the house rebuked her and her solitary state, needling her in vulnerable moments with things still found, left behind in corners and cupboards, children’s things especially – a marble under the doormat, a tin car mysteriously high up on the pantry shelf, a rubber duck in the airing cupboard, its dusty rump leaving a tideline in the basin when she rinsed it clean. It seemed to Jean as if these things had a will to be hidden. They had escaped her first-time clearing and cleaning and then come to light as if by their own volition, catching her unawares later.

  Strangest of all to find was the lock of hair. She had been reading in a small room at the back of the house that caught the last of the late summer sun. The room was empty save for an old armchair, just bare boards and dust flowers in the corners, and two faded rectangles on the papered walls – tiny pink buds in green tracery – where two pictures must have once hung.

  The cat had sat for a while on her lap, arranging herself, as cats do, to absorb the sun as best she could, till Jean had got too hot and lifted her down. She’d gone back to her reading then, till some odd movement had caught her eye and she’d looked up to see the cat across the room sitting back on her furry haunches, cuffing a paw in the air, as if half playing, half annoyed. Something was caught on her claw and, kneeling to her, Jean saw a snatch of red. Holding the cat firm, she unhooked a bow of dusty ribbon, shot with a thread of silver, and tied within it, a lock of fine, blond hair.

  Probably the slip of hair and its ribbon had been caught between the floorboards. Probably that was what it was. But still, this particular scrap of other life unnerved her, as if she’d been playing peeping Tom to the strangers living here before her. As if she’d seen something she shouldn’t.

  It was Friday night and Jean was tired. Her neck hurt. She arched her shoulder blades back and round, hoping for some ease. A bath would have been nice, but she was invited for supper at eight so it would have to wait.

  Perhaps because she looked so much at other people’s bodies, Jean wasn’t usually interested in her own. But tonight, changing out of her working clothes, she undressed entirely, dropped her underwear on the rug, and stood naked before the wardrobe glass. She looked at all the length of her.

  ‘Too tall to find a husband easily,’ she said out loud with that rueful tilt of the mouth that even those who knew her well found so hard to read. The words had the status of an old truth, like other things understood in her family: that her grandmother had died without saying farewell to her daughter; that her mother had married beneath her; that they’d rather Jean had been born pretty than clever.

  Wheeling her bicycle the short distance to supper, Jean paced her mood against the trees spreading high over the road. Their leaves shushed her feet, brittle and soft, and the clear, darkening sky was visible through their branches. Laying down her worries like this was an old trick, learned from something Jim had told her about, a Russian who couldn’t stop remembering things and had made it into his trade. He’d remember lists of words by placing them in his mind up and down the streets of his home town, until his head was so full that he’d have to do the same thing to forget them, walking round the streets in his mind till he’d cleared the words away again.

  So Jean leaned her worries up against the trees as she walked her way to supper, and by the time she had reached the twelfth elm, she had shrugged herself free, for now.

  In the normal way of things, supper with Jim and Sarah Marston was as close to a family affair as Jean came. Jim opened the door to her before she could turn the handle, and held out a glass.

  ‘It’s a weak one now; been waiting for you so long, the ice’s melted.’

  Jean shrugged off her coat and swapped him the glass for her bag.

  ‘You know not to put ice in my whisky,’ she said.

  ‘You likely to be out tonight?’

  She took a long sip. ‘No, but you never know.’ She pointed up the stairs. ‘Are they?’

  ‘Waiting for you. Go and send them off.’

  ‘Them or me.’ She blew him a kiss and went up the stairs.

  The children smelled sweet and warm in their beds, doeeyed with near sleep.

  ‘Buzzz, buzzz,’ Meg murmured as Jean took the book from the shelf. She kissed each of them on the forehead and sat on the chair between the beds.

  ‘From where we stopped before,’ she said. ‘You remember, there’s Wild Man and Wild Woman in their cave and Wild Dog has gone to them on account of the delicious smell of the mutton. You both listening?’

  The two little girls nodded their heads into their pillows, and Jean began to read:

  ‘… Wild Horse stamped with his foot and said, “I will go and see and say why Wild Dog has not returned. Cat, come with me.”

  ‘“Nenni!” said the Cat. “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me. I will not come.” But all the same he followed Wild Horse softly, very softly, and hid himself where he could hear everything.’

  She read on until the Cat went far, far away and then, with another light kiss for each sleeping girl, she stopped, put the book back in the shelf and turned off the light.

  ‘Sleep tight,’ she said.

  Jim watched Jean as she told them how their children slept. She spoke to the pair of them, but in truth she spoke only to Jim. He took his time, as she talked, watching her, gauging how she was. He saw that she had changed her clothes for the evening. She wore stern two-piece suits for doctoring, but now she wore a summer dress that Sarah would probably tell him later had gone out of fashion several years ago. She had on the earrings her grandmother had left her, and her curly hair was getting long, so that she had to push it from her eyes more than once.

  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.

&
nbsp; ‘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.’

  4

  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 t
he 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.