Tell it to the Bees

by Fiona Shaw

  Setting out, Jean had little patience with her own feelings. She had a map and compass and a good sense of direction to guide her through this walk.

  You’re a fortunate woman, she told herself. You deserve short shrift. And she checked her bootlaces, humped up her haversack and set out.

  All day the sky stayed low and every so often the thin mist that had followed her from the town would drift up from the valleys and hang in a desultory kind of way over the high moorland, laying a fine drift of wet over everything: plant, stone, solitary walker, the sheep that huddled in the lee of the rocks. Occasionally Jean heard the bristle of a small creature in the gorse and later, when she had dropped down lower into the valley, she heard deer.

  Unpacking her lunch, she found her haversack wet with dew. She stood by a stream to eat and watched the long-tailed tits, their feathers dirty in the mist, skitter about the tall, dead stems of willow-herb. The rushes were half-dead and half-green, bundled untidily at the edge of the water. She saw a single fern pushing through the fallen leaves, its green so green it was like an interloper in this landscape.

  The last miles were heavy weather. Her feet were wet; the haversack straps dug into her shoulders and her knees had started to ache with every downhill step.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she said. She looked around her, peering into the empty, sodden air. ‘Bloody hell,’ she yelled, and she laughed, cold and alone and on a walk that was too long of her own devising.

  When Jean bent over the bed and saw the little boy’s sore eyes and runny nose and heard his cough; and when she coaxed his mouth open and saw the tiny tell-tale spots clustered in his soft cheek; when she felt the heat of his brow, she knew they were in for a bad run.

  ‘Keep him in bed, keep the room cool and dark and encourage him to drink as much liquid as you can. Water, Ribena, doesn’t matter. You’ll notice a rash appear in the next day or so. That’s normal. Stomach pain, diarrhoea is normal. The high temperature is normal. But if it stays high, beyond Friday, call and I’ll be out to check on him.’

  ‘Can’t you give him some medicine? Or some of those anti things?’

  Jean shook her head. ‘Won’t help. It’s a nasty disease and he’ll need the best care you can give. But most likely in a week or so’s time he’ll be well on the way to recovery.’

  In the course of the day, Jean made house calls to two more mothers with four children between them, and gave each of them the same advice, explaining that measles was highly infectious and warning them to keep other children away.

  By the end of the week, she had seen several dozen children and the town was in the grip of an epidemic. When another doctor went down with the disease, she took on his calls too; her evenings were filled with the sharp cries and racking coughs of sick children. She was exhausted and exhilarated.

  ‘It’s blown away my winter blues,’ she said to Jim.

  ‘I’m sure they’re delighted to be helping you out.’

  She swiped at him. ‘I mean that I’m good at this. It’s what I was trained for.’

  ‘Mrs Sandringham moved in?’

  Jean nodded. ‘For now. She’s a saint. Hot food and warm house when I come in at night. Her humming. Some cheerful noise.’

  She reached over and tapped Jim’s hand.

  ‘Your girls all right?’

  ‘Right as rain.’

  ‘It’s a horrid disease, Jim. Lock them up for now if you have to.’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Dr Markham here,’ Jean said, and when the voice at the other end spoke, her shoulders slumped.

  It was a woman’s voice, its telephone cadence high and tinny, urgent. Jean shut her eyes and for nearly a minute the voice went on. Finally, opening them again and squaring her shoulders, as though for a fight, Jean broke into the stream.

  ‘You’re doing everything you can, and as I said last night, you’re doing it very well and …’

  She rolled her eyes at Jim.

  ‘No, it is only the measles,’ she said in a voice which sounded almost the parody of calm. ‘It would be no wonder if Connie caught them too. But at least you know now what to expect. High temperature, tummy upset, rash … No, there’s nothing else I can do. I know she’s only little but …’

  Following another spate of sound, Jean compromised.

  ‘I’ll call by in a couple of days, Monday afternoon. She might be through the worst of it by then, with any luck. You’re doing a grand job. Keep it up. Excuse me now. Yes.’

  And then she brought the conversation to a close, banging her fist quietly on the table for emphasis.

  ‘I think we’ll find her temperature is on its way down by then,’ she said. ‘Yes. A couple of days. Afternoon.’

  She put the telephone down hard on its cradle with a snap of plastic.

  ‘Mrs Bewick,’ she said. She slumped into her chair. ‘She called yesterday, too, to tell me about her little girl. She didn’t sound like a very happy mite, but that’s how it is.’

  ‘Measles?’

  ‘Four children, gone down like ninepins, eldest to youngest. Three boys first, and now Connie. Only girl and her mother’s pride and joy. Father’s away, working on the roads, so Mrs Bewick’s exhausted. I don’t think that helps.’

  ‘No family to help out? Neighbours?’

  ‘No family near by. Also she’s a bit strange. Won’t let anyone else do for them. Calls me, and calls me out, all the time, but doesn’t even like me examining them.’

  ‘You sound fed up.’

  ‘I’m tired is all, and she’s a worrier. She always thinks they’re ill. I don’t know how many times I’ve been into that house.’

  ‘And now they are.’

  Jean frowned. ‘The boys are on the road to recovery. The eldest two will be back to school in a day or two.’

  ‘She wants you to do some of your magic, my dear,’ Jim said.

  ‘Don’t tease me. I’m too tired. She doesn’t want magic from me.’

  ‘So what does she want?’

  She shrugged and got to her feet. ‘I don’t know, but it’s not a cure for her daughter’s measles.’

  With Mrs Sandringham living in, the big house felt quite different. There were lights on when Jean came home, and curtains drawn. She opened the front door to different sounds and smells. The wireless on and Mrs Sandringham humming at the stove, a pot of stew bubbling. The smell of her powder. Sometimes the pungent odour of young man, and there would be Mrs Sandringham laughing and chiding in the kitchen with one of her boys.

  ‘Look at you,’ Mrs Sandringham would exclaim when Jean pushed open the kitchen door. ‘Well, look at you.’ And she’d cluck around Jean, her nylon housecoat bristling, chivvying a son, pulling out a chair for her, lighting the gas under the kettle for tea, slicing and buttering a chunk from the loaf, and all the while chatting of something and nothing. Jean would sit, bone-weary, and be glad of the diversion.

  ‘You can buy it sliced now,’ Mrs Sandringham would say. ‘It’s off the ration. But I don’t know what people see in it.’

  Then she’d take the honey from the larder and dip a teaspoon with great ceremony.

  ‘Not too thick, Mrs S,’ Jean would say, and Mrs Sandringham would tut, but scrape the honey back.

  ‘You’ll fade away, you’re not careful,’ Mrs Sandringham said that Sunday evening, the second Sunday of her moving in. ‘You were a man, you’d have a wife doing things properly for you, not this halfway house.’ She leaned back against the counter, arms folded, and watched Jean, who was finishing an early supper at the kitchen table. ‘It’s the day of rest. Your eyes are on stalks and you can’t stop yawning.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Jean said, filling her bowl full of Mrs Sandringham’s sponge pudding with a show of enthusiasm. ‘Hale and hearty, with the best housekeeper in the world. The measles won’t go on for ever. Another month, I’d give it.’

  Mrs Sandringham pulled a chair out from the table.

  ‘If you don’t mind?’ she said, and Jean nodde
d, smiling slightly at the unusual formality.

  Mrs Sandringham shook her head.

  ‘It’s too much for a woman, all this. It was different, with Dr Browning. He had a wife as well as me. Mark you, he had his run-ins with illnesses too. But it’s not the same.’

  ‘I’m doing the same job a man would do, and I’m not doing it badly.’

  Mrs Sandringham sat up straight in her chair. She checked her hair, re-pinning it with expert fingers, then put her hands on her lap.

  ‘Can I speak plainly to you, Dr Markham? As one to another?’

  ‘Of course,’ Jean said.

  ‘Well, then, it’s not the point, is it? That you can do the job the same? In a war and that, then women are needed in men’s place. They do the job as well. We all of us know that, specially the women. But the war’s well over, the men are back, and there’s no need for you to be working your fingers to the bone, out all hours, and home to a house big enough for a great pile of a family, and it’s got nothing but you and your cat. It’s a shame, you being as you are.’

  Jean looked across the table. Mrs Sandringham’s hands had come untethered from her lap and she was rubbing at a mark on the table, the stone in her ring catching the wooden surface with a faint cratch sound. As Jean watched, she lifted her head and focused somewhere off near the sink, as if summoning herself again.

  ‘First of all, I have to be frank, when you arrived, you didn’t seem the thing at all, after Dr Browning, and him there so long. Your own ways and so forth. I thought, to be honest, you’d only be here till you’d got the ring on your finger. But it hasn’t gone like that, and besides, we rub along well enough now?’

  Jean nodded.

  ‘You’ve been good to my boys, and you like my casseroles, which is a thing Dr Browning never was so keen on.’

  ‘Best housekeeper any doctor could wish for,’ Jean said.

  But Mrs Sandringham’s thoughts were intent upon something, and Jean wasn’t sure she’d heard her.

  ‘I thought of writing it in a letter,’ the housekeeper said, ‘but then it wouldn’t come out right. The thing is, and I know it’s not the best time to be saying it. But there never is in your line of work. The thing is, I’m thinking I’ll move to my sister’s. Not right now. Later in the year, after the summer.’

  ‘The one living on the farm?’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to live in the countryside. The boys are grown now. It’s not so much a farm. More of a smallholding. But it’s too much work for her on her own, and you know her husband passed away.’

  ‘You’d be going for good?’ Jean said.

  ‘She’s got a man can help her this summer, but she can’t afford him much beyond. So I thought it best to tell you soon as I could. So there’s plenty of time.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jean said. ‘Of course. That’ll be quite a change for you.’

  Mrs Sandringham got up and busied herself with the kettle.

  ‘I’ve helped out often enough.’ She shimmied it over the hob. ‘I know what’s needed. But I wouldn’t go before you’d found someone else.’ She lifted the kettle, on the poise of its boil. ‘I wouldn’t dream of doing that.’

  *

  Jean slept through that night. The doorbell was rigged up so that it rang inside her bedroom, but there were no call-outs. Yet something still brought her out of sleep with a start as if an electric shock had run through her. Head heavy on the pillow, she lay still, coming round. One of her hands was wedged between her legs, the other cradled beneath her head.

  The light was bleary so it seemed not so much that the day was dawning as that the night was, in some essential way, undone. There was no more sleep to be had, but the morning was hard and unyielding, and Jean got up into it slowly, her limbs freighted with reluctance.

  As her body surfaced, Mrs Sandringham’s words came back to her and a wash of sadness ran across her, that it was only ever her own hands that caressed or cradled her.

  The consulting room was warm, as always, by the time she arrived, the gas hissing quietly below its breath. Her desk was ordered, pens and prescription pad ready, and the teapot was under its cosy. The wireless was on in the waiting room, magazines straightened, chairs aligned. Two patients were waiting when Jean looked in. They kept their eyes down on the pages of My Home and Practical Householder, as if to avoid her notice, stay safe.

  Jean knew that for every man or woman who came to see her, and put their bag down, or took off their hat, or unfastened their coat, and sat in the buttoned brown upholstered chair, there came into the consulting room with them a whole life lived, and a cluster of human intimacies. She knew that very often the sore arm, or the asthma, the bronchitis or the shingles, the infected finger or the worry over another pregnancy, carried the fray of that life. She would listen, and she would treat, and often she was sure that the first did more good than the second.

  That Monday in January she did as she always did when she arrived at the surgery; shaking down her cuffs, a habit learned from her father, positioning the desk lamp, tearing yesterday from the calendar and gathering herself.

  As a doctor, Jean was unruffled and authoritative. She listened attentively and learned over time that different kinds of performance worked better for men and women, so unless she knew to do otherwise, she would school her manner for each.

  Formality worked better with most men, so she would sit behind her desk, pen poised when they came in, and when she examined them, she’d make a point of turning up her cuffs crisply. As though they were a business to be managed, not a human being with a body. She’d always get straight down to it, making it clear that any questions she asked had a bearing on the problem brought, and when it was necessary to ask about things that might embarrass, she would do so with her eyes down, intent on the notes she was taking. Only later, once her examination and assessment was made and the man was breathing easier again, adjusting his braces, or tying laces, would she ask him if he had any other worries.

  With women she did things differently, shutting the door more carefully and then perhaps pouring herself some stewed tea. She’d listen with her head on one side, and when the consultation was finished, she’d ask them about somebody else, their children or their mother. She might even remark on their hairdo, and put a rueful hand to her own.

  That Monday morning she saw a knee injury, back pain, haemorrhoids, a possibly tumorous lump and a duodenal ulcer. She saw a man with a bad heart and a young woman who stroked the arms of the buttoned chair and said the problem was that she couldn’t breathe. Five minutes a life was the rule, and Jean was proud of her ability to give people the time they needed, and to keep to the schedule. Still, she allowed some slack to those who couldn’t fit their pain into the minutes provided and, by the time she arrived on her first house call, she was, as usual, running behind.

  It was gone four o’clock when she got to the Bewick home. She’d heard nothing, no message left, which was a good sign. A scurry of fingers opened the front door to her and she smiled wearily at the small, grave boy in underthings who stood back against the wall, his face still riddled with rash.

  ‘You feeling a bit better?’ Jean said, and he nodded. ‘Good. Upstairs?’

  He nodded again.

  Last time Jean had seen Connie had been only three days ago. She’d stood at the front door scuffled in her mother’s skirts, bright-eyed and shy. Jean remembered her apple-round face solemn at the threshold, and then wide in a smile as Jean bent to pick her up.

  ‘Let me have a hold of you, you little sugar plum,’ she’d said as she swung the small chunk of girl up level with her eyes and then turned her round and carried her up the stairs before her.

  Today Jean found Mrs Bewick sitting on her bed with Connie a swaddled bundle in her tight arms. She looked unkempt, her lank hair bundled up roughly, a grubby beige cardigan pulled over a thin cotton shift dress. Jean could see that she was shivering.

  ‘Mrs Bewick?’ Jean said. ‘It’s Dr Markham. Can I come in?’

&nb
sp; She didn’t lift her head, didn’t reply. Jean could hear the child’s breathing, laboured and rough. The room was stuffy and the bed unmade. A bedside lamp cast a brackish light into the room, as though it were underwater. A bucket of dirty nappies stood by the chest of drawers, and a baby’s bottle lay beside it. The bottle rocked slightly as Jean walked across the floorboards to the bed.

  Crouching beside mother and child, Jean put a hand to the woman’s elbow.

  ‘Let me see her,’ she said softly.

  Mrs Bewick made no reply, only held her child closer to her.

  Jean put a hand to the small brow. She was burning with fever.

  ‘Has she been like this for long?’

  Mrs Bewick turned the cradled child away.

  ‘I need to see her, Mrs Bewick. I’ll only be a minute.’

  Jean could smell the little girl’s hair, that sweet, milky smell. She could hear her struggle for air.

  ‘A couple of things. I must check a couple of things.’

  ‘I didn’t call you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You said not to call you.’

  ‘Let me examine her, please.’

  She tried to keep the panic from her voice, and maybe that persuaded Mrs Bewick and she placed Connie on her lap and allowed Jean to loosen the swaddling.

  The three brothers were crowded in the doorway, shoving for a better view, but silently, as though they knew that something in this visit was very different from the last, and so they met it with their own, childish gravitas.

  Jean turned to them. They looked like the three wise monkeys there, one tousled head below another, below another. She wanted to close the door against them. She didn’t want them to see their sister like this. She didn’t want them to see their mother’s fear. She didn’t want them to see her own. Forcing a smile, she waved her arms as if they were some quizzy pups.

  ‘Go on, you lot. Git.’

  Even in the silty light Jean could see the blue shadow at the girl’s lips, and when she lifted a small hand free of the blanket, the same chilly shadow at the fingertips.