by Fiona Shaw
He nearly turned around and went, except that a big lady saw him and marched at him like a tank and so he froze instead of running. She wore a thin coat like Auntie Pam did, over the top of everything else, so he could see her dress peeping out at the top and from underneath. You could get an electric shock off Auntie Pam’s and when she stood under the electric light, the coat shone like plastic. This lady’s had a pattern on it that looked like tongues in blue and red that swirled and flipped about in the wind.
‘It’s not anyone that’s ill,’ he said. ‘It’s about the bees. She said I could see the bees.’
And Mrs Sandringham got him by the collar and took him round the side of the house and shouted for the doctor.
She was wearing old trousers and a pullover with holes and she had a scarf around her head. When she got nearer, he saw she was smiling.
‘Charlie Weekes. I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘Come and see what’s going on.’
The bees had things to fear in the winter. Mice, which crept in at the door and ate their sweet food. Woodpeckers that could shred the hive to splinters. Canny blue tits that came tap-tapping at the entrance to snap up any curious bees. Dr Markham told Charlie how the warm February sun could lure them from the hive with a promise, like the ice queen, then freeze them to death. How they could lose their way home in the snow, bewildered by its brightness. He watched her heft each hive to know its weight, and she told him how careful you must be, when it was still wintry, not to disturb the bees or they might kill their queen, though she didn’t know why.
She gave him a notebook with a red cover and a leather loop to hold the slender pencil.
‘Might be useful,’ she said.
He wrote down that a slice of onion was good for bee stings. He wrote down that bee stings were good for arthritis. He wrote down that honey was heavier than water. He wrote down that you could talk to the bees and tell them about important things. But you must do it quietly, else they might fly away.
Before he left that day, Charlie ran back to where the hives stood. The doctor hadn’t told him how he should speak and he wasn’t sure how near to be, or what he should say. So in the end he stood at one side and put his head close, as if listening at a door. Covering his mouth with his hand, he told the bees he would be back next weekend and that he was glad now about the fight at school. Then, very quietly, he told them that his mum was sad but he didn’t know why.
8
Lydia cycled through the town with the noise of the wind in her ears and the sight of her son in her mind’s eye. The sun shone a thin light and the day promised to be warm, though it wasn’t yet. Down the hill and over the criss-cross of streets, past men and women washed and combed and brushed for the day. Hair sliced into lines, scarves tight beneath the chin against the messy air, walking on and on, seeing and not seeing, ready and not ready for daylight business. Or queuing, checking watches, leaning and careful against a corner, rocking on heels still pink from between the sheets. Or heads ducked into newspapers to find a retreat from the rise of the day here and now in this place, these pavements, this weather, this town.
She’d been cross with Charlie this morning. He’d had his breakfast in front of him for ten minutes and not started on it yet and she was impatient with his dreaminess.
‘Get on and eat, otherwise …’
And she’d turned with a shake of the head and gone for more water for the tea, so that Charlie had finished the sentence behind her back.
‘Otherwise I won’t grow tall and strong like my dad.’
She hadn’t been sure, from the way he said it, whether she was meant to hear him, or not. It was what she used to tell him when he was little, and it was true that she hadn’t found the new thing to say now he was bigger. But there was something in Charlie’s tone that sounded bitter, not amused or jokey, and Lydia didn’t know how to respond to that. So she’d sat down with the tea and settled on something else instead.
‘Charlie, you’re not making yourself a nuisance over the bees, are you?’
Which had got Charlie’s head up from the threads of jam he was patterning over his bread. He’d stared at her, his mouth slightly open, in something that looked like alarm.
‘She hasn’t said that? She hasn’t said it to you?’
‘No, she hasn’t. I haven’t spoken with her. Haven’t clapped eyes on her yet. But you’re there every week almost,’ Lydia said, and then, trying to make light: ‘I barely see you weekends, these days.’
‘She’s said I can go after school today. If I want.’
He waited, eyes down again on his plate till he caught her nod, then he started eating his bread and jam, taking large bites and swallowing fast.
‘Perhaps I better go and get ill,’ Lydia said, smiling, watching him, ‘so at least I could meet her. Thank her for her trouble.’
‘It’s not trouble,’ Charlie said. ‘She likes me being there. I like the bees. I can help her,’ and he pushed back his chair to leave the table.
In that way parents have when they need to have the last word, Lydia called as he left the room, ‘Wash your face before you go, and don’t forget your dinner money.’
Afterwards, cycling, the early morning wind forced tears from her eyes. They scudded across her cheekbones, reluctant messengers from some unexamined pool. In her bag were a Thermos of tea, a clean pinafore and the square, clean corners of a book. She’d take it out at lunchtime if she could, and dip in like dipping in a stream, let the words carry her somewhere else, anywhere.
‘Where’d you get the habit from?’ her friend Dot asked once, as if reading was a bit like picking your nose.
‘I had an uncle used to read to me.’
She looked down at her shoes, remembering, but not wanting Dot to ask about it.
Sitting side by side at the end of the vegetables, leaning against the shed. She used to put one hand behind her and snag at the splintery wood with her thumb, pressing just hard enough to feel the thread of nerve, and with the other hand she’d turn the pages, watching for her uncle’s nod. She remembered how she’d liked to think nobody could see them, hidden behind the rhubarb leaves and ornamental thistles.
‘So you got it from him, then.’
‘Must have done.’
‘What about his own kids?’
‘He never married. Don’t even remember any girlfriends. Then he was killed in the war. Ship got torpedoed.’
‘Sounds like you were very fond of him.’
‘He used to read me Sherlock Holmes.’ Lydia laughed. ‘Got me scared out of my wits.’
Dot rolled her eyes, as though it explained everything, that it was Sherlock Holmes, though Lydia knew she’d never read a book in her life.
‘He promised to marry me when I was bigger. By the time he was killed I’d got old enough to know that you couldn’t marry your uncle, but still …’ Lydia shrugged.
She tailed off, and Dot nodded her understanding, not about the reading, but maybe about the rest.
When she could, Lydia got to work ahead of time. That way, she could find a good spot in one of the vast bike sheds and get away quick at the end of the day, pedal like fury back to her boy.
She was nearly in the factory door when the five-minute hooter sounded. You could hear it all the way across town, and Charlie used it as his signal to leave for school. She pictured him grabbing his satchel and his coat, pushing his arms into sleeves as he set off down the street, his socks halfway down already, his collar skewed.
This doctor bothered Lydia. She wasn’t from the same place as them. She lived differently. She’d speak differently, and that mattered. Lydia wondered what they talked of, her son and this woman. She wondered what he’d think, that his mother worked in a factory and this woman was a doctor. She wondered why the doctor wanted Charlie there.
Around her the women gossiped and smoked. Somebody crooned ‘Secret Love’ till the bell sounded and the conveyor belt began its endless journey.
All through the morning
Lydia wondered. Her head was tilted to the belt and her hands moved without thought, doing their dance with cable, clamp and screwdriver. When she first started in this room, she’d thought how pretty the boards looked with their patterns of coloured wire. Pretty after the grey on grey of the munitions. She didn’t notice now. Only joined in the joke occasionally, when a girl left with her leaving gift, how the only thing she ever made and the one thing she never got from this place was a wireless.
The tea-trolley was rolled round and Lydia stood and drank her tea for ten while the tea-breaker took her place at the line.
Lunchtime, and she ate quickly in the blather of gossip and noise, the voices cutting this way and that. Cheap stockings to be got at a place behind the station. A girl got in the family way and flung out for it, till the problem disappeared and no more said.
‘It’s the mother should be ashamed. Girls die of that.’
‘Least she can get herself a husband.’
‘Might have queered the pitch for a baby, though. She won’t be telling any hubby about that, now will she.’
Then it was on to a pair found carrying on in the wire store.
‘Hard at it, they were, when the line controller came in. Bad luck. He’d lost his watch, only went in to search for it.’
‘Locked, I heard they were.’
‘Then she’ll be needing more than new stockings,’ Dot said, and Lydia laughed with the rest.
Arrangements were being made, for the pictures, and for dancing at the Grafton. Dot nudged her.
‘You coming?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Lydia looked down at her shoes.
‘Come on. Charlie’s old enough now. And there’s always his aunt.’
Lydia followed Dot’s glance across the cafeteria. Robert’s sister Pam was sitting with an older group of women. Feeling their eyes on her, she looked across at them.
‘Or Annie? She could come and sit in with Charlie. They’re good pals, aren’t they?’
‘She gets precious little time free from her mother. I don’t want to ask her to give up some more. Besides which I think there’s a young man lurking somewhere.’
‘Keeping his distance from Pam, I should think, if he’s got his head screwed on right.’ Dot nudged again. ‘Look, she’s going to give you a smile.’ She made a wave with her hand and grinned.
‘Don’t,’ Lydia said. ‘Anyway, I don’t want Charlie round there if he doesn’t have to be.’
Pam must have said something to the women sitting with her, because Lydia saw several heads turn, quizzical, and Pam’s in the middle, stony with dislike.
‘She really has it in for you. Stealing her boy,’ Dot said, her voice sarcastic.
‘Leave it, Dot.’
‘What is it, ten years since you moved here?’
‘Pam doesn’t get over things,’ Lydia said.
‘Yes, we all know that. We all know how her mum died and her dad died and how she kept her baby brother out of Park Hill single-handed with only the rats for company.’ Dot’s voice was singsong with scorn. ‘Working nearly to death to bring him up.’
‘But it’s true,’ Lydia said. ‘I heard it all from Robert before I ever met Pam. And how her husband died in the first year of the war with Annie not even out of nappies.’
‘Course it’s true,’ Dot said. ‘Course it bloody is. We’ve all heard about her sacred Dennis. That’s not the point.’
‘You mustn’t speak ill of the dead,’ Lydia said, but there was a half-smile on her lips. ‘It’s just easier if I keep away from her as best I can,’ she said, fingers on her tray, ready to leave.
‘What I mean is, all that’s nothing to do with you. You didn’t even live here then. You don’t even come from this town …’
‘Which is something else she holds against me,’ Lydia said. ‘Thinks I’m stuck up. She thinks Robert should have married a local girl.’
‘Once her Dennis was gone to the happy hunting ground she’d have married Robert herself if she could,’ Dot said.
‘Dot!’ Lydia’s exclamation brought looks from other tables, and she clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘You can’t say things like that,’ she said from between her fingers.
‘That’s why she hates you,’ Dot said slowly. ‘She’s jealous. She did all the hard work, brought him up, and then just when she’s lost her husband, you waltzed in and stole Robert from her.’
‘And had Robert’s son,’ Lydia said. ‘She hates Charlie nearly as much as she hates me.’
‘So come on,’ Dot said. ‘You can’t change any of that. Forget your sorrows for a couple of hours.’
‘I’ve got my book to forget in.’
‘It used to be you suggesting it. Remember? Last-minute Lydia. Remember them calling you that? We’d get to four o’clock on a Friday, or a Tuesday even, and it’d be you saying let’s go dancing, or get a picnic up, or you’d have some mad thought because there was a full moon and we’d go off and do it and have a laugh.’
Lydia smiled.
‘Come dancing tonight. It’ll do you good. Besides, a dancer like you, you might get lucky. There’s some lovely men on a Friday night.’
‘I’m married. With a son.’
‘I was joking, mostly,’ Dot said. ‘But with Robert and all. You need to look out for yourself.’
‘And Charlie.’
‘You don’t look out for yourself, you can’t look out for him.’
Lydia stood up. ‘I need a bit of time,’ she said, picking up her book, and Dot patted her arm by way of understanding, though whether it was understanding about the dancing, or about her wanting to read her book in the lunch hour, Lydia didn’t know.
Robert was already home when Lydia came in from work. On the table were his shoes, dull with fresh polish. She heard his voice beyond the kitchen. He was in the bathroom, humming a tune from way back when.
A different time in our lives, she thought, and the smile in remembering was chased across her face by sadness.
As she started to prepare for supper, busy with pans and groceries, Charlie’s breakfast plate and cup in the sink reminded her that he was late today because of the bees, and she stopped in her busyness a minute with thinking.
It was odd, Robert being home so early. She wondered about it. His spirits sounded high. She began on the washing, lifting clothes from the horse, folding and smoothing.
‘… She is watching and longing and waiting
Where the long white roadway lies.’
He had a lovely voice. He used to sing a lot. It was the song he sang to her the day his leave was over and they stood on the platform in a throng of uniforms.
‘And a song stirs in the silence,
As the wind in the boughs above …’
They were close up against one another, like all the other sweethearts, and he had one hand on her belly with its tiny comma of life swimming in there, and he sang into her ear.
‘But there’s one rose that dies not in Picardy!
’Tis the rose that I keep in my heart! …’
The laugh in her throat caught her by surprise, as she remembered how his voice had tickled. God, he had such a beautiful voice. She used to tease him that he could stand in for Vera Lynn any day, and he sang her ‘Roses of Picardy’ there on the platform and she loved him.
Lydia put the kettle on for tea and her chest felt tight with tenderness. This was the same man she had fallen for ten years ago. The same man whose voice saying her name made her stomach turn over with desire. Surely to goodness there was a way out of their present trouble? She knocked gently on the bathroom door.
‘Robbie?’
The singing stopped abruptly, mid-line.
‘I’ve got the kettle on. Do you want a cup?’
He answered yes, but even through the door she could tell he was surprised.
When he came out, she said she’d heard him singing.
‘Reminds me of you going back to your ship that time. You sang that song then. Do you remember?’
>
He nodded slightly, hair tousled, skin warm and fresh, his cologne sweet between them, and she glimpsed in the gesture, the way his dipped his head, eyes closed, the man she had fallen in love with.
‘I was just pregnant,’ she said, smiling, still caught in the memory. Something was in her mouth to say, something smooth and salt and solid. Something that might be a wish, or a promise, or both.
She watched him stare.
‘Robbie,’ she said.
He frowned.
‘Why are you calling me Robbie?’ he said.
‘I always used to.’ She could feel the shape of the words behind her lips, gathered in the space above her tongue. She could taste them. ‘Remember?’ she said, but to herself.
They might have made love now. She would have touched his warm, sweet skin; on the nape of his neck maybe, he always loved that. Or put her hands on to his shoulders, an invitation for his around her waist, them dancing there in the half-space, till his hands slipped down to her hips and he pulled her close and she felt the rise of his desire. They might have made love now.
Growing up, Lydia didn’t know what a man’s body looked like. Twice, or maybe three times, she’d glimpsed her father half-undressed in his heavedup, woollen under-things, but the sight left her puzzled. Not at all like what she’d heard whispered at school. For a time during the war there was the American with the gentle smile. He charmed her, flirted with her and then he took her virginity. She’d given it willingly enough, and she did like him, though it wasn’t more than liking. But she never saw him naked. He would take her clothes off carefully, folding them piece by piece on the chair, stroking her arm, her shoulder, her breast, till she stood bare, shivering. But then he’d be so coy, undressing with his back to her, having her turn away before slipping beneath the covers to join her, that all she knew of him was what she felt, and though he was lying hard up against her, somehow it didn’t feel like him.
Then there was Robert. He wasn’t like the American, not charming like that. He didn’t treat her like royalty or even hold the door open for her. But from the first time she saw him, something got hold of her from the inside. She was standing outside a pub, stamping her feet for warmth, waiting for her friend and caught in her thoughts, when a voice broke in.