Tell it to the Bees

by Fiona Shaw

  Again, a nod.

  ‘And you had a good day?’

  Charlie crossed his arms over his chest.

  ‘Has the cat got your tongue, Charlie?’ she said.

  ‘George can mend the puncture,’ he said.

  ‘Is that Annie’s George, do you mean?’

  ‘He’ll do it tonight if I ask him.’

  ‘He might be busy, Charlie.’

  ‘He’ll do it.’

  ‘Have you met him?’ she said, and Charlie nodded again.

  ‘It’d take quite a boy to be worth her,’ she added, as much to herself as to Charlie, but when she saw his face, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed, she was taken aback. Then it dawned on her. Charlie was jealous. Her ten-year-old boy had been jilted for the first time.

  19

  Lydia felt clumsy. The woollen socks were itchy and the boots heavier than anything she’d ever worn. Her feet caught every root, every knuckle of stone on the path. She couldn’t swing her elbows like Jean did, and though it was Jean who had the heavy haversack, it was Lydia that had to call a short halt at the top of the first hill.

  She bent forward, hands on her thighs, while her heart slowed.

  ‘You should have brought someone used to this,’ she said when she’d caught her breath. ‘Making bits for wirelesses doesn’t help much.’

  Jean looked across the moorland, the brown coloured in here and there with purple heather, slender sheep trails dipping away to invisibility, the pale sky and curtain of shadow on the hill, waiting for the sun to lift higher. She listened to the sound of small birds at work.

  ‘You’ll soon find your walking legs. Eat this,’ she said, handing Lydia a piece of oatcake. ‘And the shoes will ease up.’

  ‘You sound like someone’s mother,’ Lydia said, but Jean didn’t reply and they walked on in silence.

  The landscape was vast and endless. It unnerved Lydia. No hedges or railings or trees. No other people. No animals – none that she could see, anyway. She hadn’t been on a walk like this before and she was unsure of herself. She wondered whether there was something more she ought to be doing.

  The sun drew higher in the sky and the day grew warmer. Jean stripped off her sweater and tied it around her waist. Lydia opened the buttons on her cardigan. They walked steadily and Lydia discovered that Jean was right and that her heart and lungs had found their own rhythm.

  Walking like this, not for any other reason than to walk, and in easy silence, Lydia’s thoughts roamed. She wondered where Robert would be today, what he might be doing. She wondered if he’d be having lunch at Pam’s tomorrow, like usual.

  Bastard, she said to herself, and Old cow, and then she laughed beneath her breath. Least you don’t have to do that any more.

  She wondered how Annie was getting on, whether Pam knew about George. She must do by now, and come to think of it, Annie had been looking a bit down in the mouth the last couple of times Lydia had seen her. Nothing to stop and ask about, you couldn’t in that place, all those people, but definitely not her usual self. Grey about the gills. If Lydia didn’t have her own affairs to worry over, she’d have gone and had a word, asked her over for a cup of tea. But it wasn’t so straightforward now, now Robert was gone.

  Robert gone. Straight words. Hard ones. But walking here, high up in the light, she felt her mind begin to lift away from loss; to stretch itself and open up with possibilities. Daydreams they were, she knew that. But they were the first she’d had for a long, long time. She imagined giving up her job in the factory and doing something else. She imagined a new home, a different front door. She’d go on an adventure with Charlie. To a foreign country, or to an island. Do something she’d never dared think of before.

  She thought of never returning.

  She could just never go back, she told herself. As easy as that. Drive on in the car and leave everything behind her. Get to the seaside, get a job, forget about Robert, forget about the rent. Maybe she’d even meet someone else some day. Bring Charlie out there. He’d love to live by the sea.

  But her thoughts faltered with Charlie. It didn’t feel as simple when she thought of him and her mind swung away.

  She looked out across the moorland scrub and quickened her pace. Jean had promised a valley to her, with cows in fields, a stream and trees. A greener, softer landscape, and Lydia wanted to be there now.

  ‘I can’t see any trees,’ she said. ‘Not proper ones. Are you sure about the valley?’

  ‘We’ll be dropping down to it in about a mile,’ Jean said.

  ‘My dad used to go off hiking. But he wouldn’t take me. It was fine, women walking to work. But they weren’t to do it for recreation. Then it was only for boys.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  ‘I think he simply didn’t want me along. He always dressed up his dislikes into morals. I’ve never done this before,’ Lydia said. ‘Never just walked.’

  Jean looked at Lydia, and Lydia had the feeling that she had shocked Jean with this.

  ‘Not even when you were little?’ Jean said. ‘Not even with your uncle?’

  ‘Of course we walked. But it was always to school or the shops or the park. For something. You don’t wear special shoes for that.’

  Jean laughed. ‘But are you regretting it?’ she said. ‘Wishing you were home with a book?’

  ‘It’s good for letting your thoughts run,’ Lydia said. ‘Daydreaming. I haven’t done that in a long while.’

  Jean took off her haversack and fished out the water bottle. She passed it to Lydia.

  ‘The more you drink, the lighter my load,’ she said, stretching her arms back behind her head and dropping them forward.

  Lydia drank. It felt wonderful to be this thirsty and then to drink. She looked over at Jean, squatted down, looking at the path. The back of her shirt was dark with sweat. Lydia watched as Jean reached to pick up a pebble. She watched her muscles dance beneath the cotton; she watched the strong, slender rise of her spine and she wondered if she’d ever been in love. If she’d ever had a man touch her.

  Jean’s voice broke across Lydia’s thoughts.

  ‘I often find myself thinking when I’m walking,’ Jean said. ‘Sometimes I lean my worries up against the rocks as I walk. But sometimes something comes to me, about a difficult case maybe, that I hadn’t thought of in the surgery. A diagnosis. An answer.’

  Lydia saw how the curls at the nape of her neck were tight and damp. She passed her the bottle.

  ‘You’ll have to come dancing, in return,’ she said. ‘Come out on a Friday night with the girls. I bet you’ve never done that.’

  Jean laughed. ‘I’m not a great one for dancing.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how you do it. Get dressed up, forget about the week, enjoy yourself.’

  ‘What were you daydreaming about?’ Jean said, and they both laughed because they knew she was changing the subject.

  ‘This and that.’ Lydia looked away. ‘A different life.’

  ‘What kind of different life?’

  Lydia shrugged. ‘I don’t know. One in a different place. Me and Charlie.’

  Jean gave what Lydia had come to think of as her doctor’s nod and didn’t ask more, only hoisted the haversack.

  The sun was hot. Jean tied a scarf around her head. Lydia’s legs were weary with walking and she longed to sit down in some shade and eat.

  But she felt at ease. Happy even, and she smiled to herself.

  ‘See there, below us,’ Jean said, and Lydia looked down to see the slice of deep green far below.

  At the start of the walk, Jean had spread the map on the car bonnet and shown Lydia their route, tracing it over and around the lines and shadings, and Lydia had watched Jean’s finger finally curve its way down into a wooded valley. It hadn’t meant much to her then.

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ Jean said, and now Lydia imagined the cool beneath the trees, stream water and a rock to sit on.

  As the path dipped, it curved its way through a high moor meado
w flecked with yellows and greens and tiny, brazen pinks. Despite the summer days, the ground here was still boggy and the two women picked their way carefully, branching their arms for balance. They were almost there, almost to the tumbled wall that marked the start of the woodland, when Lydia, doing some fancy footwork to avoid the glisten of standing water, caught her foot in a root, or a branch, or in the tangle of half-thoughts and new sensations, and stumbled hard forwards.

  She must have cried out, because in the moment of her falling, Jean turned and caught her, stepping back with the force of Lydia’s fall to keep her own footing.

  She held her so close, arms around her body, braced against her weight, that Lydia could feel Jean’s heartbeat. She could feel her breath against her cheek, her fingers pressed into her side. Doctor’s fingers. Impersonal fingers.

  ‘I’m glad you turned so quickly,’ Lydia said.

  ‘So am I. I don’t want to be doctoring on my day off.’

  Lydia laughed. ‘Let’s go on. I’m longing for my lunch.’

  Slowly, gently, Jean set her on her feet again. Lydia felt Jean’s hand brush against her hair, smelled the soap and sweat of her. She put a hand to her ribs. It was so long since she’d been held and she could still feel Jean’s fingers there.

  Scrambling the wall, at last they were into the trees. It was cooler here, the light broken up, and far below there was the sound of water breaking over stone. They walked over a crumbled wash of dry leaves and a question rose in Lydia’s mind.

  ‘Why did you ask me today?’ she said, but quietly, beneath her breath. Then she said it again, louder. ‘Why did you ask me?’

  This time Jean stopped and turned and, as she smiled, Lydia took a step towards her, put her hands on either side of Jean’s head and kissed her.

  20

  Charlie held the frame in both hands. He felt its weight its honey gravity, while bees swerved around his head, lazy with the smoke.

  ‘It’s full,’ he said.

  ‘Shake it now,’ Jean said. ‘To get rid of the bees.’

  Charlie shook the frame and the bees fell. He was glad of his bee suit and the gauntlets. With a long feather, Jean brushed the last of the bees free from the capped cells and Charlie lowered the frame into the empty super.

  Steadily they cleared the supers from each of the hives, carrying them up to the shed, ready for the harvest. It was ten o’clock by the time they were done and the sun was already warm.

  ‘Lemonade for you,’ Jean said. ‘I’ve got two patients to visit and then we’ll be ready to uncap the cells.’

  So Charlie sat at the kitchen table and drank his lemonade and watched Mrs Sandringham humming her tune, busy at the stove. He thought about Jean. She was as excited as he was today, but he wasn’t sure that it was about the bees.

  ‘Mrs Sandringham, why are you going to leave?’ he said, addressing himself to another adult mystery. ‘It’s nice here. Dr Markham is a good doctor, and there’s the bees.’

  ‘Right now I’m cooking up a storm for your tea,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  Charlie could hear her tone, but he carried on anyway.

  ‘Dr Markham is sad about you leaving. I know, because she said so.’

  ‘There’s Mr and Mrs Marston and Emma and Meg all for tea. Come to try the new honey, like every year. Your mother too, so I gather, which is very nice, so I’ve a pile of work cut out.’

  ‘She doesn’t think anyone can replace you,’ Charlie said. He paused, very puzzled by grown-ups. ‘So why is she so happy now?’

  Mrs Sandringham turned and studied Charlie’s face.

  ‘I’m going to live with my sister on her farm, help her out, with her husband died. As for the doctor, you keep your nose to yourself, young man.’

  ‘But you’ll be sad leaving, won’t you? No more lemonade and cooking storms.’ He dug a spoon into the table. ‘I’m going to be sad.’

  Mrs Sandringham shook her shoulders in a way that reminded Charlie of a dog beginning to shake off water.

  ‘You just get on with what you’re good at,’ she said, ‘and I’ll get on with what I’m good at.’

  ‘But Dr Markham –’

  ‘No more about it now, thank you.’

  Charlie knew how adults were sometimes, so Mrs Sandringham’s brusque manner was no more than he expected and he didn’t take it amiss. But she hadn’t answered his question about the doctor, so he thought he would go down to the bees.

  Jean watched Charlie from her bedroom window. He walked with such a boy’s stride, swiping at the air with his gauntlets, kicking at a loose pebble. But the way he held himself and the turn of his head – he did those things just like his mother.

  She had never been kissed like that before. They walked into the woods and down to the stream. They found a flat rock with a strip of sunlight across it where they sat and ate sandwiches. Jean rolled her shirtsleeves up above her elbows and leaned back on her arms, lifted her face to the slant of sun. She shut her eyes.

  I don’t know where I am, she thought. I could be anywhere in the whole world.

  Lydia had taken off her heavy shoes and socks and was dangling her feet in the stream.

  ‘How strange they seem under the water,’ she said.

  Jean looked at Lydia’s feet. They were two pale fish below the surface. She put her hand out and touched Lydia’s hair, warm with the sun.

  ‘You love this place, don’t you?’ Lydia said.

  They barely spoke after that, and they didn’t touch, but as they walked through the woods, up out of the valley and back to their starting point, the space between them was so charged that every move, every gesture Lydia made tugged at Jean.

  Only once they were driving back and the town lay close below did a distance reassert itself and they spoke again, in oddly formal tones, about the weeks ahead. Jean was going to join Jim and Sarah at the seaside for a few days. Lydia would still be working all the hours she could. They spoke briefly of Charlie. Lydia didn’t mention Robert and Jean didn’t ask. Neither spoke of what had happened, or when they might see one another again.

  Standing in her bedroom, pulling on old trousers and buttoning her shirt, Jean felt a surge of excitement. She loved this day; she loved the honey harvest, the process of it. After extracting, filtering and filtering again, she loved filling the jars with the pale, clear honey from her bees. From the weight of the frames she knew it was a good crop this year, and she’d already telephoned Sarah to have her bring more jam jars.

  But she was kidding herself that the feeling in her belly was about the honey.

  Jean hadn’t spoken to Lydia since the walk. She could have taken her another book, or asked her for tea, and she hadn’t. But Lydia’s kiss had up-ended the world and Jean didn’t know how to go on. Things were altered in a way she couldn’t understand. Finally she had left it to Charlie: ‘Your mother would be welcome to join us, if you think she might like to,’ she’d told him, her voice steady and her heart beating a tattoo, and this morning he’d mentioned, like an afterthought, that she would come when her shift was ended.

  Jean wondered whether Lydia was possessed by the same confusion. Waking up in the early morning, she imagined Lydia in her bed, maybe still asleep. Her head in profile on one pillow, hair caught across her cheek. On the other pillow a novel still open like a bird. Getting dressed, she’d see Lydia by the stream, pulling on her socks and boots, her shoulders curved down, fingers fiddling with laces.

  Seated before Mrs Sandringham’s cooked breakfast, she thought of Lydia snatching her own, chivvying Charlie, making sure he had his uniform straight, then pulling her bike round in the yard, leaning it into her hip to get the gate open, pedalling to the factory. And so it went on through her day. She conjured Lydia everywhere – her face, her neck, bent towards the stream, her shoulders, her breasts, her hands as she spoke, telling stories in the air, her laugh, her mouth – but she didn’t know how to see her.

  Uncapping was a messy
business. Charlie had been told this a dozen times by Mrs Sandringham and he was taking his duties seriously. While Jean was seeing her patients, he had got things ready. The shed floor was covered with sheets of classified ads and minor news that lifted in the draught, and a bucket of water and one of Mrs Sandringham’s clean rags stood by the worktop.

  The bread knife, to be used for uncapping the cells, shone dully in the shed’s half-light and a galvanized washtub was ready to take the cappings. Beside this stood the extractor.

  ‘You any good at arm wrestling, Charlie?’ Jean had asked him a few days ago, and they had sat at the garden table and tried their strength.

  ‘You’re strong for a lady,’ he said, after Jean had pushed his arm down flush with the table. ‘Stronger than my mum. But nowhere near as strong as my dad.’

  Then Jean had showed him the extractor and explained how it worked. The frames of uncapped comb got spun inside the barrel so that the honey came spattering out against the sides and was then drawn off through the small tap at the base. It would be Charlie’s job to turn the handle that made the barrel spin, but it was a tricky process. The handle needed turning gently at first and then faster. But turn it too slowly and the honey wouldn’t come out. Turn it too fast, and the comb would break up. He would need to be strong and measured to do it well.

  ‘That’s why the arm wrestling,’ Jean had said gravely. ‘To be sure that you’re strong enough for the job.’

  A few bees, fellow travellers in the full frames, dunned on the shed window. Charlie had left an inch open at the top for them and soon enough they would find it and make their escape. Otherwise, the shed was quiet and still.

  Jean was back from her calls; he had seen her return. He opened the extractor tap and imagined the honey running from it in a clear, slender stream. He imagined it running on and on, filling all the jars they had and then the bottles, and the bowls, and the cups and the pans, just the finest, slender thread that never stopped, like a wish in a fairy story his mother had told him as he dropped to sleep when he was smaller. Tilting the nearest frame towards him, he ran his finger down the wax cappings. A thimbleful of honey. That’s how much each one held. That’s how much a single bee could make in the whole of her lifetime, so Dr Markham said.