by Fiona Shaw
Lydia strode, commanding her legs to walk fast, not caring that she stumbled in the coming dark, not caring to find a rhythm. She walked upwards into the night till she was out of breath, and finally she turned back, towards the litter of lights below. It was hard to keep her head up, too hard to look out, and Lydia kept her eyes on the road. She didn’t see the figures till they were quite close.
She heard the woman’s voice first, soft, enquiring. A question, Lydia could hear that. And she looked up to see two figures walking up the hill towards her, a young woman, and beside her, a small boy, head down, trailing something. For a split second she didn’t recognize him. The boy paused to answer, lifted his head. Then her heart was in her throat and the blood roared loud in her ears. But she couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t speak.
As if in slow motion, she saw him drop what he carried – a satchel, her mind told her somewhere, unimportantly – and then she saw him gather himself up and run.
Out of the shadows he ran towards her and she stood and waited. Behind him the young woman also stood and waited and another, unimportant thought crossed her mind, that she must be Robert’s.
But now Charlie was in her arms and she didn’t think any more.
41
The sky sat upon their shoulders, so low and so grey, and their movements in the cold day were thick and imprecise. The ground was soft with the rain, and earth soon clodded their boots. The hives were heavier than Jean remembered.
Slowly they lifted, slowly they manoeuvred. Every so often she would stop and look around her, as if storing up her fill of it against the future.
Charlie ran about, helping, and Lydia came out for a while, wrapped up in Jean’s old coat.
There was everything left to do, and nothing at all. They had come to their decision in an instant three months ago but spoken of it to nobody, not even Charlie, till they knew they could go. Now they were leaving and, for the time being, they would take only what they needed.
Jim drove the car slowly across the silent Sunday town. Behind, in the trailer, the four hives and Charlie.
‘You found someone quickly, for the hives,’ Jim said.
‘Yes.’ Jean looked out at the town.
‘You’ve gone already,’ Jim said. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘I didn’t choose it.’
‘You chose something. Are you taking the cat?’
‘She’ll like it. The heat. The insects.’
‘And us?’
‘You’ll visit. For ages. We’ll visit.’
They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. Lydia sat with them. She wrote on a list, and crossed things off. Sometimes she smiled at what they said, but she didn’t join the conversation. This was not her farewell.
Charlie was in and out, buzzing, excited. Often, Jean saw, he would brush by Lydia, or pause, and she would put a brief hand on his hair or drop a kiss to his shoulder. Jean saw that till he left the room, Lydia’s eyes didn’t leave him. She wouldn’t let him go.
‘You have money enough,’ Jim said.
‘I’ll write before we’re on the street,’ Jean said.
‘Viale, not street. Or strada.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I will not worry,’ Jim said.
‘We’ll be careful. It’ll be easier in a foreign country.’
‘You’re a doctor. Everybody sees you.’
Jean shook her head.
‘Only if they need to. We’ll be careful. We’ll be strange already, for being English.’
‘And I will not miss you in the Red Horse on Thursdays. I will find another oldest friend to put in your place.’
The doorbell rang and Lydia went to see.
‘You know there was a whip-round at the factory,’ Jean said. ‘Like they do when a girl gets married.’
‘That’s a nice gesture,’ Jim said.
‘Pam organized it. She left the money in the porch with a note. Lydia didn’t show it to me, but it made her cry a little.’
‘Does she know what happened?’
‘She knows that Annie lost her baby. Nothing else. She’s been round with Annie every day almost. Made her promise that she’ll visit us before the year is out.’
‘Do you think she will?’
Jean shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t think Lydia could bear to go without the promise.’
She got up and fetched the jug of coffee.
‘Lydia’s learning the language so quickly. More quickly than me,’ she said. ‘We have a book. But I’ve done my other homework. I’ve written some letters and made some telephone calls. I can practise over there and I’ve established that there are plenty of sick people. English-speaking sick people. So I’ll get to work on them while I’m learning new words.’
‘Then you are as set as you can be, though it might take some getting used to. A foreign country and foreign ways. What about here? Have you cured everybody here?’
‘Everybody who will be cured.’
Sarah and the little girls came at lunchtime and Charlie showed the girls the four squares in the grass where the hives had been.
‘They’re like windows,’ he said.
‘What to?’
‘It doesn’t matter, so long as you can look through them.’
He chased them to the bottom of the garden, roaring like a lion; and a while later they went home.
They packed Charlie’s shelves that evening, each thing wrapped in old news till the holdall was full. Though it was late now, he swore he would not sleep. Lydia turned off his light and went downstairs.
‘Is he excited?’ Jean said.
‘He said it would be like a new world to look at. He said you had told him so.’
Jean kissed the woman she would leave her life for, run away for.
‘He’s right,’ she said.
They stood an arm’s length apart, Robert rocking slightly, Charlie standing stock-still. The street was quiet. There was that same pause now that they do in the films, and Charlie thought how strange it was that it could really happen like that.
‘What do you want?’ Robert said at last.
For a moment Charlie thought perhaps his father didn’t know him. But something about the way Robert crossed his arms and waited answered that.
‘I wanted to see you,’ Charlie said.
Robert leaned his shoulder against the doorframe. His mouth was a piece of string and on his jutting chin was the forgotten haze of an old man’s stubble. He put out his hands, like a performer when he’s done a trick.
‘So. Here I am,’ he said. ‘Not very hard to find, eh?’
‘I heard about Pam,’ Charlie said. ‘Annie told me. I’m very sorry.’
Robert shrugged. ‘Quick’s best.’
Charlie nodded.
‘She visits you over there, doesn’t she?’ Robert said.
Charlie nodded.
‘Took your time, coming to pay your respects,’ Robert said. ‘Took your bloody time.’
Lives on his own, drinks on his own. That was what Annie had written, and Charlie could feel the drink in the air like a mood. There were stains on his father’s trousers and his cardigan was grubby.
‘Annie looks in, though,’ Charlie said, surprised by pity. ‘Calls in to see you. I know that.’
Robert shrugged. ‘So why’ve you come back?’
Charlie told himself that he’d turned up here and his father had had no warning. That he was an ill man, and lonely. He told himself that he had gone away a child and come back a man.
‘Like I said, I wanted to see you.’
‘Nobody wears suits like that in this town. Get in before I die, is it?’
Charlie shook his head, because he didn’t want it to go like this. Somewhere behind him he heard the sound of someone running, light, urgent footsteps. They were coming down the street.
‘Let’s go and have a beer. Or a coffee,’ he said. ‘Get off the doorstep, anyway.’
The afternoon sun trailed a dir
ty finger over the front window. Charlie felt cold. The sun had no heat here, no warmth.
Robert turned. ‘I’ve got my tea on,’ he said, and he walked back inside, stoop-shouldered.
His steps were awkward and slurred. There was nothing left of the swagger Charlie had tried to copy as a boy.
Charlie stood undecided. He put a hand to the bag on his shoulder, felt the jar of honey.
What are you going to do, Charlie? he said to himself.
Behind him the running steps drew closer and he turned. A boy ran down the centre of the empty street as if his life depended on it, legs flying, running like a demon, one arm like a piston, the other holding something, a box or a boat, tight to his side. He was close now, but he didn’t see Charlie, a man in a suit on a doorstep. Didn’t look, at any rate. His eyes were wide and his breath was quick, and he might be running to anywhere. He might be running from anything. He was just a boy going by, perhaps ten years old, in trainers and scruffy jeans.
Charlie turned back to follow his father.
‘You bastard,’ he said quietly.
The house was cold and unchanged, ornaments, curtains, tables and chairs. It smelled of old smoke and old food. In the kitchen Robert spread margarine on two slices of bread and poured orange soup into a bowl at the blue Formica table. He didn’t look up. Charlie watched him sit down and dip his spoon, lift it to his mouth and suck. Watched him light a cigarette and lean it in the ashtray, waiting.
‘Still eating your cockles?’ Charlie said.
‘You bring me some? In that pansy bag?’
Charlie took out the jar of honey and set it down beside the ashtray.
Robert picked up his cigarette, jabbed it in his mouth. He drew hard, pulling the glow towards him.
‘I don’t want to know about your fucking honey,’ he said.
Charlie stood quite still. His legs were shaking and his mouth felt dry. It had come to it.
‘No, you never wanted to know,’ he said.
Anger shook his body, shook his voice. An old anger he knew too well, that had him whisper to the bees all those years ago.
‘She took you away from me.’ Robert’s voice was plaintive, wheedling and he seemed to shrink into his chair. ‘I had no choice,’ he said, speaking each word slowly, separately.
‘You always had a choice.’ Charlie’s voice was rough, peremptory. ‘You could have written. Asked Annie. Done something.’
He walked over to the sink and looked out at the yard. The back gate was half off its hinges. He willed his father to speak. To say that he’d tried. This was the hope that had brought Charlie so far, and he held his breath in the dingy kitchen.
Come on, he thought. Please.
But when he turned back, his father only sat on, slumped, his cigarette burning up towards his fingers.
The boy in Charlie pleaded to go. But he was an adult now, a man taller than his father, and he had come a long way to ask this question.
‘The day you sent me back,’ he said. ‘Why did you do it?’
Robert flicked the cigarette stump towards the ashtray and looked his son in the eye.
‘You left, your mother left. Pam, Irene. Everybody’s bloody left me.’
Pushing his chair back, he crossed his arms as if he’d made his speech now and that was the end of it.
‘You’re talking bollocks. Annie’s still here, though God knows why. And Pam didn’t leave you. She brought you up. Thought the bloody sun shone from you,’ Charlie said.
‘When the children get born, then the women leave you,’ Robert said. ‘Every time.’
Charlie shook his head impatiently. ‘You came and got me, you told me we’d have fun and then you sent me back again.’
Robert took another cigarette from his packet. ‘You come back to tell me you didn’t have fun?’
He was watching Charlie like a boxer in the ring when he gets his man down.
Rage struck Charlie like an electric bolt. He stepped forward and lifted his fist to punch his father. Hard in the face. Half a step, that was all he took, and he saw Robert’s fear.
‘That’s what I came back for,’ Charlie said.
He flicked his fingers open, grazing the air an inch from Robert’s face and he saw his father flinch.
‘You’re scared of me,’ Charlie said in wonder, and he leaned back against the sink and laughed, a hard, electric laugh.
‘But it’s more civilized to talk than fight,’ he said. ‘You haven’t asked about my mother.’
Charlie pictured Lydia with her coffee and her book, waiting for him in the Café Nazionale. He hadn’t told her about the trip, and he’d meet her there in two days’ time and tell her nothing. Jean had made him promise not to.
‘It was our choice to leave, not yours,’ Jean said. ‘But this life has been too hard-won. Leave her with her peace.’
‘I don’t want to upset her,’ Charlie said. ‘But I want to see my father for myself. As an adult.’
‘I know you need to. But it will change things. Wait a while before you speak to her, till your feelings have settled a little,’ so he had he agreed that he would say nothing for now.
Robert didn’t speak, only watched him with wary eyes.
‘You haven’t asked, so I’ll tell you about her,’ Charlie said, because now he understood Jean’s fear and he wanted to hurt this man.
What he said to Robert then was true, but it wasn’t the only truth; things had been hard at the start for Lydia and Jean and they’d struggled. People aren’t nicer somewhere else. He had felt this as a boy, though not much was said; but he knew it as a young man because they had spoken to him about what it had been like.
‘She’s happy and they’re still together. They’re still sleeping in the same bed.’
Robert put the cigarette to his lips and rummaged in his pocket for matches.
Charlie watched the suck of his cheeks and the pull of the flame and pity washed through him. He wondered what the hell he was doing here, a thousand miles from home, stuck in this hopeless conversation with this old man who didn’t want to be his father.
His throat ached and his eyes throbbed, as though he’d been crying for hours. He felt like someone who has sleepwalked their way into somewhere and then woken up.
‘I thought it would be different,’ he said to his father.
In the late afternoon sun a boy in trainers and scruffy jeans bent to the pond’s edge. He pressed his finger to the black box beside him, its antenna waving slightly at his touch, then stretched out his arms like a small god. Lifting his boat out, he turned and stood proud. Above, on the hill, Charlie stood watching.
Placing the boat and its black box on the grass, the boy wiped his hands on his T-shirt and was off, shouting to a friend, running to the far side.
The town was still full of boys, Charlie thought, though he was twenty years away. His memory reached across, like the boy’s dancing shadow in the water, etiolated, awkward.
He stood perfectly still, unseen, barely there.
The minutes passed and the wind arrived to whip the surface of the water. The boy returned for his boat and Charlie looked at his watch. It was time to go.
About the Author
FIONA SHAW lives and works in York. After giving birth to her two daughters, she suffered a postnatal breakdown – an experience she chronicled in her acclaimed non-fiction debut, Out of Me, shortlisted for the MIND prize. She is the author of two previous novels, The Sweetest Thing (2003) and The Pictures She Took (2005).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Royal Literary Fund for their financial assistance during the writing of this novel. Ledig House in New York State offered me a sanctuary within which to finish the novel: I am grateful to D.W. Gibson and the wonderful staff there, and to my fellow writers, with whom it was a pleasure and an inspiration to spend those weeks.
My thanks to Elizabeth and John Horder and Peter and Sue Tomson for their reflections on what it was like to be a GP in the 195
0s; and to Danielle Walker Palmour for giving me a taste of beekeeping.
Thank you to Karen Charlesworth, Jean Downey, Anna Maria Friman, Sandy Goldbeck-Wood, Liz Grierson, Susan Orr, Adam Phillips, Martin Riley and Dave Tomson for all their backing in so many ways.
Thanks also to the following for their kind permission to reprint short extracts from other works: A.P. Watt for John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps; and Pan Macmillan for Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios.
‘Roses of Picardy’, words by Frederick E. Weatherly, music by Haydn Wood © Chappell Music Ltd (PRS). All rights administered by Warner Chappell Music Australia Pty Ltd. Reproduced by permission.
Many thanks to Alan Mahar and Emma Hargrave at Tindal Street.
Above all, my thanks to Clare Alexander for her unstinting support.