The Beekeeper's Secret

by Josephine Moon

  Nonetheless, he was expected to complete his undergraduate degree followed by a master’s in business administration, while Rebecca had to drop out of university to care for Leo. They got married, of course, because it was the expected thing to do. Dougal’s father had given him a speech about responsibilities and being a man. It was a toxic combination of circumstances, and the marriage foundered four years after it began. Tansy had met Rebecca many times since her own nuptials. She and Dougal had shared custody of Leo after their divorce with grace and consideration and surprising levels of good humour. Sometimes Tansy wondered if they’d been given a better start, if the cards had fallen differently, if their marriage would have survived.

  Dougal’s dream was to see Leo get a better and easier start in life than he’d had. And in his vision, creative writing was not that start. After extensive to-ing and fro-ing, though, Dougal had swallowed his doubts with great effort and left Leo to his dreams. Which were, it seemed, his dreams no longer.

  ‘I can’t see a future in it,’ Leo said now, picking up a banksia cone and running his fingers along the alternating spiky hair and smooth seedpods that made it look like a human face.

  Tansy’s heart sank. ‘But this semester is nearly finished and then you’ve only got six months left,’ she said, increasing her pace to keep up as Leo’s strides increased. They sidestepped two joggers coming the other direction.

  ‘What difference does it make if I leave now?’ he said. ‘It won’t change anything. You dropped out and you’ve got a great business that you love. Everything turned out well for you.’

  Tansy was silent, trying to find the most helpful thing to say. ‘Great business’ wasn’t a term she would necessarily apply to what she did. She loved it, sure; it brought her delight and fulfilment. But if he was thinking in terms of financial abundance, then the term wasn’t appropriate. Not yet, anyway. One day she hoped it would be. But even if it never became financially rewarding she would still want to do it. Money certainly wasn’t everything.

  Then again, her lifestyle would be vastly different if they didn’t have Dougal’s salary coming in. Her nose twitched while she struggled with all of these thoughts and the emotions they brought up. Maybe she was selfish to pursue what she loved at the expense of their overall income. But that was crazy. It wasn’t as though they didn’t have enough—look at where they lived.

  But what defined enough?

  She felt herself frowning, appalled to think she could have—however innocently—encouraged Leo in any way to leave when he was so close to finishing his degree. Dougal would be furious. And most of all, she didn’t understand. There’d been no warning that this was coming, as far as she could tell.

  ‘Has something happened?’ she asked. ‘Has something, or someone, made you feel like this?’

  Leo stopped, threw away the banksia pod, and raised his sunglasses to sit on top of his light brown curls. She stopped too, and removed her own sunglasses so that their eyes met. With his Rip Curl shirt, dark tan and fair hair, he looked like a surfer, although he wasn’t. He’d tried surfing once, but said it wasn’t for him. Still, he spent a lot of time at the beach, jogging, sunbaking and swimming, playing touch football with male and female friends.

  ‘It’s been coming since the end of last year. I do love to write, but not the sorts of things they’re teaching. In some ways, I think it’s taking me further away from my own style. I feel like there’s something else out there for me and I need to free myself up to do it.’

  ‘You feel?’

  ‘Call it a hunch, a gut feeling, whatever you like.’

  ‘Do you think you should speak to Rebecca about this? A student advisor?’

  ‘I’m an adult and I can make up my own mind,’ he said irritably.

  ‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean anything by that; I just don’t understand and I’d like to.’ She tried to sound as reasonable and interested as she could without letting her rising panic show. Leaving uni would be a mistake—a terrible mistake.

  ‘Look,’ she said, grasping for a compelling argument, ‘you’ve got time before the end of the semester, so why don’t you just think about it for a while longer? In fact, don’t you even have some time into next semester to pull out or defer without penalty?’

  Leo’s face softened. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, use that time, okay? Don’t do anything right now. Just concentrate on getting to the end of this semester and do your best. You’ll have a few weeks’ holiday and you can reassess in that time.’

  He nodded, not quite a nod of agreement, but at least she hoped that her suggestion might make him pause before he did something he’d regret.

  After their walk, Leo went to uni, a bit reluctantly, but at least he’d gone. Heading to the shower, Tansy hoped that some sort of light bulb would go off in his head while he was there. As for her, she had things to do. At the top of the list was the reunion (cleverly disguised as her birthday party) she was planning for just over three weeks’ time. She should have sent out invitations by now, but she’d been busy with Isabelle’s bedroom and the many details to do with an impending move to Canada. Where were they going to live? What would they leave behind and what would they take with them?

  The weather was completely different, so they’d need new heavy coats, gloves, woollen scarves, maybe boots. All the things they didn’t have or need on the Sunshine Coast. She was building lists of things to buy, subscriptions and automatic debits to cancel—gym memberships, her subscriptions to home styling magazines, Dougal’s wine club membership, their mobile phone plans. Health insurance? Would they need new health insurance over there? She supposed so. Then again, maybe they’d lose all their waiting periods and tax benefits. And maybe they wouldn’t even stay there that long. If something went wrong and they wanted to come home again quite soon, it would be a real pain to set everything up again. She put a mental asterisk next to that one to remind herself to phone their current insurance company to talk about it.

  Better yet, she would start a new list, this one of things to allocate to Dougal to take care of. It was only fair that they share all the stressful preparation for leaving.

  Refreshed from the shower, she made herself a hot lemon tea and threw open the glass doors to the balcony, which overlooked the heavily treed hillside on which their unit complex nestled. She set up her laptop at the table and brought out an aromatic candle for ambience. It was fining up into a glorious warm autumn day, much more typical of the coastal weather than the cold snap they’d had the past few days. A kookaburra landed on the railing and cocked its head to the side, gazing down its lethally sharp beak at her to see if she had any breakfast scraps to throw.

  ‘Not today, mate,’ she said, holding out her hands to show they were empty. The kookaburra regarded her for a moment, as if assessing whether she was telling the truth, and then shot off again in a snap of wings against air, looking for snakes or grubs to eat instead.

  Lighting the chai-scented candle, Tansy opened her laptop and began to type up her email invitation to family members. It’s my thirtieth birthday soon, she began. Please join me at Noosa River on . . .

  She filled in the important details, then explained that it was her wish to see them all together before she and Dougal left for Canada. Then she changed her mind and deleted that bit. It would be more fun to announce it on the day. She’d already sworn Leo to secrecy and he could keep a secret as well as any spy, so there was no chance of it getting out.

  She’d decided on meeting at the barbecue sites along Noosa River. As a venue, it was relaxed (and that could only be a good thing, given that she was planning on introducing Maria into the fray) and always busy with people (which meant no one could kill anyone . . . only kidding . . . sort of) and had space for the children to run around. She put her own email address in the top line, CC’d the rest of the family, but BCC’d Maria. She wanted her aunt’s arrival to be a great surprise too, and didn’t want to give her mother any opportunity t
o back out of the meeting.

  Speaking of which, she must call Enid and try to suss out what was going on between her and her father. She could call Finlay, of course, but he was impossible to read. He and Leo would both be great employees of the national security service.

  She sent the email, stood up and stretched, and then went into her office, which also faced the glistening expanse of the ocean and so was drenched in warm morning sun.

  Soon, though, serious doubts began to creep in. She’d sent the email with a dollop of giddy good intentions (she’d go down in genealogical history as the person who reunited their family!). But now she began to fret. What if no one came? What if they all came but then hated her for dropping them into a situation they didn’t want to be in? What if the reason for Enid and Maria’s falling-out wasn’t just that Maria had abandoned the family . . . what if she’d done something really bad?

  She sent a quick text to Rose. Hiya, how are you? Do you have time to talk? I need a second opinion on something. PS I’ve just sent you an email about my birthday xx

  Time ticked on and after an hour with no response from her sister (as usual), Tansy decided that she should just bite the bullet and pay a visit to Maria. It was too late to go today; she still had too much work to do on Isabelle’s room and a new email enquiry that she would have to answer promptly in order to pitch her services. And she had another new client to meet this afternoon—a young boy named Ernest, who, his mum said, loved rocks. That would be interesting.

  But tomorrow. She would definitely go see Maria tomorrow. She’d bake a cake. Or, okay, maybe she’d buy one, because she wasn’t much of a baker and it was the thought that counted, wasn’t it? They could have tea and cake. The fact that Maria hadn’t responded to her emails probably just meant she was shy and feeling awkward because Tansy was Enid’s daughter and something had gone down between the sisters that made contact difficult.

  Maria and Enid were two grown women in the autumn of their lives. They were family, for goodness’ sake. This was how wars started and carried on through generations. Time went on and no one had a clue what anyone was fighting about anymore. It was crazy. It wasn’t good enough. Tansy couldn’t do anything about the wars around the world, but she could do this. She could help end the madness here in this family, once and for all.

  And then they would all eat cake.

  7

  Tansy followed the grass pathway away from the cabins and dining hall where a group of barefoot women with yoga mats were drinking from mugs in the sun, past the vegetable garden and wandering chooks, and through the gradually thickening bush, just as the young woman, Petrice, had told her to do. The girl was short and stocky and probably around Leo’s age, Tansy guessed, but with a lot less confidence. When Tansy had addressed her, asking where to find Maria, Petrice had stopped and leaned on her broom; Tansy noticed a large purple burn mark on the hand that gripped the shaft.

  ‘She’s checking the bees,’ Petrice had said, talking to Tansy in an off-centre kind of way that made Tansy feel that she shouldn’t make too much eye contact, as if Petrice was a formerly abused dog that remained wary of another kick coming its way. ‘She’ll be up there for a while.’

  The hives—four multistorey sets of white boxes placed several metres apart—were situated in a rough clearing away from the tall trees and with an enviable view over the rolling hills below and out to the ocean.

  And it was Maria, she assumed, there in among them, dressed like a space alien in head-to-toe white protective clothing, with thick yellow gloves, and a broad-brimmed hat with a black net falling over her face and well down her chest. She was bent over a hive with some sort of metal tool in her hand, gently prising off the lid of a hive box, a thick, tacky dark substance stretching apart as the lid yielded.

  ‘Hello,’ Tansy called cheerfully, fuelled by her high expectations for this first meeting.

  Maria didn’t seem to hear her, so Tansy swung around to approach from the side, not wanting to startle her by coming from behind. The bees’ buzzing increased.

  Suddenly, Maria straightened and spun around, her metal tool in one hand, the square lid of the hive in the other. ‘Don’t move,’ she instructed, and Tansy froze to the spot.

  Maria studied the young woman in front of her, wondering who she was. Was she part of the yoga retreat? The corporate group had left and the yoga women were not long here. She hadn’t learned all their faces yet. At the same time, she was concerned about the increased noise from her girls. They were agitated. Maria deliberately took a deep breath to calm herself, and spoke soothingly. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. Just relax.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not frightened,’ the woman said, smiling a huge toothy smile.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ Maria said. ‘I was talking to the girls. Are you allergic to bee stings, by any chance?’

  ‘Ah, I don’t know. I’ve never been stung.’

  Maria tsked. ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re too close. They don’t know you. And you’ve come the wrong way. See?’ She pointed to the line of bees coming and going from the hive. ‘You’re standing right in their flight path. When you approach a hive, you should come from the side or the back. They’re very busy, very driven. They dislike having their work interrupted.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry . . .’ The woman went to step backwards.

  ‘Just wait there,’ Maria said. ‘And don’t swat, whatever you do. I’ll not have one of my bees killed because you bumbled into their workspace. Just hold on.’

  She gently replaced the lid of the super—the upper box of the hive. She’d have to leave that one until tomorrow. Her hand hovered over the smoker, wondering if it was warranted; the girls were obviously upset. But instead she picked up her spray bottle of water and spritzed the top of the hive and a nearby log with droplets to distract them, began to hum a gentle hymn, and walked slowly and diagonally away.

  ‘Follow the way I’m going,’ she directed the woman. ‘Don’t hurry. Don’t let them think you’re worried.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t until you began to—’

  ‘Probably best if you don’t speak. And remember to breathe.’

  Maria kept walking down the pathway, keeping a sideways backwards glance to make sure the woman was following, and stopped when they were a safe distance from the hive. Then she turned to face her surprise guest.

  ‘I’m so sorry if I’ve caused you any trouble,’ the woman began, raising her silver-braceleted arms to shade her eyes from the sun. ‘I only wanted to let you know I was there, so I didn’t startle you. I didn’t realise I would upset the bees.’

  Maria reached back behind her head and removed her hat and net to see the stranger more clearly. She had dark hair and a long nose. Long limbs. She was rather tall. She looked like an artist. Or a triathlete. And she also stirred something in Maria’s chest, something from the past.

  ‘I’m Tansy,’ the woman said, holding out her slender hand. ‘Your niece.’

  And when Maria didn’t respond, unable to speak over the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat, Tansy held up both her hands and shrugged with that toothy smile again. ‘Surprise.’

  To reach the stove, Maria had to move aside a host of materials she’d got out in preparation to begin work. With the markets on again tomorrow (gosh, they came around quickly each week), she was in full production mode today. Burn salves were at the top of her list, and chunks of rendered beeswax were waiting to be melted and whisked with raw honey, coconut oil, sea buckthorn oil and aloe vera gel before being poured into tins and left to cool and harden.

  ‘Let me help you,’ Tansy said, picking up various jars and tubs to move across the bench, ignoring Maria’s demurral. ‘What’s sea buckthorn oil?’

  ‘It comes from a shrub with tiny yellow berries and has healing properties for the skin.’

  ‘Not from the sea, then?’ Tansy grinned.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you doing with all this
?’

  ‘I’m making a balm that treats minor burns.’

  ‘Oh, can I help?’

  ‘Let’s start with a cup of tea, shall we?’

  That seemed to satisfy Tansy for the moment, and her niece carefully moved a box of pamphlets and bunting off a chair at the small kitchen table where Maria ate her meals, normally alone.

  Maria lit the gas with a match. The stovetop had an automatic starter but she preferred not to use it. There was something about that moment when the head of the match cracked against the flint and there was a tiny pause, just a millisecond in time, before the flaring of the flame that brought Maria great solace. It reminded her that while she might have done things that had had a trans-formative effect on her life and on those around her, there was still in her past that millisecond in time, that tiny space of silence, after she’d set her intention but before she’d taken action, before everything changed, and she could revisit this moment whenever she wanted, just by striking a match.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my dropping in unannounced?’ Tansy said, her voice rising in evident hope that Maria would absolve her of any transgression. When Maria didn’t respond, her niece busied herself opening a fruitcake she explained she’d picked up at the store on the way. It made Maria think about her own mother’s fruitcake recipe, which she still knew off by heart, and that always resulted in a dry over-boiled lump with not enough fruit to warrant its name, but which she had always loved and returned to for second helpings.

  ‘I guess you do mind,’ Tansy said, her face falling, ‘or you would have replied to my letter or emails.’

  Maria cleared her throat and pulled out tea and honey. ‘It’s a bit of a shock,’ she said truthfully.