by Wendy Jones
The nurse—Flora didn’t know her—had come. Flora was sitting on newspaper in bed in their small bedroom. She heard the nurse saying, ‘Listen, Mrs. Price, are you in pain?’
Flora shook her head. The nurse put new pages of the Daily Express on the sheet under Flora. It crinkled gently. Flora looked down. The newspaper was soaked with blood. Flora Myffanwy had not seen so much blood before, not from a person, not from herself.
Flora watched a long transparent line of saliva drop slowly, inexorable, down until it fell past her open knees and dangled over the bright red flood that had seeped and soaked into the many leaves of the newspaper beneath her. She closed her eyes and the line of dribble wavered and fell into the blood.
Flora heard herself breathe inwards loudly. She closed her eyes and, as if at a distance, heard herself make a dreadful sound such as only the grieving make in the freshest moments of their grief. This primeval sound left her and its awfulness seemed to fall over Narberth. There was a profound and reverential silence, as if many souls had heard and many souls had listened. It was a sound without words or shape that anyone in Narberth would understand.
9.
SWARMING
Maid! Call for help!’ a guest at the Ritz demanded, leaning out of her room, her dressing-gown held around her. ‘Get a constable.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Hilda responded, obediently but alarmed.
‘Or a porter. There are bees.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Hilda shoved her trolley to the side, almost breaking into a run to fetch the housekeeper. But Grace stayed.
‘Do you have a nest in your room?’ Grace asked. The woman nodded, considering Grace too unimportant to answer with more than a gesture.
‘You won’t need a policeman, ma’am,’ Grace continued, feeling a quiet confidence. ‘I know about bees.’
‘And what do you know about bees?’ The guest had come outside the room and was looking in the direction in which Hilda had disappeared.
‘I used to keep them,’ Grace said, remembering her hive made of a wicker coil and the grassy smell of burning leaves in the smoker.
The woman looked at her, her perception of the maid shaken.
‘I kept bees, I made honey.’
The woman sighed, reluctant to allow a maid expertise beyond cleaning. She held the door open for Grace, with a look suggesting Grace was foolish to subject herself to the rage of wild beasts.
Grace entered the lavish suite. She couldn’t immediately see any bees; she checked the vase of white alum lilies but there was nothing. The French windows were open: the bees must have left.
Grace turned to leave the suite when she saw a chair on the balcony: around its back was a lump of bristling bees seething and crawling over each other. They had swarmed, perhaps coming from the plane trees in Green Park behind the hotel. Half the hive would have left, taking their old queen with them, who would now be in the centre of the mass. They were resting, would rest here for two or three days—not that the Ritz would allow bees—while the scout bees went ahead and searched for a new home in a tree hollow.
Grace moved nearer—the bees were unperturbed. Her arms were bare, her face uncovered but she wasn’t afraid. It was months since she had been near bees and she had missed their productivity and selflessness, how each one busied itself for the good of the hive, working ceaselessly over the brief span of their lives. They were beautiful and useful.
The housekeeper entered with a tablecloth draped over her head.
‘You could be stung to death, girl,’ she warned, waving a broom in the air.
‘It’s best not to do that, it can frighten them.’ Grace stood by the chair where the bees had made a cruciform with their brown bodies. ‘I am a beekeeper,’ Grace said. It felt a long time since she had heard herself define herself and say, ‘I AM . . .’ but it was true, she was a beekeeper. And she was like a lost bee without a hive. Sometimes Grace had wondered, as she donned her brother’s beekeeping hat and gloves, if the bees had chosen her to be a beekeeper rather than the other way round.
The housekeeper was too frightened of the insects to use her authority and turn Grace back from a beekeeper to a maid. She dropped the tablecloth and ran out, her hands in front of her.
Grace bent down to see the energy of the hive. Before they swarmed, the bees would have fed deeply on honey and nectar to build up their strength. They were full and satisfied. It would be days before they were busy and forward-moving again. There was nothing to be afraid of; bees and people had worked together since the Babylonians.
Grace went to the door of the suite, where the butler, the housekeeper, the guest and Hilda were gathered waiting for her. They flinched backwards when Grace opened the door.
‘May I be informed of what is happening?’ the guest demanded of the butler. The butler looked at Grace.
‘I need a basket or a cardboard box and a cloth—that tablecloth will do.’
‘Hurry! A cardboard box. You heard!’ the housekeeper ordered Hilda, then she shamefacedly handed the tablecloth to Grace.
‘What are you going to do, girl?’ the guest asked, looking in her tasselled bag while she spoke. ‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ the woman continued, thoroughly and finally disregarding Grace, angry with a maid who could speak and inform.
Once Hilda returned with the box, Grace went back into the suite and knelt by the chair. The other women stood at the doorway watching warily, looking ready to scream and flee. Grace, with the reassurance of familiarity, penetrated her hands into the hive. The bees swarmed to her bare skin and walked over her fingers and palms. She took a handful of bees and laid them in the box, where they sat contained in one ball. She picked up another ball of bees, which hung down in a deep arch as she moved her hands into the box. The bees didn’t split and become ten thousand individuals; they stayed as one, as if magnetised together. Grace thought again how, as long as bees made honey, the land would be abundant with food and flowers. The bees, she felt, were the first friends she had found in London that she understood and was familiar with: it was as if they embraced her and held her hand.
When the bees were ensconced in the cardboard box, Grace tied the tablecloth around the box, knotted it and left the room, carrying the makeshift hive.
‘Duchess, what an inconvenience for you. The matter is in hand,’ the butler fawned. ‘Girl?’ he said, turning to Grace.
‘They need to be taken to the countryside.’
‘Take them to my office, girl. For the time being, put that box in the cupboard behind my desk, and lock the door. Hurry, girl. My sincerest apologies, Duchess: an unforeseen incident.’
‘Yes,’ the duchess said, dismissing the butler as she had dismissed the maid, waving her hand, entering her suite and closing the door.
Grace only had an hour of her half-day off before she had to return to the Ritz. The incident with the bees had taken most of the afternoon in the end, so there wasn’t time to go to the Suffragettes’ meeting and she had missed the jujutsu class. She wanted something to do rather than sit in the stuffy dormitory with the prying eyes of the other maids on her, nor did she want to be in, in case her brother came, so she went for a walk.
As she trudged along Piccadilly, she walked past elegant women amid the dirt and the smoke. Here, in the dirtiest place she had ever been, were the most beautiful people she had ever seen; women draped in mink furs, their kohl-darkened eyes tilted arrogantly towards the weak sun, as if mesmerised by the smog that overlay the city like an unwashed blanket. Grace felt ambivalent about London. Ambivalent—that was a word she had learned from Wilfred. She remembered affectionately that he had been reading a tatty dictionary. She wondered how Wilfred was, imagined his life must be much the same, settled again, after what had happened.
She saw the Royal Academy ahead. Should she go in? Her clothes were shabby. She had not been inside an art gallery before, but she felt emboldened by
her beekeeping and, along with watching Mrs. Garrud practising jujutsu, Grace had become less numb and afraid, able to venture out of herself a little more. She walked through an imposing wrought-iron gate into a square fronted by a building that looked like a palace for art. There was a statue of an artist, easel in hand, paintbrush poised as if petrified in an ecstasy of art. Grace followed the queue and paid for a ticket, standing quietly among the confident conversations around her. She was surrounded by older ladies in expensive coats, their mature faces resting in the expression they had favoured over a lifetime, be that pleasant gentleness or a scathing scorn. Their faces were set now, as if portraits.
Once inside the gallery and on the first floor, Grace walked past a great gilded mirror but ignored her reflection—she cleaned mirrors like that in the Ritz—then through an arch with two cherubs languishing on the architrave and into a square room hung with paintings, mostly of military men. On the ceiling were flabby horses, angels and perhaps God, overseeing the mastery of art. She noticed even the skirting board was gilded. The room was deeply quiet. Her shoes clacked on the floor—it felt forbidden to break the silence, like pushing a finger against the white fondant icing of a cake until it cracked. A guard sat below a painting like a stubby bulldog. Grace paused in front of a portrait of a girl with flowers: Miss Anna Alma-Tadema. ‘Miss’, that simple, poor title which a girl hoped she would shed in her womanhood, as if it were a milk tooth, loosened then replaced by a stronger edge.
A sullen woman with a rather spoiled-looking expression passed by with her authoritative but appeasing husband wearing top hat and tails, and Grace was reminded of her parents. Although her father thought for himself in his work, at home he always did as her mother demanded, acquiescing to her. When Grace had left Narberth, her mother hadn’t stopped her, so her father didn’t either. He was a doctor and important in the town, but weak at home. She missed her father, but she could not respect his weakness. Grace did not miss her mother. She had known her mother was nasty—she was constantly snappy—but not that she was cruel; cruel enough to let Grace, her daughter, leave home when she needed care most.
One painting stood out from the others studded around the room. It was of a man without status or title, without medals or a military uniform. He was an older man who had seen life and seemed saddened, but his gaze was direct. His hands were folded self-effacingly on his lap—hands that wouldn’t invade. He looked as if he might not have long to live and was retiring and receding from the world—all power, all vigour spent. Yet he was more real than the other faces, with less façade. The painting was only oil swished onto a taut canvas, but there was a humanity to this portrait. It was as if his puffy face had been hammered by pain and experiences so that his aspect was full of acceptance, although a shade more and it might be depressed.
Grace sat down heavily on the hard bench opposite the man; the day had been long and eventful already and she was weary. She rested in his presence. Had she seen a face with that much acceptance and modesty in London? Across centuries his acceptance soothed her: what he knew of the world reassured her. That he could paint himself without pomp showed her there was another way in the world from the gilded decoration of the Ritz, the bored opulence of the ladies who slept there, the futile striding and the empty purposefulness of men who didn’t need to work for money, and the children being educated with finesse for lives of little purpose. But then Grace’s work these last few months had little meaning for her. She was only a pair of hands.
The card said Self-portrait of the Artist Aged 63, on loan from the National Gallery. So this was Rembrandt. Was he great, Grace wondered, for his skill with a brush or because his humility made him so? Somewhere in her broken spirit, she felt a balm. There was a confusion of whiskers and wrinkles about his mouth, and his dark eyes were half-hidden amid the blotched, saggy skin. The column of his neck was lost to pudginess and he had a potato-nose—he had not lied about himself. He didn’t look Welsh, nor did he look English—but he looked human. She had waited a long time in this city to find someone who was this human and who had nothing they wanted her to be.
‘Come on, slowcoach,’ Hilda said. ‘You’re dragging your feet today.’
Grace felt exhausted but took a quick step and put her hands on the chambermaid’s trolley alongside Hilda.
‘We’re both tired this morning,’ Hilda yawned. ‘All that excitement over the bees yesterday, and I expect you painted the town red on your afternoon off.’ She nudged Grace cheekily. ‘Were you doing the Tutankhamun Shimmy?’ Hilda wriggled her hips from side to side. ‘Twenty-seven more rooms to service. Twenty-seven beds to strip, fifty-four mirrors to polish, occasional tables to wax, brass lights to clean, shower-baths to scrub, umpteen yards of skirting-boards to dust. You ever had a shower-bath?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither. We have a tin bath in the back yard.’ Hilda liked to talk, Grace noticed. She chattered and filled the silence that Grace’s numbness created. Hilda had told her that she was a Christian—‘a Christian is always a servant!’ she’d explained—and that every time she finished making a bed, she touched the pillows and silently blessed each one and the head that would sleep on it.
‘But my brother,’ Hilda continued, ‘always skinny-dips in the Thames. I say I’m clean and he’s stupid. Bet your brother isn’t as stupid as my brother.’ She knocked on the door to the Ballantyre Suite and waited meekly.
‘Enter.’
A lady sat with her back to them, in the curve of a dressing-table, myriad glass bottles before her prisming the light. She had a pink powder puff in her hand and was dabbing her décolletage while considering a half-finished watercolour painting in front of her. A silk kimono was hanging loosely around her and rested lightly on the carpet, cranes leaping upwards from the hem. When she turned, Grace recognised the elegant profile of Lady Lytton.
‘Good morning, ma’am,’ Hilda said, and bobbed into an obsequious curtsey.
Lady Lytton smiled then turned back to her toilette, selecting a sapphire necklace from a velvet-lined box, coiling the jewellery round her neck and stretching elegantly as she hooked the clasps. She smiled at Grace and Hilda’s reflection anodynely and, if she recognised Grace, she didn’t reveal it.
‘Get in the bathroom!’ Hilda whispered, pulling Grace’s cuff. Once inside, door shut, they scooped up the scattered bath towels and rolled them into a fluffy bundle for the laundry. Grace buffed the enormous silvery mirror, reaching to its outer edges, while Hilda straightened the shower curtain, Welsh-combing the white silk with her fingers. She dried the steel flower that was the showerhead, then jerked out the bathplug so the bathwater slurped into the bowels of the city.
When they emerged from the bathroom, Lady Lytton turned fractionally and lifted a pink teacup to her lips, holding its gold handle delicately.
‘You may go,’ she stated, addressing their reflections in her cool, smooth voice, then picking up a paint set and looking at the small, vibrant squares of colour.
‘The bed, ma’am?’ Hilda asked anxiously.
‘This maid will finish it.’ Lady Lytton indicated Grace. Grace saw Hilda disguise her surprise. Hilda took the order like one who only knew how to obey and not to reply. She nodded obediently and left, taking her maid’s trolley with her.
‘Grace!’ Lady Lytton exclaimed, turning round fully. ‘I haven’t seen you at Mrs. Garrud’s classes,’ she said with concern. ‘And you didn’t come to the last few Suffragette meetings.’ Her enthusiasm revealed her youth, despite the lacquer and polish that money bestowed upon her. ‘When I failed to see you here, I thought you might have lost your employment.’
A wave of tension came over Lady Lytton’s beautiful, painted countenance. ‘Are you well? I wondered what had happened to you.’ She took a long look at Grace and bit the corner of her lip. ‘I thought I might not see you again.’ Suddenly she put her hand to her eyes and let out a strangled sob. ‘I see you a
nd I see my sister.’
Grace watched quietly, unmoved, standing in front of, and apart from, the other woman who was crying, her face creased with deep pressure, lost in herself. Grace looked at this woman who had had a sister whom she’d lost and Grace thought of her brother and how she hated him and wanted him dead.
‘I would do anything to see her again,’ Lady Lytton confessed, her voice cracking into a high pitch on the word ‘anything’. ‘She was only twenty-eight. You look so much like her. You even frown like her.’ She dabbed her red eyes elegantly and pulled her kimono around herself with trembling fingers. ‘And when I saw you and you looked so much like her, and I began to wonder if you were enceinte . . .’
Shock went through Grace.
‘I thought you couldn’t tell,’ Grace said coldly. ‘I thought it was hidden.’
‘It’s hidden if it’s not acknowledged,’ Lady Lytton replied. ‘It was the same with my sister. She had an abortion—or tried to. You won’t do anything silly,’ she asked pleadingly. ‘Will you, Grace?’
It had occurred to Grace. But her father was the only person in Narberth who would have known how to do it. She had tried with a knitting needle, but it hadn’t worked. If it had, it would have ended her problems; she would still have had to leave home but she would have had a future, a life, her own life, instead of this constant sliding down a slippery black hole, like Alice in Wonderland, all the while getting bigger and bigger. Could she still get one now? This was London. But it was surely too late.
A silence fell. It seemed Lady Lytton grasped that she had sown an idea in Grace’s mind; contaminated another woman’s thoughts with a desperate measure.
‘It’s too late for you now,’ Lady Lytton stated.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
But Grace saw that Lady Lytton didn’t know for certain. Her father was a doctor: he always knew what he was speaking about when it came to operations and surgery, and he never spoke in that breathy way.