The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  I knew he was quoting from something, but I didn’t know what it was. I still don’t.

  He gestured behind the altar, to the stacked tombs behind him, and now my eyes were fully accustomed to the gloom I could see the bees, flying in and out of tiny holes and cracks in each tomb. I peered forward.

  ‘They’re – in there?’

  Charles pointed. ‘There they are,’ he said, his voice thin and high. ‘And – up there.’

  He rocked on his heels, hands clasped tightly behind his back, as I stared up at the low ceiling, a third of which was missing. Wooden boards covered most of it. But a gap about five or six inches wide showed something. A row of yellow-grey, thick, plate-like shapes, like dough or something squashed or rolled out into a waxy, lipped circle, sticking out of the ceiling. At first I thought it was expanding foam, like the stuff Daddy used to get rid of mice. Then I looked again at the tiny crawling forms covering them. Combs. They were honeycombs.

  Charles jerked his head over towards the furthest wall, into which were set five or six stone recesses: tombs, places of rest for the dead. The bottom two – about three feet wide – were shut. The others were shut too, but sealed up and over with something messy like clay, straw poking out of the mixture, and a hole about the size of a penny at the top of each one. In and out of these holes, and in the ceiling, bees flew, crawled, hovered. I could see only a few – probably about fifty. But the sound – I knew from the sound there were many, many more than that.

  ‘In my grandfather’s day we had trouble with the death’s head hawkmoths. They’d come into the chapel, getting up into the ceiling. Then there were swifts, trying to build nests, bee-eaters – all kinds of birds. Some of them did a lot of damage. So we nudged them towards the tombs. Easier to keep a smaller entrance. But they still love the ceiling, too. They won’t swarm, my girls. Oh, sometimes you think they’re going to but they won’t. They’ll never leave. They know they’re luckier than most bees.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We look after them, they look after us. It’s always been that way.’ He got closer to me, and I could feel his warm breath, the faint stench of wine and Sylvia’s perfume on him. ‘This is what you have to understand. If we leave, they die. And vice versa.’

  We were both still. I did not move. I felt he wanted me to give way, submit, and I wasn’t going to. And I was trying to digest whether he really believed this or not when suddenly, outside, far in the distance, came the sound of a horn, like a hunting cry.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ said Charles.

  ‘I think it’s a car horn,’ I said. It started, then stopped, then started again.

  ‘Idiots,’ he said, irritated. ‘Where was I? Swarms, oh yes. If half your hive flies away you haven’t taken care of them, and you deserve to lose them. You can tell when they’re looking to swarm. They send out messengers, looking for pastures new. They start laying new queens. You check the hive. You uncover the mud, smoke them a bit, have a look in the comb – this slides out, you see.’ He gestured to the metallic shelves of the chapel’s tombs.

  And again, the sound of the horn came, more loudly than before, continuous now. ‘What the bloody hell is that?’ he repeated. ‘Have a look for queen bee cells. Then you wait, and you look out for them, and when they swarm, you capture them. And you gently shove them back in here. Plenty of space for them, anywhere in the chapel. All they need. The world is here, isn’t it?’ He spread his arms wide. ‘All the world is here.’

  For the first time I found myself wondering if he was a little mad. ‘Why don’t you have – um, those hives like everyone else has?’ I mimed ‘hive’, making a sort of square shape with my hands.

  Charles gave a barking laugh. ‘Force them to my will? Bees weren’t made to be kept by men. They were made to build a hive the way they want. That’s nature. They found this place themselves. When they came to the Reverend all those years ago, he understood that. When my great-great-grandfather bought the house and chapel, he knew the history, he knew what had happened here, he understood that too. You have to. We were from the area. We knew the stories. How they came here. What it means, you know. You can’t hem them in. Listen, just read Pammy’s little booklet. My parents weren’t keen on it, oh no. That’s why we don’t share it around, you know. But it’s good, if you look past some of the rubbish she’s convinced about. She was only twelve.’

  I waited for him to expand. ‘Merry’s got it. I’ll get her to lend it to you. It’s jolly interesting. She writes well. We always thought – anyway, lot better than a lot of these people you read about these days. Cartland, and so forth. Tells a damned good story.’

  ‘I’d like to read it,’ I said. My analytical brain wanted to take in some actual information. It was tired of this swirling uncertainty. ‘Thank you –’

  The horn blared again, and this time I could hear car tyres, the screeching scrape of rubber on gravel, and voices. ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Charles, forgetting where he was, all expansiveness gone. ‘I think it’s troublemakers of some kind. Gypsies. I bet it’s gypsies. We’d better go and see. Hurry up. Pick up that – no, not that.’ He gathered the spoons, and the candles, flipping them into the wooden box, locked it and almost pushed me out of the door. It was nearly dark outside.

  ‘Thank you –’ I began, but Charles was moving away.

  ‘Sylvia’s the Outsider, understand? She unlocks the place. Since you’re one of the Beloved Girls, Merry can be a Hunter this year. So Sylvia plays a role for once. And as Joss’s mother, on his eighteenth birthday, it’s only right, yes, it’s right . . .’ He paused for a second. ‘Yes. You and Kitty wait inside with the candles to light the way whilst we open the combs. Got it?’ He squinted into the distance. ‘Now, one more thing,’ he said, and the horn blew again, and I could see something, moving across the lawn, stumbling.

  ‘Look –’ I said. ‘Over there –’

  I gasped, as Charles grabbed my arm. Softly, he said: ‘I said one more thing, Jane. Listen, if you don’t mind.’ He was pinching the soft flesh above my elbow. ‘Sylvia is glad you’re here. She was fond of your father. But don’t get ideas, do you hear me? The Collecting happens, and then it’s time for you to move on. Wherever that is. Understand?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, staring blankly at him. ‘I understand.’

  Behind him, on the lawn, someone slumped to the grass, laughing loudly. I squinted, adjusting from the darkness of the chapel to the light outside to the shade again.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said, and I pulled away from him. From the house I could hear shouts. As we got closer, it looked like a pile of bright patterned colours, one of Sylvia’s huge scarves. It moved. A slim, dirty foot encased in a leather thong poked out.

  ‘Kitty?’

  ‘Good God,’ said Charles, under his breath. He overtook me, reaching his daughter, jabbing her with his foot. I realised the laughter was hers.

  She was slumped on one side, but she flopped over, onto her back, hair slipping over her face. I saw the mascara, smudged, the dim, unfocused eyes, the slack mouth.

  ‘Well, hellooo,’ she said, and then she rolled onto her side again, and belched, loudly.

  ‘Get up, Catherine,’ said her father, nudging her again with his foot. ‘Help her,’ he barked at me. ‘Now.’

  I slid my arm under hers, and tried to haul her up but she was like a dead weight. She smelled of Anaïs Anaïs, and cigarettes, and wine. Her breath was stale, like yoghurt.

  ‘Kitty!’ Sylvia was calling, from an open window. ‘Oh goodness. Kitty?’

  Aunty Ros stood on the terrace. ‘She woke me up, Charles. They drove at ninety, I’m sure. Those boys. She was screaming and crying. They had music on so loud, they just opened the door and she fell out. And the horn, Charles. So loud. I was frightened.’

  ‘Catherine, are you – are you drunk?’ said Charles, though I should have thought that was obvious.

  Kitty turned over, bum in the air and I saw the back of her skirt was filthy with caked-
on mud and dirt. She scrabbled to her feet: with anyone else it would have been a ridiculous, undignified sequence. She raised herself up to her full height, adjusting her sliding navy T-shirt, and putting her hat – a battered panama, tatty blue ribbon – on her golden head at a rakish angle. Her bare legs were dirty. Her eyes glittered.

  ‘I’m drunk, oh yes I am, because I’ve been at the pub, with boys, doing lots of things I shouldn’t be doing, and in two weeks’ time I’ll be eighteen, Daddy, and I can do what the hell I want.’ She was swaying, like a pendulum, almost in time, as she spoke.

  ‘Get inside, have a bath. You’re in a disgusting state.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you hear, Charles! Kitty woke me up! She woke me up, Charles!’ Ros was covering her ears, her too-short white embroidered nightdress riding up almost to her groin. In the yellow light from the kitchen, she looked much older than Charles; her sagging jaw, and the hands, swollen with arthritis, yet wrinkled, dotted with liver spots. Her eyes were blank.

  Charles looked down at his daughter, thin lips white with fury. ‘You’re making quite a name for yourself, Kitty, you realise that.’

  ‘Yes, Kitty. You are,’ said Ros, hands still over her ears.

  Kitty turned away from her aunt, towards her father. ‘Brrrrrrlllllll.’ She flung her arms out, head back, waggling her tongue. She really was quite out of it. ‘They’re Joss’s friends. You don’t have a problem with Joss going out and getting pissed with them. You like that. You want him to get in with Giles. You want his dad to buy those George something mamog-mahogany dining chairs off you.’

  ‘God’s sake, Kitty. Don’t you see why Mummy and I –’ Charles’s face screwed up into an extraordinary combination of rage and pain. ‘Be a good girl. Here – I’m talking to you. Don’t walk away!’

  ‘A good girl. You have no idea. I’m good. I’m very good,’ said Kitty, and she turned, and was walking away, the scarf trailing behind her across the lawn. She flung one hand up high. ‘Sorry I woke you, Aunty Ros.’

  Ros took her hands away from her ears. ‘Are the bees OK, Charles? Did you check the – Charles?’

  But Charles wasn’t listening. He was staring at his retreating daughter, hands scrunching and unscrunching at his side.

  ‘Two weeks, Daddy-o! Two weeks to go! Then it’s all over for you!’

  Joss appeared at the pool gateway. He gestured to me. Come here?

  But I didn’t want to stick around. I didn’t want to see any more. I stalked past them, up the stairs, to my room, quietly shutting the door, putting a chair under the handle.

  I lay on the bed, listening to the sobbing echoing through the house, the whispered fury. The lines from the song kept playing around and around in my head, the rest of that hot, still night.

  Two, two, the beloved girls,

  Clothed all in green, O,

  One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Is there something wrong with Kitty?’ I asked Merry, two days after Kitty’s disgrace. We were walking through the garden towards the chapel, I slopping along in the too-big and tatty old wellingtons from the boot room which I wore rather proudly. There had been a heavy storm the previous night and my other shoes weren’t suitable for the wet path down to the village. Merry, in a blue and green towelling playsuit and muddy trainers, leaped nimbly ahead of me, a long switch of mallow in her hand to swipe flies, wasps and butterflies off the flowers, leaving them free for the bees.

  I’d been at Vanes about three weeks and beyond the intermittent showers of Charles’s birthday, this was the first time it had properly rained. That spring, and summer, there had been hardly any rain, only day after day of blazing sunshine. The TV news, on the rare occasions we saw it, showed people my age, in fluorescent acid colours, tripping and dancing to house music in fields bleached yellow. Back in London, the streets seamy and bone dry, I’d felt addled with heat.

  The previous night’s downpour reset everything. It was now sunny, but breezy, the wind challenging us, the weathervane for once pointing a different direction – west – the sky a bright, hard blue. Charles had gone to ‘meet a buyer’. Sylvia was working – since Charles’s birthday, she had been holed up in her study much more than usual, drafting and redrafting her new textile design, what would become ‘Summer Rain’, Rory sleeping by her side. He seemed to have aged several years in the last week, and all he wanted to do, more than ever, was stick by Sylvia. I loved stroking his soft ears in the afternoons as we sat on the terrace shelling peas with Sylvia or in the kitchen helping her to wash up and I knew how he felt; she was the only member of the family I could be myself with, and she was the hardest to pin down.

  ‘Kitty?’ Merry said. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Dunno. She’s just – a bit different these days.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she want to go to Cambridge?’

  ‘No idea. Maybe it’s because she thinks she’s not clever enough? I’m pretty sure Mummy got her a place, anyway.’

  ‘That can’t be true,’ I said, shocked.

  ‘She didn’t even get called for an interview. All Joss’s friends did, at Farrars, and Kitty’s much cleverer than them. So Mummy rang up the History professor at King’s College. Professor Lovibond, isn’t that a great name?’

  ‘Yes –’

  ‘I love it. I want to write a novel about someone called Lovibond, one day, don’t you –’

  ‘What happened, Merry?’

  ‘Oh. Fine. Sorry. Well, Mummy knew him from when she was growing up. He was her mum’s lodger. Do you know about her mum? Never mind, anyway, he spoke to her history teacher at Letham’s, they were old buddies too, Kitty got called in for an interview then given an offer. A and two Bs. It’s not what you know, etc.’

  Those had been my predicted grades, in another world, another life. ‘That’s not fair,’ I said.

  ‘Why not? Kitty deserved a place.’ Merry sprang instantly to her sister’s defence. ‘She’s as good as anyone else. But, anyway, she’s furious Mummy interfered, and I think she’s nervous. Convinced she’s not good enough, et cetera, et cetera.’

  ‘Your mum wouldn’t do that,’ I said, definitely.

  ‘Mummy organises everything, you just don’t see it. She makes out she’s away with the fairies. It’s all an act.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was silent for a moment, wondering what to say next, as our tread fell in tandem, one with the other, and we crunched away from the house past the pool.

  (‘No thanks, Merry,’ Kitty had said flatly when her little sister had run to the pool and asked her and Joss if they wanted to walk into Larcombe with us. She’d hardly been seen since the night of her disgrace two days ago. She’d spent the next day in bed, only emerging at lunchtime that day in sunglasses. ‘You two go ahead.’ And she’d slowly crossed one leg over the other, then turned back to reading Emma, pushing the sunglasses very slightly up her nose. Joss stubbed out his cigarette and raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Have fun, you two.’)

  ‘Mummy’s furious she doesn’t want to go, and Mummy never really gets furious. But Daddy doesn’t seem to care. I don’t know.’

  ‘What will she do?’

  ‘Giles Leigh-Smith says she should just carry on being backing singer in his rock group. Giles says they’re going to be massive soon. They’re called the Minotaurs. He says he’s got some producer coming down from London who will definitely sign them up. But Kitty needs to be in it for people to have something to look at. She doesn’t really sing, she just hums and la-la-las and wiggles in the back. I’ve heard she says she won’t do that any more either. She won’t wear their clothes and do what Giles says.’

  ‘I’m surprised they even tried,’ I said, wondering at the person who would try to tell Kitty what to do.

  ‘Giles is really peed off. Everyone is with her at the moment.’

  ‘Giles is at school with Joss?’

  Merry turned, and I saw her face was red. ‘He’s the most popular boy in the year. His famil
y is very rich. They just got a Sky satellite dish, too.’ She looked at me, unsure whether I’d understand what a big deal this was. ‘It gets programmes from a satellite up in space.’

  ‘Oh right.’ I didn’t say Claire’s telly-obsessed mother had got one last month, or that the Ghoshes down the road had had, for the last five years, a vast satellite dish which boomed Bollywood musicals and Indian soaps – ‘Doordarshan time!’ – into their living room, which we used to watch, sitting on the living room floor, passing bowls of sesame sticks and Mrs Ghosh’s samosas to one another.

  ‘Giles wants her to dress like that girl out of Shakespears Sister. They were on T-O-T-P’ – Merry enunciated the letters carefully – ‘last week. Siobhan Fahey had a black bra on and black lacey top and a big floppy hat and a miniskirt. That’s the sort of thing singers wear. But Kitty won’t. He says she should because she’s his girlfriend.’ Merry shrugged slightly, and I saw her expression. ‘Joss and Kitty had a big fight about it because Joss says Giles is his mate. Joss is like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Friends with everyone, friend to no one,’ said Merry, gnomically, and she opened the gate that led towards the chapel.

  In the golden light of day, not at dusk, I could look at the strange, half-ruined building more calmly. Before, I couldn’t see that it had once been a beautiful building, and as Merry opened the door I spotted wild thyme and grasses, flourishing in the cracks on the ancient stone floor, the walls bathed in afternoon light upon which were the carvings – naïve, other-worldly outlines. I could just make out a lion, jaw open, prone on the ground, and further along, a saint of some kind, with bees around his head, almost like a halo. Outside, around us, all was silent but for the distant, humming roar, quieter now than in the evening.