The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read: And Other Stories Page 9

  Elizabeth crept quietly forward to slide the beans into the waiting colander.

  ‘Elizabeth.’ Her mother spoke softly.

  Her heart jerked. She sensed she was to be told a secret, something that would be intimate between them, and for a few seconds, but which felt like a time out of all time, the secret was suspended there between them, tangible, knowable, shared, but not yet given the form of words. There was an absolute afternoon stillness, among the canes and the greenness.

  ‘Have you to do any homework?’ Her mother turned away, breaking the invisible thread, evading her eye, and Elizabeth felt herself pushed back again into childhood.

  All over the fence and the broken-down wall, the nasturtiums blazed.

  She liked it best in winter, with early dark, and the wood fire on, and she and her mother and Milo at the table. But that was unimaginable now; winter was a fairy story. They sat out on the back step, and the air was full of midges and cruising wasps, and Milo was off down to the brook. Da would not be back until dark.

  Thoughts danced like moths in Elizabeth’s head.

  ‘You should travel to other countries, in your years to come. There’s a world beyond yourself you must break through to. Never forget it.’

  Sometimes her mother would talk like this without any warning – not of clean clothes and homework books, but of adult life and death.

  ‘You should see all there is to be seen.’

  She might as well have said, fly to the moon.

  ‘It would be a disappointment to me, Elizabeth, were you not to, and a sad waste.’

  Such talk made her uncomfortable, as if she itched inside her skin. She could not imagine her own future in this place called ‘the world’; she only ever went down inside herself – her whole life looked inwards.

  ‘Would I have to?’ She picked anxiously at the skin around her bare toes, imagining some ceremony of being cast out, and a terrible solitude among strangers.

  ‘There will be as little for you here as there has been for me. Besides, you will want it.’

  No, she would have said. But did not, being unable to explain, even to herself.

  The sky was damson-stained by the time the truck clattered in. Hearing it, she remembered Minchy Fagin.

  The cocoa was frothing out of the pan. She was to remember it, marrying the image of it to his sudden, extravagant words for ever.

  ‘I’m taking us to the sea. Throw everything up, school and all. We’re going.’

  Her mother’s hand only just hesitated as she was pouring, but Elizabeth saw her eyes flicker anxiously to his face. He was expansive like this, full of schemes and plans, when he’d been with Nolan and Glinty and the rest, drinking.

  ‘A week in this weather would about set us all up.’

  Tiny bubbles prickled over the surface of the cocoa.

  They were hustled upstairs, so that she knew he had not said anything about it before now, and that Ma was waiting until they were out of the way, to get at the truth of it.

  ‘Will it be fishing? Will it be sea, to swim in? Will we sleep out on the sand all night?’

  ‘Hush, you.’

  She set her hand in the small of her brother’s back, going behind him up the stairs. She did not want to talk about it, not until all possibility of disappointment was past. She thought of the sea, curling over her bare feet.

  ‘He said a whole week, Elizabeth. You heard, didn’t you? He said it was to be a week. Elizabeth, why won’t you say anything?’

  ‘It might not happen. There might not be the money.’

  ‘It will. It will . . . and Minchy Fagin won’t be going to the sea. Minchy Fagin doesn’t know anything at all.’ His face was lit with hope.

  They went the next morning, all of them in a line along the front seat of the truck.

  ‘It’s education in itself,’ Da had said, answering their mother’s disapproval of the missing school time.

  ‘And where’s the use of the half they do? Tell me that. We’ll stop off for a fish supper as well.’ And he had lifted his hands from the wheel, while they were going along, smacked and rubbed them together, and all the time casting a sideways glance at Ma, who had firmed her lips, but kept the words back, knowing him in this mood, and too proud to nag.

  But there was no fish supper. She had packed sandwiches and buns, and they ate them going along. Da dropping egg and tomatoes down his shirt front, anyhow and deliberately, Elizabeth knew, because Ma had defied him with her sense, and taken the extravagant pleasure out of the fish supper.

  And then, they were there. The truck turned without any warning off the road, through a gap in the hedge, and bumped over grass, and stopped, and a cow loomed its great, square head at the truck window. But they were used enough to cows.

  Later, she thought of her mother’s feelings at arriving in a field full of cowpats, and thistles like spears, to a caravan that smelled of rustiness and mice. Years later, when it was all over, she understood how it had been, with a senseless man who had no notion of your real needs, but who was given to such fits of craziness, taking you five miles from the nearest house, and a half-mile to a tap, when you had already been threatened with losing the pregnancy no one knew you had.

  Later, she saw how Ma’s life had been for fifteen years, nothing but a round of work and disappointment, with, just occasionally, ten minutes to sit on the step with her face to the sun. Later, when Elizabeth herself looked at some boy with a new haircut raw up his neck, and eyes glistening with nervous lust, she thought of it, and the thought was enough to draw her sharply back into herself.

  Later. But not tonight, when she was drooping tired, yet too excited to sleep, nor the next morning, when she woke to a milky light, and the soft sough and rasp of the sea, dragging down the shingle.

  The bed was a plank, with a thin, sour mattress, and both of the windows were partly broken, so that sometime between sleep and now, she had been aware of the cow’s breath on her face, and of Ma crying quietly.

  When she stepped outside, entirely by herself, she had looked straight over the edge of the world, onto the shining sea, and she ran on bare feet towards it, arms open.

  They were there four days before it happened, and the sun never stopped shining, but there was always a wonderful coolness off the sea. Milo leaped about like a goat-kid, wild and solitary, talking to himself.

  There was no warning. Elizabeth sat up in the middle of the fifth night, wakened by odd, half-smothered moans and whisperings and the torch waving over the walls and roof like a drunken thing. It caught Milo’s face, and his eyes were huge and terrified in the light of it.

  ‘Your Ma’s in trouble. You stay with her, Elizabeth. You stay here.’ He was dragging on his trousers.

  ‘No. I want to come with you. I don’t want to be left.’

  ‘Jesus, girl, you do as you’re told just the once, why can’t you?’

  The injustice stung even then, in the midst of it all. She had never disobeyed him, never dared. Then he went out into the darkness, dragging Milo down the step after him, and away towards the truck.

  For a moment, it was utterly still and silent. She crouched back in her bunk against the wall, and prayed to God.

  ‘Elizabeth? Elizabeth, be a good girl. Light the lamp. He’s taken the torch with him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You turn up the oil with the little knob.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t like to be in the dark.’

  The lamp flared and then sank back to a low blue flicker.

  ‘Will you come here and sit by me?’

  She reached out. Ma’s hand was slippery and hot.

  ‘Minchy Fagin said you’d been to see the doctor.’

  ‘Minchy Fagin!’

  A breeze blew through the broken window-pane, making the lamp sputter.

  ‘Da’s gone for someone. He took Milo with him.’

  Her mother gave a sudden, sharp cry.

  ‘He’ll bring the doctor back, won’t he?
’

  ‘The dear knows. How’ll he find me one, Elizabeth? I don’t know.’ She was gripping Elizabeth’s hand; the nails were sharp.

  ‘Should I get you a drink of water?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘What should I do?’ She was afraid. She wanted to be anywhere, for things to be normal again, for someone else to be here.

  ‘He met a man who had this place to let. Why did he waste his money on a tin shack in the middle of nowhere? Because he has no sense.’

  Elizabeth wanted to stop her ears.

  ‘You shouldn’t think of yourself, they say, you should always put others first. You should never be self-regarding.’

  ‘I know.’ Though she had always questioned it, for what other person did she, Elizabeth, know, so well as she knew her own self? What other point of reference had she? How else might she measure the truth of things than against herself? If she denied and obliterated this Elizabeth, what was left?

  ‘Don’t listen to it, don’t! Don’t make that mistake, Elizabeth.’

  She thought, let them come back, let them bring someone quickly. I don’t want this. Her mother was crying, and then stifling her cries in the blanket, and Elizabeth’s hand was held stuffed hard against her mouth. She felt her mother’s teeth biting into her in pain.

  ‘But it was for you to have this time. A week by the sea. That was all.’

  And they had, running across the hot shingle to the water, hearing the hiss and lap of the waves through the darkness.

  ‘It won’t stop, Elizabeth. There’s no way I can make it stop.’

  She had not understood then, not until later, after Da had come back, with a woman who was the only help he could find. She had been some kind of nurse, she said, though way back.

  There had never been a chance for her, the woman had said, not a chance, the poor girl, the blood and all had soaked through the mattress to the floor below.

  Elizabeth had gone to the truck, shaking, and climbed in, and sat there with Milo, who was fallen asleep across the seats. She had moved him to be closer to her, and seen the torch flickering about inside the caravan. But after a time, she had slept, too, and when she had woken, it was light, and there was an ambulance and a black car drawn up beside the caravan. Da had been standing out there, helplessly, in the field, shirtless.

  A terrible knowledge shocked her through. She remembered the feel of Ma’s hand, and the fear in her voice that had sounded like complaining, as they had sat together, and that had been in another life. Now, she knew at once, in this cold dawn, that she must set herself aside, as her mother had done. Her arm was numb beneath Milo’s sleeping weight.

  Looking up, she saw Da, eyes bleared and wild, seeking her out.

  They had simply abandoned the caravan – even left the door swinging open. Their things had been piled anyhow into the truck, without being packed. Elizabeth had felt ashamed of it.

  The oil lamp had long since guttered out.

  ‘You’ll be away to school again tomorrow.’

  Then, they had driven all the way, in silence, with Milo rigid and white-faced between them, and never once stopped. They could pee when they got home, Da said, and they had not dared to question it.

  When the truck slewed onto the rough ground at the back of the house, the late afternoon sun was slanting through the bean canes. Elizabeth saw Ma there, picking in the green, undersea light. She wanted to duck down and swim to her, and she could not.

  But it was Da who leaned his head on the steering wheel of the truck then, took in a great breath and let it out again in one single, juddering, lurching sob.

  Milo had not let go her hand for the whole journey, and would not now, and so she sat, trapped there between them.

  ‘Go in, Elizabeth. The stove’s not lit. You’ll have to get the sticks.’

  But still, for a long time, she did not move, only sat, not able to let her grief out, and the truth in. Not wanting the future to begin with this one, simple act, of obeying him.

  The brooch

  The brooch

  The remarkable thing was that so many people did not know he was blind. That was his pride, her aunt Elsa said.

  ‘You must never, by word or deed, show that you know it.’

  She had repeated the words to herself, at the same time pinching her nails hard into her palms. They had come on the train, in a compartment smelling of the oranges a woman opposite had taken out of her bag and peeled, onto a handkerchief.

  Eating in public was common, her mother said. The child’s head was crammed with their sayings, like buttons packed into a box. Years later, on a walk, or serving a customer across the counter, one would come to her unbidden, as if someone moving things about in an attic had disturbed the box, and it had come open and spilled about.

  In this way a memory of her uncle would return, and of her aunt Elsa, who had to inject herself twice a day in the thigh, because she was diabetic. She had once come upon her in the bathroom, extending a stringy, blue-veined leg.

  Later there had been whispering.

  ‘Don’t let the child see.’

  ‘It’s life. You cannot keep things from her.’

  ‘Dolly is over-protective,’ the aunt said. Dolly was the family name. In their own world, her mother called herself Dora.

  ‘Dolly is over-protective with that child.’ (Whose own name was Rima, after a girl in a book.)

  And so, getting out of the train, bearing the smell of the oranges faintly on her coat, she remembered. ‘Never, by any word or deed.’

  But it was a remarkable story. She understood that later. He had been struck blind on the instant, after what they called a brain-storm, at the age of eighteen and so had had to give up his job in an accounting office. He had a genius for figures, a genius and a passion, figures fascinated him, he told the child, you could play with figures like toys, but better, because you grew out of toys. Walking down the long avenue between the bungalows, or across the flat, flat sands that went on for ever to the flatter sea, the dog let off the lead to run ahead, he shot figures at her like bullets.

  ‘Five nines?’

  ‘Seven add seven, divided by seven?’

  ‘A tenth of a thousand? Of a hundred? Of a tenth?’

  ‘One six is six, two sixes are twelve, three sixes are . . .?’

  ‘Listen to this. Every part of the nine times table adds together to make nine. Two nines are eighteen – one, add eight, is nine. Three nines are twenty-seven – two, add seven, makes nine. Four nines are?’

  ‘Thirty-six.’

  ‘Three and six make?’

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘That’s the beauty of it.’

  And he shouted suddenly, and waved his stick in triumph to the sky. (It was not a white stick.)

  ‘That’s the beauty.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, and stopped to stare down at her own footmarks that pressed into the sand and at once filled up with water, and the water reflected the sky. And then the footprints sank back into the sand again with a tiny sucking sound.

  ‘Look.’ That was beauty, to her. ‘Look!’

  He came back. Looked down. And her face burned, in the realisation of what she had said. ‘Look.’ And that he could not.

  ‘Never by one word or deed.’ So she could not apologise, could not refer to it in any way. But she put her hand into his as they walked.

  The dog Shep ran up and down, far out at the water’s edge, barking after seagulls.

  He could never have sat at home idle, his mother had seen to that, and his own determination. By the time he had met Elsa – who had gone to a Ladies’ Night at the Masonic with her father, because her mother had felt unwell – his new way of life was established, and taken for granted by everyone. His blindness had not troubled Elsa. She had ignored it. Already, plenty of people did not know that he was blind, but those who did would marvel.

  He had become a commercial traveller in hosiery, with a leather attaché case crammed full of samples – men’s so
cks, and children’s, and ladies’ stockings in every shade and gauge. By the time he and Elsa married, his routine was set and he had only to move it, along with his things, out of his parents’ house and into his own, which was the bungalow that Elsa’s father had built for them.

  The alarm clock was set for six every morning, because he did things so slowly. He made a pot of tea, each action following the next in the same, methodical routine, and took a cup, with an arrowroot biscuit, in to Elsa, who needed to eat and drink on waking, because of her diabetes. After that, and her own routine of the injection, she waited on him, cooking breakfast, brushing his coat and trilby hat, polishing his shoes and setting them out beside the front door. He sat down at the table on the signal of the pips for seven o’clock, and the news on the wireless. They ate as they listened, and then she went through the suitcase with him, listing the contents, and the exact order in which they were arranged, and he stood beside her and memorised each item, touching his hand briefly to it, and then the case was closed and at the snap of the lock, the dog, Gem, or Shep, or Ben, a series of identical sheepdogs, who replaced one another over forty years, would jump up and go to the front door, to wait, expectant, eager.

  ‘You could set the clock by Mr Burgage,’ they said. The child heard it often enough.

  The walk to the railway station took him fourteen minutes. At the triangular kiosk on the corner the newsagent waited, holding out the Daily Telegraph to his reaching hand, and at the marble horse-trough they paused for the dog to drink, and every morning was like every other morning, and nothing varied.

  He caught the seven-fifty, with a season ticket, and held the newspaper up to his face, turning the pages as the other men did, and the other men never knew. Or so it was believed.