The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (12 page)

The sun shone hard in their faces, and the sky was muzzed with the heat. Even days like this were long remembered and talked about, but to have weeks of sun, without the familiar, soft grey veils of rain, drifting over them from the hills, gave her a feeling of strangeness in itself.

After Christmas, she would be twelve. Thinking of that troubled her, she wanted to clutch at everything familiar and hold it to her. But the heat and dryness
were not familiar, and now, there was this new anxiety.

Yet the house, when they went in through the back door, seemed the same, and its smell was a comfort. There was the jug of cold tea on the table beside the loaf, and a ticking silence about the place.

‘Elizabeth? You come and help me now, would you be good?’

She was picking the beans that hung down, heavy, from the row of canes. Elizabeth pushed her way through the ropy tangle of stems to the inside of them, where the light was undersea green. She dropped the picked beans into her lifted skirt. The leaves smelled bitter. She felt Ma’s presence on the other side of the green curtain, saw the faded patch of her skirt; she could have reached out and touched her. She crouched down, and this, too, was childhood – being small among the beans. This smell.

‘They say it’s not been so hot for a hundred years.’

‘They do.’

‘We saw Minchy Fagin, by the pumps.’

Silence. But there had been a fraction’s pause in the picking.

Elizabeth crawled out from under the canes,
holding up her laden skirt. Ma stood lower down the row. Her hands were still on the beans, her eyes far away. It seemed important not to interrupt. But in the moment of looking, Elizabeth had a flash of insight, like a vision, and in it, she understood what it was to be poor, and hard-worked, with rough hands and no time to yourself, and that her mother had long ago accepted what marriage to Da had brought her to, and yet still gave in to her flickerings of longing. Da was sour-tempered and grudging and his belly hung over his trousers, and he never wore a collar to his shirt, which grieved his wife.

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.