The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (13 page)

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 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 socks, 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.

In the city the dog led, crossing at traffic junctions, turning on a command – for he held the map of the place in his head, together with the list of his calls in their order, and at every shop and department store he was punctual, for the time ticked within him like a second heart. He set out his samples and displayed the socks and stockings by stretching them carefully over his hand.

‘Burnt sand,’ he said. ‘Camel’, ‘Blush’, ‘Regulation Navy’, ‘Waverley – a more subtle blue.’ He remembered the words of colours, but no one could know whether what he saw within, behind his sightlessness, in any way corresponded now to the reality, whether blue was indeed blue.

They gave him the orders. ‘One dozen grey gents’ half-hose. Size 9–11. Two dozen navy. Size eight. A dozen boys’, aged nine to ten. Fifty pairs of thirty denier, seam-free. Fifty pairs of silk sheer, Blush. Medium.’ Trainees, new to hosiery, would remark that Mr Burgage never took out an order book, never wrote anything down at all in any way, but the question that might have followed was not asked – though later, in the staff cloakroom, they might whisper among themselves. And it was remarkable, for no order was ever wrong, there was never a mistake.

The evening paper was handed to him by another seller, on another corner, but this one he did not open on the train, it was carried home pristine and unfolded, for Elsa, and given to the dog as they reached the gate, to carry in to her.

In the bungalow the routine was always the same. The names and the figures waited, arranged as they had been entered, in the order book of his head. She had a tray of tea ready, and he drank two cups at once, and set a third on the arm of the chair; then, he began to speak, head back against the moquette, lids
half-closed over unfocused eyes. The order was transferred, in Elsa’s oblique writing, onto the pad.

‘One dozen grey gents’ half-hose. Size 9–11. Two dozen navy. Size eight. A dozen boys’, aged nine to ten. Fifty pairs of thirty denier, seam-free. Fifty pairs of silk sheer. Blush. Medium.’ His concentration must not be interrupted, the child had been told, she must never speak a word during this time, never distract either of them or the order would fall into disorder, the figures fly about anyhow from his head to Elsa’s page and never be correctly rearranged again. And so she would sit under the dining table, her own legs pressed against the dark wooden legs, or else behind the sofa holding a book. But she was never reading, only listening, listening. ‘One dozen grey gents’ half-hose, size eleven. Two dozen navy, size 9–11.’

In forty years his routine had not altered. In forty years, it was said, he had never made a mistake.

On Friday nights he went to the Masonic Lodge.

‘Never ask questions. Never speak to him about it,’ the child was told. ‘Those are secret matters.’

They walked on the beach to a point parallel with the seafront houses, and then turned, and he knew precisely where to turn, she did not have to stop or
prompt him, which was a miracle to her, and yet, by now, one that was quite taken for granted. The dog went on running about at the edge of the water, busy with seagulls, though it turned when they did and ran about again, going the other way, and the sea never came nearer. People rode racehorses through the shallows.

He talked to her. He was always gnawing over something, Elsa said. Why men wanted to fly – how it had always been an instinct, an impossible, physical desire, how they had flown in dreams, and legend and early art. Whether there was really any such thing as the Blood Royal. What was the point or purpose of the migration of hirondines. He taught her to pronounce the word carefully – ‘Hirondine’.

‘A wonder of the world, some would say, and proof as to the existence of a Creator.’ He had stopped and begun to dig a neat little hole in the sand with the ferrule of his stick. ‘It seems to me no such thing.’ She went close and looked down, as the hole filled up with water.

‘Think of the waste.’ He turned on her so that she started. She tried to see into his eyes, which were looking about anyhow, wildly, in his anger.

‘A waste of effort, without any point or purpose. See those sand worms?’ The ferrule dabbed down, here and there, pointing at the small, grainy coils. To her that was a proof, the fact that he knew their whereabouts exactly, sightlessly.

The wind blew, ripping hard over the open sand, and the dog came running in towards them.

At Pitt’s Café, they always had the same order, and that was another ritual – a slice of apple pie and a slice of treacle tart, a pot of tea, a milky cocoa, and a bowl of water for the dog. She slipped the pie crust to it under the table, feeling the slippery nose and mouth cold against her fingers.

‘Your aunt doesn’t know about this, and your mother would call it very common.’ She waited for him to tap the side of his nose and to wink, an odd, clumsy wink that did not completely come down over his eye. Then, across the green plastic table, she would try again to look into his eyes, at the milky surface which was faded and grey. The eyes never focused on her; there was no one there. She did not understand how people were said not to know about the blindness.

‘What are you staring at?’

They left, taking a snicket between the café and the public conveniences, back towards the town. She came four times a year, with the seasons, and they took the same way whatever the weather, and the only difference was that in December and April, they saw no one else, and the sands were pale and bare as a desert, under the enormous sky.

The last time came abruptly. It was October. The dog was called Shep, and the best one ever, he said. The seagulls were strung out like pearls along the water’s edge, hundreds of them, and Shep raced to flurry and scatter them.

At first, the week had seemed no different. When they had walked into the bungalow, at five o’clock in the afternoon, it had smelled the same, the smell she dreamed of sometimes when she was at home, an intense, many-layered smell, and each room had a slight variation – in the bathroom, traces of antiseptic from the solution in which Elsa’s syringes were steeped, in the front room, a faint staleness, and the clothiness of the moquette.

He came home at twenty past six, the dog Shep running in with the newspaper, and the tea was on the
table, and she must be silent. There was the recitation of that day’s order.

‘Less again,’ Elsa said.

He did not reply.

‘Weren’t you expecting the new samples to have come?’

He did not reply.

Later, she realised that the knowledge of what had happened had been hovering in the air at that moment, and had brushed against her, and that there was an unease in his silence.

‘Your books came. Nothing else.’