The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (16 page)

She was not there and did not come. After six days, he began to feel safe. He wished he could ask them, for he was sure they knew her, but embarrassment, and a desire not to tempt fate, kept him silent, even supposing he could have made himself understood, for by mentioning her, he might in some dreadful way conjure her up in reality.

On the following Sunday, she came to the flat. He
knew it was her when the doorbell rang – an incongruous, irritating doorbell which played a sickly little tune. He had been cleaning – the vacuum and brushes were about the floor, and for several moments he stood quite still among them. No one came here and he had scarcely seen his neighbours. But it was not that. He had a terrible sense of the woman’s presence, mesmerising, relentless, waiting outside on the landing.

‘How did you know where to find me? No one has this address.’

‘I have followed after you one night late.’

She wore boots and a long grey coat that seemed to have been cut from stiff felt in the way it stood out from her body.

‘There is nothing to be said. I can’t agree to your demand. It is not possible, that’s all.’

She did not reply, only stood obstinately there so that he had either to shut the door in her face, or let her in.

She sat on the edge of the brown leatherette sofa and talked, not begging or pleading, simply re-telling her history, in a monotonous voice, and then stating again the reasons for wanting to escape from Vldansk,
and her longings for a new life. He paced about the small room, and then stood at the window looking at the snow-covered fields, treeless and hedgeless, stretching away until their edge blurred into the line of the horizon. He felt her staring at his back. He was angry. He was afraid. He wondered if he could simply run out of the flat and away, miles and miles across the hard-packed snow.

Or if he might kill her.

But after a time she stopped talking and, in a while, simply went, though for some time after she had gone the room still seemed to hold the imprint of her unsmiling, relentless presence. He stood without putting on the lamp, looking out onto the snow. There were never any stars here, nor the clear brightness of moonlight, only a gathering greyness, once day had leaked out of the sky. He wondered if she had walked or cycled. Then, so as not to think of her at all, he found paper and pen and wrote a long letter to an acquaintance in England, a man with whom he had been at school and had met by chance some years later, walking across a piece of wasteland with a greyhound dog. They were in the same field of
work. He had had no thought of writing to him, or indeed to anyone, before today.

That night he dreamed of her again and again, was angered by it. He did not go to Antonyin’s for a week. He found a fish café near the railway station and ate there, and the oil in which the food was fried gave him indigestion.

She was waiting for him one evening as he left the works, standing in the snow in her stiff felt coat, her protuberant eyes fixed upon him. He turned away without acknowledging her, and began to walk quickly to the cycle racks.

‘I have made supper. I am a good cook. I will lead you the way there.’

‘No.’

‘It is near the river. Don’t lose me out of your sight or you will not arrive.’

She had a bicycle propped up against the fence, a high-handled old machine on which she looked laughable, a circus figure, small and squat and neckless, the grey coat reaching to her heavy boots.

‘No.’

Yet he was curious to know how she lived. And hungry. So then, let her make a fool of herself, let her
slave over a cooking pot for him. He felt defiant. He would give her nothing else.

The frozen sleet was driven like pine needles into his face and he struggled to see ahead and keep up with her as she swung round corners and skidded down the alleyways that led to the river.

Her rooms, though they felt cold, were nevertheless as oppressive and stifling to him as her physical presence. There was one small living area, and a sink and cooker behind a curtained partition. She shared a lavatory and bath two floors below with the other tenants. The air on the landing and staircase, as well as in the room itself, was thick with the smell of cooking meat and onions.

He was not a tall man but he felt like a giant lumbering inside the overcrowded space. The chairs, and stools and small tables were draped with pieces of beaded and embroidered fabric, and fabric was pinned to the walls here and there, tiny cushions were piled about and there was a clutter of ornaments, half of them cracked or broken. He imagined her squirrelling all this together, surrounding herself with objects to fill the hollow of her existence. The room made him panic.

She was not a good cook. The meat was tough, the lumps of onion half-raw, and he felt the food settle in the pit of his stomach. She talked of her plan. She would pack everything in tea crates and ship it ahead of her, she said, she could not bear to enter on a new life without her own things. But they themselves would fly to England, where he would arrange the marriage licence at once. This should not take many weeks; her papers were all in order. He found himself arguing about the laws and regulations, the difficulties of her even entering the country.

‘It is out of the question. You simply do not understand. It is impossible.’

‘For me to come to your country, for me to be married to you, it is all possible.’

‘No!’

‘Why is it “no”? Why? Why?’ She was shouting at him. ‘You should do this thing. It is nothing. It will never inconvenience you.’

‘No.’

He knew that the crates of dreadful cracked ornaments, and beaded drapes and cushions, would be delivered to his own home, and wait there. That she would unpack them and then they would take over,
clouding and blurring the tidiness of his domestic life, making disarray where there was at present spareness and order. She would be at his table, in his kitchen, staring, staring. She would somehow contrive to be married to him and having done so, she would never leave.

‘I have no other chance. I am not a young woman. It is the only way to a new life. Why do you deny me?’

This time, he did escape, out of the room and down the dark stairs. He did not look back, and yet he had an image of her which he carried for a long time, standing, white-skinned and squat in a claustrophobic room among the ruins of the awful meal, unsmiling. He had never seen her smile.

She did not follow him, but he heard her, shouting after him down the stairs, and then through the open window, high, screeching, furious accusations.

It took two days for him to leave Vldansk. He pleaded a dangerously sick mother. No one questioned it. During that time, he slunk about like a man on the run, taking a circuitous route from his flat to the works, always at different times. He resented being driven out. But the closest he came to real
sadness was during his last hour there when, waiting in the half-empty airport lounge, he thought of Antonyin’s, and warmth at remembered happiness spurted up in him.

The food on the plane was the old food of the country, congealed grey gristle in paprika with watery cabbage and sour bread. But he ate it, out of relief at finding himself on his way home alone – for he had dreaded seeing her, waiting for him at the airport, wearing the stiff, long grey coat and staring, staring.

England was mild. A warm, damp wind blew diesel fumes across the tarmac. He felt light-headed, almost happy.

His house was as he had left it, cold, ordered, empty, the curtains falling together just so, the books, spine to spine, exactly placed along the shelves. He closed the door.

And then, a terrible, desperate loneliness fell upon him. Emptiness seemed to ring in his ears with the silence. Her loneliness had been buried in mess and clutter, muffled in cloth. His was laid bare as bone in this space. Only at Antonyin’s had they both been able, for an evening here and there, to set it separately aside.

She would not leave his head. He imagined her, seeing through the windows and even the walls of his house, pictured her sitting opposite him at his table, in his chairs. He did not want her. He had hated her.

After a few days, he went out to the newsagent and bought a paper, and several magazines and, returning home, began to go through them for the addresses of agencies who might supply him with a foreign wife.

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Epub ISBN 9781446485705

Published by Vintage 2004

8 10 9 7

Copyright © Susan Hill 2003

‘The Brooch’, ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘Antonyin’s’
Copyright © Susan Hill 1996
‘The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read’,
‘Moving Messages’, ‘Father, Father’, ‘Need’,
‘The Punishment’ and ‘Sand’
Copyright © Susan Hill 2003

Susan Hill has asserted her right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author
of this work

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
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ISBN 978 0 09 945895 1