The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (6 page)

A month after Leila Crocker had first come to the house, Nita found her in the kitchen one evening.

‘I am cooking for us all.’

‘Oh, there is no need. I was going to make omelettes with a salad.’

‘I’m sure you would prefer roast chicken.’

‘And then,’ Nita said, going in, trembling, to her sister’s room, ‘I noticed it.’

‘Noticed what?’

‘How can he think of doing such a thing? How can he?’

The light had caught the ring on Leila Crocker’s hand as she had reached out to one of the kitchen taps.

Kay laid down her pen. Her diary was open on the desk in front of her.

‘The diamond hoop with the small sapphires?’

‘Yes.’

Though their mother had rarely worn it, saying it was too special, too dressy, it was to be kept for very special occasions, and those had rarely come, in such quiet, self-contained lives.

‘Are you sure?’

The words came out of Kay’s mouth as heavy and cold and separate as marbles.

‘Go down and see for yourself. If he has to give her a ring – well, people naturally do –’

‘Not the ring that belonged to their wife of thirty-seven years who has been dead for under a year. I think not.’

At two o’clock in the morning, Kay went into her sister’s room and, after hesitating a moment, her bed.

‘Ninny?’ She had not used the name for twenty years.

‘I’m not asleep.’

‘I don’t think I can bear it.’

‘I know.’

‘I feel as if I were a child.’

‘What would other people do? Different kinds of people?’

Kay thought of Anne McKay, and Mrs Willis. ‘Do you – do you believe she can know?’

They lay, picturing their mother, floating somewhere nearby, smiling, patient.

Is it for her? Nita thought, feeling her sister’s warmth to the side of her. As children they had often crept into one another’s beds. Is it really for Mother’s sake that I mind what is happening more than I have ever minded anything apart from her dying?

But in the end she turned on her side and took her
sister’s hand and, after a few moments, slept, exhausted by the impossible, unanswerable questions.

‘We cannot possibly go to the wedding,’ Kay had said. But of course they did, and somehow got through the service, at which there were three hymns and two readings and Leila Crocker wore cream lace. The church and the hotel room afterwards were full of strangers. Their father’s face was flushed with excitement and open devotion.

Somehow, they got through all of it. Somehow, they stayed until the car had left the hotel courtyard, waved at by the strangers.

In the avenue, Kay stopped, took off her jacket and shook it out until the few paper rose petals drifted into the gutter.

The two weeks that followed were extraordinarily happy. They felt an unreal sense of freedom and contentment, in the house by themselves, answerable to no one. The sun shone; they set the table up on the terrace and ate supper there, and, at the weekend, breakfast and lunch as well.

They put a shield around themselves. Neither
referred to their father or to the marriage. When postcards arrived, first from Rome, and then from Florence, they read and then discarded them without a word.

But on the morning they were due to return Nita cut fresh branches of philadelphus and put them in jugs about the house.

‘We have to try. We have a duty to try. Things may go perfectly well.’

From the very beginning they did not, though whose fault it was none of them could have told.

It was difficult to share their home with another, difficult to accept her as having precedence over them, difficult that she and their father slept in the same room, the old room in which their mother had slept in the years before her last illness, difficult to get used to changes of daily routine and the presence of their stepmother’s possessions hanging in wardrobes, filling drawers, displacing the old order of things. Difficult to find someone else in the house every evening when they returned home, at supper, at breakfast and for the whole of every weekend.

‘Difficult, difficult, difficult,’ Kay said, walking faster than usual up the avenue.

But difficult might have become less so. They might perhaps have adapted themselves to the new arrangement, in the end. Difficult was not painful or hurtful and it was pain and hurt which came very quickly.

‘What is happening?’ Nita said as they rounded the corner, and saw the removal van outside the house. ‘What is happening?’

They almost ran.

It was nearly over. The work had been going on for most of the day. All the old furniture from their mother’s sewing room and the small sitting room, as well as from the bedroom in which she had died, had gone. In the sitting room were a new, bright-blue sofa and chair, and a glass-fronted cabinet. The sewing room and bedroom were empty.

Their father met them in the hall, saw their faces, but could not manage to meet their eyes.

After that everything disintegrated, everything was swept away, or so it felt. Their mother’s clothes were cleared, and her papers. The photographs of her
about the drawing room and their father’s study disappeared, though her pearls and her two pairs of good earrings did not go, their stepmother wore them.

‘How dare she?’ Kay said, banging into her father’s study. ‘How dare she take Mother’s things, her personal things, how could you let her?’

‘Please lower your voice. I remember that when your mother passed away –’

‘Died. She died.’

‘– you – and Nita – you said you would prefer not to have those things. As I understood.’

‘That did not give – your wife – the right to appropriate them.’

He stood up. ‘I gave them to her. I wanted her to have them. Leila took nothing.’

‘How could you give them – you?’

‘I think, I believe, that it is what –’

‘If you say it is what Mother would have wanted, I think I shall kill you.’

‘Kay –’

‘You let her throw out our mother’s furniture – clear her things.’

‘We did it together. It was time.’

‘For who?’

‘For me.’

‘You are a blind, cruel, besotted, foolish old man.’

At the top of the stairs, she almost collided heavily with Nita.

‘Whatever is happening? Why were you screaming?’

In her own room, Kay sobbed tears of bitter pain and rage.

Nita had closed the door. ‘It is very hard,’ she said. ‘I hate this. I mind it as much as you do. I mind it for Mother’s sake and for us, but screaming at Father is not right – he loves her, he is besotted with her. He cannot see that she is doing anything wrong.’

‘He is being treacherous, utterly treacherous. He was married to Mother for almost forty years. He loved her, he saw her die and almost went mad with grief. We had to watch all that, bear all that. He has utterly, utterly betrayed her, bringing that woman here, marrying her in such haste, such a few months after – and making that – that vulgar display, that wedding – giving her Mother’s jewellery, helping her throw Mother’s things away – taking down the photographs.

‘She has no idea, none. She is completely insensitive and I do not care for her, I wish she had never come here – but I don’t blame her and I do not hate her. I blame him. I hate him. I can’t forgive him – I cannot –’

The tears this time were not of anger, but of misery and grief at everything lost, and after a moment Nita cried with her for the same loss, of their mother and of everything that had been hers, and for the loss of him, the loss of all love, for it seemed that their father had taken everything from them, and given it to his wife, taken his love for them and for their mother and theirs for him, taken his loyalty and sense of what was right. Taken their home and their place in it.

They sat holding one another on Kay’s bed as the light faded, and the empty room below and the empty room next door were like hollow caves carved out of their own hearts.

They lived in the house for another five months, and in that time everything changed, piece by piece. Everything that was old and familiar and belonged to their past went and was replaced by the new, the
strange, until only their father’s study and their own rooms remained unaltered. They scarcely spoke to him, avoided him altogether if they could. To their stepmother they were polite, with all the careful, wary courtesy of strangers, but they saw, in her face, in her eyes, that she was indifferent to them.

‘They neither need nor want us,’ Nita said, ‘that much is clear without anything being said.’

They felt invisible, quite supplanted, quite irrelevant. One evening they drew a circle on the street map, and began to look within it. They could not have borne to change their routine, the walk to the same bus stop, the return together. It was all that was left to them, apart from their jobs, and their own shared life.

When they found a flat which would do, Kay told their father, who said nothing. ‘You have your own lives to lead,’ their stepmother said brightly; ‘naturally you do.’

The flat was really quite pleasant. The sitting room had wide windows overlooking the chestnut trees that lined the quiet street. The rooms were freshly painted. They grew used to not having a garden, particularly as it was winter when they moved in.

They wondered from time to time whether they had judged Leila Crocker, as they still thought of her, correctly, whether she had cornered their father into a meeting, marriage, the clearing away of his past, or whether she had in fact been blameless and the fault was his, but it came to matter less and less just as, to their surprise, they were able to remember their mother more clearly in the flat than they had in the old house. She had come with them, she was there every evening on their return, in her photograph, which was everywhere, and with her invisible yet smiling, patient presence.

They thought as little as possible about their father and their old home, though it was the memories of home which gave them the greatest pain, striking without warning, because of the way the sun shone suddenly through a window, or the banging of a gate. At these moments, the past would wash over them and drown them in itself. Their years of childhood and young womanhood were fresher and more vivid than the previous day so that it seemed they might simply have opened the door and walked back into them.

Their habits firmed, hardened, their natures set.

Routine became all-important. They came to dread any disturbance, any hint of the unfamiliar.

Their father’s new marriage had nothing to do with them.

‘It is far better,’ Kay said; ‘it is the only way.’ And all the while believed it.

But very occasionally, Nita got up before her and went to the early service. Kay could never be persuaded. It was the only rift between them, and slight enough, apart from the day Nita let the blue ribbon teapot slip out of her hands onto the floor of the kitchenette, where it smashed into far too many pieces for there to be the slightest hope of repair. Walking into the room a moment later, Kay found her sister standing, staring down at the shards of china and, recognising them, she began to scream, furiously, uncontrollably, her voice rising and rising, until Nita’s face took on a look of pain, and panic, and, as Kay’s scream intensified, of fear.

One of the Morris kids had let Rosa’s hen out and was chasing the poor flapping thing round, both of them squawking together and mud flying.

That’s all the site was that year, mud. We were in it for a month and I think it rained every day. At night I lay in the bunk and went to sleep to it, slamming on the van roof and rolling down the sides.

‘Get off. Get away.’ I couldn’t catch him of course. He ducked and dived off. All the Morris kids are quicksilver, it’s in them to be. But I got the hen without much trouble. She just cowered in the mud and let me pick her up and, when I held her funny, soft, wet body between my hands, went very still.

Then it came.

‘Hooey – oo. Hooey – oo.’

I froze like the hen, waiting.

‘Hooey – Ssssss . . .’

I couldn’t see him and in any case he was clever at
throwing his voice. I held onto the hen tighter for comfort.

‘Hooey – oo.’ No one else would have heard it. He whistle-whispered in a queer, sing-song way. It made my neck prickle.

I hated him. Little Midge, the whistler, somewhere here, pressed up against one of the vans, or in the dark slit between two of them, or skulking behind a tent flap.

Rosa’s hen jerked its head round suddenly and I saw its unblinking little eye, round as a button. Something in the gleam of it gave me nerve and I walked wildly round the back of Rosa’s van, opened the door of the cage slung below it and bundled the hen in. Rain dripped from the overhead awning down my back.

From somewhere close by a baby set up a wail and that started another, and set the ponies off one by one, geeing and braying and whinnying.

I found that one of the worst things. That it was never quiet. I’d been born into it and grown up with it and never accepted it. There’s always a racket, day and night, children, animals, musicians, all jammed together, living and breathing and playing and
fighting in one place. I used to walk away sometimes, along the cliff path and down onto the secret beach, just to get away from it. To get some quiet. The sea was never quiet, but that was different. The sea was a peaceful noise.