The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (3 page)

He hadn’t forgotten. The boy had made sure, teaching him slowly, going over and over it until he was certain that Mart May knew. If he had been afraid that he would not remember, the moment he held the full paintbrush over the tin, he knew that he was all right; he could see the letters, clear as lights in the sky. Slowly he began to copy them from the pictures in his head onto the tin.

M-A-R-T M-A-Y.

That night he slept without dreaming, without stirring.

After that he saw the letters everywhere, but now he was dissatisfied, hungry to learn the next, to piece all the black spikes together until they gave up their secrets.

Once or twice he bought a newspaper or a magazine and spent his lunch break picking out his own letters like individual thorns in a bramble bush. Once he saw his own name, M-A-Y, surrounded by other unknown marks, and seethed with frustration. He needed to know. He needed the boy.

He did not reappear until late the following spring. One afternoon, there were shouts from the far end of the garden; the next, the crunch of bicycle wheels on the gravel paths. Then, on his way from the beehives, he saw them – the boy, and another boy, shorter, darker. They were attaching an old apple crate to one of the bicycles with twine.

‘You want wheels on that.’

They both looked up. Mart May saw the cloud-grey eyes with their skein of green for an instant, before the boy bent his head again.

The twine was tied and knotted. The box bumped and scraped along the gravel behind the bicycle, which they wheeled fast, up the path and out of sight, shouting.

The next day, Mart May listened out from early, but it was late in the afternoon before they came,
crashing suddenly into the glade, pulling the bicycle and the apple box behind them. He had been about to open a hive.

‘Hey, let’s look, let’s see the bees.’

‘Not now you won’t. Making all that racket. Drive ’em mad.’

‘Oh.’

They turned away.

‘I’ve something to show you,’ Mart May said.

They paused, restless as the bees.

‘What?’

‘I’ve been waiting to show you all winter.’

They dropped the bicycle and followed him round to the tack room. He did not want both of them, was uncertain where he had felt proud.

‘What is it?’

It was different, their talk, their restlessness. Everything was different.

He opened the wall cupboard and took out the tin. They watched, fidgeting. He looked at the boy, holding the tin up slightly.

‘I thought,’ Mart May shook up the tin violently, ‘you’d like a mint.’

‘Oh.’

He held the tin out with the painted letters towards them, not opening it, willing the boy to see, to notice, to know. To say.

But he only waited, shifting about, so that in the end the man simply took off the lid and offered the tin. Their hands dived and jostled inside, came up with sweets.

‘Have two.’

‘Hey, thanks.’

‘Yes, thanks, Mart May.’

‘Remembered my name then?’

‘Oh yes.’

The man showed the tin again. ‘Go on then,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘See?’

‘What?’

He turned it again and read, his finger following the letters, ‘M-A-R-T M-A-Y. I painted that – “Mart May”. After you’d gone away last year.’

A flicker passed over the boy’s face. ‘OK,’ he said.

Mart May struggled, desperate not to have to ask, needing the boy to offer, to produce by some magic, the two books, the two pencils. Sweat prickled his
neck. ‘I could do with learning a bit more,’ he said in the end. ‘You teaching me again.’

The boy’s face was the same, pale lashes, pale hair, white skin. But not the same.

The other one tugged at the apple box.

The boy glanced at Mart May and quickly away, as he turned after the apple box and the bicycle.

‘You were right, Mart May,’ he shouted, skidding away.

‘What about?’

‘You’ll be bringing your pals here, you said. Plaguing. And now I have.’

The noise of them and the clattering box and the skidding gravel went on sounding through the glade. It took a long time for the quietness to return and while he waited for it Mart May stood quite still, turning the silver tin with the mints inside and the lettering on the outside, round and round slowly between his hands.

‘I never realised,’ Nita said, standing beside the washbasin rinsing out a tooth glass. Kay was turning a face flannel over and over between her hands, quite pointlessly.

‘Dying. Do you mean about dying?’

‘That. Yes.’

They were silent, contemplating it, the truth sinking in at last with the speaking of the word. In the room across the landing their mother was dying.

‘I really meant Father.’

Naturally they had always seemed happy. Theirs had been the closest of families for thirty-seven years, Raymond and Elinor, Nita and Kay the two little girls. People used to point them out: ‘The happy family.’

So they had taken it for granted that he loved her, as they loved her, fiercely and full of pride in her charm and her warmth and her skill, loved her more than they loved him, if they had ever had to choose.
Not that they did not love their father. But he was a man, and that itself set him outside their magic ring. They simply did not know him. Not as they knew one another, and knew her.

‘But not this.’

Not this desperate, choking, terrified devotion, this anguish by her bed, this distraught clinging. This was a love they could not recognise and did not know how to deal with – and even, in a way, resented. And so they fussed over him, his refusal to eat, his red eyes, the flesh withering on his frame; they took him endless cups of tea, coffee, hot water with lemon, but otherwise could not face his anguished, embarrassing love, and the fear on his face, his openness to grief.

The end was agony, though perhaps it was more so for them, for their mother seemed unaware of it all now. She had slipped down out of reach.

It lasted for hours. There was a false alarm. The doctor came. Next she rallied, and even seemed about to wake briefly, before drowning again.

They had both gone to sleep, Nita on the sewing-room sofa under a quilt, Kay in the kitchen rocking chair, slumped awkwardly across her arm. But some change woke them and they both went into the hall,
looking at one another in terror, scarcely believing, icy calm. They went up the stairs without speaking.

Afterwards, and for the rest of their lives, the picture was branded on their minds and the branding marks became deeper and darker and more ineradicable with everything that happened. So that what might have been a tender, fading memory became a bitter scar. Their father was kneeling beside the bed. He had her hand between both of his and clutched to his breast, and his tears were splashing down onto it and running over it. Every few minutes a groan came from him, a harsh, raw sound which appalled them.

The lamp was on, tipped away from her face and the golden-yellow curtains she had chosen for their cheerful brightness during the day were now dull topaz. The bedside table was a litter of bottles and pots of medicines.

Her breathing was hoarse, as if her chest was a gravel bed through which water was trying to strain. Now and then it heaved up and collapsed down again. But the rest of her body was almost flat to the bed, almost a part of it. She was so thin, the bedclothes were scarcely lifted.

Nita felt for Kay’s hand and pressed until it hurt,
though neither of them was aware of it. Their father was still bent over the figure on the bed, still holding, holding on.

And then, shocking them, everything stopped. There was a rasping breath, and after it, nothing, simply nothing at all, and the world stopped turning and waited, though what was being waited for they could not have told.

That split second fell like a drop of balm in the tumult of her dying and their distress, so that long afterwards each of them would try to recall it for comfort. But almost at once it was driven out by the cataract of grief and rage that poured from their father. The bellow of pain that horrified them so that in the end they fled down to the sitting room, and held each other and wept, but quietly, and with a restraint and dignity that was shared and unspoken.

There was to be a funeral tea, though not many would come. She had outlived most of her relatives and had needed few friends, their family unit had been so tight, yielding her all she had wanted.

But those who did come must be properly entertained.

Nita and Kay arrived back before the rest to prepare, though the work had been done by Mrs Willis and her daughter.

The hall was cool. Nita, standing in front of the mirror to take off her hat and tidy her hair, caught her sister’s eye. They were exhausted. The whole day, like the whole week, seemed unreal, something they had floated through. Their father had wept uncontrollably in the church, and at the graveside bent forward so far, as the coffin was lowered, that they had half-feared he was about to pitch himself in after it.

Behind Nita, Kay’s face was pinched, the eye sockets bruise-coloured. There was everything to say. There was nothing to say. The clock ticked.

She will never hear it tick again, Nita thought.

For a second, then, the truth found an entrance and a response, but there was no time, the cars had returned, there were footsteps on the path, voices. The truth retreated again.

They turned, faces composed. Nita opened the door.

Every day for the next six months they thought that he would die too. If he did not, it was not any will to
live that prevented it. He scarcely ate. He saw no one. He scarcely spoke. He had always been interested in money, money was his work, his hobby, his passion. Now, the newspapers lay unopened, bank letters and packets of company reports gathered dust. For much of the time he sat in the drawing room opposite his wife’s chair. Often he wept. Whenever he could persuade Nita or Kay to sit with him he talked about their mother. Within the half-year she had achieved sainthood and become perfect in the memory, every detail about her sacred, every aspect of their marriage without flaw.

‘I miss her,’ Kay said, one evening in October. They were in the kitchen, tidying round, putting away, laying the table for breakfast.

Nita sat down abruptly. The kitchen went silent. It had been said. Somehow, until now, they had not dared.

‘Yes.’

‘I miss laughing with her over the old photographs, I miss watching her embroider. Her hands.’

‘People don’t now, do they? There used to be all those little shops for silks and threads and transfers.’

They thought of her sewing box, in the drawing
room by the French windows, and the last, intricate piece, unfinished on the round wood frame.

‘Things will never be the same, Kay.’

‘But they will get better. Surely they’ll get better.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Perhaps – we ought at least to start looking at some of the things.’

The sewing box, her desk, the drawers and wardrobe in her bedroom. Clothes, earrings, hair-brushes, letters, embroidery silks were spread out for inspection in their minds.

‘You read about people quarrelling with their mothers.’

‘We never quarrelled.’

‘You couldn’t.’

‘You read about it being the natural way of things.’

‘Quarrelling is not obligatory.’

They caught one another’s eye and Nita laughed. The laughter grew, and took them gradually over; they laughed until they cried, and sat back exhausted, muscles aching, and the laughter broke something, some seal that had been put on life to keep it down.

Outside Nita’s room, they held one another, knowing that the laughter had marked a change.

In the study, hearing their laughter coming faintly from the distant kitchen, their father let misery and loneliness and self-pity wash over him, and sank back, submerging himself under the wave.

What would life be like? They did not know. Each morning they went out of the house together, at the same time, and parted at the end of the next street. Nita walked on, to her hospital reception desk. Kay caught her bus to the department store where she was Ladies’ Fitter.

At six they met again, and walked home. And so, life was the same, it went on in the old way – yet it did not. Even the shape of the trees in the avenue seemed changed. When they neared the house something came over them, some miasma of sorrow and fear and uncertainty, and a sort of dread.

Each knew that the other felt it, but neither spoke of it; they spoke, as before, of the ordinary details of the day, the weather, the news of the town.

And in each of their minds was always the question – will today be different? Will this be the day when he wakes from the terrible paralysis of misery?

But when the door opened into the cool, silent hall
and the light caught the bevel of the mirror, they knew at once that after all, this was not the day, and went in to hang their coats and empty this or that bag, to wash and tidy before going in to him.