Tell it to the Bees (24 page)

‘What's happened?' Jean said. ‘I knocked on the door, but you didn't answer, and then I saw you, through the window. Lydia? What's happened?'

Lydia fetched a cloth from the kitchen and wiped the table clean. Robert's voice was gone from the room, but the song's soft melancholy was wrapped like a shawl about her shoulders.

She gestured to Jean to sit.

‘I got a letter today. I'm going to be evicted,' she said in a voice that pleased her with its calmness. ‘I can't earn enough to pay the rent, and now the landlord wants me out.'

There was silence for a minute. Jean sat down. She pressed her hands together and ran her fingers through her hair.

‘When?' she said finally.

‘I've got a month.'

Lydia watched. Jean looked bewildered, incredulous.

‘Did you know it was coming?' she said.

Lydia shook her head.

‘I've got behind on the rent since Robert left. He stopped paying into it months ago. But I didn't know I'd gone this far. I suppose I've been a bit distracted, what with one thing and another.'

She smiled, but Jean didn't seem to notice.

‘Why didn't you mention it?' she said.

‘Why would I? Anyway, I've been over it with Dot, and what I can do –'

Jean interrupted her, her expression hurt.

‘You've been to see Dot already? Why didn't you come to me?'

Lydia shook her head. ‘Get hold of yourself, Jean. It's not you being evicted, it's me. I'm the one that's had the
terrible news, not you. You're being jealous, and it looks daft,' she said. ‘I'm going to get a cardigan.'

When she came downstairs she could hear Jean in the kitchen, setting the kettle to boil. The blue flare of the gas threw a queasy light over the dark. Lydia watched Jean's tight, angry movements.

‘Have you ever seen anyone evicted?' Lydia said.

Jean shook her head.

‘Dot has. I have. I've seen a family put on to the street. Two bailiffs, red-faced, thick-necked men, carrying out the lot – beds, cot, chairs, clothes, pots, pans, the baby's doll. The children crying and the husband shouting first and then he's gone to the pub, and the woman standing in the middle, apron still tied round, baby on a hip, stunned. As if somebody's hit her with a sledgehammer. Then a policeman coming and telling them to move on, they're causing an obstruction.'

They stood silently in the kitchen's half dark, until at last Lydia spooned tea into the pot and lifted the roaring kettle.

‘Do you see now why I might turn first to a friend who knew about that?'

‘What did she suggest?' Jean said.

‘But you do see, don't you?' Lydia said and Jean nodded. ‘Then hold me now. I don't want anyone else to do that.'

And Jean held Lydia tightly to her, as if her arms could be proof against the bailiffs or the loss of love.

‘I can hear this song,' Lydia said. ‘So clearly I'd swear it was out in the room, not in my head. It's sung so beautifully, in Robert's voice, but it's like a taunt, because he used to sing it when we were first married. First married and still in love.'

She put a hand over her eyes.

‘And now, somewhere else in the town, he'll be singing it to another woman, and all he's left me is the memory of it.'

When Jean left and the noise of her motor car had faded into the night, Lydia climbed the stairs, her body heavy with fatigue. For a minute she stood silent beside Charlie's bed, listening to the lift of his breath, before tucking his covers tighter against the night. Then she lay down and fell into an undreaming sleep.

Jean delivered Mrs Sandringham to her sister's small-holding, tucked up in the fertile flat fields to the south of the town. Mrs Sandringham sat in the back of the motor car like the queen, weeping and excited.

‘But I know you, Dr Markham. You'll just eat baked potatoes, or you'll cook up that horrid pot of yours.'

‘I'll be perfectly fine. Besides, baked potatoes and my horrid pots got me through medical school very nicely.'

‘That's if you remember to eat at all. You'll waste away if you don't get more inside you.'

Watching Mrs Sandringham and her sister bustle about each other, making their first moves since childhood back into a shared household, Jean felt a surge of jealousy. She drank a last cup of strong tea, ate a slice of cake, and drove away with promises of visits.

As a child, Jean would set herself hard tasks. The first had been to run non-stop around the garden when she was nine, because her father said girls had less stamina than boys. It took several attempts. On the first she got as far as the bottom wall. On the second she reached the compost heap. On the third, she was all the way into the kitchen garden, rows of cabbages either side of her, when she thought that if she didn't stop, her heart would burst. But she kept on and then it was done, and she sat on a bench
outside the kitchen door and grinned while her chest ached and her vision cleared again.

There had been a pile of other tasks after that, and though she told her father about only a few of them, they were all performed for him. Cataloguing butterflies, swimming to the far rock, eating quickly, jumping off high walls, knowing the direction of the wind: the list was long and diverse, the challenges ever greater. It culminated in Jean's determination to study medicine.

‘I'm speaking for your father in this, too, and it's not what we want for you,' her mother had said.

‘But it's what I want,' Jean said. ‘What I've wanted for years.'

However, her mother had her speech to say and she would not be diverted.

‘We've discussed it at some length' – Jean had heard the sound of their discussion the evening before; her mother's shrill, querulous voice, her father's voice careful, placating – ‘and we're agreed that it is not an occupation suitable to your temperament, your turn of mind and so we will not support it financially. How will you find a good marriage if all your time is taken up with sickness and disease?'

‘It's a profession, not an occupation,' Jean said. ‘And why is it only you telling me this? Where's Father?'

‘He's happy for me to talk to you, and I resent your tone. Your attitude just confirms that our decision is the right one.'

Jean's years of medical training made up the last and hardest of her tasks. She was not a natural scientist and her studies took much of her mental energy and kept her at her books for long hours into the night. Her parents' disapproval cast a shadow at the start and, though eventually, begrudgingly, they gave her a small allowance, she struggled through her student years. It was Jim, now a practising solicitor, and not her parents, who made sure
she had enough to eat and coins for the gas. Often he would turn up unannounced and take her out to the Italian restaurant on the corner or arrive with a shopping bag full of canned food.

Driving home from Mrs Sandringham's new life, Jean felt that same fierce energy she had known in her growing-up. She felt it for the first time in nearly twenty years and so distinctive was it – like a mood that changed the very colour of the everyday world – that she stopped the car by a path into some woodland on a road she didn't know.

She got out and set off walking, then jogging, and then she was running, running hard in the wrong shoes over the gritty scumble of the path, to feel that old sense of exertion.

Jean dipped her finger into the glass and tasted the beer froth.

‘The Red Horse has the best beer,' she said. ‘And this is a new barrel. Am I right?'

‘I wish you wouldn't do that,' Jim said.

‘Am I right?'

‘Yes,' he said, his voice sulky.

‘Nobody can see us, tucked away in here.' She put her finger in again. ‘You sound like my mother. Besides, I've always done it.'

‘And I've always disliked it. Now for God's sake eat the crisps, so I can tell Sarah.' He pulled the packet open and sprinkled over the salt.

‘I'm perfectly well,' Jean said.

‘Perfectly well, but mysteriously unable to sleep and without appetite; both by your own admission. Losing weight hand over fist.'

Jean shifted on her seat and looked at the walls, but horse brasses and old prints of the town offered no diversion.

‘Since Mrs Sandringham went,' she began, but Jim interrupted.

‘Don't tell me. Since Mrs S went you've had an epidemic, countless sets of tonsils, a worrying bout of early-in-the-season bronchitis in the elderly population, a few industrial accidents and an uncommon number of births, all demanding your singular attention.'

‘You sound angry,' Jean said, and Jim rolled his eyes. ‘But why?'

‘You've found a receptionist for the surgery – good. I'm sure she's doing a fine job with the filing, and ringing the bell nicely for the next patient. But she's not putting your dinner to keep warm, or making sure there's food in the house and neither are you. What have you done about finding a housekeeper?'

Jean shrugged, but said nothing.

‘I don't know how to explain the state you're in, but we're worried. You're not eating properly; you're working too hard; probably listening to your jazz records till the small hours. You're burning the candle at both ends and in the middle.' Jim picked up his pint. ‘I've said my piece, and now I need a drink.'

Jean glanced at her friend. He didn't know. He hadn't guessed. But she could only tell him the half of it.

‘I've got some ideas,' she said. ‘I'm just a bit short on time.'

Jim stared into his beer, then suddenly looked up and round at her.

‘You haven't done something really daft?' he said. ‘Been converted by one of those ghastly evangelical preachers, perhaps? Sneaked off to a tent when nobody was looking?'

Jean laughed. ‘I couldn't bear the music.'

‘Or discovered something else. I don't know – that the truth lies in the stars, so you're up all night with a telescope?'

‘I will find a housekeeper,' Jean said firmly. She took out her cigarettes and offered them over. ‘How are the girls?'

‘They're fine. They'd be even finer if they got to see their favourite godmother occasionally. I can't believe you're out on call every night.'

‘Please, Jim,' she said.

He got to his feet. ‘I'm getting you pickled eggs now, and some of that fat pork.' From his tone she knew he was struggling to force a banter. ‘Then I can add them to Sarah's list.'

Jean put the cigarette to her lips and breathed the smoke in deep. She felt her lungs fill, expand and then she breathed out slowly, letting the tension ride with the smoke into the tiny room.

As he left the snug, Jim turned.

‘I know something's up,' he said, pointing his cigarette. ‘I know you're not telling me. But as well as being desperately curious, I'm worried, because look how it's taking you.'

Jean went to the window. The wind was getting up and the Red Horse was rocking on its pole. She stood very still, looking out, sheltering the small flame in her mind. Jim was right; of course he was right, though she couldn't tell him why. But their conversation had given her an idea so obvious she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it before and, standing there, she willed it to survive and grow stronger. Which it did and became the rising of a plan. So even as she waited for Jim with his eggs and fat pork, she began to chafe with impatience to be home.

It was newly dark and the air was fresh. It would rain soon. Jean opened the yard gate and let herself in. She looked across to the house. Charlie's light was off and Lydia stood at the kitchen window looking straight out at Jean's patch of darkness. Jean watched her, entranced. Then
Lydia moved away and the back door opened and she stood in the doorway, a dark shadow of a woman. Jean could make out a cup in her hands.

As Lydia sat down on the step, wrapping her cardigan round for warmth, it looked as if she might almost have been waiting for Jean.

Jean watched and her heart beat out the seconds like a percussive force. She was unavoidably, unaccountably in love with this woman who sat there on the cold stone, unknowing and unknown.

Stepping forward, past the bicycle and the dustbin, past the geraniums, their garish red veering into the drift of light from the open door, Jean called out softly, urgently.

‘Lydia.'

She watched Lydia put down her cup and listen, shoulders wary, staring into the dark.

‘Lydia,' Jean called again and unable to hold herself back any longer, so much energy awkward in that small space, she ran the last few steps, took her hands, tugged her to her feet and kissed her.

Lydia pulled away. ‘The neighbours,' she said. ‘Or if Charlie hears us.'

‘I've had an idea,' Jean said, her words tumbling out.

‘You smell of beer. You're not drunk, are you?'

‘Listen. I've got to tell you.'

‘It's late, Jean.'

‘One minute, and then I'll go if you want. I can just slip away into the night.'

Lydia laughed. ‘There's no need to be melodramatic. I can listen for your minute.'

She poured Jean a cup of coffee from the jug and they sat on the step, hip to hip, and Jean explained herself. The conversation in the pub with Jim; the swinging horse sign, the wind, which mattered for some reason.

‘What do you think?' she said finally.

‘Jean,' Lydia said slowly, ‘you're a doctor, and I work in a factory.'

‘It solves everything,' Jean said. ‘Your crisis. My crisis. We can live under the same roof. Charlie would love it. The garden, the bees …'

‘Wait a minute. Don't rush me.' She put her hands between her thighs and dropped her forehead to her lap.

‘Lydia?' Jean touched her shoulder, the back of her head. ‘You're cold. Let's go inside.'