The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (10 page)

He thought that almost certainly the waiting would kill him by itself, but it didn’t, and after a time he simply accepted that it never would but that he would die of something very ordinary, like old age.

Until then, he just had to wait, and go on waiting while nothing happened. Nothing at all.

Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.

‘
Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
’

It rode with me up the escalator and my footsteps tapped it out in a rhythm along the street. My mother had a similar problem with hymns.

‘
I am a little world made cunningly
.’

I wondered if Velma had ever suffered from poetic tinnitus. It might provide an opening.

The restaurant was chrome and black and angular and a shock to the system. The table was square, the plates were square and the water came in a square glass, but the bread rolls were round and soft, like my life now, lived among hills like breasts and tender bales of fabric.

They had tortured flowers with wire stays, and
straitjacketed them in thin metal tubes. The table napkins were origami.

‘Didi!’

Her kiss scratched my cheek, dry as a quill.

‘Goodness,’ I said. I have not been Didi for thirty-four years.

I had painted Velma in my mind and the picture had been a good likeness. She was blade-thin, wore cream, smoked.

‘You look so wholesome,’ she said. ‘London is foul.’

The menus were startling, scarlet boards lettered in spikes of black.

‘Shall I order for us both?’

They say we do not see ourselves as others see us, but I saw perfectly how Velma saw me and I was not having it.

‘Crab,’ I said, speaking directly to the waiter. ‘Turbot with buttered spinach. Pommes dauphinoise.’

‘Six gulls’ eggs, and a tiny salad.’

Velma lit a cigarette.

‘You used to smoke Black Russian,’ I said. It had been a matter for wonder among the rest of us.

‘I’d have known you,’ I said.

I meant, you look your age and more, look harder, smarter, slicker, dryer; look like this restaurant. Yet, oddly, still the same. They can do this sort of thing with computers now. Digital ageing.

The hills like breasts and the soft folds of fabric and pillows of fabric have had an effect on me, too.

‘
Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
’

‘Known you anywhere,’ I said.

The crab tasted of seaside holidays and flaked sweetly between my teeth.

‘Extraordinary.’

I wondered what, but she said it while looking round at two men who were walking into the restaurant. In fact I was not sure she had meant to speak to me at all, and buttered a soft, plump roll to fill in time. It is not every day I eat in a cutting-edge London restaurant with square plates.

‘
I am a little world made cunningly
,’ the moving message read, neon-green on black. ‘I need intellectual discipline,’ I said, though how could she have understood? ‘Fierce words. Analysis.’

That was probably the reason for the tinnitus.

In a train, when you are facing the moving message about not leaving personal belongings behind
you it is possible to raise a newspaper to shut it out, but I have found no similar way of dealing with the lines inside my head. I should have asked my mother what she did about the hymns, whether she simply let Wesley flow reassuringly, upliftingly on.

‘Aren’t gull’s eggs very dry?’ I said.

I caught Velma’s expression as I lifted a forkful of steaming, buttery spinach and potato to my mouth.

I was everything she could patronise. I laid the forkful of food down uneaten on the square plate. At home I eat square boxes of soup and too much butter and live among full-breasted hills, and bales of soft fabric.

The turbot was glutinous and very white on the black plate.

Velma patted cigarette ash into the broken shells of her gulls’ eggs.

‘I daresay you’ve made a lot of money, too,’ I said.

We ought to begin the conversation about the past now, the one we had almost begun on the telephone.

‘No, don’t tell me, let’s meet . . .’

She had rung up the magazine that featured my quilts among the soft-breasted hills, and briskly obtained my number.

‘Do you remember Douglas Merton? He became a bishop. Do you remember Georgina Lee? She’s a prison governor. And a dame,’ I said. ‘Imagine. Imagine.’

A smaller scarlet card was flourished, the spiked lettering in silver this time, making the puddings quite hard to decipher.

When I looked up squinting from the parfaits and coulis and tartes, I saw that Velma was crying. They were discreet tears, and quite silent, caught trembling in the spider legs of mascara.

‘Oh God. What can I do? I must be able to do something. What can I order? Shall I order you brandy?’ I said.

‘Dear Didi.’ Cream, thin, hard, dry, smart, weeping Velma. ‘Practical Didi.’

So then I did order brandy, which came with my softly mounded, smooth, shining, rose-red mousse, stuck with horizontal chocolate quills, like a chic hat on a plate.

‘I’ve no idea, really,’ I said, ‘what you
do
.’

‘Recruitment.’ Velma finished her brandy in one impressive swallow. ‘Until I sold the company.’

To one side of the rose-red hat was a small sphere of glistening rose-pink ice.

‘But mainly, I’m a mistress.’

Do you remember Velma Prescott? She’s a mistress now. Imagine.

But the spider-legs of mascara had released the tears, which slid down her porcelain cheekbones, until I wanted to cry with her.

‘Brandy makes it worse,’ I said.

My ice tasted intensely of lavender.

‘
I am a little world made cunningly
.’

‘Has he left you, or something?’

Almost an hour later, nervy with three tiny pewter-coloured cups of bitter coffee, I had learned that he had not. I had learned almost everything.

After the restaurant, we had walked a long way and then sat down on a backless bench in a churchyard, though if I had worn such a suit as Velma’s I would never have done that. But Velma was immersed in trying to stop herself crying, rather as one is in trying to stop a nosebleed. I had no helpful suggestions, so I looked at the tombstones.

(‘At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow Your trumpets, Angells.’)

I welcomed the moving messages now, feeling a desperate need for the bracing sustenance of words.

‘It was seeing you,’ Velma said. ‘In that magazine.’

The tears seemed to have dried.

‘There you sat. That view, all that wonderful coloured stuff tumbling off your lap. I haven’t slept properly since.’

‘Winter in the country can be quite testing,’ I said.

Two buses roared past the churchyard, rows of faces peering down at us, round, white Os, such as children draw.

‘We got buses a lot, in those days,’ I said.

‘I still do.’

I stared.

‘The underground is filthy.’

I stared.

‘What did you think, then – the Bentley and the chauffeur?’

Like sudden sunlight, the old Velma shone out. Looking at her next to me on the green, backless bench, I decided she had not, after all, had a facelift.

We were fifty-four. Flesh and skin and hair betray us.

(‘Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
’ I made a vow then, to embrace the old disciplines. The words.)

We had been incongruous, unexpected friends from our first day, without anything but English Literature and twenty-three other students in common.

‘I don’t think I could accommodate my life to someone else,’ I said, ‘on their terms. Not even for all the accounts at Knightsbridge shops.’

She had told me everything about it, before my edible millinery had arrived. She had a taxi account, a dress account, a hair account, even a flower account.

‘Wives can wear slippers and tracksuits,’ she had said. ‘Mistresses can’t. Their hair must always be immaculate, make-up applied and the flowers must never have dead petals. And of course although I suppose an unavoidable major illness might be forgiven, colds are out.’

‘Wherever,’ I said, ‘is the benefit?’

We both looked at the word money as it ran past us, a silent, moving message.

A thin little wind had got up and scattered bits of paper about the churchyard.

‘I can’t tackle London often,’ I said; ‘you need your wits about you.’

Still, I was sharpening up now. I did not want to leave. I was not missing the soft-breasted hills and the fabrics in any way.

‘It is just – uncreative,’ Velma said. ‘There is nothing to show for it.’

‘
I am a little world made cunningly
.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said to Velma, ‘I have been thinking about a higher degree. There is nothing furthering to the cause of human endeavour in quilts.’

A plastic cup had fetched up against my ankle.

Perhaps I meant it. The texts were there, I knew most of the words, I’d been saving them up on the moving messages.

‘But you looked so right,’ Velma said. ‘Dear Didi.’

She wanted me in my place. I saw that.

She was older again and there were no marks at all on her cream suit from the green backless bench.

‘Dear Didi.’

I felt confused emotions. Angry. Patronised. Dissatisfied.

I kicked the plastic cup hard across the path.

The green country that led towards the soft-breasted hills looked queer and different from the windows of the train. Strange, unfamiliar and unnerving. I did not know if I liked it any more. But when I thought of the angular restaurant and the dark churchyard I did not like those either.

‘
I am a little world made cunningly
.’

It was raining when I got back, and the cloud was low and draped in scarves about the soft-breasted hills.

‘
At the round earths imagin’d corners
.’

Velma would be dressed in taupe and pearls, made up, among the immaculate flowers.

‘
Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
’

‘There is nothing to show for it,’ Velma had said. ‘It is just – uncreative.’

I let myself into the house and stood, among the bales of fabric in the last grey light. ‘
Blow Your trumpets, Angells
.’

I watched the moving messages for some time. I was grateful for them. They might mean nothing and
lead nowhere. But Velma did not have them. I was sure of that.

So I supposed I was to be envied.

Their mother’s father had been a saint. He had died before he was forty of an illness he had accepted without complaint, which made him a martyr too. Lizzie and Clara had only one picture of him in their minds, from a story their mother told and re-told, of him sitting beside the stove in the evenings with the two dogs asleep at his feet. At nine he would take out his pocket watch to wind, yet twenty seconds before he made the slightest movement, without fail the dogs got up and ran to the door.

They went to their own beds at night with the picture of the uncomplaining invalid and the telepathic dogs in their minds as they lay down.

But their mother’s mother was never spoken about, though they had known that she still existed, ‘with Aunt Kath’.

They were afraid of their mother, even years after they had homes of their own. There were subjects
they had never raised, questions they had never asked and now never could.

After the funeral they had looked, horrified at their own daring, in the green leather hat box in case they might find a will, and had not, though they found their own birth certificates and some school reports, but nothing that went back into her past, or was connected only with her rather than with all of them. The hat box had been mysterious, anything might have been inside, they had believed in it as they might have believed in a fabled casket or a piece of the True Cross, and now it had been exposed and it was nothing, after all, a hollow drum.

Clara put the lid back and for a moment, kneeling on the floor in the fading January light, either of them might have begun a conversation that could have continued for the rest of their lives. The house was very still and filled with their mother as well as with her coats and shoes and the silk kimono Lizzie had so unsuitably brought her back from a single visit abroad. Seeing it hanging, never worn, scarcely even so much as touched, behind the bedroom door, had brought the flush of shame to her face all over again.