Tell it to the Bees Read online

  Getting to and from the factory wasn’t so bad. Lydia pushed the pedals hard and fast.

  ‘Cycle really quickly and don’t look around you. Once you’re here, we’ll look after you,’ Dot said.

  So she kept her eyes on the road and set up a race with herself, a best time to reach the factory gates in.

  ‘I might have passed him on the street and not known. I might have passed him with –’

  ‘Don’t. Don’t think about it.’ Dot took Lydia’s hand, shaking it with each word. ‘You’re better off without him. You’ve known that a good while.’

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ Lydia said. ‘Not at all.’

  Dot was as good as her word and in the factory Lydia was one of a crowd. She had her own barricade, joking and joshing, daring any other woman to shout out after her down the corridor.

  ‘But you need to get out a bit,’ Dot said as they walked towards the cafeteria. ‘I know what’s up, but it must have been weeks by now and you still shut in there. Let’s have a trip. Next Sunday, a few of us girls. Take the bus into the countryside. Or walk out a way along the river maybe. Take some cake, tea in a Thermos. Or even go in all together for a bottle of port.’

  She nudged Lydia, but Lydia shook her head.

  ‘Not yet, Dot,’ she said, and Dot turned away, her shoulders rigid with exasperation.

  ‘You don’t know what’s good for you, love.’

  ‘I’ve got Charlie,’ Lydia said. ‘And I’ve been to the library a lot.’

  ‘The library. It isn’t books are going to keep you company. It’s summertime. The sun’s out and you’re shut in. Look how pale you are. It’d be good for you, get some sun on your face. That won’t cost you.’

  ‘I don’t want to go out with the girls. Not even with cake and port.’

  ‘Charlie’s only a boy. You don’t want to be weighing him down, do you?’

  ‘What makes you think I am?’ Lydia said. ‘I’m not saying anything to him.’

  They reached the cafeteria queue and Dot dropped her voice.

  ‘Saying, not saying, doesn’t matter. It’s that his dad has upped and left. That’s what’s happened to him, whatever you’re doing. He’s a boy and probably doing what boys do.’

  ‘Which is?’ Lydia said, her voice raised and angry. The woman in front shifted slightly and she felt herself blush. Dirty linen, she thought. ‘Which is?’ she said again, more quietly.

  ‘Which is keeping to himself and keeping that self busy. I’ll bet you he’s out of the house more than ever, and when he’s in, nearly doesn’t come out of his room. I bet he’s dead quiet. More than usual.’

  Lydia shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean I want him to be,’ she said.

  ‘No, but you’re moping in there every time he puts his head up. You’ll make him feel it’s his fault, you’re not careful.’

  ‘Robert’s been back a few times,’ Lydia said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What do you mean, what for? We’ve been man and wife the last ten years.’

  ‘Probably to pick up his clean underpants.’

  The woman in front snorted.

  ‘Dot!’ Lydia said, shocked. ‘Now you keep your voice down,’ she added, then a giggle caught her and suddenly the two of them were convulsed over their dinner trays.

  ‘Look, Lydia,’ Dot said when they had calmed, her voice close, quiet. ‘I’m only down once in the week with Paul to the Crown for a quick one. A half a lager, a game of bar billiards. But twice in as many weeks there he’s been, at a corner table.’

  They were up to the front now, Dot first; and it was trays on the counter for cauliflower cheese and a slice of ham, or beef and salad.

  ‘Looks all right today,’ Dot said and, getting no reply, she looked back.

  Lydia stood motionless, tray still down by her side, staring at the vat of cauliflower. On the other side of the counter, the ladling woman waited.

  ‘What are you having?’ Dot said.

  ‘Was he with –?’

  ‘Let’s get our dinner and sit down,’ Dot said.

  ‘Was he?’ Lydia said, her voice dangerously thin.

  Dot reached and took Lydia’s tray.

  ‘The cauliflower, thanks,’ she said to the woman. ‘Come on, love. There’s plenty here are happy to hear us, but we’re holding up the queue.’

  Dot found them seats at the end of one table.

  ‘Don’t know any of this lot,’ she said. ‘They won’t be wanting to listen in.’

  ‘Robert’s stopped paying into the rent,’ Lydia said, shaking salt over her cauliflower in angry jabs.

  ‘God, Lydia! What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The man’s a bastard. Is he giving you anything for groceries, that kind of thing?’

  Lydia shook her head.

  ‘Can your family help out?’

  Another shake.

  ‘You can take him to the court.’

  Lydia set the salt cellar down hard.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Who do you know who’s managed that? Name me one.’

  ‘But you can do it. I heard someone say so.’

  ‘It’s not women like us that manage it.’

  Dot’s face crunched with frustration. ‘You don’t think, do you? Don’t look ahead. It’s fine, dancing when the sun’s shining. You can dance the socks off anyone. But things have been going this way for quite a while. You knew where Robert was heading and even if you hoped he wasn’t, you should have made some plans. Done something. Got a blinking umbrella. Or at least gone to look for one. You can’t just not do anything, not think about it,’ Dot said.

  ‘Was he with her?’ Lydia said. ‘In the pub?’

  ‘Course he was. Buying her bloody Martinis, what’s more, on your bloody rent money. So now I’ll tell you one thing about her and only one. She’s not a looker. Not compared to you.’

  Lydia picked at her food, pushing it this way and that. She had no appetite. A thousand thoughts, a thousand questions rushed her mind.

  ‘You don’t eat, you won’t be strong enough to sort things out, look after your boy,’ Dot said.

  So Lydia ate, willed the food down, swallowed against the hard lump of her life.

  The two friends had got up to leave, when Pam came upon them, mouth gritted in a smile, netted hair swinging like a club, elbows braced, ready for battle.

  ‘Lydia,’ she said, nodding.

  Lydia didn’t reply.

  ‘Hello, Pam,’ Dot said.

  Pam stared at her. ‘I’ve come to speak to Lydia. There’s no need for you to listen in.’

  Dot looked at her friend, then sat down. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  Turning a shoulder to Dot, Pam began her speech. Lydia watched her. Pam’s stance reminded her so strongly of Robert, it was all she could do not to exclaim.

  It’s in the jut of her jaw, she thought, or maybe the way she has of standing, as if she’s about to leap up on a wall.

  By the time Lydia was listening again, Pam had almost finished up, leaning in so close that Lydia could hear the slight adjustment of her teeth as she spat out the words.

  ‘… but it’s been long enough now,’ was all Lydia heard, and then Pam paused as if inviting Lydia to respond. Dot rolled her eyes.

  ‘You had the beef salad, didn’t you?’ Dot said.

  ‘What?’ Pam said.

  ‘The beef salad. You ate it for dinner.’

  ‘What?’ Pam said again.

  ‘Pickled onions do leave such a strong aftertaste,’ Dot said.

  ‘Were you listening to me?’ Pam said.

  ‘You said it was long enough now for something,’ Lydia said with a shrug.

  ‘You should be thinking of the family at a time like this,’ Pam said. ‘Not only of yourself. It’s very embarrassing for all of us. There’s your son, and your duty as a wife.’

  ‘My duty?’ Lydia said, her voice incredulous. ‘Do you know what your sacred brother has been getting up t
o? For years? Was that his duty?’

  The words had come out unexpectedly. She’d never before let herself think about the reality of what Robert had been doing, but as she spoke she realized the terrible truth of all his infidelities, all his betrayals.

  ‘Lydia?’ Dot said.

  ‘There’s conjugal rights,’ Pam said. ‘Men don’t just up and leave their wives.’

  Lydia took a long breath. Different answers tumbled through her head.

  ‘Tell that to Robert,’ she said finally. She turned and walked away, not waiting for Dot, not caring, suddenly not able to bear any of it.

  Dot caught her up at the end of the day and they walked back into the town together.

  ‘She was furious,’ Dot said. ‘She didn’t know what had got into you. Said you’d never said anything like that before. She said: “I don’t see why she had to shout at me like that.”’

  Lydia laughed at Dot’s imitation, but her voice was bitter.

  ‘The woman is a monster,’ she said. ‘She has her reasons, losing her parents to one war and her husband to another. But even so. I’ve petted her and stroked her and sidled up to her for years. Listened to her lies about my husband. Now I don’t have to any longer.’

  The two women walked slowly, enjoying the light and easy warmth of the late afternoon sun. Around them, hundreds of others, released by the same bell, made their way home, beginning to siphon off now to left and right as they walked through the town. Men, women, boys in overalls, and girls not long out of school. The girls with their headscarves ripped off, hair and gossip tumbled round their heads in clouds of permanent wave. They ran along the pavements, past Lydia and Dot, like colts, like sirens, like animals pent too long, jostling and laughing, shouting and whispering, mouths behind hands and their sweet voices littering the air.

  ‘My Dave mentioned Annie last night,’ Dot said. ‘I meant to say.’

  ‘Mentioned why?’

  ‘He was dressed up smart, natty tie, those narrow trousers they’re wearing now, the young men, hair slicked up, shoes polished. Said he didn’t want any tea thanks, Ma, so I asked him where he was off to and if he’d be late in. He said it was a double date. He said Annie was in the other half.’

  ‘Annie?’ Lydia said.

  ‘Turns out she’s walking out with Dave’s workmate, George Pemble. Been going on a while, but very hush-hush on account of her mother.’

  ‘The note,’ Lydia said. ‘I knew it was something like that.’

  ‘Does Pam know?’

  Lydia shook her head.

  ‘If she did, she’d move heaven and earth to stop it. Annie’s the only decent creature to come out of that house, poor love.’

  They’d reached the corner that marked the parting of their ways and Dot turned to go.

  ‘George is a good type,’ she said. ‘Got a bit of mouth with a few pints in him, but he’ll look out for Annie. Do what he can with her mother, too, though he’s young to be much of a match.’

  Lydia nodded, but her thoughts had turned again; she was weary to the core and longed to be alone.

  ‘Thanks Dot,’ she said, and she rode away.

  15

  The cat lay out in the bars of sunlight, limbs extended, eyes down to a sliver. Only her ears made any move, twitching slightly as Jean came in.

  She ran her fingers through the soft fur, felt the slight arch of pleasure. She touched a paw, lifted a claw with her fingertip, drawing it from its soft sheath, and felt it tip at her skin, almost painful. The early summer had turned hot and Jean basked with the cat, sprawling her legs out on the floorboards in the study, loving the wood warmth on her skin.

  She was excited, but she didn’t know why. Her appetite, usually strong, had deserted her and for the last few nights even sleep had been hard to come by. Sometimes she got up and sat in an armchair with a mug of tea and Sarah Vaughan on the gramophone. Others she lay on her bed, eyes wide to the dark. Then night-time call-outs came as a relief, and she had to check the enthusiasm with which she answered the telephone, casting the worried and the fearful into the electric charge of her strange mood.

  Mrs Sandringham chastised her daily for not clearing her plate and then wanted to make her sit still a while, or take her temperature.

  ‘I’m a doctor, Mrs S,’ Jean said impatiently, but it was true that she couldn’t diagnose this condition.

  This time of year, Jean’s list was always lighter. She didn’t know why it was. Perhaps people simply felt better and got ill less often when the sun shone. It could be as simple as that. Anyway, it meant more time, and so these summer months she was in the habit of slipping further into her friends’ lives, making herself part of their family, a kind of fair-weather part, Jim teased her. Doing the shopping with Sarah, meeting Meg and Emma from school occasionally, taking them to the town pool for the afternoon, or into the country for a weekend picnic.

  So Jean was on errands with Sarah when she saw Lydia Weekes again one Saturday afternoon, standing on the far side of the bustling street. But unlike every other woman, Lydia seemed to have no purpose. She held a basket like everyone else, and probably she had a list too. On the back of an envelope, Jean imagined, or hastily scribbled on the margin of the evening news. But she was doing nothing. In fact, she looked as if she’d been arrested midway to somewhere, her slight body lifted up and dropped there, inside a yellow shift dress, with her back to Marshall and Coop’s, arms by her sides, neither standing nor walking quite, her head bowed, her face closed in, closed off.

  It was a busy time of day on the high street and women shoved past, impatient, wielding baskets like battering rams, pushing prams like tanks. Jean watched as Lydia was pushed forward towards the gutter, and then back, till she stood hard up, back against the plate glass window, out of which a vast pair of spectacles glared at passers-by.

  Standing outside the butcher’s, waiting for her friend, Jean watched this woman, Charlie’s mother, and her heart went out to her.

  ‘What on earth?’ Sarah said, setting down her basket and looking over to the far pavement.

  Jean started. Her mind had gone elsewhere and it took her a moment and a careful look at Sarah’s basket of meat to remember where she was.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Nothing. A patient,’ Jean said. ‘I must visit her later.’

  ‘You were miles away.’ Sarah hefted up the basket. ‘Miles and miles.’

  As they walked off, Jean stole a last look and, though she barely knew what she was thinking, it crossed her mind how beautiful Lydia was, and how sad she looked.

  They were nearly back to the house when Jean ventured an unfamiliar kind of comment.

  ‘They’re pretty, the dresses being worn, with the big buttons and open necks. The sleeves like that.’ She shaped what she meant with her hands and Sarah laughed outright.

  ‘Now this I don’t believe. Dr Jean Markham commenting on ladies’ fashion.’

  Jean was put out.

  ‘Just because I’m voicing my thoughts,’ she said.

  ‘Is there a reason you want a dress with big buttons? Or maybe some higher heels.’

  ‘I don’t want to wear them. I was only noticing what’s being worn.’

  But she saw her friend’s shrug and her smile, as though Sarah knew something that she didn’t.

  A few days later, Jean was on her way across the park with her black bag and certain stride, making good time, almost to the west gate, when she saw Lydia again. It was late in the afternoon of a sunny day and the air was full of children’s shouts, shrill by now and weary with the heat. People were spread like washing over the grass, the mothers with their jam sandwiches, the lovers, newly-met after work, still coy with one another, fingers full of daisies, marking the distance between their knees. But the bright colours were dulling at the edges, the flowers scuffed with their long day out, the grass crumpled. Already two men in clipped grey uniforms and resentful shoulders were laying out hoses for the evening’s recovery, one eye to
the park clock so that they could ring out the end of the day, expel the mothers and the lovers, lock the gates and have their park back to themselves.

  Jean’s thoughts that afternoon were as busy as her feet, worrying over Mrs Sandringham’s departure in the autumn, which would come up sooner than she knew, and about how to refuse the rash of summer evening parties. Her mood was strange, she knew that, and she simply couldn’t bear the prospect of so much gregarious obligation. So it was chance; or a familiar perfume; or some strange motion somewhere – a thing she had no faith in, but that Jim might call the gods – that meant she looked up just as her path approached Lydia’s, at one corner of a bed of pink dahlias.

  Lydia, still with her hair up tight from the factory, walked with her bicycle, a plastic mackintosh piled into the front basket, and her thoughts adrift. Jean watched her. She walked like a dancer. Jean hadn’t noticed it before. Her spine was arched and her shoulders back and she held her hands almost slack on the handlebars. Even her feet were turned slightly, as if she were returning from a rehearsal, not from a day on the production line.

  There were things Lydia should be thinking about, like how to make ends meet, and Charlie, and a comment thrown her way at work about Annie, and what to say next time Robert came home. But she couldn’t bear to think now. Her mind strayed, and she stared at the lovers, their glances playing tag across the grass, as if they were from another country.

  Jean watched Lydia walk towards her slowly, carelessly, eyes down, shoes catching at the gravel, and she felt her heart jump. She had learned to keep other people’s grief at bay, but now she didn’t want to. Though she was unused to hesitation, this knowledge, this certainty, gave her pause.

  ‘Mrs Weekes,’ she said, and perhaps if she hadn’t spoken, Lydia would have passed by, unseeing.

  But Lydia stopped walking and looked up.

  ‘How are you?’ Jean said, and then, because this seemed too much to the point, ‘How are the books?’

  Lydia knitted her brow. ‘Dr Markham,’ she said finally, and she pursed her lips as though pleased to have made the connection. ‘Yes, I like one of them. The thriller.’