Field Study (9 page)

A month in, over dinner, he tells his father and brother about it. That he is enjoying his new work and feels relevant too, in an engaging but not too demanding way. Dad is pleased. It is exactly the life he wanted for his boy. But his brother is angry. What has this whole bloody crisis been about? They argue in hissed whispers in the kitchen, so their father can’t hear. A glass is smashed to diffuse the tension. His brother is ashamed, sweeps up the glass and leaves.

The architect rents a flat nearer the office and starts sleeping with the girl who lives downstairs. He visits his brother to patch things up, and soon they are making up a foursome at weekends.

Some time later, he realises he has been walking in and out of buildings without thinking about them.

He visits his dad regularly, too, and they often spend their Sundays working together on the allotment. On one such visit, his father expresses concern about his tomatoes. They are suffering from the unseasonal cold and urgently need protection.

The architect looks around at the other allotments and is
shocked and amazed by the ugly ingenuity of crooked panes and corrugated iron. Sodden, splintered window frames forming crude but effective structures. Plants thriving below warm condensation.

He gathers materials from the tip, from skips, from the wasteground by the canal. Dad potters happily, tying up the runner beans, only half-aware of his son, who sits in the doorway of the shed with a brown paper bag and pencil, and sketches a rough idea in the early afternoon sun. By evening, a splendid construction surrounds the tomatoes, complete with a hinged door for ease of picking.

Dad is overjoyed. Son is proud and pleased and also sad. The sun still shines, but the wind has picked up, and the rawness of a day spent outside is in his face and fingers.

The doubt that came from nowhere and disappeared again without reason. The turmoil and confusion, concession and healing. The arguments, bitterness and lessons learnt. All these have left the mark of compromise on him. He is stable and disappointed. No longer an architect.

Be careful, then, and be gentle about death.
For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through
The door, even when it opens.

D. H. Lawrence, ‘All Souls’ Day’

Spring was late in coming: the bees needed feeding.

The beekeeper was walking with honey pots in his pockets. One mile north along the line of the valley, up on the rise above the stream. The hives seemed further from the house this year, and the old man kept what felt like a steady pace, but his progress through the winter grass was slow. Eyes set on the first group of beeches where his hives were placed, he had been thinking about the neat row of cones for days: backs to the east wind and the sheltering copse, westward faces watching for the spring bloom of the blackberries, the wildflowers’ first flush. Waiting. The beekeeper’s legs were a year older again, and his heart, and he stopped often on the narrow path. Standing, breathing among the wet clumps of grass. And this is when he saw it.

A speck of movement, easier to see out of the corner of one eye. A small shadow, beating a steady path across the low plain below him. Upright, not animal. The old man stopped, held in his rattling breath. Stood watching the dark fleck and its dogged progress. No one else lived at this end of the valley, only him.

The beekeeper was transfixed by this small, human disturbance in the flat land. Had not seen a soul since winter began, perhaps longer. His eyes brushed the valley for other movements, company for the speck: a hunting party, perhaps, or woodcutters if the village stocks were low after the long cold. But the rolling copse and grass
were empty as always. The common lands of the nearest village were just visible from where the beekeeper was standing: half a morning away for a young man, and the villagers rarely came beyond them.

As the speck came closer, the beekeeper could see how it faltered, as if searching or undecided, and he wondered if it might be afraid: strayed too far from home, seeking familiar ground now, the assurance of the track to the village. The old man could just make out the sunken line of it to the north; the muddy cut in the sodden valley, which healed a half-mile after it left the commons, overgrown with bramble and grass.

Below the beekeeper, the stream ran deep and close to the foot of the slope, and here the speck wavered, stopped. The old man crouched low in the grass at the top of the rise. Aware for the first time he too might be observed, if the figure chose to cast its eyes upwards. They were no more than sixty paces apart now: close enough for the old man to see it was a child. A spare little body, with long hair to its shoulders. Small chest rising, falling, face turning first upstream, then down. The beekeeper watched the slight figure hesitate on the shallow bank, listened to the high flow of water against rock. He thought
turn north
; if it walked north along the stream, it would come first to the mossy bridge and after that the track. But the child did not turn, slid instead down the bank, gripping briefly onto rock, then letting itself drop into the fast water.

The old man stood up sharply, out of the cover of the grasses. Watched in dismay as the child slipped under the surface, out of sight: the day was grey-cold, with an east wind and the water melt from the mountains. When, a few seconds later, a few yards downstream, the child’s fists broke the water and then its face, the old man recoiled. But instead of the drowning, or indeed lifeless form he expected, the small figure stood up in the icy black flow, found its feet and started wading.

The beekeeper’s first thought had been to help the child, but second thoughts came now, with fear not far behind. It unnerved him, the small form, in its obstinacy, wading on. Arms high, chest deep, stiff-necked: wilful. Even at this distance, he could hear the child’s breath, coming in gasps: a sharp noise which tugged at the old man’s insides, had him flinching, withdrawing into the trees. Fingertips reaching for bark, seeking cover of the bare winter branches, the beekeeper kept his eyes on the child as it clambered, dripping, out onto the near bank. Its clothes clung dark-wet to its narrow frame, and it stood a moment, sodden, shaking. Then, on limbs fine as spindles, it stumbled, gathering itself again: walking, soon quickening, making ground, leaving the flat run of the valley behind. The old man watched, heart uneven, as the child moved faster, leaning into the slope, grabbing at handfuls of the long grass, pulling itself in a true line up the hill, towards the beeches where the beekeeper was standing.

Seen
. The old man shrank back further into trunk and
twig. Retreating, fleeing to where the trees grew thickest.
Just a child, just a child, but what can it want from me?
He cowered, breath too fast and loud. Came to feed his bees, and now he hid himself. Tight bundle of elbow, knee and rib; eyes down, fixed on the mossy ground. Listening.

Time passed, breath slowed. No sound came, save the familiar valley noises of wind and water. The old man waited a few minutes longer and then uncurled, slowly, as his stiff limbs allowed, standing gradually straighter. He was careful to stay within the cover of the beeches, moving cautiously to where he could see out through the branches, survey the hillside, the valley again.

Old eyes watery, he blinked, searching out the fine movements of the child among the grass and shrub. But there was no trace of it: on the slope, the track, in the bushes, by the stream. It had disappeared.

The heavy grass was lank, bleached pale by the winter, the trees on the horizon stood black and wet and bare.

__

The winter had been long and the hive stores were low. The old man mixed honey with water from the stream: a full pot for each cone, for his bees to feed on. He checked the walls for tears and gaps, mending with plugs of moss and wax. Palms resting gently on the woven surface, he pressed an ear to each of his hives in turn. The bees had retreated deep into the comb, but the beekeeper could
hear their wings. A warming hum under the wind in the beeches that still showed no green.

Late morning and clouds gathered on a cold wind. There were other hives to check, over the next rise, but the old man smelled ice on the air and turned for home. Slower than he used to be, afraid the weather would be faster than him now. Frost racing him back along the valley floor, gripping already at his fingers, its cold ache crawling into the joints.

Snow fell in the afternoon and the beekeeper took up his winter place beside the fire again. The day was dark beyond the door, the snow thick and grey. He could barely see where the tree line started, when afternoon ended and evening began.

__

A life spent with bees and eating honey. Toothless since middle-age. Gruel with honey, hot water with honey, spoonfuls of honey in the morning. The beekeeper had seen times of plenty: used to trade with the villagers, back when his hives dotted the valley. Now he kept them only as far as he could walk, trusted in his bees to provide for him. Not reliant on anybody. Kept a few chickens, and they laid their eggs for him in predictable places. Sowed summer and winter vegetables, barley, gathered what he didn’t grow from the valley. Elderberries, wild garlic, nuts and mushrooms.

The old man had his father’s eyes and bones, hips which jutted like a woman’s, large kneecaps and long thighs. Long gone, the beekeeper rarely thought of him now; his mother remembered only as a tight grip above the elbow. No brothers, no sisters, no neighbours; silence came an age ago and never left, the years going by unnoticed. Colour bleeding from his hair and eyes, unheeded; flesh falling into soft folds under the hard line of his chin. He shaved, and where the skin hung loose, the bristle grew feathery white, undisturbed by the razor.

Bees were the rhythm of his year; blooms and birdsong marked the turn of the seasons. Fifty harvests he had seen, perhaps more,
no matter
: he lived in the certainty of another, his life an unfailing cycle of spring summer autumn winter spring. Until this year, when a child came instead of the expected mild winds.

__

The beekeeper sat by his fire but could not settle. Remembered the child dropping into the stream, and then afterwards, how fast it moved, seeming to come up the rise directly for him. His four walls around him, fingers itching in the warmth of the fire, he doubted now that the child had seen him at all.
Fool
. Still, as he turned the day over, the old man could feel his heart again: the sudden fear up on the slope, as though the small figure had come for him; and then the relief later, when it was gone again. He shifted until he was comfortable on the straw
and sacking. Not cold, but aware of the winter in his bones. He imagined the snow covering the long grass of the valley now, the spare trail of broken stems left on the slope by the child. The beekeeper closed his eyes.

In the beeches again, but not hiding this time: searching quietly through the trees. He finds the child sleeping and he is not afraid. A still figure, lying in front of the hives. Snow blows in across the clearing, a smooth drift forming against its curved spine.

When the old man woke, it was night and the house was cold. Outside in the woodpile, he found first an old shawl and then a small, taut body beneath it, curled against the logs. Cold to the touch, but dry and still breathing. A boy. He carried him inside.

__

Careful not to warm him too quickly, the old man let the boy sleep. Young and slight, he was no weight at all to carry and seemed even smaller lying there in the corner by the fire.

The child’s few clothes, soaked from the stream, were rigid in the chill night, stiff as dry leather, and the skin beneath was blue, joints chapped and weeping. It seemed impossible, but the boy was still alive, pulse low but regular, pumping visible at wrist and ear. The old man wrapped the naked limbs in rags, covered them with straw. He fetched more firewood, and then snow to melt
for cooking. Bitter outside but his lungs felt tight in the smoky room and he didn’t like to be too close to the low shape curled in the corner.

While he worked, the beekeeper tried to remember the villagers who had bought his wax and honey. Families, two or three generations he had known. They had come out to him in their carts, on foot, each autumn. With cloth and fat for trading, sacks of wheat, baskets of apples. This boy might be a grandson or great-grandson, but his narrow features called no faces from the old man’s memory.

What he could recall were whispered exchanges, inquisitive glances: whole families come out from the village to look at the bee man. Children watching from behind their parents’ legs, running if he came near them. Women talking to him, smiling, but their eyes always sharp, always moving, surveying his small home and its smoke-blackened contents. He knew they liked his honey, and the trade was good, but he hated the staring and the questions, which got worse as he got older. Didn’t know why he should feel lonely, why it should be safer in the village. Always lived here, always would and he couldn’t understand these people, why they chose to spend their days all stuffed together, but could never find a way to tell them.

The slight figure was touched grey by the shadows beyond the fire, and thoughts of the villagers made the old
man uneasy: he had never been afraid of bees but sometimes of people. Always glad when the honey was sold again, the season colder, his solitude returned.

A day passed, the snow stayed, the night was cold and wakeful. The boy lay by the embers, the beekeeper sat against the wall, under the blanket, folded over, doubled up against the winter that wouldn’t end.

The child woke briefly on the third morning, when the sky was clear, and the old man stirred an egg into the boy’s soup, spoke to him for the first time.

– Too much snow to go home now. Too far from the village. You can wait here.

His voice a cracked whisper, barely audible. The child blinked and ate and then slept again. The old man kept the fire stoked and fed the boy each time he woke, but when, on the fourth day, the child was running a fever, the old man decided he should find the boy’s family. Brave the cold and the village.