Five Boys (24 page)

But the Bee King seemed to know almost as much about the dank world of mushrooms as he did about the sticky world of bees and on several occasions was spotted rooting at the roadside or foraging in the corner of some field.

One Wednesday lunchtime Howard Kent crept into the woods just above the village, to eat a little bread and cheese as a preliminary to getting his head down for half an hour. He sat and ate but sleep somehow failed to find him. He felt, in fact, peculiarly wide awake. He ate a little more to see if that might help—it didn’t—and was becoming quite frustrated when he glanced over his shoulder and found the Bee King standing not twenty feet away.

“Mr. Kent,” the Bee King called out. “I’d like to ask a favor.”

Howard was used to being the one doing any spying and was not at all happy with things getting switched about.
The Bee King strolled over to Howard with a little basket in his hand.

“Can I borrow your knife?” he said.

The idea took a while getting through to Howard. He stared at his penknife. Its blade was still streaked with cheese.

“I suppose so,” he said.

The Bee King picked something out of his basket that looked, to Howard, more like a pickled egg than a mushroom and held it up between finger and thumb.

“Lycoperdon pedicellatum,” he said.

He took Howard’s knife and cut into the puffball. The two halves parted in the palm of his hand. Its insides were as wet and brown as chewed tobacco.

The Bee King nodded. “Sometimes you just have a hunch,” he said and threw the rotten mushroom into the nearest bush.

Howard held his hand out, but the Bee King seemed to be in no hurry to give the penknife back.

“It’s a fine knife,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

“Totnes,” said Howard Kent.

The Bee King had another look at it, folded the blade back into the handle and returned it to Howard. Then he took up his basket and slipped back into the trees.

By early June the Boys were released from the garden shed and would have been out among the bees a good deal sooner if they had only come up with the right attire. Aldred took along his old gas mask to one of their weekday meetings and pulled it over his balaclava, producing what appeared to be an airtight fit, but the Bee King demonstrated the ease with which a bee’s sting could penetrate the
knit of the wool. Heck was all for using heavy sacking. Finn twice turned up with his mother’s sieves and colanders but could never quite work out what to do with them. It was Lewis who suggested using the cottage’s net curtains and by their next visit the Bee King had got out his Singer and sewn them into shape. The Boys cut out cardboard brims for their caps to keep the bees away from their faces and from that point on, as long as they wore long trousers, they were more or less at liberty to go where they pleased.

They followed the Bee King from one hive to another like trainees accompanying a consultant on his rounds. Were so proud of their homemade veils that they took to wearing them around the village, which caused a bit of a stir. Lizzie Hathersage thought they looked like child brides and there was widespread concern at the idea of a grown man even owning a sewing machine, let alone knowing how to operate it. When news of the villagers’ hostility got back to the Bee King he decided that the veils should only be worn around the garden, and after every subsequent session they were hung up in the kitchen beside his own straw boater, which went some way to placating the Boys.

Safely festooned beneath their veils, the Boys were free to observe the hives at the height of that summer’s foraging—to watch the bees arrive, with their hind legs loaded with bright spots of pollen, and waddle into the shadows, while the bees ahead of them took flight again. One Saturday afternoon, having stripped a hive of all its supers, the Bee King drew the Boys’ attention to twenty or thirty bees clinging to the side of the brood box with their backsides in the air. These bees, he told the Boys, were sending out a
pheromone to guide back any bees disoriented by all the disruption. The bees seemed to have such a vocabulary of dancing and wiggling and special scents that Aldred sometimes wondered if he would be able to remember them all. But if there was any aspect of the bees’ behavior the Boys didn’t understand they were expected to ask for an explanation, and soon they found that the Bee King’s answers only confirmed what they had more or less worked out for themselves.

It wasn’t long before they were allowed to handle the frames and shown how to turn them so that any uncapped honey didn’t come pouring out. Hector was holding up a frame one day and studying the dimpled quilt which covered the pupae when the Bee King reached in, scratched away at the comb’s surface and dragged out a small white worm between his fingernails.

“Wax moth,” he said. “Not welcome,” and rubbed it away between his finger and thumb.

The Bee King was surprisingly nimble fingered. Could nip a bee by its wings and turn it upside down, with its little legs wriggling, and point out its antennae, proboscis, sting and wax glands.

The ends of the Bee King’s fingers were stained black, and Hector asked if it was the bees that caused it.

The Bee King shook his head and looked at them. “They’re printer’s fingers,” he said. “Stained for life.”

He once sneezed into his handkerchief, and as he was putting it back in his pocket a bewildered bee crept out of the folds and flew away. The Boys watched, openmouthed. There might have been a quite rational explanation. The whole thing might have been some elaborate trick. But as
far as the Boys were concerned the Bee King was able to sneeze bees into being and had his own small colony living inside him.

In the evenings they would sometimes sit out in the garden and listen to the steady hum of the bees’ industry and breathe in the honey in full flow. The Boys learned how the different sounds from the hive denoted different moods, different activities, and that each worker, far from being a mere gatherer of nectar or builder of comb, carried out a whole host of duties at various points in her short life—a nursemaid to the larvae, a sentry to keep out robber bees, a carpet sweeper to keep the hive tidy, a punkah-wallah when it got too hot.

According to the Bee King, people used the hive as a model for whatever system or philosophy they happened to favor. A monarchist would see it as the epitome of royal patronage, a communist as the embodiment of the individual’s willingness to devote himself to the state. But very few of these people, the Bee King said, had ever been anywhere near an apiary—wouldn’t know one bee from another—and only an experienced beekeeper could tell you whether the queen actually gave the orders or was just a prisoner in her own castle, carrying out the colony’s commands.

When Lewis asked the Bee King what
he
made of the hive he said that, if anything, he preferred to see it as a numbers machine and the bees not as tiny bankers or foundry workers but as cogs in a vast arithmetical mill. “Each frame is a living abacus,” he said. “Eggs are constantly added and subtracted.” The colony was continually carrying out its own checks and balances. If a hive grew too crowded the queen swarmed, dividing the colony, to continue her arithmetic somewhere else.

The business of the hive, the Bee King said, was that of conversion: wax into comb … nectar into honey … eggs into larvae … pupae into bees. The colony’s only concern was its own continuity. If they lost their queen the workers would take an ordinary egg, feed it regally and rear an heir to the throne. But whatever system one imagined operating in it, whatever philosophy one imagined motivated it, the hive was an entity in itself. To deal in individual bees was to miss the point. Left alone, the hive would regulate itself quite happily. Whatever questions arose were constantly answered, its problems constantly solved.

Whenever Lewis Bream raised his hand in Mrs. Fog’s classroom he was either bursting to go to the toilet or just plain stumped at what was on the board. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, what Mrs. Fog considered to be one of her brighter pupils, and when she saw his hand go up one afternoon during that summer of bees, with him in no evident hurry to leave his seat, she naturally assumed that she was about to be called upon to go back over the problem she had just set.

“Would you say …” Lewis said, then stopped and decided to come at it another way. “Are you a monarchist, Miss, or a communist?”

Mrs. Fog’s blood ran cold. Her ears burned; her faculties failed her. The fact that such bile should come spouting out of a boy who was, ordinarily, little more than mute, only doubled its impact. It was as if Lewis Bream, one of the most timid, unexceptional children ever to stare up at her, had climbed onto his desk, yanked down his trousers and proceeded to toy violently with himself.

She was torn between fetching her cane and shaking the
boy by the shoulders, but managed to recover herself, grab him by the ear and drag him over to Dunce’s Corner, if only to give herself some time to come up with a more appropriate punishment. For the rest of the day she was badly flustered, and kept snapping her chalk on the board and losing her place in her usually seamless delivery. Lewis, meanwhile, stared into his little corner with all the dignity of a saint and when the end of the day came around, with Mrs. Fog still no clearer and Lewis still not the least bit contrite, all she could think to do was write a note and send the burden of determining his punishment home with him.

“Lewis spent the afternoon in Dunce’s Corner,” the note said, “after casting political aspersions on his teacher.”

As she tidied the classroom, her words kept coming back to her—not least the way she had referred to herself in the third person, as if this alone might provide her with some badly needed perspective on the afternoon’s events.

Back home, the note went back and forth between Lewis’s parents, succeeding in confusing and upsetting them almost as much as Lewis had confused and upset Mrs. Fog. Neither wanted a conversation with their son about politics, neither knew for certain what “aspersions” were and in the end Lewis was summoned by his father, given a general dressing-down and sent to his room, where he lay on his bed and listened to the summer’s evening going on beyond the curtains.

He could hear the birds fussing in the gutters and the mumble of the wireless coming up through the floor. He closed his eyes—he wasn’t sure how long for—but was vaguely aware of the evening’s shadows filling the lanes and when he heard his mother talking to a neighbor in the front
garden he got up from his bed and opened the window a couple of inches to hear what she had to say.

She was at her wits’ end, apparently. The end of her tether. She had a son with a head full of bees. Who talked earnestly about all sorts of nonsense. Who had even begun to
walk
in a peculiar way. And now, to cap it all, he had somehow managed to get that rock of a woman, that beacon of reason, Mrs. Fog, in a flap.

The more she talked, the more she seemed to upset herself. Seemed to have not the least inclination to stop. She began to ramble. Started ranting—slurring. But plowed on, getting louder and louder, until every last house in the street knew all her troubles and any remaining sense rolled back and forth, like a bottle on the deck of a pitching ship.

Lewis lay on his bed, wondering how much longer she could keep it up, when he heard a terrible shriek followed by the sound of splintering wood. There was a period of blessed silence, and Lewis pulled back the curtain to find his mother with one arm around Mrs. Heaney’s shoulder and her foot caught in the broken bars of the garden gate, like a rabbit in a trap.

T
HE INTRUDER
came at the Bee King’s garden by an unconventional route, negotiating the beans, sweet peas and chrysanthemums of the allotments, where the bees had been foraging only hours before.

He stopped at the fence, up to his knees in stinging nettles, and surveyed the cottage’s silhouette—a solid block of stone, with the Bee King sleeping somewhere in it and the moon high above its chimney pots—then fed a leg through the fence, found his footing and eased the rest of him after it.

He inched along the wall of the shed until he felt the lawn firm beneath his feet, then went straight over to the nearest hive. Stooped beside it. Listened. Nothing but a low, perfunctory hum. Checked over both shoulders. Whispered a few words, as if at confessional. Took a deep breath to steady himself. Then raised his hand and brought it down hard onto the hive.

The bees stirred. Roared up like an engine, but just as quickly died away. The intruder looked at the hive. Muttered a few more words to himself, shifted position. Leaned against the hive, embraced it and began to rock it from side to side.

He was still shaking it when the bees burst out into the garden. Within seconds the night was flushed with them.
And their excitement spread from hive to hive like a contagion, rattling all the other bees into action, until the apiary was madness manifest.

He got to his feet, made for the gate, but wasn’t halfway there before the first wave of bees was on him. He stumbled on for another yard or two before he fell. And as each bee landed and unloaded its sting, it released a joyful pheromone, which spoke profoundly to all the other bees. So that in a matter of seconds the intruder had a shawl of bees on him. Then a blanket. Then was utterly enthralled by them.

Marjory Pye couldn’t think whom to turn to. She’d contemplated running down the hill to Lillian Minter’s and jumping on a train to go and stay with her sister, Flo. What got in the way was the fact that she couldn’t muster the courage to open the lavatory door, in case the demon that had kept her cowering there since three in the morning came stumbling after her, waving its bandaged hands in the air.

She’d never considered the vicarage to be much of a sanctuary but it was one of the few houses visible through the hole in the lavatory door. The fellow in it, after all, was meant to have the whole weight of the church behind him.

She’d spent half the night cooped up in that wooden hut with nothing but a handful of chocolate limes she found in her overcoat pocket to keep some sugar in her blood. Had perched on the lavatory seat with her foot jammed against the door, and got up every five or ten minutes and peeked through the spy hole to see if the coast was clear, but no matter how many times she looked it was never quite clear enough.