The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read (14 page)

The books were not ordinary books, they were gramophone recordings that came in flat, heavy boxes, tied with leather straps, and were exchanged for a new set every other week. He listened to them for an hour each evening, and sometimes the child listened with him, to
The History of the Second World War
by Winston Churchill, and the diaries of statesmen, and the lives of kings. Travellers read of journeys and philosophers asked the questions which she herself asked constantly. What is the world? What is real? Who am I? But their answers were intricate, incomprehensible. He listened to the novels
of Charles Dickens and Arnold Bennett, and the plays of Shakespeare. When she was not there, he listened alone. Elsa took her book into the stuffiness of the front room, preferring to hear words in silence, in her own head.

The new book was
The Origin of Species
. She stayed listening with him for a short time only. His eyes were closed. She scrutinised his face, the thick folds from nose to chin, and the flesh of his neck; he was a heavy man, and almost bald. She tried to slide the door open soundlessly but it brushed along the carpet.

‘Ten tomorrow,’ he said. ‘All set?’

‘All set.’

It would be Saturday. ‘All set’ was what they always said.

But it was different, from the beginning, though she could not say why. There was simply an unease.

The sun shone, reflecting on the flat surface of the water, and there was a little warmth in it. He talked, but not as usual; today, there were not the problems about the ordering of the universe. Instead, he spoke in odd, disjointed sentences, about trivial things.

‘Arthur Jenkins – he travels up on the same train,
same compartment, wife’s a sister of the Grand Master. Arthur Jenkins dropped his spectacles on the rails, down the edge of the platform. They held us up for fifteen minutes, but they fished them out, do you know. Shep has fleas. Do you think Shep has fleas? Better get some powder. Better tell your aunt, she can’t stand a dog that scratches. Do you know that tea-set, the one with the tree – “Tree of Life”, they call the design? She was given that, on a Masonic Ladies’ night. We look after the wives. Marry into the Masons and you’ll be taken care of. She’s no need to worry. Do they use lard or margarine, for the pastry in these pies? It tasted of lard the last time. It’s different today. My mother would never have anything but butter. I wonder they use lard. Could be pork lard, and they do have Jews in. Do you know about Jews? Jews have been some of my best customers.’

After they had eaten at the café, they always went back to the bungalow over the level crossing, where they waited by the gates for the London train to go through. The only people they saw were in the shops of the Parade, where they went if the aunt had given
them an errand. But today was different. There was a tight, pinching feeling inside her.

Walking beside him towards the town, along back streets she did not know, away from the level crossing and the Parade, she avoided the cracks in the paving slabs with particular care. The voice in her head asked, What is life? Is it a waste of effort that birds migrate? What are light and darkness? When I am dead, will I know it?

The week had not been the same.

The dog Shep was uncertain here and did not trot ahead, and once the uncle confused the way, so that they found themselves on wasteground near the coal tips.

‘Drunk again,’ he said. They doubled back.

There was a door in the side of a warehouse they came to, with an engraved plate. She had not liked the change in their routine, and the feeling she had within her now was fear.

‘Elsa has that dressing-table set, the comb and brushes and mirror, with the mother-of-pearl backs. You know them. They’re very high quality. They came from here.’

A cubby-hole office with glass sides looked into the
body of the warehouse, which had metal shelving like Meccano, stacked with boxes, and crates on the floor.

‘This friend’s a Jew.’

She wondered what a Jew would be, but he was just a man like any other, small, with a moustache and an overall the colour of cardboard.

‘This is the young lady,’ the uncle said. The man put out his hand to her to shake, and as she did so, in that precise moment she felt that the world took a lurch forward, pushing her closer to adult life. She was like a snake inside the beginnings of a new skin, and the strangeness of it troubled her.

She was to choose a present for herself. That was why they were here. A chair with a hooped back was set for her, and then trays of jewellery came out, brooches and necklaces and small bangles and pins, attached to black velvet pads.

She was completely free to choose.

The dog Shep lapped noisily from the dish of water they had brought.

There were questions she could not ask. Why were they here, now, today, to give her a present? How should she choose? How much was the present to
cost? And what her mother would say bubbled inside her head.

‘Expensive presents are always bribes.’

‘No one can buy affection.’

‘Jewellery that draws attention to itself is vulgar.’

The things were of emeralds and sapphires, silver and gold. But what she liked best and wanted she had seen at once. It was a brooch of a small poodle dog, with a sparkling body of diamonds and studded red rubies in a pattern for the collar and the eyes.

‘Take your time,’ he said. They were talking, and out of politeness, she looked at other brooches, at a bracelet, beaded with coral, and a pearl rose pin, resting on her palm. But she wanted the diamond dog.

‘Has that caught the young lady’s fancy? The little doggy brooch?’

Hearing it, and feeling her own flush of immediate anger at the words, addressed as if to a baby, she knew that she had been right, that things were different, and she was no longer a child.

She stood up. The brooch lay apart from the rest of the jewellery, on the table, the ruby eye gleaming as the sun caught it, through the skylight.

‘We seem to have made our selection.’

She loathed him. He was on one side, and she and the uncle on another.

‘Dolly has always been proud,’ Elsa had once said.

She understood what it meant now.

He picked up the brooch.

‘Very nice choice,’ he said, ‘very suitable,’ and held it up, not to her, but in front of her uncle’s face.

‘Isn’t that pretty? Isn’t that a nice choice for a young lady? See? Can you see it at all?’ He pushed it right up, under the uncle’s nose.

So it was not true that people did not know. The blindness was obvious, she saw that now.

‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Very nice.’

The place was hateful to her, suffocating, she wanted to be outside. But they must wait for the brooch to be put into a padded box, and the box wrapped and tied with fine string and made into a little handle, which the man set to dangle on her forefinger, and that was how she carried it, holding it up so that it swung a little.

It had begun to rain. In the alleyway leading from the warehouse the cobblestones were greasy. She wanted to thank him, but for a moment could not speak, only held the parcel, and felt disbelief that it
contained the diamond dog with the ruby collar and eyes, and that the dog was hers. He fumbled with his stick and Shep’s lead. The rain beaded the sleeves of his coat and the beads gleamed.

‘The dog brooch is so beautiful.’ She heard her own voice sounding odd, clear and high and formal, as if she were speaking to a stranger, some friend of her mother to whom she must be polite.

‘Thank you very much indeed for giving it to me.’

They stood, Shep close between them so that she smelled the doggy smell that came off him as the rain soaked his coat. Then she looked up.

He was crying. It was not the rain. Tears were coming quite silently out of the sightless eyes and running down his fleshy, fallen cheeks.

He said, ‘I’m a cast-off. On the scrap heap. That’s the bottom of it. I haven’t told Elsa. I’m telling you.’

She was silent, not fully understanding, and yet appalled.

‘Out,’ he said, and made a gesture with his arm. ‘I’m out.’

The rain was soaking her hair and neck, cold, bitter rain. The dog pressed closer and whimpered slightly.
Behind them, the lamps set along the warehouse came on suddenly.

Then she knew that it had indeed been different, and why. It was the last time. He had no more work. They had asked him to go. The routine of his daily life was finished. She did not know why this should make any difference to their walks on the beach, and the pies and tea and cocoa in the café, the wait to see the London train by the level crossing. That routine had nothing to do with his weekday work. But they would not go again, she knew, and the next time she came here she would be older. She was already older. That was why he had bought her the brooch.

‘Wait a minute, please,’ she said and, sheltering beneath the overhang of the warehouse roof, with the drops of rain rolling off it onto her shoulders, she unpicked the string handle with her fingernails, and unwrapped the paper parcel, opened the box. The diamond dog gleamed in the silvery wet afternoon light, and the collar and eyes glinted their rubies. She lifted it out and pinned it on the lapel of her woollen coat. She did not speak. Neither of them spoke, they only turned to go on, up the alleyway, the dog Shep pulling on the lead. And then, suddenly, she was
afraid, because it was the end of things, because she felt unlike herself. The ground was no longer firm beneath her. She wanted to be home, wanted warmth and to be as she had been, secure inside her old, unchanged self, wanted to be dried and petted and given hot tea, and hear some strange, sonorous voice reading from the gramophone.

In the last long avenue, she took hold of his hand. But when they reached the bungalow, they were met with anger, because he had kept her out for so long, and it was growing dark and they were soaking wet from the rain.

And when she showed the brooch on the lapel of her brown coat, her mother’s face pursed up in disapproval. The dog was not diamonds and the collar and eyes were not rubies. It was diamanté only, and that was common, her mother said, and quite unsuitable to give to a child.

He was one of the few people who could have felt a lift of heart on seeing the buildings at Vldansk. They were ugly, and yet to him they were – not beautiful, but something that was higher than beauty: they were perfectly symmetrical. From every angle, they satisfied, but particularly on first approach, driving up the wide avenue set with fir trees regularly spaced, and he was stilled and settled by the sight of them. He would be contented here. That was now certain. Others who might have come had attachments and commitments, or did not want to put themselves out of sight and the chance of promotion. He was unattached, with only himself to satisfy, and he found his work of consuming interest. The prospect of the coming year excited him.

There was nothing else to be enjoyed in Vldansk. The city was without charm or idiosyncrasy, raw and with no sense of a past. The oldest feature was an ornate and hideous marble horse trough, with winged
warriors rearing from the sides and dating from just before the First World War. In summer horses still drank from it – they were in general use here, not only on the miles of flat surrounding fields, but in the streets themselves, pulling vegetable carts, bringing farmers into town, among the grey, sardine-can cars.

For three weeks he lived in a hotel until the company flat was made ready for him. There was life in the place to make up for the flat beer and greasy, gristly sausages, the coarse blankets, and peculiar-smelling soap that came in little, rough sticks. When he moved into the apartment, it felt as dead as the surface of the moon. The four blocks were set down at right angles to one another, on a featureless road three miles out of the town, without any neighbourhood streets or meeting places, and completely surrounded by turnip fields, which when he arrived, were being harvested. For two weeks, the carts moved slowly up and down the rows, and there was the sight of men lifting the vegetables and slashing their tops, before hurling them up into the wagons. The horses stood, chewing on mangy-looking hay. The turnip smell, like that of unwashed feet, seeped into the flat and lingered there.

But the activity was something to look at, each morning. At the end of the second week, the fields and sky were bright with bonfires, and the ground itself was set on fire, the flames running this way and that across it like tracers across the night sky. The firing was like some sort of festival. The workers brought their families, riding out on the carts and in dilapidated old vans and on an army of bicycles, and their children danced wild demoniacal dances in the light of the flames. The acrid smell of smoke drove out the vegetal gases at last.

The next day, the fields were charred and still smoking, but by eleven, rain had come and damped the fires out, and with them, whatever life there had fleetingly been. After that, autumn merged into the beginning of winter, and deadness everywhere. Nothing moved on the fields save for a hare which he saw once or twice racing across the barren brown furrows. When the first frosts, and then the snow came, it, too, was gone.

But at least the snowfall brought a brightness. He lay in bed seeing the pale sheen on the ceiling the first morning after it had fallen, and when he opened the curtains his spirits lifted at the whiteness, where there
had been only grey and dun. But after a while, the sight of the snow became tedious too, and he began to feel starved of colour, to crave it, in this monochrome world, he dreamed of colour, of the Mediterranean and California, sunlit, garish, technicolour places. Even people’s clothes and skin were colourless here.