The Hive (22 page)

Heather walked down the hill, with Maisie holding one hand and little Archie Stuart holding the other. Scarlett kept a few paces ahead of them, leading the way. It was a shame that Bea had asked her to look after the children today of all days. She had been looking forward to it being her go with them for months and so, of course, had Maisie. But now here they were, and it wasn't really the best of days for it. To be honest. What with one thing and another.

“Can't Poppy come to tea too?” whined Maisie. “We've got this game going with the Sylvanian school.”

“Don't be silly, Maisie.” That was all Heather needed—a difficult child. “You've got Scarlett today; she'll play Sylvanians, won't you, Scarlett?”

“Aww. I used to
love
Sylvanians,” said Scarlett, smiling fondly at the memory while she walked backwards. “But I've grown out of them. Can we go on Facebook instead?”

“Golly, I don't think so. You're only ten! I'm sure Mummy doesn't let you. You can play in the garden…”

She didn't ask where Bea had been today—she wasn't a stalker, for heaven's sake, Bea had every right to do whatever she wanted. Heather had reviewed the whole Bea's-birthday-lunch confusion in her mind earlier, and had seen, quite clearly, that it had been an innocent misunderstanding and mostly, as usual, all her fault. There was no harm done. None at all. And those birthday bits and pieces would come in handy. At some point. Apart from the helium balloons. And the cake. The enormous cake.

Heather opened the front door and put all the book bags, shoes and coats in neat little piles. Frankly, she told herself, you might as well enjoy the next couple of hours while you can. Because outwardly, at least, life's normal. But soon Guy will come home. And Maisie will go to bed.

And then she would have to tell him about the…what she found. And that would be the turning point. Because that would be the moment when it—the thing—would stop being a secret hidden deep inside her body, known to her mind and her mind only, tucked away somewhere between the fear department and the imagination. It would be the moment when it turned into something much, much worse: it would become a fact.

The children disappeared off, the girls to Maisie's bedroom and little Archie to the TV. Heather opened the fridge to see what could be rustled up for tea, and found nothing. Of course, that lunch had ended up so crowded that people had actually been in her fridge, grabbing what they could find like scavengers in the wake of a nuclear bomb. She moved on to the freezer. It really had been quite extraordinary—much the busiest of all the lunches there had been so far. And they had made an absolute fortune. Heather tried to remember it all, because Guy was bound to ask the minute he got in. They could stretch that conversation out before they got on to the…you know. But the sad thing was, she hadn't really managed to enjoy it while it had been going on. Which was a shame, because, for two whole hours, her little house really had been the center of the St. Ambrose universe. And that was something she had always longed for, almost her dearest wish: to be at the center of the St. Ambrose universe. Instead of being a tiny little satellite, like a pinprick, buzzing around on its outer limits. Which was how she generally felt, the rest of the time.

Chicken nuggets or fish fingers? The girls could choose. She headed for the stairs, but stopped at the sound of scuffling in the dining room. Who was that? Oh. Scarlett, at the desk in the corner, on the computer.

“Hi!” Scarlett turned round and dazzled a surprised smile, as if the very last person she had expected to find in Heather's own dining room was, of all people, Heather. “I
love
what you've done in here.”

“Really?” Heather looked around. “It's only magnolia…”

“Well, it's
gorgeous.
” Scarlett turned back to the screen. “I was just checking Facebook. Colette's already put up pictures of the spa day. I knew she would. I
love
Colette.”

Heather walked slowly towards the screen. At first she could only see bubbles, lots and lots of bubbles. Then some raised glasses came into focus. And teeth. Rows of exposed teeth, catching the flashlight. Then Bea's face took shape, and Colette's and Jasmine's and—whose was that?—Sharon's. There were a few more heads with their backs to the camera, but before Heather could identify them Scarlett had closed the page and somehow steered Heather out of the room and back to the stove.

“It looks really fun. I can't
wait
till I can go on spa days. I like fish fingers but Archie likes nuggets.” She opened a cupboard and spotted the enormous cake on the shelf. “Oh wow! Look at that cake. Is that for Mummy? Mummy
loves
cake.”

“Does she? Well, we could have some when she gets here.” Heather was starting to feel quite dazed by the twists and turns of this day. She wasn't really used to anything very much happening. Ever. At all. Today, it really was quite a struggle to keep up.

“Oh, no. That's so funny!” Scarlett giggled. “She
loves
it but she doesn't
eat
it. And anyway it's the huge main party tonight at our house. She won't want to eat before that, will she?”

The front doorbell rang and Heather staggered towards it. Bea, gleaming, shining, wafted in on a cloud of lavender and ylang-ylang.

“This is for you, though I cannot ever thank you enough.” She handed Heather a miniature scented candle. “You are a
total
star. That vast lunch and then my unruly rabble for tea.” She slipped off her jacket and popped it over the banister. “How did it all go? Bet it was awesome. I
so
wish I could have been here. Tell me
everything.
”

“Oh. Bea.” Her voice dropped to a whisper and tears sprang up into her eyes. She didn't know why, but somehow Heather couldn't hold any of it in for a second longer. “Something awful has happened. I've got…I've found…a…lump.”

Bea sprang into life, as if this was a moment she had been training for. In the time it took for the tears to roll down Heather's face, before they even started to drip off the pointy bit of her chin, the children were all shut up in front of the TV, issued with a slice of cake, and Bea was back with her at the bottom of the stairs, with a box of tissues and kind eyes. She fired questions at Heather while simultaneously mopping at her. What was the shape of the lump? Was it Heather's first? Who was her GP? Did they have any insurance? Why on earth not?

“And who have you told so far?”

“Nobody.”

“Good. Let's keep it like that, OK?”

“Apart from Guy, obviously.” Heather blew her nose.

“I suppose so,” Bea conceded, pulling out another tissue. “We've got a bit of a problem with it being Friday night, of course.” Bea pursed her lips and gave a little moue of crossness which Heather presumed to be sort of jokey. “Not perfect, finding it on a Friday, was it? We're going to have to wait all weekend, now, aren't we? And my Birthday Weekend, too.”

“Sorry,” mumbled Heather.

“Don't worry.” She squeezed Heather's hand again and Heather couldn't help but notice she was wearing a new wristband:
BEA'S
40
TH—GIRLS' SPA TOUR!!!
“I'll just have to put it out of my mind. We'll get going next week. First thing. The good thing about being at this age when it's
so
dangerous and can be
so
aggressive is that they do move quickly. Even without insurance.”

“Sorry,” mumbled Heather again.

“We'll just have to cope until then, won't we? But remember,” Bea put her arm around Heather—quite a soft arm, actually. Heather had expected something a bit firmer, more muscle…​“just keep it to ourselves for the time being, mmm? Good girl.”

E
very morning, Georgie hoped for a breakthrough. She was so lost, so all at sea, in this whole situation that she could not in any way predict what a breakthrough would look like when it came. But she did feel that she would know it if she saw it. It would be a change, that’s what it would be. She would get to Jo’s house and something would be different. Jo would look different, or say a different thing. And this terrible, miserable, hopeless stasis would come to an end. Something would shift.

She drove onto the main road that took her to Jo’s part of town. The children were at top volume in the back this morning—they were teaching Hamish to rap, with consequences which were, to them, beyond hilarious—but she didn’t mind that. Actually, she loved it—when they were all in one place like this, in the car, round the kitchen table, piled in the double bed on a Sunday morning. When she could see her family as one physical object, trace its edges, measure the length and breadth of it, calculate its mass, work out its—what was Kate learning about the other night? Newtons. That’s right, newtons. How many newtons are there in that lot in the back? She looked in her mirror. Loads, she thought with satisfaction. Just check out all those newtons. Georgie didn’t go in for life plans or any of that rot, but if she did have to come up with some explanation for her point or purpose it would probably be exactly this: to create the largest, noisiest, most solid family that she could. That was enough for her gravestone. That would do her.

It was the quiet that Georgie found so painful. Jo’s reluctance to bang on about her private life had turned from refreshing to something really quite unhealthy. They saw each other every day, but communication between them had been gradually skimmed down until it was now reduced to practically nothing. As soon as the funeral was over and the boys were ready, Georgie had offered to take them into school in the mornings. She could see that Jo wanted to hide away for a bit, but she had thought that was all it would be—for a bit. Now here they were, weeks down the line, and Jo was still hiding away. And it wasn’t ideal for Georgie, adding that extra leg to every school run, and she was getting later and later as the term progressed. But neither of them seemed to be able to change the arrangement, because to change the arrangement they would have to have a conversation. And they hadn’t had one of those for weeks.

She turned into Jo’s road, drew up outside the house and leapt out of the car. Georgie knew that she was partly to blame—always late, always rushed, in a state of perpetual motion and only ever talking as she walked, like she was President of the United States storming around the West Wing instead of a Home Counties mother with time-management issues. It was pathetic. She needed to sort herself out.

“Morning, all.” She darted up the path to the back door, grabbed a couple of the boys’ bags for them and moved back down the path again. “How you doing, love? Much sleep?” Opened the boot, slung in the bags, shut it again.

“Not bad.”

“Is that your breakfast?” Georgie closed the car door on the boys, got into the driver’s seat and lowered the passenger window to shout through it while she started the ignition.

“I’ll get something else before I go to work,” Jo called back. “Have a good day, boys.”

Georgie strapped herself in and reversed into the drive to turn round again. Jo was framed in her rearview mirror, alone in her front yard—“garden” might have been the word for it once upon a time, but not anymore—one hand holding a packet of Gummy Bears, the other waving. She looked shrunken, sunk in. Tiny. Utterly alone.

“How’s your mum today?” She looked into her mirror as she asked the boys.

“She had that dream last night,” said one.

“About Dad,” filled in the other. “She’s never great when she’s had that dream about Dad.”

Of course, one of the reasons neither of them wanted to change the system was because the boys obviously preferred it like this. While Jo had been busy cutting herself adrift, they had gone in the other direction—instinctively, it seemed to Georgie. They were always placing themselves in the middle of things—the school, the football team, the swim squad, the Martins’ car. Hiding out in the crowd. Finding safety in numbers. How she wished she could somehow persuade Jo to do the same.

Rachel was walking up the hill; the two girls were ahead on their scooters. Guy had dropped Maisie off at the Masons’ cottage first thing this morning, without any explanation as to what Heather might be up to. Climbing the Ten Tors, Rachel presumed, or a spot of heli-skiing off K2. It wasn’t easy, but she just had to accept that Heather was a full-time athlete now.

The quiet was useful, to be honest: there was so much to think about. Rachel had sat up late into the night with that photo album of the old headmaster from the twenties and thirties, and a memoir he’d written. She didn’t need that sort of detail—you could knock off a sketch with a school building and a couple of war veterans without having to know any of it. But she’d been riveted, totally caught up in it. Something about what Mr. Stanley had said when he retired: how glad he was to have come back from the war too mutilated to face the London future that had been ordained for him, what a privilege it had been to stay in the place of his birth and watch a generation of children go off towards a different future that—

The girls stopped, waited for Rachel and then took her side and matched her pace.

“Mu-um…”

“You know Scarlett”

“and Milo.”

“And how she’s horrid…”

“Ah,” said Rachel, who had mentally parked all of that before Christmas, her own emotional traffic being rather busy at the time.

“We told Miss Nairn about the oranges—”

“It happens every day with the oranges.”

“—and she said that Scarlett was being nice and she couldn’t tell a person off for giving a person oranges.”

“And we don’t know what to do now.”

“Hang on.” Rachel stopped walking, to concentrate. “Whoa there. What oranges? You didn’t tell me about any oranges.”

Georgie turned in to the school car park, shrieked to a halt, flung open the car doors and gave a quick sharp tug to the first child she could reach. They tended then to come out in clumps if you did that, she found, like clothes out of the washing machine—still basically separate objects, but temporarily engaged in a loose tangle which had the advantage of easier handling.

“OK, chop, chop, chop. Let’s go.” She took up the rear position as they all headed for the playground.

Clover, standing by the gate, stood back to let them past. “Tut, Georgie,” she said helpfully. “You’re really late.”

She got all the children into their respective classrooms just as the bell was ringing, and headed back to the car.

“You’re always late, aren’t you?” Clover was still at the gate, holding a book of raffle tickets. “And you seem to be getting later. I couldn’t bear it, always being as late as you. You need to sort yourself out.”

“Clover, do bugger off,” Georgie said politely. She went to pass her, but Clover blocked the way.

“Just saying. It would drive me mad. Being you. That’s all. Anyway. Ticket for the Gourmet Gamble?”

“The what?”

“The Gourmet Gamble! You know, lots of us are making lots of different dishes and then everybody else buys a ticket and then there you are, Bob’s your uncle, that’s your supper tonight. Honestly, Georgie. What is your head full of? How could you forget a thing like that?”

“What am I like, eh?”

“I know! So. Can I sell you a ticket?”

“No.” Georgie picked up Hamish and tried to squeeze by. “You can’t.” She gave a broad smile. “You can bugger off.”

“I’m having to organize it all on my own. Of course. Heather and Bea were supposed to help. But they can’t now”

Georgie got herself into the gate.

“obviously…”

And wriggled through.

“but I’m sure you’ve heard all about that.”

“Yep,” she called cheerfully over her shoulder. “I’m sure I did.” She had no idea what Clover was on about and nor did she care. “Buggeroff buggeroff buggeroff, off, off,” she sang quietly to herself to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus” as she turned back to the car.

Heather looked straight ahead as she steered out of the car park. The last thing she wanted to do was meet someone’s eyes when she had done such a good job of keeping it all quiet so far. She did have very expressive eyes—her best feature, Colette said—and it would be typical of her—and her eyes—to give the game away now. It had been hard, this week, avoiding Rachel in the mornings and Georgie in the afternoons and not joining in with any of the exercising. But she was sure Bea was right: it made everything one hell of a lot easier if all and sundry didn’t know what she was going through.

She drove slowly past the St. Ambrose world, going ahead with just another St. Ambrose day. In her wing mirror she could see Georgie strapping Hamish into his car seat, and Rachel wandering over to talk to her. The sporties were gathering around Colette’s Polo in running shorts this morning, all off to jog round the football club three times. She knew that because Bea had sent her the text anyway—as a sort of cover—even though they both knew that she wouldn’t be joining in now. Ashley’s mum and a few others were meeting by the gate. Of course, it’s Weight Watchers this morning. They never seem to lose anything, bless them, but you can’t blame them for trying…It was all so normal and yet to Heather—in her car when she was never usually in her car, alone with Bea when she had never been alone with her before—it all looked heartbreakingly remote. Like an old home movie of a past that was lost to her.

Heather pulled herself up. She mustn’t think negative thoughts. She was so fortunate, really, that Bea had chosen to take control of the situation in the way she had: marched her down to the surgery first thing Monday morning, taken the day off work today to take her to the hospital appointment. “I’ll do this one,” she had said to Guy. “You’ll need plenty of time off later, don’t you worry. Keep calm and carry on, that’s the best thing you can do for us right now.” Even then, Guy had started arguing. And it wasn’t like Guy to argue. Heather had had to give him one of her very meaningful looks—you see, it was useful having expressive eyes—to make him shut up. But she didn’t have to really because Bea was insistent and there was no changing Bea’s mind once she’d set it to something, as Guy was just going to have to learn. Bea had held up her hand and said, “I will drive her there myself.” And that was that.

Or it would have been, Heather was sure, but there was something a bit dodgy with Bea’s car today, it was making a slightly funny noise—Guy thought it might be tappets—and she just didn’t want to risk it. So Heather was in fact driving Bea to the hospital, which wasn’t quite the idea. But it did mean that Bea could catch up with her texting and emailing on the way there—she was so busy and it was a nightmare for her giving up a whole morning in the middle of the week like this. And it was no bad thing really because at least it gave Heather something to do other than just worry.

The wait seemed to be going on and on. Heather had read all the copies of
The Lady
and Bea seemed to be running out of things to do on her BlackBerry.

“Remind me again why you don’t have insurance,” she said, with a lovely smile. And Heather obediently started a recap about how they had to choose, really, between the pension on the one hand and the health on the other and they perhaps could get both but now there was the worry about college for Maisie and how although she wasn’t like Scarlett, wasn’t going to set the world alight, poor love, she did like her books and she could still pick up and they didn’t want to not save for uni just because of how she might or might not do in her SATs…

Bea held up her hand to stop her. “Thanks,” she said, “but I didn’t
actually
mean it.” She rooted around in her huge bag and took out an enormous book which Heather at first thought was, like, the Bible or Shakespeare or something, but turned out to be the Stuart family diary. “I hope they don’t give you Wednesdays, because they’re no good for me at all, Wednesdays. We’d have to get a rota going from the beginning.” She turned a few pages. “And then there’s a whole week in May when Tony’s parents are having the kids while we’re off to play golf…”

Bea looked so worried there, twisting her mouth while she sucked on her pen, that Heather stretched her hand over to comfort her. “You know, I probably shouldn’t say this, I just feel it’s not going to come to that. I told you, my GP was concerned and everything but he didn’t look completely worried sick.”

Bea turned, her eyes alight with empathy. Nobody’s eyes quite lit up with empathy like Bea’s, and right now she had them on full beam.

“You do have to remember, they’ve seen it all before.” She squeezed Heather’s arm. “It’s one in three, love.
One in three.
You mustn’t forget that.”

“Yes, but…” Something felt a bit topsy-turvy to Heather about all this. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. But then nothing was really as it should be today. “He did say it was ‘a good shape,’ didn’t he?”

Bea flicked her eyes up to the ceiling and back again.

“And that all that fertility treatment I went through can do exactly this…”

“Listen.” Bea shuffled in her seat while she picked her words carefully. “You have to realize that it’s not yet a year since I lost poor Laura.” That was the first time Heather had heard that Bea was even close to Laura. She had no idea. She had never seen them together. But she could see that did make things much, much harder. “And my motto for cancer is, and always has been, this: realism, not optimism. From the start. There’s so much you’re going to have to deal with, lovely. Why add disappointment to the list? That can be
so
painful in itself. Now.” Bea stroked Heather’s hair, lifted a few strands, studied them with a frown. “What do we think? Are we going to go for the cold cap? Or is it just not worth it?”