Tell it to the Bees Read Free

on the ear and then they were home.

3
    Jean Markham wanted no more that evening than to sit for twenty minutes and watch her bees. There was nothing she needed to say, but she’d have liked just to sit. Then she’d put Peggy Lee on the gramophone and pour herself a Scotch. But she was late and there was no time for any of that. The house was quiet. Mrs Sandringham had gone a couple of hours earlier, home to her large boys and their impossible appetites, so nothing now disturbed the empty spaces.
    She stopped in the hall and stood still, listening, waiting for the noises of her arrival to subside – the door slam, her footsteps on the tiles, the bump of her heart in its cavity, the dull echo from her dropped bag. The silence gathered itself around her shoulders, warm and possessive, and she put a hand to it as you might to a cat that had settled there, then climbed the stairs to her bedroom.
    It was five years since Jean took on this house but it hadn’t yet let her take possession. Built for a different cast and at a different time, with its breakfast room and dining room, servants’ bells, maids’ attic rooms papered in faded flowers, it seemed still to resist her efforts and her living. She occupied properly only a few rooms: her bedroom, the kitchen, sitting room. Her father’s books in what she called, for a joke, her library. For the rest, the house rebuked her and her solitary state, needling her in vulnerable moments with things stillfound, left behind in corners and cupboards, children’s things especially – a marble under the doormat, a tin car mysteriously high up on the pantry shelf, a rubber duck in the airing cupboard, its dusty rump leaving a tideline in the basin when she rinsed it clean. It seemed to Jean as if these things had a will to be hidden. They had escaped her first-time clearing and cleaning and then come to light as if by their own volition, catching her unawares later.
    Strangest of all to find was the lock of hair. She had been reading in a small room at the back of the house that caught the last of the late summer sun. The room was empty save for an old armchair, just bare boards and dust flowers in the corners, and two faded rectangles on the papered walls – tiny pink buds in green tracery – where two pictures must have once hung.
    The cat had sat for a while on her lap, arranging herself, as cats do, to absorb the sun as best she could, till Jean had got too hot and lifted her down. She’d gone back to her reading then, till some odd movement had caught her eye and she’d looked up to see the cat across the room sitting back on her furry haunches, cuffing a paw in the air, as if half playing, half annoyed. Something was caught on her claw and, kneeling to her, Jean saw a snatch of red. Holding the cat firm, she unhooked a bow of dusty ribbon, shot with a thread of silver, and tied within it, a lock of fine, blond hair.
    Probably the slip of hair and its ribbon had been caught between the floorboards. Probably that was what it was. But still, this particular scrap of other life unnerved her, as if she’d been playing peeping Tom to the strangers living here before her. As if she’d seen something she shouldn’t.
    It was Friday night and Jean was tired. Her neck hurt. She arched her shoulder blades back and round, hoping for some ease. A bath would have been nice, but she was invited for supper at eight so it would have to wait.
    Perhaps because she looked so much at other people’s bodies, Jean wasn’t usually interested in her own. But tonight, changing out of her working clothes, she undressed entirely, dropped her underwear on the rug, and stood naked before the wardrobe glass. She looked at all the length of her.
    â€˜Too tall to find a husband easily,’ she said out loud with that rueful tilt of the mouth that even those who knew her well found so hard to read. The words had the status of an old truth, like