Tell it to the Bees Read Free Page B

then?’ Sarah was taking the food to the table, her forehead puckered, busy.
    He asked Jean about her bees, and she talked as she ate, her speech and her eating cutting across each other.
    â€˜The queens have gone out of lay and nearly all the brood combs are covered. Not much more to do now till spring. I’ll creosote the hives in the next week or so and there’s a few knot holes to plug. Keep the weather out.’
    â€˜Slow down! You’re getting faster,’ Jim said. ‘Isn’t she, darling?’
    â€˜You always say that,’ Sarah said.
    â€˜I don’t,’ Jim said. ‘Do I?’
    The two women exchanged a look, and Jim leaned across to his wife and cupped a hand to the back of her head, a gesture so habitual to him, he didn’t know he’d made it.
    â€˜I don’t,’ Jim said again, stroking his wife’s hair.
    Sarah pressed her head back against his hand. ‘My love, since our first date, almost.’
    Jean laughed. ‘Such a gooseberry I was. Only your mother could have made me do it.’
    â€˜Which first date?’
    â€˜Eating ice creams, by the beach. Jean was talking about medicine, I expect. You got out your watch. Timed her speech.’
    Jim put his hands up. ‘My oldest friend and my wife. What chance do I have?’
    They knew the colour of old jealousy, each of them at the table. Their stories were like incantations, to keep it at bay.
    It was one of Jean’s few real regrets, that she couldn’t have married Jim. But when, all those years ago, he had put a proprietorial hand to her head, cupped it to him, his fingers in her hair, she had felt caged, possessed, and she had fought wildly, cruelly perhaps, against him.
    Yet even now, eating supper in his house, with his children asleep above, she couldn’t help a twist of desire. Not for this man who was her closest friend, but for the life here that she could only ever visit.
    And so the three of them talked on, chewing the fat until the warm light of the kitchen was cut by a ring on the doorbell.
    Mrs Sandringham’s boy was pink with exertion and he spoke in bursts, so that the message came out like small gusts of wind, the vowels and consonants tossed about inside it.
    â€˜Robson’s worse … missus says noise you told her … it’s there.’
    Mrs Sandringham had been housekeeper and factotum to the doctor years before Jean became the doctor in question and inherited her, and she was a stickler for certain kinds of etiquette. Young John had been coached from a young age on how to deliver these messages, butthe fact was that he was more at ease with crankshafts and inner tubes than he ever would be with people. All this Jean understood, and so she thanked him gravely before taking Jim’s car and setting off into the November dark to see the dying man.
    It wasn’t much over the half-hour before she returned. Jim had kept the pudding warm for her. Jean put her spoon into the hot apple.
    â€˜These first cold nights,’ she said. ‘They take bodies by surprise.’
    â€˜Anything you could do?’
    â€˜It was really his wife that needed me. To tell her there was nothing she could do. That you can’t stop a dying man from dying, not with all the will in the world.’
    â€˜That’s what you said to her?’
    â€˜Course not. I gave Mr Robson a shot of morphine, told her the lemon cake was delicious and that he’d smiled when I said I’d been well looked after.’
    â€˜Had he smiled?’
    â€˜Then I reminded her that the world and its wife would be through her parlour very soon paying its last. So we sat back, she and I, and talked about food and wakes, and who could be counted on for what, daughters and sisters and such. She made a list; and told me how there were those who said her baking had brought them back from death’s door, and her man upstairs more than once even.’
    Jim smiled.