The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read Read Free Page A

scraped along the gravel behind the bicycle, which they wheeled fast, up the path and out of sight, shouting.
    The next day, Mart May listened out from early, but it was late in the afternoon before they came,crashing suddenly into the glade, pulling the bicycle and the apple box behind them. He had been about to open a hive.
    ‘Hey, let’s look, let’s see the bees.’
    ‘Not now you won’t. Making all that racket. Drive ’em mad.’
    ‘Oh.’
    They turned away.
    ‘I’ve something to show you,’ Mart May said.
    They paused, restless as the bees.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’ve been waiting to show you all winter.’
    They dropped the bicycle and followed him round to the tack room. He did not want both of them, was uncertain where he had felt proud.
    ‘What is it?’
    It was different, their talk, their restlessness. Everything was different.
    He opened the wall cupboard and took out the tin. They watched, fidgeting. He looked at the boy, holding the tin up slightly.
    ‘I thought,’ Mart May shook up the tin violently, ‘you’d like a mint.’
    ‘Oh.’
    He held the tin out with the painted letters towards them, not opening it, willing the boy to see, to notice, to know. To say.
    But he only waited, shifting about, so that in the end the man simply took off the lid and offered the tin. Their hands dived and jostled inside, came up with sweets.
    ‘Have two.’
    ‘Hey, thanks.’
    ‘Yes, thanks, Mart May.’
    ‘Remembered my name then?’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    The man showed the tin again. ‘Go on then,’ he said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘See?’
    ‘What?’
    He turned it again and read, his finger following the letters, ‘M-A-R-T M-A-Y. I painted that – “Mart May”. After you’d gone away last year.’
    A flicker passed over the boy’s face. ‘OK,’ he said.
    Mart May struggled, desperate not to have to ask, needing the boy to offer, to produce by some magic, the two books, the two pencils. Sweat prickled hisneck. ‘I could do with learning a bit more,’ he said in the end. ‘You teaching me again.’
    The boy’s face was the same, pale lashes, pale hair, white skin. But not the same.
    The other one tugged at the apple box.
    The boy glanced at Mart May and quickly away, as he turned after the apple box and the bicycle.
    ‘You were right, Mart May,’ he shouted, skidding away.
    ‘What about?’
    ‘You’ll be bringing your pals here, you said. Plaguing. And now I have.’
    The noise of them and the clattering box and the skidding gravel went on sounding through the glade. It took a long time for the quietness to return and while he waited for it Mart May stood quite still, turning the silver tin with the mints inside and the lettering on the outside, round and round slowly between his hands.

Father, Father
     

Father, Father
     
    ‘I never realised,’ Nita said, standing beside the washbasin rinsing out a tooth glass. Kay was turning a face flannel over and over between her hands, quite pointlessly.
    ‘Dying. Do you mean about dying?’
    ‘That. Yes.’
    They were silent, contemplating it, the truth sinking in at last with the speaking of the word. In the room across the landing their mother was dying.
    ‘I really meant Father.’
    Naturally they had always seemed happy. Theirs had been the closest of families for thirty-seven years, Raymond and Elinor, Nita and Kay the two little girls. People used to point them out: ‘The happy family.’
    So they had taken it for granted that he loved her, as they loved her, fiercely and full of pride in her charm and her warmth and her skill, loved her more than they loved him, if they had ever had to choose.Not that they did not love their father. But he was a man, and that itself set him outside their magic ring. They simply did not know him. Not as they knew one another, and knew her.
    ‘But not this.’
    Not this desperate, choking, terrified devotion, this anguish by her bed, this distraught clinging. This was a love they could not recognise and did not know