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

also open. From the garden came voices speaking quietly together.
    ‘Kay.’
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘There is – there’s someone in the garden with Father.’
    They looked at one another, recognising the next step taken, the next stage reached.
    ‘Good,’ Kay said. ‘Isn’t that good?’
    Though they had to wait and absorb it, take in the feeling of strangeness. No one else had been in thehouse since the day of the funeral. Now someone was here, some old friend of his, some neighbour, and although if asked they would each have said that they welcomed it, nevertheless it felt like a violation of something that had grown to become sacred.
    The clock ticked in the hall behind them.
    ‘Oh goodness,’ Kay said, half-laughing with impatience at their own hesitation, and walked boldly out through the open windows onto the terrace.
    The scene, and the next moments that passed, took their place in the series of ineradicable pictures etched into their minds, joining their mother’s deathbed, the funeral, the sight of their father leaning over the grave.
    Two garden chairs were drawn up on either side of the small table. Two cups and saucers, the teapot, milk jug and sugar bowl stood on the table. That fact alone they had difficulty in absorbing, and wondered wildly how the tea had come to be made and found its way out there.
    Hearing them, their father turned, but did not get up.
    Kay and Nita hesitated like children uncertain of what to say or do next, needing permission to comeforward. They were on the outside of a charmed circle.
    ‘Here you are!’ he said.
    After another moment, and as one, they began to cross the grass.
    ‘This is a friend of mine – Leila. Leila Crocker.’ He gestured expansively. ‘My daughters. Nita. Kay.’
    They knew, Nita said afterwards. They knew absolutely and at once and their stomachs plunged like lifts down a deep shaft, leaving only nausea.
    The garden froze, the colours were blanched out of everything, the leaves stiffened, the trees went dead. Unbelievably, instinctively, impossibly, they knew.
    She stood. Said, ‘How very nice.’
    Under their feet, deep below the grass and turf, the earth seemed to shift and heave treacherously, shaking their confidence, throwing them off balance. The sky tipped and ended up on its side, like a house after a bomb had fallen.
    At the moment of death, it is said, a person’s past rushes towards them, but it was the whole of the future that they saw, in the instant between taking in the presence of the woman with their father, and her words; and in composing themselves to greet her,they saw what was to come in every aspect and detail, it seemed.
    ‘But that cannot have been so,’ Nita said, years later. Yet it had. They knew that absolutely.
    But all they saw was a woman, of perhaps forty-five, perhaps a few years less or a few years more, who wore a cherry-red suit and had hair formed in an extraordinary bolster above her brow, and who was called Leila Crocker.
    ‘Leila,’ she said quickly; ‘please call me that.’
    They would not. At once they retreated into themselves like snails touched on the tenderest tips of their horns. They could not possibly call her Leila, and so they called her nothing at all.
    ‘I’m afraid the tea will have gone cold.’ And she touched the china pot with the blue ribbon pattern. Nita and Kay flinched, though giving no outward sign. The last woman to have touched the blue ribbon teapot had been their mother.
    ‘Not that we’ve left much of it I’m afraid.’
    Their father’s voice sounded quite different to them. Lighter, younger, the tone oddly jovial. Everything about him was lighter and younger. Hesat back smiling, leaning back in the garden chair, looking at the blue ribbon teapot, and at the woman.
    ‘No please.’ Nita made a strange little gesture, like a half-bow. ‘Don’t worry. We always make tea freshly.’
    No one moved then. No one else spoke.
    We make a tableau, Kay thought, or one of