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

those old pictures. ‘Tea in the Garden’ – no, ‘A Visitor to Tea’.
    Their father might have spoken then, might have told them to take their freshly made tea into the garden to join them. The woman might have said, observing their evening routine, that she must go. But he did not, she did not; they sat, as if waiting to resume an interrupted conversation, so that in the end it was Nita who broke the tableau, by turning and going quickly back across the lawn and through the open French window into the house. Kay gave a half-smile, as if in some kind of hopeless explanation or apology – though meaning neither – before following her sister. Just at the window, she glanced quickly back, expecting them to be watching, feeling their eyes on her. But her father and the woman wereturned towards one another, both leaning forwards slightly, their eager conversation eagerly resumed.
    We might not have been here, Kay thought.
    In the kitchen, Nita dropped the lid of the kettle and the sound went on reverberating on the tiled floor, even after she had bent impatiently to pick it up.
    Rain poured off the roofs of the houses they walked past and the early blossom lay in sad, sodden little heaps in the gutter. Spring had retreated behind banked, swollen clouds and a cold wind.
    ‘Perhaps it is time for us to leave home,’ Kay said into the umbrella with which she was trying to shield her head and face. Nita stopped dead and lifted her own umbrella to stare at her sister and the rain flowed off it down her neck.
    ‘Even without . . . well, there will surely be changes. Perhaps we should institute our own.’
    ‘Why must there be changes?’
    ‘Aren’t we rather too old to be living at home still?’
    Kay was thirty-five, Nita about thirty-seven. They looked older. Felt older.
    ‘But wherever would we go to? Where would you want to go?’
    ‘A flat?’
    ‘Do you like flats?’
    ‘Not particularly.’
    ‘We are perfectly happy and comfortable as we are.’
    ‘Yes.’
    They turned the corner. Each had had a private inner glimpse into the rooms of a small flat, and looked quickly away.
    ‘Besides.’
    The rest was unspoken, and perfectly understood. Besides, Nita would have continued, now that she has come to the house there is all the more reason than ever for us to stay.
    Every afternoon since that first day when they had stepped into the garden and seen their father sitting with Leila Crocker over the blue ribbon teapot, they had dreaded coming home and finding her there again. Twice already they had done so. Once, the two of them had been seated in exactly the same place in the garden, the table and the tea things between them so that they might never have moved at all.
    The next time, Leila Crocker had been coming along the passage from the downstairs cloakroom asthey opened the front door. None of them had known what to say.
    Now, Kay turned her key in the lock, pushed the door slowly and waited. They both waited, listening. But the house was empty, they could feel at once. It felt and sounded and smelled empty. The clock ticked. Nita took both umbrellas out to the scullery.
    At the end of the television news, when Kay had switched off the set, their father had not come home.
    ‘He has never said anything.’
    ‘Perhaps he has nothing to say.’
    ‘He has told us nothing about her. Wouldn’t it be usual – to tell something?’
    ‘What is “usual”? I don’t think I know.’
    ‘No.’
    It was not that he had behaved secretively, or evasively, or avoided them. Things had gone on exactly as before. Except that in some vital, deep-rooted way, they had not. Because always, no matter how he behaved, the woman was between the three of them.
    The taxi came for him each morning. He went out, returned, sometimes very late, opened his letters, readthe newspaper, worked at his desk, smoked his single late cigar. When they were all together, he ate with them. When he was not at home, they had no idea of where he was