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

and could not ask.
    The house seemed suddenly imbued with meaning, redolent of their past and precious to them. Every door handle and window-pane and cupboard. Every book and curtain and step on the stairs. The mirror in the hall and the clock and the blue ribbon teapot, all seemed to hold the life of their family within every atom, to be infinitely more than household objects made of wood and glass and metal and china and paint. Every touch and footstep, the echo of every word spoken, was part of the fabric and substance of the house. At night they lay and wrapped it round themselves and held it to them.
    They were possessive, passionate and jealous of it and everything it contained. The feeling they had for it was as strong and vital as their love for their father and the memory of their mother. They were shocked by the power of it.
    They could not say that they liked Leila Crocker. They could not say that they disliked her.
    ‘Her hair is very tightly permed,’ Kay said.
    ‘But her shoes are good.’
    At the department store during one lunch hour Kay had suddenly told the other fitter about it. Anne McKay’s hirsute face had lit up.
    ‘Oh, Kay, that is so very nice! Isn’t that nice for him? I think that’s lovely.’
    What is ‘lovely’? Kay thought, panicking. I have told her that he brought a woman to tea. Her face betrayed her terror. Anne McKay reached out and touched her arm. They were seated in the old broken-down basket chairs in the dusty little staffroom.
    ‘I meant how lovely for him to have some companionship. I know you miss your mother, of course you do, but life has to move on.’
    Does it? Why does it? Why can it not stay as it is? Kay took a bite from her sandwich but could not swallow it.
    ‘You won’t be at home for ever, will you? Either of you.’
    Won’t we? Why not? Why should we ever leave? Who could make us?
    Kay jumped up, and went to the cloakroom and there spat the piece of sandwich violently into the lavatory basin.
    ‘I suppose,’ Nita said, hearing about it later, ‘that companionship is important.’
    ‘He has us. He isn’t alone.’
    ‘We should try to be fair.’
    ‘What is “unfair”?’
    ‘We are – well, isn’t it quite different?’
    ‘From what?’
    ‘I mean, it is just a different kind of companionship – friendship. Of course it is, Kay.’
    But what the nature of the friendship or companionship was they could not have said.
    It had been raining for almost a week, but now, as they walked the last hundred yards down the avenue, the sun came out and shone in their faces and reflected watery gold on the wet pavement and the house roof.
    ‘We must try to be fair,’ Nita said again.
    They quickened their steps.
    But the house was empty, as it was empty every evening for the next week, and after that, it seemed, was never empty again. It was the speed of it all that horrified them, the speed which was, Kay said, unnecessary and unseemly.
    ‘And rather hurtful.’
    But their father was now oblivious to everything except the woman he was to marry. For he would marry Leila Crocker, he said, telling them, with neither warning nor ceremony, the next time he spent an evening at home with them.
    ‘I should like you to know,’ he had said, laying down his soup spoon, ‘that I have asked Leila to be my wife.’
    The room went deathly silent and, it seemed to Kay and Nita, deathly cold. A chill mist seemed to creep in under the door and the window frame, curling itself round them so that they actually shivered. They could not look at him or at one another. They could do nothing.
    ‘I have found a very dear companion, a very fine person with whom to share the rest of my life. Your mother – her illness and her death – were – very difficult. I had not imagined – of course you hardly know Leila, but you will come to know her, and to love and admire her, I am quite certain of it. Quite certain.’
    He beamed innocently from one to the other.
    ‘This is going to