The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read: And Other Stories

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Susan Hill

  Dedication

  Title Page

  The boy who taught the beekeeper to read

  Father, Father

  Need

  The punishment

  Moving messages

  Sand

  Elizabeth

  The brooch

  Antonyin’s

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘Hill can evoke a setting, convey the essence of a situation and let one see into the inmost hearts of her characters in a paragraph or even a single sentence’ Francis King, Spectator

  A young schoolboy visiting his aunt's country home finds company and friendship with the gentle beekeeper and begins teaching the man to read, so that it seems nothing can ever intrude upon their closeness. A young country girl fights against becoming a downtrodden domestic skivvy like her dead mother, while another young girl reaches a delicate understanding with an elderly blind man as they walk along the beach together. On another beach a more sinister plot unfolds as a gang of boys plans a most wicked deed.

  ‘Hill's sentences speak eloquently ... the pleasure to be had from [these] stories lies in their carefulness: memories are exactly sustained, small gifts are valued, little words are listened to’ Guardian

  ‘Hill's stories evoke place, situation and complex emotions with enviable economy ... Masterly’ Daily Mail

  ‘Simple and mesmeric prose’ Observer

  ‘These very strange, beautiful tales demonstrate a relentless capacity to surprise ... The Boy Who Taught The Beekeeper To Read introduces many individual people who will continue to stare back at the reader long after the book is closed’ Times Literary Supplement

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Susan Hill's novels and short stories have won the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham and John Llewellyn Rhys awards and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is the author of over forty books, including the five Serrailler crime novels, The Various Haunts of Men, The Pure in Heart, The Risk of Darkness, The Vows of Silence and The Shadows in the Street. Her most recent novel is A Kind Man. The play adapted from her famous ghost story, The Woman in Black, has been running on the West End stage since 1989.

  Susan Hill was born in Scarborough and educated at King's College London. She is married to the Shakespeare scholar, Stanley Wells, and they have two daughters. She lives in Gloucestershire, where she runs her own small publishing company, Long Barn Books.

  Susan Hill's website is www.susan-hill.com.

  ALSO BY SUSAN HILL

  Featuring Simon Serrailler

  The Various Haunts of Men

  The Pure in Heart

  The Risk of Darkness

  The Vows of Silence

  The Shadows in the Street

  Fiction

  Gentlemen and Ladies

  A Change for the Better

  I’m the King of the Castle

  The Albatross and Other Stories

  Strange Meeting

  The Bird of Night

  A Bit of Singing and Dancing

  In the Springtime of the Year

  The Woman in Black

  Mrs de Winter

  The Mist in the Mirror

  Air and Angels

  The Service of Clouds

  The Man in the Picture

  The Beacon

  The Small Hand

  A Kind Man

  Non-Fiction

  The Magic Apple Tree

  Family

  Howards End is on the Landing

  Children’s Books

  The Battle for Gullywith

  The Glass Angels

  Can It Be True?

  To Vivien Green

  Best of Agents

  Susan Hill

  THE BOY WHO

  TAUGHT THE

  BEEKEEPER

  TO READ

  The boy who taught the beekeeper to read

  The boy who taught the beekeeper to read

  ‘What are you doing?’

  There might be a boldness in the boy’s voice but there was fear in his heart too and the boldness hardly concealed it. Mart May could tell.

  He had emerged out of the shimmering white gold of the mid-afternoon high summer garden into the deep green cool, a thin boy with arms and legs as greenish pale as peeled twigs, pale hair; but he stood his ground, once upon it, which Mart admired.

  ‘Listen,’ he said.

  The small boy stared.

  ‘Go on – you listen.’

  They both stood quite still, the man in the strange helmet and ghostly garment and the stick-limbed boy. There was no movement of air among the dark heavy August leaves, so that the vibrating in the branches of the oak tree above them was clearly heard, like the sweet music of comb and paper.

  ‘What is singing?’

  ‘The swarm.’

  ‘Oh.’

  After a moment Mart May said, ‘You visiting?’

  ‘I came last night. It was dark.’

  ‘On holiday then.’

  The boy seemed to consider it, but in the end did not reply.

  Mart May bunched the ankles of the billowing white suit into bicycle clips. The boy went on watching.

  ‘You could hold the ladder,’ Mart said, ‘see I don’t come a purler.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘A purler? Where’ve you been all your life?’

  ‘In Scotland and London and Kent and France and London.’ He ticked the places off.

  Something about the careful answer, and about the seriousness of the pale boy’s pale face touched Mart May at a level he scarcely knew in himself. He felt it as a swift sharp twisting sensation in his throat.

  The boy wore long shorts, almost to the knee, and a cotton shirt with a neat collar.

  ‘A purler,’ Mart May said at last, ‘is a tumble-fall. I don’t want to climb that tree and have the ladder slip.’

  ‘What would you have done if I hadn’t come?’

  ‘Mind out for myself like I always do.’

  ‘Why are you going up the ladder?’

  ‘To take the swarm.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Back to the hive where they ought to be.’

  ‘Are they your bees?’

  ‘They say a swarm belongs to you until it’s out of sight and then it’s anybody’s. They’re her ladyship’s bees. I look after them.’

  He lifted the ladder and propped it against the tree directly below the widest spreading branch. The boy waited until it was wedged in place and then came forward and put his hands on either side. Mart May climbed delicately, effortlessly; the swarm of bees was taken into the cotton bag and carried like burglary swag down to the ground and across the clearing on the far side of the glade. The boy followed, silent, watching, his green-white body a small ghost behind the voluminous billowing beekeeper.

  ‘What will happen now?’

  ‘They’ll settle down. Takes a while.’

  ‘They didn’t sting you.’

  ‘Their bellies were full. When they’re that way they can’t bend themselves to sting.’

  ‘Why did you wear your covering-up thing?’

  ‘Best be on the safe side.’

  ‘When do they sting you?’

  ‘When something upsets them.’

  ‘What will upset them?’

  ‘This and that. Losing their queen. People getting in their path. Thunder.’

  Mart May the man began to emerge from the suit like a grub from a chrysalis. He folded the discarded whit
e husk and set the helmet on top. A low soft hum came from the beehive.

  The boy stood in the underwater light of the clearing. Beyond, the shimmering garden. Mart May opened his mouth to ask his name but the boy slipped through the hair crack between the forming of the words and their speaking and was gone, absorbed into the sunlight, leaving the bee man heavy among the shadows.

  The hot weather settled in. The garden was drenched with butterflies and the petals floating off the last of the roses. Behind the garden the house remained half-shuttered the whole of each day. When Mart May was sent for to smoke out a wasp’s nest in the attics he made his way through ocean depths of corridor, but the attic was hot as a boiler room and baking in the sun. Long-dead spiders were caught, transparent in dirty webs.

  ‘What are you doing?’ The boy watched him emerging silently as if through the wall.

  ‘Smoking out the jaspers.’

  For the first time he laughed. ‘Jaspers.’

  ‘Wasps to you, then. And if bees won’t go for you, these will. You steer clear.’

  ‘I’m not afraid.’

  ‘Well, I am afraid for my job if I let them pepper you.’

  Mart May waited for the boy to move to the farthest end of the baking attic before pumping out the smoke.

  Like a white moth the boy pressed himself against the wall and watched.

  ‘Now we scram,’ Mart May said after a moment.

  They stood on the landing outside letting their eyes adjust to the dimness.

  ‘I thought you were the bee man.’

  ‘So I am, and a lot else besides.’

  ‘Wasp man.’

  ‘Window cleaner, guttering clearer, rabbit popper, boiler stoker, pigeon shooter, rat catcher, molehill flattener, leaf sweeper and a few I’ve forgotten for now.’

  ‘My mother is dead so I came here.’

  The dust surrounding them on the landing stopped seething, like the stopping of a clock.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Mart May.’

  He was gone again, quicksilver down the steep dark stairs. Mart stood, hearing the faint far-off closing of a door, and then the silence again, like felt in his ears.

  After that, they met several times a week, the boy materialising wherever Mart May happened to be working, so that it seemed he had been waiting, following.

  The name, he said, was James Burnett. But he was never anything to Mart but ‘the boy’.

  ‘My father is working in a dangerous country. I’m not allowed to go.’

  ‘Well you’re safe enough here if you steer clear of jaspers and don’t fall in the pond.’

  ‘I can swim.’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘If I drowned, would you lose your job?’

  ‘Very like.’

  ‘Likely.’ His voice was clear as a flute, and prim as a girl’s.

  ‘What, you being my schoolmarm now? You’d have a job on.’

  Mart May was scraping the last of the honey from the combs. The boy, as always, watching, watching. Close up, even his eyelashes were pale, feathers above cloud-grey eyes.

  ‘You like this?’ He held out the comb. ‘Make your hair curl.’

  ‘That’s bread crusts. My father won’t come home for at least a year.’

  ‘He won’t know you then.’

  The cloud eyes flickered with alarm.

  ‘All that bread crust and honey’ll have made your hair gone curlified.’

  ‘Curlified.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘How do you spell “curlified”?’

  Mart May rested the cleaned comb on the tray. In the lance of sunlight falling between the leaves, the gnats danced.

  ‘Her ladyship would be your grandmother then?’ he said at last.

  ‘No, my aunt. Don’t you know?’

  ‘I do now. You’ve told me.’

  ‘Not that. Don’t you know how to spell “curlified”?’

  ‘No,’ Mart May said, walking away, ‘I don’t.’

  When he glanced round the boy had gone.

  He did not appear again for three days. The weather turned warm and sultry, there was no air, no stirring of the leaves. The bees teemed inside the hives, restless, pent-up, sullen.

  Once or twice Mart May caught sight of Lady Burnett walking slowly along the gravel path, pulling off the dead heads of a late rose here and there, probing the dahlias with her stick. She kept aware. Hayes the gardener dealt with her, took the orders, heard the complaints. She never came into the glade, though occasionally when he was doing some job about the house she came upon him, and always spoke. Polite, haughty.

  ‘What’s that?’

  The boy slipped into sight from behind the old stables. Mart May was sitting astride the old mounting block.

  ‘A blade. It got warped – see –?’ He held out the bent metal.

  ‘Can you flatten it?’

  ‘Should do.’

  There had not been horses here for years. The stables were used for storage, but the tack-room was Mart May’s, where he brewed tea, ate his sandwiches, had an old radio.

  ‘I saw a lot of jaspers, going in and out of a hole.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘By the tomato greenhouse.’

  ‘Right. We’ll go along in a bit and do for ’em.’

  ‘Do for ’em.’

  ‘And don’t you ever go poking into their nests with a stick or such.’

  ‘Would they turn nasty?’

  ‘Mad as mad. You leave them to me. Just report back.’

  ‘Report back.’

  ‘Little Sir Echo.’

  ‘I like the things you say and how you say them. I like to say them as well.’

  Mart May held out the blade. ‘Nearly there.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘Hacksaw.’

  The boy swung the tack-room door gently to and fro.

  ‘You see in there – the old cupboard on the wall?’

  ‘“First Aid”,’ the boy read. ‘The letters are nearly worn off.’

  ‘The one with the cross on. Open it and you’ll find a tin.’

  ‘There are quite a few tins.’

  ‘A tin with some writing.’

  ‘Does it say “National Dried Milk”?’

  ‘A silver tin.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Open it. If it’s got mints in it does.’

  ‘Oh –’

  ‘Have one. Keep your mouth watered.’

  ‘You must like mints a lot. Mint toffees. Mintoes. Mint humbugs. Mint Imperials. Extra Strong Mints.’ The boy ferreted about amongst the cellophane.

  ‘You can get me out an Imperial, if you please.’

  They sat, Mart May on the block, the boy on the broken-backed chair, turning the sweets around and around in their mouths.

  The late swallows skimmed low into the doorway of the end stable and out again.

  ‘Pity you don’t have a pal to play with. Bit lonely, here with the old people.’

  ‘I haven’t got a pal.’

  ‘Must have.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’d better get looking.’

  ‘I’m going to a new school.’

  ‘You’ll get pals there then.’

  ‘Will I?’

  Mart May looked up. The boy’s pale face was troubled.

  ‘You’ll be bringing ’em here soon enough, plaguing me, going off to their places, plaguing.’

  ‘Plaguing.’

  ‘Still, bit of life about the place is a good thing.’

  ‘Were there horses?’

  ‘Long before I got here.’

  ‘When did you get here?’

  ‘Fifteen-sixteen year. Right.’ He swung himself off the block, holding the blade.

  ‘Can I have another mint?’

  ‘And put the tin back after.’

  ‘Is it your tin?’

  ‘It is now.’

  ‘You should have your name on it, then. Mart May. At school
you have to have your name on everything, every single thing.’

  ‘School’s a nest of thieves, then, is it?’

  ‘“A nest of thieves”. Why a nest?’

  Mart May walked off, slowly, carrying the blade. ‘You,’ he said, ‘make my head buzz.’

  The boy made a boil in his cheek with the mint and put the tin back in the cupboard.

  Mart May was in the toolshed fitting the blade into the hacksaw.

  ‘If you had a brush and some paint I could do it for you.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Paint your name on the tin.’

  ‘Get on, there’s no thieves here.’

  The boy rubbed the toe of his sandal to and fro in the dry earth, making it fly up like sand. Mart May laughed. ‘I suppose if I don’t let you you’ll burst open.’

  ‘I will paint your name on the tin and on the cupboard and on the door and on this door.’

  ‘You’ll not, these belong to her ladyship. Just the tin. There’s some old paint back of that shelf if it isn’t all dried up.’

  The boy had seemed odd, solemn, quiet, pale, not like any boy he’d ever encountered, but now, clambering down with the paint tin and beetling off across the yard, he was changed, excited, full of what he was doing. Ordinary, Mart May thought. Normal. He wants to be normal. Just wanted the chance, he thought.

  He had no children.

  He bent his head and back to sawing.

  After a couple of minutes the boy was back at his elbow. ‘Is it M-A-Y or M-E-Y?’

  The saw froze. Mart May looked at the golden dust in soft heaps at his feet.

  ‘Mart May? Which is it?’

  He looked straight into the boy’s sea-green eyes. Saw a fleck of green, there, like a wand drawn across.

  The boy waited.