‘I can’t say I know,’ the man said quietly, rubbing his finger up and down on the flat of the jaw.
‘You have to know.’
‘Well, I haven’t, because I don’t.’
The sea-green eyes widened. ‘Mart May?’ There was a strange awe in the boy’s voice. ‘Can you not spell?’
‘I cannot.’
‘Can you not write?’
‘I cannot.’
The boy struggled for several seconds with this astonishing, unprecedented truth.
‘Can you not – read?’
Mart May stood his ground and held his gaze. ‘No,’ he said calmly, ‘I cannot.’
The boy let out a soft slow breath, a sigh of wonder through pursed lips. ‘I think it would be good,’ he said at last, ‘if you learned.’
Mart May laughed, discomforted. ‘You think I should go back to school, then?’
‘Oh no.’ The boy did not laugh. ‘I shall teach you.’ A week passed. Every day, the boy waited, carrying two books and two pencils, and every day Mart May was busy. Seeing the books and pencils made him sweat. The old anxieties which he had thought long dead pulsed in the pit of his stomach. He hid, found jobs in distant outbuildings and fields, but always the boy discovered him, as if by some magic sense, and materialised behind or beside him with the two books, the two pencils.
The sullen weather pressed in. The sun was sulphurous. The leaves hung heavy. The bees fumed.
‘We should start,’ the boy said, sliding into the tack room. Behind his small pale figure the clouds were gathering, curdled, inky. Mart May had switched on the light, a single bulb strung to the beam above.
He was plaiting onions.
‘Your aunt doesn’t pay me to look at picture books.’
The boy had pulled a stool up to the workbench under the dirty window. The two books and two pencils were set between them.
Panic flustered the man. Words bubbled up, excuses, fears, but remained foaming in his mouth.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. The boy opened the books. At once, black letters danced malignly before Mart May’s eyes, evil, spiked, terrifying marks, blurring together, separating, making his head sore. He began to breathe too quickly.
‘First we find the letters of your name. M.’ The boy pointed. Mart May stared as the marks swerved, leaned, straightened themselves again.
‘M.’
Under the boy’s small finger, the marks became still. The nail was like a shell, the blood flushed rose-pink beneath it.
‘Now you find “M”.’
The rain began, single drops plashing fatly onto the roof. Thunder grumbled.
The boy’s neck and ears were like doeskin.
Slowly Mart May set his own thick, dirty forefinger on the page and moved it along between the forest of letters. The boy watched.
‘M.’ The finger swatted the fly-black letter, crushing it.
‘Good.’
Mart May felt a flush of pleasure swell in him.
‘A is the next. “M-A”,’ and the small finger set off again moving confidently over the paper. It rested on a letter like a tripod.
The shed was livid with lightning, and the roof erupted under the battering of the rain.
Every day he returned, carrying the two books, the two pencils and every day Mart May could do no other than sit down somewhere – up to the bench, in the attic, on the window ledge, on the mounting block – and follow the small finger, stumbling his way along the black trails. After that the boy made him write the letters he had read. His small pale face was intent, his body willing Mart May on.
The summer days flamed into one another without rain after the single storm which had not lightened the air. In the still clammy nights the black letters took on life, crackled and became barbed wire, sharp with some terrible inner electricity zapping through Mart May’s dreams.
Relentlessly each morning and afternoon, the boy slid up beside him.
‘M-A-R-T M-A-Y.’
The man wrote line after line of penance, detained in the shed, the tack room, the hot attic.
‘M-A-R-T M-A-Y. M-A-R-T M-A-Y.’
‘You can do it. You can. Tomorrow I’m going to teach you my name.’
But on that next day, for the first time in nine years, the man did not go to work. His head was stabbed with black spikes. For a week he did not go. He was exhausted by a fear within him which formed itself into a dread of seeing the boy.
He sat in the dim kitchen. The light from the small panes filtered through the plants that filled the window ledge and clambered up from the flower bed outside. The room smelled permanently, faintly, of cat. He slept half the day, but the dreams had eased. The black letters became velvet and fur, blurred and softened at the edges.
At last, he woke to rain, soft veils of it blotting out the colour from the sky. He took his bicycle from the lean-to and rode to the bees.
It was as though he had slept for a year and woken in shame to see what he had neglected. For the four days he worked until late into the evening, as if to do penance. He felt changed, older, was uncomfortable inside his own skin, uncertain where he had always known certainty.
Late on the fourth afternoon, coming into the tack room, he saw that the catch was off on the door of the wall cupboard. It swung open to his touch. The silver tin with the worn blue letters was at the front. He lifted it down, opened it, took out a mint, and, as the fumes of it caught his throat, he had a sudden sharp sense of loss and emptiness. The boy had not appeared once since his return.
Three more days passed, during which Mart May felt restless, missing the quiet, pale figure at his elbow. He wanted to ask about him, but did not, only worked on at this job or that, until gradually he was no longer so alert for the sudden appearances. Days were like the old days again and beginning to shorten. The bees were still and close. The evenings and nights were cool.
He should have been settled in himself as the year slipped down, his old self, but he lacked something and there was always an edge to his mood, a frustration. He had unfinished business.
He spoke sometimes to the bees.
In the middle of an afternoon he finished repairing the hinge on the gate into the sunken garden, swung it to and fro to see that it ran smooth, and then, as if hearing a click in his head, at the same time as the latch clicked shut he knew what he should do.
In the shed, at the back of the shelf, he found the tin of paint and the brush. In the tack-room cupboard, he found the tin. He emptied the sweets onto the bench.
He hadn’t forgotten. The boy had made sure, teaching him slowly, going over and over it until he was certain that Mart May knew. If he had been afraid that he would not remember, the moment he held the full paintbrush over the tin, he knew that he was all right; he could see the letters, clear as lights in the sky. Slowly he began to copy them from the pictures in his head onto the tin.
M-A-R-T M-A-Y.
That night he slept without dreaming, without stirring.
After that he saw the letters everywhere, but now he was dissatisfied, hungry to learn the next, to piece all the black spikes together until they gave up their secrets.
Once or twice he bought a newspaper or a magazine and spent his lunch break picking out his own letters like individual thorns in a bramble bush. Once he saw his own name, M-A-Y, surrounded by other unknown marks, and seethed with frustration. He needed to know. He needed the boy.
He did not reappear until late the following spring. One afternoon, there were shouts from the far end of the garden; the next, the crunch of bicycle wheels on the gravel paths. Then, on his way from the beehives, he saw them – the boy, and another boy, shorter, darker. They were attaching an old apple crate to one of the bicycles with twine.
‘You want wheels on that.’
They both looked up. Mart May saw the cloud-grey eyes with their skein of green for an instant, before the boy bent his head again.
The twine was tied and knotted. The box bumped and 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 his neck. ‘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 how to deal with – and even, in a way, resented. And so they fussed over him, his refusal to eat, his red eyes, the flesh withering on his frame; they took him endless cups of tea, coffee, hot water with lemon, but otherwise could not face his anguished, embarrassing love, and the fear on his face, his openness to grief.
The end was agony, though perhaps it was more so for them, for their mother seemed unaware of it all now. She had slipped down out of reach.
It lasted for hours. There was a false alarm. The doctor came. Next she rallied, and even seemed about to wake briefly, before drowning again.
They had both gone to sleep, Nita on the sewing-room sofa under a quilt, Kay in the kitchen rocking chair, slumped awkwardly across her arm. But some change woke them and they both went into the hall, looking at one another in terror, scarcely believing, icy calm. They went up the stairs without speaking.
Afterwards, and for the rest of their lives, the picture was branded on their minds and the branding marks became deeper and darker and more ineradicable with everything that happened. So that what might have been a tender, fading memory became a bitter scar. Their father was kneeling beside the bed. He had her hand between both of his and clutched to his breast, and his tears were splashing down onto it and running over it. Every few minutes a groan came from him, a harsh, raw sound which appalled them.
The lamp was on, tipped away from her face and the golden-yellow curtains she had chosen for their cheerful brightness during the day were now dull topaz. The bedside table was a litter of bottles and pots of medicines.
Her breathing was hoarse, as if her chest was a gravel bed through which water was trying to strain. Now and then it heaved up and collapsed down again. But the rest of her body was almost flat to the bed, almost a part of it. She was so thin, the bedclothes were scarcely lifted.
Nita felt for Kay’s hand and pressed until it hurt, though neither of them was aware of it. Their father was still bent over the figure on the bed, still holding, holding on.
And then, shocking them, everything stopped. There was a rasping breath, and after it, nothing, simply nothing at all, and the world stopped turning and waited, though what was being waited for they could not have told.
That split second fell like a drop of balm in the tumult of her dying and their distress, so that long afterwards each of them would try to recall it for comfort. But almost at once it was driven out by the cataract of grief and rage that poured from their father. The bellow of pain that horrified them so that in the end they fled down to the sitting room, and held each other and wept, but quietly, and with a restraint and dignity that was shared and unspoken.
There was to be a funeral tea, though not many would come. She had outlived most of her relatives and had needed few friends, their family unit had been so tight, yielding her all she had wanted.
But those who did come must be properly entertained.
Nita and Kay arrived back before the rest to prepare, though the work had been done by Mrs Willis and her daughter.
The hall was cool. Nita, standing in front of the mirror to take off her hat and tidy her hair, caught her sister’s eye. They were exhausted. The whole day, like the whole week, seemed unreal, something they had floated through. Their father had wept uncontrollably in the church, and at the graveside bent forward so far, as the coffin was lowered, that they had half-feared he was about to pitch himself in after it.
Behind Nita, Kay’s face was pinched, the eye sockets bruise-coloured. There was everything to say. There was nothing to say. The clock ticked.
She will never hear it tick again, Nita thought.
For a second, then, the truth found an entrance and a response, but there was no time, the cars had re
turned, there were footsteps on the path, voices. The truth retreated again.
They turned, faces composed. Nita opened the door.
Every day for the next six months they thought that he would die too. If he did not, it was not any will to live that prevented it. He scarcely ate. He saw no one. He scarcely spoke. He had always been interested in money, money was his work, his hobby, his passion. Now, the newspapers lay unopened, bank letters and packets of company reports gathered dust. For much of the time he sat in the drawing room opposite his wife’s chair. Often he wept. Whenever he could persuade Nita or Kay to sit with him he talked about their mother. Within the half-year she had achieved sainthood and become perfect in the memory, every detail about her sacred, every aspect of their marriage without flaw.
‘I miss her,’ Kay said, one evening in October. They were in the kitchen, tidying round, putting away, laying the table for breakfast.
Nita sat down abruptly. The kitchen went silent. It had been said. Somehow, until now, they had not dared.
‘Yes.’
‘I miss laughing with her over the old photographs, I miss watching her embroider. Her hands.’
‘People don’t now, do they? There used to be all those little shops for silks and threads and transfers.’
They thought of her sewing box, in the drawing room by the French windows, and the last, intricate piece, unfinished on the round wood frame.
‘Things will never be the same, Kay.’
‘But they will get better. Surely they’ll get better.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Perhaps – we ought at least to start looking at some of the things.’
The sewing box, her desk, the drawers and wardrobe in her bedroom. Clothes, earrings, hair-brushes, letters, embroidery silks were spread out for inspection in their minds.
‘You read about people quarrelling with their mothers.’
‘We never quarrelled.’
‘You couldn’t.’
‘You read about it being the natural way of things.’
‘Quarrelling is not obligatory.’
They caught one another’s eye and Nita laughed. The laughter grew, and took them gradually over; they laughed until they cried, and sat back exhausted, muscles aching, and the laughter broke something, some seal that had been put on life to keep it down.