The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read by Susan Hill

and fluff matted to it. It had been for weeks in her pocket.
    ‘Yes!’
    His face went bland and soft with pleasure, as his tongue folded round the sweet. She had not been ready for his questioning. Her own anxiety was too much upon her, like a shadow fallen. No one in their family went sixteen miles to see Doctor Hennessy, for just nothing. The last time she had been taken, it was to have him lance a boil between her shoulderblades, that would not be drawn even with the hottest poultice, and had kept her sitting up, and crying with pain, for three nights. Even then, they had gone there on the bus, with every jolt and jar an agony. Da would not take time off to drive them in the truck.
    The sun shone hard in their faces, and the sky was muzzed with the heat. Even days like this were long remembered and talked about, but to have weeks of sun, without the familiar, soft grey veils of rain, drifting over them from the hills, gave her a feeling of strangeness in itself.
    After Christmas, she would be twelve. Thinking of that troubled her, she wanted to clutch at everything familiar and hold it to her. But the heat and drynesswere not familiar, and now, there was this new anxiety.
    Yet the house, when they went in through the back door, seemed the same, and its smell was a comfort. There was the jug of cold tea on the table beside the loaf, and a ticking silence about the place.
    ‘Elizabeth? You come and help me now, would you be good?’
    She was picking the beans that hung down, heavy, from the row of canes. Elizabeth pushed her way through the ropy tangle of stems to the inside of them, where the light was undersea green. She dropped the picked beans into her lifted skirt. The leaves smelled bitter. She felt Ma’s presence on the other side of the green curtain, saw the faded patch of her skirt; she could have reached out and touched her. She crouched down, and this, too, was childhood – being small among the beans. This smell.
    ‘They say it’s not been so hot for a hundred years.’
    ‘They do.’
    ‘We saw Minchy Fagin, by the pumps.’
    Silence. But there had been a fraction’s pause in the picking.
    Elizabeth crawled out from under the canes,holding up her laden skirt. Ma stood lower down the row. Her hands were still on the beans, her eyes far away. It seemed important not to interrupt. But in the moment of looking, Elizabeth had a flash of insight, like a vision, and in it, she understood what it was to be poor, and hard-worked, with rough hands and no time to yourself, and that her mother had long ago accepted what marriage to Da had brought her to, and yet still gave in to her flickerings of longing. Da was sour-tempered and grudging and his belly hung over his trousers, and he never wore a collar to his shirt, which grieved his wife.
    Elizabeth crept quietly forward to slide the beans into the waiting colander.
    ‘Elizabeth.’ Her mother spoke softly.
    Her heart jerked. She sensed she was to be told a secret, something that would be intimate between them, and for a few seconds, but which felt like a time out of all time, the secret was suspended there between them, tangible, knowable, shared, but not yet given the form of words. There was an absolute afternoon stillness, among the canes and the greenness.
    ‘Have you to do any homework?’ Her motherturned away, breaking the invisible thread, evading her eye, and Elizabeth felt herself pushed back again into childhood.
    All over the fence and the broken-down wall, the nasturtiums blazed.
    She liked it best in winter, with early dark, and the wood fire on, and she and her mother and Milo at the table. But that was unimaginable now; winter was a fairy story. They sat out on the back step, and the air was full of midges and cruising wasps, and Milo was off down to the brook. Da would not be back until dark.
    Thoughts danced like moths in Elizabeth’s head.
    ‘You should travel to other countries, in your years to come. There’s a world beyond yourself you