Laurie King - The God of the Hive

“I like to sing.”

“I thought you might. Do you want to sing something for me?”

She happily launched into a merry song with Chinese words. Despite the foreign tonality of the melody, her voice was pure and precise, skipping up the half tones without missing a one. At the end, Goodman clapped in an explosion of flour. I joined him, although the impact reverberated through my skull.

“Ha!” he laughed. “That was very fine. You must teach it to me one day.”

“You sing now,” she ordered.

Perhaps the task at hand or the demands of the kneading rhythm brought the song to mind: Goodman threw back his head and, in a rich and unexpected baritone, began to sing.

There were three men came from the west their fortunes for to try,

And these three made a solemn vow, John Barleycorn must die .

I stirred and tried to catch his eye, but he was well launched into the song and beat his bread dough with gusto. I subsided; surely the child was too young to understand the words?

It is a rousing tune, to be sure, and he did skip over the more adult verses-it is a very old song, and whether it is a paean to fertility sacrifice, an evocation of Christian Transubstantiation, or simply a drinking song, John Barleycorn is put through the wringer-hacked, beaten, ploughed, sowed, and buried-before he is reborn as beer, and finally sprouts up anew. Goodman sang and thumped his bread, raising a fine mist of flour in the room.

To my relief, when the song ended, Estelle did not enquire into the significance of the words. She merely demanded another. Goodman started “Frère Jacques.” Instantly, she joined him. In French to his English, the high child’s voice and the man’s baritone wound around each other, creating sweet harmony from an unlikely cottage in a Lake District clearing.

During the afternoon, he juggled for her, four round oak galls, then threw himself into a game of hide-and-seek that had us both grinning with Estelle’s infectious giggles. Later, they went out to fetch the day’s eggs from the hen-house, stopping on the way to examine a flower of some kind.

“Let Nature be your teacher,” Goodman said-or rather, pronounced.

“I don’t go to school yet,” Estelle told him.

“It is never too early to have a teacher. Or too late,” he said, with a note of surprise.

“How is Nature a teacher? Does she stand in front of a classroom with a stick?”

“I believe Mr Wordsworth merely meant that we can learn much from the world around us.”

“Is Mr Wordsworth a friend of yours?”

“We have many friends in common, Mr Wordsworth and I. Such as the hedgehog you shall see this evening.”

Their voices trailed off then, in the direction of the hen-house.

Dusk. The mouth-watering odour of baking wheat permeated the universe, and although I had been up and around, I was again on the settee in front of the fire. Estelle and Goodman were seated side by side in the open doorway, waiting for a hedgehog to emerge after a saucer of milk. Every so often he reared back his head to look at her; he seemed fascinated by the shape of her eyes.

“There it is!” Estelle squeaked.

“Shh, don’t frighten him. Not to worry, he’ll come back in a minute. See, there’s his nose, sniffing to make certain the world is safe.”

“We won’t hurt it.”

“Hedgehogs are shy.”

“What does shy mean?”

“Shy is when a person is frightened of many things.”

“I’m shy.”

“Ha! I don’t think that’s so.”

“I’m frightened of aeroplanes.”

“That only makes you sensible.”

“I’m afraid of our neighbour’s dog. It’s big.”

“That’s probably sensible, too.”

“Are you scared of anything, Mr Robert?”

“Look, he’s finished the milk and is looking around for more. Greedy thing.”

“Shall we give him more?”

“No, we don’t want him to forget how to find his own food. Milk is a treat, not dinner.”

“What do hedgehogs eat?”

“Roots. Grubs.”

“Ew.”

“Carrots are roots. You ate those.”

“Because Mama says I have to be polite and eat what I’m given.”

“You don’t like carrots? Then I won’t serve them again.”

“But I don’t eat grubs.”

“True. But a hedgehog likes them. He would probably say ew if you offered him a chocolate biscuit.”

“Let’s try!”

“Ah, the scientific approach. No, I don’t wish to introduce him to the taste of chocolate. What if I’m wrong and he likes it, and that one morsel condemns the poor creature to spend the rest of his life in unrequited longing for the taste of chocolate?”

“You talk funny, Mr Robert.”

“People before you have told me that.”

“So, are you frightened of anything?”

“Logic and persistence-I fear you will go far in this world, Estelle Adler.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

He sighed. “Fear,” he said, and turned to look down at the child by his side. “I am afraid of fear.”

Then he jumped to his feet. “If you can say the word pipistrelle , I will take you to watch the bats come out.”

Evening, and I might have curled up to sleep fully clothed except it had occurred to me that children required putting to bed. Estelle and Goodman were in front of the fire, he on the floor with Damian’s sketch-book on his knee, she stretched with her belly across the tree-round he used for a foot-stool, narrating the drawings for him. I had found the book in my rucksack, astonished that it had survived this far, and leafed through its pages before I gave it to her, making sure it contained none of his detailed nudes or violent battle scenes. Some of the drawings I had found mildly troubling, but doubted a small child would notice.

“That’s Papa,” she said. “His face doesn’t look like that, much.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Goodman replied, and I had to smile: Damian’s self-portrait might have been an interspecies breeding experiment, his face oddly canine down to the suggestion of fur.

“And that’s Mama,” she said.

“She’s very pretty.” I must tell him about Estelle’s mother , I thought. Tomorrow .

“Papa says I have her hair.”

“Doesn’t she miss it?” he asked.

It took her a second to understand the joke. Then she giggled and called him silly, explaining that her Mama had her own hair, of course!

A vivid picture of that heavy black hair spilling over a cold slab flashed before my eyes; I shuddered.

The sound of a page turning, and then silence. I knew what sketch they were looking at, since I had lingered over it myself.

Estelle, yet not Estelle. In this portrait, Damian was looking forward through time to put an adult shape on his small daughter’s face. One might have thought it was Yolanda, from the clear Chinese cast to the features, but no one who knew Holmes could possibly mistake the imperious gaze from those grey eyes.

“I think that’s Mama,” the child said, sounding none too certain.

“No, it’s you,” Goodman said.

“I don’t look like that.”

“You will. Your Papa thinks you will.”

She leant forward, her nose near to touching the page.

“He loves you very much,” Goodman said.

“I love him, too. Mr Robert, is Papa all right?”

“Yes.” Goodman’s voice was absolutely certain, and my fingers twitched with the impulse to make a gesture against the evil eye.

Estelle did not respond, not immediately. Instead, a minute later I heard her feet cross the room, and opened my eyes to find her standing beside me, the sketch-book in her hand. “Can you take this out for me?” she asked.