Laurie King - The Language of Bees

Holmes set his empty cup on the table. “You've been in the East,” he said. “ Hong Kong?”

“Shanghai. How …?”

“The cut of your trousers, the silk of the cravat, the colour in that tattoo. How long have you been there?”

“Years.” He took out an enamelled cigarette case and a box of vestas: If he was anything like his father, tobacco signalled a lengthy tale.

The match flared and was pulled into the tobacco, then he shook it out and dropped it in the saucer.

“You remember meeting Hélène?” he asked us.

“Mme Longchamps, yes. The gallery owner.”

“She was a great deal more than that. She was my saviour. She died, just after Christmas 1919. I was… I had been going through a bad time. They ran in a kind of cycle, the bad times did, usually lasting two or three months before I grew sufficiently disgusted with myself to crawl back and let her nurse me to health. I no doubt contributed to her death-she was ill, with the influenza, but when I sent her a message to say I wanted to come home, she nonetheless got into a taxi and came to get me. A week later, I was sober and she was dead.

“I stayed for her funeral, and then I simply walked away. I knew that if I remained in Paris, I wouldn't last the year. And although a part of me felt that might be for the best, to remove my sorry self from the world, at the same time I felt I owed Hélène a life. So I saw her into the ground and then I turned and walked across town to the Gare de Lyon, and boarded a train for Marseilles.

“The sort of ship that will take on a man with neither suitcase nor identity papers is fairly primitive, but I found one, the Bella Acqua, and signed on to work my way across the globe. No drugs, no parties, no paints, nothing but hard work, bad food, sea air, and a drawing pad for entertainment.

“I grew brown, I grew muscle, and at night-you can't imagine the dreams I'd had, before, but under that regimen, I'd fall into my bunk and sleep like a baby. Do you know what a blessing sleep can be?”

“Yes,” Holmes said.

Damian's question had been rhetorical, but at Holmes' answer he paused to squint at him through the smoke, then gave a thoughtful nod. “So, six months: across the Atlantic, working our way down the coast of Brazil, taking on rum and coir in one place, trading the rum for timber in another, buying hides farther down, transporting the odd passenger who might have needed to leave a town quickly and without notice-whatever took the Captain's fancy. We rounded the Horn and worked our way up Chile to Mexico and San Diego, then set off across the Pacific. The Hawaiis, Japan.

“Finally, we came to Shanghai. Have you been there?”

“Once, briefly.”

“A seething mass of corruption and vice-I think you'd enjoy the straight-forward criminality of the place. I found it filled with temptation, which you'd have thought a poor choice for a man in my position, but I was hungry to join the world again.

“With nothing to spend my pay on, I'd accumulated enough to take a small room in a… well, I thought at first it was simply one of the compounds they have in the city- Wong houses, they're called, with a number of units set into a series of courtyards, and a single entrance from the street. Within a day or two I couldn't help noticing that there were rather a lot of young girls living there who had a series of older male visitors. The whole Wong was one pleasure-house compound. I eventually found out that my landlord had three such, and made a habit of installing one or two large young men in each to help keep the peace. He may have expected that I should eventually become a client myself, but in fact his girls were little more than children, and my taste has never run in that direction. I became a sort of brother to them, and they could practice their English and come to me with problems. I took a job in the afternoons, washing dishes in a noodle shop. It paid a pittance-I still had no identity papers, so my choice was limited-but it gave me two meals a day and mornings free.

“The mornings I needed for the light, because I'd started to paint again. Er, I think you knew, that…?”

For the first time, the young man's self-assurance faltered, with the question of what his father had or had not known. Holmes rose and walked into the house; Damian gave me a sharp look that called to mind his father's hawk-like arrogance, but I could only shrug.

Holmes came back carrying a flat object a foot wide and eighteen inches tall. He set it on the stones, propping it upright against an unoccupied chair.

“That's his?” I exclaimed. “That's yours?”

The unsigned painting had hung for years on a wall of Holmes' laboratory upstairs, a puzzle to me, although I'd caught him studying it from time to time. Holmes owned little art, and had showed no interest, before or since, in a thing as jarringly modern-weird, even-as this one.

Damian picked it up to examine it by candle-light; his expression softened, although I could not tell what he thought of the painting, or of finding it here. “Yes, this is one of mine. From before the War.”

“I was told 1913,” Holmes agreed.

“I would have been nineteen. Imagine, being nineteen. It's not bad, considering. How do you come to have it?”

“It came on the market in March 1920.”

Damian turned his hawk-gaze on Holmes. “It was one of Hélène's?”

“Yes.”

Damian put the painting down again, and we all three studied it.

The canvas showed a bizarre dream-image of the sort that came to be called Surrealism. In technique it was masterful, closely worked and as detailed as a photograph. Its background was an English landscape: neat fields set inside hedgerows, a lane with a bicycle, a cow in the distance. On the horizon, white lines described the chalk cliffs where the South Downs fell into the Channel-not far from where we sat. In the foreground was a table, the weave of its spotless white cloth clearly shown, and on the cloth rested an object from a madman's nightmare: Its front half was an everyday English tea-pot, blue and white porcelain, but the back of it became a huge, distorted honeybee, every hair painted with precision, its wings set to quiver, its stinger exaggerated into a tea-pot's handle, throbbing with menace.

I'd thought it an oddity, but now it was a revelation: At nineteen, a year after his mother's death, Damian had definitely known who his father was. He had known of Holmes' beekeeping avocation in his so-called retirement. He had painted this as a portrait of the famous man who had, to his mind, coldly abandoned mother and child. He had painted it with the consummate skill of a man, impelled by the fury of a scorned adolescent.

SO,” SAID HOLMES. “SHANGHAI.”

“Yes.” Damian took a breath, either summoning his thoughts, or rousing his determination. “As I said, you might think the city was the very worst place for a man vulnerable to temptation, but after my long sobriety aboard the Bella Acqua , it was as if my body came to value its natural state, and my mind found the tight-rope act of daily life in Shanghai exhilarating. It was a challenge simply to walk down the street for a newspaper, passing two gin-joints, an opium den, and the Sikh who sold bhang from a tray.

“And there was another reason Shanghai felt right. Do you know André Breton?”

“I have heard of him,” Holmes replied. “The self-appointed spokesman for the movement known as Surrealism.”

“Now, yes. During the War, André worked at the hospital in Nantes, where he came to adapt certain psychological theories of Sigmund Freud to treat victims of shell-shock. That was where I met him, after I… after I was injured.