I can hear it. The bees suck the flowers all summer long, humming and buzzing, quite overwhelmed by their discovery of such an extensive treat. I am sure they come from as far afield as Enfield, and Richmond, and Epping and Dulwich: from the green outer suburbs. For surely bees live in hives, and where in the crowded inner city is there room or time for anyone to keep beehives? Neighbours would complain.
Hilary suggested to the garden committee that the hedge be removed: she thought the bees were dangerous: she thought they might sting her little girl, Lucy. The garden committee looked at her in amazement, and explained that bees were good, and necessary to man’s survival.
‘What about woman?’ asked Hilary, triumphant.
That was when she was pregnant for the second time, having lapsed briefly into heterosexuality with a man who could be guaranteed to treat her badly and abandon her; which indeed he did, in the sixth month of her pregnancy.
Hilary then worried, throughout the seventh and eighth months, in case the baby turned out to be male, and as such designated as enemy and rejected by the lesbian friends on whom she now depended for help and support, and who gave it gladly but not unconditionally. Hilary could not bear the thought of handing a male baby out for adoption – a Caucasian male infant, a prize in the world of baby-bargaining would be handed out to the straightest of straight middle-class couples. And then she, Hilary, would be responsible for bringing into the world she was trying to reform the worst form of male oppressor. Nor could she damage little Lucy by exposing her to the brutality and aggression of a male brother. In the ninth month the only solution seemed to be to put down the baby at birth, if it should be male. She wept and writhed and told Jennifer, and Jennifer refused to speak to her any more.
‘She’s wicked!’ said Jennifer. ‘Wicked!’
‘She’s mad,’ was all Hope would say. ‘She’ll be better when the baby’s born. How could anyone look like that – tight to bursting – and not be slightly mad? Let’s hope it’s temporary.’
And Hope waved her scarlet, perfect fingernails in the vague direction of Hilary, who refused to wear the kind of full and blousing garment which would hide her extraordinary shape – she seemed to be without fat, and the baby lay inside her, with its folded form straining and outlined just beneath, it seemed, the skin of her belly.
When the baby was born, plopping easily into the world, it was, indeed, discovered to be a boy, and Hilary loved him very much, and little Lucy spent her time attending to its infant male needs; and Hilary’s friends were indeed scornful of its maleness; and Hilary’s lovers complained of the attention she paid it in the night; so Hilary renounced her lesbianism altogether, and thereafter had to put up with Jennifer’s rather patronising forgiveness, and the told-you-so attitude of Wincaster Row.
The new baby’s father, even, cautiously, came back from time to time to dandle it upon his knee. He took Lucy out as well.
‘I’m not one of your sissy men,’ he’d say. ‘I’m not one of those poncy men who dance attendance upon feminists and get their kicks out of being mentally whipped, and run the crèches at women’s conferences in return for a kick and a smile. I’m just sorry for the poor little bugger.’
Hilary would dance up and down with rage. She was a beautiful girl, in a brownish, sinewy kind of way, and tried to live by her principles. Even Jennifer acknowledged it.
‘The world is so arranged,’ said Jennifer, surprisingly, ‘as to make doing right almost impossible. At least Hilary is trying.’
Jennifer gives Hilary little dresses and little white socks for Lucy, but Hilary just puts them in the jumble sale, and Lucy goes on wearing dungarees. Lucy longs for dresses and dolls, but perhaps that is only because she isn’t allowed them.
I had a baby once: it was neither male nor female. It was born without reproductive organs: it died within five minutes of birth and just as well. Extraordinary things are born to woman: mutants of another race, unviable. Cling to a sense of self through that, if you can. Of purpose. I asked the doctor not to tell Laurence what the matter with the baby was. (Can we call this thing, my child, a baby?) How could I say to Laurence, you and I together, this is what we made. Nothing. We cancelled each other out. I bore the burden of this knowledge alone. Stillborn, I said, and Laurence didn’t ask any further: barely a why or a wherefore, and he an investigative journalist, and, as usual, away at the time.
Easier to find out and condemn what goes on in another country, in a far-off place, than what happens in your own home and in your own heart.
I told Isabel. ‘Aren’t you angry?’ she asked. ‘I would be, if fate picked me out amongst millions, and dealt me a blow like that.’
I replied that I had worn anger out. But it may not be so. Perhaps after all it was red rage that burned out my eyes. Or perhaps it was only fate, being kind, dealing me a trump card. Certainly I have caught Laurence’s butterfly nature on the pin of my helplessness; he struggled a little and made his protest, drunk and unshaven down at the pub, and now lies still, and holds me in his arms, careful and caring and good at last, frightened to move suddenly unless something else gets torn.
You really cannot expect a blind woman to have a baby. Some do, of course, but it isn’t expected. Soon I will be too old, in any case, and saved.
Buzz-buzz! How busy we all are along Wincaster Row. At least the bees stop at night, when cold slows their wings and the weight of the honey they won’t let fall all but defeats them. They make it back to the hive if they can, and die if they can’t, uncomplaining and dutiful. A bee could spend its days, as a butterfly does, glorifying its maker, dancing in the sun, rejoicing in the Lord – but no, it prefers to labour. Nevertheless, the bees are clearly pleased by the fuchsia hedge.
Work in Wincaster Row does not stop when night falls. Then the fuchsia bush hangs darkly and silently at the end of the garden. I remember it from my sighted days: how the lights from the windows – which sometimes burned all night – would outline its shape: it seemed then a hovering storm cloud, picked out with flecks of blood.
Oliver the architect sometimes works until two or three in the morning. He is designing a building for the disabled: he works for nothing. Anna, his wife, would prefer that he should work for something and spend more time with her and the children: but seldom says so.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ Hope says crossly, ‘if only everyone would look after themselves and forget about the rest of the world, it would be in a much better state.’
Hope’s lovers bring her chocolates and flowers, in the hope of making her feel something more than kindness towards them. They puzzle her. What is it they want? Sex she understands, and offers, but they want her essence, her very soul, not just her body. She is writing a paper on Thucydides. No one will pay her for it, she explains. It will be published in an obscure magazine and forgotten. But it’s interesting: such things must be written. Hope lectures in Greek poetry at Birkbeck College, to mature students. They study for the sake of it, not in the hope of future employment. One pupil is over eighty.
Buzz-buzz! Dawn’s breaking. I can tell, because I hear the bees.
Hope once got stuck halfway up the oak tree in the communal garden. She was trying to rescue a kitten. Hope wept: the kitten wailed: the fire engine arrived. Ivor the alcoholic fell hopelessly in love with Hope, for at least a month, and Ivor’s wife baked bread furiously, in the hope that her proper domestic worth and value would become apparent to him—which indeed it always was, but what has love to do with just deserts? Those who don’t deserve it, receive it. Those who most need it, seldom have it. To those who hath, as Jesus once observed,
