Chapter 23
Bear
Pearl digs at the dry earth with a small trowel and when she feels there is a sufficiently large hole, she lays down the tool, and arranges a cross-hatching of twigs across the void, selecting just the right lengths to bridge the gap.
She takes a small blue watering can over to the outdoor tap at the back of the house.
Her mother’s voice calls out from inside, asking if she needs help, and Pearl calls back, “S’okay.
I’ve got it,” as she grips the stiff metal lever and loosens it.
She smiles. Proud that, like most things, she has got it.
She takes the can back to the hole in the lawn and pours a light sprinkling of water across her work.
She watches as the earth turns dark and the twigs are set in place a little better.
Then she squats down, the hem of her dress trailing in mud.
She takes three shiny leaves stripped from the laurel bush earlier and lays them over the twigs to darken the hollow beneath.
A perfect den for woodlice and creepy-crawlies.
She will look tomorrow and see if any have come.
But in the meantime, she works her way across the lawn to check on the homes she’s created on previous days, slowly peeling back one leaf at a time, careful not to shock the creatures with a sudden rush of light.
Lily watches Pearl through the window as she folds a basket of clean washing.
She can see so much of Bear in her. In her independence, her love of rummaging about in the earth, her gentleness.
During lockdown, while Lily worked on cataloging the library’s ebooks, Bear took care of her schooling, skimming over the work her teachers set online in favor of practical things.
On the hill outside their house, they’d lifted the paving bricks to forage beneath them for treasure.
Practiced adding and subtracting with Roman money.
Lily would overhear Pearl trying to pronounce the Latin names: aureus, denarius, quinarius, and laughing with Bear over an emperor who’d minted thirteen different coins bearing his own image during a single year’s reign.
“Shall we make coins with us on them?” Pearl asked. “Even more than Quietus!”
Later, when Bear’s museum work moved online, he and Pearl had streamed their archaeological adventures to the home-schooling community and encouraged them to bury their own time capsules.
Lily had enjoyed those days. The three of them always within earshot of one another, cocooned. A protective web spun around their home. In the hour just before sunset, they would venture out. “Remember masks!” Pearl would say, hoping to stop at the café serving ice creams from an open window.
And in the quiet beauty of the world, they would coast down the center of carless roads on their bikes, the silky smooth of the tarmac rushing beneath their wheels, Pearl sitting on Lily’s handlebars.
“Faster, Mama, faster!” she would shout, as Bear whooped alongside them, seagulls squawking overhead.
Halcyon days. Days that, around the edges of fear, glistened with strange newness and freedom.
It was a Thursday when it happened. An ordinary day, its agenda set by the nocturnal banging of the cold-water tank in the loft.
“I’ll fix it today,” Bear said into his pillow, as sunlight finally spilled through the thin veil of their curtains.
Sitting up in bed, he mentally retraced the solutions he’d found on a plumbers’ forum earlier in the week.
Fitting baffle vanes inside the cistern, replacing the diaphragms or, his own choice, installing a larger ball float.
“We could get someone in,” Lily had said.
“Why risk it? And I can take Pearl; she’ll like pottering around up there.”
Anxieties—the area of unboarded joists near the eaves, the gaping hole of the open loft hatch—flickered across Lily’s mind and then faded.
She’d stretched, content, because Pearl would be with Bear.
Bees’ wife, Charlotte, had once told Lily how, carrying a basket around the wide aisles of the posh supermarket in town, she’d felt insulated, as though nothing bad could happen while she was cradled by its spacious architecture, surrounded by its carefully ordered produce.
“That’s how I feel when I’m with Bear,” Lily had said, the words forming before she’d had a chance to consider them.
Charlotte had laughed. “Lucky you. Don’t tell Bees, but I’ll need to keep going to Waitrose to get my fix.”
Lily had been embarrassed. By how clichéd her view of Bear—a man—might seem.
She’d added, “I think it’s all those years abroad doing his digging.
I guess you just end up being very capable when you spend so much time in the middle of nowhere.
” Although she realized it wasn’t that at all. It was how he’d changed after Paris.
Charlotte had nodded, dark hair brushing at her jawline. “Yes, that’s true—it is oddly reassuring having him close by. And you, of course, but you know what I mean.”
Up in the loft, Bear and Pearl took the lid from the cold-water tank. “Have you got it?” Bear asked. Pearl stepped in to grip one of its sides and together they leaned it against the rafters, droplets of condensation soaking into dusty chipboard flooring.
“I can see into Mrs. Greene’s garden from here,” Pearl said, standing on tiptoe to look through the small cobwebbed window on the gable wall.
Bear lowered his hands into the water, positioning his spanner against a brass nut. “How are her runner beans looking?”
“Tall. Preeetty tall. Her wigwam is bigger than ours.”
“What do you think? That taller canes encourage her beans to climb, or she’s put them in because they outgrew the shorter ones?”
“I’m not sure,” Pearl said, her face pressed close to the dusty glass. “But I’d sure like to know her secret.”
Bear smiled to himself—he loved hearing Pearl adopting grown-up phrases.
As he worked, Pearl sorted through an old pile of books. “I don’t remember any of these. Are you saving them for if there’s another baby?” she asked as she turned thick fabric pages, pausing to peer into a circle reflecting her own image.
“Nope. Mainly so that when we’re old, we can remember reading them to you,” Bear said as he tightened the metal arm of the new ball float. “There. Want to help put the lid back on?”
She put the book aside and stood up. “Why does it need a lid?”
“To keep the mice out.”
“Are there mice up here?” Pearl asked, peering into the eaves, as they slid the plastic cover back into place.
“No, it’s more of a just-in-case,” he said, brushing his face clear as he felt the light tickle of something touching his skin. “Shit!”
Pearl covers her mouth, giggling. “Fifty pence!”
“I think I’ve been stung.” Even before the sentence is out, Bear feels the crease between nose and cheek start to swell.
Pearl blinks at him through the gloom. “Ouch, I can see where it got you. Does it hurt, Papa?”
He presses a finger to the tightening pad of skin.
“Only a bit. But I’ll be fine. I hope we haven’t got a nest up here,” he says, looking around.
“Although I’m sure we’d have heard them.
Maybe one just followed us up.” He notices the strewn pile Pearl’s left behind.
“Now let’s tidy up these books and choose some to take back down.
” They spend too long lingering over pages.
Half an hour has passed when Pearl picks up The Very Hungry Caterpillar and declares that if she were wanting to turn into a butterfly, she would definitely start with ice cream.
She asks Bear what he’d choose first, and when he tells her watermelon, he notices that his voice sounds hoarse.
That his throat feels odd. He speeds through the last few pages, then neatens the pile of books.
“Come on, let’s go down. Here, fireman’s lift,” he says thickly, as he hoists Pearl onto his shoulder and navigates the metal rungs one-handed.
She giggles again, and he is reassured that she does not detect his urgency, does not notice how swiftly he deposits her on the carpet and slides the ladder back into position, how deftly he prods the loft hatch back into place with the hooked pole.
But inside, his heart is racing, and he feels his face expanding, his tongue growing thicker, as he moves about the landing.
He unplugs the iPad in his office, and motions Pearl into her room.
There, he taps the icon for children’s television, and Pearl is delighted to be presented with cartoons before evening. Before lunch, even.
He’s lightheaded now, but just needs to hold himself together until he is far enough from Pearl.
He stumbles down the stairs, gripping the banister.
Where is Lily? In the garden? In the kitchen?
He peers into the empty living room and calls her name.
But his words get lost in throat and tongue, which—with each moment—expand like leavening dough.
As he sinks down onto the sofa, he bangs a balled hand against the coffee table. Once, twice—
“Bear? Is that you?” And then Lily is there. In the doorway. White dress, dark hair, lips moving with words he can’t decipher. She kneels beside the sofa, tries to get him to talk, to make sense of what she’s seeing.
“Pearl! Pearl? Do you know what’s wrong with Papa?
” Bear grips Lily’s wrist, jerks his head from side to side, but it’s too late.
Pearl is already on the stairs, her small face appearing between the wooden spindles, too scared to come any closer.
“Oh, God, I didn’t think,” Lily says, glancing back at Bear.
He loosens his grip on her arm. Blinks. As if to say, It’s okay; there’s nothing to be done now.
Lily softens her voice, turns back to Pearl. “Do you know what happened? You were with him in the loft.”
“We read books,” Pearl says, eyes wide.
“But nothing happened?” She takes in Bear’s swollen face, touches a hand to it. “Nothing hurt him?”