38. “The Arrival of the Bee Box”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

“The Arrival of the Bee Box”

DECEMBER 27, 1962

COURT GREEN

Ted stumbles out of the van before the latched gate to the back courtyard, having fishtailed, the balding tires spinning in knee-high snow, up Court Green’s unplowed lane. He unhooks the latch under the precise beam of the headlamps and struggles to tug the gate open against the resistance of the undisturbed, overnight drift. It is snowing still, though in a becalmed, leisurely sift, the fat flakes meandering into his coat collar, melting in his threadbare scarf; coating his uncovered head in white as if to warn of their true, decisive intent.

Back in the cab he eases the hand brake, grinding the reluctant gears uphill and into the blanketed back court. He kills the engine, shuts down the lights. Everything is blue. The silent, snow-packed old vicarage, the barn and outbuildings stand eerily still, the windows dark, the thatched roofs of the house and the empty cottage where he stores his tools coated thickly and glinting, as if in icing sugar. It hardly seems his house.

The journey itself has seemed his soul’s trial, a cosmic return on his heedless investment in guilt. He said he would go to Court Green for her, his reasons for coming as errant as his emotions, as his current life. He has had morning till night now to think about that alone, slogging from the Pennines at a snail’s pace down England’s whiteout spine, snow driving straight into the windshield with no relent for three hundred miles. Having to stop every quarter hour to clear the built-up slush from the feeble wiper blades; almost as often—hunched over the steering wheel to squint into the squall, like every other underdressed pilgrim skidding benumbed over the nearly impassable roads toward some necessary destiny, the heater boxes groaning nonstop under the dash in every vehicle—almost as often wondering what he was doing, why he was doing this. He nearly thought better of it yesterday, eating Boxing Day goose with his parents as the snow began to fly, unworrisome flurries at first, carried fast by the moor-top winds. By the time he’d raked the coal fire in the tiny parlor hearth—the last one to bed, sitting alone with his finger of brandy after the others were asleep—the snow had begun to stick, a batting of white running geometric over the tops of the hewn blackstone fences patchworking the Calder Valley. When he parted the curtain this dawn, it was snowing hard, the derelict van caked to the wheel wells, the blizzard rearing like a swan. Even so, he really never considered backing out, driving straight to London. He simply could not disappoint her again, the reasons, though complex, clear enough.