‘Brown Bea,’ said Peter, looking at Beatrice’s dress.
‘Bees aren’t brown, Pete. Bumblebees are gold and black.’
‘Some are brown,’ Peter argued, glowering at his brother.
‘Beatrice doesn’t bumble, she’s a honey bee, aren’t you?’ Angie took her by the hand.
‘They’re very brown.’
‘Still, I think I like honey bees best,’ she said.
‘So do I,’ said Beatrice.
It would be two months before lessons began in September. For Beatrice the time crawled. Once or twice over the summer she was invited up to the house and these were wonderful exhilarating times. Then came one baking hot day in early August when Angelina turned thirteen, and Beatrice was invited to a picnic on the beach, but everyone was out of sorts for some reason. She was confused to see that Angelina’s eyes were red-rimmed, her lovely mouth turned down. Ed got them all playing cricket on the damp sand above the shoreline.
Peter performed a splendid catch. ‘You’re out, Angie,’ he insisted, and the girl threw down the bat with a wail and marched up the beach to where Mrs Wincanton was packing away the picnic. Beatrice saw her cast herself in her mother’s lap and Oenone hug her tight as she wept inconsolably.
Hetty saw Beatrice’s puzzlement.
‘Daddy was s’posed to come today,’ she explained importantly, ‘but he telephoned to say he isn’t and that’s why she’s upset. Angie feels things very deeply, you know. That’s what Mummy says. Nanny says it’s bad for her to be overwrought. I don’t know what that means, do you?’
‘It means,’ said Peter, pursuing the ball as it rolled past, ‘that you’re a sneak who listens in to grown-ups’ conversations.’
‘Shut up, Peter,’ Hetty cried, and Peter pretended to shy the ball at her, then grabbed her instead and forced sand down her neck.
‘Hey, pack it in, Pete,’ Edward said, coming to rescue Hetty. Beatrice had often noticed that he was the peacemaker, effortlessly defusing tension.
By the time the others trooped up to fetch their towels to swim, the regulation hour for their food to settle having passed, Angie looked more cheerful. Beatrice overheard her tell Edward, ‘Mummy says he might come next week instead.’
After the children had splashed in the waves for a while, they lay on their towels on the beach sharing bottles of homemade lemonade while behind them on the dunes their mother read a book.
‘Bowl me a few balls in a moment, Pete?’ Ed said.
‘S’pose,’ Pete said, grumpy.
‘Don’t you like cricket?’ Beatrice asked him.
‘It’s all right,’ Peter said, with a shrug.
She saw that being good at games came naturally to Edward. He was kind, too, and a natural leader, at ease with everybody and everything, the complete antithesis of poor Peter. She watched Peter’s face, pinched and unhappy, when Angie questioned Edward about school, and Ed told them stories of cheats and swaggerers, of brutal initiation ceremonies and bullying masters. These were, she sensed, not things that happened to Edward, but she wondered if Peter knew about them all too well.
The following Saturday, Beatrice’s mother said to her husband at breakfast, ‘I hear Michael Wincanton is coming down from London this weekend. That will be lovely for the children.’
‘Ah, our Honourable Member,’ Hugh Marlow said, folding his newspaper in order to read an article about Germany’s growing air force. ‘I’d like the chance to ask him what he believes this Herr Hitler is up to. I don’t think we can trust the fellow for a moment. What sort of a title is Führer anyway? Ridiculous nonsense.’
Beatrice said, ‘Why doesn’t Angie’s father live at Carlyon Manor?’
‘Don’t speak with food in your mouth,’ Delphine said. ‘He does, but he often has to be in London. When one governs the country, there is little time for holidays.’
At last August turned to September, and now when Beatrice visited the house there were big leather trunks gaping hungrily in the boys’ bedrooms, and Nanny and Brown sewing laundry labels on shirts or packing books and piles of ironed clothes. Whilst Ed practised kicking a rugby ball about the grounds, Peter went for walks on his own and grew listless. It wasn’t hard to work out that he didn’t enjoy school.
And suddenly, like the house martins that had nested under the eaves of Beatrice’s bedroom all summer, they were gone.
Lessons started the following Monday.
As Angie had confided to Beatrice, Miss Simpkins wasn’t a bad old stick, though plain of face and a little portly, it could not be denied, and her stockings tended to gather in frumpy folds on her thick ankles. She was kind, but her patience was not endless.