“Yes,” her brother says. “It’s getting a lot bigger very, very fast.”
He thumbs on the television, without the sound, and they watch as bulletins interrupt regular programming. Parliaments debate and leaders demand explanations from one another. The UN is in session, and so is NATO. Britain is on high alert; the government’s misdeeds in Congo have become painfully public. Israel and Egypt, once friendly, now nervous, are positively spitting. So are Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. A swarm of bees in Santiago has revealed secrets: excesses, debauches, and betrayals. The United States, China, India, and Pakistan have all announced their intention to destroy the bees, though what they will do—Shoot them? Nuke them?—is unclear. To the leaders of the world, though, they are bad bees. They are bees of aggression, not bees of honey and peace. They are evil bees, and cannot be tolerated.
Too much truth cannot be allowed.
In London—stung, perhaps, by the implication that all this originated here—a nasty red-topped anger is building. Bee-keepers are told they must register, must submit their hives for inspection. No, of course, these are no ordinary bees, but it pays to be safe. It helps to rule people out. Any bee-keeper, after all, might be a sympathiser, a fifth columnist. Meanwhile the people growl back at Westminster: Who is responsible? Who is answerable? Who must give back his pension? (Not that anyone ever is, or does.)
Who will be held to account?
Who did this?
Who must be thrown to the beast?
“It’s getting much bigger,” Mercer Cradle repeats.
XI
Ancient’s history;
a personal matter;
Lovelace.
Edie wakes, still cold from Cuparah’s icy salvation of decades gone. It’s earlier than she intended, and the effort of getting vertical is for the moment too much to contemplate. Her body is old, and the bones themselves have taken up a kind of muttering. Even Bastion, she sometimes thinks, is in better overall repair than she is.
She ruffles his ears gently, and he makes a sound in his belly like a lawnmower but does not wake. Almost, Edie lifts him up for a hug, but a dog must be allowed his dreamtime. She refrains, and curls around him instead, hoping his hot-water-bottle body will draw her down into her own sleep. She gets, instead, the strange, meandering kaleidoscope which has recently been her mind’s recourse: the weird pageant of her life.
Alas, without many of the dirty bits.
Edie Banister could never decide if it was a dream or a nightmare, that long, strange fugue which carried her—and, incidentally, His (and then Her) Majesty’s United Kingdom—from 1946 to the end of the century. The Cold War framed everything, the great Soviet steamroller looming to the East and the plucky Yanks to the West—but Edie fought an altogether different war of her own: a long, shadowy, personal one against an enemy who somehow never went away. It did not matter how many times she beat Shem Shem Tsien. He always came back, and each defeat served only to make him more cruel.
Sleep clearly isn’t an option. With the assistance of the headboard and being careful not to disturb Bastion where he lies, Edie rises and stands naked in front of the mirror in the attic of the Pig & Poet. Not twenty any more, alas. Not even thirty or forty or fifty, or any of those comfortable landmarks which come before people call you “old.” And yet there is muscle, still, in her narrow arms, and though her joints protest, they will move, will serve, will—in absolute necessity, and on the understanding that the following day will be a world of pain—glide through the steps and swirls of the featherlight hiji waza Mrs. Sekuni recommended for senior combatants.
She brushes out her hair and trims it, then puts on her next identity: a severe grey suit and flat shoes—Sunday School Edie, complete with ugly handbag big enough to conceal Bastion and some other items she has recently cooked up.
The arrival of Mr. Biglandry at Rallhurst Court implies, of course, that Billy Friend has been interrogated, and if he gave her up he has likely also yielded the name of Joshua Joseph Spork. Assassins, though… Edie did not anticipate that. An arrest warrant, for sure—but killers, no. If Shem Shem Tsien were still alive, that would be a different matter, but age and cumulative injury have by now surely achieved what she never could. The Opium Khan would be a hundred and twenty-five this year. No. Shem is dead, and good riddance. Which implies either someone new, or that her own country’s secret service has just attempted to erase her.
She has seen the news, of course, knows that there are golden bees in the air over warships and cities and stock exchanges and homes, knows that governments are screaming blue murder. All the same, she had expected something more subtle. But perhaps she is simply sugar-coating the past. Maybe Abel Jasmine would have ordered her death: former agent launches one-woman revolution, engages doomsday device.
Edie stares back down the tunnel of the years, and feels the urge to shout advice to herself. Follow your heart, make the world you believe in. Governments promise everything, but change nothing. Beyond anything else, trust Frankie.
At last, she wakes the dog and ladles him gently into position, ignoring a burble of profound betrayal. Bastion does not approve of the handbag as a method of conveyance. Edie slips her hand between the leather straps and gentles him. Thinking about it, she realises it may not be the handbag per se, but the three or four Tupperware containers on which he sits, which smell of strange chemicals and plastic tape. Bastion most especially does not approve of Tupperware. He views it as a means to keep him from things rightfully his own, such as liver. The list of things of which he does not approve is long and complex, embracing such varied sinners as cats, thugs, wellington boots, brightly coloured umbrellas, cows, and unlicensed taxi cabs. But things which keep him from liver are near the top.
Edie catches the bus in Camden and lets it take her all the way west, then waits for the Catholic school in Goldmartin Street to disgorge its students and teachers, equally dressed in grey uniforms, so that she is suddenly just one of a great throng of severe women striding along the wide pavement. If anyone is following her, she has just made their lives almost impossibly difficult and annoying.
In the Underground she doubles back on herself and heads towards Harriet Spork’s convent. Sooner or later, she’s fairly sure, Joe will go there, and that is a calculation others will make, too.
Love causes people to do stupid things. That does not, she realises now, make them the wrong things.
The war came to an end and—as with the one before it—everyone was too exhausted to cheer. People smiled at one another not like victorious heroes but like punch-drunk prizefighters, eyes swollen shut and lips rippled and split, who do not understand why everyone is clapping. A numb silence settled over Europe from Snowdon to Ararat. Edie Banister—in the person of Commander James—was detailed to accompany Frankie from London to Calais and down to her family’s home in rural France.
“Did you win the war for us?” Edie asked her in the grim little sleeper compartment of the southbound train.
“No,” Frankie said seriously. “I would say I am responsible for no more than a few percentage points of variance in the outcome. The military men are incapable of asking a clear question. If they can only see one way of doing a thing, it follows that there is only that way. I spent six weeks working on an issue with sonar before I established that the use they proposed for the new technique was utterly…” She waved her hands in a gesture of aggravation and stared moodily out of the window. Then she looked back at Edie, and forced a smile. “I’m sorry. It was frustrating. More honestly… I do not believe this will be a pleasant journey for me. There will be pain of the soul. But… it is pleasant to see you, Commander Banister.” She reached over and grasped Edie’s hand, and smiled a wide, inviting smile. Then she drew a little closer. “More than pleasant, if I am honest.”