The Beekeeper's Promise (Page 44)

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to drive?’ I’d asked him as we walked to the car. He’d taunted me then, leering at me, dangling the keys in front of my face and pretending to stagger drunkenly down the path.

‘Come on, Zac, please. Let me drive,’ I’d said more forcefully.

A mistake.

His expression immediately grew cold, his eyes frosting over with anger. Most people describe anger as hot and fiery, but Zac’s was always as cold as ice.

‘Get in,’ he snapped. ‘Or would you rather walk home?’

I should have refused to get in.

I should have walked.

I shouldn’t have gone home.

I should have left him, then and there.

In the car, he was silent. I tried to make things better, to soothe his anger by talking about inconsequential things: how nice the lunch had been (it hadn’t, though – it had been the usual grey, tasteless cut of meat served with overcooked vegetables); how well his mother was looking now she’d got over that nasty cold she’d had; how the weather seemed to be brightening up for the week ahead.

He hadn’t replied. He’d just pulled away from the kerb and driven, too fast, through the village, the speed-limit signs lighting up in warning as the car approached and then flashed past them. I’d pulled out my phone, to check the weather forecast and see whether the week ahead was indeed going to be warm and sunny. I’d had the phone turned off during lunch – a formality, really, as I never expected anyone other than Zac to phone me or text me on it. As I switched it back on, it beeped. I glanced at the screen and then swiped the message out of the way.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me who it’s from then?’ Zac had said, his tone dripping acid.

‘It’s a message from one of the people in my tutorial group. She’s just saying they haven’t seen me for a while and wondering if I’m okay.’

‘Let me see,’ he said, taking his left hand off the steering wheel. The car, which was travelling far too fast now on the twisting country road, swerved a little and an oncoming motorcyclist flashed his lights and gesticulated angrily.

‘Zac, no, be careful.’

‘Give me the phone, Abi,’ he said, his tone unnaturally calm. In that moment, his voice sounded almost reasonable.

‘Here, look,’ I turned the phone so that he could see the message.

‘Sam?’ he said. ‘Who the hell is Sam?’ A muscle flickered in his jaw.

‘Sam is a girl. Just a girl in my tutor group. I told you.’

‘Give me the phone, Abi.’

‘When we get home, I will. You can look at it then and you’ll see. There are no other messages. It’s just that I missed the last two meetings and caught up online.’

And then he lost it. ‘I said, give me the fucking phone!’ He screamed the words and I flinched as if they were blows raining down on my head and arms.

I realised, then, that he was steering straight towards one of the trees growing on the raised verge along the side of the road. Terrified, I reached across with my right hand to grab the wheel, to try to put the car back on course, and he brought the edge of his left hand down hard on my forearm, with such force that I felt the bones snap. I screamed in pain and terror, my hand dangling at an agonising, useless angle. We’d avoided the tree, but the car lurched and swerved again and the engine roared as he stood hard on the accelerator, deliberately steering towards the next one.

In that moment, I realised that he was trying to kill me. Perhaps to kill himself while he was at it, too, but he was going to crush the passenger’s side of the car against the tree at full speed, obliterating me.

Where did it come from, that surge of strength through my body? I know, now, that the terror and the pain must have made adrenaline shoot through my veins and that my next movement was reflexive. But I think it was something more than that, too. It was anger at the damage he’d done to me, it was the spark of my Self, suddenly reawakening; it was the resilience of the human spirit. It was resistance.

Because he had the accelerator forced to the floor, my seatbelt didn’t restrain me as I twisted round and reached across with my good, left arm. I grabbed the wheel and forced it to turn, resisting his strength, finding my own power at last. I felt the car rise up as it hit the grass verge, missing the solid grey trunk of the tree by a few millimetres, and then it flipped, an almost graceful arc of car-shaped metal flying through the air into the path of the oncoming lorry.

Braced for the impact, I felt my knee twist with a searing pain that brought a red mist down over my eyes and made my stomach heave.

And then I felt nothing. Just a strange, unearthly calm as the car imploded around the two of us. Zac and me.

And when everything finally stopped, I looked over at him. His eyes were wide, surprised, as cold and blue as ice. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and the waxy tinge of death suffused his face.

I remember very clearly what I felt in that moment. Relief. Nothing else. Before the pain made me pass out.

Later, when I came to and I saw Zac’s face as they cut his body out of the car, I still felt very little. I was deep in shock, of course; but even so I can remember how it was to see his familiar features in his bloodless face and have the sense that this wasn’t him.

His body was a lot less cut up than mine was. He had suffered massive internal injuries where the steering wheel crushed his ribcage, splintering the bones and driving them into his heart and lungs.

My injuries were more visible, but not fatal: lacerations to my arms, the lower part of the right one hanging at a useless angle where the bones had been sheared through; a dislocated knee and more lacerations to my thighs. All outwardly mendable, given time. It was the trauma that went so much deeper, though; that crippled me more than my damaged limbs.

But even through the shock and the chaos, and despite the fact that the paramedics were trying to shield me from the sight of him, I can still remember it clearly. His frozen, waxen features; and my sense of stunned relief.

‘Little Abi, how perfect you are . . .’ I can hear his words now, the words he spoke at the end of our first date, as if they were blown on the wind that stirs the meadow grasses at my feet. And I know, now, exactly what those words meant. To him, I was blank piece of paper on which he could write what he wanted. I was already isolated – it would be easy to control me. I was desperate for affection, but I didn’t know what real love was. My mother’s love for me had dissolved long ago in a sea of cheap vodka and since then I’d made do with the love offered up by the children I’d cared for, knowing that they would grow up and I would be forgotten as I moved on to another family. What a little mouse I was, naïve enough to be flattered, to mistake the attention he bestowed on me for love. I wanted it to be, and so I made myself believe that it was something it wasn’t.

With my fingertips, I trace the lines of the cross scored into the oak tree once more. Almost seventy-five years on, the long, vertical cut with its two cross bars has widened as the tree has grown. But, at the same time, the oak has managed to heal the scar, sealing closed the wound.

I run my hands over the sleeves of my shirt, feeling the faint ridges beneath the thin cotton and I marvel at the way my body has healed itself, just as the tree has done.

The cross is just as much a part of the oak as its branches and its roots, just as my scars are now a part of me, for ever more. And yet, there is resilience. The body finds a way to close the wounds, to live with the scars. To heal.

And, yes, even to grow.

Eliane: 1944

The winter had seemed interminably long. Eliane’s heart was frozen with grief and loss, which even the first warm day of spring couldn’t thaw. Despite what Yves had said, she felt she’d lost both of the men she’d loved. And the war dragged on, sapping France, bleeding the country dry. The tide had turned against the German army now – that much was evident from the preoccupied air and low spirits of the soldiers occupying the château as they passed more long months away from their homes and families in a strange, starved land where they were hated and feared. Official reports in the newspapers were heavily censored, glossing over the setbacks for the occupying army. But Monsieur le Comte would come into the kitchen on the winter evenings to sit by the warmth of the range and sip his night-time tisane, and he would whisper news to Eliane and Madame Boin of the growing groundswell of action, of Allied air-raids, of Soviet victories and of German defeats. As spring arrived and his reports told of a definite, sustained shift in the momentum of the war against Hitler’s Wehrmacht, a few fragile shoots of hope began to stir in their hearts.

One morning towards the end of May, Eliane and Madame Boin were in the kitchen preparing the first of the early cherries, which Eliane had picked from a tree that was tucked into a corner behind the barn, where it caught the sun and was protected from the frost and wind so always bore its fruit before any of the other trees. The tips of her fingers were stained pink by the tangy juice as she cut the stones out of the fruit.

As Oberleutnant Farber and the general entered the kitchen, the women set down their knives and wiped their hands on damp cloths, turning to face the soldiers respectfully. Visits to the kitchen by the general were rare – more often it was Oberleutnant Farber alone who came to relay any official orders, or Monsieur le Comte who occasionally passed on requests from the Germans for a particular dish to be served at dinner that night.