The Language of Bees

A maid at the first and a man with a newspaper at the second both got as far as my first dozen words-“Good evening, I'm a friend of the Adlers at number seven and”-before their gaze strayed to my nondescript shirtwaist and unremarkable skirt and their faces shifted to polite disbelief.

The third time it happened, at number eleven, the person whose suspicions I raised was a child of perhaps eight or nine. She opened to my knock, and although I expected a parent to appear any moment, the child faced me with all the aplomb of a householder. So I told her who I was and what I wanted. She put her head to one side.

“You don't look like one.”

“One what?” I asked. How did one talk to a child, anyway? I hadn't much experience with it.

“Like a friend of the Adlers.”

“Why, what do they look like?”

“Not like you,” she said helpfully.

I looked down at my skirt, and pulled a face. “I know. I had to visit my parents today and this is how they like to see me.”

“You're too old to have to dress for your parents.”

“One never grows too old for that.”

Her shiny head tipped to the other side as she considered. “They give you an allowance, and you have to keep them happy?”

“Something like that.” My parents had been dead nearly a decade, but that did not mean I had not, at times, changed my appearance to satisfy other figures in authority.

“That's dreadful,” she stated, making it clear that I had just scotched her entire expectations for life as a free adult.

“True, but its merely on the surface. May I ask you-”

But our discussion on the merits of Bohemia was interrupted by the child's own figure of authority, as fingers wrapped around the door eighteen inches above hers and pulled it open. At last: the mother.

The girl craned her head upwards and said, “Mama, this lady is looking for 'Stella.”

“Actually,” I said, “I'm looking for Estelle's parents.”

“Why, what did they do?”

An interesting assumption. “Nothing, as far as I know. I'm a friend of Damian's, in Town unexpectedly, and I was hoping he and Yolanda would be here. But no-one answers, and I wonder if you have any idea where they might have gone?”

The eyes did their downward glance. “Frankly, you don't look like one of the Adlers' friends.”

I stifled a sigh, but the child cut in. “She's just come from visiting her parents and she's afraid of being cut off so she has to dress like that, just like us and Grandmama.”

There was humour in the woman's face at that, the sort of humour that indicates a degree of wit.

“I haven't worn the skirt since last year, and I didn't have time to adjust the hem,” I admitted. “But it's true, I've known Damian for years. I met him in France, just after the War.”

The claim either sounded real or contained a fact that she knew to be true, because she looked down at her daughter and said, “You run along and pour the tea for your dollies, Virginia. I'll be there in a moment.”

Reluctantly, the child withdrew to trudge, shoulders bent, for the stairway. When her feet were on the steps, her mother turned back to me.

“There was a gentleman here the other day, asking after Yolanda.”

I could hear the accusation in her tone, and scrambled hastily to assemble a harmless explanation. “Tall, older man?”

“Yes. You know him?”

“My father. Or rather, step-father. When I knew I'd be coming up, I asked him to call by and tell Damian and Yolanda. They weren't answering their telephone, and she's a terrible correspondent. When he didn't find them, I hoped perhaps he'd just missed them.”

“I see,” she said, accepting both the explanation and the insider's comments about the Adlers. “Normally on a Saturday evening I'd say you could find Yolanda in church, but I haven't seen either of them for some days. They may be out of town.”

“When did you last see them?”

“Let me think. You know, I don't believe I've seen her for quite a while, although I saw him more recently. Sunday, was it? Yes, he walked down the street with a valise as we were leaving for dinner at my mother's. He said hello to the children. But I haven't seen either Mrs Adler or the child since… oh, I know, we met in the park perhaps ten days ago, just after the rains stopped. Our daughters enjoy playing together.” I thought it unlikely that the bright-eyed child I had just been speaking to would share too many interests with an infant less than half her age. More likely their “playing together” was a convenient pretext for their mothers to linger on a park bench, chatting.

“That would have been, what, Wednesday?”

“I think so.”

“And Damian, you saw him Sunday afternoon?” With a valise-leaving for Sussex?

“That's right.”

“You said Mrs Adler goes to church on Saturday night. Where is that?”

“Well, I don't know that it's church, exactly. It's one of those meeting hall places full of odd people.”

“Is it nearby?”

“I think so-it's my husband who told me about it, let me ask him. Jim? Jim, could you come here for a moment, there's a lady looking for the Adlers in number seven. My husband, Jim,” she said when a rotund man of forty came to the door, pointedly carrying a tea-cup. Distant voices indicated other children, under the supervision of a nanny. And the presence of an undistracted wife at the door at a time when cooking odours filled the house indicated a cook on the premises as well: no Bohemians, these.

“Mary Russell,” I said, holding out my hand first to him, then to her.

“Jim, can you tell Miss Russell where that meeting hall was that you saw Mrs Adler going into, some weeks back?”

Jim was not the brains of the family, and had to hunt through his memories for the event in question. After a while, his round face cleared. “Ahr, yais. Peculiar types. Artistic, don't you know?”

“That sounds like the Adlers,” I agreed merrily. “Do you remember where the hall was?”

He stirred his tea for a moment, then raised the cup to slurp absently: The act stirred memory. “It was coming back from the cinema one night. Harold Lloyd, it was. Wonderful funny man.” I made encouraging noises, hoping I was not to hear the entire plot of whatever picture it was.

Fortunately, his wife intervened. “Which cinema house was it, Jim?”

“Up the Brompton,” he answered promptly.

“Not the Old Brompton?”

“Nar, up near the V and A.”

“Isn't that the Cromwell Road?” I asked.

“Thurloe, for a time,” she corrected me.

“Not Thurloe,” he insisted. “Below that.” This, my mental map told me, did indeed put us onto the bit of the Brompton Road that jogged to join the Fulham Road. I did not know how a stranger ever found his way around this city, where a street could be called by five names in under a mile.

“So was the meeting hall along the Brompton Road?”

“Just this side.” Between them, they narrowed it down for me, and although I knew the area well enough to be certain there was no true meeting hall in that street, there were any number of buildings that could have a large room above ground-floor shops, and his description of “atop the stationers' with the fancy pens in the window,” was good enough to start with. I thanked them and wished them a good evening.

Jim left, but the wife stepped out of the door and lowered her voice. “You said you're a friend of his? Mr Adler's?”

“Originally his, yes,” I said carefully.

“But you know her a little?”

“Not as well as I do him, but a little.” One photograph and a husband's description might better be described as