He’d also invested in the new library. A shiny brass plaque informed everyone who cared to read it, and there were many who did, that the local community was deeply grateful to Green’s Apiaries for its generosity when the library was built.
Revenge of the nerds, that’s what it was. And the rest of us, those of us who hadn’t been particularly nerdy, but popular enough in school, had to sit on the sidelines and watch how Gareth wallowed in increasingly more dough with every passing year.
Everyone who worked with bees knew that the real money didn’t lie in honey; Gareth’s assets didn’t come from honey. The real money was in pollination. Agriculture didn’t have a chance without bees. Mile after mile of blossoming almond trees or blueberry bushes; they weren’t worth a dime unless the bees carried the pollen from one flower to another. The bees could travel more than several miles a day. Many thousands of flowers. Without them the flowers were just as useless as the contestants of a beauty pageant. Nice to look at, while they lasted, of absolutely no value in the long run. The flowers wilted, died, without bearing fruit.
Gareth had invested in pollination from day one. His bees had always been traveling colonies. Always on the road. I’d read that it made the bees stressed, that it wasn’t good for them, but Gareth claimed the bees didn’t notice anything, they were thriving just like mine.
Maybe it was exactly because Gareth had come to the trade from the outside that he’d invested in that field. He’d understood where things were headed—that small honey farms, like mine, run more or less in the same way for generations, didn’t exactly put money in the bank, hadn’t done so before and certainly didn’t do so now. Every single small investment was an effort, and we lived at the mercy of the friendly local bank, which wasn’t always a stickler when it came to making loan payments on time and trusted that the bees would do the job this year as well, trusted me when I said that the watered-down cheap stuff from China, which was sold as honey and came in greater quantities with every passing year, didn’t make a difference, that honey prices would remain exactly where they’d always been, that the prospects for a steady revenue were good, that the ever more unpredictable weather had no impact on us, that we could guarantee good sales in the fall. That the money would pour in, just as always.
It was all lies. And that was why I had to reorganize. Become like Gareth.
Chapter 16
WILLIAM
“Do you want me to do it?” Thilda asked. She stood at the door with the shaving things and a mirror in her hands.
“You could cut yourself on the razor,” I replied.
She nodded. She knew, as I did, that she’d never been particularly steady-handed.
A bit later she came in with a bowl of water, some soap and a brush. She put all of it on the bedside table, which she then shoved up against the bed, so that I had a good working angle. Finally she put the mirror there. She stood waiting while I lifted it up. Was she worried about how I would react?
It was another man who stared back at me. I should have been frightened, but I felt only a sense of wonder. Gone was the feeble chubbiness. Gone was the pleasant shopkeeper. The man who stared back at me was someone else, someone who had experienced something. A paradoxical idea, in that I’d been lying in bed for months and had not experienced anything besides my own vile thoughts. Still, the reflection in the mirror said nothing about this. The man staring back at me reminded me of an ocean voyager who had returned after months at sea, or perhaps a miner who came up after a long shift, or a scientist on the way home from a long and dramatic research trip in the jungle. His features were clearly defined, he was slender, hardened into elegance. He was life lived.
“Do you have a pair of scissors?” I said.
Thilda looked at me in confusion.
“I can’t start with the razor, there’s too much.”
She nodded and understood.
Soon she was back with the sewing scissors. They were awkwardly small, made for dainty women’s fingers, but I was able to cut away the worst of the shaggy growth.
Slowly I dipped the brush in the water and rubbed it against the soap. It foamed with the fresh scent of juniper.
“Where is the razor?” I looked around. She just stood there with her hands folded in front of her apron and her eyes fixed on the floor. “Thilda?”
Finally she handed me a razor that she’d had in her pocket. Her hand trembled slightly, as if she didn’t quite want to surrender it. I took it and started shaving. The razor scraped against my skin; the blade needed sharpening.
Thilda stood watching me.
“Thank you. You can leave now,” I said to her.
But she stayed. Her eyes were on my hand, on the razor. And suddenly I understood what she was standing there and worrying about. I let my hand drop.
“Isn’t it a healthy sign that I’m shaving?”
She had to think, as usual.
“I am so very grateful that you have the energy for this,” she replied finally, but remained standing there all the same.
If one was going to do something like that, it was a matter of finding a method that would give the impression of death by wholly natural causes. That way I would spare Edmund. I had several procedures in mind—I’d had a lot of time to plan them—but of course Thilda didn’t know that. She just assumed that if she left me alone in a room with a sharp instrument, I would take advantage of the opportunity, as if it were the only one. That’s how simple she was.
If I wanted to put an end to it all, I would have long since walked out into the snow, wearing only a nightshirt. Then I would be found frozen to death the next day, with ice in my beard and eyelashes, and my death would be just that: the seed merchant lost his way in the dark and froze to death, poor wretched soul.
Or a mushroom. The woods were full of them and some of them had last autumn found their way down into a top drawer of the bureau furthest to the left in the shop, duly locked, with a key to which I alone had access. The effect of the mushroom was quick, in the course of a few hours one grew lethargic and dull, then unconscious, followed by a few days during which the body was quickly broken down before it collapsed. A doctor would hold that the cause of death was organ failure. Nobody would know that it was self-inflicted.
Or drowning. There was a strong current in the river behind our property even in the winter.
Or Blake’s dog farm, with seven savage mutts snapping against the fence.
Or the steep cliff in the woods.
There were many possibilities, but now here I was, shaving off my beard and did not have the slightest intention of implementing any of these methods, including the razor I held in my hand. Because I had gotten out of bed, and I would never consider such a course of action again.
“Don’t let me keep you,” I said to Thilda. “I’m sure you have work to do out there.” I pointed towards the door, in reference to the rest of the house, with its relentless demands for dusting, cooking and scrubbing of clothing and floors and everything else that women at all times maintain must be cleaned.
She nodded and finally she left.
There were times when I had the impression that Thilda would have been more than grateful if I took a razor blade or perhaps preferably a carving knife, put it against my throat and let the blood pump out of the main artery until there was nothing left of me but an empty shell, an abandoned cocoon, on the floor. She had never said as much, but she and I had both come to curse the sunlight that found its way to precisely her nose in the assembly hall more than seventeen years ago. It could have found its way to so many others, or no one at all.