Free Darius Bell and the Crystal Bees by Odo Hirsch Page A

disappointment.
    From the clock tower, you could see all the way over the fence of the estate and into the streets beyond. And of course you could see the estate itself – the wood far off in one corner, the pond where Mr Gardiner, the town fishmonger, cultivated fish in return for delivering a portion of his catch to Mrs Simpson. The various buildings of the estate were visible – the buttery where the Deavers lived, the dairy where they kept their chickens, the garages that Mr Bullwright, the builder, had converted into a luxury dwelling for his family, the gardener’s lodge where the Fishers lived, surrounded by toolsheds and greenhouses. Everything was set against the fields and the orchards where Mr Fisher grew his crops. Normally, when he looked across the estate, Darius hardly noticed those. They were the background against which everything else stood out, like the tablecloth on a table when your eye is drawn to the fruitbowl and the lemonade jug and the dish of cakes standing on it. But today that was what Darius saw. The fields. The orchards.
    Everything was in lines. That was the first thing you noticed. The low, earth-hugging vines of the pumpkin field, the green studs of lettuce plants, the beans strung up on long wooden frames, the trees of the peach and the plum and the apple orchards. They all looked so healthy, just as they looked every year. The first flowers were appearing, just as they always did. And yet this year those flowers would develop no fruit. There were no bees, and without bees, the flowers would blossom and wilt and leave nothing behind. There would be no bright orange balloons in the pumpkin field, no red baubles nestled in the strawberry field, no pink blush hidden behind the leaves in the peach trees.
    Plants didn’t naturally grow in lines, Darius knew. You only had to glance at the bright confusion of the wood in the corner of the estate to see how plants grew when left to themselves. The regularity, the order, the consistency everywhere else were testament to the work Mr Fisher had put in. For as long as Darius could remember, the gardener had been a presence in his life, always visible somewhere on the estate, glimpsed across a field or walking through the trees, hunched over a shrub or high on a ladder pruning a branch, beckoning to him, giving him a fruit to taste, showing him how to plant something or pick something, watching patiently to see that he did it properly. It was Mr Fisher who had made all of this happen, who had turned the dark earth of the Bell estate into a sea of fertility out of which came fruit that was fresher and more succulent than anyone else’s – Fishers’ fruit, for which people at the market would jostle and push.
    Everywhere you looked from the clock tower, the results of his work were visible. It wasn’t the background, Darius realised, but the very essence of the estate. The mark of Mr Fisher’s hand was all across the landscape.
    How could he leave all of that behind? Gazing at the fields and orchards, Darius remembered the pain he had seen in Mr Fisher’s face. He had never seen such pain before, not in an adult anyway, not so openly, so naked. Yet now he thought he understood it. How could you bear to leave the place where you had done so much, a place where you had worked every piece of earth, which looked the way it looked only because of what you had done, which yielded the riches it yielded only because of the effort you had expended year after year?
    Disappointment flooded over Darius again. Bitter, unyielding disappointment. Even now, as he stood up here on Saturday morning, two days after his father had confessed there was nothing he could do, it hadn’t got any better.
    Their family would be all right, just. Darius’s mother had told him that it wouldn’t be easy, but there was a little money that would help them get through the year, replacing the food that would normally have come from Mr