The Exiles

discoverer of the bee-immune Ruth, had assumed dictatorship of the affair. ‘Pick one more up to prove it.’
    ‘I’ve picked up three.’
    ‘Well, pick up one more.’
    Ruth wondered if it was physically possible to be stung by a bee without showing it on your face. Very doubtful, she thought, and remembered that she had heard that dogs could smell fear, and it nearly always made them bite you.
    ‘Go on,’ urged Wendy, impatient for blood.
    Very carefully, Ruth eased a bee off a clover flower, closed her hand around it for a second, and dropped it lightly onto another blossom. Its legs clung stickily to her fingers for a moment before it fell.
    ‘Easy as anything,’ said Naomi with her nose in the air, ‘I mean for Ruth,’ she added as Wendy turned greedily to look at her.
    ‘Doesn’t it run in families then?’ asked Wendy, disappointed.
    ‘Not ours,’ said Naomi, and left rather hastily. That seemed to signal the end of the performance and the group wandered apart, all except for Egg Yolk Wendy, who stuck to Ruth like chewing gum. She hadn’t finished yet.
    Ruth turned her back to Wendy and lay on her stomach, peering down into the grass, watching an ant. It struggled up and down along the blades of grass, heading away from her. She picked it up and moved it a little way along its journey. It staggered for a while, and then turned ungratefully back in the direction it had come from. Ruth heard, ‘Does it work with wasps?’
    Silence.
    ‘I said, “does it work with wasps?”’
    ‘I heard you.’
    ‘Well, does it? Do wasps,’ said Wendy, ‘sting you? Or not?’
    ‘They haven’t yet.’
    ‘Perhaps they don’t, like bees.’
    There was no reply.
    ‘Look,’ said Wendy, ‘let’s go and find some wasps. Perhaps they’ll not sting you, like bees don’t.’
    It occurred to Ruth that acquiring glory wasn’t all jam. It appeared that one was expected to uphold one’s reputation by continual acts of heroism. What would she be required to do supposing she survived the wasps?
    ‘There’s always wasps around the dustbins,’ remarked Wendy temptingly. ‘Take your fingers out of your ears!’
    In one way or another, that particular lunch hour was an eventful time for every member of the Conroy family. While Naomi, with her fingers crossed in her pockets, supervised Ruth’s earnest juggling of the bumblebees, Rachel and Phoebe (and every other child in their primary school) were indulging in an outbreak of midsummer madness. That morning the County Council grass cutter had visited the school and had removed two weeks’ worth of thick damp growth from the playing fields. It had been left piled into an enormous heap at the furthest corner of the school grounds. The children of the school discovered this treasure trove, buried in it, rolled in it, hurled it, smothered their friends with armloads of it, and stuffed it in fistfuls down their enemies’ necks. The teacher on playground duty that day (who suffered from hay fever and had kept well away from the playing fields) was somewhat taken aback when she blew the whistle for afternoon school to see that her charges (who had gone out clean and more or less pink) returned to her filthy and more or less green.
    Meanwhile, Mr Conroy was having the most exciting lunch hour of them all. Returning from work for his dinner he found Mrs Conroy anxiously peering down the road, clutching the first ever solicitor’s letter delivered to disturb the household. Evidently she was talking to herself, for her lips were moving.
    ‘Wonder and worry,’ he heard as he came up to her, ‘I’ve done nothing but wonder and worry all morning, thank goodness you’re home at last,’ she said, distractedly kissing the air beside his ear and thrusting a long white envelope into his hands. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing you’ve done and I know the girls can be naughty, but they’re not that bad that anyone should want to … well, for Heaven’s sake John, patting my back won’t help anything! Open it up and tell me the worst!’
    Mr Conroy ceased attempting to calm his wife and studied the address on the corner of the envelope.
    ‘Never heard of them,’ he remarked and began carefully unsealing the flap so as not to tear it.
    ‘Do hurry, John!’
    ‘It looks like,’ said Mr Conroy after hastily scanning the first page, ‘my poor old Uncle’s dead …’
    ‘Well, it’s the first I’ve heard of you having a poor old Uncle,’ replied his wife, sighing