The Beacon (3 page)

The weekend with Patricia Hogg taught her so much that she was still absorbing the lessons months later. She learned about how differently others live and speak to one another, that friends can be slippery
and friendships treacherous and that you needed to have resources within yourself to make up for it.

Inevitably, her friendship with Patricia changed and they spent less time together, and when the question of her coming in turn to the Beacon was raised, May was at first evasive and later, when it recurred, said that Patricia was afraid of sleeping in strange houses. She knew that her mother was quietly relieved. There was enough to do and more without the anxiety of having a visitor.

During May’s last years at the village school her friendships were more numerous and also more casual, and in any case she was focusing on the scholarship to the grammar school which would take her away from many of the people she had been with from the beginning. She longed for the senior school, longed for the new lessons and the new books, the uniform and the opening out of world upon world. It was taken for granted that she would pass the examination and so she believed it and made plans in her mind accordingly. The others would go to the secondary school in the market town; the grammar was fifteen miles and a much longer bus ride away. During the final term and after the exam, May detached herself from the village school and everyone in it little by little, though no one else was aware of it.
She did so instinctively and to harden herself, not wanting to be hurt by the pain of the final separation. It was the place she would miss and the loss of it would affect her no matter where she went next, for the small building was what she had loved the most, and although she was eager for her future and the new life, she did not yet know what the new school was like or how strong an attachment she might develop for it.

At home, nothing changed outwardly but Berenice grew and in growing she too began to reveal herself. She was a spoilt and manipulative child, prone to tears and tantrums and to sudden fevers which gave her fits and caused terror in everyone other than May, who had a calm inner knowledge that Berenice would always survive. No mere physical illness, no fever however high and dramatic would ever get the better of her – that much was perfectly clear to May, though to May alone. And yet May loved her as much now that her true nature was visible as she had when Berenice had been a quiet and undemanding baby, and Berenice accepted her sister’s attentions and love as her due and was nourished and enriched by it.

May loved her brother Colin because he was so easy, so straightforward, so readable and predictable. Life for Colin was an uncomplicated business because it was entirely outward. He had, apparently, no inner life whatsoever, no private thoughts or concealed
feelings, no complex responses to other people or to events. Life was linear. Colin had no favourites and no secrets, he treated everyone according to their status in the hierarchy, looked to himself, was generous and hard-working and ended every day in every way the same as he had begun it.

And then there was Frank.

A
FTER A
time she went up to the bed and looked down at her mother’s dead body. Her eyes were open but they were not ‘her’ eyes now, they were ‘the’ eyes. Already the body had become impersonal.

Tentatively, May reached out her hand. She should close the eyes. The sightless blank stare was more frightening than anything else, but she had never done such a thing, though read of it often enough, and did not know if the eyelids would yield. But when she pressed gently on the soft, tender tissue and moved it forward, it slid down over the eyeball quite easily.

The head lay light on the pillow. She had become a light thing of bones and skin and hair over the last few months, flesh had dissolved and withered away and she weighed almost nothing; there was scarcely any impression on the mattress.

The room was thick with the silence. May felt that it stuffed her lungs with something dry and cloth-like as she breathed it in instead of air. The silence went through the whole house, like smoke from the hearth.

She did not know what she should do next. She had not prepared for this moment, though it had been coming for long enough. Somehow she had expected it to happen earlier in the day when other people might be here, even if the Beacon was never full of people as it used to be; mostly she was here with Bertha alone.

A tiny spider was on the back of the dead hand, quite still, and it occurred to her that the hand would not feel the tickling of the insect now. The hand felt nothing.

She turned away. She went from the bedroom and down the stairs and out of the house altogether, suddenly desperate for air, and stood in the dark gulping it in as she might gulp water in great thirst. And it was air, cool, fresh, with the taste of the hill and the earth and the night upon it, and it refreshed her. She looked up at the sky and a picture on the back of one of her exercise books with the drawing of the globe and the constellations came to her mind.

There were thin skeins of cloud winding in front of the moon. She crossed the yard.

Everything was empty, the animals long gone. She
went into the pigsties and the stables where the iron rack still had some wisps of hay and there was straw on the floor brushed up against the wall. The cattle sheds were bare and dark and cold and swept clean. The stones were loose here and there beneath her feet. The wire of the chicken shed was torn away at the bottom. She went inside. The earth was bone dry but there was still the faint sour chicken smell inside the wooden house and just visible stains of droppings on the floor.

In and out of every building, in and out, opening doors, walking around, hearing her own footsteps and nothing else, nothing else.

In the house the body of her mother lay alone and she would rather be here, remembering the warm breath of animals and the feeling of their hot rough tongues, the silken inner ears of the pigs and the coarse hairy skin of their backs, the bones of the chickens beneath the mounds of soft feather.

She walked round slowly. Since the animals went, she had scarcely been out here. The buildings were collapsing. A few winter gales and more gates would break from their hinges, more slates and stones come crashing down. The farmhouse itself was sound enough and she had kept it clean and painted. She had wondered occasionally whether they ought at least to get back some chickens and a few geese and loan out
the stables for a riding horse but had never got round to it. Besides, her mother had set her face against any animals. Animals were to do with the past and the way the Beacon used to be, not this half-life she had lived for the past twenty or more years with May, shut away from the outside and whatever belonged to it. Now, May stood in the chicken shed and thought, yes, she would get some day-olds, next spring, for there was no one to stop her. She could do as she liked.

She went out into the dark of the farmyard again. The moon had slipped out of sight and a wind came whispering up the hill towards her in advance, as always, of a gale later.

Far down she saw the lights of the village and of the farm on the opposite slope. There had always been pitch black up here at night and as a child she had grown used to coming home up the black lane from the bus and having an instinctive sense of what was around and ahead of her, but gradually she had lost that sense and had to feel her way anxiously or use a torch.

She had left the light on in the porch and the hall and upstairs in the front bedroom. She looked at the house, sailing like a ship at sea, visible for so many miles around. The Beacon.

It occurred to her that no one in the universe other
than herself knew yet that Bertha was dead. It could not go on being so but for the moment, as she stood in the dark and the rising wind, it was like holding a secret to herself.

She had felt nothing after the immediate shock of finding her mother dead, nothing at all, and wondered if it would come, sadness, grief, loss, bereavement. She had lived with Bertha for so many years there must be some hurt, and before that she had been here with the others and her father too, never, ever completely alone.

The only time she had been separated from the Beacon and the people of it had been the year she had spent in London, and that she could barely remember, it was so long ago and a life so wholly other, so detached from everything in her experience before or after. Very occasionally, shards of memory of that time came to her like very faded scents and sounds, and usually she could not find a reason for their reappearance, no reminder, no link from present to past, they were simply there, briefly, as she did some job, sat here or there.

She was conscious of the minutes passing, moving her away from the time when her mother had been alive and from the moment when she had found her dead and moving her forwards to whatever she had to do. She realised that she did not quite know. There
seemed no urgency. The body in the bed needed nothing. She needed nothing. What was there to do?

She looked back up at the night sky, huge and impersonal. Smelled the air which had grown colder as she had been out.

Was it the doctor she had to call? The undertaker? Which undertaker? The silence in the house would be broken by people entering it. The time when it was May and the dead body of her mother would be over and she would have to open her arms to the time that was coming when everything would change.

But it has already changed, she thought. It has changed now. Better get on with things then. Ringing the doctor. Ringing the undertaker.

And then the others.

Colin. Berenice.

Frank. He ought to be told. He had the right to know. But she would not tell him and she doubted if the others would bring themselves to speak to him either.

T
HE YEARS
at the grammar school, to which she had indeed won a scholarship, were, she knew now, the best of her life because every day she looked forward, every day she was a step further into the future, which she knew, as everyone knew, was to be entirely successful and a fulfilment. She did not know in which direction she might go, though it was not likely to have much to do with maths and science at which she had to work harder than others to keep pace. Languages were possible. History she found endlessly interesting, and her childhood delight in the globe she had spun round with her finger never left her, so that geography was something she always looked forward to. She liked reading the English set books, the poems and the novels, though not the plays because she found anything theatrical and dramatic
embarrassing. She was an orderly girl, her desk always tidy, her work always marked high for neatness. Early on one of her teachers told her she should think of the Civil Service because she would run an office so efficiently. She wondered about teaching history. She would go somewhere, take up something, fulfil her promise. It was not that she longed to escape the Beacon. She was happy there. Home was home and a familiar comfort, and there were times as she grew up when the idea of leaving it to study or work in some distant place filled her with fear but also seemed so unlikely that she gave it little thought.

She made a great many friends but none of them was ever close and she never again went to stay at someone else’s house, though there were plenty of visits to dinner and tea and those girls occasionally came to the Beacon.

One, Janet Fairley, was quite new, having come to live in the village only the year before from somewhere much farther north. Her father ran the garage, selling petrol and servicing the farm vehicles and the private cars that more people were now acquiring. Her mother had a couple of rooms in the house which she let whenever they were needed.

Janet Fairley was a bright-faced, open-hearted girl who had brought novelty to a class of girls who knew one another too well and had grown bored. She was
friendly towards everyone, made no enemies and joined in no quarrels. And when May had asked her to tea at the Beacon her brother Colin had first talked to her more than he ever talked to anyone and then taken her round the farm, explaining the animals and the machines and the way of everything, earnestly and carefully, as if it were important for her to know and understand everything. May had been taken aback at the way her friend had been appropriated. Her mother had watched him with nervous eyes.

The following Saturday evening, Colin had brushed his hair back and glued it down with water and polished his shoes and walked into the village. Later, they learned that he had called at the Fairley house. The week after that he had taken Janet on the bus into town. They had gone to the pictures.

A year later, Janet Fairley’s mother had died very suddenly and Janet had left school and taken over both the running of the house and the paperwork of the garage. A year after that Colin had married her, and then Arthur Fairley had met a woman in town who, within a couple of months, was his own new wife.

It was not Colin’s marriage which caused the grief in the family, it was his announcement that he was not staying at the Beacon but going to work as a stockman
on a farm the other side of the valley. John Prime had sat silent in the kitchen night after night, arms folded on the table in front of him, bewildered, uncertain who or what to blame.

But after Colin and Janet Fairley were married, and Colin had left, a new farmhand came to help and things rolled on much as before, though there was more room to move in the house. They could spread themselves comfortably around the kitchen table.