by Susan Hill
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘You shouldn’t be there on your own with . . . with her. Shouldn’t you get the doctor now, then the undertaker would . . . shouldn’t you do that?’
‘I don’t think so. There’s no urgency. She’s dead, Colin. She can surely stay here the one night in her bed.’
Though as she spoke, as she said ‘she’ in her mind, it was ‘it’. The body. Not their mother. Not Bertha.
‘I could come after milking.’
‘You do that, Colin, that would be best.’
‘I doubt if Janet can get away.’
‘No, no, she needn’t trouble. Just you.’
‘Right. Was it, you know, peaceful?’
‘Oh yes. Yes, very peaceful. She just drifted off to sleep. It was fine.’
‘Good. That’s good. So I’ll see you tomorrow, May.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’ll be mid-morning. Sometime mid-morning.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’ll ring . . . Berenice.’
‘Yes. I’ll do that now. She’ll come of course, but it will depend when she can get away.’
‘I suppose so. Yes.’
‘Goodnight, Colin.’
‘You sure you’re all right?’
‘I’m quite sure. Goodnight then.’
Everything that could be said had been said. May knew that if she had needed him to come he would have driven over at once, but they understood one another well enough, she and Colin, she had spoken the truth in reassuring him and he knew it. She pictured him going to tell Janet, with small brown Eve listening, eyes bright with inquisitiveness, and Sara reading hunched in a corner of the sofa, not listening, not interested. Sara reminded May of herself in her youth, detached from everything going on around her. She had tried to talk to her sometimes, to show that they were on the same side, but Sara had recoiled into her privacy, looking at May with scorn.
The house was so still. Even the wind had died down now as often happened here. A wind would blow for ten minutes or half an hour then drop, leaving the Beacon quite silent. At other times it would roar up the hill and settle to hurl round the chimneys and crash the gates for three or four days or more, driving them all mad.
It was some time since she had eaten anything but she only wanted to drink cold water and when she did so strange thoughts came to her, that Bertha would never eat or drink again, that Bertha would never speak or sigh or smile again. That finally it was all over. Though she shied away at the last thought, fearing what might be to come, unhappy that the future she had longed for was now the present and she would not be able to live in it. It had happened before.
6
MEMORY IS random. The time she spent at the university was a series of moments which were illuminated in exact detail set between stretches of total darkness, and the moments were not necessarily important or significant ones. They had been caught in the passing beam, that was all.
In the final few days before she left the Beacon, John Prime had become almost entirely silent with her, not out of disapproval, she understood that, but from embarrassment that he had nothing to say about her future life, because he knew nothing. She might have been going to the moon. Bertha did not speak to her either but the reason for that was easy to explain. Bertha was envious and Bertha certainly disapproved. Bertha saw May escaping to somewhere of bright promise peopled by those who would turn her daughter’s head and seduce her away from her family, causing her to look down on them and dissociate herself from everything to do with them and their life at the Beacon. She remained silent except when she let out short hissing remarks that darted in and out of her mouth like a snake’s tongue. If you missed them they were not repeated.
From feeling sad that she was leaving and uncertain whether or not she was right to be doing so, May longed to go and ticked off the days in thick black ink on a little notepad beside her bed, leaving it out so that Bertha would see it.
She went alone. Her trunk had gone on ahead by British Road Service and she had only a small linen bag embroidered with purple irises by some forgotten aunt. John Prime drove her to the station in the pickup and as they turned out of the gate, May looked back to see if her mother was watching and waving her out of sight. But she was not.
Her father gave her a ten-shilling note and was glad when she said he should not wait for the train, he had too much to see to.
She knew of one other girl from her grammar school who was going to London, though Sybil Parsons had been in the parallel form and never a friend. But when May got onto the train she saw Sybil in a corner of the first compartment she came to and slid the door back at once, relieved not to be travelling alone after all, though she had not known until this moment that she had minded.
Sybil Parsons was knitting, the work growing out of a neat cotton bag. She was dressed neatly, in a plaid skirt and white blouse with a high collar. Her coat and a small grey hat were on the rack above her head and it was from the rack, an hour later, that she produced her lunch, a tidy parcel of greaseproof paper tied with string containing egg sandwiches, a neatly cut square of Battenberg cake and two small perfectly round apples.
May had rejected Bertha’s offer of a packed lunch, saying that she would eat on the train, but when the attendant came down the car calling first service for the restaurant, her nerve failed her entirely and so she sat opposite Sybil Parsons, watching her eat the neat, crustless sandwiches, biting them with small snaps of her front teeth.
She had a flask of orange squash and when she had drunk some, offered it to May, after first wiping round the rim of the cup with a paper napkin.
May could taste the weak squash now, feel the cream Bakelite cup against her lips and even the lurch of the train as she drank.
*
London. She had been confused and unhappy from the first day, not by the city itself which she liked to walk in by herself, through crowded streets and empty squares, up side alleys and wide open green spaces. For that first term she spent most of her spare time when she was not in classes walking alone, and as it was dark early most of her memories of that time were of lighted shop windows and lighted buses, the smell of smoke and fog on cold air and the faces of strangers looming at her suddenly in the streets.
No, it was not London.
She did not enjoy living with other people in the honeycomb of college hall, where she made no friends because she could not learn the language of late-night gossiping and early romance. She shared a room with a pleasant, quiet girl called Frances Lea who was studying biology and left for the labs early and came home late after meetings of Societies – the Folk Dance Society, the Alpine Society, the Methodist Union, the Choral Society. May worked dutifully and attended lectures and walked through London. After some hesitation she joined the Film Society and sat in dark cinemas watching strange art films with subtitles that seemed to her as meaningless as rituals from a lost past. At a meeting she suggested they try Ealing Comedies or films starring Fred Astaire but was received with such coolness that she abandoned the Film Society and went to small cinemas alone to enjoy Top Hat and Spring in Park Lane.
She made the best of her own company but when the spring came she joined the tennis club and played in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
It was around this time that the terrors began. The first had come when she was waiting at a crossing in the Strand, and before the lights changed from red to green she saw the whole stream of traffic as a thunderous army menacing her and the people walking past as hostile enemies with staring eyes which bored through her body and into her soul. The lights changed from red to green perhaps twenty times before she was able to shake herself free of the terror enough to cross the road and then she ran for the safety of the college walls and a dark corner where she stood with her hand on the wall, and the wall seemed to be about to crack and crumble.
The terror left her as suddenly as it had come, so she decided she must be sickening for an illness and even w
ent to the college nurse who took her temperature, pronounced her well and told her to have a quiet weekend.
In the middle of the night the terror woke her. It had not been a nightmare – she had come out of a safe and dreamless sleep into the knowledge that large ants were crawling over her body and eating the skin away. She put on the lamp, disturbing Frances Lea, who turned over two or three times, muttering.
There was nothing on her skin, but she inspected her arms and legs closely for any sign of bites or marks. When she lay down again she saw strange shapes behind her eyes, trees with branches that curled upwards and inwards and turned to ash and blood-covered beaches dotted with mounds of sand-covered snakes which stirred and coiled and uncoiled. Her own heart was beating extremely slowly and as it beat she felt it enlarging, swelling and filling out like a balloon inside her chest and stomach and finally growing up into her brain.
She sat up and felt calmer and in the end remained sitting up for the whole of that night, and by morning, felt tired but calmer and entirely herself.
The terror did not return for four days. Then, as she walked into the large lecture room, she saw that the seats were filling up not with other students but with white translucent shapes like boils which pulsated and began to exude thin trails of greenish pus. The pus ran down between the rows in a thin virulent stream widening as it moved and flowing towards her. She turned and ran down the corridor, down the great flight of stone stairs into the college entrance hall, but she knew that the stream was flowing behind her and gathering strength like a tide. She ran outside and through the gates and, dodging the people on the pavement, into a side street which led to the river. It was only when she was there, leaning on the Embankment wall looking at a huge barge going slowly past on the water, that she felt safe, for somehow the other tide had dried up and shrivelled back on meeting the great flowing Thames.
A few nights later she woke to find herself in the corridor with Frances shaking her by the arm. ‘You scared me – you keep doing this, May, you keep on scaring me.’
‘Doing what?’
But Frances shook her head, pushed her back into bed, then turned over.
The next afternoon when she got in from lectures she was asked to the warden’s office.
She was referred to a doctor who prescribed sleeping tablets, even though she had no trouble sleeping, only with terror, and she could not find words to speak about it. The tablets made her thick-headed in the mornings and she found it hard to focus on the Reformation and Frederick the Great and Mussolini’s policy, but the terror continued to strike her without warning.
Frances asked to change rooms.
May was put into a small cubicle on the top floor with a window so high that it allowed her no view except of a grey dishcloth square of sky.
She cried much of the time she was there and then the terror followed her down the escalator of the Underground station and onto the train. It took the form of extremely thin men without faces who walked sideways and could slide themselves into her body like cards into a pack and talk to her in obscene language. She got out at the next stop and ran, but of course it made no difference, by then they were in place.
It was a beautiful spring, mild and sunny, and May walked through the parks and sat on benches and took her work to cafés where pigeons flocked onto her table for biscuit crumbs, but the pigeons had running sores and red gimlet eyes which saw into her soul and she was forced to cross to the other side of the city, miles and miles of walking to get away from them.
Once a fortnight Bertha Prime wrote her a letter, on one side of the paper, asking questions rather than giving news of the Beacon, and as May could not answer truthfully she did not reply at all.
*
When the first-year examinations came she was very confident, because although she had failed as a human being living in London she had worked hard, the only short-lived trouble being the effect of the sleeping tablets, which she had thrown down the lavatory when she dreamed of being eaten from the head downwards by Frederick the Great at a state banquet. But when she sat down in the exam hall and the first paper was delivered to her desk, she saw that it was written in a menacing and unfamiliar language which contained threats and abuse. She folded it forty times into a tiny pellet, picked up her things and left. When someone called her name she ignored her.
She left London the next day and, sitting in the corner of the compartment, wished that Sybil Parsons was opposite to her with neatly wrapped sandwiches. But Sybil Parsons was happy at her own college in Regent’s Park and would not be home until the very last possible day. She had sent May one postcard suggesting that they might meet if she, Sybil, ever had ‘a spare half-second’, but May had not replied to that either and had sensed Sybil’s sigh of relief from the building on the other side of the lake.
7
THE ODD flares of memory from that year remained.
Once, she had sat down on the bottom step of a large house on her way back to college after a late-night walk, overcome with terror and feeling safer huddled against the railing there, and a taxi had slowed and stopped. A woman and a man had got out and while the man had paid the woman had come towards the house. She had stared down at May.
‘What are you doing there?’
But then the man had come up. ‘Poor girl, poor girl, whatever is wrong with you?’
He had been concerned until the woman had said, ‘No, don’t talk to her, don’t touch her, send her away, send her away.’
But before he could do as he was bid, May had spared him, sensing that he would have to obey the woman, his wife presumably, and be ashamed to do so, and had got up and run away down the road. Glancing back, she had seen his face in the light of the street lamp, looking after her, troubled.
One day she had walked down an alleyway off Fleet Street and, seeing a door ajar, opened it further and found herself looking into one of the newspaper printing works with the machines rolling and the place an inferno of noise. She had felt the machines were about to lift steel claws and draw her down into them and had turned away and run without looking where she ran so that she was almost killed by a bus. The bus was a red dinosaur lit up inside and roaring.
Once, she had seen the Professor of Medieval History stop and pee against the wall at a side entrance to the college and she had been unable to move but had to watch as he buttoned his trousers and adjusted his coat before turning away. He had not seen her. He had not known that he was known, she had thought afterwards.
But there were very few lighted pictures between the long dark stretches of that single year.
8
AND SO she came home and it was as if that year had never been. The worst she had to endure was the expression on her mother’s face, of satisfaction and smugness, for Bertha had been right all along and May was not fit to be away. John Prime said nothing but one morning after she had been back a few days he had brought her a mug of tea early and said he was going up to look at the sheep on the top, which meant the fields farthest away from the Beacon, and perhaps she would like to go with him. She had drunk the hot sweet tea quickly and slipped out of the house carrying her shoes in case her mother should hear and stop her, and they had travelled together on a golden morning when the sun was already hot as it rose and the larks spiralled up out of sight, singing, singing.
The terrors had not come home with her and she slept as deeply and dreamlessly as she had as a child. It was only the days that seemed a dream, for she glided through them and it seemed to her that as she did so she was like a wraith and left no mark. She was neither happy nor unhappy, she was suspended, apart from all feeling. She spent most time with her father out on the farm, riding with him, watching him, occasionally helping with this or that small thing, and his unquestioning and accepting company soothed her. Otherwise she helped in the house, doing what her mother asked, not thinking, making no plans. The summer drew on and the days passed by, the swallows soared over the roof of the Beacon and the house martins nested
under the eaves. The barn owls reared young and flew, cream-faced and on silent wings, past her window at night.
It was at night that May walked out by herself. She waited until the house was still and left through the back door, sliding the bolt carefully and then crossing the yard to the gate and so into the fields or down the lane. It was a dry summer and the nights were sweet and cloudless, the stars brilliant. When she was out like this, her detachment became an intense sense not so much of happiness as of rightness and satisfaction that she was here, in this place. She went a long way, up onto the high hill among the sheep, whose pale eerie faces appeared out of the darkness close enough for her to feel the warmth of their breath on the night air. She felt ageless and suspended in time and wished for nothing, hoped for nothing, simply was, quietly there.
No one ever found out about her night walks, or so she thought, and the broken sleep seemed never to leave a trace upon her.
The one person she talked to about what she might do with her future was Berenice, who was so much younger but still nearer to her in age than anyone else in the house except for Frank, with whom she could talk about nothing simply because Frank talked to no one. Frank listened and watched and otherwise scarcely impinged on life at the Beacon.
She and Berenice spent hours upstairs in May’s old room which Berenice had taken over the day she had left for the college, Berenice brushing her hair or leaning out of the window, May sitting on the bed putting forward this or that plan.
But no plan was satisfactory. She did not want to go back to studying, even if there had been a college near enough for her to travel to every day; she knew that her mind would have turned to sawdust with the boredom of the jobs available in the town, in shops or offices; she did not have the temperament for nursing; she could not teach without finishing her course.
‘You’ll have to get married,’ Berenice had said at last. ‘There are plenty of men to marry.’