The Beacon

by Susan Hill

  To May, marriage meant exchanging one house for another, possibly one farm for another, one lot of chores for another, and then the possibility of having children. She did not think she liked children enough to make them the focus of her own life for the next twenty years and could not picture herself feeling enough for any man to do the same.

  ‘You should have a boyfriend by now.’

  Berenice had a boyfriend, Alan Meersey whose mother had died when he was born and whose father looked after him alone in a flat over the fish shop he ran. Alan Meersey was the fourth of what was to be a line of boyfriends stretching far into the future before one ever became a husband, but May knew that it was Berenice who had the knack of acquiring boyfriends, because she liked them. She liked boys more than girls, she said, it was quite simple.

  But nothing fitted May. Besides, while she was at the Beacon the terrors stayed away. Sometimes she could barely remember them or understand the power they had had over her. Here she felt safe. She was aware that in lingering at home, perhaps waiting for something to happen, something that would solve the problem of her future for her, she was betraying herself and everything she had once wanted and might have had. She dared not defy the terrors which she knew perfectly well would overcome her if ever she made a second attempt at independence.

  Once she almost told Berenice about the terrors but held back partly because she did not have the words to describe them, partly because she was ashamed of them, but mainly because instinctively she knew that Berenice was too young and also that she was happy and May had a duty to protect her from the shadows.

  Now, May sat for a long time at the table in the kitchen feeling the absolute silence of the house and her aloneness in it like a cloth wrapping around her and shrinking back into it for safety.

  But in the end, she returned to the telephone in the cold hall.

  ‘Berenice?’ she said.

  9

  WHEN BERENICE was eighteen she had simply said that she was leaving home and had gone two days later, to the town ten miles away.

  Bertha Prime had wept. May had gone to London to study, something which Bertha could understand and of which she was secretly proud, though she would never have said so. But Berenice had left home to live with the family of someone she had been at school with, but nevertheless barely knew, in order to work in a florist’s shop, and so Bertha’s resentment was bitter and, she felt, entirely justified. When Bertha was a young girl she had been pretty with a small, heart-shaped face and a slender neck, but as she grew into late middle age the flesh thickened and dropped and formed pillows beneath her jaw. She looked at Berenice who resembled her more closely than any of the others and saw her own young self and her resentment blazed up into anger. If Berenice chose to leave her home and family without good reason then Berenice would have to beg to be welcomed back. But Berenice did not beg. She loved her work, became the manager of the florist’s shop and had a succession of boyfriends of her own age before meeting Joe Jory when she was twenty and he was forty-nine. Joe Jory played the flute in a folk band and was the only man in the whole of the north to read people’s futures for money. He wore a thin ponytail and a thick beard and a strange hat with a band embroidered in bright runic lettering. He and Berenice married and went to live five miles from the town in the opposite direction from the Beacon, in one of the old quarrymen’s cottages. They were as happy as children and so did not bother to have any of their own.

  A few times they had made the journey to the Beacon in Joe Jory’s dilapidated van, but Bertha had been unwelcoming and put her resentment forward like a hook on which they could not help but catch themselves, so they did not bother to come again but just sent cards at Christmas and on birthdays, at least until John Prime’s funeral.

  It was Joe Jory who had told Berenice about Frank. He was the first to find out.

  *

  ‘Berenice?’

  ‘She’s gone then?’

  May closed her eyes.

  ‘Are you on your own?’

  ‘Yes. Except . . .’

  ‘That doesn’t count. Not any more. Do you hear me, May? Listen – you’re on your own. She doesn’t count any more. It won’t sink in yet but when it does you’ll know what it means. You’ll be free then.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘You’ll understand later. You’ve rung Colin.’

  Berenice just knew. Always knew.

  ‘How long ago?’

  How long ago was it? May shook her head, as if she could shake the sense of time back to rights, time which had run away and lost itself since it had happened.

  ‘Not long,’ she said at last. ‘It just – happened. I was outside. I wasn’t with her.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Not your fault.’

  Wasn’t it? The enormity of having let Bertha die alone after having promised so many times made her go giddy.

  ‘Listen, you don’t have to fetch the doctor or the undertaker tonight but I would if I were you. You’ll lie awake thinking about it. Get them to come, May.’

  How was it that Berenice could manage everything, sort it out at once, when she was the youngest and had been shielded from life by the rest of them for years?

  ‘You can talk to Colin about the arrangements.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Funeral.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It would be about a week to ten days, depending.’

  Depending?

  ‘How busy they are, mutt.’

  Berenice even knew what she was going to say when it was still unformed by her mouth.

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘Is the bottle of brandy in the front room cupboard?’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes. I don’t know.’

  ‘Have a drink. Not more than one but have one. A good measure. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then phone the doctor. He has to come first to certify but you can ring the undertaker to come straight after. Take her away. Do it before it gets really late.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May? You’ll be all right now. You will.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know what else I’m going to say.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re not to think of telling him. Not to ring him or send him a letter, nothing. He has no right to know. He forfeited that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we should put it in the Advertiser.’

  ‘Oh yes. I’ll do that tomorrow. Colin will help me with that.’

  ‘Good. You’ll be all right, May.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She would be.

  She put the receiver back and went into the front room. The fire had not been lit in this grate for, what, two years? There was the cold of death in the walls. The brandy was there, in the cupboard. She took it into the kitchen. Poured a good measure. Drank half of it. Then she went back to the telephone.

  Berenice had said what she had thought, that Frank shouldn’t be told. They would surely all agree on it. Colin would and that was everyone. She, Colin, Berenice. Frank had forfeited this and every other right.

  The doctor came within the hour, the old Dr Price not his son, which was a relief to May because he had been the one Bertha had known, the one who had come out to her for years of her odd fits and panics as well as in the last few years to see her when he could do nothing but pretend.

  ‘Now what about you, May?’ he said, following her up the stairs.

  ‘I’m all right, doctor, I’m fine.’

  ‘You said you weren’t with her?’

  They stopped just outside the bedroom door.

  ‘I’d only slipped out for a few moments. She’d been fine all afternoon – all day – I’d never have gone but she’d been fine.’

  ‘No one’s blaming you, May. No one ever could. You’ve been a load-bearer for many years. Besides, you know they have a way of waiting to die till they’re left alone. Why that is nobody knows, but it’s a fact. Maybe to spare the living, maybe for som
e other reason.’

  ‘Is that what she was doing? Waiting to die until I was out of the room?’

  ‘It could be so, May, it could be so.’

  They had been speaking in low voices which seemed odd for they could not waken Bertha now. Respect, May supposed. More respect. Why were the dead to be more respected than the living? She did not think she had ever received respect from a soul throughout her life, but perhaps she would not have known it anyway.

  The body had changed again. It was smaller. The flesh was shrinking further back from the bones and the whole frame seemed smaller and slighter in the bed, as if life had been a weight and space-filling like air in a balloon and now that it had gone what had contained it fell in upon itself.

  She looked at the doctor. Looked away. She was growing used to the density of the silence in the room now.

  It took little time.

  ‘Your mother might have wanted to rest awhile here at home, May. Are the others coming?’

  ‘Not tonight. I don’t know how long they might be. It would be best if she went, wouldn’t it?’

  She saw that he understood.

  ‘Then telephone for the undertaker.’

  She could not tell him that she had already done so.

  At the front door he said, ‘Take another small nip of the brandy, May, and then no more.’

  As he went away she saw the lights of the undertaker’s van coming towards her up the hill.

  10

  THE DAY Frank Prime had left the Beacon at the age of nineteen he had changed. The silent, watching boy had begun to talk, while still a watcher; the one who had slipped like a shadow in and out of rooms became the man who laughed loudly, spoke loudly and became the centre of attention with great ease.

  Like May, he had gone to London. Unlike May, he felt that he had come home from the moment he stepped off the train.

  He had left school at fifteen and gone to the technical college in the town for two years to study surveying and after that become apprenticed to the local council buildings department, but on arriving in London the Frank Prime who had done all of this was shed like the skin of a snake. He had saved enough money, carefully and quietly, to rent a couple of rooms and take his soundings of London, walking about the city as, if he had known it, his sister May had done and the walking had eventually led him, too, to Fleet Street but not to the hell pits of printing machines. Frank Prime had walked into three newspaper offices in search of work and in the third had found it. He became a noisy, sociable dogsbody in the newsroom.

  From the first day he had found himself, as he had found his city, and he seemed to explode with cleverness and confidence and a passion for news and for words on paper, a passion which he had never known for the figures and measurements, lengths and breadths of surveying.

  He got in early and left late but joined the rest of them in one or other pub from the beginning, and in the pubs he listened and stored away gossip, stories, confidences.

  Over the next few years, Frank ascended from office boy up the ladder to reporter and then, after moving papers, to senior reporter. He specialised in crime, and in addition to travelling round the country to the scenes of major crimes he spent days in the Old Bailey at trials. His face became familiar. He had regular bylines. He seemed to love and be immersed in his work.

  And then he married, a widow called Elsa Mordner who had money and a large and gloomy mansion flat at the South Kensington end of Earls Court. Elsa had a sallow skin and a sour expression. She was tall, with long bony Gothic hands and feet and, until she met Frank, had been increasingly lonely and without anyone or anything in particular on which to spend her money and her attention. In Frank, it seemed that she had a docile, cheerful, companionable man who was out of the flat for the major part of the day as well as for those nights when he was away reporting. Somehow, her long days spent shopping or reading or going to galleries and tea shops, which had been mainly ways of filling the time, were transformed simply because she had someone who would be coming home to her. After a year of marriage, the two or three close friends she had noticed that her complexion was less sallow, her expression less sour, and concluded with relief that this marriage, contrary to all their expectations, was completely suitable for her.

  Frank had never taken her to meet his family and indeed almost never spoke about them, whereas she told him a great deal about her own in Munich and took him to visit them twice. The visits were not a success because the family could not understand why Elsa had married an Englishman not once but twice and sensed, rightly, that whereas they were from generations of solid burgher stock Frank Prime was not. Such things mattered. He was aware of the polite, correct and entirely chilly atmosphere and regressed to his old childhood self, silent and watchful. Elsa did not care for the person her husband turned into when they set foot in her home country and thereafter she went to see her family alone.

  In Munich, Elsa’s parents lived, as they had always lived, in a large, high-ceilinged apartment in an old building, so it was natural for her to have bought the same in London, but the apartment was the one thing about his marriage which Frank hated. He hated living on one level. Going to bed on the same floor as that in which the cooking was done and in which he ate and read and watched television felt wrong, and although he was entirely happy in London he missed having outside space of his own, in summer most of all. Even a small garden would have done.

  Intermittently over the years he raised the subject with Elsa, who was quite uncomprehending.

  ‘I lived in the country,’ he would say. ‘I lived on a farm. I lived among open spaces.’

  So with Elsa’s money they bought a small flat by the sea. Meanwhile, in London, instead of pacing up and down a garden path somewhere, Frank paced up and down the long rooms of her mansion flat where the lamps had to be lit almost all day and the bedroom often smelled of roast lamb or frying eggs.

  Frank communicated rarely with his family at the Beacon. He did not so much think as brood about them. Elsa no longer asked anything but never ceased to find it strange that anyone should not wish to keep in touch with parents and siblings, not speak to them on the telephone, not write or visit, not want to have news. She was not a possessive woman and would have been happy to share Frank with whichever members of his family he chose as she had wanted him to be part of hers. Indeed, what followed might never have happened if she had not read out loud at breakfast a couple of lines from one of the weekly Munich letters. She usually did this and Frank usually listened in silence and without comment.

  They had been married for fourteen years. Frank was now head of the news desk and no longer went out to the courts or away reporting crime. He was too senior. He ran the most important part of one of the most important national newspapers. He wrote leaders from time to time. It had taken a while for Elsa to understand that leaders, written anonymously, were more prestigious than news pieces with a byline.

  ‘Listen,’ Elsa said, ‘my brother is writing a book!’

  She went on, translating as she read the letter from her mother who still lived, alone now, in the same old apartment.

  ‘“Peter came to see me as usual on Tuesday and made me very pleased and proud. He has been asked to write a book about some aspect of the law, which I do not fully understand, I confess, for a publisher in Bonn who I know is very highly regarded. So, we will have an author in print in the family!”’

  Frank looked at his wife. Her long face was proud. It was then that it came to him, the whole thing at once so that he was taken aback and had to leave the room and walk round the flat. ‘So, we will have an author in print in the family.’ Well, so they would have two. The book was there in his head, whole, as if someone had planted it, a shrub in the earth. He had no idea where it had come from or why, but he took it and he would make use of it. It excited him.

  He got off the bus halfway as usual and walked the rest of the way to Fleet Street and noticed nothing around him and, when he got into his office, h
e stood looking out of the window high up, looking down on the street and knowing, knowing, hugging his secret to himself. It had changed him.

  He went to a stationer’s at lunchtime and bought two large writing pads, ruled, feint with margin, and a new pen. He had always used a typewriter and now a word processor, but he knew instinctively that he would be writing this by hand.

  He would take time off work and write in their flat by the sea in Suffolk. They were due there the following weekend and he would begin then, while Elsa went shopping and visited friends in the town, took part in coffee mornings and bridge afternoons. Her social life there was far richer than in London. Frank never joined in such things, nor was it expected.

  He walked the first half of the way home more quickly than usual.

  Three days later they drove to the coast. They arrived just after two and fell into their routine, Frank going out to buy fresh fish for their evening meal and to walk back along the shingle beach, Elsa remaining in the flat to make up the bed and air the rooms. It was a bright early-spring day with a bitterly cold east wind off the sea, the tide rushing in.

  He got back to find Elsa lying in the doorway of the bedroom, a pillowcase in her hand. She was dead, he knew it the moment he touched her, her face twisted a little to one side, eyes open and startled.

  Within six weeks, Frank had resigned from his job, sold the London flat and moved what he needed to Suffolk. He had no need to work now, whether or not the book was successful. But he did not doubt that successful was what it would be and in this he was fully justified.

  It took him a much shorter time to write than he had expected. Once he began, the pen took on a life of its own and he watched it race across the paper, telling, inventing, creating detail after detail. Every evening when he read over what had been done that day he was astonished at how convincing it was, how the stark descriptions and bleak conversations conveyed truth. At first he wondered where deep inside him it was coming from, this story he did not know he had to tell, but then he simply accepted it and continued.