by Susan Hill
Perhaps if she and May had spoken about him, if they had spoken about anything more than trivial things, they would have found out at least this about one another, that there had been such love.
Life changed. Life stayed the same. Bertha Prime retreated back into herself. The animals went. The men left. May spent more and more time alone. The house seemed emptier than it had ever done before and few people called. May went to see Colin and Berenice because they preferred it that way round and Frank remained in London.
Yet May was not unhappy. She liked life to be even and uneventful, she needed the routine of days and to know that it would be winter and spring, that it would be dark early and late and then light in the mornings with the long-drawn-out summer evenings. She looked for the return of the swallows and house martins and swifts to their nests and the frogs crossing the yard on their way to the pond and waited for the berries to ripen and the nuts and leaves to fall, feeling each small repeated change as her security.
Even Bertha’s demands were regular and formed the backbone of May’s routine. She had to take her early-morning tea and get her up, wash her, help her to dress and to her chair and later to make lunch and settle her for her afternoon rest. Make tea. Settle her for the night.
Nothing disturbed the tenor of their days or the quiet in which they passed them.
14
WHEN JOE Jory told his wife that she should telephone the girl who came in part-time to help in the florist’s and tell her that she was needed today, at once, Berenice did as he said out of astonishment because such a thing had never happened before. He had nothing to do with the shop. He never came to it. The girl had arrived within twenty minutes, and Berenice and Joe Jory had left in silence, walked to the van and driven home, and until they were inside he had told her nothing, other than to reassure her that there had been neither an accident nor a death.
All the way home he had wondered how he could protect her, even while he knew he could not spare her. He could only nurse her as the blows fell. Colin would find out, if he had not already done so, but Colin was strong and he had Janet.
And then there was May.
The rain had stopped and a weak sun was shining onto the back of the house. Joe Jory opened the door and set a chair there. Then he handed the newspaper to Berenice and went quietly away, to potter about in his den within earshot, not able to bear to watch her face as she read.
It took her a long time to read it, mainly because she had to keep going back to the beginning, and to the headline and to the photographs, trying to take in what exactly had happened, what Frank had said. But in the end, when she had read it all the way through slowly twice, she let the paper fall onto her lap.
Sensing a change in the quality of the silence, Joe Jory came out of his den, pulled another chair beside hers and took hold of her hand. She turned to look at him. Her face had changed. She had aged, somehow, in those fifteen minutes, had lost the bloom of innocence which had always been such a delight to him. Her eyes were wary.
‘But it isn’t true,’ she said, ‘none of this is true. All this. All this Frank has written in his book . . . if he has written these things.’
‘Oh, he’s written them all right. He has written them.’
She looked down at the paper. ‘The Cupboard Under the Stairs,’ she read. ‘He’s written a book about us called that?’
‘Yes.’
‘“The Story of One Boy’s Brutal Childhood.”’
‘Yes.’
‘But . . .’ She looked down again. At Frank’s photograph and at the picture of the cover of the book he had written, and at the two photographs of them all, and of the Beacon. They took up a whole page of the paper.
‘But . . . it isn’t true. What Frank says about us . . . about . . . our home. These terrible things he says about himself. None of these things are true.’
‘No.’
She shook her head. ‘How can this be happening? How can my brother have written these things? How can he have done this?’
Joe Jory stroked the back of her hand. There was nothing at all that he could say to help her or to change any of it.
‘Why has he done this? Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? It’s why?’
‘Yes.’
She sat with the sun on her face, feeling her husband’s thumb rubbing the back of her hand, the newspaper on her knee, and she could not make sense of any of it. But at last she said, ‘A newspaper isn’t enough to go by, do you understand me? I have to read the book, don’t I? I have to read Frank’s whole book.’
Three days later, Joe Jory brought it back home with him, having driven over ninety miles to the nearest city with a bookshop. He had kept it in its paper in the old string bag he used for shopping and looked neither at it nor inside it all the way back. It was not for him to do that, it was for Berenice.
It was late afternoon when he walked into the house and by then she had spoken twice to Colin and once to Janet. But they were certain that as yet May did not know anything at all.
The book Frank Prime had written told the story of his unhappy, lonely and abused childhood at a farm called the Beacon and of the misery almost day and night of his life there until he fled the place. It blamed his misery not only on his parents, John and Bertha Prime, but on his siblings too, either because they were party to the infliction of Frank’s suffering, or because they shared in his torments and did nothing.
Everyone was named and there were so many details of dates and times and places and of what he had to endure that it must, surely, be truth rather than fiction, for who would make up such stories?
There is a cupboard beneath the stairs at the Beacon and I cannot now go into any house which has a similar cupboard or think of that particular one without pain and a return of the memories and the nightmares. I have given my book its title because that cupboard symbolises everything that was bad about my boyhood, sums up every tiny cruelty, stands for every fear.
It is a large cupboard because the Beacon is a large farmhouse and it has a few bits and pieces at the back – as I dare say every cupboard under the stairs does – the leg of a broken chair, a stock of brandy, an ancient leather suitcase, some bits of wrapping paper. It has a sloping ceiling of course, and the ceiling comes right down to the small angular space at the very back into which I used to crawl and where I sat for so many hours, pressed against the plaster and smelling the dirt and dust. I do not remember when I was first pushed into the cupboard but I cannot have been more than a toddler, a little boy of barely two, and I know that it was not part of some childish game. It was my father, John Prime, that huge man with the raw red hands, who put me in there, for some babyish mis-behaviour, and dropped the latch. If I cried about anything or made some little complaint, I was put into the dark there. Why? Why me? None of the others was ever pushed into that cupboard. Colin was not a bad boy, as bad boys go, but he was up to far more mischief about the place than me and he was told off, but only lightly, only in a jokey tone. He was never punished as I was punished.
I can never forgive my parents for what they did to me. I am a man who is terrified of the dark so that I can barely go out on winter evenings and I have slept with a lamp on beside my bed for years. Imagine what that did for my marriage – though my wife, Elsa, was very understanding. I never told Elsa the half of it.
I cannot forgive my father or my mother, Bertha, for colluding with him – for she never protested, never tried to protect her little boy.
But what about my brother and sisters? Surely they would have tried to stop it happening and to let me out of that dark and dreadful hole? No. Instead, they pushed me back inside it and even shut me in there when my parents were not around, threatening me with dreadful horrors if I managed to escape of my own accord. But it was the things May told me, things about what lived and breathed inside the cupboard under the stairs, that were the worst of it, monstrous, evil, lurid, hideous creatures and spirits. These creatures insinuated themselves into my mind and burrowed t
heir way down into my subconscious and fed on my imagination. I can conjure them up now. I can smell and feel and hear them and I am still afraid, though I know they do not exist and were only the awful fantasies invented by May.
The cupboard under the stairs is not the worst of it, not by a long way, but let it stand for everything they did to me through those years of my growing up. John and Bertha, Colin and Berenice and May took away the innocence and the happiness, the peace of mind and the whole childhood of their own brother Frank and, now that Frank is a grown man, he cannot forgive them.
I dedicate this book to every boy who was ever made to suffer in the cupboard under the stairs.
In his own cottage, sitting alone, Colin Prime read on. The rest of the family were in bed but he could not have slept until he had finished his brother’s book, though it was years since he had read anything but the newspaper, from time to time, and the stock reports. He had no head for reading and no leisure, but this was different, this book held him in his chair for an hour, two hours, scarcely able to breathe in the quiet kitchen.
At first what he read had puzzled him because he had taken it to be a story, in spite of their names being true, and he had not understood why Frank had not thought to invent names for his characters. But as he read on it became clear, though only in one sense. Clear that Frank meant them to be themselves and their parents too, and the Beacon and the farm and the village and the village school to be true to life, yet not clear because the rest was an invention. What had Frank meant? To tell a story or remember the truth or to muddle the two?
But as he read on, Colin saw that there was no confusion, not in Frank’s mind, not in his intention. He told the story as if it were true. He told their lives as children in every detail so that anyone reading it who knew them would recognise them as themselves, and anyone going to the Beacon would know every room and the items in those rooms. But what he was telling as if it were the full truth was not the truth. It was not the truth as Colin knew it or as it had ever been. It was not Frank’s truth because none of the things he described had ever happened. Not the beatings nor the taunting, not the hunger nor the thirst nor the punishments, not the way his father had made him run round the farmyard naked in the gale and rain when he was five years old, not the tale of his being locked in the shed with the bull or made to eat the swill from the pig bucket. It was not true that Colin had locked him in the cupboard under the stairs time after time or that they had all taken him up to the attic and whipped him raw. It was not true that his mother had goaded them on and spat in Frank’s face and that he had had to sit under the kitchen table while the rest of them ate and had only been given the scraps they dropped down to him. It was not true that he had been made to walk four miles back home from school because John Prime had thrown him off the tractor. Not true that May had jammed his fingers in the door and gone on closing it. That he had never had any new clothes of his own but only Colin’s cast-offs after they were worn out, and shoes that were the wrong size and made his feet bleed. Not true that May taunted him because he could not spell Berenice. Not true that. Not true. Not true. Page after page after page. Not true.
But Colin had to read on to the end, every lie, every page that was not true. He could not stop until it was after three and he had to get up again at five thirty. Then, at last, he closed the book and laid it down on the arm of the chair and put out the lamp and dozed in front of the dying fire until the dawn came up because he was too tired and angry, too hurt and bewildered, to go upstairs to bed.
15
NO ONE knew how to tell May, left at home with Bertha, managing everything.
‘It’s May,’ Colin said several times a day to Janet, when he had found words to talk to her about it.
Janet too read the book at a sitting, but Janet was shrewd and understood Frank better than any of them. ‘He was always fly. He used to look and hang about and not speak to you. It doesn’t surprise me. It shocks me, of course it does, it’s a terrible thing to have done, but it doesn’t surprise me. Not in Frank. Frank might have done anything, I’ve always thought that.’ She was not claiming special knowledge, or being wise after the event. Janet spoke the truth. She had always believed Frank capable of something but of course she could never have imagined this. Nobody could have done so.
‘It’s May.’
‘She has to be told, Colin. Why try to protect her? She’s a grown woman, and clever, she went to university, she spent a year away from home. You seem to forget that about May. You have to show it to her.’
But Colin had shaken his head.
Berenice had driven over to their cottage, leaving Joe Jory, who was getting ready to play at a folk festival and in any case felt that he had done all he could and it was no more of his business except in so far as it might affect Berenice.
They sat round the table, Colin, Janet, Berenice, and the book was there in front of them. The cover, with its sepia photograph of a small boy in shorts, his hair cut raggedly and too short, his head bent, beside the shadow of a low door, seemed to make a fourth, a spectre at the table.
‘What’s he done it for?’ Colin said. ‘That’s what I can’t get my head round. Why? What’s it for?’
‘To cause pain.’
‘Why would he want to do that?’
‘His sort do.’
‘What sort? I don’t know what you’re talking about here. This is my brother, my only brother, and he writes a book about his childhood – our childhood, mine, my childhood – and it’s all a pack of lies. I don’t know why, that’s all there is to it.’
‘Does it matter why? He’s done it and everyone knows about it, thanks to the paper.’
‘You can’t blame them, it’s a good story.’
‘Everyone will know.’
‘There’s nothing to know.’
‘What will they say?’ Janet asked.
‘No smoke without fire.’
‘Precisely.’
‘But there is.’ Colin got up and wandered about the room, a huge man, making every piece of furniture seem too small. ‘That’s exactly what there is. Smoke and no fire. There never was a fire. Was there?’ He sat down again.
‘Not to my knowledge,’ Berenice said.
‘Isn’t that – well, I suppose, the point?’
They both looked at Janet.
‘You say it wasn’t to your knowledge. But maybe things happened to Frank you didn’t know about. Well, that could be it, couldn’t it? You can’t just dismiss it.’
‘I can,’ Berenice said.
‘The thing is, he accuses us. We shoved him into that cupboard, we made him run round our yard with no clothes on and whipped his legs, we threw him off the tractor. Us three. This is what he’s saying so I don’t see that he can have suffered in secret, not at all.’ Colin got up again, walked about. Sat.
‘I just want to get this quite straight,’ Janet said. ‘Nothing happened to either of you of this sort? You weren’t beaten – well, not more than any of us were – nobody shut you in this cupboard, you weren’t laughed at and sneered and jeered at and singled out for unkindness?’
‘No, we were not. Nothing like that, ever. They were good parents to us. To all of us.’
‘Right. So it’s made up.’
‘Of course it’s made up.’
‘We just come back to why. Why has he done it?’ Colin said, and ground his thumb into the tabletop.
‘Money. People get paid for books. And fame.’
‘Funny sort of fame.’
‘Look, I don’t care about him, Col, I don’t give a toss about Frank and why, I care about us. I mind what he’s done to us with this. I mind what he’s done to Dad’s memory and to Mother, what it’s going to do to us with the people we’ve always known. We’ve lived here all our lives, we know everyone, we’ve never had anything to be ashamed of or anything to hide.’
‘Still haven’t.’
‘But it’ll seem as if we have. Some people will believe it, people always do
, and they’ll look at us and point and gossip behind our backs.’
‘Sticks and stones.’
‘No, Colin, no, words can hurt you. Frank’s words have started hurting us already and it’ll just get worse.’
They fell silent and each of them stared down at the book and the book seemed to grow bigger and bigger as they looked at it, to become a vast, bloated, hideous thing, and then to come alive and smirk and mock at them.
The book that Frank had written seemed larger and more powerful than anything in the room, anything in their lives now and in their lives as they had been, because it had changed them and the change could never be undone. The book had power. They understood that. The book had made what was innocent seem sinful, had tainted them and the past and had destroyed the innocence in which they had all lived until now.
And so they sat on, surrounding the small and terrible thing which was Frank Prime’s book.
But of course May knew. She might be alone with her mother at the Beacon but she was not a recluse. The local paper was delivered every week, though principally for Bertha’s interest rather than May’s own. May was in the habit of skimming it first, over her milky coffee and before taking it upstairs to Bertha, and so found the page about Frank’s book, together with the photographs.
She was mortified and she was angry, but from the first sentences as she read them she was not altogether surprised. Frank had always been the watcher, the one who listened behind half-open doors, the one who played small, mean tricks and then smiled. Quiet, waiting Frank.