by Susan Hill
Nor did May wonder why he had done this, since it was quite clear to her that, although he liked money, he would like fame and to be talked about even more, and it would not trouble him that the talking was not full of admiration.
She had to keep the paper from Bertha, and she was anxious about Colin and Berenice, feeling them to be more vulnerable than she was herself and both almost wholly innocent of the malice and devices of a man like Frank.
May cared nothing for what anyone in the village or further afield might either think or say because surely anyone who knew them at all would know that what was written could not possibly be true. They would take it for the fairy story it was, for fairy stories had wicked parents and unhappy children locked in dark cupboards or else sent out alone with a crust of bread into a snowy forest. Frank had written a fairy story, but because he was what he was, had thought it more amusing to use his own family and their home and their true names.
*
When Berenice telephoned, May was ready and perfectly calm.
‘Of course I mind,’ she said, ‘of course I’m angry. But there is nothing to be done about it but hold up our heads. It will pass. Everything does.’
‘Shouldn’t it be stopped? Surely it can be stopped if it’s all untrue?’
‘How? The book is written and published. How can we stop it? Who would take any notice?’
‘But it isn’t true.’
‘A lot of stories aren’t true.’
‘But he’s saying that it is. He isn’t telling a story.’
‘We know that he is. Everyone else will too.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I just am.’
Berenice sighed. She wished she had let Colin do this, as he had half offered. Perhaps he would have been able to make May understand.
‘You haven’t let Mother see the paper?’
‘Of course not.’
‘People were talking about it in the street – in the cafe.’
‘People will. Oh, Berenice, let it run its course. We know the truth.’
‘Do we?’
‘What?’
‘I just . . . wonder. Maybe some of those things did happen.’
‘None of them did. How can you honestly think that? You and I know we didn’t do any of them, Colin is the kindest man on earth – and could anything like that have been going on without our knowing?’
‘No.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I’m so angry, May.’
‘So am I. We have every right to be angry.’
‘But what are we going to do?’
‘Nothing. We can and should do nothing. Let Frank wonder. Let him stew and wonder what we’re thinking and what people are saying and what might happen. Let him. That will be his punishment.’
‘I don’t think it’s enough,’ Berenice said.
And thinking about it all the rest of that day and in her bed at night, nor did May.
None of them had been prepared for what happened. They had expected people to stare but not to stare with such knowing and judgemental eyes, so that all three of them were forced to look away at once, or down to the ground, burning with shame. They had expected some people to come up and tell them that, no, they did not believe any of it, that they had known John Prime for the good man he had been and Bertha for the difficult but still good mother, known Colin, known May, known Berenice. Knew. But few did, though a couple of people came into the florist’s shop and bought something small which Berenice knew was entirely out of kindness or at least pity, and one of the men who worked with Colin made some gruff remark that he understood as sympathetic. But on the whole, people stared and summed up for themselves and kept their distance.
May retreated even more into herself and the routine of life at the Beacon, looking after Bertha and shopping some distance away where she was not known and might not meet anyone who would stare. She read the book. It shocked her more than she had expected or could have explained to the others. She was disgusted by the things Frank had invented and the lubricious way in which every detail was told. If it had all been true and written by someone quite other, she would have been shocked because she did not see why such things should be bruited abroad. They were terrible and if they were true should remain private, and the victim should work out his salvation with some trusted adviser or well-trained professional.
Colin and Berenice had been angry and hurt at once but it took more time for May’s feelings to harden. She felt little for herself, the bitterness was mainly on behalf of their dead father and their mother who lived in a lonely, twilight invalid world, mostly of her own devising.
She thought about Frank for a long time, walking about the farm and up onto the hill where she was unlikely to meet anyone and where she sat on one of the low stone walls from where she could see the roof of the house, thought and delved into her memory of their childhood. But she came up with nothing, nothing at all but contentedness and a certain amount of hardship, though no worse than that suffered by many round here and by no means as bad as some. Had one of them been mocked and teased, it would have been May herself because she had been clever, but her cleverness had simply been accepted, as had Berenice’s prettiness and Colin’s strength and loyalty. That was how it was. That was how they had been.
When she returned from one of these walks May went to look at the door of the cupboard under the stairs. Frank had described it well enough, and when she looked inside found that he was right about that too, though it was even smaller than he had implied and no child could have been pushed very far to the back. The latch was loose too and the door easily opened.
But the cupboard under the stairs was only a symbol. She wondered if one small thing had happened to Frank, which had then seeded itself like a weed, gradually taking over his mind.
No. He had done this with malice, to hurt them, but John Prime was beyond hurt and in a different way so was Bertha, and as for the three of them – they would neither be hurt nor fooled. And they could answer back, May thought suddenly. They could do that.
16
THEY EXPECTED it to be a nine-day wonder and that they had only to hold their heads high until it all died down but in this they were wrong. Things not only went on but they grew worse because as the book was published Frank gave interviews in newspapers, on radio and television, and spoke about them without any reticence, repeating the lies and basking in the sympathy of those who talked to him. New photographs of him appeared alongside those of the small boy and of the whole family. The book became a best-seller and then, in paperback, a bigger seller and there were posters advertising it, bearing the photographs, on hoardings and at railway stations.
A year and a half passed during which none of them grew accustomed to it or learned to ignore the expressions on the faces of those who had once been friends and were still neighbours. They had only one another to speak to now, but that was one thing they could still do. They spoke on the phone, usually May and Berenice but sometimes Colin, too, or Janet on Colin’s behalf, and told one another of this or that which had happened because of the book. Without these conversations and the times when they gathered either at the Beacon or at Colin’s farmhouse, they would have suffered even more. But it was a hard time and the hardness of it showed on their faces.
The year after the story first appeared, a film of Frank’s book was announced and the papers were thick with it all over again, with the names of directors and producers and actors.
‘Actors pretending to be us,’ Berenice said, ‘and John and Bertha. Actors pretending they know us. And where will they film them? They can’t think of coming to the Beacon?’
Perhaps they had thought of it, but no more than that, and it was said the filming would take place in Ireland, or Scotland, or on the Isle of Man or even in Spain – though it was Ireland in the end.
Perhaps I will die before it happens, May often thought, so that I won’t have to endure this any longer.
But she did
not die. None of them died but went on, holding their heads up and talking together and making the best of it, which was all they could do.
Bertha grew more feeble during this time and spent most and then all of the day in bed, lying plucking at a piece of knitting she had asked May to start for her, or twitching at the corners of the magazine she still had delivered though never read. She slept and looked at the sky beyond the window and her mind wandered to places May did not recognise when she described them. She became quieter and less demanding but she hated to be left alone and May found it difficult to get out for long to shop, and impossible, soon, to be able to go and see Colin and Berenice. They had to come to the Beacon, but that was not easy for them and so the times they all met together to talk and for comfort were fewer.
Their lives became narrower and each one of them looked inward and felt inclined to solitude. Janet noticed the change in her husband, Joe Jory in Berenice, but there was no one to notice the change in May.
Frank’s life changed too.
For a time, Frank Prime was interesting to a great many people. He was known, people demanded his company, his opinions were sought after – at least on the subject about which it was felt he had written so movingly and with such truth. Every now and again, at some lunch or on a television programme, when people surrounded him and listened to what he said, Frank felt a small discomfort, as if a shoe were pinching slightly, and he recognised it as guilt. But it would always pass and he felt no shame. For he came to believe in what he had written. Those childhood memories which had been ordinary and frightening were overlaid by the childhood of the boy he had invented. He felt a sadness on behalf of the small child he had created.
Money came in from the book and more money from the film of The Cupboard Under the Stairs, more money than he had expected. But he spent little. Sometimes the shoe pinched and he thought that he should give some of it to Colin and May and Berenice, none of whom had ever had much to spare, but the pinch eased and he did nothing.
He waited for the sky to burst open and for fire to rain on his head. Every morning he woke expecting angry letters in the post or even a ring at his doorbell and to find one of them waiting. But he heard nothing at all. The longer the silence went on, the more he thought about them and wondered how they had reacted and what effect it had had upon them, and the silence and the fact that he could not know frustrated him and became a constant irritation like an itch beneath the skin. It exercised him more and more until he thought of little else. He woke wondering about them and as he went about his day they were with him, but silent and out of reach.
Colin, he thought, would bear it without complaint and little comprehension. He might be puzzled enough to think back to their childhood and go over certain days, delve into certain memories, but on the whole Frank thought that Colin would react little, would simply go on with the business of his life.
Berenice had always been a pert-faced, sugarcoated, manipulative little thing, and it would be Berenice who would scream and shout and try to chivvy the others into anger and violent reaction. Berenice would weep and storm and be full of self-righteousness. She would not stop to think but if she did she would, of course, believe nothing because her own childhood had been so rose-strewn, its paths so smooth and easy. Nothing had ever happened to Berenice. Others saw to that. It had occurred to him once that Berenice might even enjoy the notoriety; he clung to that and soon it was firmly fixed in his mind. Berenice was proud. She was written about, someone had played her in a film. She had probably read the book several times and marked certain passages and gone to see the film more than once too.
The only one he feared was May. He could not guess at May’s reaction. May had ploughed her own furrow. May had had her chance, had gone away and might have stayed away as he had done, but she had been fearful and weak and scurried home. He had no sympathy for May. But if there were ever to be any retribution he knew that it would come from her.
Over time he justified his book by allowing all the inevitable tiny slights and knocks of childhood to grow and harden in his mind as he went over them, elaborated them and added detail. He allowed his feelings to overflow as he remembered, until he could no longer have identified what was true and what he had invented. The others could have set him right but he could not talk to the others and so he came completely to trust himself and his own ordering of things.
He was detached from all the new people who seemed to have gathered round him, and from what they said. And then the letters began to arrive and it was hard, at least at first, for Frank to be detached, for people wrote telling him their most intimate and terrifying secrets, the stories of the abuse they had suffered at the hands of parents and friends, sisters and brothers, neighbours, nannies . . . the list went on, everyone in the world, it seemed, had been beaten and starved and kept in the cold, every little boy had a cupboard under the stairs and every girl a locked cellar. The writers addressed Frank with relief and gratitude. To them, he was the only person who might understand, the first one they had been able to tell. They wrote page after page and they were unbearable to read. They called him a brave man and a saint. As the book grew in popularity and then when the film was shown, so the letters increased in number and length and in the horror of the stories they told, the secrets they spilled, the nightmares they recounted.
At first he read them all. At first, he replied, though saying little, only making a formal acknowledgement and giving a few words of thanks or understanding, but as more and more letters came, he skimmed them and before long ceased to read them at all but tore them up or burned them immediately, and certainly he no longer answered. But his silence seemed only to increase the number of letters. The writers seemed to be banging on his door and shouting at him to notice them, recognise them, speak to them, like the angry, unnoticed, neglected children they were. He felt as if he was drowning in the letters and the weight of their distress, bowed under so much pent-up unhappiness which he had somehow released.
Finally he asked his publishers not to forward anymore and then the letters were merely answered with a printed acknowledgement, but the flow barely paused.
He still lived in the flat he and Elsa had shared. His neighbours went on with their own lives in ignorance of who he was and what he had done, but when he stepped into the streets he was quite often recognised and stared at and sometimes followed. People went up to him in cafés and shops and began to talk to him, to thank him, to pour out their stories. He felt oppressed by them and went out less and less. He slept badly. He missed Elsa then, Elsa’s straightforwardness, her complete lack of self-absorption, her brisk kindness. He had a lot of time in which to remember Elsa. He understood her now. He appreciated her.
But there was no Elsa.
In the end, he closed up the flat and went abroad, first to Europe but then, on a whim, to South Africa, where he settled in a house overlooking a bay and tried to write a second book and failed and after that sat in the sun and looked without much interest at the sea, and so the months passed and all the time he wondered about Colin and Berenice and May and how they had coped with what he had done to them, what they thought about him. He felt like someone shut out of a room in which everyone was discussing him but to which he would never be admitted and when he pressed his ear to the door all he heard was a dull and indecipherable murmur.
But they were not talking about Frank. If there were murmured conversations they did not mention him. Between Colin and Berenice and May now his name was never spoken, and they got through the days as best they might, working, eating, sleeping, waiting for sufficient time to pass in which the memory of it all would fade and even, by some, be quite forgotten.
And time did pass and some did forget. But Frank could not. Instead, as he sat in the sun and wandered about the beaches and drank in the bars, he remembered more clearly and in more vivid detail the things of his childhood, so that he seemed to be living at the Beacon again, to be walking about the rooms and touching the furnitu
re, sleeping in his old bed and eating at the kitchen table, smelling the smell of the beasts in the yard and feeling the movement of the trailer beneath him as he rode up the hill behind the tractor with the others, the air fresh on his face. He could hear their voices. He could see the small mole on May’s neck and Colin’s finger where the nail had come off and the bright yellow of Berenice’s ribbons. He heard their shouts as they came whipping down on trays and boxes through the snow and his knee burned where he had skidded across the ice in short trousers.
Things he had not known he remembered were there, after all, and had only been hidden at the back of a drawer or put away in the attic and now they were all spread out before him so that he could not forget them again.
His nights were disturbed by the voices. People who had written letters visited him to read them out loud and the scenes they described were presented to him like plays that he was forced to watch. Small children cried and hid their faces behind their hands, but the tears came through their closed fingers and the voices began to call his name. They asked for help. They told Frank that he was their only friend and that he alone could save them. They begged and pleaded and wept and he could not get away from their anguished faces, and the voices, when he woke, sweating, were still speaking and crying softly in his ears.
He fled back to England. He had long since sold the flat by the sea, and now he hated the open spaces that had once spelled freedom. He moved into a London flat at the very top of a house with a skylight that let in light and brightness and a small balcony on which he could sit looking over the tops of the trees to the Heath. He changed the old, heavy, dark furniture, spending a great deal of money on new, pale-painted cupboards and chairs with light covers, on white rugs and bright pictures. He had plenty of money. The flat was airy and quiet. But the voices and the faces could not be sold or otherwise disposed of and were there, released into the clear, clean spaces of their new home.