The Beacon

by Susan Hill

  He never slept easily now. Small children pressed in on all sides in his dreams, the unhappy, piteous, damaged children of the letters. They implored him to help them, wept and held out their arms to him and then became angry and violent towards him and shouted out his name in hating voices, blaming him. He got up and walked about the flat and, sometimes, even dressed and walked the streets, hearing the sound of sirens, seeing the amber glow of the distant lights. Cars passed him and cats streaked in front of him across the road and he went on walking until he was exhausted, but when he returned to the flat he dared not lie down for fear of the dreams.

  He thought of going back to South Africa, or else travelling to another country, to Chile or New Zealand or Japan, but he let the thought go, having the sense to know that the children would fill his dreams just as well there and that he had no escape from them.

  *

  The letters were all answered for him, but once or twice his publishers sent one on because it was a different kind of letter, perhaps from someone who knew him, which was how he received the announcement, clipped from the local newspaper, of his mother’s death.

  17

  ‘She should come back here,’ May said. ‘It’s still done. It’s always done. For people to pay their respects. I don’t understand why you think we should do anything else.’

  Colin and Berenice were silent, not catching her eye.

  ‘You think it will still make a difference? Of course it won’t. It’s over – what Frank did is all over and forgotten. People don’t remember that now.’

  Though she knew that they did, for how could such things be forgotten?

  ‘They know that none of it was true.’

  But they did not.

  ‘They’ll want to come as usual and we should have the coffin here. She should go from here.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Colin said quickly, ‘I agree with that. Of course she should go from here.’

  ‘It’s having the coffin here . . .’ Berenice said. ‘Perhaps it would be best if the undertaker brings her here and we just follow.’

  ‘They came to see Father. You remember how many people came.’

  ‘That was before.’

  ‘Before Frank.’

  ‘Mother was respected as much as he was. It would be wrong not to do what’s always done.’

  There was sudden quiet so that they could hear the faint whirring of the chimney cowl.

  ‘You do what you think is best, May.’ Colin got up. ‘It’s up to you.’

  ‘We should agree. I don’t understand why you’re objecting.’

  ‘Because,’ Berenice said gently, ‘it would be a humiliation if no one came.’

  ‘I want her to be here. It isn’t right without her.’ Though May had felt the emptiness of the house and her own freedom since Bertha’s death as a longed-for blessing.

  ‘You decide,’ Colin said, closing the door behind him.

  They sat on in silence, the two sisters who were so rarely alone together, and the quietness of the house settled on them and calmed them so that they felt in tune with one another and friendly.

  She has changed, May thought, changed entirely from the pert-faced, pretty, spoilt little girl who demanded attention and praise and played off each of us in turn against the others. She has not grown up in any way I expected except that she is still pretty. I suppose it is all thanks to Joe Jory.

  She has not changed, Berenice thought, time has brought her back to the sister she was when we were children, afraid of most things and under our mother’s thumb. She had her chance and tried to take it and failed, and after that she retreated into the safety of this house, our parents, the past and her old self. Why? Was it the fault of anyone at all?

  She looked across the table at May. She has a pinched, sour face, and perhaps nothing truly good has ever happened to her, nothing to transform and enrich her, none of the tremendous surprises of life.

  And then it occurred to her that perhaps Frank had been right in one way, that what had been done to May had been a cruelty, though one she had always and fully accepted. They should have sent her back to London on the next train, thrown her into the sea and forced her to swim, as birds drive their young away. They took her back because it was good for them, not good for May.

  Was Frank right?

  She shook her head. The sun shone on them and the grey hairs glinted like wire on May’s head. But Berenice’s hair was golden.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Berenice asked.

  May was silent.

  ‘If you think she should come home, she should come home. Even if no one comes to pay their respects.’

  ‘We will be here.’

  ‘Shall I come to stay the night with you?’

  May looked up in surprise. ‘Why?’

  ‘You might not want to be alone with the coffin.’

  May laughed. ‘I was alone with her alive for all those years,’ she said. ‘I was alone with her after she died. I can be alone with her again.’

  ‘Then I’ll come in the morning.’ Berenice stood up.

  She did not understand May. She had never known what went on behind the thin pinched face and the narrow spectacles and she never would. May did not change. May had always been a book which was closed and padlocked.

  *

  They brought Bertha’s coffin home to the Beacon six days after her death and in the morning May had prepared the room, with fresh flowers brought over by Berenice and tall candles, though the day was brilliant and the sunshine put out the light of them.

  The coffin was open in the old way. That was right, May said, and what she would have wanted, as it had been for Bertha’s parents and for John Prime.

  When the men had gone May hesitated, suddenly anxious about going into the front room to be alone with what she could not now think of as her mother but was something quite other, a dead body. On the night Bertha had died and when she had been lying in her own bed, she had been there with May, she herself, the woman, her mother. Now it was different. The body in the coffin was no longer Bertha.

  But in the end May did go in and forced herself to look at the pale shrunken face and the slightly puffy eyelids, the tight jaw and the hair combed tightly back from the dome of the forehead. For a moment the sun was clouded and the candles stirred, their light flickering briefly across the waxen face, and May half expected her mother to open her eyes and stare into her own, the lips to move and speak, in order for her to say that something was wrong or make a demand.

  The sun came out again. The room brightened. Bertha Prime lay dead.

  *

  May put on a cotton frock and her blue jacket and waited. Drinks were set out on the sideboard and she had made sandwiches and a cake; there were biscuits, sweet and savoury, cheese and fruit. She had opened the front door first thing and left it open for people to come in.

  No one came until, at a few minutes to twelve, Dick Strong, the old cowman from John Prime’s early days, drove in through the gate in his ancient Ford and wearing the black suit he had had since his own father’s funeral sixty-seven years before. He was small and thin as a chicken and the suit was vast on him, hanging off his shoulders and falling in folds around his black shoes. He stood looking down into the coffin for a long time, then turned away and waited for May to offer him a drink, whisky, which he drank at once before going out into the farmyard and standing there, looking around at the empty barns and byres, his eyes watering, though whether from old age or the sun or even grief May could not have said.

  She thought it possible that Dick Strong, who lived alone and saw no one, might be the only person in the county who knew nothing at all about Frank’s book and would not have cared if he did.

  No one else came until first Colin and Janet, then Berenice with Joe Jory arrived less than half an hour before the undertaker, who closed the coffin.

  The sun shone on the cars as they slipped out through the gate and made the awkward turn into the lane and on their faces through the glas
s and on the white and yellow flowers, bright on their mother’s coffin.

  18

  HE DREAMED a dream of such vividness and clarity that for an hour after he woke from it he could not stop trembling, and it was then he made up his mind to travel to the funeral. He knew of nothing else that might save him. But it was a long way and he did not have a car any more; the journey was complicated and it was so long since he had been up there that he did not know the line to the town had been built over years before, so he had to get a taxi. He recognised the town well enough, though it had spread out; there were the usual blocks of houses where fields had been, but the little he saw of the centre was familiar. The town was built on a hill that sloped down to the river. It was prettier than he had remembered, but then, the sun was shining.

  The taxi driver took a new road to the village and now, because there were only the hills and fields and small clumps of woodland, sheep and stone walls, he quickly lost sense of where he was and none of it was familiar. He might never have been here in his life before.

  He had intended to go straight to the church but as they turned into the road leading to it, he saw that the cars were already outside, the back of the hearse open. The service would have begun and he could not walk in late by himself, interrupting it, having them all turn to stare at him. He told the driver to go back and take the road leading to the Beacon, but at the bottom of the lane, had him stop. He paid and watched the taxi until it was out of sight.

  And now he remembered, the beauty of it and the loneliness of it together, and as he walked slowly towards the deserted farm he understood why he had hated it and why he had gone away and sworn never to come back.

  It was the same. But not the same. He walked in through the gate and saw that there were clumps of grass growing between the stones and that some of the stones were sunken down and broken, and there was grass growing out of the roofs of the cowsheds and two or three doors had come off and were lying on the ground and others swung open, half off their hinges.

  One trailer, its wheels rotting and overgrown with weed, was in the far corner by the tin barn, but there were no other vehicles.

  It was silent. That was the strange thing that made him stand still in the middle of it all. Swifts still dived down into their nests in the roof slates of the farmhouse and swallows in and out of the sheds, but they were noiseless in their flight and there was not a stir of a breeze through the silent summer afternoon.

  Frank looked about him slowly and after a while he found that his eyes were full of tears. He walked into the pigsty where there was still the faint sour smell of the animals and round to the stables where he saw wisps of hay from the iron manger rusting on the wall. The shadows were hard and dark across the broken cobbles of the barn floor. Above his head he saw a row of nests, perfect half-cups of clay moulded to the beams. In the corner by the old privy, where the nettles came waist-high to him, there was the sharp stench of fox. The only animals here now were wild and came and went freely, their lives untouched by humans.

  He wondered if the door of the house had been left unlocked, as it always used to be, and whether he should go in if so. He went towards it and the sun blazed about him.

  The door was not locked. He touched the knob with his finger. Somehow, going inside would break the spell and would bring him face to face with everything and not least the truth.

  He went from empty room to empty room and each room was sun-filled and he wondered as he walked quietly about why he had hated it so much that he had needed to hit back in whatever way he could, at the house and everyone he had lived with here. As far back as he could remember he had felt a misfit and as if he had been dropped into the wrong place, and the feeling had only strengthened as he had grown up. Of course he had told no one. What could he have said which would not have made them simply laugh at him? He had always believed that they laughed at him in any case.

  He stood in the hall. The place smelled different. It smelled of emptiness. Did May live here alone now? He had no idea what any of their plans were because he knew nothing about them. He never had known.

  He tried not to think about the book that had come out of him spontaneously, like some sort of effusion which he had not been able to suppress. It had controlled him, having a life and will of its own, and so he felt no guilt about it or responsibility for it. But how could he explain that to them?

  He had come to his mother’s funeral but too late, and there was nothing else for him here now. He should never have come. Had Bertha known about what he had written? Had anyone told her? Was there even a copy of his book in the house at all? He had not seen one. The only books had been the old ones in the glass case, untouched for years, and a couple of library books in May’s bedroom.

  There had been no reaction at all, no one had written, and he even wondered now if they might not know about the book. It was another world up here, people lived narrow, inward-focused lives.

  But someone would have told them, someone in the town, some old acquaintance or relative, someone. They could not be ignorant of what he had said.

  And then he heard the sound of cars turning into the yard and it was too late. He stood in the sunlit front room beside the table of food and drink covered in white cloths and waited for them to find him.

  It was Colin who came in first, barely recognisable in his dark blue suit and tight collar, his body thicker than Frank remembered it, his hair thin on a head which looked wrong bare of its usual farmer’s cap. Colin saw him at once and his face reddened from the neck up. He stopped dead, and at his shoulder, Janet and May, who came in together, stopped and for a few seconds there was absolute silence. In the hall behind them the voices of Berenice and Joe Jory died.

  They heard the clock tick.

  Then May looked round for help. But no one could help her.

  ‘It had already begun. I was too late for the funeral so I came on here,’ Frank said at last.

  They remained silent.

  No one else had come back, though Eve and Sara had been in the church.

  Most of the food would be wasted though the drink would keep, May thought. Yet she was glad she had done things properly. Frank had seen that. She had done everything as it should be done.

  She went to the table and pulled off the cloth and they stood around, looking down at the plates of food as if uncertain what they were or what should be done with them.

  Then Colin took a few steps towards his brother. Frank stood his ground but his eyes were nervous.

  ‘By rights, I should hit you for what you’ve done,’ Colin said, ‘and kick you out of this house. You can take it that if it had not been today and her funeral, then that’s what I’d have done. You can take it I would.’

  He turned and went to the sideboard, opened a bottle of beer and poured it into a glass. Then the others stirred among themselves and May went into the kitchen to put the kettle on and to clear her mind of the shock of seeing him, and to think what to say or do.

  On the way to the church in the car following the hearse Berenice had said, ‘I wonder if Frank will dare to show his face.’

  ‘Never,’ Colin had said. ‘He’d never. He doesn’t know about it, anyway.’

  Nevertheless, they had waited for his footstep, separately wondering and half expecting until the last possible moment. No one had spoken his name again and as the service had continued it had gone from their minds.

  He looks the same, May thought. Older but the same. The same face. The same body, no fatter, no thinner, the same watching eyes. The same.

  She could not believe that he had dared to come. He had ruined their lives and taken away every friend they had, tainted their memories and left a terrible doubt hanging over their childhood, even though they knew in their hearts that the things he had told were untrue, for those things could not be unsaid and there would always be the suspicion. She prayed that he would simply go so that when she went back into the front room there would be a space and they would move together
to fill it and he would never come here again.

  But when she carried in the teapot he was standing opposite her, his back to the window, and the sun forming a halo behind his head. She looked directly into his eyes. How can you grow up with someone from birth and know nothing about them, she thought, share parents and brother and sister with them, share a house, rooms, a table, holidays, play, illnesses, games and not know them?

  And it flashed through her mind again, as it had done every day since knowing what he had written, that, after all, it might be true and they had chosen to forget but Frank had not forgotten. What then? But it was not true. She knew that as well as she knew her own name and her own self. No word of it was true.

  She poured the tea and he came over and took a cup, not looking at her or speaking, and carried it back to the far corner of the room beside the window.

  Berenice watched him, then looked at May.

  May kept her face blank.

  They stood in silence, separated from one another as if they were pieces placed on a board. The cups chinked in the saucers. Frank looked out of the window.

  Colin said, ‘We should read the will now. It’s the right thing to do.’

  May had forgotten. It was some time since Bertha had told her that her will was in the small drawer of the bureau. May had gone there that evening, taken out the long cream envelope, turned it over, put it back and never thought of it again until the day after Bertha had died. Colin had asked and she had fetched it from the drawer and given it to him. He was the eldest child. He should decide. ‘We’ll do it the way it has always been done,’ he had said. ‘After the funeral. It’s what she would expect.’

  It was what had happened after John Prime’s death. The Beacon and everything in it plus the small amount in the bank had all passed to Bertha, as they had expected.