The Beacon (6 page)

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.

T
HE 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.

A
ND 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.’

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.

W
HEN
B
ERENICE
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?’