The Beacon, Page 2

  She fell into schoolwork. She loved the exercise books she was given, one of which had times tables, rules and measures on the back, the other lists of the principal rivers and mountains of the world, of Kings and Queens, of Important Dates and Capital Cities and the Constellations. She learned them by heart without trying because she looked at them so often, read them so many times, that her mind, almost her skin, simply absorbed them.

  As she moved up from class to class everything became more interesting and the exercise books now had algebraic and chemical formulae and French and Latin verbs. The beginning of each term, when she wrote her name on each book, filled her with a huge excitement for the knowledge that was waiting for her, the exercises to come.

  Yet she was a friendly girl too; she learned skipping games and five stones and catching rhymes and huddled against the wall hearing tales. She played rounders because she had an excellent ball eye, though her running was awkward. She could jump higher than any other girl in the school and played the recorder well enough to be in the band.

  When she was seven she acquired a particular friend who had come to the school that term.

  Patricia Hogg’s father was the new gamekeeper to the big estate on the other side of the hill, across the valley from the Beacon, and for a time, May, Patricia Hogg and a girl called Geraldine were always closeted together. But, three being a crowd, Geraldine was edged out, and May and Patricia Hogg were left to sit together, eat lunch together, walk part of the way home together. Patricia Hogg was a reader like May and in spring and summer they took their library books and sat in the sun on the wall or on the grassy bank, skirts hitched up above their knees so their legs would brown.

  Patricia Hogg had none of May’s fire for learning and the books she read were always school or fairy stories, but they formed a comfortable pairing.

  Once, May was invited to stay with Patricia Hogg at the gamekeeper’s cottage, which sent Bertha into a spasm of uncertainty and alarm, for no member of the Prime family had been to stay at the house of anyone who was not a close relative as far back as anyone could remember, so that there was the worry of what state May’s clothes were in and how she should carry them and if presents ought to be taken.

  But in the end this was sewn and that was mended and everything was clean and a canvas bag found in one of the upstairs trunks and a jar of honey and a slab of home-cured bacon wrapped in greaseproof and settled among the cotton knickers and white socks.

  She had left with Patricia Hogg after school, walking importantly out of the gate carrying the canvas bag. They walked to the opposite end of the village from the one which led to the Beacon, and waited in the sun for a bus. When it came it was full with people coming back from the market and they had to stand, holding onto the cracked leather seat backs and swaying about as the bus went round the bends. She could remember the feel of the leather in her hand, years afterwards.

  The cottage was on the very edge of the estate and backed onto the woods. It was small and dark with low ceilings and you went in straight from the street. There was no porch.

  There were five of them living in the cottage with the indoors dog and two cats, and with May it was crowded and felt more so when the gamekeeper came in from work. He was a huge man. They were all huge, with large hands and feet, and Mrs Hogg had a great, wide backside which seemed to fill half the kitchen when she bent over.

  May slept in the same bed as Patricia. She had never in her life slept in a bed with anyone else and crept to the far side and held onto the edge in case their legs touched. To May, sharing a bed was a strange and unpleasant thing to do, and hot, too, under the heavy quilt.

  The Beacon was never completely silent because of being high up and always troubled by a wind, but here the woods seemed to press into the house like baize, so that no air could get through and the light was oddly green. She could not get to sleep for the stillness and the odd shrieks of creatures out in the darkness, and then she began to want the lavatory. She tried to ignore the pressure of it but in the end she had to whisper to Patricia, and not knowing what to say, asked, ‘Has your dad locked up downstairs?’

  The toilet was outside at the bottom of the thin garden close to the trees.

  ‘Why, what are you frightened of?’

  ‘I’m not frightened. I need to go to the toilet.’

  ‘There’s something under the bed for that.’

  May had been mortified. There were pots under the beds at home too, though also a proper flush toilet in a lean-to beyond the scullery. The idea of using a pot with someone else in the room, even in the dark, was quite shocking. She lay absolutely still on the far edge of the bed and in spite of the discomfort eventually slept. She woke sometime later. It was still pitch black, and Patricia was making tiny snorting sounds. May slid inch by inch from the bed onto the floor and then felt around for the pot on the rough boards, praying for the other girl not to wake.

  In some ways everything at the Hoggs’ cottage was familiar. The dark. The fact that the outside world seemed to be inside too, the sounds the pigs made and the smells. Otherwise, it was entirely strange, denser and closer, as if everyone and everything was packed tightly together, bodies and clothes, china and pans, cats and chairs and the gamekeeper’s guns and sticks.

  There were the indoor dog, and two cats, but no animals other than two pigs and the gun dogs which lived in outside cages and the ferrets, and the wood came right to the fence and one day might have marched into the house like a wood in a fairy story.

  May learned an early lesson about people, which is that they can change according to their settings and how they fit into them. Patricia Hogg at home was not the same as the one she knew at school. At home she took the lead and was not always friendly, sulked and was cocky. She was the eldest child of three and the only girl.

  They went for desultory walks and sat in the fringes of the wood among leaves and pine needles with their backs against the tree trunks. May had brought a book but Patricia did not want to read. She did not seem to want her here and there was nothing to talk about. They had been shooed out of the house after breakfast.

  It was a dismal three days and May felt that she was doing wrong simply by being her usual self, but she had no other self to present and found herself, for the first but not the last time, without resources and unable to mould herself to blend with her surroundings or to fit in with the expectations of others. She had no idea what those expectations were. The difference in the other girl was both a shock and a puzzle and she did not know how to relate to this new Patricia Hogg.

  She finished her book and asked if she could borrow another but there was only the Bible in the cottage, so she found herself reading Exodus and Isaiah and Revelation by the light of the oil lamp at the kitchen table while they drank beakers of cocoa and Mrs Hogg banged the iron down onto sheets and shirts. Always after, that biblical language was associated for May with the smell of the hot flannel and the dusty taste of cocoa so that wafts of one or the other came to her if she was in church or heard the Bible being read aloud anywhere.

  The weekend with Patricia Hogg taught her so much that she was still absorbing the lessons months later. She learned about how differently others live and speak to one another, that friends can be slippery and friendships treacherous and that you needed to have resources within yourself to make up for it.

  Inevitably, her friendship with Patricia changed and they spent less time together, and when the question of her coming in turn to the Beacon was raised, May was at first evasive and later, when it recurred, said that Patricia was afraid of sleeping in strange houses. She knew that her mother was quietly relieved. There was enough to do and more without the anxiety of having a visitor.

  During May’s last years at the village school her friendships were more numerous and also more casual, and in any case she was focusing on the scholarship to the grammar school which would take her away from many of the people she had been with from the beginning. She longed for the senior sc
hool, longed for the new lessons and the new books, the uniform and the opening out of world upon world. It was taken for granted that she would pass the examination and so she believed it and made plans in her mind accordingly. The others would go to the secondary school in the market town; the grammar was fifteen miles and a much longer bus ride away. During the final term and after the exam, May detached herself from the village school and everyone in it little by little, though no one else was aware of it. She did so instinctively and to harden herself, not wanting to be hurt by the pain of the final separation. It was the place she would miss and the loss of it would affect her no matter where she went next, for the small building was what she had loved the most, and although she was eager for her future and the new life, she did not yet know what the new school was like or how strong an attachment she might develop for it.

  At home, nothing changed outwardly but Berenice grew and in growing she too began to reveal herself. She was a spoilt and manipulative child, prone to tears and tantrums and to sudden fevers which gave her fits and caused terror in everyone other than May, who had a calm inner knowledge that Berenice would always survive. No mere physical illness, no fever however high and dramatic would ever get the better of her – that much was perfectly clear to May, though to May alone. And yet May loved her as much now that her true nature was visible as she had when Berenice had been a quiet and undemanding baby, and Berenice accepted her sister’s attentions and love as her due and was nourished and enriched by it.

  May loved her brother Colin because he was so easy, so straightforward, so readable and predictable. Life for Colin was an uncomplicated business because it was entirely outward. He had, apparently, no inner life whatsoever, no private thoughts or concealed feelings, no complex responses to other people or to events. Life was linear. Colin had no favourites and no secrets, he treated everyone according to their status in the hierarchy, looked to himself, was generous and hard-working and ended every day in every way the same as he had begun it.

  And then there was Frank.

  3

  AFTER A time she went up to the bed and looked down at her mother’s dead body. Her eyes were open but they were not ‘her’ eyes now, they were ‘the’ eyes. Already the body had become impersonal.

  Tentatively, May reached out her hand. She should close the eyes. The sightless blank stare was more frightening than anything else, but she had never done such a thing, though read of it often enough, and did not know if the eyelids would yield. But when she pressed gently on the soft, tender tissue and moved it forward, it slid down over the eyeball quite easily.

  The head lay light on the pillow. She had become a light thing of bones and skin and hair over the last few months, flesh had dissolved and withered away and she weighed almost nothing; there was scarcely any impression on the mattress.

  The room was thick with the silence. May felt that it stuffed her lungs with something dry and cloth-like as she breathed it in instead of air. The silence went through the whole house, like smoke from the hearth.

  She did not know what she should do next. She had not prepared for this moment, though it had been coming for long enough. Somehow she had expected it to happen earlier in the day when other people might be here, even if the Beacon was never full of people as it used to be; mostly she was here with Bertha alone.

  A tiny spider was on the back of the dead hand, quite still, and it occurred to her that the hand would not feel the tickling of the insect now. The hand felt nothing.

  She turned away. She went from the bedroom and down the stairs and out of the house altogether, suddenly desperate for air, and stood in the dark gulping it in as she might gulp water in great thirst. And it was air, cool, fresh, with the taste of the hill and the earth and the night upon it, and it refreshed her. She looked up at the sky and a picture on the back of one of her exercise books with the drawing of the globe and the constellations came to her mind.

  There were thin skeins of cloud winding in front of the moon. She crossed the yard.

  Everything was empty, the animals long gone. She went into the pigsties and the stables where the iron rack still had some wisps of hay and there was straw on the floor brushed up against the wall. The cattle sheds were bare and dark and cold and swept clean. The stones were loose here and there beneath her feet. The wire of the chicken shed was torn away at the bottom. She went inside. The earth was bone dry but there was still the faint sour chicken smell inside the wooden house and just visible stains of droppings on the floor.

  In and out of every building, in and out, opening doors, walking around, hearing her own footsteps and nothing else, nothing else.

  In the house the body of her mother lay alone and she would rather be here, remembering the warm breath of animals and the feeling of their hot rough tongues, the silken inner ears of the pigs and the coarse hairy skin of their backs, the bones of the chickens beneath the mounds of soft feather.

  She walked round slowly. Since the animals went, she had scarcely been out here. The buildings were collapsing. A few winter gales and more gates would break from their hinges, more slates and stones come crashing down. The farmhouse itself was sound enough and she had kept it clean and painted. She had wondered occasionally whether they ought at least to get back some chickens and a few geese and loan out the stables for a riding horse but had never got round to it. Besides, her mother had set her face against any animals. Animals were to do with the past and the way the Beacon used to be, not this half-life she had lived for the past twenty or more years with May, shut away from the outside and whatever belonged to it. Now, May stood in the chicken shed and thought, yes, she would get some day-olds, next spring, for there was no one to stop her. She could do as she liked.

  She went out into the dark of the farmyard again. The moon had slipped out of sight and a wind came whispering up the hill towards her in advance, as always, of a gale later.

  Far down she saw the lights of the village and of the farm on the opposite slope. There had always been pitch black up here at night and as a child she had grown used to coming home up the black lane from the bus and having an instinctive sense of what was around and ahead of her, but gradually she had lost that sense and had to feel her way anxiously or use a torch.

  She had left the light on in the porch and the hall and upstairs in the front bedroom. She looked at the house, sailing like a ship at sea, visible for so many miles around. The Beacon.

  It occurred to her that no one in the universe other than herself knew yet that Bertha was dead. It could not go on being so but for the moment, as she stood in the dark and the rising wind, it was like holding a secret to herself.

  She had felt nothing after the immediate shock of finding her mother dead, nothing at all, and wondered if it would come, sadness, grief, loss, bereavement. She had lived with Bertha for so many years there must be some hurt, and before that she had been here with the others and her father too, never, ever completely alone.

  The only time she had been separated from the Beacon and the people of it had been the year she had spent in London, and that she could barely remember, it was so long ago and a life so wholly other, so detached from everything in her experience before or after. Very occasionally, shards of memory of that time came to her like very faded scents and sounds, and usually she could not find a reason for their reappearance, no reminder, no link from present to past, they were simply there, briefly, as she did some job, sat here or there.

  She was conscious of the minutes passing, moving her away from the time when her mother had been alive and from the moment when she had found her dead and moving her forwards to whatever she had to do. She realised that she did not quite know. There seemed no urgency. The body in the bed needed nothing. She needed nothing. What was there to do?

  She looked back up at the night sky, huge and impersonal. Smelled the air which had grown colder as she had been out.

  Was it the doctor she had to call? The undertaker? Which undertaker? The silence in
the house would be broken by people entering it. The time when it was May and the dead body of her mother would be over and she would have to open her arms to the time that was coming when everything would change.

  But it has already changed, she thought. It has changed now. Better get on with things then. Ringing the doctor. Ringing the undertaker.

  And then the others.

  Colin. Berenice.

  Frank. He ought to be told. He had the right to know. But she would not tell him and she doubted if the others would bring themselves to speak to him either.

  4

  THE YEARS at the grammar school, to which she had indeed won a scholarship, were, she knew now, the best of her life because every day she looked forward, every day she was a step further into the future, which she knew, as everyone knew, was to be entirely successful and a fulfilment. She did not know in which direction she might go, though it was not likely to have much to do with maths and science at which she had to work harder than others to keep pace. Languages were possible. History she found endlessly interesting, and her childhood delight in the globe she had spun round with her finger never left her, so that geography was something she always looked forward to. She liked reading the English set books, the poems and the novels, though not the plays because she found anything theatrical and dramatic embarrassing. She was an orderly girl, her desk always tidy, her work always marked high for neatness. Early on one of her teachers told her she should think of the Civil Service because she would run an office so efficiently. She wondered about teaching history. She would go somewhere, take up something, fulfil her promise. It was not that she longed to escape the Beacon. She was happy there. Home was home and a familiar comfort, and there were times as she grew up when the idea of leaving it to study or work in some distant place filled her with fear but also seemed so unlikely that she gave it little thought.