‘We should sit down,’ Colin said.
They waited.
He had taken the envelope out of his inner pocket and held it in his hand. He looked at it. Then he took the chair at the head of the table and gestured to May and Berenice. Janet went to the sideboard and picked up the teapot and Joe Jory followed her into the kitchen, closing the door.
‘Are you expecting to sit down with us?’ Colin asked without looking at his brother.
‘I’ll stand here.’
‘Right.’
They waited and the sun was hot and bright and everything was silent save for the small sounds Colin made as he took his spectacles out of their case, slit open the long envelope and unfolded the paper.
Berenice half closed her eyes against the sun. She wanted to go home so as to be away from Frank and the atmosphere of mistrust and strangeness he had brought into the house, and the will, she knew, would have nothing to do with her, the youngest child and a girl, though perhaps Bertha might have left her the walnut sewing case she had loved as a child. She did not want anything else.
May deliberately suspended all thought, all feeling, in order to get through the rest of the time until they would all have gone and she would be alone here, as she wanted.
Frank looked out of the window at the deserted farmyard and knew that he should not have come. There was nothing here for him. He thought of the airy white spaces of his flat and the absence of any reminder of this place from which he could barely believe now that he had come. He looked at them seated at the table. Colin. May. Berenice. Who were these people?
Suddenly, he was glad that he had written about them and about the Beacon as he had, because it was all true, though not true in the sense of its being the literal truth. The spirit of it was true and the spirit was the truth. He felt a burden he had not known he had been carrying roll off his back.
And then he heard Colin’s voice. Colin had begun reading before Frank had realised it and so he missed the first lines of their mother’s will. But in any case there were not many.
‘“To my younger son, Francis Erwin Prime.”’
He heard the unfamiliar name. He did not recognise himself.
There was a silence of such depth and intensity that it frightened him.
Colin read again, his voice almost a whisper. ‘“To my younger son, Francis Erwin Prime.”’
The will was dated eleven years previously. Eleven years. Before any of it. Before the book. Whether or not Bertha had known about the book was irrelevant.
Frank looked at their faces.
Berenice was staring, eyes wide, cheeks scarlet, mouth a small puckered little o.
May had her hands together in front of her face but he could see the chalk white of the skin between the long fingers.
Colin had laid down the sheet of paper but kept his hand upon it, his head down as he read again and again.
From the kitchen came the crash of china being dropped onto the stone floor, then Janet’s little cry, Joe Jory’s rumbling voice.
Bertha had left the Beacon to Frank. The house. Its contents. The land. On the understanding that May should be allowed to remain there for the rest of her life. There was a hundred pounds each left to Colin and to Berenice. Nothing else.
Frank was as shocked as they were, perhaps more so, and he felt their shock and bewilderment, their anger and disappointment, like a fire which he could not approach, its heat was so great.
But now, Colin got up and walked out. They heard him call to Janet. Berenice fled after him, her face puckered into tears. May neither moved nor spoke. She hardly seemed to breathe.
He should have spoken. He wanted to say that he would have none of it, that the Beacon was theirs, her home, Colin’s farm, and that he washed his hands of everything. If he had done that, if he had said it quickly and clearly and walked out of the door and away, perhaps they might have been able to think better of him in the end, even if they could never understand why he had ruined their lives. If he had.
Instead, the idea that the Beacon was his own, entirely his to do with as he chose, flared up inside him like a spurt of energy, exciting him. Suddenly, he knew what he wanted, what he would do.
Berenice was standing in the open doorway, looking at May. Only at May.
May followed her.
They left, Colin and Janet first, then Berenice and Joe Jory with May in the back of the van, and none of them looked back.
Frank went to the sideboard and poured himself a shot of brandy. The sandwiches were curling at the corners, the glaze on the cake was sweating in the sun.
The sun had slipped round the room so that half of it was in shadow.
He went out to the yard. The swifts were soaring. The sky had a silver sheen.
‘May?’ His voice sounded strange in the empty yard and her name spoken aloud had no meaning.
He went round the empty buildings and found her, as he knew he would, by the broken gate into the old horse pasture, staring up to the hill.
‘What will you do?’ May asked at once. ‘What will you do now?’ Her voice was without expression.
Frank looked slowly around. At the fields baking in the sun. The parched grass. The cracks in the mud around the gate. Back at the house. Until that moment he had had no thought as to the answer. What would he do?
But as they stood there, a yard apart, not looking at one another, with the swallows flying in and out of the empty buildings behind them, he knew. It was not a decision made, it was just knowledge. He knew.
‘Come here,’ he said.
May did not stir but he sensed the tension in her.
‘What is there for you here?’ she asked. ‘You hate this place. You said so. There was never anything for you here but misery. You said.’
He did not answer. He did not have to.
‘When will you come?’
He shrugged. ‘I have to sell up in London. After that.’
‘Where are you staying now?’
‘Nowhere. I didn’t bring anything.’
‘You’d better stay here then.’
‘I’ll go back. Ring for a taxi and get the train. There’ll be one.’
‘Probably.’
‘You?’
She looked round. ‘Me?’ She did not understand.
‘What will you do?’
Until that moment, May would have said that she knew her own future well enough. It was here. She had come back to the Beacon all those years ago because she had failed to make another sort of life and she had no thought of trying again. She might have said that her mother had made her stay but that was not the whole truth. Bertha had only had the power that May allowed her.
Frank. If Bertha had known about his book, would she have left him the Beacon? But Bertha had not known. They had done that. They had kept it from her.
‘We never told her,’ May said now. ‘We said nothing. You didn’t deserve that, but she did.’
The sun was bright on the far fields now. Behind them, the yard was in shadow.
She could go. Because Bertha had said she could stay here for the rest of her life did not mean that she was obliged to do so. She could go anywhere at all. Where? It was as though she saw the whole world and everything in it in one second, every possibility was set before her. And then a shutter clicked and it was gone.
‘I will stay here,’ May said.
*
A future with the brother whom she did not know and who had written the terrible things which had ruined their lives and stained their past, spoilt their memories of happiness, such a future was unimaginable.
But Frank returned to London, sold the flat, packed up what he wanted to keep of his possessions, which was little enough when it came down to it. He returned to the Beacon towards the end of that long golden autumn and took over the attic rooms, but left everything else as it was, as it had always been.
Once or twice he said that in the spring they should move out this or decorate that and May supposed that he wa
s right, for the house was shabby and he could make what changes he wanted.
Colin and Berenice never came back to the Beacon. Sometimes, May drove out to the florist’s or the cottage, but there was a distance between them now, and it widened and became a strain so that, gradually, they saw one another less and less.
Once, on the first chilly evening when May had lit a fire in the grate, she asked him why he had written what he had, why he had told the lies and named them all as he had done.
‘I never understood,’ she said. ‘I still don’t understand.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Did you do it on purpose, to hurt?’
He was silent. Because he asked himself the question every day and could never properly answer. All he knew was that he had always hated this house and felt a misfit among them, and when he had found a way of paying them back and getting a kind of revenge, he had done so. The money was irrelevant, though he had enjoyed some of the fame. He had always intended to leave a mark deeper and more lasting than the near-invisible writing made by the others.
‘Did it make you happy?’
He did not know. But it had given him satisfaction. He had changed the way things were seen and the way they would be remembered. He had changed the way other people thought of them.
The autumn slipped down into one of the harshest winters for years so that they had no time or energy left for argument and scarcely any for conversation. They got through the days as best they could, cut off from the rest of the world by the snow and blizzards, the ice and gales, and later the floods as the thaw came, and it was as though they each lived surrounded by an invisible, impenetrable bubble, almost entirely unaware of one another.
But once or twice, May came upon him standing in the hall and staring at the door of the cupboard under the stairs, and remembered the horrors that had long ago pursued her and did not like to catch his eye.
ALSO AVAILABLE BY SUSAN HILL IN VINTAGE PAPERBACK ARE
THE SIMON SERRAILLER CRIME NOVELS
The Various Haunts of Men
A woman vanishes in the fog up on ‘the Hill’. Initially, the police are not alarmed but when a young girl, an old man and even a dog disappear, no one can deny that something untoward is happening in this quiet cathedral town.
The Pure in Heart
It is spring in the quiet cathedral town of Lafferton and a little boy has been abducted at the gate of his home. Meanwhile, a severely handicapped young woman hovers between life and death, and an excon finds it impossible to go straight . . .
The Risk of Darkness
Children have been disappearing; there are no leads – just a kidnapper at large. The police have failed, the families are distraught. Then Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler receives a call: a child has been snatched in Yorkshire. Has the abductor struck again?
The Vows of Silence
A gunman is terrorising young women. What – if anything – links the attacks? Is the marksman with a rifle the same person as the killer with a handgun, or do the police have two snipers on their hands? Two forthcoming events, a local fair and the high-profile wedding of the Lord Lietuenat’s daughter, only add to the pressure on Simon Serrailler.
Susan Hill, The Beacon
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