The Beacon (13 page)

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.

‘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 was 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.