The Beacon Read online

  SUSAN HILL

  The Beacon

  VINTAGE BOOKS

  London

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Also by Susan Hill

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Otherbooks

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409016724

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2009

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Susan Hill 2008

  Susan Hill has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Chatto & Windus

  Vintage

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099526957

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  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon CR0 4TD

  THE BEACON

  Susan Hill’s novels and short stories have won the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham and John Llewellyn Rhys awards and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Many of them are set texts for GCSE and A-Levels. The author, among other novels, of I’m the King of the Castle, Strange Meeting and In the Springtime of the Year, she is also creator of the series of Simon Serrailler crime novels.

  She wrote Mrs de Winter, the sequel to Rebecca; and her bestselling ghost stories – The Woman in Black, The Mist in the Mirror and The Man in the Picture – have won her acclaim. The Woman in Black, which was adapted for the stage, has been running in London for over twenty years.

  Susan Hill is married to the Shakespeare scholar, Stanley Wells, and they have two daughters. She lives in Gloucestershire, where she runs her own small publishing company, Long Barn Books.

  Susan Hill’s website is www.susan-hill.com

  ALSO BY SUSAN HILL

  Featuring Simon Serrailler

  The Various Haunts of Men

  The Pure in Heart

  The Risk of Darkness

  The Vows of Silence

  Fiction

  Gentlemen and Ladies

  A Change for the Better

  I’m the King of the Castle

  The Albatross and Other Stories

  Strange Meeting

  The Bird of Night

  A Bit of Singing and Dancing

  In the Springtime of the Year

  The Woman in Black

  Mrs de Winter

  The Mist in the Mirror

  Air and Angels

  The Service of Clouds

  The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read

  The Man in the Picture

  Non-Fiction

  The Magic Apple Tree

  Family

  Children’s Books

  The Battle for Gullywith

  1

  MAY PRIME had been with her mother all afternoon, sitting in the cane chair a few feet away from the bed, but suddenly at seven o’clock she had jumped up and run out of the house and into the yard and stood staring at the gathering sky because she could not bear the dying a second longer.

  And when she returned only a little later Bertha was dead. May knew it had happened as she walked back into the house, before reaching the bedroom, before seeing her. She knew it from the change in everything and from the silence. But she still drew in her breath and her hand went to her mouth when she looked down.

  The farmhouse was called the Beacon and they had been born and reared there, Colin, Frank, May and Berenice, but only May had been left for the last twenty-seven years to live with both their parents and then, after their father’s death, with their mother alone.

  One week, their father had been helping to haul a cow out of a ditch and, the next, most of the animals had gone. Bertha Prime had called in a neighbour and had them sent to market. Only the chickens had remained.

  After that, Bertha had let out the fields. Otherwise life had stayed the same. There were no animals to feed and milk early and late and, once Frank moved out, no man to do it anyway.

  It was no longer usual, in the 1960s, for an unmarried girl to go on living with her parents, their insurance against the deprivations of old age, and if they had ever been asked about it directly, John and, after John, Bertha would have said that they would be more than happy for May to leave home, preferably to be married but if not that then for a career. They had neither asked nor expected her to remain with them. It had just happened.

  May would have said the same. It had just happened. ‘Fallen out that way.’ There was more to it than that, of course, but John and Bertha did not know the ‘more’ and May preferred to bury it.

  Perhaps Bertha guessed something but if she did she never spoke of it.

  She stood in the doorway, hand to mouth, and her mother lay in the bed with the slatted oak frame and she was dead. From that moment everything was different. She was a dead body, not Bertha, not her mother.

  May had been with her, watching from the front porch, when they had brought her dead father home and carried him up and laid him down on this same bed, so she knew the appearance of death, as she recognised the absoluteness of the silence. But it was shocking all the same. She went unsteadily across the room and sat in the cane chair, but for several minutes could not look at the bed.

  2

  JOHN AND Bertha Prime had taken the Beacon over from John’s father and mother, and had moved in as one family in the last years of the thirties, and to Bertha living with them was what she had expected and the hard work was expected too. She had not come from a farming family – her parents had kept the village store – but no one could have lived at the Beacon without understanding what the life of everyone around them entailed. Only the large landowners had cottages into which sons and their new families could sometimes move. John Prime’s father, also John Prime, was no such man.

  John and Bertha had come back from their wedding st
raight to the attic bedroom, which had been turned out and cleaned in their honour, with new curtains and a new mattress for the old bed but nothing else, and the following morning Bertha had come downstairs to work in the dairy with her new mother-in-law. After the dairy there were the chickens and then the geese, and after the geese the beehives, and after that the kitchen, and that was life at the Beacon. Once a week she spent an afternoon with her own parents and served in the store, and at first it felt as if she had never left but, before long, this was changed and that was changed, things were in a new place, the shelving was rearranged, and Bertha had soon felt like a stranger who knew nothing of the way things should be.

  They were married in July and in November she stopped going to the store every week and when she did go, she no longer served there because she got in the way and slowed things down, they said, and besides, now she was pregnant with her first child.

  The baby, a boy, was born on the hottest day of the following summer while every available man and woman was out in the fields and Bertha lay and sweated in the attic bedroom through thirteen hours of labour. John Prime lived for half an hour only, and the next summer another baby was stillborn, though this one came in the night of torrential rain that washed a ton of mud and stones down the hill and half a flock of sheep were buried.

  Her mother-in-law was not unfeeling, not unkind, but having lost three children of her own, accepted those things as inevitable and said very little, though she did not press Bertha to return to the dairy or the kitchen, but let her work things out in her own time. But sitting alone in the attic or going for silent walks along the lanes and through the fields near the Beacon gave her thoughts of death, and when her mind turned twice to drowning and she caught herself looking at the strong branch of a tree, Bertha went back at once to work in the dairy and among the chickens, terrified.

  Her husband, John, was sympathetic but uncomfortable and in any case spent little time with her, because there was always too much work to be done and that was the way of it. Only sometimes in winter, when the weather was bad and the nights drawn in, he would come with his father to sit beside the fire next to her and drink a glass of ale and talk a little, though always about the farm or the state of the land or the prices at market. Once or twice they would listen to the wireless and afterwards talk would turn to the wider world and what would happen if there was another war, as seemed likely. But the talk was brief and petered out with the dying fire and then it was time for the women to set out the bread and cheese and last drinks before bed.

  Two days before the outbreak of war, Bertha went into a short, sharp labour with Colin, who was nine pounds of furious health, and barely a year later Frank was born and a family was established and no one looked back, though Bertha went to the churchyard every Easter and Christmas to put flowers on the infant graves. In the years when she had been ill and first housebound and then bedridden, May had taken over the duty, because she was asked and because it was something that had just always been done like so much else in a life filled with habit and custom and a small amount of ritual.

  May herself arrived in the spring of 1942, born in the same bedroom but only just, for by now Bertha’s labours were even quicker and the baby had almost been born in the kitchen and then on the last treads of the stairs.

  May was neither large nor robust but a long, pale, straggling baby who would not suckle and seemed to have no appetite for life. In the end, it was her grandmother who coaxed her forward a little further each day when Bertha’s milk had run out, by giving the baby milk fresh from the cow and sitting patiently with her on a kitchen stool until she had finished a bottle. The two boys thrived and raced about.

  Because their lives were already hard, the war brought nothing very much worse, and indeed, in some ways it was easier because it brought extra help on all the farms, in the shape of prisoners of war and even land girls, though the latter were never sent to the Beacon. The Prime family were better off for food than many others – the men shot rabbits and there were always fruit and mushrooms for those who knew where to look.

  May was three when her grandfather died and she remembered nothing of him but the smell of his tobacco which seemed to come from the pores of his skin and the hair of his head and be woven like another layer of thread into every item of his clothing. When he died, John Prime moved into his shoes and the only difference was that now he gave instead of took the orders. The work was just the same. But there was never any question of John and Bertha moving out of the attic down to the big bedroom and the large bed. If the widow had ever felt it was her place to give them up now to the next generation, as others would and had in her position, she said nothing and did nothing and so everything remained as it had and Bertha could not ask. It was another ten years before Bertha attained the large room and the biggest bed, and by then she had forgotten that they had once been so prized. The attic was hers. The attic was where her marriage had begun, the attic was her marriage’s own private space, her small world, and in the end she was reluctant to leave it. But by then Colin and Frank needed a bigger room and May moved into theirs, and so everything changed and life went on with only a pause for the shifting of mattresses.

  They kept dairy cows and a few beef cattle, sheep and pigs and chickens, with geese and turkeys for Christmas, and they grew wheat and barley and potatoes, and as the land was partly on the side of the hill that stretched away from the Beacon and partly on the plain running down to the river, the work was both varied and never-ending. After the war they stopped using horses and bought a tractor and the milking gradually became more mechanised, but that did not shrink the working hours and the weather was against them for seven months of the year in this distant and uphill place.

  May had fragmented memories of growing up at the Beacon, like a series of pictures in an album except that sometimes the pictures had sound or came with their own smell and taste. Someone from the village brought a grandchild of the same age, Sylvia, and Sylvia and May had wandered out into the strawberry patch and eaten the fruit warm from the sun until their mouths were scarlet and their stomachs ached. The taste and the smell of the berries and the straw they rested in and the earth beneath it were there for the taking for the rest of May’s life if she read or heard the single word ‘strawberry’.

  The pain in the back of her legs after climbing the hill and the feel of the rain and wind stinging her face.

  Her grandmother’s smell when she was old. May had not liked to go near her in the chair or in her bed because of the smell which was of something both decaying and oddly sweet.

  She had gone to school on the bus from the end of the track, but memories of school were even more fragmented. The feel of a wooden ruler in her hand and, once, being told that a girl in her class had measles very badly, and then next, that she was dead.

  The shiny green tiles in the washroom. The cold water that made your teeth ache when you drank it from the tap, cupping your hand and filling it first then scooping the hand to your mouth.

  But there were no really bad memories and that was important. Later, when she had to sit down and go step by step through her life – their lives – from far back to the present, she could not conjure up anything that was more than a passing unpleasantness that went with everyone’s childhood – pain in a tooth or a boil or disappointment over something postponed. Life had simply gone on uneventfully until, when she was six, her sister and the last child had been born and christened Berenice. Sheila had been their grandmother’s chosen name; John Prime would have gone along with anything. No one quite knew where Bertha had found the name Berenice.

  From the beginning, May had loved her with a protective and slavish intensity, spending every moment she could hanging over the cot and the pram, answering her cries with an urgency that everyone said would be regretted. The baby had seemed complacent and self-absorbed and as she grew up had taken her sister’s attentiveness so much for granted that it had warped her character. But May had continued to love
and serve, and secretly, Bertha had found it a relief not to have more work, more calls on her attention. She had realised very quickly that the baby could be left to May.

  May Prime was clever. That had been clear when she had picked out letters on the back of her father’s newspaper as he held it up and then found the same letters in the family Bible and in the stock book and in the books from the glass case in the sitting room. She had found pencil and paper and copied the groups of letters until they formed words and asked for the words to be read and whispered them over and over, staring at the marks until they gave up their secret to her and she could read. That had been before she went to school and was a thing unheard of in the family, though both her grandmother and Bertha Prime read books during the winter and her father went through the paper from front to back every day after dinner.

  She had loved to read and later to take the arithmetic books from her brothers and try to work out the exercises, though numbers did not make the same sense to her that words did. There was a globe of the world in the front room, beside the single glass-fronted case of books – Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, an encyclopedia, a dictionary, Everyman in Health and Sickness, the prayer book, The Ready Reckoner. She sometimes took down the globe and twirled it on its stand and read the names of the countries aloud.

  By the time she went to school with Colin and Frank she could read and had an odd, random confetti in her brain of bits of knowledge which floated about and changed shape like the tiny shards of bright glass inside her brother’s kaleidoscope. In the end the fragments would come together in a linear form, though some would prove incorrect or useless and others were lost altogether.

  She loved the school from the first moment of walking into the cloakroom and finding her own name on a piece of card slotted into a little metal holder above a peg. Her name. She loved the smell of the entrance and the different, wood-dust smell of the hall and the smell of the classrooms which were placed all around it, a different smell again, of chalk dust and of other children.