Free The Beacon by Susan Hill

thought about it, she felt it would be pointless to exchange one house and its upkeep for another, strange one and to alienate and upset her mother. Colin said nothing but Janet had sometimes asked her obliquely if she was quite ‘all right’ and did she not ever think of leaving the Beacon should the opportunity arise, and Berenice was more open and told her she should find a husband before it was all too late. ‘You should, May, it’s what you need. It’s only normal. You should do it.’
    But May knew that she would not. She was an intelligent woman. She knew what others said of her, and her family, but she ignored that knowledge and kept on with her life. She was not ungrateful. It might be pedestrian but she had a home, food and comfort and a share in the farm, though money never came easily. They had not moved with the times at the Beacon. One day in the January of a bitter winter, she was standing at the window looking out onto the yard and saw two of the cowmen and her father dragging a zinc feed bin containing a sick sheep across the frozen snow with ropes, towards the barn. Their ancient coats were tied at the waist with binder twine and their caps, soaked with the snow, were blackened and shapeless. She felt guilt and shame that their lives were so hard, that they had not enough help, notenough decent machinery, but had to drag animals in bins across the snow.
    Knowing how the kitchens at other farms were, May worked to make sure that the one at the Beacon was clean and as tidy as it could be, with the range always lit and the table well scrubbed and cleared of milk bottles and old sacking, half-eaten bread loaves and rusty nails and cans of sheep dip. She grew plants on the window ledges and washed the covers and curtains and scrubbed the tiles on her hands and knees. Left to Bertha Prime the place would have fallen apart. Sometimes, John Prime would help her with the kitchen jobs, drying the pots and filling the range, but he came in every evening exhausted and fit only for eating and then nodding off for an hour in the chair before going to bed. He was a man who said little, though he smiled at those he knew, and once, he told May that she was ‘the best in the world’. She wished she had known that he was going to say it because she would have prepared herself to listen carefully, but instead the words were spoken and over before she had realised and the memory of them grew faint quite quickly. ‘The best in the world.’ She gazed at him occasionally when he was asleep in the kitchen. He looked older than his years, as all the men who worked on the land did, and his hair had thinned early. His hands were calloused and reddened, thenails broken down. Manual work outdoors was hard on the body. The cold burned through to the men’s bones and they sweated in the sun. She felt sorry for him, though he knew nothing else and never expressed a desire for it either. But her mother angered her, resting much of the day and giving up all of her work to May, though she was surely capable of doing more than she pretended. She still mended a few things and knitted, but mainly she sat looking out of the window and doing puzzles in the daily paper, eating what was set in front of her and saying little to anyone. Once May had begun to drive she had suggested outings to the village, to the town, or to see Colin or Berenice, but Bertha would go nowhere and after a time May did not ask. She was relieved. She liked driving her car, liked being alone and free of everyone.
    If she had been asked she would have said that, yes, she knew it would have to happen, of course she knew, as who could not, but naturally the blow fell when it was furthest from her mind.
    It was one of the first warm days of April when the green shoots of wheat were spiking through and the yard had dried out after the months of mud. She had hung out a line of washing. The kettle was on ready for when the men came in for breakfast. She was putting out