Free The Beacon by Susan Hill Page A

some scraps of bacon rind and crumbsfrom the board and, as she did so, noticing the touch of sun on her face. The tractor pulling the trailer was turning into the gate and she watched it, her father glancing round to check the distance from the post, though he knew it by feel, could have turned in blind and never made a mistake. The trailer was loaded with bales of wire because they were repairing the fences after winter.
    May watched as the machine stopped and then shuddered as her father switched off the engine. He waved to her and began to climb down, but instead of jumping to the ground from the metal step, as usual, he hesitated for a second and then fell.
    She hesitated, thinking he had twisted his ankle on the step or missed his footing, thinking those things at the same time as knowing that he had not, that the way he had fallen and the way he lay was because of something else.
    She knew that he was dead before she knelt down to him, but by then two of the other men had come into the yard and May stood up and started shouting.
    It was all pointless, everything that happened then was quite pointless, but it had to be gone through, the telephoning, the doctor, the ambulance and covering him with an old coat and rubbing his hands and talking to him. He was dead. He had been dead as he fell, they said, and May had known it.
    But she had stayed there with him until the end, watched him go, out of the gate and turning into the lane for the last time, the awkward turn which he had made on bringing the tractor in. The last time. She had talked to the men and to the doctor and still lingered outside, putting off the moment when she had to go in and tell her mother, the moment when everything would change and the future she had always dreaded would begin.

13
     
    S HE DID as she had been told and drank the small second glass of brandy and then no more, sitting at the kitchen table in the house full of silence and remembering that last time and how she had felt the tightening of the threads that bound her here.
    Tonight, she felt the freeing of them. Bertha was gone. May knew that it would take her a long time to grow used to her absence and to the empty time she would have to fill. After her father’s death they had gone on for a while as before, the men doing the same work, the tractors turning in and out of the yard, the animals in the stalls and sties, chickens still pecking about the grass behind the house. Then, one by one, things had been let go. The cattle first, then the pigs. It was three years before the sheep were sold off after a particularly hard winter. The chickens remained awhile longer, and the geese had only gone the previous spring. One of the men had left the day of John Prime’s funeral, two others had lasted only a year more.
    That funeral had been the hardest day of May’s life. She had not realised how much she needed her father’s presence to make life at the Beacon bearable until she had watched the coffin being lowered into the ground. She had loved him and looked to him for comfort and strength and the occasional word of praise. Gratitude did not need to be spoken, she knew he was grateful to her.
    The short drive back to the house with Colin and Janet had been made in silence, but then the place was full, John Prime had been well respected and everyone expected a wake, people coming from some distance. For an hour or so the Beacon had been full of warmth and large bodies and strong voices, glasses raised and plates emptied of food.
    There had never been a party at the Beacon before, and to her shame she had even enjoyed it and been proud for her father. Colin had worn a stiff suit and looked uncomfortable. Joe Jory, who owned no suit, had draped his cap with black ribbon and made a bow of black ribbon into some manner of a tie. And Bertha had sat in state in the front room and receivedeveryone, gracious as a queen, dabbing her eyes with a folded handkerchief. But what May never knew was that