Free The Beacon by Susan Hill Page B

Bertha’s grief, though formally expressed, was sharp and bitter. She had been married to a man she had loved and respected and now her future, like May’s, was stretched bleakly before her.
    Perhaps if she and May had spoken about him, if they had spoken about anything more than trivial things, they would have found out at least this about one another, that there had been such love.
    Life changed. Life stayed the same. Bertha Prime retreated back into herself. The animals went. The men left. May spent more and more time alone. The house seemed emptier than it had ever done before and few people called. May went to see Colin and Berenice because they preferred it that way round and Frank remained in London.
    Yet May was not unhappy. She liked life to be even and uneventful, she needed the routine of days and to know that it would be winter and spring, that it would be dark early and late and then light in the mornings with the long-drawn-out summer evenings. She looked for the return of the swallows and house martins and swifts to their nests and the frogs crossing the yard on their way to the pond and waited for the berries to ripen and the nuts and leaves to fall, feelingeach small repeated change as her security.
    Even Bertha’s demands were regular and formed the backbone of May’s routine. She had to take her early-morning tea and get her up, wash her, help her to dress and to her chair and later to make lunch and settle her for her afternoon rest. Make tea. Settle her for the night.
    Nothing disturbed the tenor of their days or the quiet in which they passed them.

14
     
    W HEN J OE Jory told his wife that she should telephone the girl who came in part-time to help in the florist’s and tell her that she was needed today, at once, Berenice did as he said out of astonishment because such a thing had never happened before. He had nothing to do with the shop. He never came to it. The girl had arrived within twenty minutes, and Berenice and Joe Jory had left in silence, walked to the van and driven home, and until they were inside he had told her nothing, other than to reassure her that there had been neither an accident nor a death.
    All the way home he had wondered how he could protect her, even while he knew he could not spare her. He could only nurse her as the blows fell. Colin would find out, if he had not already done so, but Colin was strong and he had Janet.
    And then there was May.
    The rain had stopped and a weak sun was shining onto the back of the house. Joe Jory opened the door and set a chair there. Then he handed the newspaper to Berenice and went quietly away, to potter about in his den within earshot, not able to bear to watch her face as she read.
    It took her a long time to read it, mainly because she had to keep going back to the beginning, and to the headline and to the photographs, trying to take in what exactly had happened, what Frank had said. But in the end, when she had read it all the way through slowly twice, she let the paper fall onto her lap.
    Sensing a change in the quality of the silence, Joe Jory came out of his den, pulled another chair beside hers and took hold of her hand. She turned to look at him. Her face had changed. She had aged, somehow, in those fifteen minutes, had lost the bloom of innocence which had always been such a delight to him. Her eyes were wary.
    ‘But it isn’t true,’ she said, ‘none of this is true. All this. All this Frank has written in his book . . . if he has written these things.’
    ‘Oh, he’s written them all right. He has written them.’
    She looked down at the paper. ‘
The Cupboard Under the Stairs
,’ she read. ‘He’s written a book about us called that?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘“The Story of One Boy’s Brutal Childhood.”’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘But . . .’ She looked down again. At Frank’s photograph and at the picture of the cover of the book he had written, and at the two photographs of them all, and of the Beacon. They took up a