The Beacon Read Free Page B

the better of her – that much was perfectly clear to May, though to May alone. And yet May loved her as much now that her true nature was visible as she had when Berenice had been a quiet and undemanding baby, and Berenice accepted her sister’s attentions and love as her due and was nourished and enriched by it.
    May loved her brother Colin because he was so easy, so straightforward, so readable and predictable. Life for Colin was an uncomplicated business because it was entirely outward. He had, apparently, no inner life whatsoever, no private thoughts or concealedfeelings, no complex responses to other people or to events. Life was linear. Colin had no favourites and no secrets, he treated everyone according to their status in the hierarchy, looked to himself, was generous and hard-working and ended every day in every way the same as he had begun it.
    And then there was Frank.

3
     
    A FTER A time she went up to the bed and looked down at her mother’s dead body. Her eyes were open but they were not ‘her’ eyes now, they were ‘the’ eyes. Already the body had become impersonal.
    Tentatively, May reached out her hand. She should close the eyes. The sightless blank stare was more frightening than anything else, but she had never done such a thing, though read of it often enough, and did not know if the eyelids would yield. But when she pressed gently on the soft, tender tissue and moved it forward, it slid down over the eyeball quite easily.
    The head lay light on the pillow. She had become a light thing of bones and skin and hair over the last few months, flesh had dissolved and withered away and she weighed almost nothing; there was scarcely any impression on the mattress.
    The room was thick with the silence. May felt that it stuffed her lungs with something dry and cloth-like as she breathed it in instead of air. The silence went through the whole house, like smoke from the hearth.
    She did not know what she should do next. She had not prepared for this moment, though it had been coming for long enough. Somehow she had expected it to happen earlier in the day when other people might be here, even if the Beacon was never full of people as it used to be; mostly she was here with Bertha alone.
    A tiny spider was on the back of the dead hand, quite still, and it occurred to her that the hand would not feel the tickling of the insect now. The hand felt nothing.
    She turned away. She went from the bedroom and down the stairs and out of the house altogether, suddenly desperate for air, and stood in the dark gulping it in as she might gulp water in great thirst. And it was air, cool, fresh, with the taste of the hill and the earth and the night upon it, and it refreshed her. She looked up at the sky and a picture on the back of one of her exercise books with the drawing of the globe and the constellations came to her mind.
    There were thin skeins of cloud winding in front of the moon. She crossed the yard.
    Everything was empty, the animals long gone. Shewent into the pigsties and the stables where the iron rack still had some wisps of hay and there was straw on the floor brushed up against the wall. The cattle sheds were bare and dark and cold and swept clean. The stones were loose here and there beneath her feet. The wire of the chicken shed was torn away at the bottom. She went inside. The earth was bone dry but there was still the faint sour chicken smell inside the wooden house and just visible stains of droppings on the floor.
    In and out of every building, in and out, opening doors, walking around, hearing her own footsteps and nothing else, nothing else.
    In the house the body of her mother lay alone and she would rather be here, remembering the warm breath of animals and the feeling of their hot rough tongues, the silken inner ears of the pigs and the coarse hairy skin of their backs, the bones of the chickens beneath the mounds of soft feather.
    She walked round slowly. Since the animals went, she had