She made a great many friends but none of them was ever close and she never again went to stay at someone else’s house, though there were plenty of visits to dinner and tea and those girls occasionally came to the Beacon.
One, Janet Fairley, was quite new, having come to live in the village only the year before from somewhere much farther north. Her father ran the garage, selling petrol and servicing the farm vehicles and the private cars that more people were now acquiring. Her mother had a couple of rooms in the house which she let whenever they were needed.
Janet Fairley was a bright-faced, open-hearted girl who had brought novelty to a class of girls who knew one another too well and had grown bored. She was friendly towards everyone, made no enemies and joined in no quarrels. And when May had asked her to tea at the Beacon her brother Colin had first talked to her more than he ever talked to anyone and then taken her round the farm, explaining the animals and the machines and the way of everything, earnestly and carefully, as if it were important for her to know and understand everything. May had been taken aback at the way her friend had been appropriated. Her mother had watched him with nervous eyes.
The following Saturday evening, Colin had brushed his hair back and glued it down with water and polished his shoes and walked into the village. Later, they learned that he had called at the Fairley house. The week after that he had taken Janet on the bus into town. They had gone to the pictures.
A year later, Janet Fairley’s mother had died very suddenly and Janet had left school and taken over both the running of the house and the paperwork of the garage. A year after that Colin had married her, and then Arthur Fairley had met a woman in town who, within a couple of months, was his own new wife.
It was not Colin’s marriage which caused the grief in the family, it was his announcement that he was not staying at the Beacon but going to work as a stockman on a farm the other side of the valley. John Prime had sat silent in the kitchen night after night, arms folded on the table in front of him, bewildered, uncertain who or what to blame.
But after Colin and Janet Fairley were married, and Colin had left, a new farmhand came to help and things rolled on much as before, though there was more room to move in the house. They could spread themselves comfortably around the kitchen table.
Berenice passed for the grammar school, though she did not get a scholarship which meant that money was tighter. May had dreaded her being there for all that she loved her sister, but Berenice kept her distance, and did not acknowledge her during school hours, and put everyone she met under her thumb. She was clever and lazy and had a winning smile which kept her in everyone’s favour and May was left to get on, purposefully working towards her future.
During this time Frank was almost invisible. Frank had done everything late – walked, talked, and as he grew older he talked less than any of them. He spent a lot of time alone, wandering about the farm, sitting under hedgerows and in the hayfield, apparently doing nothing. He was towards the bottom of his class at the village school and he seemed to bewilder the teachers, the other children and his parents most of all. They never knew what to make of Frank, they said; no one knew what Frank was thinking; what went on in Frank’s head was one of the great mysteries. He grew taller than the others, though he never appeared to eat a full meal, and he was unnervingly thin, his head apparently sprouting from the bony cavity of his neck and shoulders as if from a coat hanger. He did little speaking but a great deal of staring out of large green-grey, slightly bulbous eyes. He followed people too, his father and the men about the farm, his mother in the house, the other children at school almost anywhere. Turn round and Frank would be there, silent, watching, following.
The one he liked best in the family was Berenice. They sometimes spent an hour or more closeted together whispering. But as Berenice grew up she eased herself away from him and he drifted off to spend more time alone. May neither knew nor understood him because there seemed little to take and keep hold of for more than a few minutes, as Frank slipped and slithered out of her ken. She subscribed to the general opinion: what goes on in Frank’s head is a mystery.
He liked the animals and helped sometimes with milking and feeding, but John Prime seemed to have no confidence that he would be able to take on more of the work and eventually the whole farm, even if he showed signs of wanting to do so. He showed no signs of having interest or talent in any direction, though he was never rude, never wilful, and May often suspected that he was their mother’s favourite. She had caught them in the kitchen, Frank being given some small treat or simply special attention.
But for the most part Frank, like Berenice, slipped almost out of May’s sight.
She narrowed down her special subjects gradually, dropping maths and sciences and, reluctantly, deciding on history rather than geography. She excelled in French and English and it was decided that she would try for a university place and a county scholarship, for without funding there would be no question of her being able to go. John and Bertha Prime looked at her bemusedly, proud, puzzled and a little nervous, wondering if a clever child who went away to educate herself further and presumably to make a life elsewhere was what they had ever intended.
It occurred to Bertha that there were very few careers open to a woman but that teaching was the most obvious. Having had the thought, she allowed it to become a hope and then an assumption. It was the way she dealt with many of the things in life which she did not control. From then on, in her own mind, May was going to study to become a teacher and, once trained, would naturally return home. There were schools, and teachers would always be needed. Once she had settled her daughter’s course for life she was quite happy. She told her husband what was likely to happen to May and he saw no reason to argue. May, as a teacher, would fit back into the family perfectly well.
Teaching was not what May had in mind. She liked school but the idea of going back to one, even in another capacity, filled her with dread, for that would be going back not moving forward and May wanted change and new challenges, other worlds.
Colin and Janet had their first child, called Eve, the year after they were married and another daughter quickly after that and so were entirely caught up, as John and Bertha had been before them, in the life of a farm and a family. The only difference, as Bertha often mentioned, was that they had their own place and the luxury of not having to share it with an older generation; they made their own choices, worked for themselves, enjoyed a more prosperous way.
But it was understood that in due course Colin would return to take over the Beacon and bring his family to live there again. No one spoke of it, no one asked, it was just the way of things.
May had worked steadily, done well in her exams, got the scholarship, sailing through it all in a state of extraordinary calm. She had applied to two universities within an hour of home, and also to London, where she had never been and which was a five-hour train journey away.
She was invited to an interview.
There was a way to do these things, the headmistress said, and a way not to do them and if you did them the correct way you had every chance of making a good impression but if you did them the wrong way, however clever you were, however good your results, you would make a poor impression and be marked down.
The way to make the right impression, those who had been given an interview were told, sitting in a nervous group together, was to wear a hat and gloves. The hat should be small and plain, the gloves should be leather and dark in colour. Everything else, it was implied, would follow as the night did the day.
May had one hat, a straw one bought when she was thirteen for her confirmation, and a pair of white cotton gloves.
‘There’s my beige felt,’ Bertha said uncertainly.
‘Oh, that would be far too big.’
‘I do have some black leather gloves. Somewhere.’
May found them after a long search through the two bottom drawers of her mother’s chest, wrapped in tissue. They had tiny pinprick holes all
over the palms and buttoned at the side. May had bigger hands than her mother and could not get them on. Bertha said they could be damped and stretched and tried that evening, only to see the gloves harden and shrink even further. The wet leather smelled sour.
They had gone into town the following week, Bertha, May and Berenice, who would never miss a trip during which money might be spent on her, and found a plain chocolate beret and dark brown gloves straight away so that there was time for Berenice to try on a new coat and then to have tea in the department store, which was a thing May last remembered doing before she went to the grammar school. She liked it. She liked sitting in the mushroom-and-gold-painted room which had pillars and tall windows overlooking the square and eating a teacake. Bertha had a teacake. Berenice had an expensive ice-cream sundae in a tall glass.
‘If you pass this interview I don’t know what we’ll do next,’ Bertha said, her eyes watery, though with the heat of the tea room not with tears.
‘I’ll arrange it all, there’s nothing for you to do.’
Bertha sighed. But May meant what she said. She would get her place and she would find out about everything and arrange it all. It was her future. There was nothing for her mother to do. Her father had once mumbled about money, but that would be arranged as well, May told him, the scholarship paid for everything. There was nothing for him to do either, and so he and Bertha watched as the future came rushing towards them and carried May away, leaving them breathless like watchers on a shore.
May organised her room in the student hostel, her clothes, transport for her luggage, books and stationery, opened a bank account into which her scholarship money would be paid, and did it all with smooth efficiency so that the others looked on in awe at this young woman who seemed so at home already in a world far beyond their experience.
As they watched her, May seemed to be with them watching herself, equally amazed at her own cool achievements. She seemed to have grown a second self and this one had, for the time being, taken control. But in bed at night and at odd moments during the day, May came to and trembled at what was happening to her and her lack of control over it all and did not know if she could trust this other person to get things right. Practically, she knew it would work out perfectly, but this other May had pushed her aside and would not pay attention to her general nervousness and fleeting fits of pure panic.
In the end, she decided that she had better let everything happen according to plan. Once there, she would know if it had been for the best or was a hopeless mistake but she could not decide on the basis of a single visit to London.
The interview had been straightforward. She had set off on the train wearing the beret and gloves, but when she had arrived and found her way through the terrifying melee of the city to the college gate, she had felt a sudden moment of certainty that a beret and gloves would give a false impression and pulled them off and stuffed them in her bag.
The college was warm and smelled like school, and the corridors and the wood panelling reminded her of school too, so that she felt quite at ease. She was made to wait only five minutes in an outer room before being called in. No one else waited with her.
She was called in to sit in front of an elderly professor, a younger man and a woman who introduced herself as the Tutor to Female Students and who reminded May so much of her headmistress that the sense of being somewhere familiar was strengthened.
The questions were partly about work, books and reading, with a few about her family and her background which she was aware were being asked for her own benefit.
‘We want you to be sure you have made the right choice,’ the woman said. ‘And that you’ll find your feet and fit in easily.’
‘I’m sure I will.’ May heard her own clear and confident voice and recognised it as belonging to the one who had brought her this far.
At the end of the interview she had walked down the long corridors and out into the college courtyard knowing that she had made a good impression and would almost certainly be offered a place and that her headmistress had known nothing at all in recommending the hat and gloves.
She had some time before her train. It was dark. Fog came off the river and wrapped itself fuzzily round the street lamps on the Strand. She stood and watched the buses and taxis and cars and people stream past her and smelled the smells of fog and petrol and knew that she had been right and that this was where she should be. She was excited, not nervous, she was looking forward, not worried about leaving her present life behind.
Years later, she remembered the moment in every detail, saw herself standing there in the middle of London, felt the same feeling in the pit of her stomach. It only needed a breath of foggy air or the sound of traffic through busy evening streets to bring it back.
5
SHE LEFT the night and the stars and the empty spaces and crept back into the house and the terrible silence.
She stood in the kitchen doorway and for a second saw the dogs that used to lie by the range in coldest winter and the cat on the old crocheted wool cushion. The people round the table. John Prime in his shirtsleeves and braces, cutting cheese. Frank staring, staring. Berenice in something pretty. May herself was not there, she had already left and come back, an invisible ghost to spy on them.
Nothing had changed in the kitchen except that there was no one there, dogs and cat long dead and never replaced, John Prime dead, Berenice in her own home. Frank. But she turned her mind from Frank now.
And Bertha.
She climbed the stairs, holding the banister not for support but for comfort. How many hands had slipped over the rail, smoothing and smoothing but never wearing it out?
It was different. Even in this short time the body had slipped further down into death. It seemed to have changed colour, the skin to have yellowed and become more opaque. She remembered hearing about how everything flees the body at the moment of death, not only living cells but bacteria and microbes, how the air flees the lungs as oxygen evaporates, how decay begins, taking over what is left.
She could see it.
The body on the bed did not belong there now, did not belong in this place at all, and she could no longer relate to it. She reached out to touch one of the hands but drew back. She had nothing to do with this strange thing.
She switched off the lamp and closed the door, leaving it to itself and to the ongoing work that death must do.
In the kitchen she poured a beaker of water. The wind had got up a little more and was rattling the larder window. She took the water to the table and sat down.
She knew what she was doing. Everything had changed the moment her mother had died, but now it had settled and she clung on to what there was because once the calls had been made the next change would be greater and she did not feel ready for it.
She was fifty and felt older, felt a thousand years old and weary, and how would her life be now? She sensed that there would be things she might have to fight for and she had done all the fighting years ago.
There would be no fighting with Colin. He was too like their father, needing peace and ready to pay for it. Berenice would fight in her own clever, soft-footed way, the blade always concealed.
But Frank? What would he do?
Surely Frank would not come. He had too much to lose in a fight which must be all three of them combined against him.
Frank would not come.
The telephone was in the hall. It was put there when they first had a telephone thirty years ago, put where people used to put their telephones but where no one kept them now, out among the coats and in a draught. She had thought for a long time that one day she would have it moved, into the kitchen or the front room, but making changes to the way the house was and had always been had not been easy, even when her mother had finally taken to her bed.
But now, May thought . . . now.
The only change had been when the old heavy black receiver had to be changed for a push-button model, and in a moment of self-will, May had chosen cream be
cause a cream telephone seemed stylish. But all a cream telephone did was become grubby.
It was grubby now.
‘Hello?’
It was Eve who answered, dark-haired, brown-faced Eve who had been born old, like a hobgoblin in a story and then had had to grow into her ancient looks. Eve had become a nurse, abandoned nursing, married a farmer, abandoned him, moved away, come back and married the other stockman who worked alongside her father, and who was twenty years older. They lived in the next door cottage which was small and dark like Eve, and where they were as happy as children.
‘It’s Amma.’ Amma for Aunt May. Even now the children were not allowed to call her May.
‘What’s the matter?’
It must have sounded in her voice. ‘Is Colin there?’
‘I’ll get him. What’s the matter?’
‘Let me talk to Colin.’
Eve made an impatient sound with her tongue against her teeth.
‘May?’
‘She’s gone.’
She heard the long sigh first, then he asked if the doctor was there.
‘No. I don’t have to get him tonight, do I? I don’t think so. I’ll wait till morning.’
‘Whatever you think. You know best, May.’
I don’t, she thought. I have never known best, I have always made the wrong decision, been asked and not known the answer.
‘Do you want me to come now?’
He should have said, ‘I’ll come,’ not asked her to choose. She could not expect him to drive thirty miles when there was nothing he could do because it was done. Everything.
‘Have you told Berenice?’
‘I rang you first.’