It came together with its title, like a child born already named, but he had to choose how to send it out into the world. Deciding took little time.
On the day he finished, he went for a walk along the road that ran beside the shingle beach. It was grey and cold and the waves were white-flecked. He was surprisingly content being alone and scarcely missed Elsa, but he was aware that both men and women living alone can become misanthropic and reclusive and he would need to give thought to his future. Perhaps he would marry again. If he did so, it would be on different terms. He was now wealthy and he was inclined to believe that the book might also make him famous. He had the stronger hand now.
He wondered if he would write anything else, if there were other things stored away in the dark cupboard. He felt no urge to investigate. If they were there, they would come to the surface.
From his time in Fleet Street he knew a couple of publishers and one literary agent and, wanting an opinion and someone else to handle the business side of things, he spent the next ten days typing his manuscript and making some small changes and corrections. Then, he packed it, posted it to the agent, and very deliberately put it from his mind.
11
IT WAS Joe Jory who found out about it first. After he had driven Berenice to work every morning in the old van he often had time on his hands. The band had more gigs in the winter and the telling of futures was a dwindling business, but Joe Jory was resourceful and liked ferreting about, so he began to make bits of money here and there from buying and selling. He bought from here and sold to there, went to auctions and flea markets and had a special line in following up the death notices in the local paper. If he read of a person who had died at an advanced age, he tracked down their address and went there, offering to clear. Nine times out of ten there was remaining family or else the house was empty or he got sent smartly away, but then there were the occasional times when he struck lucky. Berenice privately admired his enterprise while chastising him to his face for profiteering from the dead when they were barely cold. Joe Jory took it all in and carried on, knowing that with Berenice words came cheap.
On this morning he bought a couple of papers and then went into Dusty Dolly’s where he sometimes had breakfast and read his way carefully through the small ads. Dusty Dolly’s was full and smelled of damp coats and frying bacon.
There were a couple of death notices which he ringed in biro, and a few ads for jumble sales, which only rarely yielded him anything worth buying. After he had done the work, he had a second mug of tea and began to look through the rest of the local paper.
He did not recognise the photographs at first but that was not surprising as he had not known any of the family at that age. The first was just the author as a small boy; the second, the author with the rest of his family sitting in a field somewhere round a picnic cloth, a tractor and trailer in the background and hay stooks. Joe Jory looked more closely.
John. Bertha. Colin. Frank. May. Berenice.
When he left the cafe he walked, through the town, up the hill behind it, down on the other side, back along the road past the mill, down into the town again. An hour of walking did not help to clear his mind, did not help to order his swirling thoughts, did not help him to decide what he should do. He did not know if he should go to the shop now and tell Berenice or wait until she got home that evening, or whether he should tell her at all. No, he must tell her before someone else did, someone outside the family, or someone made an unpleasant remark, dropped a hint, head to one side, pitying. Perhaps May would telephone her, or Colin; they would tell her and spare him. Perhaps she already knew?
No, he was certain that she did not. There was no way she could have kept this to herself. She did not know.
He sat on a low wall outside the post office, took the paper out and read the page again.
The Cupboard Under the Stairs.
Berenice could not have kept all this to herself either, so it could not be true. Perhaps a little of it was true?
He refolded the paper. He went back to the cafe. Another mug of tea and he would fetch Berenice out of the shop, take her home and tell her there, break it to her in his own words first then show her the paper.
The cafe was full now and he had to sit at a table with a couple of women. One of them glanced at him. Glanced away.
It wasn’t the girl, Tina, who brought his tea over, it was Vic the owner. Vic didn’t serve tables but he was serving now, bending down to him as he set the mug on the table.
‘On the house, this,’ he said.
Shame surged up like bile into Joe Jory’s mouth. This was the start then, the first thing Frank Prime had done to them. People knew. People would talk and blame, or talk and pity, talk and wonder, talk and stare. Talk.
He sat in front of the tea, not drinking, turning over what he should do. He did not want Berenice to see the paper before he had prepared her. Had Colin seen it or May? Bertha, he knew, was not likely to do so and it could be kept from her without too much trouble. He thought of telephoning Colin, but what if Colin had not seen it, did not take the paper and so he was the first to – to what? Break the news. Better he did it than a stranger.
In the end, he decided that it was not up to him to tell anyone but Berenice. She could talk to the others, let them decide what to do between them. If there was anything at all that could be done.
He walked slowly along to the florist’s shop. Outside on the grey pavement the buckets of bright flowers had been freshly watered. The sun had come out and caught the drops of it here and there and made tiny rainbows. Joe Jory stood looking at them. He should call Berenice out and show them to her, so that she could enjoy them before what he had to say changed everything.
But she saw him through the window. She was wrapping some long-stemmed roses in white tissue. He watched her. She was concentrating but she glanced at him a couple of times, bright-faced, smiling. So no one else had been in before him. She did not know yet.
He waited, looking at the drops of water on the bright flowers until the customer had left and the shop was empty and then he went inside.
12
AFTER BERENICE left home, May found a job, though only in the village, working at the convent which was hidden out of sight at the bottom of the wooded valley.
Water came flowing down the steep and stony track through the trees and fell without ceasing into a stream which flowed on, widening to a river as it ran past the convent and away between steep banks. May answered an advertisement in the window of the village shop. She cycled along the path that skirted the wood and wound down, more gently than the rushing water, towards the convent buildings. She had never been here before. She pushed her cycle the last yards and then stood, looking at the bowl of sky and the water falling and the flat stretch of gravel path leading to the front door. It had a strange atmosphere, desolate in spite of the sound of the water.
But when she had been asked inside she found not a desolate place at all, though one which was quiet and calm. The nuns smiled at her. She saw them doing ordinary things, cooking and writing and sewing and sweeping the floor. Somehow, she had not expected that, just silent women saying silent prayers.
She was to help in the kitchen and the garden and with the chickens, because there were too few of what they called Lay Sisters at that time – some were too old, too sick, two had recently died. She had expected someone to ask her if she was baptised and confirmed, if she prayed and went regularly to church. No one did. She had expected nuns to be stern and stony-faced but several smiled.
She went home feeling pleased.
Bertha Prime had pinched in the corners of her mouth and said that May wouldn’t last long and that it was not natural for a lot of women to live cooped up together.
For seven months, May cycled the six miles to the convent and back every day and when she was there she was perfectly content. She did not mind manual work, she liked being outside better than in and she found the nuns kind and friendly. She grew used to the
bells and the way they stopped whatever they were doing every so often to kneel and pray or go to the chapel. When that happened she carried on with her own work and no one suggested that she should do otherwise. She did not have much conversation unless about a job just done or needing to be started, but she had time to think; otherwise the routine was gentle and soothing and the time slipped by as smoothly as the water in the stream.
At the end of seven months, just as the cold of winter was beginning to ease, Bertha Prime slipped in the yard and broke her leg, and a week later, had a slight stroke.
May left the convent. She would be welcome back whenever she could go, they said, when she could be spared from home. But she never would be. May knew that.
The convent in its deep bowl beneath the woods and beside the water became a place she returned to sometimes in her mind and she often dreamed about it. It was a solace to her. But she never returned. Just come to see us, they said. She did not.
After that she knew she would never take any job away from home, that she would be here to run the house and look after her mother forever, or what passed as forever. She had had her chance of freedom but freedom had not been for her, she had been afraid of it, and life under the rule of fear was not life worth having. At the Beacon she was safe and not unhappy. As her mother turned in on herself and never fully recovered from the first stroke, so May took over the reins of the house, made the decisions, looked after the everyday work, saw to paying the men, and once a week took the bus into town to shop. Later, she bought a car, against Bertha’s wishes, and learned to drive rather quickly, to her own surprise, and then she was able to go to the supermarket further away and to visit Colin and Janet and, once she was married to Joe Jory, Berenice. She enrolled for a night class in local history, knowing that she should not waste her brain, and borrowed books and joined the Local History Society. Twice, she presented papers to their meetings, one of which was printed in the biannual Local History Journal. So long as May kept things running smoothly at home and she herself was looked after and not left alone at night, Bertha accepted all of it without resentment, though without comment or interest either. May was quite alone in her activities outside the Beacon and inside it, alone in her own mind. But if it was a lonely life she grew used to that, and it was not a sad one. May was perfectly well aware that one or two men had found her interesting and even attractive and that if she had chosen to do so she could probably have married, but she did not choose. She liked her home and, if she ever 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, not enough 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, the nails 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 some scraps of bacon rind and crumbs from 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
SHE 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 th
e 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 a while 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 received everyone, gracious as a queen, dabbing her eyes with a folded handkerchief. But what May never knew was that 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.