The Beacon (10 page)

In his own cottage, sitting alone, Colin Prime read on. The rest of the family were in bed but he could not have slept until he had finished his brother’s book, though it was years since he had read anything but the newspaper, from time to time, and the stock reports. He had no head for reading and no leisure, but this was different, this book held him in his chair for an hour, two hours, scarcely able to breathe in the quiet kitchen.

At first what he read had puzzled him because he had taken it to be a story, in spite of their names being
true, and he had not understood why Frank had not thought to invent names for his characters. But as he read on it became clear, though only in one sense. Clear that Frank meant them to be themselves and their parents too, and the Beacon and the farm and the village and the village school to be true to life, yet not clear because the rest was an invention. What had Frank meant? To tell a story or remember the truth or to muddle the two?

But as he read on, Colin saw that there was no confusion, not in Frank’s mind, not in his intention. He told the story as if it were true. He told their lives as children in every detail so that anyone reading it who knew them would recognise them as themselves, and anyone going to the Beacon would know every room and the items in those rooms. But what he was telling as if it were the full truth was not the truth. It was not the truth as Colin knew it or as it had ever been. It was not Frank’s truth because none of the things he described had ever happened. Not the beatings nor the taunting, not the hunger nor the thirst nor the punishments, not the way his father had made him run round the farmyard naked in the gale and rain when he was five years old, not the tale of his being locked in the shed with the bull or made to eat the swill from the pig bucket. It was not true that Colin had locked him in the cupboard under the stairs time
after time or that they had all taken him up to the attic and whipped him raw. It was not true that his mother had goaded them on and spat in Frank’s face and that he had had to sit under the kitchen table while the rest of them ate and had only been given the scraps they dropped down to him. It was not true that he had been made to walk four miles back home from school because John Prime had thrown him off the tractor. Not true that May had jammed his fingers in the door and gone on closing it. That he had never had any new clothes of his own but only Colin’s cast-offs after they were worn out, and shoes that were the wrong size and made his feet bleed. Not true that May taunted him because he could not spell Berenice. Not true that. Not true. Not true. Page after page after page. Not true.

But Colin had to read on to the end, every lie, every page that was not true. He could not stop until it was after three and he had to get up again at five thirty. Then, at last, he closed the book and laid it down on the arm of the chair and put out the lamp and dozed in front of the dying fire until the dawn came up because he was too tired and angry, too hurt and bewildered, to go upstairs to bed.

N
O ONE
knew how to tell May, left at home with Bertha, managing everything.

‘It’s May,’ Colin said several times a day to Janet, when he had found words to talk to her about it.

Janet too read the book at a sitting, but Janet was shrewd and understood Frank better than any of them. ‘He was always fly. He used to look and hang about and not speak to you. It doesn’t surprise me. It shocks me, of course it does, it’s a terrible thing to have done, but it doesn’t surprise me. Not in Frank. Frank might have done anything, I’ve always thought that.’ She was not claiming special knowledge, or being wise after the event. Janet spoke the truth. She had always believed Frank capable of something but of course she could never have imagined this. Nobody could have done so.

‘It’s May.’

‘She has to be told, Colin. Why try to protect her? She’s a grown woman, and clever, she went to university, she spent a year away from home. You seem to forget that about May. You have to show it to her.’

But Colin had shaken his head.

Berenice had driven over to their cottage, leaving Joe Jory, who was getting ready to play at a folk festival and in any case felt that he had done all he could and it was no more of his business except in so far as it might affect Berenice.

They sat round the table, Colin, Janet, Berenice, and the book was there in front of them. The cover, with its sepia photograph of a small boy in shorts, his hair cut raggedly and too short, his head bent, beside the shadow of a low door, seemed to make a fourth, a spectre at the table.

‘What’s he done it for?’ Colin said. ‘That’s what I can’t get my head round. Why? What’s it for?’

‘To cause pain.’

‘Why would he want to do that?’

‘His sort do.’

‘What sort? I don’t know what you’re talking about here. This is my brother, my only brother, and he writes a book about his childhood – our childhood, mine, my childhood – and it’s all a pack of lies. I don’t know why, that’s all there is to it.’

‘Does it matter why? He’s done it and everyone knows about it, thanks to the paper.’

‘You can’t blame them, it’s a good story.’

‘Everyone will know.’

‘There’s nothing to know.’

‘What will they say?’ Janet asked.

‘No smoke without fire.’

‘Precisely.’

‘But there is.’ Colin got up and wandered about the room, a huge man, making every piece of furniture seem too small. ‘That’s exactly what there is. Smoke and no fire. There never was a fire. Was there?’ He sat down again.

‘Not to my knowledge,’ Berenice said.

‘Isn’t that – well, I suppose, the point?’

They both looked at Janet.

‘You say it wasn’t to your knowledge. But maybe things happened to Frank you didn’t know about. Well, that could be it, couldn’t it? You can’t just dismiss it.’

‘I can,’ Berenice said.

‘The thing is, he accuses us. We shoved him into that cupboard, we made him run round our yard with no clothes on and whipped his legs, we threw him off the tractor. Us three. This is what he’s saying so I don’t see that he can have suffered in secret, not at all.’ Colin got up again, walked about. Sat.

‘I just want to get this quite straight,’ Janet said. ‘Nothing happened to either of you of this sort? You weren’t beaten – well, not more than any of us were – nobody shut you in this cupboard, you weren’t laughed at and sneered and jeered at and singled out for unkindness?’

‘No, we were not. Nothing like that, ever. They were good parents to us. To all of us.’

‘Right. So it’s made up.’

‘Of course it’s made up.’

‘We just come back to why. Why has he done it?’ Colin said, and ground his thumb into the tabletop.

‘Money. People get paid for books. And fame.’

‘Funny sort of fame.’

‘Look, I don’t care about him, Col, I don’t give a toss about Frank and why, I care about us. I mind what he’s done to us with this. I mind what he’s done to Dad’s memory and to Mother, what it’s going to do to us with the people we’ve always known. We’ve lived here all our lives, we know everyone, we’ve never had anything to be ashamed of or anything to hide.’

‘Still haven’t.’

‘But it’ll seem as if we have. Some people will believe it, people always do, and they’ll look at us and point and gossip behind our backs.’

‘Sticks and stones.’

‘No, Colin, no, words
can
hurt you. Frank’s words have started hurting us already and it’ll just get worse.’

They fell silent and each of them stared down at the book and the book seemed to grow bigger and bigger as they looked at it, to become a vast, bloated, hideous thing, and then to come alive and smirk and mock at them.

The book that Frank had written seemed larger and more powerful than anything in the room, anything in their lives now and in their lives as they had been, because it had changed them and the change could never be undone. The book had power. They understood that. The book had made what was innocent seem sinful, had tainted them and the past and had destroyed the innocence in which they had all lived until now.

And so they sat on, surrounding the small and terrible thing which was Frank Prime’s book.

But of course May knew. She might be alone with her mother at the Beacon but she was not a recluse. The local paper was delivered every week, though principally for Bertha’s interest rather than May’s own. May was in the habit of skimming it first, over her milky coffee and before taking it upstairs to Bertha, and so found the page about Frank’s book, together with the photographs.

She was mortified and she was angry, but from the first sentences as she read them she was not altogether surprised. Frank had always been the watcher, the one who listened behind half-open doors, the one who played small, mean tricks and then smiled. Quiet, waiting Frank.

Nor did May wonder why he had done this, since it was quite clear to her that, although he liked money, he would like fame and to be talked about even more, and it would not trouble him that the talking was not full of admiration.

She had to keep the paper from Bertha, and she was anxious about Colin and Berenice, feeling them to be more vulnerable than she was herself and both almost wholly innocent of the malice and devices of a man like Frank.

May cared nothing for what anyone in the village or further afield might either think or say because surely anyone who knew them at all would know that what was written could not possibly be true. They would take it for the fairy story it was, for fairy stories had wicked parents and unhappy children locked in dark cupboards or else sent out alone with a crust of bread into a snowy forest. Frank had written a fairy story, but because he was what he was, had thought it more amusing to use his own family and their home and their true names.

*

When Berenice telephoned, May was ready and perfectly calm.

‘Of course I mind,’ she said, ‘of course I’m angry. But there is nothing to be done about it but hold up our heads. It will pass. Everything does.’

‘Shouldn’t it be stopped? Surely it can be stopped if it’s all untrue?’

‘How? The book is written and published. How can we stop it? Who would take any notice?’

‘But it isn’t
true
.’

‘A lot of stories aren’t true.’

‘But he’s saying that it is. He isn’t telling a story.’

‘We know that he is. Everyone else will too.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I just am.’

Berenice sighed. She wished she had let Colin do this, as he had half offered. Perhaps he would have been able to make May understand.

‘You haven’t let Mother see the paper?’

‘Of course not.’

‘People were talking about it in the street – in the cafe.’

‘People will. Oh, Berenice, let it run its course.
We
know the truth.’

‘
Do
we?’

‘What?’

‘I just . . . wonder. Maybe some of those things did happen.’

‘None of them did. How can you honestly think that? You and I know we didn’t do any of them, Colin is the kindest man on earth – and could anything like that have been going on without our knowing?’

‘No.’

‘Of course not.’

‘I’m so angry, May.’

‘So am I. We have every right to be angry.’

‘But what are we going to do?’

‘Nothing. We can and should do nothing. Let Frank wonder. Let him stew and wonder what we’re thinking and what people are saying and what might happen. Let him. That will be his punishment.’

‘I don’t think it’s enough,’ Berenice said.

And thinking about it all the rest of that day and in her bed at night, nor did May.

None of them had been prepared for what happened. They had expected people to stare but not to stare with such knowing and judgemental eyes, so that all three of them were forced to look away at once, or down to the ground, burning with shame. They had expected some people to come up and tell them that, no, they did not believe any of it, that they had known John Prime for the good man he had been and Bertha
for the difficult but still good mother, known Colin, known May, known Berenice. Knew. But few did, though a couple of people came into the florist’s shop and bought something small which Berenice knew was entirely out of kindness or at least pity, and one of the men who worked with Colin made some gruff remark that he understood as sympathetic. But on the whole, people stared and summed up for themselves and kept their distance.

May retreated even more into herself and the routine of life at the Beacon, looking after Bertha and shopping some distance away where she was not known and might not meet anyone who would stare. She read the book. It shocked her more than she had expected or could have explained to the others. She was disgusted by the things Frank had invented and the lubricious way in which every detail was told. If it had all been true and written by someone quite other, she would have been shocked because she did not see why such things should be bruited abroad. They were terrible and if they were true should remain private, and the victim should work out his salvation with some trusted adviser or well-trained professional.