The Beacon Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 hisfamily 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