The Beacon Read Online Free PDF

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 itwould 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 andreading, 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 ofLondon, 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
     
    S HE 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