The Beacon by Susan Hill

listened to what he said, Frank felt a small discomfort, as if a shoe were pinching slightly, and he recognised it as guilt. But it would always pass and he felt no shame. For he came to believe in what he had written. Those childhood memories which had been ordinary and frightening were overlaid by the childhood of the boy he had invented. He felt a sadness on behalf of the small child he had created.
    Money came in from the book and more money from the film of
The Cupboard Under the Stairs
, more money than he had expected. But he spent little. Sometimes the shoe pinched and he thought that he should give some of it to Colin and May and Berenice, none of whom had ever had much to spare, but the pinch eased and he did nothing.
    He waited for the sky to burst open and for fire to rain on his head. Every morning he woke expecting angry letters in the post or even a ring at his doorbell and to find one of them waiting. But he heard nothing at all. The longer the silence went on, the more he thought about them and wondered how they had reacted and what effect it had had upon them, and the silence and the fact that he could not know frustrated him andbecame a constant irritation like an itch beneath the skin. It exercised him more and more until he thought of little else. He woke wondering about them and as he went about his day they were with him, but silent and out of reach.
    Colin, he thought, would bear it without complaint and little comprehension. He might be puzzled enough to think back to their childhood and go over certain days, delve into certain memories, but on the whole Frank thought that Colin would react little, would simply go on with the business of his life.
    Berenice had always been a pert-faced, sugarcoated, manipulative little thing, and it would be Berenice who would scream and shout and try to chivvy the others into anger and violent reaction. Berenice would weep and storm and be full of self-righteousness. She would not stop to think but if she did she would, of course, believe nothing because her own childhood had been so rose-strewn, its paths so smooth and easy. Nothing had ever happened to Berenice. Others saw to that. It had occurred to him once that Berenice might even enjoy the notoriety; he clung to that and soon it was firmly fixed in his mind. Berenice was proud. She was written about, someone had played her in a film. She had probably read the book several times and marked certain passages and gone to see the film more than once too.
    The only one he feared was May. He could not guess at May’s reaction. May had ploughed her own furrow. May had had her chance, had gone away and might have stayed away as he had done, but she had been fearful and weak and scurried home. He had no sympathy for May. But if there were ever to be any retribution he knew that it would come from her.
    Over time he justified his book by allowing all the inevitable tiny slights and knocks of childhood to grow and harden in his mind as he went over them, elaborated them and added detail. He allowed his feelings to overflow as he remembered, until he could no longer have identified what was true and what he had invented. The others could have set him right but he could not talk to the others and so he came completely to trust himself and his own ordering of things.
    He was detached from all the new people who seemed to have gathered round him, and from what they said. And then the letters began to arrive and it was hard, at least at first, for Frank to be detached, for people wrote telling him their most intimate and terrifying secrets, the stories of the abuse they had suffered at the hands of parents and friends, sisters and brothers, neighbours, nannies . . . the list went on, everyone in the world, it seemed, had been beaten andstarved and kept in the cold, every little boy had a cupboard under the stairs and every girl a locked cellar. The writers addressed Frank with relief and gratitude. To them, he was the only