The Beacon by Susan Hill Page A

person who might understand, the first one they had been able to tell. They wrote page after page and they were unbearable to read. They called him a brave man and a saint. As the book grew in popularity and then when the film was shown, so the letters increased in number and length and in the horror of the stories they told, the secrets they spilled, the nightmares they recounted.
    At first he read them all. At first, he replied, though saying little, only making a formal acknowledgement and giving a few words of thanks or understanding, but as more and more letters came, he skimmed them and before long ceased to read them at all but tore them up or burned them immediately, and certainly he no longer answered. But his silence seemed only to increase the number of letters. The writers seemed to be banging on his door and shouting at him to notice them, recognise them, speak to them, like the angry, unnoticed, neglected children they were. He felt as if he was drowning in the letters and the weight of their distress, bowed under so much pent-up unhappiness which he had somehow released.
    Finally he asked his publishers not to forward anymoreand then the letters were merely answered with a printed acknowledgement, but the flow barely paused.
    He still lived in the flat he and Elsa had shared. His neighbours went on with their own lives in ignorance of who he was and what he had done, but when he stepped into the streets he was quite often recognised and stared at and sometimes followed. People went up to him in cafés and shops and began to talk to him, to thank him, to pour out their stories. He felt oppressed by them and went out less and less. He slept badly. He missed Elsa then, Elsa’s straightforwardness, her complete lack of self-absorption, her brisk kindness. He had a lot of time in which to remember Elsa. He understood her now. He appreciated her.
    But there was no Elsa.
    In the end, he closed up the flat and went abroad, first to Europe but then, on a whim, to South Africa, where he settled in a house overlooking a bay and tried to write a second book and failed and after that sat in the sun and looked without much interest at the sea, and so the months passed and all the time he wondered about Colin and Berenice and May and how they had coped with what he had done to them, what they thought about him. He felt like someone shut out of a room in which everyone was discussinghim but to which he would never be admitted and when he pressed his ear to the door all he heard was a dull and indecipherable murmur.
    But they were not talking about Frank. If there were murmured conversations they did not mention him. Between Colin and Berenice and May now his name was never spoken, and they got through the days as best they might, working, eating, sleeping, waiting for sufficient time to pass in which the memory of it all would fade and even, by some, be quite forgotten.
    And time did pass and some did forget. But Frank could not. Instead, as he sat in the sun and wandered about the beaches and drank in the bars, he remembered more clearly and in more vivid detail the things of his childhood, so that he seemed to be living at the Beacon again, to be walking about the rooms and touching the furniture, sleeping in his old bed and eating at the kitchen table, smelling the smell of the beasts in the yard and feeling the movement of the trailer beneath him as he rode up the hill behind the tractor with the others, the air fresh on his face. He could hear their voices. He could see the small mole on May’s neck and Colin’s finger where the nail had come off and the bright yellow of Berenice’s ribbons. He heard their shouts as they came whippingdown on trays and boxes through the snow and his knee burned where he had skidded across the ice in short trousers.
    Things he had not known he remembered were there, after all, and had only been hidden at the back of a drawer or put away in the attic and now they were all spread out