The Beacon by Susan Hill Page A

London. Unlike May, he felt that he had come home from the moment he stepped off the train.
    He had left school at fifteen and gone to the technical college in the town for two years to study surveying and after that become apprenticed to the local council buildings department, but on arriving in London the Frank Prime who had done all of this was shed like theskin of a snake. He had saved enough money, carefully and quietly, to rent a couple of rooms and take his soundings of London, walking about the city as, if he had known it, his sister May had done and the walking had eventually led him, too, to Fleet Street but not to the hell pits of printing machines. Frank Prime had walked into three newspaper offices in search of work and in the third had found it. He became a noisy, sociable dogsbody in the newsroom.
    From the first day he had found himself, as he had found his city, and he seemed to explode with cleverness and confidence and a passion for news and for words on paper, a passion which he had never known for the figures and measurements, lengths and breadths of surveying.
    He got in early and left late but joined the rest of them in one or other pub from the beginning, and in the pubs he listened and stored away gossip, stories, confidences.
    Over the next few years, Frank ascended from office boy up the ladder to reporter and then, after moving papers, to senior reporter. He specialised in crime, and in addition to travelling round the country to the scenes of major crimes he spent days in the Old Bailey at trials. His face became familiar. He had regular bylines. He seemed to love and be immersed in his work.
    And then he married, a widow called Elsa Mordner who had money and a large and gloomy mansion flat at the South Kensington end of Earls Court. Elsa had a sallow skin and a sour expression. She was tall, with long bony Gothic hands and feet and, until she met Frank, had been increasingly lonely and without anyone or anything in particular on which to spend her money and her attention. In Frank, it seemed that she had a docile, cheerful, companionable man who was out of the flat for the major part of the day as well as for those nights when he was away reporting. Somehow, her long days spent shopping or reading or going to galleries and tea shops, which had been mainly ways of filling the time, were transformed simply because she had someone who would be coming home to her. After a year of marriage, the two or three close friends she had noticed that her complexion was less sallow, her expression less sour, and concluded with relief that this marriage, contrary to all their expectations, was completely suitable for her.
    Frank had never taken her to meet his family and indeed almost never spoke about them, whereas she told him a great deal about her own in Munich and took him to visit them twice. The visits were not a success because the family could not understand why Elsa had married an Englishman not once but twiceand sensed, rightly, that whereas they were from generations of solid burgher stock Frank Prime was not. Such things mattered. He was aware of the polite, correct and entirely chilly atmosphere and regressed to his old childhood self, silent and watchful. Elsa did not care for the person her husband turned into when they set foot in her home country and thereafter she went to see her family alone.
    In Munich, Elsa’s parents lived, as they had always lived, in a large, high-ceilinged apartment in an old building, so it was natural for her to have bought the same in London, but the apartment was the one thing about his marriage which Frank hated. He hated living on one level. Going to bed on the same floor as that in which the cooking was done and in which he ate and read and watched television felt wrong, and although he was entirely happy in London he missed having outside space of his own, in summer most of all. Even a small garden would have done.
    Intermittently over the years he raised the