Lighthousekeeping

by Jeanette Winterson

  ‘Yes, like you.’

  I went quietly to bed, DogJim at my feet because there was nowhere else for him. I curled up to keep warm, my knees under my chin, and hands holding my toes. I was back in the womb. Back in the safe space before the questions start. I thought about Babel Dark, and about my own father, as red as a herring. That’s all I know about him – he had red hair like me.

  A child born of chance might imagine that Chance was its father, in the way that gods fathered children, and then abandoned them, without a backward glance, but with one small gift. I wondered if a gift had been left for me. I had no idea where to look, or what I was looking for, but I know now that all the important journeys start that way.

  KNOWN POINT IN THE DARKNESS

  As an apprentice to lighthousekeeping my duties were as follows:

  1) Brew a pot of Full Strength Samson and take it to Pew.

  2) 8 am. Take DogJim for a walk.

  3) 9 am. Cook bacon.

  4) 10 am. Sluice the stairs.

  5) 11 am. More tea.

  6) Noon. Polish the instruments.

  7) 1 pm. Chops and tomato sauce.

  8) 2 pm. Lesson – History of Lighthouses.

  9) 3 pm. Wash our socks etc.

  10) 4 pm. More tea.

  11) 5 pm. Walk the dog and collect supplies.

  12) 6 pm. Pew cooks supper.

  13) 7 pm. Pew sets the light. I watch.

  14) 8 pm. Pew tells me a story.

  15) 9 pm. Pew tends the light. Bed.

  Numbers 3, 6, 7, 8 and 14 were the best times of the day. I still get homesick when I smell bacon and Brasso.

  Pew told me about Salts years ago, when wreckers lured ships onto the rocks to steal the cargo. The weary seamen were desperate for any light, but if the light is a lie, everything is lost. The new lighthouses were built to prevent this confusion of light. Some of them lit great fires on their platforms, and burned out to sea like a dropped star. Others had only twenty-five candles, standing in the domed glass like a saint’s shrine, but for the first time, the lighthouses were mapped. Safety and danger were charted. Unroll the paper, set the compass, and if your course is straight, the lights will be there. What flickers elsewhere is a trap or a lure.

  The lighthouse is a known point in the darkness.

  ‘Imagine it,’ said Pew, ‘the tempest buffeting you starboard, the rocks threatening your lees, and what saves you is a single light. The harbour light, or the warning light, it doesn’t matter which; you sail to safety. Day comes and you’re alive.’

  ‘Will I learn to set the light?’

  ‘Aye, and tend the light too.’

  ‘I hear you talking to yourself.’

  ‘I’m not talking to myself, child, I’m about my work.’ Pew straightened up and looked at me seriously. His eyes were milky blue like a kitten’s. No one knew whether or not he had always been blind, but he had spent his whole life in the lighthouse or on the mackerel boat, and his hands were his eyes.

  ‘A long time ago, in 1802 or 1892, you name your date, there’s most sailors could not read nor write. Their officers read the navy charts, but the sailors had their own way. When they came past Tarbert Ness or Cape Wrath or Bell Rock, they never thought of such places as positions on the map, they knew them as stories. Every lighthouse has a story to it – more than one, and if you sail from here to America, there’ll not be a light you pass where the keeper didn’t have a story for the seamen.

  In those days the seamen came ashore as often as they could, and when they put up at the inn, and they had eaten their chops and lit their pipes and passed the rum, they wanted a story, and it was always the lighthousekeeper who told it, while his Second or his wife stayed with the light. These stories went from man to man, generation to generation, hooped the sea-bound world and sailed back again, different decked maybe, but the same story. And when the lightkeeper had told his story, the sailors would tell their own, from other lights. A good keeper was one who knew more stories than the sailors. Sometimes there’d be a competition, and a salty dog would shout out “Lundy” or “Calf of Man” and you’d have to answer, “The Flying Dutchman” or “Twenty Bars of Gold“.’

  Pew was serious and silent, his eyes like a faraway ship.

  ‘I can teach you – yes, anybody – what the instruments are for, and the light will flash once every four seconds as it always does, but I must teach you how to keep the light. Do you know what that means?’

  I didn’t.

  ‘The stories. That’s what you must learn. The ones I know and the ones I don’t know.’

  ‘How can I learn the ones you don’t know?’

  ‘Tell them yourself.’

  Then Pew began to say of all the sailors riding the waves who had sunk up to their necks in death and found one last air pocket, reciting the story like a prayer.

  ‘There was a man close by here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned was telling himself stories like a madman, so that as one ended another began. On the seventh day he had told all the stories he knew and that was when he began to tell himself as if he were a story, from his earliest beginnings to his green and deep misfortune. The story he told was of a man lost and found, not once, but many times, as he choked his way out of the waves. And when night fell, he saw the Cape Wrath light, only lit a week it was, but it was, and he knew that if he became the story of the light, he might be saved. With his last strength he began to paddle towards it, arms on either side of the spar, and in his mind the light became a shining rope, pulling him in. He took hold of it, tied it round his waist, and at that moment, the keeper saw him, and ran for the rescue boat.

  ‘Later, putting up at The Razorbill, and recovering, he told anyone who wanted to listen what he had told himself on those sea-soaked days and nights. Others joined in, and it was soon discovered that every light had a story – no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.’

  Cliff-perched, wind-cleft,

  the church seated 250, and was almost full at 243 souls, the entire population of Salts.

  On 2 February 1850, Babel Dark preached his first sermon.

  His text was this: ‘Remember the rock whence ye are hewn, and the pit whence ye are digged.’

  The innkeeper at The Razorbill was so struck by this sermon and its memorable text that he changed the name of his establishment. From that day forth, he was no longer landlord of The Razorbill, but keeper of The Rock and Pit. Sailors, being what they are, still called it by its former name for a good sixty years or more, but The Rock and Pit it was, and is still, with much the same low-beamed, inward-turned, net-hung, salt-dashed, seaweed feel of forsakenness that it always had.

  Babel Dark used his private fortune to build himself a fine house and a walled garden and to equip himself comfortably there. He was soon seen in earnest Biblical discussion with the one lady of good blood in the place – a cousin of the Duke of Argyll, a Campbell in exile, out of poverty and some other secret. She was no beauty, but she read German fluently and knew something of Greek.

  They were married in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, and Dark took his new wife to London for her honeymoon, and thereafter he never took her anywhere again, not even to Edinburgh. Wherever he went, riding alone on a black mare, no one was told, and no one followed.

  There were disturbances at night, sometimes, and the Manse windows all flamed up, and shouts and hurlings of furniture or heavy objects, but question Dark, as few did, and he would say it was his soul in peril, and he fought for it, as every man must.

  His wife said nothing, and if her husband was gone for days at a time, or seen wandering in his black clothes over the high rocks, then let him be, for he was a Man of God, and he accepted no judge but God himself.

  One day, Dark saddled his horse and disappeared.

  He
was gone a month, and when he returned, he was softer, easier, but with plain sadness on his face.

  After that, the month-long absences happened twice a year, but no one knew where he went, until a Bristol man put up at The Razorbill, that is to say The Rock and Pit.

  He was a close-guarded man, eyes as near together as to be always spying on one another, and a way of tapping his finger and thumb, very rapid, when he spoke. His name was Price.

  One Sunday, after Price had been to church, he was sitting over the fire with a puzzlement on his face, and it was finally got out of him that if he hadn’t seen Babel Dark before and just recently, then the man had the devil’s imprint down in Bristol.

  Price claimed that he had seen Dark, wearing very different clothes, visiting a house in the Clifton area outside Bristol. He took note of him for his height – tall, and his bearing – very haughty. He had never seen him with anyone, always alone, but he would swear on his tattoo that this was the same one.

  ‘He’s a smuggler,’ said one of us.

  ‘He’s got a mistress,’ said another.

  ‘It’s none of our business,’ said a third. ‘He does his duties here and he pays his bills and handsomely. What else he does is between him and God.’

  The rest of us were not so sure, but as nobody had the money to follow him, none of us could know whether Price’s story was true or not. But Price promised to keep a look out, and to send word, if he ever saw Dark or his like again.

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed he did, but that didn’t help us to know what Dark was about, or why.’

  ‘You weren’t there then. You weren’t born.’

  ‘There’s always been a Pew in the lighthouse at Cape Wrath.’

  ‘But not the same Pew.’

  Pew said nothing. He put on his radio headphones, and motioned me to look out to sea. ‘The McCloud’s out there,’ he said.

  I got the binoculars and trained them on a handsome cargo ship, white on the straight line of the horizon. ‘She’s the most haunted vessel you’ll ever see.’

  ‘What haunts her?’

  ‘The past,’ said Pew. ‘There was a brig called the McCloud built two hundred years ago, and that was as wicked a ship as sailed. When the King’s navy scuttled her, her Captain swore an oath that he and his ship would some day return. Nothing happened until they built the new McCloud, and on the day they launched her, everyone on the dock saw the broken sails and ruined keel of the old McCloud rise up in the body of the ship. There’s a ship within a ship and that’s fact.’

  ‘It’s not a fact.’

  ‘It’s as true as day.’

  I looked at the McCloud, fast, turbined, sleek, computer-controlled. How could she carry in her body the trace-winds of the past?

  ‘Like a Russian doll, she is,’ said Pew, ‘one ship inside another, and on a stormy night you can see the old McCloud hanging like a gauze on the upper deck.’

  ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘Sailed in her and seen her,’ said Pew.

  ‘When did you board the new McCloud? Was she in dry dock at Glasgow?’

  ‘I never said anything about the new McCloud,’ said Pew.

  ‘Pew, you are not two hundred years old.’

  ‘And that’s a fact,’ said Pew, blinking like a kitten. ‘Oh yes, a fact.’

  ‘Miss Pinch says I shouldn’t listen to your stories.’

  ‘She doesn’t have the gift, that’s why.’

  ‘What gift?’

  ‘The gift of Second Sight, given to me on the day I went blind.’

  ‘What day was that?’

  ‘Long before you were born, though I saw you coming by sea.’

  ‘Did you know it would be me, me myself as I am, me?’

  Pew laughed. ‘As sure as I knew Babel Dark – or someone very like me knew someone very like him.’

  I was quiet. Pew could hear me thinking. He touched my head, in that strange, light way of his, like a cobweb.

  ‘It’s the gift. If one thing is taken away, another will be found.’

  ‘Miss Pinch doesn’t say that, Miss Pinch says Life is a Steady Darkening Towards Night. She’s embroidered it above her oven.’

  ‘Well, she never was the optimistic kind.’

  ‘What can you see with your Second Sight?’

  ‘The past and the future. Only the present is dark.’

  ‘But that’s where we live.’

  ‘Not Pew, child. A wave breaks, another follows.’

  ‘Where’s the present?’

  ‘For you, child, all around, like the sea. For me, the sea is never still, she’s always changing. I’ve never lived on land and I can’t say what’s this or that. I can only say what’s ebbing and what’s becoming.’

  ‘What’s ebbing?’

  ‘My life.’

  ‘What’s becoming?’

  ‘Your life. You’ll be the keeper after me.’

  Tell me a story, Pew.

  What kind of story, child?

  A story with a happy ending.

  There’s no such thing in all the world.

  As a happy ending?

  As an ending.

  To make an end of it Dark had decided to marry.

  His new wife was gentle, well read, unassuming, and in love with him. He was not in the least in love with her, but that, he felt, was an advantage. They would both work hard in a parish that fed on oatmeal and haddock. He would hew his path, and if his hands bled, so much the better.

  They were married without ceremony in the church at Salts, and Dark immediately fell ill. The honeymoon had to be postponed, but his new wife, all tenderness and care, made him breakfast every day with her own hands, though she had a maid to do it for her.

  He grew to dread the hesitant tread on the stairs to his room that overlooked the sea. She carried the tray so slowly that by the time she reached his room the tea had gone cold, and every day she apologised, and every day he told her to think nothing of it, and swallowed a sip or two of the pale liquid. She was trying to be economical with the tea leaves.

  That morning, he lay in bed and heard the clinking of the cups on the tray, as she came slowly towards him. It would be porridge, he thought, heavy as a mistake, and muffins studded with raisins that accused him as he ate them. The new cook – her appointment – baked bread plain, and disapproved of ‘fanciness’ as she called it, though what was fancy about a raisin, he did not know.

  He would have preferred coffee, but coffee was four times the price of tea.

  ‘We are not poor,’ he had said to his wife, who reminded him that they could give the money to a better cause than breakfast coffee.

  Could they? He was not so sure, and whenever he saw a deserving lady with a new bonnet, it seemed to smell, to him, steamingly aromatic.

  The door opened, she smiled – not at him, at the tray – because she was concentrating. He thought, irritably, that a tightrope walker he had seen on the docks would have carried this tray with more grace and skill, even on a line strung between two masts.

  She set it down, with her usual air of achievement and sacrifice.

  ‘I hope you will enjoy it, Babel,’ she said, as she always did.

  He smiled and took the cold tea.

  Always. They had not been married long enough for there to be an always.

  They were new, virgin, fresh, without habits. Why did he feel that he had lain in this bed forever, slowly filling up with cold tea?

  Till death us do part.

  He shivered.

  ‘You are cold, Babel,’ she said.

  ‘No, only the tea.’

  She looked hurt, rebuked.

  ‘I make the tea before I toast the muffins.’

  ‘Perhaps you should do it afterwards.’

  ‘Then the muffins would be cold.’

  ‘They are cold.’

  She picked up the tray. ‘I will make us a second breakfast.’

  It was as cold as the first. He did not speak of it
again.

  He had no reason to hate his wife. She had no faults and no imagination. She never complained, and she was never pleased. She never asked for anything, and she never gave anything – except to the poor. She was modest, mild-mannered, obedient, and careful. She was as dull as a day at sea with no wind.

  In his becalmed life, Dark began to taunt his wife, not out of cruelty at first, but to test her, perhaps to find her. He wanted her secrets and her dreams. He was not a man of good mornings and good nights.

  When they went out riding, he would sometimes thrash her pony with a clean sing of his whip, and the beast would gallop off, his wife grabbing the mane because she was an uncertain horsewoman. He liked the pure fear in her face – a feeling at last, he thought.

  He took her sailing on days when Pew would have been a brave man to take out his rescue boat. Dark liked to watch her, drenched and vomiting, begging him to steer home and when they got the boat back, half capsized with water, he’d declare it a fine day’s sailing, and make her walk to the house holding his hand.

  In the bedroom, he turned her face down, one hand against her neck, the other bringing himself stiff, then he knocked himself into her in one swift move, like a wooden peg into the tap-hole of a barrel. His fingermarks were on her neck when he had finished. He never kissed her.

  When he wanted her, which was never as herself, but sometimes, because he was a young man, he trod slowly up the stairs to her room, imagining he was carrying a tray of greasy muffins and a pot of cold tea. He opened the door, smiling, but not at her.

  When he had finished with her, he sat across her, keeping her there, the way he would keep his dog down when he went out shooting. In the chilly bedroom – she never lit a fire – he let his semen go cold on her before he let her get up.

  Then he went and sat in his study, legs flung up on the desk, thinking of nothing. He had trained himself to think of absolutely nothing.