Lighthousekeeping

by Jeanette Winterson

  Dark hesitated with his cargo and lemonade and pies. Would she sit down with him for a moment?

  She nodded.

  They went to a series of tables underneath a spread of palm trees brought from India, and as strange and heady to London as a primeval forest. They sat in rattan chairs, while an Indian waiter in a turban and sash served Coronation Chicken to a family of coal merchants from Newcastle.

  ‘Is the baby…?

  ‘She is quite well, Babel, but she is blind.’

  ‘Blind?’

  And he was back in that terrible day, when she had come to him, soft and helpless, and he had…

  She had another lover – he had always known it. He had watched her walking quickly at night to a house on the other side of town. She was cloaked, shrouded, she hadn’t wanted to be seen.

  When she had gone in, Dark had stood outside the window. A young man came forward. She held out her arms. The man and Molly embraced. Dark had turned away, the pain in his head sharp in the brain-pan. He had felt his fear drop anchor in the soft parts of him. This was the fear that had been sailing towards him through the fog.

  He had set off back to town. He didn’t expect to sleep. Soon he began to walk all night. He couldn’t remember when he had last slept.

  He remembered laughing, and thinking that if he never slept he would be dead. Yes, he felt dead. He felt thin and empty like a dredged shell. He looked in the mirror and saw a highly polished abalone, its inhabitant gone, the shell prized for its surface. He always dressed well.

  Molly had noticed the change in him. She tried to please him, and sometimes he could forget, but then, making love, at the moment when he was most naked, he heard the bell again, and sensed the ribbed ship with its ragged sails coming nearer.

  He had never told her how he shadowed her steps, and when they had met one night at an inn called Ends Meet, and she had told him she was going to have a child, he had pushed her away and run through the town and locked himself in his rooms, wrapped in ragged sails.

  On the walls of his rooms were the drawings that Stevenson had made of the lighthouse at Cape Wrath. The lighthouse looked like a living creature, standing upright on its base, like a seahorse, fragile, impossible, but triumphant in the waves.

  ‘My seahorse,’ Molly had called him, when he swam towards her in their bed like an ocean of drowning and longing.

  The sea cave and the seahorse. It was their game. Their watery map of the world. They were at the beginning of the world. A place before the flood.

  She had come to him that day, soft, open, as he sat motionless by his dying fire. She had begged him and he had hit her, hit two red coals into her cheeks, and then hit her again and again, and she had put up her arms to shield herself, and…

  She broke his thought as she spoke.

  ‘From where I fell.’

  He looked at the child, laughing, gurgling, unseeing, its hands on its mother’s face, its head turning to follow the sounds. Now he knew what he had done, and he would have given his life to put his hand inside time and turn it back.

  ‘I will do anything you ask. Tell me. Anything.’

  ‘We have no wants.’

  ‘Molly – am I her father?’

  ‘She has no father.’

  Molly stood up to leave. Babel jumped after her, spilling the bottles of lemonade. Molly held the baby close, and the baby was quiet, feeling its mother’s alarm.

  ‘Let me hold her.’

  ‘So that you can dash her to the ground?’

  ‘I have thought of you every day since I left. And I have thought of your child. Our child, if you tell me so.’

  ‘I did tell you so.’

  ‘I never thought I would see you again.’

  ‘Nor I you.’

  She paused, and he remembered her that night, that first night, with the moon shining white on her white skin. He put out his hand. She stepped back.

  ‘It is too late, Babel.’

  Yes, too late, and he had made it too late. He should go back, he knew his wife would be waiting for him. He should go back now. But as he took a deep breath to go, his will failed him.

  ‘Spend this day with me. This one day.’

  Molly hesitated a long time, while the crowds passed about them, and Dark, looking down, not daring to look up, saw reflections in the polished toe-pieces of his boots.

  She spoke like someone far off. Someone who was a country where he was born.

  ‘This day then.’

  He shone. She made him shine. He took the baby and held it by the hissing engines, and close against the smooth traction of the wheels. He wanted her to hear pistons pumping and coal shovelling and water drumming against the sides of the giant copper boilers. He took her tiny fingers and ran them over brass rivets, steel funnels, cogs, ratchets, a rubber horn that trumpeted when she squeezed it in her tiny hands, Dark’s hands over hers. He wanted to make for her a world of sounds that was as splendid as the world of sight.

  Some hours later, he saw Molly smile.

  Late now. Crowds were drifting towards the bandstand. Dark bought the baby a clockwork bear made of real bearskin. He rubbed it against her cheek, then he wound it up and the bear brought two cymbals together in its paws.

  It was time for him to go, he knew it was, but still they stood together, as everyone else parted to pass them. Then silently, without him asking, Molly opened her bag and gave him a card with her address in Bath.

  She kissed his cheek, and turned away.

  Dark watched her go, like watching a bird on the horizon, that only you can see, because only you have followed it.

  Then she was gone.

  Late now. Shadows. The flare of gas lamps. His reflection in every pane of glass. One Dark. A hundred. A thousand. This fractured man.

  Dark remembered his wife.

  He pushed his way down the galleries and back to where he had left her. She was still there, hands folded in her lap, her face a mask.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I was delayed.’

  ‘For six hours.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Pew – why didn’t my mother marry my father?

  She never had time. He came and went.

  Why didn’t Babel Dark marry Molly?

  He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.

  But they might not be telling you the truth.

  Never mind that. You tell them the truth.

  What do you mean?

  You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.

  So what should I say?

  When?

  When I love someone?

  You should say it.

  A stranger in his own life,

  but not here, not with her.

  The house he bought her in her name. The child he took as his own; his blind daughter, blue-eyed like him, black-haired like him. He loved her.

  He promised himself that he would come back forever. He told Molly that what had begun as a penance had become a responsibility. He couldn’t leave Salts, not now, no, not yet, but soon, yes very soon. And Molly, who had begged to come with him, accepted what he said about his life there, and that it would be no life for their daughter, and no place for the second child that Molly was expecting.

  He said nothing to her about his wife in Salts, and nothing to her about his salty new son, who had been born almost without him noticing.

  April. November. The twice-yearly visits to Molly. Sixty days a year where life is, where love is, where his private planet tracked into the warmth of its sun.

  In April and November, he arrived half frozen, hardly able to speak, the life in him remote. He came to her door and fell inside, and she took him by the fire and talked to him, for hours it seemed, to keep him conscious, to keep him from fainting.

  Whenever he saw her he wanted to faint. He knew it was the sudden rush of blood to his head, and the fact that he forgot to breathe. He knew it was an ordinary symptom and an ordinary cause, but he knew,
too, that whenever he saw her, his desiccated, half-stilled body jerked forward, towards the sun. Heat and light. She was heat and light to him, whatever the month.

  In December and May, when it was time for him to leave, he carried the light with him for a while, though the source was gone. As he travelled out of the long sun-spread days, he hardly noticed that the clock was shortening, that night was falling earlier, that some mornings there was already a frost.

  She was a bright disc in him that left him sun-spun. She was circular, light-turned, equinox-sprung. She was season and movement, but he had never seen her cold. In winter, her fire sank from the surface to below the surface, and warmed her great halls like the legend of the king who kept the sun in his hearth.

  ‘Keep me by you,’ he said. It was almost a prayer, but like most of us he prayed for one thing, and set his life on course for elsewhere.

  They were in the garden raking leaves. He leaned on his rake and looked at her, their tiny daughter on all fours, feeling the different-shaped edges of the leaves. He picked one up and felt it himself; hornbeam it was, serrated, corrugated, nothing like the fronds of the ash, or the flat, spotted, palm-sized curling sycamore, or the oak, sporting acorns and still green.

  He wondered how many days he had in his life – in his whole life – and when they had fallen one by one, and him naked again, time’s covering gone, would the leaves be heaped up, the rotting pile of his days, or would he recognise them still – those different-edged days he had called his life?

  He put his hand into the pile. This one, and this one – when he had taken Molly and their daughter to the sea. This one, when they had gone for a walk along the beach and he had found her a shell snail-tracked like the inside of an ear. This one, when he had been waiting for her, and when he had seen her before she had seen him, and he was able to watch her, as only strangers can and lovers long to do.

  This one, when he had held his baby high above the world, and perhaps for the first time in his life wanted nothing for himself.

  He counted out sixty leaves and arranged them in two blocks of thirty. Well, there were three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. For three hundred and five he would no longer exist.

  Why? Why must he live like this? He had got himself caught in a lie and the lie had got him caught in a life. He must finish his sentence. Seven years, he had privately decided when Molly had agreed to take him back.

  Then they would leave England forever. He would marry her. His wife and son in Salts would be well provided for. He would be free. No one would ever hear of Babel Dark again.

  How were you born, Pew?

  Unexpectedly, child. My mother was gathering clams on the sea edge when a handsome enough rogue offered to tell her fortune. As such a thing didn’t happen every day, she wiped her hands on her skirt and held out her palm.

  Did he see riches, or a great house, or a long life, or a quiet hearth?

  He couldn’t be sure of any of that, no, but he did foresee a fine child born within nine months of this day.

  Really?

  Well, she was very perplexed by that, but the fine rogue assured her that the very same thing has happened to Mary, and she had given birth to Our Lord. And after that they took a walk along the beach. And after that she forgot all about him. And after that, his fortune-telling came true.

  Miss Pinch says you came from the orphanage in Glasgow.

  There’s always been a Pew at Cape Wrath.

  But not the same Pew.

  Well, well.

  As I was no longer Making Progress, I let my mind drift where it would. I rowed my blue boat out to sea and collected stories like driftwood. Whenever I found something – a crate, a gull, a message in a bottle, a shark bloated belly-up, pecked and pitted, a pair of trousers, a box of tinned sardines, Pew asked me the story, and I had to find it, or invent it, as we sat through the sea-smashed nights of winter storms.

  A crate! Raft for a pygmy sailing to America.

  A gull! A princess trapped in the body of a bird.

  A message in a bottle. My future.

  A pair of trousers. Belonging to my father.

  Tinned sardines. We ate those.

  Shark. And inside it, dull with blood, a gold coin. Omen of the unexpected. The buried treasure is always there.

  When Pew sent me to bed, he gave me a match to light my candle. In the tiny oval of the match flame, he asked me to tell him what I saw – a boy’s face, or a horse, or a ship, and as the match burned down, the story would burn out over my fingers and disappear. They were never finished, these stories, always beginning again – the boy’s face, a hundred lives, the horse, flying or enchanted, the ship sailing over the edge of the world.

  And then I would try to sleep and dream of myself, but the message in the bottle was hard to read.

  ‘Blank,’ said Miss Pinch, when I told her about it.

  But it wasn’t blank. Words were there all right. I could see one of them. It said LOVE.

  ‘That’s lucky,’ said Pew. ‘Lucky to find it. Lucky to search for it.’

  ‘Have you ever loved anybody, Pew?’

  ‘Pew has, yes, child,’ said Pew.

  ‘Tell me the story.’

  ‘All in good time. Now go to sleep.’

  And I did, the message in the bottle floating just above my head. LOVE, it said. Love, love, love, or was it a bird I heard in the night?

  The mystery of Pew was a mercury of fact.

  Try and put your finger on the solid thing and it scattered into separate worlds.

  He was just Pew; an old man with a bag of stories under his arm, and a way of cooking sausages so that the skin turned as thick as a bullet casing, and he was, too, a bright bridge that you could walk across, and look back and find it vanished.

  He was and he wasn’t – that was Pew.

  There were days when he seemed to have evaporated into the spray that jetted the base of the lighthouse, and days when he was the lighthouse. It stood, Pew-shaped, Pew-still, hatted by cloud, blind-eyed, but the light to see by.

  DogJim was asleep on his peg rug, made out of scraps like himself. I had unhooked the big brass bell we used to call each other for supper or a story, and I was rubbing the salt off it with a duster torn out of an old vest.

  Everything in the lighthouse was old – except me – and Pew was the oldest thing of all, if you believed him.

  Pew lit his pipe, and cupped the bowl in both hands, looking up, as the wind-once-a-week ship’s clock struck nine.

  ‘Babel Dark lived two lives, child, as I have said. He built Molly a fine house outside Bristol – not too near, but near enough, as though he had to court danger as he courted his new wife – and new wife she was, for Dark married Molly in a thirteenth-century Cornish church, hewn from a single rock.

  ‘Remember the rock whence ye are hewn? Aye, but he had forgotten about the pit.

  ‘Down south, Dark went by the name of Lux and spoke with a Welsh accent, because his mother was Welsh, and he knew the lilt.

  ‘Mr Lux paid well and lived well when he was with Molly, and Molly explained to anyone who was curious that her husband was a man with shipping interests that kept him away for most of the year, except for the two months, April and November, when he came back to her.

  ‘He gave no orders to her but one, that she should never follow him to Salts.

  ‘One day, a handsome woman came and lodged at The Razorbill – that is to say, The Rock and Pit – and gave her name as Mrs Tenebris. She did not state her business, but she went to church on Sunday, as you would expect a lady to do.

  ‘She sat in the front pew in a grey dress, and Dark mounted the pulpit to preach his sermon, and the text was, ‘I have set my Covenant in the Heavens like a Bow,’ referring to the rainbow after the Flood, when God promised Noah not to destroy the world again – I tell you this, Silver, because your Bible reading is so poor.

  ‘Well, as he spoke, and he was a fine preacher, suddenly he glanced down to the front row, an
d saw the lady in grey, and those about him said he turned as pale as a skinned plaice. He never faltered in his speaking, but his hands gripped the Bible as though a fiend was dragging it from him.

  ‘As soon as the service was over, he didn’t wait to receive anyone at the church door, he took his horse and rode off.

  ‘They saw him, wandering on the cliff edge with his dog, and they were afraid. He was that kind of man. There was something behind his eyes that made them afraid.

  ‘A week went by, and when the next Sunday came the lady had gone, but she had left something behind in Dark, and that’s a fact. You could see his torment written right across him. He used to vex the sailors for their tattoos, but he was the marked man now.’

  ‘Was it Molly?’

  ‘Oh it was her, it was. They had a meeting together, here in this lighthouse, in this very room, her sitting in the chair that I sit in now – him pacing, pacing, pacing, and the rain hammering at the glass like a thing trying to get in.’

  ‘What did they talk about?’

  ‘I only heard some of it – I was outside, of course.’

  ‘Pew, you weren’t born.’

  ‘Well, the Pew that was born was.’

  ‘What did she say to him?’

  Dark could feel the familiar pain behind his eyes. His eyes were bars, and behind them was a fierce, unfed animal. When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.

  He opened the small door at the base of the lighthouse and climbed round and round the steps to the light. He climbed swiftly and the stairs were steep, but he was hardly out of breath at all. His body seemed to get stronger as his grip on himself lessened. He was in control, yes, he was in control, until he slept, or until his mind escaped his cage as it sometimes did. He had been able to stop it by force of will, just as he had been able to wake up at will, driving the dreams back into the night, lighting his lamp and reading. He had been able to force it all away, and if he woke exhausted in the morning he did not care. But lately, he could never wake out of those dreams. Little by little, the night was winning.