The Light Keeper

by Cole Morton

  ‘You do know you’ll have to give in, don’t you?’ said his wife, her hand on the small of his back, as much to help her stand as to urge him forward.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I really do think so.’

  ‘Both names then? But mine first.’

  Jasmine Jones snorted a laugh, shaking her head in mock dismay, spraying raindrops on the hallway’s old orange wallpaper. ‘You lovely, stubborn man.’

  Jasmine had been raised to know her own mind and to get her own way. Papa had spent a lot of money making sure that was the case, sending her down from the mountain to the finest school in Kingston, probably the whole of Jamaica, where she had learned far more than he knew. When Jasmine and her friends walked out through the town in their starched white uniforms on sunlit evenings in the seventies they were well aware of being watched by men in cars and sidewalk bars. They kicked their heels, showed their legs, threw back their heads and laughed because they felt a hunger too, but theirs was different. Their lust, nurtured by their folks, was to Do Better. They were never meant to stay.

  So Jasmine left the island and went away to Oxford, where she met a man. ‘His face told me to trust him,’ she wrote to her mother long after meeting Robert in a coffee shop on a corner near her college. The letter was written a good six months after they met, but it was all news to her mother. By then they had studied together for their finals, the serious young ordinand and herself, a different kind of believer, working as hard as him but always trying to make it look easy. Sharing the same library table in silence, divinity and law books spread out side by side. ‘Tell Papa not to worry,’ she wrote, but she knew that was in vain. With the letter, she sent a wedding invitation. It was fast, too fast maybe, but it was also too late for Papa to stop her then, if he wanted to. So of course, both men were nervous when they met for the first time at the college chapel, on the night of the wedding rehearsal.

  ‘Look after her,’ said Papa, pulling back his shoulders and pumping the hand of the groom. It was what he had to say. He had prepared the words. His face was stern and his stare was fierce. For a moment, he was every disapproving father in history. Then a twitch on his lips became a smile, as his worried daughter watched. ‘Don’t worry!’

  Papa knew all about Robert Jones, she found out later. Papa had been to Oxford too, he still had friends from those days, only now those friends had influence and access. Questions had been asked, files checked, bishops consulted on the sly. This young priest was well thought of. He might not make a fortune, but he was a man of God.

  ‘I know you will look after my daughter, I can see that . . . my son.’

  ‘Done,’ said Jasmine to her husband, closing the door against the traffic that was swooshing its way through another miserable day. The child was home. Back in the sun, her aunts and uncles would be muttering over their tea cups about what a shame it all was, how bright little Jasmine would probably never return to the law now, after all that money had been spent on her education. But Papa would be coming soon, to see his grand-daughter. Jasmine would tell him this was her home now and he was welcome. She would not say how little time there was left for her to live in it. She had neither the strength nor the will for a fight on the day her daughter came home, but she was sure this child, this miracle, should have a name as big as the wonder she inspired.

  ‘Both names,’ said Robert Jones as he bent to kiss the forehead of the sleeping child, who wriggled in her snug of pale pink terry cotton. ‘Your mother is crazy, but she is almost as lovely as you.’

  Jasmine, who was about to draw the curtains, paused at the sight of her porridge-pale man and his lovely daughter. Her lovely daughter too, caught in a bar of swirling sunshine. One precious column of light had found a way through the rain clouds and smog, through the smudged window pane and thick house nets and was spending itself on them both. Let them be like this, she thought. Remember this, Jasmine. Remember.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, moving close to him, but he did not take his eyes off the baby. They both looked down and surprised themselves by saying the first of her two given names together, softly. ‘Sarah . . .’

  She knew none of that, of course. Her eyes had yet to open. She was not told the story for a very long time, because for years she did not want to hear anything about it or about her mother. But there was one thing Sarah could never easily put out of her mind: her earliest memory, the blinding white light. She saw it when she was three years old and holding the hand of her grandmother, as they turned from a hospital corridor into the room where her mother lay. There, surrounded by a dazzling haze of light, was Mummy on the bed, strangely yellow between the sweetie pink of her nightie and the bone white of the linen sheet.

  ‘What is in your nose, Mummy?’

  Sarah pulled herself up onto the bed by the green blanket, nearly kicking over a vase of daffodils on the bedside cabinet with her shiny patent shoe. She felt the hands of the nurse, a grip strong enough to lift her off.

  ‘Oh darling.’ The nurse’s uniform was dark blue, she was in charge. ‘Mummy is a little poorly just now, best not climb on her.’

  But Mummy spoke. She whispered. ‘Please. Let her.’

  The voice did not seem to come from her body but from the air, floating down like a feather, startling Sarah and making her want to cry. ‘Come here, my angel.’ Mummy reached out, trailing the tube attached to the bruised back of her hand. Sarah knelt on the bed and cool palms cupped her face; she was pulled in tight towards her mother’s lips, mouth to mouth, feeling and tasting tears. The tickle of eyelashes. She was too young to see the wildness in her mother’s eyes: the look of a woman trying to inhale her daughter’s energy, her love, her life, trying to suck up something of Sarah to stay there with her, in that room, a little light to burn when the darkness came. Sarah just felt herself squeezed so tight she could hardly breathe, and heard her granny’s voice.

  ‘Come on, love. Let Mummy rest.’

  Not fair, thought Sarah, you are hurting me, Mummy. She wanted to say that, but she could not speak. Then the arms around her relaxed and fell away, back down to the bed, like the arms of a puppet whose strings had been cut. The arms of her mother, bare and motionless on the bed. The skin was pale, powdery, dry.

  ‘Goodbye, my precious.’

  Mummy hissed it, swallowing with great effort as if there was something dusty, spiky in her throat. She pursed her cracked lips in a dry kiss. ‘Be a good girl.’

  Why was Mummy angry? Sarah saw light blaze from her eyes and the room was crowded with whirling angels flapping fiery wings, and she was scared. She did not know that Jasmine Jones was raging, raging hard, but not with her tiny, precious daughter. Not at all. Jasmine did her best to smile, to fight it. To reassure. ‘See. You.’ She said it so quietly that Sarah could only just hear her. ‘Later. Angel. When. I get. Home. Yeah?’

  No.

  No.

  No.

  She never did come home.

  Nineteen

  This will pass, they said. Trust us. But Sarah called out for her mummy in her sleep and in her waking, and she ran downstairs still befuddled from the tossing, turning night, shouting: ‘Mummy? Mummy? Where are you?’ There was only her father, a shadow in the doorway, bending down to pick her up. Sarah never cried, not even when he held her hard and pressed his face into her shoulder and her Little Princess jim-jams grew wet there, where his eyes were. ‘Don’t cry, Daddy,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She learned fast. She learned that some things hurt more than others; that the photographs of her mother, and her mother’s clothes, and the books that had once been read aloud – ‘all the better to eat you with’ – and the mug Mummy liked to drink from were like bits of broken glass scattered around the house that cut her when she was not looking. She learned to find other things to do when Daddy had pictures and papers spread all over the kitchen table and he was sorting the
m, flicking them, working through them fast as though he had lost something among them, or when the music in his bedroom was loud. She kept away.

  ‘Do you remember the monkeys at the zoo?’ he asked her one bedtime. ‘They were gibbons, I think – a yellow one and a black one and they had a little baby. They were swinging around and bouncing off the branches and Mummy said they were us – the two of us swinging, with you in her arms – do you remember that?’ He was talking and talking, sitting on the edge of the mattress. He had stopped stroking her hair as he thought of it, but his hand was on her forehead, just there. Warm. ‘You used to say the same thing all the time after that. “Mummy, Daddy, Baby!” Do you remember?’

  She said nothing. She felt a bounce in her chest.

  ‘You’re tired. I’ve gone on too long. Mummy loved you, Sarah, she still does. Never forget.’

  He left a warm space in the bedclothes, and she thrust her legs into it.

  ‘Goodnight, my angel.’

  ‘Night, Daddy.’

  That was all. It took her ages and ages to get to sleep.

  She loved Saturdays when his sermon had been written, her homework done and there were no weddings, so they could go for long walks in the forest with the curate’s dog, that smelly, disobedient hound called Tutu. Then to the pictures. Her father grinned stupidly and squeezed her hand and ate popcorn (and let his eyelids close sometimes, she saw him) through Toy Story and others that blurred into primary colours over time, until she became a teenager and toons were no longer really her thing at all.

  ‘Do you like this?’ he asked once in the dark, their faces reflecting the action as some prince or other flashed his sword at a dragon.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, thank goodness for that.’

  They got up, laughing, shuffled past a lot of grumbly people with awkward knees, and went for pizza. ‘Next time,’ said Sarah firmly, ‘I will choose the film.’

  She chose badly. A tale of pirates and romance, with not much blood, no swearing and only a bit of kissing, so that was okay, but all she could think of in the lovey-dovey bits was a boy from her class called Stevo, who flicked pellets of chewed paper into her hair with his ruler and would look dead cool with a cutlass in his hand. She burned up in the dark like a Ready-Brek kid, glowing with embarrassment at sitting there thinking and feeling those things while her dad was there, shoulder to shoulder.

  Luckily, he had fallen asleep in his seat.

  He will want to talk later, she thought, but she did not mind. They talked a lot, more than other girls and dads. They liked a natter, when there was time between the church and meetings, swimming and drama group, piano lessons, tennis and laying on the floor listening to soppy songs. Oh, and reading, she did tons of that: increasingly grown-up things like the Edna O’Brien novel a woman in the congregation called Suzy put her way. The words in the books were like a code – they had structure and meaning deep within them but Sarah could not quite grasp the whole, only catch fragments. Vivid, intense, adult fragments that thrilled and frightened her. She could not ask her father about it; that would be embarrassing. And he would try to make it lead on to talking about her mother, which she would not do. Under no circumstances. That was a given. There were things Sarah and her father did not talk about, for fear of spoiling what they had. Boys, for one. And two and three. But also, mainly, Mum.

  Twenty

  ‘Do you love me?’

  His hair against her face made her want to sneeze.

  ‘Tutu! Stop it!’ The dog was tugging her away to play among the forest leaves with no idea what his monochromatic eyes had just missed: her first ever real kiss. With tongues.

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said, rubbing her nose with a mitten. Sarah had known this boy James in junior Sunday school, when they were very young, then waved him off at the airport when he left with his family for India. They had spent a fortnight together every year since. Strong, bright and funny, James told stories about the missionary life and teachers who thought they were still living in the Raj. He was smart and sensitive, the things she thought she wanted. And he made fun of the Lord with jokes, which was way cool.

  ‘The nun says to Mary, “Why do you always look so solemn in your statues?” So Mary says to the nun, “Between you and me, I wanted a girl . . .”’

  Back at the rectory, her father was saying to James’s parents, ‘They’re good for each other. As friends, I mean. Obviously. They’re good friends. Oh, I don’t know, doesn’t it scare you how fast they are growing up?’

  The parents sat over cold tea and uneaten crumpets confessing that yes, it was alarming and it did make them feel old. They were all praying together, Robert and Tom and Judy, holding hands and asking the Lord for strength and wisdom, when Sarah and James were under the forest canopy kissing, trying to work out where to put their noses.

  ‘I am in love.’

  The first time James wrote those words to her was on tissue-thin blue airmail paper, sent from India seven days after the kiss. She wrote back, ‘Thank you for what you said, but I am afraid to say that I think a proper relationship requires more than a fortnight a year of proper contact in which to flourish.’ She felt very grown up, writing that, and it was only half serious, but it was also true. Sarah wanted a boyfriend whose hand she could actually hold. Lovely as he was, James would not do. They traded letters once a month, but by the time he returned to England a year later they were like brother and sister again, mooching around dusty ­museums and playing long games of chess.

  ‘I am in love.’

  The second time James wrote those words, he did not mean with her. They came after a complicated, lingering description of an unnamed school friend, which was confusing to her for reasons she could not immediately identify.

  ‘This is it, Sarah. His name is Parv.’

  Ah. Then she knew what her father would want her to think, but she was not going to think that, thank you. This was great: James was a secret friend, far away, who knew her like nobody else and had found a love really worth writing about. What a great secret. She was just a little bit jealous, though. Not of Parv, but of the passion.

  ‘I love you too,’ she wrote. ‘I always will.’ She meant it. ‘I will be as loyal and faithful a friend as you have been to me, James.’ Very Jane Austen. She was pleased with that. ‘I do not suppose there is much I can do to help you tell your parents. You are going to tell them, right?’

  Right. Her father called out as she passed the half-open door of his study later that day. ‘Honey . . . I guess you know about James then?’

  She was disappointed to lose her secret, and also very worried. She had heard her father preach. Love the sinner, hate the sin, he said. It was against God’s will. ‘It is different when you know somebody,’ he said gently, as though stumbling on a thought for the first time. ‘I suppose that is true. When you love them.’

  He pushed his glasses back up his nose and shuffled his papers in the wordless way he had of saying that he needed to be alone to work now, thank you. His sermons changed after that. He began to quote Tutu – the archbishop, not the dog – so often that the phrase became his catchphrase in the church. ‘Love is stronger than hate. Light is stronger than the darkness. Life is stronger than death. Love changes everything.’ Sarah didn’t know whether to tell him the last bit came from The Phantom of the Opera.

  The Reverend Robert Jones said those things so often to his daughter because she would not let him say what he really wanted to say, never ever. He wanted to talk about his wife Jasmine, her mother, but Sarah would not have it. He very much wanted to give her a letter that Jasmine had written for her before she died, but Sarah would not take it. He tried on her eighteenth birthday, then her nineteenth and her twentieth. He tried again on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, holding out a blank white envelope. Inside, he knew, was a much older letter with her name on it, written in her mot
her’s flowing hand.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘No. You can’t make me.’

  The eggs were burning in the pan. There was smoke in the kitchen. He pleaded, cajoled, paced the room, circling her, shouting, even cursing . . . and finally, when his eyes were blind with tears and his face flushed with exertion and he seemed about to lose his temper in a way that frightened Sarah, he went quiet. ‘Fine. It is your choice.’ He kissed her on the forehead, wetting her hair and thinking, you are so much like your mum.

  Twenty-one

  Sarah stood by the window in the tatty, untidy schoolroom and felt the heat of a radiator on her legs and the warmth of the sunlight on her face, or as much as could get through a pane of glass cloudy with handprints.

  ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’

  They were supposed to be doing Shakespeare but the teacher was off with the flu, suddenly. Sarah was shadowing Mr Alvin for a fortnight, getting her first taste of what school was really like for the people up the front. Or at the side. You should be the guide at the side, her college tutor said, not the sage on a stage. Let the children speak. But Mr Alvin said that wasn’t easy when what they had to say was so often challenging, or just so bloody rude. She had been thinking about that earlier, when the Head found her.

  ‘You can fill in this morning, Miss Jones, can’t you?’

  That was an order, Sarah realized as she watched Mrs Khan stride away down the corridor, ploughing through the crowd with her silent presence, scattering kids to either side. Genghis, they called her in the staffroom; but it was only a joke, born of admir­ation, because everybody knew what a tough job she had, holding the school together. The place was in trouble: they were five staff down already and the term was only a fortnight old. Summer term, the year almost done. Teachers were just dropping out, giving up, calling in sick. Too much pressure, not enough time, all the lost weekends and mountains of paperwork, politics and safeguarding pressure and abuse from kids who didn’t want to learn. They bitched about it in the pub, then some just went missing. They just stopped turning up. Sarah still loved the idea of teaching, with the innocence of a beginner. It was nearly time for her first-ever solo lesson and she heard her chest whistle, felt a tightening. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the warmth entering her body and on her own breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.