The Light Keeper

by Cole Morton

  Do they?

  Is that what he’s doing? His eyes are on the back of Sarah’s head, the tight twists of copper on her crown . . . No, keep going.

  ‘This was the most expensive pie he had ever seen. He wanted a taste, badly, but he also had a chance to show off to his men. No officer ever turned down one of those. So he commanded them: “Come here and feast.” They made a right old mess of the table. Flakes of pastry and smears of pie all over the place, on the floor, on their uniforms. They were loving it.’

  Gabe stops, suddenly too close to Sarah. Within touching distance, looking down on her head. She still won’t turn around. He hears his own breathing and stops it, for as long as he can bear. But then he bursts, of course, and feels like a stalker. He steps back and folds himself down to sit on the floor. Closer to her level. But he doesn’t reach out, doesn’t encroach. He begins to speak again, more at ease with the telling now.

  ‘While they were filling their faces, Mary slipped out of the room and upstairs to her husband, who was half out of bed, trying to hear what was going on. He said nothing, but pointed to the bottom drawer of his chest. Before he could make any kind of gesture to tell her there was a secret compartment, she had released the catch and pulled it out. That shocked him. What other secrets of his did she know? She took out a leather folder, emptied it of papers and pushed them into the fire that was heating his room.’

  Now Gabe glances down at the book – he wants to get the next line right. ‘Listen to this. “The flames rose once for his love for the king, once for his love of money and once for his love of another. Mary watched them burn.” Lovely stuff.’ He reaches a palm towards the wood stove warming this room, glowing orange, as if to push the papers inside. He knows she’s listening now. ‘So, that’s it. They found nothing. William got away with it because of Mary’s pie. He was made a baronet when the king returned. On his coat of arms he put a wheatear. Least he could do.’

  There is silence in the room again, for a long while. Aware of his heavy breathing, Gabe gets up and moves away, puts the book down. The wind rattles a window frame.

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just a story.’

  ‘You must,’ says Sarah.

  Oh God. Why did he start this?

  Because I said so, Gabe.

  He hands Sarah the book, his thumb on a paragraph. She reads out loud, which distresses him. ‘“After the death of his wife at a young age, Sir William asked a clergyman in Kent to take on the education of their six children.”’ The next sentence is underlined in pencil. ‘“It hath pleased God for my” . . . er . . . “sinnes to take from mee . . . my dear wife, one of the best of women, as being too good for me . . .”’

  Oh Lord. He wants to be sick.

  Sarah looks up from the page and sees his face changed. The desolation makes her go quickly back to the words, smoothing the page, running her thumb along the edge.

  ‘It is a good story,’ she says, wondering what else to say. Or do. She had not thought about that until now. He’s skinny but tough, there is nowhere to run. Is that the cost of staying here? The surge of panic is a surprise, a jangling new sound in the white noise of her non-emotions. She is everything and nothing now, too far gone to care. She will see out her time, see the dawn and take her steps; there is no way to stop it now, nothing can get in her way, but here is this man. In her face. So sad. So hurt. Whatever he is, whatever he wants, he is not dangerous. Time is passing. The day is coming. She has nothing to say, nothing. But perhaps words are what he wants in return for letting her stay. Hopefully they are, anyway. We’ll see. ‘I have a question, actually.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Was there a bird? Outside?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘A wheatear?’

  ‘Ah. Maybe not,’ he says, rubbing his cheeks, feeling warmth return to them. Feeling grateful to her for the jolt, for moving him on. The room is cold now, away from the stove. ‘No, I have to confess there wasn’t.’

  ‘Pity. I like a pie. One other thing . . .’ Such cool, clear eyes she has.

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘What happened to her? Ree, is it?’

  ‘Yes, Rí. Maria.’

  ‘Where did she go?’

  Thirty-seven

  Can I show her?

  Why do you want to?

  I have to. I don’t know.

  Why?

  She wants to know.

  I don’t care.

  I want to show her.

  That’s more like it. Why?

  I don’t know.

  She won’t shag you.

  I don’t care.

  You want it then.

  I . . . don’t care.

  You’re showing off.

  Showing off what? Myself? No. You. I’m showing off you, Maria. I’m proud of you. Who you are, what you did, what you made. How you saw. How you taught me to see.

  Showing off the woman you made?

  No. You made me. You saved me.

  I never understood how you could say that.

  I never understood how you could not see it.

  Show her. I don’t care.

  I want you to care. I need you to care.

  You’re asking for the moon, my star.

  Yes.

  Yes, Gabe.

  Yes?

  Yes.

  And so he asks Sarah to follow him up the tight, narrow staircase, conscious of his breathing again. ‘Climb with me.’ One turn and another, almost to the top but not quite. And there he stops, with the sky falling down from the lantern room, a cloud of light on the stairs. It is ignored, this time, for the sake of a heavy wooden door opening into a tight room with a high bunk, a curved room with a deep-set window. He lets her go through first. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust and he knows when it is happening for Sarah because she breathes a little faster and she makes a noise, the slightest sound, like a sigh and a gasp together, at the sight of it, the wonder of it.

  The room full of glory. The glorious room.

  What does she see? First, feathers turning in the air by the door, close to her face. White and grey, silver and black, gossamer creatures trembling at her breath. The shadows of birds, the echo of wings, the rumour of angels. Then the faces coming into focus on the walls. Fine line drawings. A haunted old man, an elegant old woman, a young girl with sunshine in her hair, a boy with pride and terror in his eyes, his youth subsiding. There are more. Strong faces and weak faces, handsome ones and ugly chops, corpulent or arrow-sharp, each rendered with the same sure marks, the same fine detail.

  ‘These are . . .’

  Yes, wonderful. He waits. Outside, a cloud gives way. Fingers of light tickle the window frame and flick at the colours on the floor, ringing them like bells. Flashes of green and gold, stabs of yellow, fracturing blues, all somehow becoming music, a rising, shimmering, jangling, tinkling collision of colour and sound, and Sarah sees that it is a mosaic of sorts. A magpie mosaic made with scraps of this and twists of that: buttons and brass, fabric and foil, spirals of wire and tiny bells, set out as a picture wider than deep, organized in ways she cannot quite understand.

  ‘Step back,’ he says.

  So she steps back and sees at last. The sea, the chalk face, the cliff tops. The hills, the valleys, the farms. The lighthouse with the lantern shining. ‘That is amazing. It is just . . .’

  ‘Rí,’ he says, bending down to touch the materials. Caressing them, as if touching a beloved face. ‘This is who she is.’

  Sarah leaves him be and takes refuge up in the lantern room. There are ships in the Channel and clouds drifting back one by one from a moody gathering over France. Just inland, above the slope of the hill, a bird of prey is in her eyeline, hovering over the gorse and heather, letting the wind flow through its wings, looking down,
watching and waiting. An angel with claws.

  Gabe comes up at last, a lost look still on his face. ‘I didn’t . . . I haven’t shown that to anyone.’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  ‘She is more than that. More even than that. The one I cried out for, before I even knew her.’

  Sarah looks at his hands turning over themselves in front of him, as Gabe sits down on the bench and leans forward. Tanned hands, trembling slightly. Strong wrists, covered by shirt sleeves. Is he strong? She cannot tell. He is burning energy all the time. His hair is like a Big Bang in slow motion, all grown out and left to stick up where it wants, but that’s okay, there’s a messy charm to it. His sideburns are ginger and silver, and his stubble sparkles. There’s a stupid little burst of hair under his lip, a soul patch that makes her smile, how silly, but the scar next to it says no, take me seriously. And his eyes say something else. Look what I have seen.

  ‘Tell me,’ she says, a teacher again. ‘If you want to.’

  ‘There was a bomb. A mine. I was in the desert, in a truck with some lads. Embedded. We flipped over. Then it was dark and really quiet. The lad next to me was crying for his mum.’ He looks at her, for reassurance that he should go on. ‘My mum’s gone, Sarah. Long ago. I was crying for . . . this sounds funny. Someone I didn’t know. I’d been looking, all my life. The one who would understand, who would look at me and know me, everything about me and just get it. Accept it. I knew she must be out there somewhere. I wanted to live long enough to meet her. Sounds foolish.’

  ‘Not to me. Were you hurt?’

  ‘The lad lost his legs. They flew us home.’

  Gabe turns back the cuff of his shirt, then pushes it up to his elbow. The skin underneath becomes hairless, pink and shiny like plastic, like the arm of an Action Man melted in a fire and reformed. ‘It’s not much . . .’

  People flinch, he’s ready for that, but Sarah wants to touch.

  ‘After that, I didn’t want to be the fearless war reporter any more. Turned out I wasn’t fearless. So I stayed at home and made a new career out of talking to the wounded. Helping them to tell their stories. After a while, it was natural to start doing the same for other people: not soldiers any more, but mums and dads, brothers and sisters of the disappeared, mostly. Missing children. Names you might know from the news. When a little boy or girl – it was mostly girls – went missing, I’d go and see their parents, talk to the family, the neighbours, the teachers, whoever.

  ‘The first time, your heart breaks. The second time, not so much. Third, fourth, fifth, whatever, it becomes routine. “Where was she last seen? Where might she have gone? Who might she be with?” The police are appealing for information, they are all over the reporters, we’re their best friends, everyone in the village loves us because we’re trying to help. Then a body is found, and the missing persons inquiry becomes a murder investigation. Suddenly they all feel like suspects, and we’re prying. We’re vampires. We should be ashamed, apparently. The circle closes, just like it does in the Army after a colleague gets hit or a soldier fires on a boy, by accident. I saw that. The back of his head blooming like a rose on the wall behind. Almost beautiful. Isn’t that a terrible thing to say?

  ‘I saw terrible things, wrote about terrible things, but writing about it does not remove the guilt you feel, as if you as the observer were somehow making it happen. And it got to me, Sarah. That’s not how it’s supposed to go. But listen . . .’ He rolls down the sleeve of his shirt carefully over the pink, wrinkled skin and stands, moving to the window. ‘I didn’t come here to get away from anything; quite honestly, it was not to escape. It was to live. The Romantics came here to get their kicks, in search of the sublime. They felt more alive when they looked over the edge of the cliffs, or even climbed up them, because it was so scary. It doesn’t do that for me, I stay away. But I do feel different here. Better. I did.

  ‘I came with her to begin again, in simplicity. We both wanted to be in a place where it was simple – which is funny, because here there is simplicity on a grand scale, strange as that sounds. You know what I mean. Spectacular simplicity. Breathtaking. Look out there. It does take my breath away, still. Huge skies, miles and miles of rolling Downs, immense cliffs, the wide sea. Something about the scale makes it restful. There’s a peace to be had in sitting here, whatever the weather. There was, anyway.’

  There was. Before.

  ‘I have seen some beautiful places. The glaciers of Iceland. A pink lake in Senegal. The Bay at the Back of the Ocean on the island of Iona – there you go. But they are not mine and this place is mine, it felt like that as soon as I came here. Our place. We came together, but I was not just being nice or trying to get on her good side, although it was always worth being there. I meant it. I felt it. My place. There is a symmetry that appeals. The sea and the sky. The white and the green, the chalk and the down. The drop and the rise. Falling and rising. Falling again and rising again. The orderliness of the fields, the ordinariness of that deep, dark English greenery, that thousand-year-old landscape, farmed and tended and walled and sown and ploughed now as it was then. You can remember, here. Things you don’t even know you have forgotten.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘The way we were before the engine, the flight to the cities, before the loss of the land. It’s sentimental nonsense, I know. Stop me. I don’t even know the names of the flowers here – what’s a weed and what’s a plant – or the birds. I only know the white arse from a book. I’m a city boy. But even I feel it, Sarah. I can sit out there and feel the calm of a settled landscape. The soft curves and rounded slopes, as a Victorian poet said. Nothing complicates it. Nothing that sticks, anyway.’

  His fingers make two lines in the condensation. ‘There’s a car coming down that long road from Beachy Head, running alongside the cliff edge. I wonder if he knows how close it is. He’ll disappear in a minute and go round the bottom of this hill, past the wood, towards the Gap. If he doesn’t turn in there he’ll have to head inland again, climbing up towards East Dean. That’s when they put their foot down. It’s like a racing circuit sometimes. I have seen a million cars in my life, but before I came here I never stopped to watch them. Let them pass through. Like feelings. Mindfulness – the teachers tell you to become aware of your emotions, let them pass through you and go on their way. It’s like that. I can sit and watch the cars – it’s better out of season – and my mind clears. Never thought of it like that before. Weird. It’s the interruptions that show you how peaceful it is.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I don’t mean you. You’re . . . welcome. I’m just saying it’s simpler here, I can practise gratitude. Even though, you know, I’m on my own. There is electricity, heat and light, water. You’ll struggle for a phone signal but it’s warm, dry, snug. When the storm comes, it’s like a giant cuffing the tower about the ears. You probably heard it. But the tower stands. There is strength. We are on the edge – who knows when the land will slip and the tower will start to go? – but for now it stands, strong. So, there was a sense of refuge here when we came. We thought we’d make a home in this unlikely place. Such beauty. To begin again. I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear all this. You can go, you know.’

  Gabe looks back at her, and all of a sudden feels exhausted. He’s had enough of this talk. More than enough. What’s the point? ‘Look, can you go? Sorry. I’m not . . . just go.’

  Sarah reaches over and puts a hand on his good arm, but he pulls it away quickly, which confuses her. ‘Sorry, I did not mean . . . please. Tell me about Maria.’

  They are locked into this now, he realizes. She won’t tell him anything unless he talks to her. He wants her to go, she seems to want to stay for some reason, but the only way to break the lock is to talk. That’s how it works.

  ‘What if I don’t want to?’ But even as he says this, he realizes it is probably time he did. He wants to. That’s a surprise. Why not talk
to this stranger, this woman who will go then and leave him alone and never come back? ‘Okay. When we came here she was always banging on about how it was a thin place, where the space between this life and whatever happens next is so thin. Do you know what I mean by that? No. I didn’t. I know what that means now. She was a therapist. As her job, I mean, not just for me, although that too, probably. That’s how we met. I went to interview the mother of a child who had brain damage because of some terrible mistake in the hospital. Rí was there in the kitchen, helping him paint. Big sploshes of colour, it was everywhere, all over the table, the floor. She was laughing, the boy was laughing, the mum was laughing. I felt like an intruder, coming into the room, all that laughter. I was hoping for tears. Isn’t that awful? Hoping that the mother would cry and I could write about that, and make the reader cry too. I was a tear-maker, a one-man raincloud, but that day I stepped into a room full of sunshine. Rí didn’t notice. I came, I went; she says she didn’t even see me . . .’

  ‘That’s not what I was expecting.’

  ‘No. I should tidy that bit of the story up really, if I’m going to start telling people. Not that anyone else is interested. Thank God. I should make her fall in love with me at first sight. I still don’t know if she . . .’

  Yes you do. You really do.

  ‘I saw her again a couple of weeks later, in a bar. By then I had quit. She didn’t know who I was, of course. She was singing with a band but we got there late and didn’t see that. I was with friends, but they were all talking and I was just sitting there, looking over at her. She had shaved her head since we met – you know, like Sinead O’Connor? She’d hate me for saying that, but there it is. Ironic really, she did it long before she had to, but if anything she looked even more amazing that night. Magnificent. Last orders had gone. There was a guy up at the bar giving her the chat and when she tried to walk away he sort of reached out and scooped her up. I couldn’t have that. Weird, isn’t it? We had never spoken to each other but I already felt like she was mine. I had been drinking, though! I was worried for her. This guy was big, heavy.’ Should he do the voice this time? Ah hell, why not? ‘“Awright, darlin’? You gonna sing me a song, aintcha?”’