by Emma Stonex
The Maiden’s the worst because it’s so far off and it’s ugly and threatening looking. Bill used to say it was dark and stuffy inside and that he got a bad feeling off it. ‘A bad, heavy feeling’ was how he put it. Obviously, I think about that a lot now. I wish I had asked him more about it, but usually I changed the subject because I didn’t want him getting upset. I also didn’t like him thinking about the tower too much when he was ashore. That tower had enough of him as it was. We had to wait to see him for so long that when he was here, he had to be here in every way.
The nights before Bill went off again were the worst. I felt sick about him going as soon as he came ashore, which was a waste because I didn’t enjoy him like I should have when he was at home. I was too caught up in the idea of him leaving again. We always spent those last nights the same. We’d cosy up on the settee and watch Call My Bluff, or some other show we didn’t need to think too hard on. Bill said he got the Channels before he went off – that’s what he called that feeling he got, of nerves and sadness was how he described it. He said it comes from when sailors used to go back on their boats after a spell at home and it took them a few days to feel better about being away, and until they did, they had that sensation of missing their real lives and having to adjust. Bill had it before he’d even left home. It was the expectation of it that was almost as bad. He’d stare out the window and see the Maiden waiting for him all that way away, and as it got dark, she’d light up, like she was saying, Aha! You thought I’d forgotten about you, didn’t you, but I haven’t. It was worse for us being able to see her. It’d have been better if we’d lived out of sight.
We’d check the weather in case the relief was getting delayed; we half hoped it would and half hoped it wouldn’t, because that just made the waiting longer. I’d cook him his favourite dinner, steak pie with Arctic roll for dessert, and bring it to him on a tray to eat on his lap, but he wouldn’t eat much of it, due to the Channels.
I had a calendar that I crossed the days off on until he came back. The children kept me busy. When Hannah was a baby, we were together on a land station, but not with the others. Bill got the tower when Julia was a few months old and I was on my own with a five-year-old and a newborn daughter with colic. That was hard. I’d feel so angry whenever I clapped eyes on the Maiden. Standing there all pleased with herself. It wasn’t fair that she had him when I didn’t, and I needed him more.
Hannah liked having a lighthouse keeper for a father because it made her stand out; her friends’ dads were postmen or shopkeepers. Nothing wrong with that, but those jobs are two a penny, aren’t they? She says she remembers him, but I don’t think she can. I think memories are very intense when they first start up and they keep a powerful grip on you your whole life. You can’t always trust them, though.
When Bill was due ashore, I’d go out and buy his favourite foods and make his special chocolates. It was a little ritual I had. I didn’t want anything to be different. I wanted him to know what to expect when he got home and for it to be there, ready for him. Just like I was ready for him. It’s the small things that keep a marriage going: things that don’t cost a lot but that tell the other person you love them and don’t ask for anything in return.
I’ve got no idea what happened to my husband. If they’d left the door open, or if they’d taken the boat, or if the oilskins and gumboots were gone, then I could maybe believe that Bill was lost at sea. But the dinghy was there and so were the sou’westers and the door was locked from the inside. Think about that. A block of gunmetal can’t lock itself. Then you put in the clocks and the laid table; it’s wrong, that’s what it is.
Bill was on the radio transmitter the day before, the twenty-ninth. He said then that the storm was on its way out. Said they’d be ready for the relief on Saturday.
Trident House have a good recording of that R/T, although I’d put money on them not letting you near it. Trident keep themselves to themselves and they don’t like to talk about what happened because it’s obviously embarrassing for them. But Bill said, let’s do it tomorrow; get Jory’s boat sent out in the morning. And they said all right, Bill, that’s what we’ll do. Now, I’m aware what Helen thinks – she thinks a big wave came up on them in the meantime. It doesn’t surprise me she thinks that because she never had much of an imagination. But I know that’s not right.
I’ll never forget Bill’s voice on the radio. Everything he said and the way he said it. That voice sounded like my husband. The only odd thing was that there was a longer wait at the end before he signed off. You know when you’re watching TV and the reception cuts out for a second and the picture jumps ahead of itself? Like that.
I’m a ‘what if’ person. I say, what if it wasn’t a freak sea the day they disappeared? What if Bill was taken? I don’t know by what; I don’t want to say by what. All the things it could’ve been – what happened, how it felt, who was there, if it was one of them that did it – not a day’s gone by when I haven’t thought about those things, but I always come back to the same. It sounds crazy when you say it out loud. It’s just what I believe. A tower light, out there on its own, it’s like a sheep away from the flock. Easy pickings.
You don’t look like someone who gives a fig for that. I don’t care. All I’ll say is you try losing that one person who means the world to you, then see how easy it is to draw a line and say, that’s it, it’s over, they’re gone. I still hear my husband’s voice, you know. Still hear it now, plain as day. Like when I’m pegging out the darks, I’ll hear Bill inside the house calling my name, just saying it like he would if he’d been busy in the back fixing the chain on his bike and he came in to ask if I wanted a cup of coffee.
I know that’s not possible. We’re not where we were before. I’ve moved to a new house; he wouldn’t know where I was. We couldn’t have stayed at the cottage anyway – they’re for keepers’ families, not missing keepers’ families. All the same, it felt like I was admitting he was never coming back. It makes me sad if I imagine him turning up on our doorstep, only I’m not there. But one of the caretakers at the Maiden cottages now would tell me. These sorts of fantasies go through your head.
Helen’s not one for fantasies. She’s too cold and matter of fact. That’s why, when you speak to her, I bet she doesn’t tell you the truth. I don’t think she knows the meaning of the word. In all the time I’ve known her, the only thing she’s been good at is lying. Helen writes me letters and sends me Christmas cards, but she might as well not bother. I never read them. I’d be happy never to hear from her again.
You’d think she’d have wanted a friend or two, given the state of her life before. But Helen never talked about that. Living next door to each other, we could have been close – that’s what PKs’ wives across the country were doing, looking after the families and leading the charge when the men were away. If we were getting along in the cottages, then they’d be getting along on the tower. That’s the rule we lived by in the lighthouse service.
But not Helen. She thought she was special. Too grand for it, in my view, with her expensive scarves and fancy jewellery. I think even if I had all the money in the world to spend on what I looked like, I’d still be plain because it comes out of you, doesn’t it, prettiness? I’ve never felt pretty.
In ordinary life, we’d never brush shoulders. I’m sorry our paths crossed at all.
It is bad luck for Helen, not believing in anything. Without my faith I’d have ended it a long time ago. I still think about ending it sometimes, but then I think of the children and I can’t. If I knew I’d find Bill there, then maybe. Maybe. But not yet. I need to keep our light shining.
Trident House tried telling me once that Bill did it on purpose. That he jumped on a French ship and floated off to start his life new. Now, I’m not a violent person, but it was all I could do not to cause a scene when they said that. Bill would never do it to me. He’d never have left me on my own.
Oh, right, there’s the door. That’s my man come to fix the TV.
Is that everything? You’ll have to come back if it isn’t. I can’t have you staying because it makes me nervous having two things going on at once, and I need to give my attention to the TV man now. I hope he can fix it because Come Dancing’s on tonight. I really hate not being able to see things properly.
10
HELEN
Every summer she made the pilgrimage, on his birthday or thereabouts. She left the dog with a friend and went by train to the nearest station, half an hour or so from the coast, and by taxi the rest of the way. Nothing much changed; nothing was different. Though the business of life went on across its surface, the earth beneath moved slowly. Waves rolled to shore, forever and ever, patiently; the leaves of the beech trees wafted like a Chinese fan.
Helen turned off the high street and walked up the lane. Midges hovered in trembling clouds and the scent of cow parsley rose ripe and heat-soaked from the busy hedgerow. Warm shadows leaned across her path; an orange sun divided by the dark stems of trees. She passed the sign for Mortehaven Cemetery. Crumbling headstones sloped from their rows, staggering down towards the lip of the promontory, beyond which the sea shot far and wide in a dazzling celebration of blue.
There had never been a grave. A bench on the headland bore the inscription:
ARTHUR BLACK, WILLIAM WALKER, VINCENT BOURNE
HUSBANDS, FATHERS, BROTHERS, SONS – BELOVED, ALL
‘BRIGHTLY BEAMS OUR FATHER’S MERCY
FROM HIS LIGHTHOUSE EVERMORE’
Many times, she had heard Arthur sing that sea shanty. Sitting on the rim of the bath, the tune fluting out of the steam; humming it at the basin while soaping his face or in the kitchen grilling rashers of bacon, hacking a loaf of bread into slabs that could stop a door slamming. ‘Let the lower lights be burning, Send a gleam across the wave.’ He’d come home smelling of seaweed and sit in his chair eating chips soaked in Sarson’s from a nest of greasy paper, his hands large and cracked like terracotta pots, with halos round the nails. Arthur caught whole fish with his fingers – or did he? There’d been magic in him: sea magic, half-man, half born in the brine. She hadn’t known at first that she would marry him. It wasn’t until he had taken her out on a boat on the water that she had looked at him and known. She’d just known. He was different out there. It was hard to explain. Everything about him made sense.
A fingerpost pointed TO THE LIGHTHOUSE COMPOUND, beyond which the winding lane narrowed, overtaken by greenery, bursting from the verges in jumbles of primrose and nettle. Further on, after a climb, the Maiden Rock appeared for the first time.
The tower shimmered on a cobalt sea, a line as clean as a pen mark. A handful of lighthouse enthusiasts might come this way during summer, Helen thought; they’d get to this point, their legs grazed by blackthorn and dog-violet, and admire the lighthouse from afar, a silver streak on a silver mirror – before turning back, tired and thirsting for cool drinks, and they’d have no need to think of her ever again.
Into the dappled glade of the ongoing track, the sign on a metal gate read: MAIDEN ROCK LIGHTHOUSE: NO PUBLIC ACCESS.
They were holiday lets now, only tenants allowed. The track was too tight and twisting even for rubbish collection; instead, plastic bins were clustered by the gate with numbers streaked on in white paint.
It was here that Helen expected to see him, every year, walking towards her. Perhaps there would be another with him, two shapes, their hands raised, and she would raise hers in return. She had to hope that was what happened: that people who belonged with each other found their way back in the end.
III
1972
11
ARTHUR
Ships and Stars
The time I think of you the most is when the sun comes up. The moment before, the minute or two, when night yawns for morning and the sea starts to separate from the sky. Day after day the sun comes back. I don’t know why. I’ve had my light safe here, shining through the dark and I’ll keep it shining; the sun needn’t bother today. But still he comes and still come my thoughts of you. Where you are and what you are doing. Even though I’m not a man who thinks about things like this, it’s now, in this moment, that I do. A man alone through the lonely hours, I nearly believe that because the sun keeps rising, and because I extinguish my light dawn after dawn as soon as it’s no longer needed, you might be there when I go downstairs. You’ll be sitting at the table with one of the others, older, perhaps, than when I last saw you, or maybe the same.
Eighteen days on the tower
Hours turn into nights turn into dawns turn into weeks, and on and on the wide sea rolls and the sting rain beats and the sun shines into evening, morning, conversations in the half-light, the never-light, conversations that never happened or are happening now.
‘Mastermind was on again,’ says Bill in the kitchen, fag in his mouth, hunched over his seashells. Every keeper needs a hobby, I told him when he started, and more’s the better if it calls for useful workmanship, a pursuit you can go at day after day until it’s perfect. An old PK I worked under taught me how to make a schooner and put it in a bottle. Personally I found it nit-picky, having to glue the sails just so. It took weeks of prep before I could slide it in and pull the rigging, and if I’d glued a whisker out of place the whole lot was wrecked. Loneliness pushes a man to his standards. I know this because I’ve been on the Maiden twenty-odd years and Bill’s done it for two.
‘Anything good?’
‘Crusades,’ he says. ‘Thunderbirds.’
‘You should have a go.’
‘With what?’
‘Whatever it is you know about.’
Bill blows his shell carving and sets it aside, then leans back in his chair with his arms behind his head. My Assistant has a studious, timid look, his hair lopped close round his ears, his features small and precise: if you saw him ashore, you’d think him an accountant. Smoke travels up his nostrils and escapes in twin jets from the corners of his mouth, where it joins the ghostly haze of whoever was puffing away in here last.
‘I know about a lot of things,’ he says, ‘but not enough about any one of them.’
‘You know about the sea.’
‘It needs to be specific, doesn’t it. You can’t just say to that old bastard Magnusson, ask me about the sea. It’s too big a topic, they’d never allow it.’
‘All right then, the lights.’
‘Don’t be a prick; you can’t have a specialist subject on your own job. Name: Bill Walker. Occupation: lighthouse keeper. Subject: lighthouse-keeping.’
He stubs out his Embassy, lights another. Given how cold it is this time of year, we have to keep the windows fastened, and seeing as this is where we do all our cooking and smoking, and all our smoking cooking, it’s heading for a proper fug-up.
‘Looking forward to having Vince back?’ I ask.
Bill expels air through his nose. ‘Can’t say I’m fussed either way.’
I take his mug and switch on the kettle. Out here our days and nights are organized by cups of tea – especially this time of year, December, heart of winter, when it gets light so late and dark so early and always so numbingly cold. Waking at four for my morning watch, back to bed after lunch, waking again later on, the curtains drawn, the afternoon gone. Is it today, tomorrow, next week, how long have I been sleeping?
The mug’s one of Frank’s, red and black with Brandenburger Tor written across it. Frank’s so finicky he’ll certainly take it with him when he goes ashore tomorrow, in case one of us nicks it. We all have our tea different so whoever’s making it has to remember. Even with Vince coming back and he’s been away weeks, we’ll make sure we get it right. It shows we pay attention. At home Helen never gives me sugar but I don’t complain, just go along with it instead of having the argument. Here we’ll get to teasing. You fucking halfwit, that fishing net holds on to things longer than you do.
Bill says, ‘D’you know Frank puts the milk in first? Bag, milk, water on top.’
‘Fuck of
f. Milk goes second.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘The tea can’t infuse in the milk otherwise.’
‘If you’re using words like “infuse” you can get fucked.’
‘If I were that PK at Longships you’d be wise to watch your language.’ But the swearing’s like the tea: all the effing and blinding helps the conversation along. If you’re swearing at someone, you’re saying you’re friends and you understand each other. It doesn’t matter who it is, or that I’m the one in charge. We’ll slip back into it as soon as we’re here and put it aside as soon as we’re ashore. If the wives could listen in on five minutes of it, they’d be appalled. At home, we’ve got to bite our tongues off before we ask how the fuck she’s been getting on and how fucking nice it is to see her and by the way what the fuck are we having for our fucking tea?
‘There was this woman last night,’ says Bill; ‘she did the Solar System.’
‘There you go then, that’s bigger than the sea.’
‘Yeah, but it’s bloody obvious what they’d ask, the planets and whatnot. They’d ask about Neptune and Saturn and they’d definitely ask about Uranus.’
‘Never gets tired, Bill, you fucking idiot.’
‘But with the sea it’s less obvious. Everything about the sea’s less obvious.’
‘I like that.’
‘Not me. Don’t like what I can’t see.’
When Bill first came to the Maiden, I thought, how’s this going to go? Some men open up to you and others don’t. Bill was quiet, contained. He reminded me of a silverback I saw once, in London Zoo, staring out of a plastic box where the visitors came in. I’ve tried since to work out what exactly I saw in that animal’s expression. Anger and boredom, long burned out. Resignation for itself. Pity towards me.
There’s a lot of time for talk, especially on middle watch, midnight to four, when you find your conversations sloping down all sorts of dark alleys that you never mention again come the morning. Whoever’s coming off watch before you will get you up, fetch you tea and a plate of cheese and digestive biscuits and bring it all up to the lantern, where he’ll sit with you for an hour before going off to his bed. He’ll do this to wake you up, get your brain engaged so you don’t fall back asleep when you’re there on your own. When it’s Bill and me, he’ll tell me things he’ll wish he hadn’t in the light of day. How he should have been a different man and had a different life and said no at the points he said yes. How Jenny asks for the seashells he’s done, but he doesn’t want to give them to her. He’d sooner keep them to himself, like so many other things.