The Lamplighters

by Emma Stonex

  It was as if I had told him that day not that I wished to end it with him – whatever ‘it’ was; a single intimacy, our getting to know one another, the confusion of our meeting, things that, all right, might amount to infidelity in the mildest sense of the word but not, in my view, the obliterating sort – but instead that I had resolved to end my union with Arthur and begin again with him. Bill would be flagrant about it, taking my hand with Jenny in the room, or slipping his arm round my waist while I was in the kitchen slicing the fruit cake she’d brought round. No matter how many times I told him no, he refused to leave me alone. And the shells! Those bloody seashells he brought back for me, the ones he chiselled on the tower; they filled up my house, my drawers, anywhere I could think of to hide the damn things because I was terrified someone would see them. I couldn’t throw them away in case Jenny found them in the bins. She often added her glass to the collection at the last minute. I couldn’t risk it.

  I was trapped. There was no escape. Not unless I confessed to the short-lived attachment we’d had – which would anyway be Bill’s word against mine.

  You can argue that one kiss was enough. But I wish Jenny knew it was nothing more. Bill and I were not in love. Love is pure and clean and kind; it comes from a noble, gentle place. It doesn’t come from frustration or blackmail or hatred or dissatisfaction. Bill didn’t love me. I want to tell Jenny that, and I’ve tried, over the years; I’ve written her letters, I’ve gone to see her, I’ve called her up, but it’s no use.

  Now you’re here. And you think I want to find out what happened to Arthur, that I’m hoping you’ll hit on what’s never occurred to us before. Well, I don’t. Twenty years is more than long enough to dwell on what you can’t change. I’d rather focus on what I can.

  My husband is dead, but I’m not. Nor is Jenny. And this thing I share with her, it isn’t a dead thing, it’s living, and if that’s the case then it can change, it can grow, it can find a way out. I’m tired of death and loss; I’ve had enough of those.

  I told you before about the garden. The way life has of coming back again and again, out of the cold. That’s what I’m hoping for. That’s what I want.

  27

  JENNY

  Ron must have left the Metro in gear because when she turned the ignition it jumped backwards like a startled rabbit. She hadn’t driven in a while and felt shaky behind the wheel, her brain confused by messages. Indicate, mirrors, check her blind spot. She used to do it without thinking. At points the whole thing felt too overwhelming.

  She wasn’t looking forward to today, her grandson’s sixth birthday party. Jenny had never enjoyed social occasions, but with Bill by her side it had been bearable.

  Now she was on her own, fending for herself at family events, mixing with people she didn’t know, whose silent judgements followed her round the room. Did they remember her from years ago? Their parents would. She had been the hysterical one, scrapping at the cameras and swearing in the news. But Hannah said she needed to get out of the house; she’d been cooped up too long; she was starting to ‘go strange’.

  She turned the fans on and thought the air emanating from them smelled of fish. She should use the car more. But where would she go? Apart from her children’s houses, or the supermarket. Join the WI, suggested Hannah. But the thought of crocheting blankets with a gaggle of old dears left her cold. She could imagine how it would be, once they realized who she was. Gossiping over their knitting needles.

  She was steeling herself to pull out of the space when she spotted a woman in her wing mirror, walking up the street.

  Jenny ducked down in the driver’s seat. She was prone to this. Whenever she saw a person she knew in the park or the shops, she wouldn’t approach them with glad surprise and a word of greeting, as other people might; she’d hide behind a lamp post or the nearest display of toilet roll and wait until they’d gone by.

  Only, this wasn’t a person she knew. She didn’t think so, anyway. Blue jeans, big jacket, yellow hair scraped back in a bun. Jenny couldn’t get a clear view of her face.

  Maybe she recognized the height and build of this woman; yes, maybe she did. The fish air grew stronger. She turned the fans off.

  The woman passed the car and stopped outside Jenny’s gate. She took a piece of paper out of her pocket and checked an address. Then she knocked on the front door and waited some time, a good two minutes, before stepping to one side and nosing into the living-room window. Jenny felt pleased she had closed the curtains.

  Another knock, another wait: whatever it was she’d come for was important.

  Still sagged in the seat, Jenny shoved the car into first and drove away, leaving her blind spot unchecked.

  When she was a girl there’d been Marmite wheels and a game of musical chairs; now it was bouncy castles and balloon artists at the village hall, the whole class of thirty invited, then back to Hannah’s semi-detached for a cake the size of a wall tapestry.

  Jenny drifted on the periphery of the gathering. While Hannah rushed about after the children, filling paper plates with slices of soggy Margherita pizza and some depressed-looking carrot sticks that had been sitting out for too long, she avoided conversation. The parents looked tired and annoyed, positioning themselves close to the bowls of cheese puffs and ogling the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cake when it was finally unsheathed and lit ablaze with enough candles to fire a rocket into space.

  ‘Mum, can you help clear away?’

  She was relieved to be given a task: in the kitchen emptying ketchup-stained discs into a black bin liner. Back in the next room, a child’s argument flared. She heard crying, soothing, then a gently closed door. She put the kettle on.

  First, the car outside with its engine running. Now Michelle Davies.

  Two decades on, older and knackered looking, but still undoubtedly her.

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  A question for herself or for Bill – it didn’t matter really. Better watch out for that, though: Hannah had caught her talking to herself last weekend and told her off. ‘Don’t get batty on me, Mum; I haven’t got the space, so it’d be Cedars Retirement and there’s only one way out of there.’ But if Jenny didn’t say these things out loud then Bill would never hear them, and she believed, somehow, wherever he was, that he did.

  If she concentrated, she could see her husband clearly, standing there at the kitchen cupboards, getting the coffee cups out, a thin pleat of cigarette smoke trailing from his hidden face like a chimney smouldering in a wood.

  She always saw Bill as he’d been when she had lost him. She could not update him, or imagine him aged. The human face changed in mysterious, spontaneous ways, not just by genetics but by the living of life. Unless it was known what had happened to a person, it couldn’t be done. So, Jenny preserved him as the man she had married, before the disappearance, before they met Helen Black, before they had ever set eyes on the terrible Maiden Rock.

  She filled the mug, although Hannah was low on Nescafé, so it was a weak brew and had to be improved by three teaspoons of sugar.

  Hannah poked her head in. ‘We’re cutting the cake in a sec.’

  ‘I’m not feeling well, love.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Just a headache. I’ll be fine.’

  Hannah looked concerned. ‘I’ve got paracetamol in the bathroom.’

  ‘It’s all right. You go ahead. I’ll have a sit-down.’

  Jenny leaned on the counter and willed the tears away. There were the quietest triggers to despair: the shortage of coffee, for one. In these moments of trivial difficulty, it felt as if the world was against her, unwilling to compensate.

  Bill’s affair had been worse than his disappearance. At least in the second he’d been the victim. Although, as Jenny told herself time and again, he’d been the victim with Helen too.

  It had started with those cups of tea. As Jenny stirred her mug, repeated refrains of ‘Happy Birthday’ seeping through the walls and the bin bag slumped
against her legs like a homeless person in a shop door, she recalled returning to Masters one afternoon when Bill was ashore. Helen sitting there, glossy and groomed, in their good room; Bill had his arm round her on the settee and their cups of tea had gone cold in front of them. Jenny thought a lot about the tea, afterwards: that they must have been talking for a long time and forgotten about the tea. The fact those teas were cold bothered her.

  Later, when she asked Bill why Helen had come to the cottage, he’d poured scorn on it. When she’d asked again, he’d shouted at her that if she spent less time at the bottom of a bottle, she might be able to work it out. His insult pierced her as sharply as if he’d said it moments ago. For days Jenny hadn’t been able to look at him, hadn’t been able to speak to him, and the separation after that was a hard one: when he went back off to the tower, she didn’t know what to think. Each time she saw Helen she turned away, afraid of confrontation but at the same time desperate to confront.

  Instead she drank and tried not to worry, but the more she drank the more she fretted and the same the other way. Jenny had promised herself she would never turn into her mum. But it had started quietly, as these things do. To start with only drinking when Bill was off because it helped to keep her company, or if the girls were fraying her nerves, or after Mark was born and then she never got any sleep. Soon, a glass turned into a bottle.

  Jenny went into the hall. The party had moved to the garden. Through the patio glazing, she saw a group of children gathered round a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, which they were stabbing with strips of material. After a while, some sweets were handed out.

  Bill had accused her of being unsympathetic. After what Helen had gone through, shouldn’t she be able to rely on her friends?

  Jenny didn’t understand why she couldn’t be the friend. Why did it have to be him? They did everything together. He didn’t have friendships she didn’t know about.

  It was never easy, from then, when Bill came ashore. Every time Jenny left the house, she assumed he was sneaking over to Helen’s, or Helen was sneaking over to theirs. When she got home, she’d check the water glasses to see if they were dry, and the tap in the bathroom that she always left askew, and smell the air in case she could detect perfume. Helen always wore the same, Eau Passionnée, only bit of French Jenny knew, and that was only because she’d been to Admiral one time and seen it on the dressing table and given herself a spritz; she never wore perfume so she’d felt like a new lady in it. The most shameful thing was how she had driven up to Exeter one day a few weeks later and bought a bottle of her own. She had wanted to feel like Helen. To see what that was like. But when Bill came ashore and she met him off the boat, the first thing he said to her was, ‘What’s that smell? It doesn’t suit you,’ so she never wore it again.

  A car pulled up outside Hannah’s house. Jenny heard a door slam. A marble of panic rolled up her throat. She gripped the banister and fled upstairs.

  Moments later, peering down from Hannah’s bedroom window, she saw it was only a parent come early to collect their child, the one who’d been crying.

  Hannah’s right, she thought miserably. I have gone strange.

  Her daughter’s room was a tip, the bed unmade, her son-in-law’s toiletries splashed across the bedside. Bill had never been messy. Lightkeeping had taught him standards, such as how to ball his socks and put them in a drawer, instead of discarding their wilted bodies on the carpet like a pair of rats squashed on the motorway.

  If only she could describe the pain that had made her do that wicked thing.

  She had wanted to shake him. She had given him beautiful children and a loving home and still he was looking over that fence thinking a couple like that, who’d gone through that, were better than them?

  Carol had stoked the flames. She reminded Jenny how she had raised that family all by herself, being on her own with the girls since Bill started on the tower and then when Mark came along she was on her own with him too, washing nappies, warming bottles, bent over the baby’s cot at three a.m., with the Maiden Rock blinking at her through the night.

  During those nights Jenny would weep with anger: she hadn’t known which was worse, that Bill was tending the flame and as wide awake as she was – awake but not helping, having no idea how ready she was to hurl the baby out the window, send him soaring across the sky like a comet in his blanket – or that he was sleeping. She could have murdered him if she thought about him sleeping. And she could have murdered him if she thought about Helen, and the less she slept the more she thought and the worse her thoughts became. She didn’t sleep for months with Mark. Not sleeping drove her potty.

  Helen hadn’t raised his family, had she? She hadn’t given him children and ironed his clothes. She hadn’t cooked him Arctic roll from scratch and stroked his brow as he complained about the Channels and how they made his stomach fill with coal.

  But still Helen felt it appropriate to write her damn letters that were only about making herself feel better, not Jenny. As soon as Jenny started reading them – as soon as she saw Bill’s name written down – she crumpled them up and threw them away.

  I bet lots of men have loved you, Jenny had thought of Helen at the time. It’s not fair for you to decide you want him now, when he’s mine and he’s all I’ve got.

  Her daughter’s nightdress lay in a heap at the foot of the bed. Jenny sat and ran a hand over it. She remembered folding Hannah’s nightie when she was little, under the pillow, kissing her clammy forehead goodnight. ‘Will you check on me? Check on me in two bits.’ ‘Yes, I’ll check on you.’ ‘In two bits, Mummy, check on me. Promise?’

  Promise. How could Bill have turned his light out on them?

  Soon, Hannah would see her innocent mother for the fraud she was – pretending all these years to be the victim when she was anything but. She would cut Jenny off, as coldly and permanently as Jenny had cut off her own mother.

  ‘Mum?’ Hannah appeared at the door.

  Jenny jumped. ‘You frightened me.’

  ‘I didn’t know where you were. How’s the head?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your headache.’

  ‘Oh. Better.’

  ‘People are leaving,’ said Hannah, ‘thank God.’ She had a tea towel over her shoulder with a smear across it. ‘Greg’s doing the party bags. Are you coming down?’

  Jenny looked away. She tried to stop the tears coming, but it was useless.

  She had only intended to give her husband a scare. She hadn’t meant for him to go forever.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Hannah came in. ‘Mum – what’s happened?’

  Jenny pulled the nightdress into her lap.

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ she said.

  28

  Trident House

  88 North Fields

  London

  Mrs Michelle Davies

  8 Church Road

  Towcester

  Northants

  12 August 1992

  Dear Mrs Davies,

  RE: ANNUAL ALLOWANCE

  Please find enclosed a cheque for this period’s Bereavement Allowance. I trust this meets with your needs.

  A note of caution: the Institution has been made aware of third parties interested in researching the history of the Maiden Rock. I have no need to remind you that our position remains clear: neither we, nor anyone connected with the disappearance, are able to provide further detail on the matter. The case has been settled and does not require revision.

  Yours faithfully,

  [Signature]

  The Trident House Fellowship

  29

  MICHELLE

  She had noticed the bird for the first time a week ago, after she’d travelled to see Jenny. That had been a wasted trip. She’d spent the whole drive back deciding what further lies she would have to tell Roger, who’d been annoyed at needing to take the day off work to look after the girls. Already she’d made up the sick friend who hadn’t long left.

  It
was sitting on the lawn one afternoon while she was folding away the garden chairs, and since then it kept appearing all over the place, on the windowsill while she was cooking breakfast, under the oak tree or perched on the guinea pig hutch, its beady eye staring in at her. It was always on its own.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said to it one day. ‘Go away.’

  She grew afraid of seeing it, even if some time could pass between sightings – but this made it worse because she would think it had gone, only for it to reappear suddenly, when she least expected it, like a poke in the ribs while falling asleep.

  On Sunday afternoon, Roger took the girls out. Michelle was sitting on the sofa reading Woman’s Weekender and was growing interested in a story about a couple done over by the mortgage lenders, when a flash of white flickered in the corner of her eye. The bird was on the grass again, its feathers settling. It orbited on the spot, getting its bearings, but when it caught sight of her it stopped and looked at her probingly.

  ‘Shoo,’ she said, parting the conservatory glass, but the bird didn’t move until she stepped outside and went right at it, as close as a metre away. Then it flew off and settled on a branch above her head. ‘Leave me alone,’ she told it. Back inside she drew the curtains and tried to return to Woman’s Weekender, but she knew the bird was there, she knew it even if she couldn’t see it, sitting there in the tree, watching.

  When Roger came home, she had the curtains closed. He said, ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ She said it was nothing, she’d just had a migraine.

  The next morning the bird was outside her bedroom. Roger had left for the office. She was glad he was not here to see her open the window and hurl a cup of water at it with a strangled noise, which prompted a flurry of wings and her elder daughter to rush in, mouth full of toothpaste, and demand, ‘Mummy, what’re you doing? You look like a clown.’ Michelle met her reflection in the mirror and was surprised by what she saw: her hair unbrushed, yesterday’s make-up black grit.