Lighthousekeeping (2 page)

The Pews have been lighthousekeepers at Cape Wrath since the day of the birth. The job was passed down generation to generation, though the present Mr Pew has the look of being there forever. He is as old as a unicorn, and people are frightened of him because he isn’t like them. Like and like go together. Likeness is liking, whatever they say about opposites.

But some people are different, that’s all.

I look like my dog. I have a pointy nose and curly hair. My front legs – that is, my arms, are shorter than my back legs – that is, my legs, which makes a symmetry with my dog, who is just the same, but the other way round.

His name’s DogJim.

I put up a photo of him next to mine on the notice board, and I hid behind a bush while they all came by and read our particulars. They were all sorry, but they all shook their heads and said, ‘Well, what could we do with her?’

It seemed that nobody could think of a use for me, and when I went back to the notice board to add something encouraging, I found I couldn’t think of a use for myself.

Feeling dejected, I took the dog and went walking, walking, walking along the cliff headland towards the lighthouse.

Miss Pinch was a great one for geography – even though she had never left Salts in her whole life. The way she described the world, you wouldn’t want to visit it anyway. I recited to myself what she had taught us about the Atlantic Ocean…

The Atlantic is a dangerous and unpredictable ocean. It is the second largest ocean in the world, extending in an S shape
from the Arctic to the Antarctic regions, bounded by North and South America in the West, and Europe and Africa in the East.

The North Atlantic is divided from the South Atlantic by the equatorial counter-current. At the Grand Bank off Newfoundland, heavy fogs form where the warm Gulf Stream meets the cold Labrador Current. In the North Western Ocean, icebergs are a threat from May to December.

Dangerous. Unpredictable. Threat.

The world according to Miss Pinch.

But, on the coasts and outcrops of this
treacherous
ocean, a string of lights was built over 300 years.

Look at this one. Made of granite, as hard and unchanging as the sea is fluid and volatile. The sea moves constantly, the lighthouse, never. There is no sway, no rocking, none of the motion of ships and ocean.

Pew was staring out of the rain-battered glass; a silent taciturn clamp of a man.

Some days later, as we were eating breakfast in Railings Row – me, toast without butter, Miss Pinch, kippers and tea – Miss Pinch told me to wash and dress quickly and be ready with all my things.

‘Am I going home?’

‘Of course not – you have no home.’

‘But I’m not staying here?’

‘No. My house is not suitable for children.’

You had to respect Miss Pinch – she never lied.

‘Then what is going to happen to me?’

‘Mr Pew has put in a proposal. He will apprentice you to lighthousekeeping.’

‘What will I have to do?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘If I don’t like it, can I come back?’

‘No.’

‘Can I take DogJim?’

‘Yes.’

She hated saying
yes.
She was of those people for whom
yes
is always an admission of guilt or failure.
No
was power.

A few hours later, I was standing on the windblown jetty, waiting for Pew to collect me in his patched and tarred mackerel boat. I had never been inside the lighthouse before, and I had only seen Pew when he stumped up the path to collect his supplies. The town didn’t have much to do with the lighthouse any more. Salts was no longer a seaman’s port, with ships and sailors docking for fire and food and company. Salts had become a hollow town, its life scraped out. It had its rituals and its customs and its past, but nothing left in it was alive. Years ago, Charles Darwin had called it
Fossil-Town, but for different reasons. Fossil it was, salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too.

Pew came near in his boat. His shapeless hat was pulled over his face. His mouth was a slot of teeth. His hands were bare and purple. Nothing else could be seen. He was the rough shape of human.

DogJim growled. Pew grabbed him by the scruff and threw him into the boat, then he motioned for me to throw in my bag and follow.

The little outboard motor bounced us over the green waves. Behind me, smaller and smaller, was my tipped-up house that had flung us out, my mother and I, perhaps because we were never wanted there. I couldn’t go back. There was only forward, northwards into the sea. To the lighthouse.

Pew and I climbed slowly up the spiral stairs to our quarters below the Light. Nothing about the lighthouse had been changed since the day it was built. There were candleholders in every room, and the Bibles put there by Josiah Dark. I was given a tiny room with a tiny window, and a bed the size of a drawer. As I was not much longer than my socks, this didn’t matter. DogJim would have to sleep where he could.

Above me was the kitchen where Pew cooked
sausages on an open cast-iron stove. Above the kitchen was the light itself, a great glass eye with a Cyclops stare.

Our business was light, but we lived in darkness. The light had to be kept going, but there was no need to illuminate the rest. Darkness came with everything. It was standard. My clothes were trimmed with dark. When I put on a sou’wester, the brim left a dark shadow over my face. When I stood to bathe in the little galvanised cubicle Pew had rigged for me, I soaped my body in darkness. Put your hand in a drawer, and it was darkness you felt first, as you fumbled for a spoon. Go to the cupboards to find the tea caddy of Full Strength Samson, and the hole was as black as the tea itself.

The darkness had to be brushed away or parted before we could sit down. Darkness squatted on the chairs and hung like a curtain across the stairway. Sometimes it took on the shapes of the things we wanted: a pan, a bed, a book. Sometimes I saw my mother, dark and silent, falling towards me.

Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.

Pew did not speak. I didn’t know if he was kind or unkind, or what he intended to do with me. He had lived alone all his life.

That first night, Pew cooked the sausages in darkness. No, Pew cooked the sausages
with
darkness. It was
the kind of dark you can taste. That’s what we ate: sausages and darkness.

I was cold and tired and my neck ached. I wanted to sleep and sleep and never wake up. I had lost the few things I knew, and what was here belonged to somebody else. Perhaps that would have been all right if what was inside me was my own, but there was no place to anchor.

There were two Atlantics; one outside the lighthouse, and one inside me.

The one inside me had no string of guiding lights.

Already I could choose the year of my birth – 1959. Or I could choose the year of the lighthouse at Cape Wrath, and the birth of Babel Dark – 1828. Then there was the year Josiah Dark first visited Salts – 1802. Or the year Josiah Dark shipped firearms to Lundy Island – 1789.

And what about the year I went to live in the lighthouse – 1969, also the year that Apollo landed on the moon?

I have a lot of sympathy with that date because it felt like my own moon landing; this unknown barren rock that shines at night.

There’s a man on the moon. There’s a baby on earth. Every baby plants a flag here for the first time.

So there’s my flag – 1959, the day gravity sucked me out of the mother-ship. My mother had been in labour for eight hours, legs apart in the air, like she was skiing through time. I had been drifting through the unmarked months, turning slowly in my weightless world. It was the light that woke me; light very different to the soft silver and night-red I knew. The light called me out – I remember it as a cry, though you will say that was mine, and perhaps it was, because a baby knows no separation between itself and life. The light
was
life. And what light is to plants and rivers and animals and seasons and the turning earth, the light was to me

When we buried my mother, some of the light went out of me, and it seemed proper that I should go and live in a place where all the light shone outwards and none of it was there for us. Pew was blind, so it didn’t matter to him. I was lost, so it didn’t matter to me.

Where to begin? Difficult at the best of times, harder when you have to begin again.

Close your eyes and pick another date: 1 February 1811.

This was the day when a young engineer called Robert Stevenson completed work on the lighthouse at Bell Rock. This was more than the start of a lighthouse; it was the beginning of a dynasty. For ‘lighthouse’ read
‘Stevenson’. They built scores of them until 1934 and the whole family was involved, brothers, sons, nephews, cousins. When one retired, another was immediately appointed. They were the Borgias of lighthousekeeping.

When Josiah Dark went to Salts in 1802, he had a dream but no one to build it. Stevenson was still an apprentice – lobbying, passionate, but without any power and with no record of success. He started out on Bell Rock as an assistant, and gradually took over the project that was hailed as one of the ‘modern wonders of the world’. After that, everybody wanted him to build their lighthouses, even where there was no sea. He became fashionable and famous. It helps.

Josiah Dark had found his man. Robert Stevenson would build Cape Wrath.

There are twists and turns in any life, and though all of the Stevensons should have built lighthouses, one escaped, and that was the one who was born at the moment Josiah Dark’s son, Babel, made a strange reverse pilgrimage and became Minister of Salts.

1850 – Babel Dark arrives in Salts for the first time.

1850 – Robert Louis Stevenson is born into a family of prosperous civil engineers – so say the innocent annotated biographical details – and goes on to write
Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The Stevensons and the Darks were almost related, in fact they were related, not through blood but through the restless longing that marks some individuals from others. And they were related because of a building. Robert Louis came here, as he came to all his family lighthouses. He once said, ‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors.’

In 1886, when Robert Louis Stevenson came to Salts and Cape Wrath, he met Babel Dark, just before his death, and some say it was Dark, and the rumour that hung about him, that led Stevenson to brood on the story of Jekyll and Hyde.

‘What was he like, Pew?’

‘Who, child?’

‘Babel Dark.’

Pew sucked on his pipe. For Pew, anything to do with thinking had first to be sucked in through his pipe. He sucked in words, the way other people blow out bubbles.

‘He was a pillar of the community.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You know the Bible story of Samson.’

‘No I don’t.’

‘Then you’ve had no right education.’

‘Why can’t you just tell me the story without starting with another story?’

‘Because there’s no story that’s the start of itself, any more than a child comes into the world without parents.’

‘I had no father.’

‘You’ve no mother now neither.’

I started to cry and Pew heard me and was sorry for what he had said, because he touched my face and felt the tears.

‘That’s another story yet,’ he said, ‘and if you tell yourself like a story, it doesn’t seem so bad.’

‘Tell me a story and I won’t be lonely. Tell me about Babel Dark.’

‘It starts with Samson,’ said Pew, who wouldn’t be put off, ‘because Samson was the strongest man in the world and a woman brought him down, then when he was beaten and blinded and shorn like a ram he stood between two pillars and used the last of his strength to bring them crashing down. You could say that Samson was two pillars of the community, because anyone who sets himself up is always brought down, and that’s what happened to Dark.

‘The story starts in Bristol in 1848 when Babel Dark was twenty years old and as rich and fine as any gentleman of the town. He was a ladies’ man, for all that he was studying Theology at Cambridge, and
everyone said he would marry an heiress from the Colonies and take up his father’s business in ships and trade.

‘It was set fair to be so.

‘There was a pretty girl lived in Bristol and all the town knew her for her red hair and green eyes. Her father was a shopkeeper, and Babel Dark used to visit the shop to buy buttons and braids and soft gloves and neckties, because I have said, haven’t I, that he was a bit of a dandy?

‘One day – a day like this, yes just like this, with the sun shining, and the town bustling, and the air itself like a good drink – Babel walked into Molly’s shop, and spent ten minutes examining cloth for riding breeches, while he watched out of the corner of his eye until she had finished serving one of the Jessop girls with a pair of gloves.

‘As soon as the shop was empty, Babel swung over to the counter and asked for enough braid to rig a ship, and when he had bought all of it, he pushed it back towards Molly, kissed her direct on the lips, and asked her to a dance.

‘She was a shy girl, and Babel was certainly the handsomest and the richest young man that paraded the waterfront. At first she said no, and then she said yes, and then she said no again, and when all the yeas and nays had been bagged and counted, it was
unanimous by a short margin, that she was going to the dance.

‘His father didn’t disapprove, because old Josiah was no snob, and his own first love had been a jetty girl, back in the days of the French Revolution.’

‘What’s a jetty girl?’

‘She helps with the nets and the catch and luggage and travellers and so on, and in the winter she scrapes the boats clean of barnacles and marks the splinters for tarring by the men. Well, as I was saying, there were no obstacles to the pair meeting when they liked, and the thing continued, and then, they say, and this is all rumour and never proved, but they say that Molly found herself having a child, and no legal wedded father.’

‘Like me?’

‘Yes, the same.’

‘It must have been Babel Dark.’

‘That’s what they all said, and Molly too, but Dark said not. Said he wouldn’t and couldn’t have done such a thing. Her family asked him to marry her, and even Josiah took him aside and told him not to be a panicky fool, but to own up and marry the girl. Josiah was all for buying them a smart house and setting up his son straight away, but Dark refused it all.

‘He went back to Cambridge that September, and when he came home at Christmas time, he announced
his intention of going into the Church. He was dressed all in grey, and there was no sign of his bright waistcoats and red top boots. The only thing he still wore from his former days was a ruby and emerald pin that he had bought very expensive when he first took up with Molly O’Rourke. He’d given her one just like it for her dress.

‘His father was upset and didn’t believe for a minute that he had got to the bottom of the story, but he tried to make the best of it, and even invited the Bishop to dinner, to try and get a good appointment for his son.

‘Dark would have none of it. He was going to Salts.

“Salts?” said his father. “That God-forsaken sea-claimed rock?’

‘But Babel thought of the rock as his beginning, and it was true that as a child his favourite pastime when it rained was to turn over the book of drawings that Robert Stevenson had made, of the foundations, the column, the keeper’s quarters, and especially the prismatic diagrams of the light itself. His father had never taken him there, and now he regretted it. One week at The Razorbill would surely have been enough for life.

‘Well, it was a wet and wild and woebegone January when Babel Dark loaded two trunks onto a clipper bound seaward from Bristol and out past Cape Wrath.

‘There were plenty of good folks to see him go, but Molly O’Rourke wasn’t amongst them because she had gone to Bath to give birth to her child.

‘The sea smashed at the ship like a warning, but she made good headway, and began to blur from view, as we watched Babel Dark, standing wrapped in black, looking at his past as he sailed away from it forever.’

‘Did he live in Salts all his life?’

‘You could say yes, and you could say no.’

‘Could you?’

‘You could, depending on what story you were telling.’

‘Tell me!’

‘I’ll tell you this – what do you think they found in his drawer, after he was dead?’

‘Tell me!’

‘Two emerald and ruby pins. Not one – two.’

‘How did he get Molly O’Rourke’s pin?’

‘Nobody knows.’

‘Babel Dark killed her!’

‘That was the rumour, yes, and more.’

‘What more?’

Pew leaned close, the brim of his sou’wester touching mine. I felt his words on my face.

‘That Dark never stopped seeing her. That he married her in secret and visited her hidden and apart under another name for both of them. That one day,
when their secret would have been told, he killed her and others besides.’

‘But why didn’t he marry her?’

‘Nobody knows. There are stories, oh yes, but nobody knows. Now off to bed while I tend the light.’

Pew always said ‘tend the light’, as though it were his child he was settling for the night. I watched him moving round the brass instruments, knowing everything by touch, and listening to the clicks on the dials to tell him the character of the light.

‘Pew?’

‘Go to bed.’

‘What do you think happened to the baby?’

‘Who knows? It was a child born of chance.’

‘Like me?’

‘Yes, like you.’

I went quietly to bed, DogJim at my feet because there was nowhere else for him. I curled up to keep warm, my knees under my chin, and hands holding my toes. I was back in the womb. Back in the safe space before the questions start. I thought about Babel Dark, and about my own father, as red as a herring. That’s all I know about him – he had red hair like me.

A child born of chance might imagine that Chance was its father, in the way that gods fathered children,
and then abandoned them, without a backward glance, but with one small gift. I wondered if a gift had been left for me. I had no idea where to look, or what I was looking for, but I know now that all the important journeys start that way.