Rubicon Beach (36 page)

One night I told him about The Number. There’s a number out there, I said, pointing to the west, another number they never found. For a long time he didn’t seem to hear me; the rain was blasting the roof and the sky was filled with sound. And then he looked at me as though he under stood perfectly what I was saying; and I wasn’t sure what to tell him, I hadn’t thought of it in close to fifteen years because I didn’t believe in it anymore. Another number, he kept saying, another number, and the more he said it the more excited he became; and I was sorry I had told him, because I hadn’t thought he would become so excited. He just kept saying, Another number! over and over. The Old World, I tried to explain, is just a number off. Yes, that’s it! he said, and soon we were talking about church steeples and lights. The Old World’s just a number off, he kept repeating, and there are twenty-seven churches in the moors rather than twenty-eight, because here they’re a number off I nodded and smiled; I didn’t see that it made any difference. But he said it made all the difference, because he and I had counted twenty-eight lights and that meant there was another light out there, the twenty-eighth, that wasn’t a church, and it had been there all along.

Then he had me in the truck driving him out into the bitter storm, heading to the point where the land ran out; the rain splashed against the window and there was no heat in the truck, and the moors were treacherous, a thousand in visible lakes. I should never have done it. Later the townspeople would say, An old man, and you took him out into the storm, it’s not enough that you drive our women from town. But they hadn’t seen the way he was, almost crazed by the idea that this other light had been there all along and he hadn’t understood it. We drove toward one light after another; we would get a hundred yards from a light and then lightning would flash over the terrain and in the momentary white glow we could make out the dim form of an old gray church rising from the waving grass. Then we would make for the next light, counting them down. We seemed destined to spend the night going from one church to another except that the old man was right, the twelfth or thirteenth or fourteenth light was not a church at all but rested out over the sea half a kilometer or so off Land’s End: the lighthouse that Anne, the old man, and I had watched and talked about that first time we drove out, the one she said had been deserted for decades. Someone was certainly there now.

A boatman lived down on the rocks above the water. I parked the truck and got the old man out the other side, and we made our way down the walk to the boatman’s house. I still remember the light from the sky swaying across the old wooden door and the knocker in the form of a cat’s head gnashing at us. The boatman was short and round, with hair putting above his ears; he wasn’t happy about being awakened and he was less happy when we told him we wanted to go out to the lighthouse. He told us we were both off our bloody nuts. He pointed out that in case we hadn’t noticed, there was a rather violent storm taking place at the moment. But the old man, blue and quaking with cold, was out of his mind to get to that lighthouse. He wouldn’t hear of it any other way. The boatman said the lighthouse had been deserted forever and the old man literally pulled him out into the rain by his shirt and pointed him toward it. The boatman discounted the light as some kind of optical illusion. “I’m tellin’ ya, there’s no one out there, “ he said. I offered him twenty pounds and he still wouldn’t go for it: “Not till sunrise anyway,” he said. Then we will wait for sunrise, said the old man. We would have stayed in the truck the next three hours but the boatman said that we could sleep in the house, assuming the twenty pound offer still stood. I had just begun to doze when dawn came through the window and the old man was shaking me by the arm, telling me it was time to go.

The storm had passed. I wanted to get to the lighthouse and back, since I had my work in Penzance and a truck to return. As we motored across the water the boatman kept advising us that this was a waste of time and our twenty pounds. “Don’t be complainin’ to me when there’s nothin’ out there,” he said. Personally I didn’t doubt he was right. In the sun over the cliffs the old man looked ghastly there on the deck of the boat: white as rock and chattering fitfully. Repeatedly I tried to get him down in the boat out of the wind, but he was mesmerized by the long white tower before us, and when I tried to shake him from his obsession he looked at me as though he were rabid. We crossed the water in a quarter of an hour; we hadn’t gotten the boat up onto the island rocks before the old man was scrambling for the door at the lighthouse base.

The door was all splinters and holes, sodden from years of the sea bashing it. We didn’t so much open it as pry it apart. The boatman was down by the water tying up the boat. When we got into the bottom of the tower, the old man flinched, looking up the stairs that wound to the top; he knew, he
knew
what was up there. Now I wasn’t sure if the convulsions were fever from cold or another kind of fever altogether. Slowly he started up the steps before me. The rail shook in our hands, and above we could hear the wind crying through the broken windows. Once he stumbled and fell back against me, almost sending us both tumbling to the bottom. When he reached the top I heard a gasp, and he stood in his place a long time until I pushed him the final step. Behind us the boatman was climbing the stairs too. I pulled myself into the observatory and found a bare room of wooden plank floors and pale blue walls, flooded with sunlight through the shattered glass and the roof tom partly away. Through the floor and to the roof extended the pillar around which the stairs had curled from the ground. There, tied to the pillar by her black hair, was a girl.

She had a face like none he’d seen. He stood agape, gazing from the girl to the old man to the girl again. The old man was frozen, his eyes narrowing in distrust now that he had found what he came to find. The boatman peered up over the floor and his jaw dropped. Immediately Lake’s impulse was to turn from her face, the beauty of which struck him as uncivilized; finally he found the presence of mind to free her from the pillar where she slumped. Her hair was in impossible wet knots. He had to cut her away with the boatman’s knife. Her dress had been made a rag by the storm, her feet were bare. Like the old man she was chilled deeply; her eyes were open but she showed no awareness of what was happening. Lake shook her hard as if to wake her. She blinked slowly and raised her face to him; she watched him a moment, then closed her eyes and fainted again in his arms. 

Lake concentrated on getting the girl down the winding stairs and into the boat while the boatman attended to the old man. They headed back for Land’s End. All the way the girl slept, bundled in blankets the boatman had pulled from a metal box. The old man just sat staring at her. Sometimes he would lean his head back and shut his eyes, then sit up again expecting her to have vanished. He was still convulsed with fever but his gaze was somewhere past fever. The boat reached Land’s End, and Lake drove the old man and the girl back to the stone house on the moors, where a man from town was waiting, furiously, for his truck.

Lake did not feel equipped to nurse a young girl and an old man. He settled them both in the cottage, the old man in his bed and the young girl in bedding on the floor. When word got out, Mrs. Easton showed up with a doctor. Lake was trying to cook soup on the stove. Neither the woman nor the doctor said anything until just before they left: “l don’t believe Mr. Cale’s going to make it,” the doctor told him. He asked who the girl was. Lake said he didn’t know. He said she was an acquaintance of the old man. “A relative?” the doctor asked. No not a relative, Lake said. “Of yours, I mean,” said the doctor. I said l didn’t know her, the American answered.