Chapter 77 The Ferry North

The Swedish coaster *Alvaret* loaded paper pulp at the Tyne on the last Wednesday of April and sailed on the Thursday tide, and her passenger list, inspected by a bored customs officer who found three names endorsed government business, contained a Miss M. Chase, a Mrs. E. Vane travelling as Mrs. Ward, and a Mr. Brown whose papers were so perfectly ordinary that they achieved a kind of anonymity no forgery matches. Brennan had spent two days in Wapping converting favours into tonnage; the master, a Swede named Lindahl with a face like a knuckle and a talent for silence, accepted his manifest, pocketed his fee, and never once thereafter looked at his passengers in a manner that could be logged. The North Sea gave them a lumpy crosswind and the Skagerrak gave them fog, and by the fourth day, standing into the Baltic with the ice out and every neutral flag in Europe hauling freight north at prices that would have embarrassed a ransom, Margaret had learned the ship's grammar: the thud of the donkey engine, the smell of pulp and diesel, Lindahl's habit of communicating entirely in weather. She stood watches she did not stand, read the log she was not shown, and worked, because work was how she kept the fear in its kennel — decoding practice traffic on a borrowed pad, re-copying the family tables until Vane confiscated the pencil. "You will wear the alphabet smooth," Vane said, taking it, and then, more gently than the words, "It is not a rosary, child. It is a key. Keys are for doors, not for worrying." She sat wrapped in two coats on a hatch cover, watching the grey water run, thirty years of lightkeeping sitting in her spine like ballast. "I first made this crossing in nineteen-eighteen, you know. Under a different empire's flags, all of them falling. The gulf was full of mines then too, only they were honest mines — they blew up what they were planted against. It is the drifting ones you must respect. A drifting mine looks exactly like a drifting principle." They spoke of the island as the ship spoke of weather, obliquely, in practicals. The light stood on a granite islet in the fairways between two shores, its clock in the keeper's cottage below, the kitchen sill bolted since before either of Margaret's wars. The cottage had a boathouse, a well, an acre of peat and thrift, and a radio room that had not transmitted since 1939 because the keepers of the light did not transmit; they listened. Vane drew the plan from memory on the back of a chart, twice, identically, down to the loose third stair — "mind the third stair, children, it counts odd" — and Margaret, watching the pencil, thought of a terrace in Islington and a staircase counted in threes by a girl holding her father's hand, and said nothing, because some arithmetics were private even from teachers. The Morse came at them on the second night out, unscheduled, when the *Alvaret* was hove to off the Åland fairways waiting for the pilot. Not from the shore station and not for the ship: a single burst on the old dead band, the frequency that had abandoned its rent, keyed now in textbook fist, plain language, five words, repeated once. Lindahl's wireless officer brought the slip up the ladder with the expression of a man handing over something wet. *THE LIGHT IS LIT EARLY STOP* "Someone is on the island," Brennan said, "or someone wants us to think so," and then stood turning his hat completely over while the Baltic breathed against the hull, doing inventory arithmetic aloud, because inventories were how he prayed. "Vane lit nothing. Edith is in London. The cottage has been shut since March. Which leaves the office, arriving ahead of schedule, or—" he stopped. "—or a courtesy," Margaret said slowly. "A lamp lit for guests. Think about it, Brennan. Every message we have intercepted since Thursday-dawn has been punctual, correct, and *considerate*. They told us May Day stands. They announced our own sailing dates to us in the clear, with time to alter course. They are running this like a firm that wants the account settled without scandal. Firms like that send cars to the airport." "Or undertakers," said Brennan. "Undertakers bill afterward," said Vane, eyes still shut. "This lot invoice in advance. I find the distinction almost charming." They came up to the island at dawn on the last day of April, under oars from a fishing boat whose skipper took Brennan's money and Brennans' silence with equal professionalism, the light tower rising out of sea-fog like a pencil standing in milk, and the sound beneath the oar-locks was the sound Margaret had heard in dreams for a fortnight without being able to name it: surf on granite, patient, repetitive, the oldest telegraphy there is. The cottage door stood unlocked. Inside, everything was cold, clean, undisturbed, thirty years of a life folded away in oilcloth — except the kitchen, where the stove had been lit and raked out, the kettle filled and set, and on the scrubbed table, squared to the grain of the wood precisely at its centre, lay one envelope of good laid paper, unsealed, unaddressed, containing a single card printed in violet ink: *YOUR ROOMS ARE READY. NOON TOMORROW, THE KITCHEN. THE TEACHER ASKS IN THE OLD FORMS; THE OFFICE ANSWERS IN THE OLD FORMS; THE CLOCK DECIDES. — THE MANAGEMENT.* Brennan searched the islet end to end in ninety minutes, professional, silent, thorough: the boathouse empty but the slips greased within the week; the well clean; the radio room dustless, its receiver warm. Somebody had lived here, carefully, recently, expecting them, wanting the welcome neither warm nor hostile but *correct*. On the kitchen sill, bolted where it had been bolted since before the peace of any living memory, sat the mother-clock — a brass instrument the size of a ship's chronometer, faced with a silvered meridian ring, noon-line engraved across its heart — keeping, when Margaret bent her ear to the case, a small dry ticking like a beetle in matchwood, patient as arithmetic, older than every government then at war. "It is true, then," Vane said behind her, very quietly, and Margaret turned and found the teacher standing bareheaded in her own doorway like a woman returned after transportation, looking at the clock with an expression that had waited thirty years for permission to exist. "The old girl kept the time through everything." She crossed the kitchen and set her palm flat on the brass, and closed her eyes, and for ten seconds Eleanor Vane was nineteen years old again, accepting a candle. Then the hand came down, and the schoolmistress returned, brisker than before, which those who knew her recognized as feeling at full pressure. "Well, children. The kettle wants filling and I want my ledger unpacked before the other guests arrive. Tomorrow at noon we shall teach somebody some manners." That night the light turned overhead, steady as conscience, and nobody slept much, and at half past four in the morning, listening to the surf, Margaret heard across the water the low exhaust of an approaching motor launch, unseen in the last of the dark, and lay still, counting the sounds as they arrived: one engine, anchoring chain, the creak of fenders, and then — unmistakable across four hundred yards of flat calm, thin and clear as a needle — a sounder, tapping somewhere on the water, conversations with nobody, rhythms rising and falling like a man talking in his sleep. She knew the fist. Fourteen months ago it had predicted her death. It had just announced, in the family script, at the bottom of the burst Miller would later log, three groups she decoded from memory against the ceiling: *WE ARE ALL HERE STOP*