Chapter 1 The Last Letter

The postbag came up on the Tuesday ferry and Iain carried it up the single track in both arms, because the wind at the harbour wall would have taken the letters out of it if he had let go. Eleven pieces. Two circulars from the harbour authority, a fishing licence, a bill for water, and one envelope he did not know. He set the bag on the table. The cottage was cold until eleven and warm after it. Maren's lamp stood on the sill where it had stood for four years, a thumb-sized glass thing with a nickel collar and a wick that burned low because the chimney drew badly. He had not trimmed it since the spring. It did not need trimming. He lit it anyway, most evenings, and carried it up the tower stairs, which were iron and cold and which he had climbed nineteen thousand times. The light had gone out on him in the same spring Maren died. Nobody explained the arrangement. The keeper's wife goes in March; the light goes out in April; the lens goes down to a store on the quay at the mainland town; the tower stands empty with its door propped against the weather. Four winters. The lens had been on a shelf in Store No. 7 ever since, under grey cloth, alongside the glass from six other lights, and Iain had not gone to look at it. A man who goes and looks at his own glass has admitted something about his own dark. The unknown envelope lay on top of the circulars. The name on it was typed: Mrs M. Ellery. Under the typed name, in a small careful hand that leaned a little to the right, somebody had written c/o the Keeper's Cottage, Lundy Light, Cursay. That address had been on file since long before. Iain knew the address the way he knew his own, and he had never once seen it written out in that hand. He left the envelope where it lay for four weeks. Bess Oram came up on the Friday with bread and a jar of the plums and stood in the doorway while the snow went sideways past her. "You've a letter you haven't opened." "You've eyes." "Post goes past my counter every Tuesday. That one sat on your table till my old eyes noticed it." She set the jar down hard enough to move the saucer. "It isn't a bill, is it. Bills have the water authority on them." "It isn't a bill." "Then open it. A man standing over a table not opening a letter is a poor look, and I have seen enough of it in this village to last me." He turned the envelope over. The paper was good. The flap had been gummed twice, by somebody who expected to open it again and be answered. The four weeks did the weather for him. The fog came in on the second of December and did not lift. The sea went flat and then went away, and by the fourth the harbour was a sheet of pewter with the boats standing on it upright and unmoving, and the foghorn at Trodday had not sounded in nine days, which nobody in the village could account for, and which made the whole place listen harder. The lighthouse had nothing to give them. Four years, and the tower on the point stood with its empty lamp-room and its four empty windows, and when people said the light was out they meant the whole apparatus of it, the light and the man and the habit. On the fourth Thursday of December he opened it. He did it standing, with the fog at the window, and it took him two attempts at the gummed flap. Edinburgh. A firm of three. The estate of Arthur Ellery, deceased, had been settled. The letter was dated the ninth of November. It regretted the death on the twenty-eighth of October and gave the date of the grant, and it said that the sole beneficiary, Mrs June Ellery of London, wished to be notified of the death of her daughter's husband, and that the notification had been sent to the last address on file, and that the last address on file was the keeper's cottage at Cursay, and that if it was no longer correct the firm would be glad of a forwarding address by return of post. He read it twice. Then he sat down, which he had not expected to do. The envelope had been addressed by a machine to a woman he had never met. Under the typed name, another hand had added the address, and that hand had not been told it would need to add anything, because a person who expects a letter to find them writes the address they want the letter to go to. Whoever wrote it was young enough to believe in a forwarding service. The letters leaned. The c stood open like a cup. It was a hand that hurried when it was pleased. He understood then that the address was old. A woman's forwarding address for another woman, put up years ago, kept in a file in an office in Edinburgh, and nobody in Edinburgh had ever laid eyes on Cursay to know it was wrong. He took the drawer out from under the table. It stuck, as it did twice a year, and he had to lift the whole table to get it, which was a thing he did without noticing. Maren's lamp was in the drawer. Beside it lay a buff Board envelope with his name on it, a return receipt, and a single sheet of foolscap typed on one side only, headed Northern Lighthouse Board, District Office, Oban, and dated the second of April, four years earlier. It was the finding. He had read it so many times that the paper had gone furry along the fold. The finding recorded that on the evening of the fourteenth of February, in the last week of the final exhibition of the Lundy Light, the light had remained exhibited until 7.54 p.m., one hour and fourteen minutes beyond its scheduled hour of 6.40, and that the keeper had given no notice to the District Office. It recorded a report from the Coastguard at Trodday that the light had still been visible at 7.05, and it recorded a certificate from the keeper in reply to the District Office's schedule of questions, and at question four, which asked for the names and stations of any person present in the lamp-room after the scheduled hour, the certificate gave one word. None. In his own hand. He had written it in a hand he was proud of. The light had not gone out that spring because of money or because of automation or because the Board had better lights to fund. It had gone out because a man had held a lamp past his hour on a February night and then written a word in a box to say there had been nobody there to help him, and the Board had believed the word, because the word came in the only shape the Board knew how to read. He put the finding back. He put the letter in beside it, and then he took the letter out again and put it on the table, because the drawer was for things that were finished, and this one was not finished, though he could not have said what it was. He did not write to the firm. There was no forwarding address to give a firm that had no forwarding address to give him. He did not write to Margot Ellery, whom he had never met and whose name he now possessed. He made tea and drank it standing and let it go cold, and at four o'clock he went up the tower with the small lamp in his hand, because the stairs were there and the going up them was the only thing that had ever reliably made the day have a shape. The lamp-room was four degrees warmer than the cottage, which made it feel warmer than it was. The pedestal stood in the middle of the floor with the drum off it. The bolted collar where the drum had sat was clean, because he had cleaned it in the spring and had not let anyone else near it since, and around the collar the brass had kept a ring of colour where the glass had stood, a thin green line, the first thing to turn in a hundred years of that glass taking the light. He set Maren's lamp on the sill. He lit it. The flame came up, went down, and settled into the small steady thing it did. Outside, the fog had made the Firth into a sheet of nothing with a horizon somewhere under it, and the tower's own light did not travel ten feet before it gave up. Below him the foghorn went. It was the first sound in nine days. It came over from Trodday at 3.40 in the morning and rolled down the water and hit the point, and the whole village heard it, because Cursay was a village where people wake for a horn, and Iain was already at the window with the lamp in his hand and his thumb on the glass. Somebody was out there, late, in a flat calm, wanting the light that was not there, and the only man awake to answer for it was standing in an empty room with a dead woman's lamp burning six inches from the glass.