Chapter 14 The Two Winters

The tide came in at four-seventeen on the first evening of the spring, and Iain stood at the kitchen window with his coat still on and counted it, because counting it was the job, and because he had told himself for four years that he would stop. It came in the way it always came in. That was the trouble. He had a notebook full of what he expected, and the expectation was that four winters of a dark tower would leave a mark on the water, and instead the water was the water, and the Firth did flat and grey and held the sky the way a floor holds a table. "Two hundred and eleven days," he said out loud, to nobody, in the room. "Two hundred and eleven days since the light went out at the end of November. And the sea has not once broken its habits." He wrote it in the book anyway, the date and the hour and the state of the glass, because that is what the book is for and because he had kept it every day since his wife died and did not yet know what he would do with the winter of it. That was the other winter, the one he did not write down. The winter before, the last one, with the light burning, and his wife on the gallery with the log and the young man from the mainland who had come to take the photographs. The winter that had not been the last winter: the winter after, when there was nothing to log because there was nothing to see, and the log went on anyway because a man cannot stop a habit by deciding to, and every entry for fourteen months said the same six words. He had gone back to the entries that night, more than once, and the one he had read most often was not his wife's. It was a page at the back, in his wife's hand, dated the November before, and it was a table, and the table was a count of ships. Four hundred and six of them. Out of Fleet, all of them, in one night, and the man on the mainland had stood in the doorway and said the number out loud as a joke, and his wife had written it down, and eight weeks later he had carried her out of the tower on his own back and put her in the ground on the mainland side, and the lighthouse had gone dark in the middle of that, because nobody was left on the rock to turn it on. The lighthouse authority had written twice. The trust had written once. Both letters had used the word *vacancy* in a way that made him put them in the second drawer and shut the drawer. He had not been up the tower in fourteen months. He had been up it four times, for the lens, because the lens had to be cleaned whether it was lit or not, and he had gone up it the fourth time and stood in front of the glass in the dark and understood that the lens was the reason, and had come back down. The count was beginning again. That was the other thing about the spring, and it came at him while he was standing at the window looking at flat water. For four years he had not counted anything, and now something in him wanted to start again at the beginning of a season, and there was no book to start, because the log was in the second drawer with the letters. He went and got it. The book was in the second drawer because that was where the letters were, and he had put it there on the Tuesday in February when the letters came, and he had not taken it out since, and he was not going to admit to anybody, including himself, that he had put the book in that drawer for company. He put it on the table and opened it at the back and looked at his wife's table, and the tide came the rest of the way in, and the wind came round the tower and made the sound it makes, which is a sound nobody in fifty years has been able to describe and every keeper has recognised. He counted the page twice. Four hundred and six. Then he did the thing he had been not doing for two hours, which was to go to the window and look south, down the mainland shore, at the black line of the point where there used to be a light. There was not a light there. There had not been a light there for sixty years. The Boar Point light had been taken out of service in the year the new one went in, and the buildings had gone to ruin after that, and from the cottage window all you could see of it was a low darker line against the water where the land came out. But somebody had lit a lamp there. Not a light. A lamp, a small one, at about the height of a table, and it was on, and it went on being on, and it was not a light because it did not flash and it did not stop. Iain Oram stood in his own kitchen with a dead woman's ship count open on the table in front of him and looked at a lamp burning sixty years too far west, and did not move, and did not put his coat off, and did not go out. The tide turned at five and went back the way it had come. He watched the whole of it go. He counted the water off the slipway at the point where the weed showed, because that was a thing his father had taught him and his father had taught him out of a book, and the number was where the book said it would be, and the book had been written by a man in a lighthouse in 1871 who had never once seen this tide and had got it right to the foot for a hundred and fifty years. "That is the whole of what you are," he said to the room. "Somebody wrote it down a long time before you and it was true anyway, and the only trouble is that being true is not the same as being noticed." The paraffin went on the shelf beside the other paraffin. The bad knee took the stair slowly and the rail was cold under his hand for all of it, and on the landing he stopped, because the window there faces the point, and there was still a lamp on it at half past five in the spring with the whole sky behind it. He got his notebook out and wrote one line. *Boar Point: one small light, wrong height, steady, no flash. Seen from the cottage window at 17:20. Second night running. Not a light. A lamp.*