Chapter 15 The Man Who Made the Timetable

The shop on the mainland side was called a store and it sold rope and paraffin and had been run by the same family since before the causeway, and on the morning of the second day Iain asked after a light and was told, without any particular unkindness, that there had been no Boar Point light in sixty years. "I know it has not. I want to know who took it out." "Boards did, that's all. Your father pulled the last of the lens out himself, one morning, with a barrow and a handcart, and he were dead within the year of it." Iain had known about the barrow. He had not known about the handcart. The keeper's house at Boar Point was not a house. It was a foundation, two courses of stone above the ground line and nothing else, and it had been that since before anybody living was born, and the point was a flat green place with a fence round it and forty or fifty years of wind coming across it without anything to slow down. He had walked out there twice as a boy and once as a man and he had never once looked at the stone, and it took him eleven minutes to find the third course, because it was under the grass. Nobody had taken the house down. Somebody had taken the house *away*, in courses, over a period of years, and taken the stone somewhere, and that is not a thing you do to a ruin. You leave the ruin. Ruins are how a place says it was here. He stood on the foundation with the wind coming over the point and read the ledger page again, because it was in his coat pocket and he had been reading it since the shop. His wife's hand. Four hundred and six, and under it in her hand a column of times going down the margin, and against the times, letters. A, B, C, D, E. Not words. Letters, one per line, down the left of the margin, and beside every letter a time to the minute, and beside some of the times a number with a cross through it. He had read this in February and had put the book in a drawer and had not thought about it again until a lamp appeared at four-seventeen on the first evening of the spring. D was four-seventeen. He had been alive that entire winter. He was nineteen years old and he was the young man from the mainland with the camera, and he had stood in the doorway of the tower and said the number out loud as a joke, and his wife had written down the time at which he said it. "A," he said to the wind on the point. "That's the tide. That's what A is." He got the book out and worked down the column properly for the first time, standing up, in the wind, with his thumb going down the page. A was the tide, and A ran for four years in the same column, the same seventeen minutes, twice a day, correct to the minute, and it was not a timetable of boats at all. It was a record of how far out the water went. B was a number every night, between the hours of dark, and the numbers went up and they came back down, and they never went below nine. C was a date, and there was a different date for every one of the four years, and the dates were all the first of November. D was a time, and there was one time, and it was four-seventeen. E was a word, and the word was the only word, and she had written it forty-one times in his hand's stead, and it was not the name of a ship. "Keep it," she had written, and then the light had gone, and the house had gone, and the man who had written the word had died. He put the book away and stood on the foundation and let the wind push him, which it did, hard, and which he let it do, because it was easier than the arithmetic and he had done enough arithmetic in one night. Four hundred and six vessels. Nine is the smallest number in column B and it never once went below it, for four years, every night, and there were four crews on this rock and the rock was four keepers, and the lowest number he had ever seen in his mother's book was nine and he had been one of the nine. And column E was a word, forty-one times, in the hand of a man who had come to a lighthouse for a week with a camera. The store on the mainland side shut at six and the woman behind the counter had put the paraffin in a paper bag and would not take money for it, and he stood on the mainland side with a bag of paraffin and a dead woman's ledger and a lamp burning at a light that had not existed for sixty years, and he did not go out to the point, because the point was four hundred metres into the dark over a causeway with a tide on both sides of it and he was fifty-one years old and had a bad knee in the cold. He went up the rock instead. He had not been up in fourteen months. He took the lamp from the entry and did not take a torch, because the lamp was in his hand and it was the one the two of them had carried up together every evening at dusk, hers and then his, and the tower had been dark since the March of the year she died, and he was not going up there with a torch in his pocket. The door at the bottom of the stair took the key the second time. The first thing he smelled was the paraffin and the cold glass, and the second thing was nothing, because a lantern room that has not been lit does not smell of anything at all. He put the lamp on the table. The lens was in front of him, four metres of it, and it was the whole of the reason he was still on the rock, and the trust letter in the second drawer had one sentence in it that he had read about four hundred times. *We would be grateful for your agreement that the lens be transferred to the museum at Leith, where it can be seen by the public.* Not sold. Transferred. Where it can be seen by the public. He had never once gone up and looked at the glass. He had cleaned it four times, on the outside, from the gallery, and the inside had been four years of his own not looking at it. He took out the cloth and started at the bottom of the nearest panel, and the glass was filthy, and after a foot of it he could see his own face in it, and he stopped. He was standing in the middle of the light with a dirty cloth in his hand and a woman of sixty-two with a book in her lap.