Chapter 16 The Boat

The boat came in at four-seventeen on the first evening of the spring, and Iain Oram heard it from the kitchen and did not go down, because the boat had been coming in at four-seventeen for his entire life and the boat was not the thing that had changed. What had changed was the lamp. He had it out on the table by six, and the shop had two inches of paraffin left in the jug and the woman had put a bottle in his hand without asking for money, and the flame was small and steady, which was the only kind of flame there is when there is no wind in a room. Bess Oram came up the slipway at half past six with a jar of plums on her head and a shawl over the top of it. "You've lit a lamp," she said, coming in without knocking, which she had done for eleven years. "I have." "That's not the tower." "No." She put the jar on the table and turned the wick down a quarter and sat, because she was seventy-eight and the chair by the fire was the chair by the fire. "MacTavish at the store says you were out at the point." "I was." "Was there a light on?" "There was a lamp." "And?" "And it was in the wrong place, and it was the wrong height, and it did not flash." Iain turned the glass of the lamp toward the window. "I have been out there twice now and it is the same lamp and it is the same place, and I have not seen it from the water yet, which is the view that matters, and I cannot get a boat out on that causeway before dark until the third of the month." Bess Oram looked at the fire for a while. "Margaret Ann had that lamp on her desk the whole time she was writing it," she said. Iain stopped. "Not the tower. The desk. The one with the green shade, and the one that takes the wick off with a key, and the third one, the tall one, that you cannot put a shade on at all." She took her shawl off. "There were three in that cottage and there are three in that house and there were three in her mother's, and the tall one is the one that was on the desk." "You have been in the tower." "I have been in the tower four years ago and I have been in the cottage in this world thirty years, and I have not been in that room since the March, and I am telling you about a lamp." She said it without any weight at all, the way people say the true thing when they have been saying the other thing for a long time. "The tall one has no shade. It is the only lamp in the house that lights the whole of a table and none of the person sitting at it. She wrote the way she wrote because of that lamp. Any fool could tell you." "Then it is in the cottage." "It is wherever she left it," Bess said. "That is not the same thing, and I am too old to be the one who goes and looks." "Margaret Ann kept the tall lamp on that desk for thirty-one years," Bess Oram said, "and she never once carried it out of the room. Not to the stair. Not when the light went and there were two of them at the table and no proper lamp anywhere in the building." She turned the wick down another quarter. "I have told that to four people in nine years and the four of them have gone quiet in the same place, and I have never once understood why, and I have stopped minding." "Which place." "After *never once carried it out*." Bess Oram put her hands flat on her knees. "That is where they stop. And I have been waiting nine years for you to ask me the next part, and you have not asked me, and I am sixty-one years too tired to hand it to a man who will not reach out for it." Iain put the cloth down on the table. "Ask me," he said. "Not tonight. Your boat is in and the tide is making and you are stood in my kitchen letting my plums go soft on your counter." She got up, which took her a while, and picked the jar up off the table. "Ask me on the seventh night. That is the night she came. Ask me then and I will tell you the whole of it, and you will want the flask in front of you, because I am not telling it on a stair." The two of them sat with that for a while. Outside, the water came up the slipway and stopped and went back, on time, the way it had done at four-seventeen on every evening of his life. "You are going to go out to the point again," Bess said. "Tomorrow." "You will not go in the day. There is nothing there in the day." "What is there at night?" "Nothing," she said, "which is what I am telling you, and I have been telling you the same way since you were nineteen and got in the way of the doorway with your boots on." He walked her down to the slipway and stood in the cold with the lamp in his hand, because the cottage was two hundred metres up the rock and there was no light on the rock at all and had not been for fourteen months, and the path was loose underfoot and he had a bad knee. At the top of the slipway, on the last three steps where the rock is cut and there is nothing to hold on to, he stopped and put the lamp down on the third step and got out his notebook, because a light that is steady is still a light and can be written down. He wrote one line. *Boar Point: still there. Third night. It was not the fog.* Then he stood in the wind on a rock with a dead woman's lamp in his hand, above four hundred metres of water, and the Firth did flat and grey and held the sky like a floor holding a table, and somewhere sixty years west of a dead man's house a small wrong light went on being on.