Chapter 17 The Two Hands, Again

"You have not touched the lens in four years." "I have cleaned it." "You have cleaned the outside of it from the gallery in the dark." She had her notebook open and she had not written anything in it for the whole of the hour. "That is not the same as cleaning it, and you know it is not, and I have watched you not do it." June Ellery had come out on the Tuesday boat with a case of lenses and a bad temper and four days of interviews, and it was now the ninth day, and she had stopped asking people questions and started asking the same three questions to objects. "What do you mean, the two hands?" "I did not say two hands." "You said it on Monday and you have said it four times since, and I have written it down four times, and I am now asking you what it means, and I would like an answer that is not a phrase." She turned the notebook round so he could see it. "It says here, in your hand, on the back of the store ledger, *the two hands*. Whose hands?" Iain looked at it for a while. He had written it on the back of a ledger in November, in the dark, at about two in the morning, and he had been surprised for a month that the words were still legible. "Mine," he said. "And hers. And they do not do the same work." "That is not an answer either." "It is the only one I have got, and I have had four years to get a better one." He put the cloth down. "The hand that holds is the hand that writes things down. The hand that stores is the hand that winds the clockwork. And they are not the same hand, and they have not been the same hand since 1871, and the whole of this tower is built on the difference." She wrote that down. All of it, in a small square hand, and then she stopped writing and read it back. "So the light is not the point." "The light is four seconds of it. The light is the bit where the two hands have to agree with each other, once every eleven seconds, for about two hundred and fifty years." "And if they disagree?" "They have never disagreed. The lens does not store. It stores nothing. It holds nothing. It lets go of the light every time the clockwork lets go, which is why it flashes, and a thing that flashes is a thing that has emptied itself, and an empty thing is how you see out." He turned the cloth over in his hands. "The lens is the holding. The clock is the letting go. And the clock was made by a man in a workshop who was not a keeper and never went near the sea, and the lens was made by a man who was a keeper, and only one of those two men has ever been cold in this building." June did not write anything for a moment. "And your wife," she said. "What about her." "She wrote the tables. I have seen them. Four hundred and six, in a night, with a column of times down the margin, and lettered A to E, and she is a schoolmistress." She looked at him. "That is a person who was keeping a record. That is not a person who was doing a hobby." "She was doing what the book told her to do." "The book told her to do it in pencil or ink?" "The book told her to do it at four-seventeen." June Ellery shut the notebook. "Then say the next part," she said. "You have been saying *the two hands* for nine days as though it were a way of not saying something, and I am going to be able to leave on Friday, and I would like to have the sentence." The light through the lantern room went round and the lens turned, and neither of them did what a person does when a thing like that happens in a room they are standing in. "The man who made the timetable," Iain said, "was not the man who made the clock. The clock is signed. It is signed H. Rennie, Leith, 1871, and his name is on the plate, and the trust will tell you he was an instrument maker and that's all he ever was." "And the numbers?" "The numbers are not Rennie's. The numbers are hand-entered in a book that is in the tower, in my wife's hand, from a source the book does not name, and they are correct to the minute for a hundred and fifty years, and I have been out on that point twice this week and the fourth column says the same time my wife wrote in her own hand the night before she died." He stopped. "Which means she was copying from something. And the something is four hundred and six vessels out of Fleet in one night, and the number was a joke, and the joke was made in front of her, by a boy of nineteen with a camera who did not live to be twenty." The clock went round. The lens came round with it and let the sea go and took the sky back. "Then the table is a record of something that was counted by one of the two people in the room," June said, "and the other one of the two has spent fifty years paying for it." "Yes." "That is the story." "That is the arithmetic." He stood up and picked the cloth up again. "The story is a young man came out to a lighthouse in November with a camera and made a joke about a fleet, and there were nine people on that rock, and eight of them are dead, and one of them is standing in front of you in a bad knee." "Tell it to my mother," she said. "Your mother has been dead for two years." "I know when my mother died." She did not look up from the notebook. "I have never once been able to write the sentence out. I can write the setting and the timetable and the four years and the nine, and I cannot write the room, because there is no room, because the room is the whole of it and it does not go on paper. So tell it to her. In words. Out loud. Not to me." Iain Oram stood in the middle of a dark lighthouse with a cloth in his hand and a woman from London sitting in the keeper's chair. "There is a lamp on Boar Point," he said. "There is a woman called Bess Oram who came up here last week on her own legs and told me where it is. And the woman at the store will not take my money. And in about six weeks there is going to be a boat coming out here that is going to cost me more than I have, and the man who hired it is going to be somebody from the trust, and he is going to stand where you are standing and put his hand on the lens and say the word *transferred*." June Ellery wrote one line on the page, and turned the notebook round, and pushed it across the deck of the lantern room toward him. *Ask him who gets the lamp,* she had written. "That is not a question," he said. "It is the only question," she said, "and you have been avoiding it for four years, and I have watched you avoid it for nine days, and I leave on Friday."