Chapter 18 The Ferry in the Spring

The ferry came in on the Friday with the spring running high off the mainland and June Ellery on it, three days after she had sailed back out of the harbour on a different boat with a case of lenses and a bad temper, and this time she came as far as the slipway in a hired car and stood in the wind in the same coat. "You have got taller," Iain said, which was the only thing he could think of that was not a question. "It is four days." She set her case down on the wet stone. "I got four days of London and a printing press, and the press is running my photograph of a timetable, and the photograph is good, and nobody in this country will print it properly, so I am here to be annoyed in person." "Bess Oram has been asking after you." "Then Bess Oram is the only person in Scotland with taste and she is eighty." He took the case. It was heavier than it looked, and it was lenses, forty of them in felt, and he understood what she had actually spent four days in London doing, which was not being at a press at all. "Come up," he said. "There is nothing to see and there is a chair and the tide is out." They went up in the dark by the path, and she asked him once, halfway, whether anybody else was on the rock, and he said no, and she said right, and neither of them said the other thing. The lamp was on the kitchen table and the tall one without a shade was beside it, and June Ellery saw the second lamp and stopped in the doorway for long enough that he offered her nothing and had to come back for her. "What is that." "That is Margaret Ann's. It has no shade. It lights the table and not the person." "Where have you had it." "In the drawer with the letters from the trust." He set her case down. "Bess Oram told me on Wednesday where it was and I have not been able to leave it in the drawer since." June put her hand flat on the base of it, the way a person touches a thing to see whether it is real, and then she took her hand off. "Ask me what I came for," she said. "You came to be annoyed in person." "I came to be told no." She sat down in the keeper's chair, the one by the window, and looked at the sea through the glass. "I came because a man in an office in Edinburgh has agreed to explain to me, on the record, why a lens from 1871 is going to Leith to be looked at by the public. I have the letter. It says *we are sure you will understand*." "He is going to come here himself," Iain said. "He is coming on the third of the month with a boat, because the causeway will not take a van, and he is going to stand in that room and put his hand on the glass and say the word." "Then when he comes, you will not be in the room." "No." "Will you?" "No." Iain turned the tall lamp so that the light went on the table and away from the chair, the way it had been set for thirty-one years. "I have been up that tower four times in fourteen months and every one of them I have come back down again, and you want to know the reason, and here it is. I do not have a gun and I do not have a lawyer and I am fifty-one with a knee, and if I am in the room when he touches it I will do something stupid and he will write a report about me and it will be true. So I will be on the rock, and the rock has four keepers' houses and a store shed, and I will be in one of them, and you will be in the tower." "That is a filthy way to keep it." "It is the way it is kept." June Ellery was quiet for a moment. Then she got up, went to the window, and looked south down the mainland shore at the low dark line of the point, where sixty years ago there had been a light. "There is nothing out there," she said. "I have been out to the point twice with the man from the store and there is a foundation and a fence and no light and no lamp and no glass and nothing at all, and he is fifty-eight and he is a gardener and he is not a liar, he simply has not seen it." "You have not been out at night." "No." She turned round. "Then tell me why you are certain. Not *that* it is there. You have not seen it either. You have seen a light on a greenish horizon from two hundred metres above a kitchen window at half past five, on two nights, and both of those nights had a fog coming off the water, and there is a thing on this coast that will show you a lighthouse that is not there four nights in ten, and I grew up on it, and my mother told me about it, and it is the reason I came to this island and not to a printing press in London." That stopped him. "Your mother told you about it." "She told me the sea lies and the lie is always a light." The lamp was burning on the table. The clock on the wall, which had been the clock of the tower since 1871 and was not the tower's any more, had been put on the kitchen shelf by Margaret Ann in a fit of housekeeping in the November, and it was going. "Nine days ago," Iain said, "there was a lamp at the wrong height on Boar Point, and it is the same lamp, and Bess Oram has told me where my wife kept it, and there is a word in a book in a dead woman's handwriting that she wrote forty-one times." He looked at the tall lamp, and at the clock, and at the dark window. "I am not certain of anything, and I have been wrong four years running. Ask me the question you put in my notebook." "I did not put anything in your notebook." "You wrote it on a page and turned the page round and pushed it across the deck at me." He almost smiled. "Ask who gets the lamp." June Ellery turned and looked at the dark, for a long moment, and then she said, "On the seventh night," and neither of them said anything else about it, and outside the tide came up the slipway at four minutes past nine, which was nine minutes early, and neither of them noticed, and the water went back again, and the spring went on being the first one.