Chapter 2 The Journalist's Room

Bess Oram came up the track on the second Wednesday of February with the mail and a list, and the list was why she stayed. "Off the Tuesday boat," she said, before she had the bag off her hip. "Camera. Notebook. One of those letters of introduction, the Board paper with the crest on it, all folded in three like a hymn sheet. She says she's writing a piece for the centenary." "The light's centenary." "A hundred years since it was first lit. They're going to mark it in the spring, and there's to be a night when they light it again, and they want to write it up." Bess put the tea down. "She wants to see the keeper." "Doesn't want to. Wants to." "She'd say the same to you. I heard her say it to the lad on the ferry landing and she said it exactly the way you'd say it." Bess straightened up. "Room above the shop's let to her. The one with the window on the water. She had a letter from her mother in her hand when she got off, and the mother's a coming up in the spring, and the two of them want to meet you before the story's written. That's the arrangement, and I'm the one who agreed to it, so don't look at me like that." "How old is the girl?" "Twenty-nine. Married once, from the look of the ring. Lonely, from the look of the coat." Bess picked the empty jar up. "There's a hundred and forty miles of water between her and anybody she knows, Iain. That makes a person talk." He went on the third day, in the hour before the tide, when the water was down far enough to lay the whole Firth out flat like a floor with a light in it. The room above the shop was the last door on the east side, with a window that gave on the water and a bed under it with a grey coverlet Bess had washed on the line and taken in before the wind found it. He knocked three times, evenly, the way you knock on a house. She had the notebook open and the pencil held loose between two fingers of her right hand, the way a person holds a thing they have not decided whether to use. "You're the keeper," she said. "I am." "Thank you for coming. I don't suppose you get many visitors." "I get the post. I get the foghorn when the fog's thick enough for it. I get Bess Oram when she's got plums." She wrote something down, and he could not see what. "You've been writing since you got off the ferry." "Since the first morning. The tower is harder to describe than I thought it would be." She set the pencil down. "I've been trying to get the words for the dark in that lamp-room. It isn't black, you see. It's a particular grey. It's the grey of a thing that has been waiting a long time and has stopped being impatient about it." "The lamp-room isn't dark any more. The lens is gone. They took it to the store when they closed the light." "I know. You said so in the letter of introduction, the one from the Board." She turned the page, looked at nothing, turned it back. "I still want the words for what was in the room before the glass came out. The words for the grey." He looked at her. She was looking at the window, not at him. "My wife had a lamp," he said. "A small one, glass, and she carried it up to the lamp-room in the evenings. She would sit in the dark with it in both hands and look out at the water. I used to think she was counting the boats. She wasn't counting the boats. She was looking for the edge of the dark, the place where the Firth stops and the nothing starts. She used to say the nothing was the interesting part. She used to say the edge was the only place in the world where a light can be seen." Margot Ellery had stopped writing. The pencil stayed where it was. "That's good," she said. "I'm going to use that." "It's not for your piece. It's for the record. I'm telling you what the dark was, so you know the grey. So you know the waiting." She wrote it down. He watched the pencil go across the page in its small careful leaning strokes, and he had a bad moment in the middle of it, because he had seen that hand before. Not on this page. On an envelope, four weeks ago, in a drawer, under a typed name, adding an address a young woman believed would find her. "The lens," she said. "Where is it now?" "I don't know. There's a store on the quay at the mainland town. They put the glass from all the closed lights in the same room. I don't think anybody has looked at this one since the spring." "It's still yours, in a way. It's still the eye. The light's gone but the eye's in a shed on a quay and it's the same eye." "I don't know if that means anything." "It means something to me. It means the dark in that room isn't empty. It's waiting for the glass to come back." He stood in the doorway a while with the Firth behind her and the window's grey on both of them. Then he asked the question he had been carrying up the track since Monday. "You've had the Board's file," he said. "For the centenary. They've given you the whole record." She did not pretend. That was the thing he noted. She put her hands flat on the notebook. "Logs, photographs, the findings, the district correspondence. A hundred years of a light being kept. It's a good archive." She lifted one hand off the page and held it up. "Four years of it are the best thing in there, and I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do with them." "Four years of it." "The last week of the final exhibition. The fourteenth of February, the year they closed." She let the hand drop. "The Board found that the light burned an hour and fourteen minutes past its hour and that the keeper gave no notice. There's a certificate. A form, filled in by the keeper's own hand, and the district office typed it up for the file. Question four asks for the names and stations of anybody who was in the lamp-room after six forty. There's one word in the box." "What word." "None." She said it without any weight on it at all. "I know how that reads. I'm not asking you to tell me it isn't true. I'm telling you I've read it, and that I came up here on Tuesday partly because of that word, and that a thing I don't understand is the only kind I know how to write about." "You came up for the centenary." "I came up for the centenary." She turned the pencil over once. "Tell me about the fog. You said eleven days. Does it come every winter or only this one." "Every winter. Some years it holds till March. Maren used to call it the fret. She said the fret came in because the water was too warm under it." "That can't be right." "It isn't. I never told her that either." She wrote that down too. And when she had finished she read back what she had written, which he had not expected, and then she said: "You have not asked me one single thing about the last night. Not one. Everyone asks about the last night. You haven't." "There's nothing in the last night." "There's an hour and fourteen minutes in it, and a word with four letters in it, and a woman who came off a boat in 2015 who has not been in a newspaper office in three years." She stood up and pushed the chair in. "I did not come off that boat in 2015, and you have not asked me that either, and I would have told you, and I think you knew that a stranger was coming and you did not ask because you already knew who."