Chapter 20 The Seventh Night

He went up the tower on the seventh night of April with the lamp in his hand, and the dark behind the lens room was the grey that four years had made it, and the empty pedestal stood in the middle of the floor with its ring of bolt holes, and the fog was coming in over the causeway in a flat sheet that did not move. He put the lamp on the table. He had the ledger with him and the tall lamp was down at the cottage on the kitchen table where it had been every evening since the fourth of the month, and where the light went on the table and not on the person, and where a woman had written four hundred and six in a night. There had been a man at the door of the tower for eleven minutes, and the fog made him not a shape but a colder patch of the doorway, and he had not knocked, and the door was not open, and Iain Oram had not opened it. He waited until it was gone. Then he went and put his hand on the door and found it wet, and he did not know how long he had been standing there. He had asked Bess Oram on the seventh night, as she had told him to, and she had told him. Her name was Elspeth Ray. She had come out on the boat on the fourth of November, nineteen fifty-nine, to take a job as a kitchenhand at Craigmore, and she had been twenty-two, and there had been a young man on that rock already that week with a camera who made a joke about a fleet, and Margaret Ann had written the number down, and then in the March the whole thing had gone out in three days with a fault in the clutch relay and the tower had gone dark and the authority had written to the family and Margaret Ann had not come out and had died in the August. "I never got a letter," Bess Oram had said. "Not in the January, not in the February. Thirty-one years I have waited for a letter that was never going to be sent, and then the boy comes off the rock, and I see him on the boat." "That was you." He had said it, not asked it. "That was me, in the June of 1990, and I had a bag on my arm and a ticket to Oban in it, and I stood on that slipway and looked up at a dark tower and I said to him, you have not lit that light." And then she had gone back on the boat. "And I came back for a week in the September and he put me on the Tuesday boat to Oban and gave me money I did not want, and that was the whole of it, and he has never once said the name out loud, and neither have I, and we have eaten Christmas dinner in the same house for thirty years." That was on the seventh night. On the seventh night of April he put the lamp on the table in an empty lens room and he wrote in the notebook, because it was what he did, and the notebook was a brand new one and it was the first entry in it and he wrote it out in full. *Craigmore. Seventh night of April. Fog in from the causeway, flat, no movement. Light out since the March of 1992 — 14 months and 4 days, which is 431 nights, and I have it in the book in column B and the number has never once gone below nine. Esler took the lens on the second. I did not contest it and I will not. The man was at the door tonight for eleven minutes and did not knock and I did not open it. I have decided I am not going to open it to anybody who has not put their name in the book, and the book has one name in it, in a hand that is not mine, and that name is not going to be written by me either. Elspeth Ray came out on the fourth of November 1959 and stood on this rock for four months and nobody on it ever said her name. There were nine of us on this rock in November 1959 and there are two of us now and one of the two is not a keeper. I am going to write her name in this book, in my own hand, tonight, in column A, and the number goes to four hundred and seven, and the tide comes in at four-seventeen, and the light is out, and the ledger is not on the inventory, and this building is not the property of the Northern Lighthouse Board.* He put the pen down. He did not write it that night. He put the pen down and he sat in the dark in a room built to be full of light with a lamp on a table, and he thought about how a man writes a name he has not been told, on the evidence of a woman of seventy-eight who has not come out of a house since she was twenty-two years old, and about how a book is a thing you fill in and it is not a thing you are told, and about four hundred and six and how much a number is worth when the person who wrote it is dead. At about eleven he got up and put the lamp out and went down, and the fog was still in and the door at the bottom of the stair was open because he had left it open, and the rock and the slipway and the causeway and the mainland were all grey, and there was nothing at the point. On the table in the kitchen the tall lamp was burning with no shade on it, and the light went on the table and did not go on the chair, and the ledger was open at the back page at the place where the two of them had left it, and the glass in the door of the cottage was black, and there was a small light out on the water at the edge of the dark where nothing was, steady, the wrong height, going on being on.