Chapter 5 The Ferry Crossing

The ferry crossing was the last building on the east side. A low stone shed with a slip of slate roof, a harbour wall running out into the Firth, and a door so dark with forty years of salt that it looked like a hole cut in the wall rather than a door. The ferryman used to keep it locked because the ferryman is not a fool, and then the ferry went south and the crossing was only a shed, and the door has been unlocked ever since because there is nothing in it to take. Bess Oram's shop is next door, and above the shop there are two rooms and a landing, and the front room has the window that looks at the water. It is the room the ferryman slept in for thirty-one years. It is the room Margot Ellery is in now, two floors down and eight hundred metres along the track, and it is the room June Ellery will have in the spring. He went up on the day after the snow, when the film had come off the grass and the village had gone back to being grey. The bed was made. The coverlet was the grey one Bess had washed and hung and taken in. The window stood open at the bottom, because the room was not being aired, it was being shown, and there is a difference, and Bess Oram is a woman who knows the difference and does not explain it. The chair was by the window, angled, with a dip worn in the seat cushion on the left-hand side. A man sat there. You could see where. He would have sat facing the water with his shoulder to the room, the way a man sits when he has come a long way to look at one thing. The letter had said her father had stayed in this room in the summers when he was young. It had not said how young. It had not said that he had been twenty-four, which Iain worked out from the date of the letter, the room and the light being lit, and the arithmetic of a man who was thirty-eight when he died in 1972. He put his hand on the back of the chair. He did not sit in it. Downstairs Bess had the counter wiped and a jar of the plums open, and she was pricing a box of tea that would not be bought until somebody's cousin came off the boat. "It's ready for the spring," she said. "It looks ready." "It is ready. I've been ready since October." She set the jar down. "You'll be wanting to know why I let it to a stranger in February. Two nights, three nights, the woman said, and then a fortnight in the end. I said a month. There's no arguing with a woman who has already decided how long she's staying." "You've had a letter from the Board." "You've had a letter from the Board." She went into the back and came out with it, and she put it on the counter between them upside down, and she did not open it. "That came on the Friday. The lighthouse one, the crest on it. Read it standing up, I haven't the eyes for that print any more." "Northern Lighthouse Board, district office, Oban. The Board has resolved to mark the centenary of the first exhibition of the Lundy Light by re-exhibiting it for one hour on the fourteenth of March, weather permitting, at four o'clock in the afternoon, and requests the attendance of the keeper. And then here is where it stops being a letter and starts being a problem: the Board is aware that the establishment at Lundy was closed in the spring of the year before last and that no keeper is now appointed, and it requests the person in whose charge the tower stands to attend and to produce the station log for inspection." "The tower's mine." "The tower's nobody's. That's what I read into it. Four years and nobody's put a name on it, and now they want it for a night." She pushed the letter across. "What are you going to say?" "That the log's in the drawer and the tower's got a door that shuts." "That's not saying anything. That's the whole of your politics." She took the letter back and squared it to the edge of the counter. "You'll say yes. You want to hear yourself say yes before I've finished my tea." He said yes. She nodded as if he had lost a bet she had laid two months ago, and went back to the tea, and the shop was quiet for a while. "There's another thing," she said. "I should have said it first and I didn't, because I've had four years to get used to it and you've had none." He waited. "The old tide tables. The hand-lettered ones, the bundle at the back." She went through into the back and came out with it, and it was a bundle of about forty sheets, folded in three, smelling of the drawer it had lived in. "The girl's been at these for a fortnight and she's taken it over the top of my counter with a lamp on it like a coroner. And I said to her, my mother kept them, and she said, and did your mother ever say who made them, and I said I never asked. And she said, well, ask somebody, and I said, you ask him, he's the one that goes and looks at things." "I don't look at things." "You've been up here. She showed me the back of one of them." Bess opened the bundle, squared the sheets, counted them out of long habit, and stopped. "There's writing on the back. Pencil. A column of dates down the side going back years, and beside each date two or three words I can't read at this distance. And at the bottom, the last one, the February one, four years back." She held the sheet up to the window. "Two figures. Seventy-four." Seventy-four minutes. He knew the number the way other men know their own street number, and he had not heard it spoken aloud since a man in Oban had said it across a table in a room with a fan in the ceiling. "There's writing above it," Bess said. "Something and something. It isn't in the same pencil." "Give me the sheet." "Take the whole bundle and be done with it. I've had it nineteen years and I never once went to the back of it." She pushed the bundle across the counter. "I only know about that inspector because he was in here. Came in the spring of the year the light went out, the March after, with a clipboard and a bad leg, and he stood where you're standing and he asked me what we kept and I said papers and he said papers will do, and he turned the top sheet over with his own hand and he wrote on it and he did the figures with the side of his thumb." She took her spectacles off and cleaned them on her apron, which she did not need to do. "And when he finished he never asked me to turn the page back. Nineteen years I've had that bundle and I've never wanted to know what a man with a clipboard was doing on the back of a sheet of paper." He put the bundle inside his coat. The paper went against his chest, and it was cold, and he stood at the counter while she put the lid back on the jar of plums. "March the fourteenth," Bess said. "Four o'clock. And you'll want the window open in the shop that day so the whole village can see it, and I'll not have anybody telling me what kind of evening it is. I'll have the lamp lit and the curtain back and the door open and that's the end of it."