Chapter 6 The Lamp and the Lens

The mainland store is a building on the quay with a sign that says Northern Lighthouse Board, Store No. 7, in a typeface chosen in 1961 and not questioned since. The door is locked at five and open at eight. Inside it smells of creosote, dry rope and cold glass, and that last smell gets into a man's coat and stays there for a year. The keeper was a young man. He had been two years in post and had come up from the south, and he had the particular stillness of somebody who has learned not to touch things in a room full of other people's glass. "Morning," Iain said. "I've come for the Lundy drum." "It's through here." He unlocked the back and turned the light on, and the room was cold enough to fog the bulb. Six lengths of grey cloth on six trestles, covered to the floor. "Lundy's the second on the left. It came in the April after last. It's in the case." He took the cloth off. The case was a deal box lined with straw. Inside lay the lantern glass of the Lundy Light, a third-order drum about fourteen inches across the waist and five feet tall, banded in brass, with a hundred and one prisms in rings that got narrower toward the top. It was the colour of a wet stone. It was the colour of the Firth at four o'clock on a February afternoon, and looking at it in a shed on a quay was like being handed back a piece of a room you had lived in. "God," Iain said, and then, "That's a lot of glass for a shed." "It's the only thing in here that's ours." The young man shut the case. "You'll want authority. I've not got authority, I've got a shed." "Telephone's in the office?" "There's a telephone in the office. The Board's number's on the wall. District office, Oban." He looked at the clock. "They'll not be in before half eight. It's Tuesday." He was in at ten past eight. Iain gave the name Lundy, the number, and the young man's extension, and then a voice came on that he had heard exactly twice in his life, once across a table and once down a telephone, and which had made the same short pause before his own name both times. "MacEoin." "Mr Pike. My name's Iain MacEoin. I'm at the store at Cursay with your man, about the Lundy drum." "I know who you are. You've made that clear on paper twice. What do you want?" "The glass, for the fourteenth of March. One hour, four o'clock, weather permitting. I'll have the tower open and the pedestal clear and I'll stand in the room and do as I'm told." "You're not on the establishment." "I'm aware of the establishment." There was a pause, and then a sound that might have been the chair. "Let the man have it out of the case and put it on the trolley and weigh it. Ninety-one pounds with the fittings." Pike's voice did not change at all. "And bring it up on the Friday, not the Tuesday. The Tuesday boat is bad and you'll not get it ashore at Trodday in a swell. And bring the station log. I want the original, in the room, in my hand, at four o'clock, and I want to be able to put my hand on the page where I have to put my hand." "Mr Pike, I have a certified transcript of the log for that week. The Board returned the transcript to me in the April. The original went into the file and stayed there." "I know where the original is. It's in a box on the third floor in Oban in a room with no window, and you will not have it back, and neither will I." A pause. "The transcript is what the finding was made on. Whatever is in the original, the finding stands on what the District Office holds, and the District Office holds the transcript, and the transcript is four lines long, MacEoin. Four. And the page I have in my hand in front of me has five." The telephone was very clear. Behind it a wire was ticking in the weather. "The transcript has four lines," Iain said. "That is correct." "Yes," said Pike. "That's what I said." The silence went on for the length of a tide. "You'll have the pedestal and the burner on the Friday," Pike said, in the same voice as before, as if nothing had gone across the middle of the conversation. "There's a man coming with it. My man. He'll carry the crate up the track and he'll want the tower open and he does not want to be asked anything about the establishment, and you'll be civil to him, because he can't help his leg and he was not at the inquiry." Then the line went dead, which in 1961 telephones did. "Was that the whole conversation," the young man said. He was holding the trolley. "It's not a conversation," Iain said. "It's a form with a person attached." The crate came off the ferry at four with the mail, and the lad from the crossing took one end without being asked, and the two of them got it up the track and through the door of the cottage on a board, because the door is two feet nine and the crate is four foot two across the base. He put it in the back room on the deal table, which had been Maren's work table, and the four legs of the crate went over four black marks in the deal that were the marks of four hundred gallons of paraffin drums. He took the lid off. The straw was dry. The brass was dulled but not green. The prism edges had a bloom on them, fine as breath on a window, and that was the salt, four winters of it, come in through a shed on a quay. He took a saucer and filled it with oil and set it inside the top ring, where the burner would sit, because the one thing that will destroy a lens faster than salt is dust in a dry room, and a saucer of oil will not keep the room from drying but it will keep the dust moving. He stood in the doorway of his own back room looking at a hundred and one prisms in the dark, and Maren's lamp on the sill in the front room threw nothing in here, and he did not light anything. He put the lid back on and left the props under the corners so the air could get under it. He had said nothing to Margot Ellery for eleven days. He had told her about the grey and the edge and the small lamp, and she had written all of it down, and twice she had come to the cottage and twice he had given her something else to write down, and twice she had said thank you in the flat way she had for things she intended to use later. What he had not told her was that there was a certified transcript of the last night of the Lundy Light, and that it had four lines in it, and that one of the nights in the winter of that year had eleven people in a boat and no light of any kind on the water, and that the finding he had carried in the drawer for four years was built on four lines, and that the man who had built it was coming up on the Friday in a crate with a burner in it. He had not told her because he did not have the sentence. He had the facts, in order, and he had had them for four years, and there was no arrangement of them that he had ever found which did not end with a question he could not survive being asked. Then, standing in the doorway, he understood that this was the thing he had been doing since the fourteenth of February four years ago, and that the glass in the shed on the quay had only made it visible.