Chapter 8 The Second Finger

At the bottom of a big spring tide, the five fingers stand clear of the water and Cursay is an animal with its feet out. The first is broad and flat and holds nothing but gulls. The second is the one that reaches. It is a long black bar of rock running out four hundred yards at an angle the others do not use, and it is the only one of the five with a name of its own, because in 1908 a man called Ellery built on it and the sea has never forgiven him, and Cursay calls it the second finger the way a body calls a thing by where it is. Iain went out on the third day of the ebb, at ten, with the low water due at half past eleven, and with Maren's lamp in his left hand because his left hand is the hand that carries it and has carried it since the spring, four years, every single evening, and there is no logic in that at all and there is a great deal in it. You cannot walk to the second finger. You can get to the foot of it. From the foot you can go up about eight feet on a seam, and there is a flat place at the top of the seam about the size of a tea table, and that is where the Ellerys' house stood, and on the flat place there is nothing at all. There is the footprint. Four walls of a rectangle, black rock with grey rock in the middle of it, the shape of a hearth, and the line of a doorstep where the men cut it to keep the rain off. There is a boot-scraper set into the rock, iron, still square in its hole, and a man in 1948 who set that scraper wanted it to stay square, and it has. There is a ring of iron in the flat rock on the seaward side, a mooring ring, rusted to the colour of a plaster, with about two feet of the rock round it worn smooth and shiny in a way that iron cannot do and only rope can do, a hundred thousand tides of a rope, a lifetime of one family's hand on a ring in the same place at the same hour. And on the landward side of the flat place, above the high water mark, there is a cairn. It is not old. Eleven years, somebody said, when he asked. It is Bess Oram's, and Bess Oram was the ferryman's wife for thirty-one years before the ferry went south, and Bess Oram has a stone on that rock for every light in the district that has been put out since the war. There are six. Each stone is a different colour and they are stacked with the largest at the bottom out of pure instinct, and the sixth and topmost is a lump of white quartz off the beach at Trodday, which is the stone of the Lundy Light, and which Bess put up herself in the April, in her good coat, with nobody to hold the second stone for her. Iain put his hand on it. Then he took Maren's lamp off the ledge, set it on the flat rock, and sat down on the seam with his back to the drop and the fog coming in from the north over his right shoulder, and he did the thing he had come out to do, which was to sit on the rock of a house that was not there and hold a small light six inches off the surface of where the fire had been. She came out along the wet sand at about eleven, in the flat white light, with the notebook in her hand and no coat, because she had decided that a coat was a thing you wore in London. Bess sent me," she said. "Bess sends everybody somewhere." "I've been out to the first finger twice. There's nothing on the first finger." She got up onto the seam beside him, in one movement, the way people do who are twenty-nine. "Is that a house?" "That was a house." "When?" "They left in the spring of the year the light went out. The house came down in the June. It took two men three weeks and the roof went last because the roof was the thing holding the walls up while you took the walls down, which Iain's father told me, and I do not have a father, so I do not know why I know it." He put the lamp down. "Ellerys. Nine hundred and eight to the year it fell. The last one of them was born on this rock in 1934 and went south at twenty and died in London at thirty-eight, and his daughter was born in London and has a room above Bess's shop with a chair in it that he sat in every summer of the twenties and thirties, and there is a dip in that chair you could put your hand into." Margot did not write it down. That was the second time. "Thirty-eight," she said. "Thirty-eight." She sat on the seam with her feet against the rock and looked at the water going out over the flat, taking the channel away from the harbour inch by inch, uncovering a hundred years of the same stones. "Ask me the thing," she said. "Iain." "Ask me the thing you've been not asking since the Tuesday I came off the boat." He turned the lamp on the rock so the flame was not between them. "How many nights did you count?" "Nineteen years of nights." He said it to the water and not to her. "Then four years of none. Every evening, one, two, three, four, five, and the five were the fingers, and the fingers did not change, and the boats came in on them at four-seventeen the old way, and I stood at the window and I did the count out loud under my breath like an idiot, and there was nobody to hear it and I did it anyway, and then the light went and there was nothing coming in at anything and no hour in the day that I could get from the water, and I stopped." "You stopped." "I stopped at the counting and I went on with the walking." He looked at her. "That's the whole trick of it and it took me four years to work it out and I am not a quick man. You stop the counting and you go on with the walking, and the walking will get you to the hour, and the hour will get you to the lamp, and the lamp is a small glass thing on a sill, and then you put it out and you have got a day." "That is the saddest thing anybody has ever said to me in a car park." "It's a beach." She did not laugh, exactly, but something in her face went and made room. "You were waiting for something to come in," she said. "For four years, you were a man waiting for a boat." The ebb had reached the harbour wall. The whole basin was out and the water in the channel was a mile and a half of mirror with the sky lying in it, and the five fingers were in a row on their stones, and the second was the one that reached, and Maren's lamp was burning on a rock where a fire had been. "There's a boat," Iain said. Margot's hand came off the notebook. "There's a boat out in that night," he said. "That is what the seventy-four minutes are, and I have not said that to you, and I am saying it now because you are going to print the four lines and I would rather you printed them knowing." She did not ask a single question. She put the pencil in her pocket. She put both hands on the stone on either side of her and stayed exactly where she was. "The boats are coming in at four-seventeen," Iain said. "Count them. And do not write anything down, because I have had four years of people writing things down."