第11章 The Count

He began it on the first day of March and he did not tell anybody he was beginning it, and the first evening he stood at the window of the cottage with Maren's lamp on the sill behind him and watched the water and said nothing at all, because a count that has been announced is a performance and a count that has not is a job. The tide came in at four-seventeen. It had come in at four-seventeen since 1831, and on the old hand-lettered tables it came in at four-seventeen with four minutes of grace folded into the figure, and the boats came in on it, and the whole harbour business of Cursay was done by a number written in a fair hand by a man who no longer had a name. One. The Aberdeen boat, too big for the harbour, put her bow against the wall and took a line. Two. The Mairi Beag, no, not yet. Two. The John D. Campbell out of Lochranza with ice on her rails. Three. A launch with nobody in it that had been out since Sunday. Four. And that was all of it, most evenings, and four was the number he had said to himself in the tower on the fourteenth of February four years ago while a fog sat on the water and a boat that was not in the list sat somewhere south of the point with her engine dead. On the fourth evening Margot Ellery came up the track and stood at his shoulder and listened to him do it. "That's four," she said. "That's four." "You counted them out loud." "I count out loud. I have counted out loud since 1971." "Why?" "Because if I do it under my breath then nobody knows, and if nobody knows then it isn't a habit, and if it isn't a habit then it's a thing I do, and a thing I do is different from a thing that happens to me." He put the lamp out and stood in the cold window. "It's a bad system. I'd not recommend it to a young man." She did not write anything down. She had not written anything down since the second finger. It was the Mairi Beag that came in on the Friday, and she came in at 4.19, two minutes late, which is a thing that happens, and the man who brought her in was Dugald Arnott, who was forty-one and who had been on that water since he was nine. He came up to the cottage on the Saturday for a quarter of paraffin, and Iain had no paraffin, and offered him tea instead, and Bess Oram had sent a jar. "You've come for the oil," Arnott said, before the tea was poured. "There's no oil in this village. There's a lens in your back room and a light going up on the fourteenth and no oil in this village. I heard you had the drum." "I had it out of a shed. That's all I did." "Aye." Arnott stood in the middle of the flag floor with his cap in his hands. "Iain, I'm after asking you a thing and I want you to say no if the answer's no. Is the light going to burn on the night?" "For an hour. Four o'clock to five." "Good." He nodded, several times. "Then I want to take the boy out." "What boy?" "Kenneth. He's five." He turned the cap over. "He was five weeks old the night the light stayed on, and he's been told the story about it, and the story his mother tells is that the Lundy Light stayed on an hour past its time and brought eleven people home, and he has decided, being five, that he missed it, and he has been not-sleeping about it since Christmas." He looked up. "I want to row him out past the point on the fourteenth at about half three and anchor, and I want him to see it come on. That's the whole of it. I'd take you out with us if you'd come, but I know you won't." "I'll come," Iain said. "If you can hold a boat at four with a five-year-old in it, I'll come, and that's a thing to be said out loud in a room, so I've said it." The shop door had been open eleven inches for the whole of it. Iain had not looked at it. When Arnott left, the door shut and Margot Ellery came in out of the passage by the flour bin with her notebook against her chest and her face the colour of a person who has just been handed something heavy in both hands. "Say that again," she said. "That your wife came home safe, that night, because the light stayed on." "Your wife," Iain said. "Eleven people. The Mairi Beag. Engine, no radio, and she was south of the point in a flat calm at half five with nothing between her and the bar but a tide that had nine minutes left in it." "Then it wasn't an irregularity." She put the notebook on the counter and did not open it. "It's in your file as an irregularity. Seventy-four minutes, no notice, no person to assist. And it was the other thing. It was a man holding a lamp in a tower for an hour and fourteen minutes to bring eleven people across a bar, and the Board called it seventy-four minutes, and a woman in a solicitor's office typed it out, and it is in a file in Oban and it is in a hundred-year archive and a journalist has read it." "A journalist is reading it standing in this shop," Iain said. "Two things," Margot said. "One. If that is what happened then somebody lied to the District Office, and the lie is on paper, and the paper is the only thing that will be printed, and the man is you." She waited, and when he said nothing she carried on, which was more than he expected. "Two. If that is what happened then it cannot be written without saying who was standing next to you when you did it, and we are back where we were on the second finger, and you are back to the seventy-four minutes being a fact about a boat instead of a fact about a person." At the top of the track she stopped, and the fog was coming across the point behind her and going out to sea in front of her. "Whose boat?" she said. "Whose was the Mairi Beag?" "Dugald's." "Whose fault was it." She was not being clever. She wanted it plain, the way a person wants a stair count in the dark. "Whose boat was it that nobody is in the official sentence, Iain? Yours. Whose was the decision? Yours. Then say whose fault it was and we can all go and do something else." He stood on his own track in the dark with Maren's lamp behind him and a hundred and one prisms in a crate in his kitchen and a Board pedestal coming on a Friday. "Mine to answer for," he said. "That is the only shape the sentence takes. It is mine to answer for and I have not answered it, and that is the difference between it being a fault and it being a thing that happened, and I know that is a lawyer's trick and I have had four years to think of it and it is the only one I have." The third night of the six was the Macdonald boys' window, two young men of twenty-six and thirty-one who had never lived in Cursay and who put a lamp in the window and stood in the road for an hour in the rain so that people would know there was a lamp, and who told the story of the Mairi Beag out loud, at volume, to nobody, on the grounds that if you are going to keep a vigil you may as well tell somebody what it is for.