第12章 The Edge

The lamp-room was a small grey room the shape of a cask, and there was nothing in it but a pedestal and a bolted collar and four windows and a man with a lamp six inches tall. He lit it at half past three, in daylight, and left it burning for an hour, and she came up at four and he told her about the edge, which he had already told her once and which he now had to tell her properly, because the first time he had told it to give a journalist a phrase. "It isn't a place on the water," he said. "That's the thing I have never been able to say to anybody. There's no line out there where the Firth stops. She wasn't looking for a boundary. She was looking for the place where the dark changes over, the way a wet road changes over in a car, when there's a patch ahead and then there's not a patch, and you can see the edge of the patch with your own eyes, and there is nothing there. And she'd sit in this room in the dark with that lamp in her two hands and she'd move it, not much, a foot at a time, side to side, looking for the place where the light stopped being swallowed and started going out. And then she'd say: there. That's the edge. And the whole of the Firth in front of you is black and you have found the one place in the world where a light can be seen, because a light on the edge of nothing is worth ten times a light on the middle of something." "And the lens would have found it for her," Margot said. "The lens would have put a bar of white a mile long out over the water and there'd have been no edge at all. There's a whole book about why. They were all wrong about it. The edge isn't a fault in the dark. The edge is the only honest thing there is about being in the dark." She wrote that down. Then she put the pencil down and squared the notebook to the table, and he knew the difference, because he had watched her do it once. "Now," she said. "I've told you why I came and I've lied about it twice, and you have let me, and we're going to stop." "Say it, then." "I did not come for the centenary. I came for a word in a box." She was not looking at him. "I got the archive in January. I've been a journalist for nine years and I have never once had a file that was a hundred years deep, and I went into it for the tower, and I came out of it with four lines and a certificate with one word in it, and I read the word about forty times, and then I sat on the floor of a records room in Charlotte Street at half past five in the afternoon and I understood that I was not going to be able to write about the tower, or the fret, or the grey, or the little glass lamp, ever, as long as that word sat in a box with a man's whole life in it." "You've written that word out in front of me twice." "Yes. And you have not asked me a single time whether it is true, and you have not told me it is not true, and both of those are the same silence, and I have been living inside it for nine days now and I can feel it getting comfortable." He put the lamp down on the sill. He had been going to do that for four years, every night, and he had done it that night, and he did not do it now. "Print it," he said. She turned her head. "The file as it stands. Four lines. The certificate, the word, the name of the keeper of the Lundy Light beside it, and the year. Print that. It is true. Everything in it is true, and it will be true in ten years when I am dead, and I have had four years of a word in a box and I have had enough of it." He put both hands flat on the sill. "I would rather be finished than be careful." "You would rather be finished," she said, "and I have been sitting in four houses in nine days being careful at you, and I want you to hear the shape of what you have just said to me, because you have just offered me the end of your life in exchange for not being asked a question. That is not a bargain. That is a man putting the lamp out." The two of them stood in a grey cask of a room forty feet above the water and neither said anything for a while, and the lamp between them was very small. "What is it you want," Iain said at last. "In a question, so that I can answer it and be finished." "I want the seventy-four minutes. Not the Board's seventy-four minutes, the ones out of the report, the ones about a man who was inefficient. I want yours." She put her hand flat on the table. "There is a page in a book in your back room and a page in a box in Oban, and one of them is a lie, and the difference between them is the whole of my article and the whole of your life, and you have had the two of them in the same building for four years and you have not put them side by side, and I have been waiting since the Tuesday I came off that boat for you to do it, and you are not going to, so I am going to." She had the book out of the coat before he had agreed to anything, and then she had the certified transcript out of the other pocket, and she put the two on the table side by side under the flame of a thumb-sized lamp, and she bent over them the way she bent over everything. He watched her read. It took a long time. She had a good eye and she was not in any hurry and he understood that she had been not-in-a-hurry on purpose for nine days. "Twenty past seven," she said. "Your log says twenty past seven, Mairi Beag seen at the bar, holding, no light aboard. Twenty-five to six, in the harbour, eleven aboard, safe. Twenty-five to seven, light out." She put a finger on the transcript. "Neither of those is in this. They have been taken out. Somebody in an office in April four years ago took two lines out of the middle of my page and typed the rest and the two lines are about a boat and a tide and fifty-one minutes, and you held this light in that room through all fifty-one minutes, and the word in the box is *none*, and there is one person on this earth who could fill that box in, and she is standing in a lamp-room in her wet coat, and she has not opened her mouth for four years, and neither have you, and the Board has got a document that says you did it alone." Iain sat down on the floor of the lamp-room, which he had not done in nineteen years of going up those stairs, because his legs had made the decision before he had. "Fifty-one minutes," he said. "I have been saying seventy-four for four years. Seventy-four is the number they use. Fifty-one is the number that was the work." "Yes," said Margot Ellery. "That is what a piece of writing is for." The fourth night of the six was the schoolhouse, and the schoolhouse window is the highest window in Cursay, and from the top of the tower you can see the lamp in it and nothing else of the schoolhouse at all, a yellow square hanging in the fog at the top of the village, and it was Bess Oram's cousin and the lamp was a hurricane lamp with the glass cracked, and he could see the crack from four hundred yards. At the bottom of the stairs he said, "Are you going to telephone them tonight?" "Yes." "Then you will not need me." He said it to make her stay, and he knew he was saying it to make her stay, and she knew it too, and neither of them said so, and that was the first thing either of them had been able to do in four years without it costing something.