第13章 The Grey

The fret came in on the Thursday and stayed nine days, and the fourteen boats that came up on the Friday were the only thing that happened in Cursay until the following Tuesday, when the fret went off the water in one night and left the harbour like a plate. The man from Oban came off the boat with the crate. He was thin the way a man is thin when a room has been his whole life, and he was about fifty, and he carried his left leg slightly out to the side and did not put a stick down, and he had a grey flannel coat and a cap with a Board badge on it and a way of coming into a room by looking at the ceiling first. "There are two things in here," he said. "You'll want the big one first." The big one was the pedestal. It came out of the crate onto the deal table in a cloud of rust dust and it was cast iron, five feet of it, with the Board's crest on one side in relief and a flange with four bolt holes on the top of it, and the holes were four inches apart and the metal round them was bright. "That came down in the April after last," the man said. "Same crate as the glass. I asked for it to come along with the burner because I knew you'd not want a new flange bolted onto the old base, and here we are." The bolt holes went into the collar the way a key goes into a lock. It took Iain a quarter of an hour to line them up on a back room floor with Maren's lamp on the sill and a woman in the doorway. When the last nut went on he put both hands on the iron and said nothing, and the man said nothing, and the doorway filled up. The burner was smaller. A paraffin vapour burner of about 1890, brass, with a reservoir the shape of a flattened kettle, and a mantel in a glass chimney, and the chimney was the size of a forearm. It came with two gallons of paraffin in a flat tin, and a tin of mantel wicks, and a tin of the wick itself, and a key. "You light it at ten minutes past twelve," the man said. "Two turns of the key, no more, and you wait for the mantle to come up white, and it takes about a minute and a half, and after that it goes on by itself, and you can shut the key and go down. You do not need to attend it. That is the entire point of it." The tower has forty-one steps and a landing at the top that four men used as a smoking room when there were four men. They went up it with the pedestal on a handcart and the two Macdonald brothers and the bad leg leading, hauling itself up one step at a time and stopping on the landing. The man with the leg was not named for the first two hours. He was the District Office, and he was the Board's man, and he would carry a crate. At about one o'clock Iain offered him tea, and he said his name was Gair, and when nothing followed it he said it again in case it had gone into the wind, and it had not. The burner was on the pedestal at ten past twelve. He lit it with a match and two turns of the key, and they all stood in the middle of the lamp-room and watched a white thread come up inside a glass chimney, and the thread got fatter, and went yellow, and then went out with a sound like a distant door, and the water four hundred feet below them turned from grey to silver and stayed silver. Nobody spoke. Four people in a white room with a light in it and nobody could find the sentence, and the silence went on so long that Gair said, "Same as the old one, then," and Iain asked him what he meant by that, and he said, "Nothing. It burns the same." It did burn the same. That was the cruelty of it. Ninety-one pounds of glass, a hundred and one prisms, a hundred years of a tower on a rock, and what came out of it was what had come out of it in 1919 and in 1954 and in the last week of February four years ago. It laid a bar of white out over the water and went on laying it, steady, unbroken, four miles, with no flicker in it and no turn in it, and the second finger came into it, and the cairn came into it, and the boot-scraper set in the rock came into it and stood out white against the black, and the tide came up the old slip and the Ellery walls came out of the water for the first time in four years. Margot Ellery was on the stair when Iain went out onto the gallery. He had not heard her come up. She had hold of the rail with both hands. "Watch it get on the second finger," he said. "It's on the boot-scraper. It's on the mooring ring. It's on the ring, Iain, the one that got worn smooth." Then she came in past him and looked at the burner and not at him. "What character is it?" "One." "What do you mean, one? Flashing lights have a character. Every light on this coast has a character. Flashing two, white, every fifteen seconds, that is the Firth. Every boat on this water navigates by the differences between them. That is what a character is. It is how you know which light you are looking at in the dark." "This has no character. One light, always on, never turns." She put her hand on the pedestal, not touching the hot brass. "There is nothing to wind here. There is nothing to attend. There is no weight tube in this tower, there is no rotation gear, there is no clock, and there is no keeper's book of hours, and the whole apparatus of a hundred years comes down to a button in a hut at the end of a telephone wire." "It comes down to a key you turn twice." "It comes down to a key. And the day after this a man in a hut will turn it on at dusk and go home to his tea, and this tower will be a lamp on a stick like a harbour light, and the Board will have a hundred and eight of them instead of keepers." She turned round. "Which means the Board's light never needed a keeper. Which means it has not needed one since somebody invented the key. Which means that when they make you a finding about seventy-four minutes, the only law they have to point at is the rule that a man must be in the room, and they point at that rule because in 1919 a man did have to be in the room, and there was no key then—" She stopped, because Gair was in the doorway with a can of paraffin in each hand. "—and there was no key then," she said, more quietly, to Iain. "That is the whole of it, is it not. The Board has spent a hundred years proving a man was in that room, and now the man is gone, and the only person left who can say that a man was in that room is the person who was in that room, and she has been sitting in a room above a shop for three weeks with her notebook shut, and you have been going up and down the stairs with a lamp you cannot carry far." "Feed the oil," Gair said. "It's a paraffin burner, it wants feeding, and if it goes dry the mantle goes." The light held until a quarter past two, and then Gair shut the key and it went out inside a minute, and the water went back to being water. The fifth night of the six was the chandlery, on the main street, which has the best window in the village. The lamp in it was a carriage lamp on a hook with a horseshoe bent over the top of the glass to keep the rain off, and the landlord stood under it with his hands behind his back and told everybody who came past that the chandlery had been shut for two years and that if this was going to be a regular thing he would want it in writing. At seven that evening Iain was in the back room with the daylight off the water when there was a knock, and it was the man from Oban, on his own, with nothing in his hands. "You didn't tell me what you'd come for," Iain said. "No." "You've been here two days." "I've been here two days." He stood in the doorway the way he had stood in Bess Oram's shop, in the same place, a man reading a room from the corners. "I've seen the light, then." "You've seen the light." "It's a good light. It's the best glass on this coast and nobody has looked at it since the day it came off." Gair's hand went towards his leg and came away again. "I'll be on Friday's boat, same as I came." "You were at the inquiry," Iain said. "Pike said so on the telephone. He said don't ask you anything about the establishment and that you couldn't help your leg." "Did he." "He did." "Then you've been told the useful thing about me and not the other one," said Gair. "Good afternoon." He was down the track before Iain had decided whether to ask him about the other one, and Iain stood in the doorway of his own back room with a hundred and one prisms behind him, and the name went into the same place as seventy-four, and the hand-lettered tide table, and the eleven people in a boat, and it lay there, and he did not pick it up.