第19章 The Last Count

The count was four hundred and six and it was the last one, and the reason it was the last one was that on the morning of the second of the month the trust's boat came out with a man called Esler and a crane operator, and at ten past eleven in the morning Esler put his hand on the lens in the lantern room of a lighthouse that had not been lit in fourteen months. Iain was in the store shed with the door open. He heard the crane go out over the causeway at noon, and he heard it come back at one, and he heard a car go up the rock at half past two and go down again at three, and he did not go up, because he had said on the Friday that he would not be in the room, and a man who has said a thing like that once is not going to be the man who takes it back. They had a crane, that was the part he could not get past. He had expected a van and a man with a clipboard. They had brought a crane onto a rock that cannot take a crane, and the crane operator had put his own outriggers down on the west gantry, which is 1871, and had not asked anybody. Esler had left at three. The case had gone, and the lens had gone, and the store shed was still a store shed, and Iain Oram sat on an upturned crate with a dead woman's ledger open on his knees and the whole of the afternoon going to waste behind him. The count was still in column A. Four hundred and six, in her hand, the night before she died, and then nothing, because the person who was going to write the next line had not written it. He got the book out and turned to the back page, where the column of times was, and where there was one time and one letter, D, and four-seventeen, and under it forty-one of the same word, and the word was *keep*. He did not go up. He went up at nine that night with the lamp, and the tower was dark behind him, and the lens was gone, and the light in the lantern room was one hand-lamp in a room built to be full of it, and it did not fill anything at all. He was not there for the light. He was there for the mark on the gallery wall, which was four inches square and was a date, cut by somebody with a chisel, the way the man who made the timetable had cut his letters, and the date was the first of November, 1871, and under it there was a second date cut shallower, and the second date was the first of November of the year the tower went dark, and under that, in the same hand, a third date, cut very recently, in the past eight months, while the tower had been standing empty and locked and the only person with a key had been the man who was not looking at it. The last count. Three dates and a man who had not come back for four years and had come back on the second of the month for a crane, and had cut his own date under two other men's, the way you sign a book you have been reading. Iain put the ledger down on the stone of the gallery and put his hand flat on the third date, and it was still sharp under the thumb, and the wind was coming over the rock at about forty miles an hour and the sea was doing what it does for five hours either side of high water. June Ellery was on the mainland side that day and did not see him. She saw the case go on the crane and she saw the crane go out over the causeway and she wrote four hundred words about the inefficiency of island transport, which was true and which was the best thing she wrote that week. She came out on the Saturday, on the boat, because Bess Oram had told her at the shop that the keeper had been seen going up the tower at nine at night with a lamp in his hand, and Bess Oram had added, in the flat voice, that a man who has not gone up in four years does not go up for a light. He was on the gallery when she came, in daylight, with the door open behind him and the wind taking her hat off her within four seconds. "Take the ledge," he said. "Not the rail. The rail is 1871 and I have just watched a man put a crane on 1871." She took the ledge. She looked at the whole of it — the gallery going round the tower, the stair, the lens room with the empty pedestal and the bolt holes standing in a circle where the glass had been, the Firth flat and grey and holding the sky. "It is empty," she said. "Yes." "You can see the mainland from here and you can see the point and you can see the whole of the rock." She had her notebook out and did not open it. "I have been on a lighthouse gallery in England with eleven thousand people on it. There is no way to describe this to anybody who has not stood on it." "No." "The lens made this room work." "The lens made that room worth cleaning." He took the ledger out from under his arm. "You asked who gets the lamp. I am going to answer it, and then I am going to give you something to write down, and I want you to write it exactly, because it is the only thing I have got and I am not going to have it paraphrased by somebody with a printing press." She opened the notebook. "Esler took the lens out of this room at ten past eleven this morning," Iain said, "and he will write in a report that the keeper of the light at Craigmore was obstructive. I will not read that report, and I have already decided I will not contest a word of it, because the man is not lying about the obstruction." "Then he has taken it." "He has taken the glass. He has not taken the book, because the book is not the lens, and because I put it in the second drawer with his letters in November, and because the book is not on the inventory. It was my wife's book. It is not the property of the Northern Lighthouse Board and it never was, and the only reason anybody has ever wanted anything out of this tower is that they think the numbers in it are a record, and they are not a record, they are a list of people." June Ellery wrote that down without looking at her hand. "A list of who." "Six hundred and eleven names, cut into the inside wall of a light that went out in 1871 and has been dark for a hundred and fifty-four years, and every one of them is on a crew list somewhere, and there are four hundred and six in column A alone, and the first column of that book is the tide, and the second column is a number that never once went below nine." The wind took the notebook page and she held it down with her whole hand. "You have been up here since nine o'clock last night," she said. "Since eleven." "Then you have been up here for twenty hours." "There is a date cut into this wall that was cut in the last eight months." He showed her, and she went and looked at it, and her hand went up about an inch from the stone and stopped there. "Somebody cut a third date under the two of the others. In this room. With a chisel, in the last eight months, while this building was locked." "That is Esler's hand." "I have never seen Esler work. I have watched a man work for fifty years and I would know that stroke anywhere." He put the ledger away. "So it is somebody who came out here on a boat, in a fog, with a chisel, and cut his own name into a wall that no one has looked at since March, and then went up the causeway and got on with his day." He went and got the lamp, and gave it to her, and did not light it. "Carry it down," he said. "I am going to stand here for a while and I have got four years of not standing anywhere, and I would like to be somewhere, and I would like you to be in the room when I come in, and I would like the lamp to be lit, and I would like it to be lit before I come in and not by me." June Ellery took the lamp without arguing, which he had not expected, and went down the stair, and he heard her get to the bottom, and he heard her stop, and he heard her say something to somebody in the entrance, and then he heard the door. It was shut.