第9章 The Room Above the Shop

She came up on the Tuesday boat in the second week of March with one bag and a hat box she did not open, and Cursay had lost the snow some time before and had gone back to being the colour of a wet pavement with the sun somewhere behind it, doing nothing. Iain was at the door of the cottage when she came down the track, because Bess had told him the boat was late and Bess was not a woman who exaggerates about boats. June Ellery was smaller than her daughter and quieter and worse dressed for the wind, in a coat the colour of the Firth that had been bought in a town with a shop. She stopped at four feet and looked at the cottage, and at the tower above and behind it, and at me. "You're the keeper," she said. "I am." "Thank you for putting the lens back." "No," Iain said. "I did not put it back. I did not have it put back. I asked a young man in a shed to let me carry ninety-one pounds of glass onto a boat, and the District Office in Oban decided the rest, and the Board's pedestal is still on the mainland being painted. Nothing about any of that was mine." "That is a very careful way of putting it." "I've had four years of practice." She put the bag down on the step and took off the hat that had not suited her. Behind her, up the track, her daughter had stopped at forty feet as well, and the two of them stood there in the March wind not going the last of the distance, and Iain had the only clear sightline in Cursay and watched a family decide who was going to be brave first. "It is June," the woman said. "June Ellery. Your name is Iain, and you have not asked me for mine, which tells me you got a letter in the post with mine in it, and that you have read it twice, which tells me you are careful. Thank you for the plums you sent back with Bess." "They were not mine. They were Bess's. I carried them up a hill." "Mine was not for you," she said. "It was for the keeper of the Lundy Light, and there is one of those, and he is standing in his own doorway in a shirt with no buttons done up, so we shall be friends." She held out her hand, and it was cold, and she did not seem to mind. In the room above the shop, the chair by the window was where it had always been, angled, with the dip worn into the left of the seat. "My father sat in that," June said, before she had taken her coat off. "Nineteen fifty-one to nineteen fifty-six, five summers, and I came with him for two of them. He sat there because you can see the second finger from it and nothing else, and the second finger is where we were born, and he never once looked at the water in that chair. He looked at that." She pointed. The rock was out in the flat light with the cairn on it and the tide round it. "I have not been north since I was fourteen. I am fifty-eight. I have been told for some years that I should not come." "Then why did you?" "Because my daughter has not answered my letters since Christmas." She sat down, in the chair, in the dip, and gave a short laugh that was not a laugh. "She answered them until Christmas. Then nothing. And in January a letter came from the Board giving her an archive to go through, and I thought: something has happened to that girl, because she is not a person who lets a thing go quiet, she is a person who has made it her business for nine years to make things stop being quiet. And something had. And I got a bed, and I got on a train, and I telephoned a woman in Cursay whose name I had taken four years to find, and I said, is there a room with a window, and she said there is." Iain stood in the doorway of a room he had not been in for four years, in a village of four hundred people, and worked out that the sum of the parts was larger than he had been told. There were three of them in the room by then, because Margot had come up the stairs behind her mother with the hat box and had stopped, and had not crossed the floor. "Your turn," June said, without turning round. "I have had the chair." "You have had the chair." Somebody laughed. It was not Iain and it was not June. Margot Ellery had put her hand over her mouth and taken it away again and it was still in her eyes. "You have not slept," the daughter said. "I have slept." "You have taken the blue train, which stops at four in the morning, and then the bus, and then you have carried a bag up a hill." "I have slept perfectly," said June Ellery, and her voice went at the edge of it, and she took her hat off again although she was holding it. "I have slept perfectly for four months, and I have had a very good time thinking about this, and I am not going to cry in front of the keeper of a lighthouse I have never seen lit." There was a knock on the door of the shop below, and then Bess Oram's voice, going up the stairs two at a time. "I said, in my own kitchen, to a woman I've known since the war, that this village cannot stand seven more dark winters, and I said it out loud, and I said I'd put a light in my window and that it would not be the Board and it would not be anybody's permission." She came in with her coat on. "And then the AGM. Six houses. Six nights, the seventh of March to the twelfth. One lamp in one window one night, and you get your choice of the night, and the seventh night is the fourteenth, and the fourteenth is the Board's night, and the seventh window on the fourteenth is your window, Iain, and don't tell me you haven't got a lamp, because Bess Oram has been in your back room and Bess Oram has seen a lighthouse lens." "Six nights," June said. "In houses." "In houses. Ferryman's widow. The two Macdonald boys. The schoolhouse, which is my cousin's and my cousin has been asked. The chandlery's been let and the tenant's abroad so the landlord'll do it. And a house for a woman who was born on the second finger and hasn't put a lamp in a window since she was fourteen." She put her hands on her hips. "It is not a vigil. It is not a religious thing. It is nine people with a hankie and an oil lamp and no central heating, and if anybody from the Board asks, it is the Fishing Gala." "It's the last winter," Iain said. "It's the last winter," said Bess Oram. "That's the whole reason. Not the one hundred years. The four. That's the one we've all been counting." That night, from the tower, with Maren's lamp on the sill of a lamp-room with nothing in it, he counted the windows. There were forty-one that could be seen from the point and twenty-nine of them had a curtain. The first one up was the shop. Then, at eleven o'clock, one of the lights on the east side came on that he had not lit, and it was not Maren's lamp, and it was not a candle, and it was in his own kitchen, eight hundred yards below his hand, in a house where there had been no light of any kind after nine o'clock since the March that Maren died.