The Lamplighters

60

After Christmas was done with, she travelled down to Cornwall for the anniversary.

It was an English afternoon, the sky the colour of Tupperware and the sea mixed up in greys and browns. Rain fell steadily, soaking ditches that were thick and mucky from autumn’s slip into winter, steeped in leaf mould and blackened wood. She’d brought the dog this time, who sniffed earnestly for foxholes. Drops spat on the shell of her umbrella. In the trees, abandoned doves’ nests fell apart, shards of ghostly eggshell glimmering among the moss.

Helen felt her bones inside her these days, aware of them as she started up the hill towards Mortehaven Cemetery – interlocking, blunt-white, her rib cage like something prehistoric. The dog stayed close to her side, sensing her need for company.

How much longer could she make this trip? This could be the last. Twenty years was an arbitrary milestone anyway. It wasn’t as though her husband would decide, it’s been long enough now, that’s a good round number; I ought to go home.

But still she came, just in case.

In case what?

The thirtieth of December, every year, she had to set eyes on the Maiden Rock, her partner in this peculiar birthday. Perhaps it was akin to keeping a wild animal in her living room, opening the door on it each day to make sure it knew she was still there. To leave it only bolstered its spars and gave it more strength than it deserved.

She doubted Jenny would come. At the ten-year mark, Helen had seen her from a distance, standing with the children, looking out to sea. She had thought about going over, but in the end had lost her nerve. Michelle hadn’t appeared for that one or any of them, she didn’t see the point and she wouldn’t today. She would call Helen next week with the excuse that her husband hadn’t wanted her to make the trip.

As they arrived at the cemetery, the wind filled her umbrella. She could hear the Atlantic Ocean as it crashed and spumed against mussel-crusted rocks, chucking up gusts of salt.

Helen knew where she was going, a headstone close to her husband’s memorial bench. The epitaph on the grave was stippled with lichen:

She stood for several minutes, until the rain stopped.

Yellow bruises tinged the clouds, the sunshine weak but willing. She put down her umbrella. Two years ago, then, Jory had died. Helen hadn’t known. In the time since the vanishing, the boatman had dipped in and out of her mind. Even though they’d been close in age, she had always felt towards him a motherly sort of gratitude. She supposed it was that he had been the first on the scene. He’d called for the lost keepers; later, he’d mourned them. Jory had been the longed-for relief, the rescuer who hadn’t been able to rescue, the shout in the wind that never found a reply.

The dog went off, following a scent between gravestones. She felt someone come up behind her, and was so confident in who this was that she could have greeted him without turning, but she wanted to see his face.

‘Hello,’ she said. She felt suddenly glad to be with another person.

The writer was wearing a red anorak and jeans, and shoes that had soaked up the rain. He had a canvas bag over his shoulder. His expression was chastened, a little apprehensive, as it dawned on him that she knew. It made sense to her now why he wasn’t suited and polished. He was a boatman’s son, had grown up tangled in nets.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked.

Dan Martin held a stone in his hand, smooth and pearlescent, with a white band across it, as fine as a cotton thread. He placed it on his father’s grave.

‘Dad thought for a long time it was his fault,’ he said. ‘That he should have done more for them. Got there quicker. Defied the weather. He couldn’t have, but still.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘I thought you might blame him too.’

‘It never crossed my mind.’

He put his hands in his pockets. ‘I’m sorry, Helen. I wanted you to talk to me without knowing who I was. Without changing what you told me or how you told it. As if I had nothing to do with it. I thought that would make it easier for you.’

A moment passed between them so warm and close that she had to glance away, remembering all he knew about her that no one else did.

‘I should have been honest,’ he admitted. ‘How did you find out?’

‘You’re not the only one interested in the truth.’

He returned her smile.

‘I couldn’t pursue the story while Dad was alive. Entertained him instead with books about guns and frigates. I think he’d be pleased, though. He wanted to talk to you himself.’

Helen searched the horizon for the Maiden Rock, disguised by mist but intermittently reflecting a shy gleam of light.

‘Twenty years,’ she said. ‘It feels different this time.’

‘How?’

‘I’m not sure. It might be me who feels different. All this talk, I’m glad it’s come out. I don’t know if Jenny feels the same, or Michelle – she told me she’d decided to meet you in the end. But it’s a curious thing. It brings that time back, but it also pushes it further out. It makes me see how many years have passed and what’s changed in my life. I’m not the woman I was. People think I should be looking back with sadness, and I do have sadness and I always will. But it’s long ago. It doesn’t hurt as much now.’

Dan hesitated. ‘I always pressed my father to talk about it,’ he said. ‘But he never did. It’s one of those things: nobody knows what words to use.’

‘Any are better than nothing.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you do.’

‘What?’

‘You know the words to use.’

He faced her. His low, straight brow; his seafarer’s eyes. He was so like his father.

‘It was always inside me to write about Arthur and the others,’ he said. ‘The day they disappeared was the day my life changed. My family changed, too. Dad never got over it. Neither did I. When I grew up, I tried to get a grip on the sea by putting it in my stories, but I never managed it because this was the one that kept asking to be told. Mortehaven was never the same after they vanished. No one knew about our town before. No one associated us with loss, or haunting. Children had happy childhoods, then they grew up and moved away and brought their own children back in the holidays to see the boats, and the Maiden Rock, and go crabbing on the quay. Afterwards, they didn’t.’

‘You couldn’t accept there being no answer,’ said Helen.

‘No. I couldn’t.’

‘But there isn’t one.’

He unzipped his bag. ‘It hasn’t stopped me searching. Over the years, I’ve asked anyone who’ll listen. I’ve given the riddle: three keepers go missing off a lighthouse, what do you think happened to them?’

‘What do you think happened to them?’

He pulled out a block of pages encased in a plastic sleeve, tied twice with rubber bands, intersecting in a cross.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Your book.’

‘Mine?’

‘And you were right, by the way. It didn’t end up being the project I thought it was going to be.’

‘You’re disappointed.’

‘No,’ he told her. ‘The opposite.’

He peeled off the bands.

‘It’s strange to think there’s no one out there.’ He walked over the stones to the edge of the headland. ‘That they’re all automated. No more keepers. No reliefs, no overdues. I got near her again a while back. We had the weather for it, so I thought, all right, Dad, just for you. There’s an odd feeling about it now. There must be around all lighthouses, but in particular the towers. It’s in knowing they’re deserted. All that stonework, all that way away, with no one inside. It’s an eerie atmosphere. You’d think it held on to something, wouldn’t you? When I went out there, it seemed like it did. Like it might.’

‘That Arthur could be there on the set-off,’ said Helen, ‘waving at you.’

‘There are people who still think they’ll come back.’

‘I hope you’re not one of them.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s unrealistic.’

‘The subject itself is unrealistic.’

‘Even so.’

‘To think that they lived?’

‘To think that they’d turn up after all this time.’ Helen stood next to him. ‘Arthur’s gone. He’s not coming back. You say you need answers, but I don’t. I’m not sure I ever did. I need acceptance. Peace. Hope. It’s taken twenty years, but I’m close.’

He passed her the book. ‘Here.’

It was heavy. ‘That’s a lot of work.’

‘Yes,’ said Dan, ‘it was. I finished it. I know more than I did before. But as for knowing what happened on that tower, Helen, I’ll never be certain of that. I’m not foolish enough to think that I might. There are a hundred endings, maybe there are more.’

Helen looked down at his soggy shoes, at the rain-spattered manuscript, and it was on the tip of her tongue to thank him. She had said sorry to Arthur and that she loved him. She always had, through the worst of it, right to the end. Even if he never heard it, it was out there now and that seemed the most important thing of all.

‘The truth is theirs,’ Dan said. ‘And yours. It isn’t mine or anyone else’s.’

The ocean air was raw and clean in her chest, as new as an early morning.

‘We’re not sure of the truth, are we,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that the point? Some mysteries just aren’t meant to be known. I’m talking about Arthur and the others, of course I am. But I’m talking about the rest of it too. You know. The rest. Why we do it. Why we strike a match. Why we built any lighthouses in the first place and every other thing you think on a good day might save a life. We’re not the ones who decide, but we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t set these attempts in place. Put in as many lights as we can, while we’re here. Get them shining bright. Keep them shining when the dark comes in.’

He watched her.

‘Go on then,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You write the ending.’

He took a sheaf of pages and threw them into the air.

‘What are you doing?’

Papers soared recklessly against the wind, scores of them in flight, bursting wings of white brilliance against sky and sea, drifting and scattering and dancing down to the water.

Helen laughed in shocked exhilaration as she followed his lead, flinging sheet after sheet extravagantly, like lottery winners showered by bank-note confetti.

She watched the pages disperse, gently rocking on the waves in every direction.

‘Thank you, Helen.’

The dog came back to her. Dan folded his bag and set off up the path.

As he reached the cemetery gate, Helen turned to see two figures standing beneath the yew. She would know them anywhere, like members of her family.

The writer stopped, to check she’d seen.

She dared to step closer, worried the women would disappear if she did.

But the nearer she drew, the clearer the vision became. Michelle’s arm was linked through Jenny’s, her expression soft and optimistic. Jenny looked the same as she always had. She hadn’t grown old. People didn’t, when you grew old beside them.

After a moment, Jenny raised her hand in hello.

Helen did the same.

Before she went to meet them, she turned to take one last look at the Maiden. The lighthouse was only the faintest line from here, a grey spike on a milk-green sea. The wind carried in; perhaps it had touched her face first, saltwater on both, drying in the fledgling sun. She knew the tower was empty, but her heart thought different. It always would. She could picture the Principal Keeper as clearly as if she were there; he was climbing the stairs, his face lifted to the light. Up to the lantern without touching the rail; further and further he travelled from the point of his dark descent, until all that was left, all that filled him, was a star almost done with its twinkling.