The Lighthouse

CHAPTER SIXTEEN. Moths

Bernard, lying on his side in the grass, touching a cornflower to Ester’s cheekbone and comparing its blue to the blue of her eye, said, ‘Come away with me.’

She waited only a moment before saying, ‘All right,’ and, as Bernard touched the cornflower to the blue of her necklace and the blue of the buttons on her blouse, she lay back in the fallen leaves.

She introduced him to her parents. Afterwards, her mother said to her, ‘Are you sure, Ester?’ and her father said, ‘You can still change your mind.’

But Ester did not change her mind. She went with Bernard to Hellhaus. While he ran the pub, she managed the accommodation, taking bookings, receiving guests, doing the housekeeping. There is a cleaner who comes very early each morning and does the bar, the public areas, before breakfast, but Ester takes care of the guest rooms herself.

There is not, in any case, a great deal to do. Of their ten bedrooms, they only ever have a few booked out at any one time. Sometimes rooms stand empty for entire seasons. She once left the light on and the window open in one of the bathrooms and did not go back for weeks. Eventually returning, she found the lightshade — a white glass bowl — full of moths.

When she was a girl, Ester was taken on a visit to the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. She was disturbed and fascinated by the museum’s extensive collections which included fish and invertebrates preserved in alcohol, stuffed mammals, and butterflies and moths pinned to display boards. A few days later, she was in her room at bedtime with the light still on, reading some romantic photo story in a magazine, when a moth flew in through the open window and began flittering around the lightbulb. This moth, which she pinned to the cork board in her bedroom, was the first in her collection, and the moth collection was the first of her various collections, although what she calls collecting, Bernard calls hoarding.

He is appalled by her bookshelves. He asks her, ‘Who needs so many Mills and Boons?’

‘I do,’ she says.

‘Why do you keep all these old lipsticks and perfume bottles?’ he says, opening her drawers, doing one of his spot checks. She has never known what he is looking for. Tipping out the contents of the envelope that she keeps in the drawer by her bed, the brittle remains of a dried-out flower falling to the floor, he says, ‘What’s all this crap?’

Not long after the day she spent lying in the grass with Bernard, Ester arrived in Hellhaus and sought out a doctor. She made an appointment, which was followed by another appointment at a clinic. And while she sat in the waiting room, she thought about those stilled creatures she had seen housed in the museum, an enormous number, and she thought about her own very small collection of night-flying moths. She still recalled the way that first one felt, the tickle of the powdery wings trapped between the palms of her hands.

A few years later, her father suffered a heart attack and died. When Ester went home, her mother said he’d been having palpitations. ‘Warning signs,’ she said, ‘which he ignored.’ And, she said, he’d already had one heart attack which had gone unnoticed.

‘He didn’t notice?’ said Ester. ‘How could he not notice?’

‘Sometimes you don’t,’ said her mother. ‘But the doctor said he’d had one. She could see the damage in his heart.’

At his funeral, Ester’s mother, cradling a relative’s baby boy in her arms, said to Ester for the first time, ‘Where’s my grandson?’ Since then, she has asked the same question, one way or another, each time she has seen Ester, until recently when she stopped talking about the grandchildren she did not have and instead began giving advice on preserving one’s looks in middle age.

Ester does not remember when she started drinking in the morning or sleeping in the middle of the day. She remembers her first infidelity, but she does not remember them all.

She wakes from her nap and sits for some time working on her face in her dressing table mirror, aware that her make-up fails to disguise the dark circles under her eyes and that it probably only draws attention to her crow’s-feet and the little lines around her mouth. Is she too old, she wonders, to have children?

She takes out the little wooden lighthouse which Bernard gave to her the morning after their wedding. She had asked Bernard for this vintage perfume, Dralle’s Illusion in a lighthouse case, a collector’s item, advertised in its day as ‘the most costly perfume sold in America’. There were two versions of the lighthouse case — a silver one and a smaller, cheaper wooden one. She was disappointed, on exchanging gifts, to find herself receiving the wooden version.

She applies the violet perfume, beneath which she still smells of the disinfectant with which she cleaned the guest bathrooms. Stoppering the vial, she picks up the silver lighthouse which is now standing beside the wooden one on her dressing table and which is missing its bottle. Putting her vial into the silver lighthouse, she returns the now empty wooden case to the drawer.

She hopes that Mr Futh will not notice his missing item, but if he does and if he mentions it she will tell him that she will talk to the people who transported the luggage. He will have to leave before there is any answer — in the morning, he will be gone.

She puts on her new dress which is beginning to look a little tired. She puts on her heels and some flashy earrings. Bernard does notice, she thinks, although he is barely speaking to her today.

She goes down to the bar and sits on her stool, waiting for Mr Futh, her only guest today. She is expecting him in the middle of the afternoon. She took receipt of his suitcase this morning and has put it at the end of his bed.

As she sips a drink, she notices Bernard looking her way, glancing repeatedly at her legs. Feeling flattered, she subtly adjusts her position so that her legs are well displayed, crossed towards him at the knee. After a while, just as her calves are going numb, the blood, she imagines, pooling in her veins, he heads in her direction and she turns towards him. Bernard, on his way into the back of the hotel, pauses beside her to suggest that she put on some hosiery.

Her mother came to visit once and Ester took her out for a stroll. They walked as far as the ferry point and then went for coffee and cake in the café near the train station. Ester told all the funny stories she could think of and her mother said, ‘Come home.’

When it is approaching sundown and Mr Futh has still not arrived, Ester remembers that he was late the previous weekend, although she cannot really remember him, cannot picture him at all.

She has a cup of good coffee in front of her, and an orange. The new girl is behind the bar with not enough to do. Bernard is sitting at a table with a drink and his newspaper, doing the crossword. Ester peels her orange onto the bar and a sweet, citrussy mist surrounds her, masking a warm meat smell. When the door opens, the three of them look up.

A thin man enters. He has caught the sun on his face, even though it is greasy with sun cream. Beneath what there is of his hair, his scalp is bright pink. His feet are in a dreadful state. Ester watches the man hobbling towards the bar. He makes a beeline for the new girl before glancing at Ester and turning in her direction instead.

Even though she has been expecting him, it is not until he is standing in front of her saying hello, saying her name, that she realises that this is Mr Futh. She can feel the heat coming off his skin. He asks for his room and she gives him the key. He says, ‘I’d be very grateful if you would bring my supper to my room,’ and then, after gazing at his feet for a while as if he is trying to think of something, he walks towards the lift.

She will fetch his supper when she has finished her orange. She turns back to the bar, and the new girl goes back to inspecting her nails, and only Bernard continues to stare at the doorway through which Mr Futh has disappeared.