Lighthousekeeping. Jeanette Winterson
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went back to Cambridge that September, and when he came home at Christmas time, he announced his intention of going into the Church. He was dressed all in grey, and there was no sign of his bright waistcoats and red top boots. The only thing he still wore from his former days was a ruby and emerald pin that he had bought very expensive when he first took up with Molly O’Rourke. He’d given her one just like it for her dress.
‘His father was upset and didn’t believe for a minute that he had got to the bottom of the story, but he tried to make the best of it, and even invited the Bishop to dinner, to try and get a good appointment for his son.
‘Dark would have none of it. He was going to Salts.
“Salts?” said his father. “That God-forsaken sea-claimed rock?’
‘But Babel thought of the rock as his beginning, and it was true that as a child his favourite pastime when it rained was to turn over the book of drawings that Robert Stevenson had made, of the foundations, the column, the keeper’s quarters, and especially the prismatic diagrams of the light itself. His father had never taken him there, and now he regretted it. One week at The Razorbill would surely have been enough for life.
‘Well, it was a wet and wild and woebegone January when Babel Dark loaded two trunks onto a clipper bound seaward from Bristol and out past Cape Wrath.
‘There were plenty of good folks to see him go, but Molly O’Rourke wasn’t amongst them because she had gone to Bath to give birth to her child.
‘The sea smashed at the ship like a warning, but she made good headway, and began to blur from view, as we watched Babel Dark, standing wrapped in black, looking at his past as he sailed away from it forever.’
‘Did he live in Salts all his life?’
‘You could say yes, and you could say no.’
‘Could you?’
‘You could, depending on what story you were telling.’
‘Tell me!’
‘I’ll tell you this – what do you think they found in his drawer, after he was dead?’
‘Tell me!’
‘Two emerald and ruby pins. Not one – two.’
‘How did he get Molly O’Rourke’s pin?’
‘Nobody knows.’
‘Babel Dark killed her!’
‘That was the rumour, yes, and more.’
‘What more?’
Pew leaned close, the brim of his sou’wester touching mine. I felt his words on my face.
‘That Dark never stopped seeing her. That he married her in secret and visited her hidden and apart under another name for both of them. That one day, when their secret would have been told, he killed her and others besides.’
‘But why didn’t he marry her?’
‘Nobody knows. There are stories, oh yes, but nobody knows. Now off to bed while I tend the light.’
Pew always said ‘tend the light’, as though it were his child he was settling for the night. I watched him moving round the brass instruments, knowing everything by touch, and listening to the clicks on the dials to tell him the character of the light.
‘Pew?’
‘Go to bed.’
‘What do you think happened to the baby?’
‘Who knows? It was a child born of chance.’
‘Like me?’
‘Yes, like you.’
I went quietly to bed, DogJim at my feet because there was nowhere else for him. I curled up to keep warm, my knees under my chin, and hands holding my toes. I was back in the womb. Back in the safe space before the questions start. I thought about Babel Dark, and about my own father, as red as a herring. That’s all I know about him – he had red hair like me.
A child born of chance might imagine that Chance was its father, in the way that gods fathered children, and then abandoned them, without a backward glance, but with one small gift. I wondered if a gift had been left for me. I had no idea where to look, or what I was looking for, but I know now that all the important journeys start that way.
As an apprentice to lighthousekeeping my duties were as follows:
1) Brew a pot of Full Strength Samson and take it to Pew.
2) 8 am. Take DogJim for a walk.
3) 9 am. Cook bacon.
4) 10 am. Sluice the stairs.
5) 11 am. More tea.
6) Noon. Polish the instruments.
7) 1 pm. Chops and tomato sauce.
8) 2 pm. Lesson – History of Lighthouses.
9) 3 pm. Wash our socks etc.
10) 4 pm. More tea.
11) 5 pm. Walk the dog and collect supplies.
12) 6 pm. Pew cooks supper.
13) 7 pm. Pew sets the light. I watch.
14) 8 pm. Pew tells me a story.
15) 9 pm. Pew tends the light. Bed.
Numbers 3, 6, 7, 8 and 14 were the best times of the day. I still get homesick when I smell bacon and Brasso.
Pew told me about Salts years ago, when wreckers lured ships onto the rocks to steal the cargo. The weary seamen were desperate for any light, but if the light is a lie, everything is lost. The new lighthouses were built to prevent this confusion of light. Some of them lit great fires on their platforms, and burned out to sea like a dropped star. Others had only twenty-five candles, standing in the domed glass like a saint’s shrine, but for the first time, the lighthouses were mapped. Safety and danger were charted. Unroll the paper, set the compass, and if your course is straight, the lights will be there. What flickers elsewhere is a trap or a lure.
The lighthouse is a known point in the darkness.
‘Imagine it,’ said Pew, ‘the tempest buffeting you starboard, the rocks threatening your lees, and what saves you is a single light. The harbour light, or the warning light, it doesn’t matter which; you sail to safety. Day comes and you’re alive.’
‘Will I learn to set the light?’
‘Aye, and tend the light too.’
‘I hear you talking to yourself.’
‘I’m not talking to myself, child, I’m about my work.’ Pew straightened up and looked at me seriously. His eyes were milky blue like a kitten’s. No one knew whether or not he had always been blind, but he had spent his whole life in the lighthouse or on the mackerel boat, and his hands were his eyes.
‘A long time ago, in 1802 or 1892, you name your date, there’s most sailors could not read nor write. Their officers read the navy charts, but the sailors had their own way. When they came past Tarbert Ness or Cape Wrath or Bell Rock, they never thought of such places as positions on the map, they knew them as stories. Every lighthouse has a story to it – more than one, and if you sail from here to America, there’ll not be a light you pass where the keeper didn’t have a story for the seamen.
In those days the