A Year of Marvellous Ways (14 page)

26

I
was in a taproom in Fowey by the water. My eyes
were set on the pages of my book, but even though my eyes were occupied my ears were not and I heard a fisherman talking about an old sea captain he once served under, a man he dearly loved, a man who now kept light on the Eddystone Rocks. And the fisherman said the lighthouse keeper was close to death and needed help, and even though I was young I found the image distinctly profound.

I followed the fisherman out on to the quay and introduced myself. The fisherman explained that he was looking for someone to witness the ending of the lighthouse keeper’s life. The old sea captain, he said, wanted to die peacefully in his tower and be buried at sea, so no doctors were to be called. However, his two children who kept light with him were fearful to dispose of his body in case they were later accused of murdering him. I said I’d be the witness and help his passing, and days later we were in his boat waiting for the weather to turn.

The first morning we headed into a strong south-easterly wind that turned into a gale and sent us scurrying back with our hearts in our mouths. But then April arrived and the first morning of that month brought us a steady north-westerly breeze, which was the most favourable wind for a landing, and with sails full and hope billowing, we set our course for the famous tower in the sea.

I sat at the bow and focused my telescope on the horizon, that incandescent line that tugged at me as strongly as the moon tugged the earth. I was seventeen years old when I spied my first love standing at the base of the Eddystone light with a fishing rod in hand and his cap pulled low and us still a mere speck in his peripheral sight.

With an hour’s journey left to go the sea became as smooth as glass and the men rowed the remaining miles with seals at our side and gulls at our heads, and what was once a fissure on the horizon soon became the lighthouse itself. I never took my telescope away from that young man fishing on the rocks. Closer he came, closer, until the lens became a face and the face looked up and the man became a girl.

Hello! she shouted.

You’ve caught a fish, I said.

I’ve caught three!

We anchored the boat fore and aft and then I jumped. And she caught me.

The lighthouse keeper was days from death. He was in between worlds, sleeping mostly, but then he would wake suddenly, staring, as if he was looking back to his world from a very distant shore. The son never said a word. He stayed next to his father like a loyal dog, slept next to him too. Three little bunks in a simple round room: one small one, one medium, and a large one. I chose to sleep with the mice on the kitchen floor below.

As dusk approached the weather turned rapidly and the winds picked up and we had just enough time to bolt the door when the first wave hit us from the south-east. The lighthouse shuddered and rocked like a tree, and a wall of water hit the window and obliterated any daylight that still remained.

The daughter took my hand and led me up the stairs to the lantern gallery. It was a small room, with iron cross-bars at the windows. We cleaned the windows and lit the oil lamps as the waves pounded and the lighthouse shook. We were so high up and the night stretched out before me desolately. Every minute felt like an hour as the Channel swallowed the tower and the wind shrieked in joy at my terror.

And that night I never left the light and she never left me. It was so hot up there and it stank of oil, and we unbuttoned and sawdust and grime stuck to our clothes. And we listened to the lamps turn and the boom of waves and the squeal of the wind, and she halted my gasps of fear with a kiss, and I never stopped her. It was my first kiss. It lasted till dawn.

The son paced round and round the room and the lighthouse keeper continued to fade. I gave him water that rested on his lips and placed my hands across his heart, and under my palm I felt the last rhythms of life play out, the last bar of a song brought to its end by the half-time beat of a solitary drum.

And with his final breath the lighthouse keeper said:
He is the light of the world. Whoever follows him will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

We buried him at sea, as was his wish. In return, the sea gave two weeks of calm for the sacrifice. The gales abated and the sea lowered, and the birds were busy overhead, cawing and diving into the fertile depths, and that sun flickered brightly across the crests of waves like young promises of love.

The grimy lantern gallery became our bed, and as the wind shrieked so did I. In the depths of night I would stand outside on the balcony with sawdust stuck in my hair. I held tight to the rail and watched the sweep of light carve through that infinite blackness seeking something greater at the horizon edge. And sometimes migrating birds, stunned and disorientated by the glare of beams, would smash into the glass and fall dead on the balcony floor. My girl would take the birds down to her brother to give him something to love.

We were the centre of that liquid universe, for we were the night sun and we said to ships, Do not come too close, we have rocks at our feet. And the crash of waves sent white spray flying, and I am scared and exhilarated and a little bit in love too. I gripped the handrail and inched slowly around the balcony searching for that small channel of calm on the opposite side to the wind, and she came out and did the same – in the opposite direction – and we met at the back and there was no room to stand side by side, so we stood face to face until it became face on face until the only breeze there was, was warm, and came from her mouth, and smelt of sweet china tea.

She was the one who taught me to smell the air. So high up the air is clean and undisturbed, and when a strong south-westerly wind blew fierce, my senses bristled as it deposited sounds and smells from America, from another time, from my mother’s time. And there was a lament on the breeze as the songs rose up from the rivers and fields.

Two days before I was due to leave, the sky was cloudless and as blue as I had ever seen it. The sun was so warm, my arms were out, my trousers rolled high. The wind stirred fresh and a ground swell sent waves billowing over the rocks at low tide depositing frothy spume that, from such a height, looked to me like fallen clouds. The boy hadn’t moved from his bunk. He slept with grief surrounded by dead birds. She left food and water by his bed, then took my hand and led me up to the gallery.

I watched her smell the air. She was like an old-time fisherman scanning the sea for the dance of fish, feeling for the mood of the currents. The sea was her mistress – not I – and she would never leave her mistress. That’s why I never asked her to. Everything has its time. Ours was fourteen days of nights and tides.

She brought out a large kite. It had a metal frame and was covered by heavy white canvas. The tail was a thick cord a good fifty, sixty feet in length and attached to the cord was a dozen or so hooks ready and baited. She secured the handling rope around the balcony rail and when the wind was in the right direction she launched the kite off the balcony and guided it beyond the reef and steered it like a craft so that the tail and the hooks dipped into the sea. Up it swooped, down it swooped, and that bait came alive to fishy mouths.

It didn’t take long for her to shout and for me to help pull in the kite, and on my word, seven fish were hooked and flying through the air towards us. Oh the weight of it, Drake! But we pulled it in and unhooked the fish, and an hour later the kitchen was filled with the smell of cooking and the son lifted his head off the bed and out of grief to the unmistakable smell of freshly caught sea bass cooking over a burning stove.

The morning the boat came to pick me up, she gave me a coin. It’s always with me. I have it here, somewhere in my pocket. Wait a moment. Here, and she handed the coin to Drake.

An old penny, he said.

Yes.

Why a penny?

But she didn’t answer him straight away. She said: When I got in that boat, Drake, I never looked back. I couldn’t. I was seventeen and I loved her. And I had had my first taste of sex and it was wonderful. Even now I still shudder. She was wonderf— Now, why have you just turned away from me?

I didn’t.

Yes you did. Oh yes you did. Does this embarrass you –

No.

– an old woman talking about sex?

Of course not, he lied.

I was young once. Hard to believe, isn’t it? For most of my life I’ve
felt
young, but of course I haven’t been. I took being young for granted. That is a statement that can only be made when one is old. I know it may not look it, but this tired old body has loved passionately. It has done things that would obviously make you blush.

Blush, said Echo, emphatically. Drake blushed, scolded.

Why a penny? he asked, after a while.

I’m getting there, said Marvellous. Don’t hurry me. Especially not
now
.

She said: Waves fell over the stern and with full sails we surfed those waves and made good speed back towards Fowey. But then I could bear it no more. My heart ached and pulled my sight back to the rock and the tower now fading into the horizon. But there was a flickering light coming from that tower, a glint, like sunlight on a mirror, and I realised it was her light to me, and I knew she would always give me light and always get me home.

I felt cold then, yet the coin burned hot in my pocket. I brought it out and warmed my hands, and looked at the coin and saw the picture of Britannia ruling the waves, and I thought, That’s her, really. A little bit her. And then I noticed it. Positioned behind Britannia’s shoulder. The lighthouse. Smeaton’s lighthouse. And everything we had was in that lighthouse. And this coin was the key to that particular door of time.

I can no longer remember her name. And I can no longer see her face. Such is my mind now. Often I am left waiting at the entrance whilst ghosts of my life are ushered to the exit. Many times I never had the chance to say goodbye, but then again my father would have said, Sometimes you never do.
C’est la vie,
say the French. But what I do remember is the
feeling
of her face and it was a
good
feeling and from that I know it was a good face. We never saw each other again.

Never? said Drake.

No, she said. Never. I never knew what happened to her, but I often wondered, of course, whenever I saw a light flashing in the distance. But it wasn’t until the night of the Still-Talked-About Storm many years later, when the new Douglass lighthouse sat upon the reef instead, that I really got to know.

Got to know what? asked Drake.

That she was still alive, said Marvellous, and her face lit up.

How’d you find that out?

Through something quite incredible, really, she said.

Go on, said Drake.

And Marvellous relit her pipe and said, Well, that night, I’d just got past The Point when the weather suddenly turned. The sky became bruised and waves hit the boat sideways in patterns of four of ever increasing size. I thought it was a dark cloud at first, Drake – it looked like a cloud – until this wave bore down on me and the boat was sucked up against its spume-crested wall. Higher and higher we went, until the wave pulled back, and the boat hung in the darkness for a moment before falling and hitting a sea as unyielding as wet sand.

I awoke dazed, looking up through a portal to a star-drenched sky. And beyond the stars bands of milky light stretched out to the hush of infinity. It was beautiful. The boat was floating in the middle of a disc of calm. The storm had pulled away, was encircling but not engulfing, and I watched as waves crashed against an invisible wall thirty yards away. And I realised I had fallen upon a grave of lost seamen, a grave not marked by a cross but by this prayer-sodden peace.

Ten yards away now, the waves were gathering and my boat was drifting mastless and rudderless towards that unmarked boundary between Life and Death. And all the while, I never took my eyes away from the sky, never took my eyes away from that narrowing portal that gave a glimpse to the other side.

And that was where it came from, Drake. The
kite
. Out of the dark like a falling star, hurtling towards me, its long tail skimming across the mountainous sea. I stood up and when that tail fell just above the boat, I jumped and reached for it. There was a moment of suspension before I felt the rope wrapped firmly between my hands, before my feet lifted off. And when the kite felt my weight, up it swooped just as the waves crashed down and engulfed my boat below.

Up I flew and my stomach lurched. Then sometimes the kite would plunge and my feet would disappear in the froth of waves and sometimes I saw the lights of other ships appear and disappear in the towering swell, and sometimes birds flew at my side, gulls and cormorants mostly, and a small flock of redstarts with the African sun still warm on their feathers. And sometimes the half-moon appeared, and I felt half glad, half scared.

It was just before dawn when the wind abated, when the billows of grey cloud dissipated and became part of a black starless sky. The battered kite drifted into the shadow of a quiet shore and I descended.