The Lamplighters Page 2
The men’s tread sounds the death drum, dogged and deep. Already they long for the safety of the tug and the promise of land.
To the kitchen they come. Twelve feet across and a socking weight tube set down the middle. Three cupboards are mounted on the wall, inside which are tins of food, precisely stacked: baked beans, broad beans, rice, soup, OXO cubes, luncheon meat, corned beef, pickles. On the counter sits an unopened jar of frankfurters, tightly packed like tissue in a science lab. By the window there’s a sink – red tap for rainwater, silver for fresh – and a washing-up bowl left to dry on its side. A wizened onion remains in the cavity between the inner and outer walls, on the racks the keepers use as a larder. Over the sink hangs a mirrored cabinet that doubles as their bathroom: the men find toothbrushes, combs, a bottle of Old Spice and one of Tabac. Next to that a dresser containing cutlery, plates and cups, everything organized and put away with the expected level of care. The clock on the wall has stopped at eight forty-five.
‘What’s this—?’ says the man with the moustache.
The table is laid for a meal uneaten. Two places, not three – a knife and fork each, a plate waiting for food. Two empty cups. Salt and pepper. A tube of mustard and an ashtray, cleaned. The counter is Formica, a half-moon, and fits snugly round the weight tube; there’s a bench tucked under and two chairs, one with the foam spilling out and the other positioned askew as if the person sitting in it had risen quickly.
Another man, the one with the comb-over, checks the Rayburn in case there’s something warming, but the temperature’s fallen and anyway it’s empty. Through the window they can hear the sea, sighing against the rocks below.
‘I have no idea,’ he says, and it is less an answer than an admission of general, fearful ignorance.
The men glance to the ceiling.
Nowhere to hide on a lighthouse, that’s the thing. In every room from bottom to top, it’s two strides to the weight tube and two to the other side.
Up they go to the bedroom. Three banana bunks curved round the shape of the wall, each with its curtain open. The beds are fastidiously made, with sheets drawn tight, pillows and camel-coloured blankets scratchy to the touch. Above are two shorter bunks for visitors and a ladder for climbing. Under the stairs, a storage hollow with its curtain pulled. The comb-over draws it, breath held, but all he finds is a cowhide jacket and two hanging shirts.
Seven floors up and they’re a hundred feet above sea level. In the living room there’s a television set and three worn Ercol armchairs. On the floor by the biggest, they’re guessing it’s the Principal Keeper’s, is a cup with an inch of cold tea in the bottom. Behind the tube is the flue coming up from downstairs. Perhaps the PK could come down to them now; he’s been up in the lantern cleaning the mantle. The others are there too, out on the gallery. Sorry they didn’t hear.
The wall clock here reads the same, stopped time. Quarter to nine.
Double doors access the service room on the eighth. Feasibly the dead men could have been here – the cavity would have stopped the smell escaping. But, as they have come to expect, it is deserted. They are running out of tower. Only the light left. Nine floors found and nine floors empty. Up to the top and there she is, the Maiden lantern, a giant gas mantle encased by lenses fragile as birds’ wings.
‘That’s it. They’re gone.’
Feathery clouds advance on the horizon. The breeze freshens, switching direction, flicking ridges of white onto the jumping waves. It’s as if those keepers were never here in the first place. That, or they climbed to the top and simply flew away.
II
1992
4
THE RIDDLE
Independent, Monday, 4 May 1992
AUTHOR PLOTS TO SOLVE MAIDEN ROCK MYSTERY
Adventure novelist Dan Sharp is out to discover the truth behind one of the greatest maritime mysteries of our age. Sharp, the author of naval action bestsellers Eye of the Storm, Quiet Water and Dreadnought Down, grew up by the sea and has long been inspired by the unsolved vanishing. Diving into factual writing for the first time, he explains: ‘The story of the Maiden Rock has captivated me since my childhood. I want to shed new light on the matter by speaking to the people at the heart of it.’
Twenty years ago, in the winter of 1972, three lighthouse keepers disappeared from a Cornish sea tower, miles from Land’s End. In their wake, they left behind a series of clues: an entrance door locked from the inside, two clocks stopped at the same time, and a table laid for a meal uneaten. The Principal Keeper’s weather log described a storm circling the tower – but the skies, inexplicably, had been clear.
What strange fate befell these doomed men? Sharp intends to find out. He adds: ‘This riddle has everything a fiction writer looks for – drama, mystery, peril on the seas. Only it’s real. I believe every puzzle can be solved: it’s a question of looking in the right places. For my money, someone out there knows more than we realize.’
5
HELEN
So this is it, she thought, as she watched him park his car a little way down the street, a Morris Minor in racing green with its exhaust hanging off the back like a cocked tobacco pipe. Helen wondered why he drove such a thing. He must be rich, if the claims on his books were to be believed: number-one bestselling author and all that.
She spotted him immediately, even though he hadn’t given her a description over the telephone. Perhaps she should have asked for one because you couldn’t be too careful about letting strangers into your home. It had to be him, though. He wore a navy-blue pea coat and a fixed, scholarly frown, as if he spent hours hunched over manuscripts that never quite gave him the time of day. He was younger than she had imagined, not yet forty.
‘Get off,’ Helen said absent-mindedly, the dog’s whiskers brushing her palm; ‘I’ll take you out after.’ She would go up to the woods, walk her in the dank wet mulch. It calmed her to think about that: that there would be an after.
The writer carried a canvas bag, which she pictured full of receipts and cigarette lighters; she could see him living in a house with the beds unmade and cats asleep on the counters. He’d have had Weetabix for breakfast, something that came out of a torn box, but he’d run out of milk so a squirt of water from the tap. A fag while he thought about the Maiden Rock and scribbled down the questions he wanted to ask.
All these years later, she still did it. Made an assessment on sight, before any of the rest, the yardstick against which she held every new person. Had they lost someone, as she had? Did they understand what that felt like? Were they on her side of the window, or the other, impossibly distant one? She didn’t suppose it mattered if he had or he hadn’t: he was a writer; he could imagine it.
Though on that point Helen was sceptical: his ability to imagine what could not be imagined. She thought of it as falling. Weightless. Disbelieving. Waiting to be caught but nobody ever did, for years and years and on it went and down she fell and there were no resolutions, no clarity or closure. That had become a fashionable word these days – closure – for people whose relationships failed or who got fired from their jobs, and she thought how those were relatively straightforward things to move on from; they didn’t push you over the ledge and let you drop. So it was to lose a person to the wind. No trace, no reason, no clue. What could Dan Sharp, whose game was battleships and weaponry and men who drank themselves dumb in the dockyards, imagine of that?
She yearned to reciprocate with others of her kind: to identify them and be identified in return. She would be able to tell their loss in their faces, not an obvious thing, some bitterness or resignation, those ghouls she had tried for so long to throw off. She’d say, ‘You know, don’t you? You know,’ and it was anyone’s guess what they’d offer in return, but if there wasn’t that to come of it, some upside in the matter of kindness and understanding, then what was it for?
In the meantime, the ghouls continued to slip between her clothes in the wardrobe, making her shiver when she got dressed in the morning, or
she discovered them crouching in corners, picking the skin off their thumbs. She had no certainty, said the therapists (it was a while since she had visited them), and certainty was at least a millimetre one could get one’s nails around.
Here he was then, opening the gate. He fumbled closing it behind him because the latch was rusted. ‘Scarborough Fair’ played on the kitchen radio; it made Helen woozy, the melancholy of it, all that about sea foam and cambric shirts and true love sourer than sweet. Wild thoughts entered her head, from time to time, about Arthur and the others, but on the whole, she’d learned to keep them at bay. What secrets a lighthouse could tell. The men’s were buried underwater, like hers.
Helen remembered her husband in pieces, parched scales that blew about like leaves coming in through the kitchen door. Sometimes she would catch hold of one and be able to look at it properly, but mostly she watched those leaves blowing about her ankles and wondered how on earth she’d find the energy to sweep them up.
Nothing changed, in the aftermath of loss. Songs kept getting written. Books kept getting read. Wars didn’t stop. You saw a couple arguing by the trolleys at Tesco before getting in the car and slamming the door. Life renewed itself, over and over, without sympathy. Time surged on in its usual rhythms, those comings and goings, beginnings and ends, sensible progressions that fixed things in place, without a thought to the whistling in the woods on the outskirts of town. It began as a whistle, expelled from dry lips. Over the years it sharpened to a bright, continual note.
That note sounded now, with the ringing of the doorbell. Helen put her hands in the pockets of her cardigan and rolled the lint between her fingers. She liked how it felt, rolling it there right under her nail, a painful thing that wasn’t quite painful.
6
HELEN
Come in. Do come in. I’m sorry it’s a mess. It’s kind of you to say it isn’t, but really it is. Can I make you tea, coffee? Tea, lovely – milk and sugar? Of course, everyone has milk and sugar these days. My grandma used to take hers black with a slice of lemon; they don’t do that much any more. Cake? I’m afraid it isn’t homemade.
So, you’re an author, how fascinating. I’ve never met an author before. It’s one of those things everyone says they could do, isn’t it, writing a book. I did think about it myself but I’m not a writer – I can think of what I want to write but it’s difficult to get that across to other people and I suppose that’s the difference. After Arthur died everybody said it would be a good thing, to put my feelings down on paper so they were out of my head. You must believe that, in being creative yourself, to have something creative to do makes you feel like a more rounded person? Anyway, I never did write anything. I’m not sure what I would have written that I’d want a stranger to read.
Twenty years, my goodness, it’s hard to believe. May I ask why it is you’ve chosen our story? If you’re hoping my husband’s like the macho men in your books and I’m going to give you a tale about missions and shipwrecks or whatever it is, you’ll have to think again.
Yes, it’s intriguing, if you believe the hearsay. For me, being on the inside, and being so close to it, I don’t think of it like that; but you shouldn’t feel bad about that, no, you shouldn’t. I’m fine to talk about Arthur; it keeps him with me that way. If I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, I’d have hit trouble a long time ago. You have to admit what happens in your life.
I’ve heard it all, over the years. Arthur was abducted by aliens. He was murdered by pirates. He was blackmailed by smugglers. He killed the others, or they killed him, and then each other and then themselves – over a woman or a debt, or a washed-up treasure chest. They were haunted by ghosts or kidnapped by the government. Threatened by spies or gobbled by sea serpents. They went lunatic, one or all of them. They had secret lives no one knew about, riches buried on South American plantations you could only find by a cross on a map. They sailed off to Timbuktu and liked it so much they never came back . . . When that Lord Lucan disappeared two years down the line, there were those who said he’d gone to meet Arthur and the others on a desert island, presumably with the poor beggars who flew through the Bermuda Triangle. I mean, honestly! I’m sure you’d prefer that, but I’m afraid it’s all ridiculous. We’re not in your world now, we’re in mine; and this isn’t a thriller, it’s my life.
Is five minutes OK? As in the minutes of a clock, if you think of the cake as a clock, that’s how big the piece is I’m cutting. Pass your plate then; there we go. I must say I’ve never got the hang of baking. It seems the thing for women, though I don’t know why. Arthur was better at these things than me. Did you know they learned to bake bread as part of their training? You learn all sorts being a lighthouse keeper.
Of all the towers, I think the Bishop has the best name. It sounds very stately to me. It makes me think of that chess piece, quiet and dignified. Arthur was extremely good at chess; I never played him on that account because we both like to win, and I wasn’t used to ceding to him or him to me. As a keeper he had to be enthusiastic about cards and games because there’s so much time to spare. It’s a bonding thing as well, a game of cribbage or a hand of gin rummy. And the tea! If a keeper’s skilled at any one thing, it’s drinking tea. They’d get through thirty cups a day. On a lot of stations, the only rule was, if you’re in the kitchen, you make the tea.
Lighthouse people are ordinary. You’ll find that out and I hope it doesn’t disappoint you. People on the outside think of it as a clandestine sort of occupation, seeing as we’re quite closed off in the way we lead our lives. They think being married to a lighthouse keeper must be glamorous, because of the mystery of it, but it isn’t. If I had to sum it up, I’d say you’ve got to be prepared for long periods of time apart and short, intense periods of time together. The intense periods are like a couple of distant friends reuniting, which can be exciting but challenging as well. You’ve had things your way for eight weeks and then a man comes into your home and suddenly he’s the master of the house and you have to play second fiddle. It could be very unsettling. It’s not a conventional marriage. Ours certainly wasn’t.
Do I miss the sea? No, not at all. I couldn’t wait to move away from it after what happened. That’s why I came here, to the city. I never cared for the sea. Where we used to live in keepers’ cottages we were surrounded, it was all you could see from the windows, everywhere you turned. Sometimes you felt you could be living in a fishbowl. When there was a storm and we got some lightning that was quite spectacular, and the sunsets were pretty too, but on the whole it’s a grey thing, the sea, big and grey and not much happens on it. Although it’s more green than grey, I would say, like sage, or eau de Nil. Did you know that ‘eau de Nil’ means ‘water of the Nile’? I always thought it meant ‘water of nothing’, which is how the sea makes me feel, in a way, so I still think of it like that. Water of nothing.
It doesn’t make any more sense to me this morning than on the day Arthur disappeared. It does get easier, though. Time gives you a bit of distance where you can look back at whatever’s happened to you and not feel all the feelings you once had; those feelings have calmed down and they’re not at the forefront of your mind in the way they are at the beginning. It’s odd because on some days it doesn’t seem so strange, what they found on that tower – and I think, well, a heavy sea must have washed up and drowned them. Then on others it strikes me as so outlandish that it takes my breath away. There are too many details I can’t shake off, like the locked door and the stopped clocks, they nag at me, and if I start thinking about it at night, I have to be strict with myself and get rid of those thoughts. Otherwise I’d never sleep, and I’ll remember the view of the sea from our cottage window, and it seems so huge and empty and uncaring that I have to turn the radio on for company.
I think what transpired is what I just told you: that the sea came up suddenly and caught them unaware. Occam’s razor, it’s called. The law that says the simplest solution is usually right. If you’ve got a mystery, don’t go co
mplicating it beyond the sum of its parts.
Arthur drowning is the only realistic explanation there is. If you don’t agree then you’re making your way down all sorts of fanciful roads such as ghostly things and conspiracy theories and all the nonsense I just told you people believe. People will believe anything, and given the choice they prefer lies to the truth because lies are usually more interesting. Like I said, the sea isn’t interesting, not when you’re looking at it every day. But it was the sea that took them. There isn’t a doubt in my mind.
The thing you need to know about a tower lighthouse – have you ever been on a tower? – is that it comes directly up out of the sea. It’s not a rock station where you’re on an island and there’s a bit of land around you where you can walk or have a vegetable plot or keep some sheep or whatever it is you want to do; and it’s not a land light, where you’re on the mainland so you stay close to your family, and when you’re not on duty you can drive into the village and go about your life as normal so long as you’re fulfilling your responsibilities when your watch comes about. A tower light’s just stuck out there in the sea, so there isn’t anywhere for the keepers to be except inside the lighthouse or out on the set-off. You could go running around the set-off if you wanted some exercise, but you’d get dizzy very fast doing that.
Oh, right, sorry: the set-off’s the platform underneath the entrance door, it wraps all the way round like a big doughnut. The set-off’s about twenty or thirty feet above the water, which sounds like a lot, but if you’re out there and a wave comes up and catches you then you’re gone. I’ve heard about keepers fishing from it, or bird watching, or passing the time of day reading a book. I’m sure Arthur used to do that because he was always one for reading; he said being on a lighthouse was his time to learn, so he took all sorts of subjects off with him, novels and biographies and books about space. He became interested in geology – stones and rocks, you know. He’d collect and sort them. He said he could learn all about the different eras that way.