Lighthousekeeping. Jeanette Winterson

always the lighthousekeeper who told it, while his Second or his wife stayed with the light. These stories went from man to man, generation to generation, hooped the sea-bound world and sailed back again, different decked maybe, but the same story. And when the lightkeeper had told his story, the sailors would tell their own, from other lights. A good keeper was one who knew more stories than the sailors. Sometimes there’d be a competition, and a salty dog would shout out “Lundy” or “Calf of Man” and you’d have to answer, “The Flying Dutchman” or “Twenty Bars of Gold“.’

      Pew was serious and silent, his eyes like a faraway ship.

      ‘I can teach you – yes, anybody – what the instruments are for, and the light will flash once every four seconds as it always does, but I must teach you how to keep the light. Do you know what that means?’

      I didn’t.

      ‘The stories. That’s what you must learn. The ones I know and the ones I don’t know.’

      ‘How can I learn the ones you don’t know?’

      ‘Tell them yourself.’

      

      Then Pew began to say of all the sailors riding the waves who had sunk up to their necks in death and found one last air pocket, reciting the story like a prayer.

      ‘There was a man close by here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned was telling himself stories like a madman, so that as one ended another began. On the seventh day he had told all the stories he knew and that was when he began to tell himself as if he were a story, from his earliest beginnings to his green and deep misfortune. The story he told was of a man lost and found, not once, but many times, as he choked his way out of the waves. And when night fell, he saw the Cape Wrath light, only lit a week it was, but it was, and he knew that if he became the story of the light, he might be saved. With his last strength he began to paddle towards it, arms on either side of the spar, and in his mind the light became a shining rope, pulling him in. He took hold of it, tied it round his waist, and at that moment, the keeper saw him, and ran for the rescue boat.

      ‘Later, putting up at The Razorbill, and recovering, he told anyone who wanted to listen what he had told himself on those sea-soaked days and nights. Others joined in, and it was soon discovered that every light had a story – no, every light was a story, and the flashes themselves were the stories going out over the waves, as markers and guides and comfort and warning.’

       Cliff-perched, wind-cleft,

      the church seated 250, and was almost full at 243 souls, the entire population of Salts.

      

      On 2 February 1850, Babel Dark preached his first sermon.

      His text was this: ‘Remember the rock whence ye are hewn, and the pit whence ye are digged.’

      The innkeeper at The Razorbill was so struck by this sermon and its memorable text that he changed the name of his establishment. From that day forth, he was no longer landlord of The Razorbill, but keeper of The Rock and Pit. Sailors, being what they are, still called it by its former name for a good sixty years or more, but The Rock and Pit it was, and is still, with much the same low-beamed, inward-turned, net-hung, salt-dashed, seaweed feel of forsakenness that it always had.

      

      Babel Dark used his private fortune to build himself a fine house and a walled garden and to equip himself comfortably there. He was soon seen in earnest Biblical discussion with the one lady of good blood in the place – a cousin of the Duke of Argyll, a Campbell in exile, out of poverty and some other secret. She was no beauty, but she read German fluently and knew something of Greek.

      They were married in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, and Dark took his new wife to London for her honeymoon, and thereafter he never took her anywhere again, not even to Edinburgh. Wherever he went, riding alone on a black mare, no one was told, and no one followed.

      There were disturbances at night, sometimes, and the Manse windows all flamed up, and shouts and hurlings of furniture or heavy objects, but question Dark, as few did, and he would say it was his soul in peril, and he fought for it, as every man must.

      His wife said nothing, and if her husband was gone for days at a time, or seen wandering in his black clothes over the high rocks, then let him be, for he was a Man of God, and he accepted no judge but God himself.

      One day, Dark saddled his horse and disappeared.

      He was gone a month, and when he returned, he was softer, easier, but with plain sadness on his face.

      After that, the month-long absences happened twice a year, but no one knew where he went, until a Bristol man put up at The Razorbill, that is to say The Rock and Pit.

      He was a close-guarded man, eyes as near together as to be always spying on one another, and a way of tapping his finger and thumb, very rapid, when he spoke. His name was Price.

      One Sunday, after Price had been to church, he was sitting over the fire with a puzzlement on his face, and it was finally got out of him that if he hadn’t seen Babel Dark before and just recently, then the man had the devil’s imprint down in Bristol.

      Price claimed that he had seen Dark, wearing very different clothes, visiting a house in the Clifton area outside Bristol. He took note of him for his height – tall, and his bearing – very haughty. He had never seen him with anyone, always alone, but he would swear on his tattoo that this was the same one.

      ‘He’s a smuggler,’ said one of us.

      ‘He’s got a mistress,’ said another.

      ‘It’s none of our business,’ said a third. ‘He does his duties here and he pays his bills and handsomely. What else he does is between him and God.’

      The rest of us were not so sure, but as nobody had the money to follow him, none of us could know whether Price’s story was true or not. But Price promised to keep a look out, and to send word, if he ever saw Dark or his like again.

      ‘And did he?’

      ‘Oh yes, indeed he did, but that didn’t help us to know what Dark was about, or why.’

      ‘You weren’t there then. You weren’t born.’

      ‘There’s always been a Pew in the lighthouse at Cape Wrath.’

      ‘But not the same Pew.’

      Pew said nothing. He put on his radio headphones, and motioned me to look out to sea. ‘The McCloud’s out there,’ he said.

      I got the binoculars and trained them on a handsome cargo ship, white on the straight line of the horizon. ‘She’s the most haunted vessel you’ll ever see.’

      ‘What haunts her?’

      ‘The past,’ said Pew. ‘There was a brig called the McCloud built two hundred years ago, and that was as wicked a ship as sailed. When the King’s navy scuttled her, her Captain swore an oath that he and his ship would some day return. Nothing happened until they built the new McCloud, and on the day they launched her, everyone on the dock saw the broken sails and ruined keel of the old McCloud rise up in the body of the ship. There’s a ship within a ship and that’s fact.’

      ‘It’s not a fact.’

      ‘It’s as true as day.’

      I looked at the McCloud, fast, turbined, sleek, computer-controlled. How could she carry in her body the trace-winds of the past?

      ‘Like a Russian doll, she is,’ said Pew, ‘one ship inside another, and on a stormy night you can see the old McCloud hanging like a gauze on the upper deck.’

      ‘Have you seen her?’