Lighthousekeeping. Jeanette Winterson
‘I never said anything about the new McCloud,’ said Pew.
‘Pew, you are not two hundred years old.’
‘And that’s a fact,’ said Pew, blinking like a kitten. ‘Oh yes, a fact.’
‘Miss Pinch says I shouldn’t listen to your stories.’
‘She doesn’t have the gift, that’s why.’
‘What gift?’
‘The gift of Second Sight, given to me on the day I went blind.’
‘What day was that?’
‘Long before you were born, though I saw you coming by sea.’
‘Did you know it would be me, me myself as I am, me?’
Pew laughed. ‘As sure as I knew Babel Dark – or someone very like me knew someone very like him.’
I was quiet. Pew could hear me thinking. He touched my head, in that strange, light way of his, like a cobweb.
‘It’s the gift. If one thing is taken away, another will be found.’
‘Miss Pinch doesn’t say that, Miss Pinch says Life is a Steady Darkening Towards Night. She’s embroidered it above her oven.’
‘Well, she never was the optimistic kind.’
‘What can you see with your Second Sight?’
‘The past and the future. Only the present is dark.’
‘But that’s where we live.’
‘Not Pew, child. A wave breaks, another follows.’
‘Where’s the present?’
‘For you, child, all around, like the sea. For me, the sea is never still, she’s always changing. I’ve never lived on land and I can’t say what’s this or that. I can only say what’s ebbing and what’s becoming.’
‘What’s ebbing?’
‘My life.’
‘What’s becoming?’
‘Your life. You’ll be the keeper after me.’
What kind of story, child?
A story with a happy ending.
There’s no such thing in all the world.
As a happy ending?
As an ending.
To make an end of it Dark had decided to marry.
His new wife was gentle, well read, unassuming, and in love with him. He was not in the least in love with her, but that, he felt, was an advantage. They would both work hard in a parish that fed on oatmeal and haddock. He would hew his path, and if his hands bled, so much the better.
They were married without ceremony in the church at Salts, and Dark immediately fell ill. The honeymoon had to be postponed, but his new wife, all tenderness and care, made him breakfast every day with her own hands, though she had a maid to do it for her.
He grew to dread the hesitant tread on the stairs to his room that overlooked the sea. She carried the tray so slowly that by the time she reached his room the tea had gone cold, and every day she apologised, and every day he told her to think nothing of it, and swallowed a sip or two of the pale liquid. She was trying to be economical with the tea leaves.
That morning, he lay in bed and heard the clinking of the cups on the tray, as she came slowly towards him. It would be porridge, he thought, heavy as a mistake, and muffins studded with raisins that accused him as he ate them. The new cook – her appointment – baked bread plain, and disapproved of ‘fanciness’ as she called it, though what was fancy about a raisin, he did not know.
He would have preferred coffee, but coffee was four times the price of tea.
‘We are not poor,’ he had said to his wife, who reminded him that they could give the money to a better cause than breakfast coffee.
Could they? He was not so sure, and whenever he saw a deserving lady with a new bonnet, it seemed to smell, to him, steamingly aromatic.
The door opened, she smiled – not at him, at the tray – because she was concentrating. He thought, irritably, that a tightrope walker he had seen on the docks would have carried this tray with more grace and skill, even on a line strung between two masts.
She set it down, with her usual air of achievement and sacrifice.
‘I hope you will enjoy it, Babel,’ she said, as she always did.
He smiled and took the cold tea.
Always. They had not been married long enough for there to be an always.
They were new, virgin, fresh, without habits. Why did he feel that he had lain in this bed forever, slowly filling up with cold tea?
Till death us do part.
He shivered.
‘You are cold, Babel,’ she said.
‘No, only the tea.’
She looked hurt, rebuked.
‘I make the tea before I toast the muffins.’
‘Perhaps you should do it afterwards.’
‘Then the muffins would be cold.’
‘They are cold.’
She picked up the tray. ‘I will make us a second breakfast.’
It was as cold as the first. He did not speak of it again.
He had no reason to hate his wife. She had no faults and no imagination. She never complained, and she was never pleased. She never asked for anything, and she never gave anything – except to the poor. She was modest, mild-mannered, obedient, and careful. She was as dull as a day at sea with no wind.
In his becalmed life, Dark began to taunt his wife, not out of cruelty at first, but to test her, perhaps to find her. He wanted her secrets and her dreams. He was not a man of good mornings and good nights.
When they went out riding, he would sometimes thrash her pony with a clean sing of his whip, and the beast would gallop off, his wife grabbing the mane because she was an uncertain horsewoman. He liked the pure fear in her face – a feeling at last, he thought.
He took her sailing on days when Pew would have been a brave man to take out his rescue boat. Dark liked to watch her, drenched and vomiting, begging him to steer home and when they got the boat back, half capsized with water, he’d declare it a fine day’s sailing, and make her walk to the house holding his hand.
In the bedroom, he turned her face down, one hand against her neck, the other bringing himself stiff, then he knocked himself into her in one swift move, like a wooden peg into the tap-hole of a barrel. His fingermarks were on her neck when he had finished. He never kissed her.
When he wanted her, which was never as herself, but sometimes, because he was a young man, he trod slowly up the stairs to her room, imagining he was carrying a tray of greasy muffins and a pot of cold tea. He opened the door, smiling, but not at her.
When he had finished with her, he sat across her, keeping her there, the way he would keep his dog down when he went out shooting. In the chilly bedroom – she never lit a fire – he let his semen go cold on her before he let her get up.
Then