Beyond the Sea (3 page)

AS FREYA APPROACHED
the island's jetty, she thrust the boat's engine into reverse. Seconds later, she killed it altogether. For a moment she was surrounded by a silent darkness. Then the lighthouse beam swept over the bay. It moved for three seconds over the sea before it disappeared for a further seven. Then it emerged and vanished again in the same revolution. As Freya watched, a long-forgotten memory emerged from the deep.

She was young and newly in love, on her way to the island for the first time with Jack to meet his parents. She would have followed him to the ends of the earth, and she told him so.

‘Well, Frey, where we're going isn't all that far from there.'

His blue eyes had twinkled as he said it, his light hair flurried by the breeze, sitting beside her on the fishing boat driven by Callum.

She had laughed as she looked at Jack, then turned her attention once more to the ocean and the darkening evening light that fell upon it. In that instant, in the gloaming, the lighthouse lamp had come alive. It was the beginning of its nightly vigil. As light danced over the bay, the beauty of it took Freya by surprise. She watched again and again, the expansive sweep across the ocean, captivated by the thought of its endless repetition, until Jack pulled her face back towards his. For a moment he simply stared at her. Then he had kissed her and she had forgotten about the lighthouse entirely.

Freya pushed the memory down, jumped out of the boat and tethered it to the jetty. Then she grabbed her bags and began the steep climb up to the lighthouse. With each sweep of the lamp she could see the dark tower briefly illuminated, and from time to time, as she ascended the path, the squat outline of the cottage around its base. Before long, she reached the gate in the wall of the lighthouse enclosure and, moving through it, crossed the garden. At the cottage door, Freya searched in her pockets for her keys. By now her heart was pounding, and not just from the climb.

She unlocked the door and pushed it open. The peculiar mustiness of an abandoned space greeted her. She peered into the darkness of the interior for a moment and then stepped over the threshold into the kitchen. Ignoring the pile of letters scattered over the doormat, unopened and unanswered for the last year, she put down her bags and moved to the wall lights. She flicked them on and turned to look at the kitchen once more.

Under the hard yellow light, everything seemed smaller, emptier, more colourless than she remembered; the ceiling low, the table bleached and bare, the kitchen worktops narrow and naked. It was all so devoid of life. Beyond the kitchen stretched the hallway. She could just make out the locked door to the lighthouse tower on the left and beyond it, she knew, although she couldn't see, were the bedrooms – the guests' furthest away, then hers, Sam's closest. As she thought of her son's room, reeking with the same cold, forsaken smell now hanging in her nostrils, Freya's stomach lurched and she struggled to catch her breath. Maybe this had been a mistake after all.

She turned and switched off the overhead lights and rested her forehead against the wall. Its coolness soothed her and eventually her breathing slowed. Looking into the darkness, the deeper smudges at its edges, she crossed the kitchen into the sitting room and lay down on the sofa. In front of her was the large picture window built into the western wall, with its magnificent view out over the sea. She caught the sweep of the lamp and watched it over and over until a small feeling of comfort balled inside her. She would stay here for a while. She would stay here, quietly watching the light, until she was ready to go to bed.

SHE FELT HIS
hands upon her, bringing her out of the depths of sleep, those unmistakeable hands that she would know anywhere, simply by touch, in pitch darkness. He never spoke, never whispered her name, but she felt his breath hot against her ear, at the back of her neck, teasing her awake. As she rose quietly back into this world, she groaned softly, feeling his fingers sliding down her back, across her skin, over her hips. She turned towards him and opened her eyes. But she couldn't see him, couldn't find his face.

‘Jack. What are you doing?' She always said this, even though she knew exactly what he was doing. The rote phrase was always followed by a smile. ‘What
are
you doing?' she gasped, as his fingers slid between her legs.

She closed her eyes again and surrendered to his touch, feeling the gradual rise of pleasure deep within her, growing, until it burst, shattering the comfort of sleep once and for all.

Freya opened her eyes. She was wide awake but it took a moment for her to place the strange familiarity of the room, the pale blue walls, the whitewashed floorboards, a wooden dresser covered in rocks and seashells which stood opposite the end of the bed. Sunlight was streaming through the windows, there was the raucous call of seabirds close by and, faintly, in the background, the sound of waves breaking upon the shore. The next instant it fell upon her – the shattering remembrance. For a second, as ever, she tried to delay the flood of knowledge, the spill of darkness and death. She closed her eyes and turned onto her side. But the knowledge bubbled upwards, per-meating every nook, every space inside her, moving through her veins like swift, slick poison. She opened her eyes again and looked at the cold, empty side of the bed. She thought of Jack, of the dream, always so vivid, so real and intoxi-cating, memory alive with desire. She thought of her son, of the empty bedroom next to the one in which she lay. And she remembered, as the tears began to fall, that they were both gone, both taken from her.

The sun was shining, the sky cloudless, but the air was cold. It was spring, after all, and summer was still some way off. But when the weather was like this, bright and clear, the sand glowed white and the sea was vivid blue and brilliant green. Freya walked along the beach at the southwest tip of the island, close to the water's edge, breathing in the salty air, meandering amidst the driftwood and seaweed. From time to time she bent down, her eye catching upon something in the sand, but mostly she gazed towards the horizon, across the sea. From this point on the island, if you sailed directly west, you would not meet land again until America. The thought of such remoteness, such splendid isolation, was both thrilling and terrifying. When it became too much, the other side of the island afforded a more reassuring view. Mull could be glimpsed to the northeast and a spattering of land beyond and to the south. Today, however, Freya was content to stare out into the wildness of the Atlantic.

At this moment, it did not look as savage as she knew it could, neither dangerous nor threatening. She ambled along the beach, her pace unhurried, familiarising herself with the land and its watery borders, hazy, forgotten. She bent down and tested the water, but it was cold, too cold still for swimming. As she reached the giant stack of rock at the southern end, she paused momentarily. Then she began to scale it. She was tall, five feet nine inches, and svelte, thinner than when she had last been here. Yet it still took her twenty strenuous minutes to get to the top. From there you could survey the island in its entirety, in all its diminutive glory. It was roughly half a mile from here to the northern tip, a quarter of a mile from east to west at the broadest point. But Freya did not want to study it all, the shingle beaches, the wild machair, the glistening burns catching the sunlight as they drained into the sea. For now she was content to see just one thing. It had been dark the previous day by the time she arrived. So she hadn't seen it properly. As she reached the summit of the rock, stood and turned inland, there it was, towering before her, majestic on the northern cliffs. The lighthouse.

It had been built over the course of two years in the mid-1800s from rose-coloured granite quarried on the Isle of Mull. Its beauty wasn't confined simply to its colour and texture, but to the grace and symmetry of its outline – it was over 150 feet in height, soaring into the sky, from a base width of around 40 feet to just over 15 feet at the top of the tower. Even now, having seen it so many times before, Freya was humbled as she looked upon it again.

‘It was designed and engineered by Alan Stevenson.' Freya remembered Pol's words as clearly as if he'd uttered them yesterday. But it was more than two years since she'd watched him clambering up the internal staircase of the tower. ‘He was the uncle of Robert Louis Stevenson. I expect you know him better?'

Sam nodded, almost overwrought with excitement, following closely like a dog at Pol's heels. ‘Yes, Mum's read
Treasure Island
to me a few times, and
Kidnapped
,' he managed, somewhat breathlessly, trying to balance his elation with the exertion of the stairs.

Anthony Tipol, or Pol for short, had once worked as a keeper at the lighthouse. After it had been automated, he had continued to be employed by the Northern Lighthouse Board, the body responsible for the upkeep of all lighthouses in Scotland, to check that everything was well maintained and ran smoothly. Pol visited every three or four months. But this particular visit had been a special one. It was the first time that Pol had allowed Sam to accompany him on an inspection. And the last time that Freya had seen Pol.

‘Aye. That'd be about right. But Robert wasn't keen on spending his life in the family business. Did you know the Stevensons built most of the lighthouses in Scotland?'

Sam nodded but Pol didn't turn to look at him. The question, Freya realised, was rhetorical. Pol was simply talking to himself on the subject closest to his heart. Following slowly behind the two of them, she was there ostensibly for the tour, but more to keep an eye on Sam.

‘And for a rock lighthouse, like this one,' Pol continued, ‘they had to ship all the granite out to the island already dressed and shaped, the slabs ready to fit one on top of another and then be anchored together.'

As they climbed upwards, Pol would shout out periodically what the rooms on each level of the tower had been used for – rope, lifebelts and a rubber dinghy in one, detonators and chargers for the fog gun in another. ‘And this was where the tanks of paraffin for the light were kept. When they abandoned oil in favour of electrical power for the lamp, they built an engine shed down below, Sam, next to the keepers' cottage that you now live in. It generates electricity for the light, and for the machinery which makes it revolve, and for your home.'

Freya listened to see if she could make out the tone of disapproval in his voice that usually became so obvious by this turn in the conversation. But she couldn't detect it. Perhaps Pol had decided, after all these years, to finally forgive them for now living there. Perhaps he had also decided to forgive her for the automation of lighthouses in general for which she felt, acutely sometimes, that he also blamed her. Still, it was too early to tell.

As they climbed higher, Freya began to feel claustrophobic. The stairs clung to the sides of the lighthouse wall, ascending in a clockwise direction, and the internal space was narrow, becoming increasingly so as they rose higher. It was also much darker than she had imagined. But then the windows in the tower were small, allowing in only a little light. They spiralled upwards, this unlikely threesome, to the omnipresent mutterings of Pol.

‘This room, see, the last one before the lamp room, once contained the air-pressure tanks for the oil. Me and the other keepers – when it was their turn to light the lamp – would pump the paraffin up to here by hand from the tanks down below; then it was vaporised and the vapour went up to the burners above.' Pol practically ran up the last flight of stairs into the lamp room, unable to repress the thrill of his remembrance, with Sam still at his heels. ‘And here, at the light itself, we'd light the paraffin vapour.' And Pol would strike an imaginary match with his hands. ‘But what really gave the light its power were the lenses that revolved around it and magnified it into the beam.' For a moment both Pol and Sam were silent, mouths open slightly as they marvelled at the sheer magnificence of it all.

‘Anyway,' Pol continued at last, finally focusing on the real lamp in front of him rather than the older imaginary one he still carried in his mind, ‘the oil lamp was eventually replaced with this electric one.' Pol pursed his lips and Freya braced herself for the tirade against modernisation that usually followed. But when it finally came, Pol's damning finale lacked both lustre and length. ‘Then automation came shortly after.'

Fortunately, perhaps, Sam was as obsessed with the long-vanished days of lighthouse keeping as Pol. ‘Pol,' he said, with that inimitably inquisitive look on his face that always made a small part of Freya's insides melt, ‘did you have to sit up all night and tend the lamp? To check that it didn't go out.'

‘Aye, that I did. When I was stationed here as a principal keeper, there was me and two others. We kept watch in turns, but when I had the night watch – from twelve to four o'clock in the morning – I would always sit up here in the lamp room. I mean you had to keep your eye on the lamp throughout the night – check the paraffin pressure was keeping up and that the burners weren't clogged. That sort of thing. But it wasn't really necessary to sit up here the whole time. But I always did, see.' And he turned to gaze at Sam, looked at him properly for the first time, scrutinised him intently to see if he understood the sacred piece of knowledge that was being shared with him. ‘I would sometimes write my log, in that quiet time. It was crucial, you see, Sam, for a lighthouse keeper to maintain his log, to keep it bang up to date. But more often than not I would simply watch the flash of the light.' He paused, pensive. ‘A man can have strange thoughts, alone at night, sitting at the top of a tower, in the middle of the ocean, miles from family and friends. He can begin to imagine that he is the only man left in the world, stranded and alone, or that the world that he knows has vanished entirely and is gone from him for ever.' Pol was nodding and Sam was watching him, mesmerised. ‘Yes, it can do odd things to a man's head to be in a lighthouse alone at night, especially at night, looking out over the sea.'

Once more Pol descended into deep thought; to change the subject, Freya spoke for the first time. ‘Perhaps Pol would let you go outside onto the gallery, Sam, and see how far you can see.'

‘Aye,' said Pol. And without looking at Sam, he moved silently to the gallery door, unlocked it and pushed it open.

As the crashing sound of the sea came rushing in on the air, Freya felt the mood of existential melancholy that had been building disperse.

‘Thanks Pol,' yelled Sam, already on the gallery, looking up at the seagulls, which were squawking as they orbited the tower. ‘Come on, Mum, come and see with me.'

Freya smiled at Pol as she moved towards the door to the gallery, but he didn't return her smile, simply turning towards the light to carry out the checks that were required of him. Perhaps she had offended him. But then she always thought that she'd offended him by the end of his visit, one way or another. Sometimes she thought she offended him simply by being there.

Outside on the gallery the air was fresh and they could see for miles. The views from the island were magnificent on a clear day, but towering one hundred and fifty feet in the air they were staggering. There was a panorama over the western islands. To the north they could see Coll and Tiree and Skerryvore lighthouse, a mere dot on the horizon. To the southeast was Colonsay, and beyond it Islay, then Jura stretching north and eastwards towards Scarba.

‘If you look closely,' she had said to Sam, ‘perhaps you can see the whirlpool of Corryvreckan.'

‘It's too far away, Mum. We can't see that. Silly.'

Then he had turned and smiled at her. Such a beautiful smile.