The Keeper’s Day Off

On his day off, Alan did not go anywhere, because there was nowhere to go. The lighthouse was on a headland at the end of a road that was only a road in the loosest sense, and the nearest anything was nine miles, and he had been to the nearest anything and it was fine, and he preferred the headland.

So on his day off he did the things he did on every other day, only slower, and with Bess.

They had breakfast late. This was the main thing. On a working day Alan was up before the light went off. On a day off he lay in bed and watched the beam go round on the ceiling until it faded into the morning, and Bess lay beside him and said nothing, because she knew he was watching it and knew he could not help it and knew it was, in its way, the same as her lying there watching him.

Then eggs. Then the walk.

The walk went down the cliff path to the little beach that nobody else could get to, and along to the rocks at the end, and back. It took an hour if you did not stop, and they always stopped. Bess collected things. She had a jar in the cottage window, sea glass and a shell with a hole worn in it and a piece of blue china from a plate that had gone down with something a long time ago, and each day off the jar got one thing fuller.

Today it was a stone with a white line right round it. Alan found it, and held it up, and she took it, and said, “That’s the one,” and it went in her pocket.

The sea was doing its ordinary work. Coming in a bit. Going out a bit. Turning over the small stones at the edge with a sound like somebody sorting through a drawer. There were oystercatchers on the rocks, piping at each other as if there were something urgent to say, and there never was. Behind and above them the lighthouse stood white on the headland, saying nothing, waiting for dark.

They sat on the rocks at the end. Bess had a flask, and cake, and Alan looked at the horizon the way another man might look at a clock.

“Day off,” she said.

“I know.”

“You’re watching the water.”

“I’m looking at it. It’s different.”

“Is it?”

He thought about it. “No,” he said.

She laughed, and gave him the cake.

In the afternoon he mended the gate, which did not need mending, and she read in the chair by the window, and a boat went across the bay, slowly, a long way out, and neither of them said anything about it, and both of them watched it all the way.

Then tea, and the washing up, which he did, badly, and she redid, quietly, and then the evening.

The evening on the headland was the best part. The sun went into the sea on the far side of the bay. It took its time. The water went gold and then the colour of a copper pan and then grey, and the sky went with it, and the grass on the cliff top lay down in the last of the breeze.

And at a particular moment, which was not a moment on any clock but which Alan knew in his bones, the light came on above them.

It swept. It went out over the water and round and came back. Bess watched him watch it. He did not go up. It was his day off, and it did not need him, and it never really had. It was the light. It came on. That was what it was for.

“There,” he said.

“There,” said Bess.

They went in. She put the stone with the white line in the jar. He put the kettle on. The beam went round on the ceiling of the cottage, and round, and round, the way it would all night, keeping the bay, keeping the boats, keeping the two of them.

Tomorrow he would go back up and polish what did not need polishing.

Tonight he was off.

The light went round.