The Lighthouse
A serialised novel
Chapter Twenty-four to Twenty-seven
At first, Henry was unsure what to say. It was a bold statement: a statement of fact rather than opinion or intuition. He thought about what it could mean. Perhaps, something had happened when she was a child: they could be repressed memories of an unsavoury event.
The door closed a little in the breeze.
Whatever it was, whatever had occurred, he had to believe her. He didn’t want to question her. He needed her more than ever. That was patently true.
‘Martha, when?’ he asked gently, without pushing, judging.
‘I don’t know. They’re just there… the memories. They’re so vivid. Of me racing up the stairs screaming. It felt so real, Henry.’ She looked like a child again, afraid of the unknown, afraid of the future.
‘I believe you. I do. It certainly explains why you’ve been drawn to this place for so many years. But maybe something happened that you’ve tried to forget, that you’ve forced inside,’ he suggested, still not judging, supportive. He looked intensely at her face, offering her whatever solace he could. Desperately trying to understand.
‘Thanks,’ she answered, keenly aware of his gaze. It didn’t bother her, it felt good to be gazed upon. ‘Shall we talk about something different?’
‘Good idea. Where would you like to start?’
‘Well…’ she began, looking around at the walls, ‘we don’t really know anything about each other. Tell me something about what brought you here, now. I’d love to know.’ Martha adjusted the way she was sitting, relaxing more.
‘Okay. So. Henry Blair, fifty-seven, single. It sounds silly. It’s like those seminars at the beginning of the year where everyone has to introduce themselves.’
‘It’s not silly at all, Henry. It’s sweet. And it may sound weird but I feel like I know some parts of you already. Carry on. Please. Fill in the gaps. To begin with, why are you here? Why buy this place? Live in a tent?’ Martha thought she may have been a little too intrusive but she felt brave with Henry as if they could easily break down some of the usual barriers quickly.
‘I’ll try. So, last year I retired after over thirty years as a philosophy lecturer. There were reasons for it but for now I’ll just say that I had to stop. I had to leave.’
Martha looked concerned. ‘Henry, that sounds serious,’ but then she winked at him as she continued to speculate. ‘You didn’t attack a student or even worse.’
‘No, nothing sinister,’ and he winked back playfully. ‘It was time to go. I left everything. I left my house with a friend, my colleagues. I needed to change direction. Start again.’
She looked temporarily satisfied. ‘And why here?’ she asked earnestly, genuinely.
‘I wanted to get away from people, cars, noise, questions and answers: everything. And then, just as suddenly, I found out that I had to stop.’
‘See, it wasn’t silly.’ Martha stretched her legs out in front of her. ‘So, has it worked. The walking, the starting again, I mean?’
‘Yes, I think it has. It took time before my head began to clear. I belong here now. My mind feels more at ease, less hurried, definitely less stressed but there are still things to work out. Normally, at this time of year students would just be arriving and look, I’m renovating a lighthouse and talking to you and it feels so good. What about you?’
Martha was such a good listener but Henry wanted to listen now, to learn more.
She drew in a deeper breath than normal and placed her hands on her knees, interlocking her fingers. ‘Well, I’ll start at the beginning, as they say. I’ve always lived here, born and bred. I’m bound up with this place, you could say. I’ve never imagined living anywhere else.’ She paused, reflecting, as if flicking through the pages of her life. ‘Sometimes, I feel like I live too much in the past. Not because I love history or anything like that but I think I’d have been more suited to another time.’ Her eyes drifted off again. ‘When I walk along the cliffs, and the wind is still and the sea calm, I can hear the sounds of the past. Not voices exactly. Mutterings, grumblings, wails and the like.
‘Imagine a film cut up into pieces and then scattered from on high. It’s as if I’m catching small snippets and listening to the pieces and then they play out to me in my mind.’ Henry listened, completely fascinated. He wasn’t in the slightest alarmed or worried by this explanation. The apparitions had shown him what was possible.
Martha continued calmly, objectively, ‘They’re never complete. Odd words, sounds. It’s like I’m reliving a drama from some other time.’
‘Like what just happened?’ Henry asked plaintively, hoping to spur her on again to open up more and more.
‘No, that felt different. It was more intense. If I’m honest, it was scarier and more real. Anyway, too much in the past, as I said. Sometimes, I make myself laugh. I sound like an old spinster. I’m only thirty-five-ish,’ and she laughed demurely, as if she was playing a part from an old black and white film.
Henry didn’t want her to stop. He wanted her to talk, talk, talk. He was mesmerised as if she were a muse.
‘So, what else? he asked. ‘I still only know a little.’
Martha unlocked her hands and rose onto her knees. ‘Next time,’ she said, enticingly. ‘At the weekend. And, if possible, I’d like to help you rebuild it. If I could. If you don’t mind. Can we meet again?’
Henry felt electrified. ‘Yes, at the weekend. Marvellous. I’ll buy some paint, a few more tools. We can study the plans again. Even try to get the stove working, and I can cook.’
‘So. Saturday morning? I’d better go now. The light’s fading.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Henry wondered how she might be getting home. Perhaps she lived on the cliffs too, not too far away.
He opened the door fully again for her to leave.
Martha’s mind was desperate to know why she had seen what she had. She needed answers. Helping Henry, being in the lighthouse, might jog her memory more.
As she went passed him, she slowed, only a little, and then left. Henry watched her as she climbed the hill, her hands once again moving strongly at her sides, a little like a marching soldier.
The sky was sombre, ash-grey, with only a few rivulets of colour.
Henry had wanted to tell her about the apparitions: to share what was happening, but he couldn’t. Not yet. Their meeting had gone so well and he didn’t want to spoil it. However, after listening to her talk about what she experienced, she may have easily believed him.
Her body transmuted from a solid to a hazy gas as she peaked the crest. Clouds hit by the last rays of the sun sparkled and fizzed.
Henry walked around the lighthouse and stared out to sea. The sun was now setting in a sumptuous pink aura. Waves appeared tipped with gold.
Two black silhouettes pirouetted in the sky, revelling in their freedom.
For the next hour, Henry sat outside his tent, drinking coffee. The light closed in like a clenched fist.
He was becoming aware of a new self emerging: a truer self than before. One that could help Martha to understand her relationship to the lighthouse and about her past.
Tiredness now took over as he unlocked the lighthouse door. Next time he read from the chest he had decided that he wanted Martha to be there.
He settled to sleep and the image of her face, her eyes, when she had travelled somewhere else, coalesced in his mind and into his unconscious.
Chapter Twenty-five
Henry awoke with love pulsing through his veins. A love of life. There is no mine or yours in love, Henry thought. It is a revolution where things emerge, merge, coalesce, become championed and reveal their true realities and natures.
As he sat outside the tent, the air felt brazenly cold.
There was no use denying it, his trained mind had begun to work overtime again: trying to analyse, comprehend everything. What connection did Martha have with the lighthouse? The way she had reacted was so strong, so violent. In a way, it was more than just a longing she had revealed. What was really happening?
As the morning sun lifted the shadows like layers to a picture, he framed her face. So young, he pondered. Perhaps, so out of time as she had alluded to.
There was an untouched innocence to her, an indefinable quality of child.
And had she witnessed history before? He wondered if she had loved in the past. She acted as if she had observed truths in another time, maybe been through the stages of a life.
Then, as the sky lightened, a strange notion came to mind: Was she a woman and a child simultaneously? Not in the sense of retaining our childhood innocence but in a real concrete way. One person with two separate identities.
No. His imagination was running out of control. It does have limitations, he chastised himself. In an infinite world there should be, according to some as always, infinite sources and solutions or theories for our imaginations to play with.
Ah well, Henry sighed, as he stood and stretched, imagination must have boundaries which it cannot cross.
He decided he needed the mundane for a time and headed for town to buy tools and supplies for the weekend. He also needed to conjure up a delicious meal for tonight.
As he travelled in, the motion of the bus lulled his mind and body into a kind of trance and he was struck, for the first time in days, by images of his late wife, June.
They were a mixture of scenes but they all had one thing in common. They were not as clear, as distinct, as before, as if a thin film of a semi-transparent substance had been stretched across them, partly obscuring them.
Henry was sad at first and as much as he willed his memory to recall them in greater clarity, they appeared weakened. Like a drowning man vainly reaching for the lifebuoy as it bobbed further and further away, so he struggled to reclaim them.
They were lost to the waves.
He stopped trying to force them. As soon as he relinquished the effort, he saw her again. This time she was not on her deathbed. She was younger, much younger, and she was working on a piece of art in their garden in the summer.
The sun was delivering strong shadows on the grass. She had been a fine sculptor. Creating beauty with her hands was all she had ever wanted to accomplish and they had kept many of her creations in their garden. She had sold some but that had never been the purpose: it was creation itself. Immersing herself in her work. Joining with it, in a way. Creating beauty out of her own will, skill and her feelings. She wanted her beliefs about life to be instilled into the object she was making. Selling some art made her happy, though: someone else appreciated what she had achieved. It was shared.
However, she could also be saddened by its loss. She owned her creations because they were a part of her. She had to find a way of letting go.
Letting go. Relinquishing the past. Henry felt that he had almost succeeded. If the escape from the past was along an avenue of closed trees, creating an arboreal tunnel, he was moving towards the elusive light at the end.
All of this was part of a process.
The past was immutable.
Totality was change.
Henry alighted the bus and raced around the shops. Finding a hardware store on the edge of town that would actually deliver was a success. For a price, of course. He ordered more and more.
He bought food and drink for the meal later. A bottle of wine, although he had no clue if Martha drank alcohol.
On the way back, he became friends with philosophy again but this time his mind turned a different way. He imagined a new philosophy of life, one that he would construct. Letting his mind wander over possibilities made the journey pass more quickly.
It was only a way of thinking, judging, viewing. It didn’t have to be complicated.
Some thinkers, religions like Buddhism, promoted the ideology of just being, of letting go. Easier said than done, Henry thought. Beginning a new journal later would be a good start.
By mid-afternoon, Henry had returned to the lighthouse. Home, he thought, for the first time.
Early October clouds looked solemn; sad almost, at the passing of summer. Could their appearance be that simply explained? Even the sea appeared morose, grey and turgid, as if the waves were retreating to warmer shores.
A turn of the tide.
While he waited for the materials to arrive, he packed away his tent. He had no idea how they were going to deliver them. It felt symbolic though. Then, he made space in the lighthouse for those belongings.
An hour later, with everything safely stored, he opened his new notebook and wrote down the title ‘My Philosophy’.
His mind had been cluttered for over thirty years with the theories and beliefs of hundreds of the world’s famous and sometimes infamous philosophers and thinkers.
As he sat, door open, a small sparrow, perhaps a baby, landed outside and began pecking the ground searching for food: for fallen seed. Henry kept still: so still that he could hear his own heartbeat.
Dramatically, it began to still his mind. There had to be a way to evacuate his mind again.
Henry believed that to be fixed in your beliefs was to stagnate. He wanted to create a mutable theory: one that could stand alone irrespective of time, gender, age, country, race or religion. Of course, any new beliefs would have to be true to him and not merely a rewrite of some higher, or shall we say, loftier ideals. He wanted it to be an absolute paradigm that overrode or dominated what was essentially your own ‘self’.
However, truths that were immutable should not be tampered with. For example, the concepts of good and evil.
But it must have flexibility in order to exist within the different selves that we have. And this must come without losing its core. Nihilism would not be a way forward.
Henry sat, pen in hand, watching the sparrow learn as it hopped about, and waited patiently for the ideas to flow.
They didn’t. A starting point did not rise and make itself visible.
Trembling, the sparrow took flight. A shadow loomed across the doorway.
Chapter Twenty-six
It was Martha.
Henry jumped up.
Her long floral skirt brought light and colour. Her bare ankles barely showed. A white blouse softened her skin. A cardigan lay around her shoulders. She had comfortable shoes on.
She smiled broadly. ‘I’m not too early, am I?’ she asked almost courteously.
‘No, of course not.’ Henry slipped the notebook behind him. ‘Come in. As you can clearly see I’ve been attempting to tidy up.’ Martha looked quizzically at him and her mouth rose slightly at the edges: It was an attempt to understand if he was making a joke or not, especially considering the piles of stuff that had been added to an already busy floor.
‘Yes, I can see,’ she added, quirkily. It was Henry’s turn to judge her intonation and what she really meant. ‘Well, I’m here to help. Shall we begin with the stove?’ she asked.
‘But you’ll get dirty,’ Henry insisted.
‘I don’t mind, really.’ He fetched some water and cleaner and a few old rags and they began.
Happily, side by side, they scrubbed and cleaned, without a care in the world. Soon, the unforgiving black stove was looking better.
Martha was just about to begin an overdue conversation when there was a knock on the door. ‘Delivery,’ sang out the delivery man from the hardware shop.
‘Hi,’ Henry answered, moving outside to see what they had got. Somehow, they had driven a small van along the coastal path and had begun unloading all of the stuff. Henry helped them to place a tarpaulin over the top.
‘Thanks,’ said Henry, trying to assess how friendly this man could be. ‘Come in. I know this may sound like a big favour, but is there any way you could help us to get the stove working?’
‘Shouldn’t really. You know, health and safety.’ Then he added in an afterthought. ‘I don’t think they’ll be any gas anyway. You’ll have to contact the gas board for that.’ He vacated the lighthouse, giving them another view of the large delivery.
‘Wow, Henry. That is a lot of stuff. We can really get started now.’ Her enthusiasm would be all he needed. But they had plenty of time.
‘I know. Shall we go for a walk along the cliffs?’
‘That would be lovely,’ she answered. She pulled her cardigan tighter and Henry found a sweatshirt to put on.
‘Which way?’ he asked, letting her take control.
‘I know a good route. Circular. Takes about an hour or so.
The air felt cooler as they set off: a breeze rising from the waves that climbed the cliffs and wafted into their faces like an unfriendly guest. Waves motioned. On the horizon, a few ships, grey and indistinct, seemed immobile. They were probably large tankers rounding the coast towards the Channel.
The ground felt hard underfoot to Martha, unforgiving, as they walked side by side. She took Henry’s hand. There was no conscious thought to the action: it just felt natural to her, as if she were leading a friend to a secret hideout.
Tufts of grass sighed as they passed them and the wind gave an audible moan to the small valley.
She desperately wanted to talk. To tell him special things. Personal things. To feel closer to him.
They began to climb again, with the cliff edge on their left. The path narrowed as if it only wanted one person to gain entry at a time. It was an old coastal path and they passed a warning sign showing the symbol of someone falling. Small bundles of gorse scrambled for position as they consumed what had been the previous path.
Martha felt the heat in his hand, the strength of his fingers as she interlocked her hand in a new grasp. Sensing that he was content just to walk she stayed silent. Only the call of a circling gull shattered the atmosphere.
A common blue butterfly, late in the season, with tired, tattered wings, landed close to them. Small yellow petals welcomed it.
Her mind drifted a little and in her mind’s eye she saw that it had always been like this: walking with Henry by her side.
A few minutes later, they summited a steep rise. Henry gallantly broke free and went ahead, offering his hand again to lift her as they crossed the peak.
It was a fine view, with a look back towards the proudly standing lighthouse, a sliver of visible beach, the vast expanse of sea and the rolling chalk hills in three directions.
‘Shall we sit for a while?’ she said. ‘Take in the view.’ There was no pressure.
They were just two people, sitting, knees up and the rest of the world did not need to exist in that space.
The sea had darkened now, losing energy, a portent to some storm perhaps, far away as yet.
Martha rested her hands between her knees. ‘I was in love once,’ she began, abruptly, taking Henry a little by surprise. His heart skipped a beat. She wanted him to know, to understand her. ‘Only once though. When I was much younger. Half a lifetime ago. Well, a different life. I was carefree, innocent. No idea what love was when it began. It took me over completely. I became a different person, lost the former me. No part of my life was my own anymore and at the time, I didn’t realise it. You don’t. It just rushes at you, sweeps you up like a tsunami. So young then. There were no rules to follow.’ Turning her head, her eyes flashed in the dimming light and they searched Henry’s soul for understanding, recognition. As if he were a mirror for her thoughts.
He sat quietly, thoughtful, and looked into her eyes, trying to capture the younger woman, well, girl, that she had once been.
‘I wasn’t a woman. I was a child. As they say, I fell into love. It was so intense. Mind and body. I was engulfed by the emotions. Everything revolved around it. It consumed me. But how could I know how dangerous it could be? People may have told me but… maybe I ignored them. To give over your life, all that you’ve been to that point, every minute of it, to open up and let yourself be taken.
‘I was a different person. I think I had no choice but to fall in love. Can we ever have a choice when it happens?’
Henry looked supportively across and then at the ground as if it held some answers on the specks of dirt and rock and sea-blown sand. He sensed that he should just listen for now.
‘For a year and a half, I saw no friends. I saw my family less and less. I was enraptured. Captured. Taken in and I thought… that all of the time he felt the same way and perhaps he did at the beginning…’ she paused, staring down at the flattened stems of grass and then lifting a melancholic face to the sea, where so many faces have searched for answers as if it were a giant cauldron of answers that could be gifted and purchased by emotion, rather than the mystery that it was… ‘then, he began to shun me, to disregard me. He would swear to my face. Blow smoke into my eyes. He changed and became so cold. He even spat at me once. Slowly, I became a husk only, hollow. All that I had given was spent, gone, used up, washed away. It had been killed, if I’m honest. Is murdered too harsh a word?
‘And that’s when I began to walk here, alone. For hours on end. In the blistering summer sun and then the autumn, freshened wind, and then the unrelenting sea-spit of early winter, covering my body and skin with a layer of regret.
‘That person was killed. She’s dead and gone. It took me years until I regained parts of the younger, former me. But I was never the same.’
‘Were you stronger after?’ Henry whispered.
‘Yes, a little. Wiser? Only in a wizened way. But so much had changed. I had lost parts of me that I hadn’t known existed, parts that had been enlivened. There were holes in me. Scars, as they say: they heal but never vanish.’ Martha breathed out and laughed at herself.
‘So. That’s enough about that. You’ll begin to think I’m a bit crazy. A seaside Miss Havisham!’
‘Well, you don’t dress like her anymore.’ And Henry smirked, although he felt deadly serious too. ‘Did you ever see him again?’
‘A few times. His face in a car turning a corner turning away from me with a look of sheer hate. For some reason. But I was not at fault. Then he moved away.’ And as she spoke, a part of her felt that if she could revisit that time and make things right again, she would, go back and change how had she acted, what she had said, and that maybe by rediscovering her younger self she could atone for whatever she had inadvertently done, for however she had pushed him away and that the sea would be the vessel for that atonement but no, it had not been her. ‘Eighteen years… that’s enough from me now.’
Henry offered her his hand for support. She took it and squeezed a little and then let it go again.
It was his turn to speak now, conventionally, to bear a part of his soul, open up like a clam welcoming the tide. But he paused: June’s face returned to him again and the image was a faded picture with tattered edges. Her lips were moving though and telling him… ‘It’s okay, Henry. Go ahead. I can see you, too. I don’t mind. Tell her…’
Turning to face Martha again, a lump entered his throat as if the past reminisces were somehow choking off the air. He found it hard to begin.
In her eyes, he saw her pain as though he had been transported back to that time.
He saw clouds forming shapes that had never been witnessed before, creating anew: forms that reminded him of the ever-changing circumstances of earlier life.
Life can change in an instant.
Swallowing hard, he began, falteringly, ‘There was only one love but she is gone now. Forever. It’s been so tough. Maybe later at the lighthouse I can tell you more. Out here I feel so raw. I’m sorry, Martha. It’s just…’
‘I understand,’ she interrupted, a look of total acquiescence holding her features. ‘I know. I can sense it from you.’
There was no space between them as they walked back. And in spirit they were bound together more closely. A wordless vow had been undertaken.
Holding hands, they crossed fields of wild grasses and scrub: some untouched by humans for thousands of years.
Untroubled.
It bent in the breeze, yielding yet strong enough to withstand the winter storms.
If there was a way to say more now, as they walked, Henry would have taken it but the image of his wife, soft and loving, had flummoxed him.
He felt he was living two lives when in those moments: travelling down one of two parallel realities like railway lines, unable to cross from one to the other.
When they arrived back, the sky had darkened. The sun had lost most of its brilliance, although a golden shimmer caressed the surface of the sea closest to the horizon as though an artist had swept a canvas with fresh paint allowing the crests of the wave to be burning with a watery fire.
It brought warmth to their eyes.
However, the air carried a chilled visitor to their bodies. Martha had goose bumps on her arms and legs. She could see the sea and all of its majesty. She was up on high. She was looking out, the salty air whipping at her face and lips. She felt powerful, commanding. The scene below was one of untold darkness.
The moon was hidden by massed Prussian blue-black clouds, bristling at their fibrous edges by starlight and space. They shifted slowly, heavily, languorously: cumbersome in their night time flight.
Then, out far, she saw two lights. Coloured. Strong. Recurring. Repeating. Dancing almost. She thought at first that they were a trick of the light: a figment of a weary imagination: flotilla of journeying ships, but no: they emitted an intelligence: they were a source of some knowledge and they were trying to tell her something.
Then, they moved freely along the horizon line: slowing and speeding up, changing altitude at will, creating a show.
Then, they were gone. She hadn’t even been able to show Henry.
He unlocked the door quickly and she rushed inside.
He followed and hung a new, more powerful light from the wall. He put the kettle on the stove and began to make a warming drink.
Martha settled on the sleeping bag and hugged her own body. She looked up at the remains of the metal spiral staircase. The increased strength of the light had illuminated more of its body. It struck her, now, as a kind of metallic fossil, unearthed by the blades of light; its black-speckled bones linking together in deathly repose for the first time in over fifty years; now becoming more alive in some magical way.
Now, after those lights, those flashes of memory intrigued her even more. She felt a desperate urge to jump up and hang there suspended like the cocooned prey of a spider, only to break free, and then be lifted by an imaginary force, higher and higher, until reaching the top and, at last, the light.
How could something so inanimate, so lifeless, have such an attraction for her? Such a power? Should she tell him about those lights?
Henry poured the hot drinks and shifted uneasily as he turned around. Tendrils of hot steam left the mugs like expelled breath.
It was then that he noticed a look in her eyes, similar to before but still present.
He put the drinks down and rushed to her.
‘You were somewhere else again,’ Henry remarked, sounding almost casual.
‘Yes, I was,’ she answered, cupping the warmth between her hands. She told him about the lights.
‘I’ve seen one before,’ he informed her, sitting down next to her, sipping. ‘I’ve no idea what they are.’
‘Yes. I don’t understand it either but then maybe, I’m not and you’re not, meant to understand… yet. It could all be leading us somewhere. That we need to climb to the top?’ Martha’s question was problematic. It would be days if not weeks before they attempted to climb to the top. It was just too dangerous.
‘Shall we move on. I mean, leave that for now?’ Henry asked, wanting to leave unsolved mysteries behind for now and finally tell someone about June.
‘Yes,’ she answered, solemnly, ‘Henry, you could start… you know…’
‘I know. You’ve shared so much already but… there’s something stopping me.’
‘Okay. That’s fine. I’ll tell you more about myself then. So, yes, he moved away and since then I’ve lived here, first with my parents and then alone. And always close by, close to the sea, close to the sound it makes, close to the cliffs and close to this lighthouse.
‘I haven’t wanted to love again. To take that chance.’ She sounded a little like a survivor of some terrible tragedy. She didn’t want him to think that she might not take that plunge again. Someday, or sooner, she thought. His reticence to talk about his late wife made him even more attractive, if fragility can foster this, but there was also the mist of mystery surrounding his abject silence. It was an enigma.
‘Henry, I’m here. I’m willing to listen and to trust.’ In her eyes he saw a quality, some vision of a brighter future, a possible reality where hiding feelings, burying them and not facing them, would not be needed: there would be an acceptance of how things were.
She was the catalyst that he required.
‘You’re right, Martha. I can’t hide anymore.’ To her it sounded more serious than she might have imagined. But she trusted her own instincts. She believed, sincerely, that a person could not pull a veil over who they truly were. Their form would be there.
‘There’s so much I need to tell you. We’ll need another drink though.’ She sat patiently, as he boiled more water, and watched his shadowed silhouette move, as though he was an animal, close to extinction, and she was the intrepid explorer about to rescue him and save him.
Outside, the wind moaned a mournful melody, as though a thousand voices of lost sailors were trying to reach them, permeate the walls and seep into their consciousness.
She imagined in her mind’s eye the grass stiffening outside and the flowers recoiling, retreating: the ground hardening in the cooler night air.
‘So, where to start? We met at university, like so many do. It was a chance meeting… well, what other kind is there. She had retaken her A-levels and so was a year late arriving. Lucky for me. So many coincidences have to fall into place, don’t they, for people to meet? So many pieces to fit together. Well… we met at a disco, of all things, if you can ever imagine that now looking at me and then we were inseparable. I stayed on to do an MA and PhD and she began her art.
‘Our life revolved around the university year which suited us both.’ Henry stopped as a gust of wind roared like an angry animal at the door, rocking the light to and fro, passing sinuous shadows across her face like ripples and then disrupting the folds of her skirt in disparate tones.
Martha sat as patiently as the sphinx, resting her head on her pent-up knees. She looked wise.
Henry continued, ‘So, for years we had an idyllic life. I got a job as philosophy lecturer and she became a sculptor. There were no children. But we were content with only the two of us. We were yin and yang, I suppose. Her creativity and optimism balanced out my more mundane exploits and a more glass half empty view of life. We fit together so well.’
It was Henry’s turn to drift off in a daydream; reliving those early days. He could see both of them, younger, smiling, full of ideas and energy and with so many fewer cares: At night, after work, there they would be, sitting holding a glass of red wine; in the garden admiring tulips in the spring sunshine and relishing their colours: walking along the cliffs butterfly spotting; travelling around Europe in the summer break. So many memories, remembered like the pages of numerous photograph albums.
But how many moments did he truly remember? he asked himself in his reverie. The smells, the sounds, the emotions, or is it just that six by four monochrome remembrance?
Memory was a monster that had to be tamed.
‘Year after year we spent and then, there we sat, planning our retirement, plotting our attack and all of a sudden she was struck down.’
Henry had to stop. Tears fell from his face. Martha leant over and took him in her arms, cradling him like a baby. His body began to convulse in pain as the memories flooded back to him.
Outside, the uncaring wind vented its anger. Layers of truculent cloud skittled across the sky trying to escape their finality. Their peril.
And on that wind ancient voices entered through the door, a fallen chorus, and spirited their way to the top of the lighthouse searching for the light, remnants of some disaster.
Martha still held him. She held him tightly. As lovingly as she had ever held anyone and the actions of his sobbing rocked her body back and forth as if she were moving to some unknown tune of grief. She could do no other than hold him, to cherish him, until he felt ready to carry on.
But she could feel his pain.
There was nowhere for him to retreat, even if she had wished to: all she wanted was to absorb his grief like an emphatic sponge.
She willed her body to help him, to soothe him, for her to feed on the pain instead of him. If she could share it, it would be over more quickly.
She began to run her fingers through his hair, over and over again, an identical movement like a fleshy pendulum counting out time. And with each swift cross of her fingers from the back to the front of his head, she imagined herself healing a broken shoreline, as the tide creates and destroys the patterns of the sand; her mind now moulding the sand over and over again into a perfect smoothness that no tide could ever dismantle, however powerful.
Little by little, moment by moment, the convulsions eased, became less violent, shorter in time, less brutal, until finally he was quiet.
Feeling the dampness of his tears on her skin he willed her body to evaporate them and as they did, so the healing would continue inside him, tear by tear disappearing: like small patches of damp left on the pavement after a storm.
She felt like a goddess who had a power that had been bestowed upon her by adoring servants and now she was humbled by them and was using it for good.
Feeling all of Henry’s body through hers, she accepted his healing and the softening of his muscles and she realised that he wanted to be set free again.
He moved away, gently and slowly, as if he was reluctant but realised like a child, that it could not last forever in child time. Where his body had been, her skin felt hot, her face was flushed. Henry’s face too was distorted with red patches of folded skin that had begun to coalesce into its former shape with the easing of pressure.
‘I’m sorry. That hasn’t happened to me for a long time. Not since she became ill. I’m really embarrassed, Martha. And I’m deeply sorry.’
‘There’s no need, Henry. I understand. Your mind is still working it out. The release will probably do you good. I’m glad I was here.’ Henry could feel the despair that had been bottled up in him finally ease, a little. He had lost a part of his self but now it was returning.
He looked into her eyes. They held a secret: a mysterious secret buried within her from earlier times. Henry imagined that it was a secret buried so deeply that not even history’s greatest minds could have found it, but here it was within his touch.
There was a primeval quality to it.
It would remain her secret, though.
Martha knew what to say and how to say it. She didn’t view him as a man wallowing in self-pity: instead, she understood and accepted what he had been through.
He fantasied even further: over thousands of years this ancient healing power had been passed down from one specially chosen person to the next and only to those who understood its potential: those who would use it wisely.
Martha did not know the details of his suffering, yet.
‘I’m glad you were here too. Not to see me like that, but just to be with me. Somehow, I fee lighter now as if I could fly and float up here, now, right to the top.
‘I need to tell you the rest now, Martha.’
All around them, in the star-shadowed hills and fields, small animals, unaware of what dangers lay in store for them, instinctively scurried to their small homes in the ground, their small hearts pumping furiously, and they saw the vastness above them but they did not contemplate it: they tumbled, instead, falling safely into the darkened hole: They had witnessed the vastness above change to a darkled sky besotted with tiny fragments of white light but they had not begun to consider it in any way or ever comprehend it.
It was just there.
The ground always beckoned.
Inside the lighthouse, Martha and Henry sat silently for just a few seconds.
Chapter Twenty-seven
If pain could be erased as easily as the footprints left on the sand then life would offer few challenges and obstacles; there would be little grief to overcome, perhaps no regret, which was natural and unavoidable but no, pain was real, it could not be expunged by the gentle rise of the tide; it was a fanged beast that gnawed persistently at your soul; ever constant, ever present, ever hateful; a beast with a memory as old as the stone-dust on the moon and as cold as lake-ice trapped forever beneath the Antarctic, solid, unbroken, unmoved and pain could not effortlessly be released or softened or lessened in any worthwhile way only by the passage of time: it had the endurance of a raging star: pain stayed in our lives, billions of particles of emotions that bound us to it.
There was only ever those few seconds.
Henry imagined Martha and himself flying through space as visitors to the stars with endless time.
No.
All of their life was suddenly condensed to that space inside the lighthouse.
This was their world, in that moment and there was now an opportunity for them to share everything that had happened; to reveal it all.
It was time to uncover the truth and if the truth was buried deep within a cave, Henry must take the first step from the light to the darkness: to cross and sense the atmosphere, to feel the texture of the rock, to gather himself along the walls, to explore all of the recesses. He felt that he knew the way to go and he must take Martha with him.
Now.
They would descend together.
‘What happened Henry?’ She rested her hand on his shoulder.
‘It was Alzheimer’s. It started slowly. We thought it was just getting older; forgetting a name, losing her car key and then it became worse and worse.
‘She would wake up during the night, over and over: seeing people, having delusions. Then she began to accuse me of lying. Her mood would change quickly and dramatically. It was truly heart-wrenching to watch. It was…’ He stuttered, briefly unable to continue.
‘Then, near to the end. I was in her bedroom, sitting reading. She was asleep, so fragile, looking small, like a girl, young for a moment and she awoke suddenly and she sat up ramrod straight and she was back again. She was her old self. Speaking normally. About art, about travelling to Europe together again.
‘And I wanted to say something to her, desperately. I needed to say it.
‘I sat on the side of the bed, holding her hand, looking into her eyes and in them I saw that she understood what was happening to her and that she would only be lucid for a short time. And inside, she knew that I was about to say something important but I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t want her to travel on with it, to take it with her.
‘Then, it was over. She was dead within a few days.’ His face was blank, drained of any emotion.
Martha was about to ask a question when the sound returned.
Insistent.
Persistent.
She sat up, looking around for the source. At first, she looked worried, then when she saw Henry’s face, she saw that it was not new to him.
‘You know what it is.’ Less of a question, more of an acceptance, not challenging. Inquisitive.
‘There’s more that I have to tell you. And it’s important.’
Thank you for reading. The Lighthouse will be published Saturdays at 5.00pm UK time.