Series Notes Contact Rehearsal Hotel
69.
THE KEEPER
David Rudkin
Postcard, circa 1910 (Godrevy, Cornwall).
THE KEEPER
David Rudkin
* * *
* * *
(A story, care of Nicholas Royle’s nightjar.) /
An elsewhere-epilogue to a collection of stories,
Shorezone (Strange attractor, 2026) ...
* * *
I feel as though they woke me. Voices before me in the dark: of two men, then an older woman then an older man, quite animated and then all suddenly laughing. I take a step forward to see who they are—they flash upon my sight, dark shapes, seated on half a dozen black leather-looking armchairs as though before a fire—but no firelight. The moment I see them they stop laughing and look up startled at me. Yet I think they don’t see me.
Then there’s only this dark again.
How long was I asleep?
*
What dark is this?
What is ‘I’?
Something I remembered then!
Thought I did.
Gone.
Where is this place I am?
*
Daylight now.
I’m searching.
I’m somewhere else I don’t know.
This wall I’m passing in here is cladded and painted white. It’s curving out slowly before me; and splays a little to where it meets the slate-tile floor. I seem to be skirting the foot of a great white-clad bell.
Now I’m passing in through a doorway deep-set into it, and come before another doorway, open onto a little room almost filled by a single bed spread with a coverlet in silky-looking blue-sea-green. The wall beyond it is concave, curved in away from me. This little room is round, I notice, as though I am inside the bell.
Who sleeps here? In this strange round little room in this bell, whose bed is this?
A sudden thought. Where do I sleep? Where is my bed?
*
Or do I sleep?
I remember no going to sleep. I remember only those voices waking me and those people I saw. Then waking again, already passing that white-cladded wall and in through the deep-set doorway in it to where it brought me. Between these seeings, there is a darkness I am. It must be sleep.
*
I’m searching again. In a new place—No. Somewhere I have been before. I’m in that big wide room again where the people were. They’re not here now. The black leatherish armchairs are empty. And it’s day. In here too the wall is cladded white, but straight. Above, all the way along, its angle with the ceiling is braided with thick dark rope. Why does that make me think of the sea?
*
Now I’m deeper into this room, the curve of empty black armchairs is side-on to me, and I’m passing a glass-fronted cabinet, mahogany I’d say, with mirrored backing where I see the whole room behind me reflected before me. In the cabinet, displayed like a precious relic but half in shadow, is a bottle-green float, pure globe in a net. On the next, white-cladded window-sill is a childishly made model of a two-master ketch; in the next cabinet, a brass storm-lantern, a teak double pulley-block—
Suddenly I’m sensing there is someone with me in this place. I look up again, sharply, into the room’s reflection there before me: the black soft leathery backs of the empty chairs are behind me now, and beyond them something I’ve not noticed before, an oval dining-table spread with a white cloth and set with silver for eight, wine glasses and all. Away to my left of it in the reflection, an interior door stands open, by which I sense I must have entered here. And framed beyond that, in dim interior daylight, a cold hallway, side-on to it a convex arc of white-cladded wall splaying—yes, I have dreamed that before—splaying out a little where it meets the slate-tiled floor—like a great white-clad bell—
Yes, I have been there. This is all one place. And the moment I see that, I glimpse before that white an obscure dark form already passing and gone—
I feel a shock of deep cold. Was that a ghost? Then no, that was surely myself, glimpsed in reflection of a shadow I somehow cast. Myself: it has to be. How, I cannot explain. But somehow myself. It has to be.
I become aware, for the first time in this place since these wakings and wanderings began, that I am hearing from outside there somewhere the seethe and drone of the sea. I know it instantly. And that sound is with me now as, with no sensation of coming here, already I’m before the doorway onto the little round room again, with the single bed with the blue-sea-green bedspread. But this time the bedding has been disturbed. On the side toward the daylight, it’s been untidily thrust aside. Someone has been in this bed, and stood from it.
And gone where?
I look around me. Before this doorway, I’m inside the cladded bell, splayed where it rests on the ground. Left of me, I see now, a section of spiral staircase rises tight to the inside curve of the wall.
Something it reminds me of. Something I’m remembering here…
*
… I’m suddenly thinking, This is no bell. This is… This is… I cannot see what it is. But something else I see. I see again that fragment of a memory that almost came to me, and backed away. It stays now.
I begin to see, I have been a darkness. Before that darkness, I was a consciousness then too? I glimpse this fragment of a remembering that backed away before: it is in me now. Is it a memory of what I am?
All I can remember, from that earlier consciousness, was a light I felt shining in my head. I shone it out from in my head, and shared it with the dark. That was what I was, just as for that sea out there I’m hearing, its way of being is to rear and fall and carve the rock. That light in my head, how or what it was, I cannot answer. Only this I see now. My light is fallen dark.
*
Secretly, feeling a trespasser, I’m passing up this first flight of curving staircase now. Twelve shallow treads, carpeted in a weave-like motif of close-packed narrow stripes of red, black, fawn and gold, leading onward, upward… As they bring me to a landing, I pass a narrow window deep-set in the cladded wall—but it too is cladded over and painted white, like a closed eye. On its blind sill rests an old brass storm-lamp. It looks as though it has spent long years in some wreck on the sea bed.
I look around where I have come. I sense I have been here before. But I have seen nothing like this before.
The landing is round, and central down into it hangs a chandelier. Opposite me, their backs to the ascending stair-rail, sits a leathered banquette with three cushions. Beside it stands an artist’s easel, empty. As I turn from it to look to where the staircase resumes its curving climb, I see that it passes on the wall, mounted on a vertical slab of grey slate, the icon of a white lighthouse—
Lighthouse.
Instantly I look up above me. I see there, as though by some nightmare dislocation, the round ceiling is the underside of a massive wheel.
I cannot be truly seeing this. Even more jarring in what I see, it’s from the centre of that wheel’s hub the chandelier is hanging.
Yet wheel it is. Ten-spoked, painted over in a sickly cream, rivet-heads and all.
What colour it was before, I cannot see now. But a wheel there, I know I have seen before. Exactly there.
Of everything around me, that alone has right to be there. It is – or was – a wheel, and once it turned, and slowly rotated a monstrous burden that it bore above it there. Now it is stilled. And painted over.
I know where I am now. I know now why this place so shackles me. Suddenly I am flooded with a living emotion, wrenching me. I feel as though I am a mariner, come home from sea to find my loved ones butchered and still bleeding.
*
Stunned, I am passing up this next curve of slowly winding stair, as though in spite of all I hope to see it, that fearsome weight the wheel once bore.
As I draw up level with it, I pass only a blank heavy cream-painted circular casing like a concrete drum, and into it is set… nothing, only the next, and here a little smaller, circular landing, its round floor bare but for more of the narrow-striped carpet in its red and black and fawn and gold. Silent, all but empty, actionless. I look across it. Against the further ever-cladded concave arc of wall two upright chairs, false-leathered in an ox-blood red, face across to a deep-set window looking west, as though for an aging couple to gaze out at the setting sun.
I pass toward them across the deathly emptiness where the glory of this tower should be. By the chairs there I turn, and look back across the nothing where it was. I gather and reassemble the reality of it in my head. Three-and-a-half-ton weight of reflective-refractive lens floating on a four-inch bed of mercury, ceaselessly turning on its wheel full circle through every twenty seconds between four occluding panels so spaced and angled that twice in each rotation the light briefly escapes, its brightness multiplied by the lens to an intensity that as far as 25 sea-miles out can be seen.
That is the light I was.
And now here, nothing, but beyond that ubiquitous thin-stripe carpet again a deep-set window, this the narrowest of them all, and out there a sea, heaving unheard and grey, and rising up there before it, thrashed from somewhere unseen below, silent shreddings of its spray. As though it weeps out there, as in here could I. Here was my light, and it is gone.
My eye is torn from my head. I am in pain and rage. What can I call this perverted tower now? Wrath Light.
*
And by that window onto the muted sea, the last stairs lead up, steep almost as a wall, less staircase, more a companion-way, into the tower-head above. I dare not imagine what will be up there now.
Even these treads are carpeted now, but beneath my feet I’m seeing not sound-dulling stripe-motif but naked latticed echoing steps in industrial iron. Thirteen—I count them—bring me to raise my head and stand up into somewhere utterly unrecognisable. With a shock I pass as though into another universe.
What was dome is straight, rectangular, a gallery square-glassed on three sides, southward to the headland, forward over sea to the horizon, north to clifftops and islands beyond. The impression is of a wheelhouse – and so must someone have intended. At the centre of the seaward glass, on the sill stands a half-helm white as chalk: no sturdy wheel but a light little thing—seize it to turn it, it will lift away in your hand, I can see that. Joke on him, who would play the helmsman here.
Here too are items of alien flotsam beached on the sills: a disembodied porthole, a crude model coaster with a cheap tin smoke-stack, a deep-red sandstone pebble worn smooth by centuries of sea; flat on its back in ignominy, a framed display, mounted on snooker-table green, of mariners’ knots – a reef-knot, a clove-hitch, a sheet-bend, a bowline… And on the wall beside where the companion-way enters the gallery, a montage of drawings, printed pages, a hand-drawn map of the headland…
I become aware I am hearing from somewhere out there a sound I do not recognise. I know it should be the dark mournful boom of a foghorn but it’s more like the thin clinking of a length of chain paid slowly again and again through an iron ring—it doesn’t sound even so real as that, more like a radio effect. How can so mean a trickle of sound be heard out at sea?
Glancing out through the southward glass, I see the green of the grassy clifftop is suddenly veiled in incoming mist. As I turn and glimpse a herring gull in flight past the northward glass, his grey turns dusty, his body evaporates and vanishes, printing a white flash on my eye. Already the light around this look-out has thickened to a dirty grey, clotted and wreathing. Blindfold by the fog, the wheelhouse feels suddenly adrift: I fancy I could look out and over, and see below me no tower anchoring me to the ground. Unfooted from the earth, the wheelhouse would sway and fall…
Irrationally I pull back, as though so close to the window I might overbalance the tower. From the top of the companion-way I face down into the roundel where my magnificent lantern once blazed and turned and twice every 20 seconds sent out a beam to sweep and scythe the dark. Nothing there now. I feel as though wakened from the dead, to find myself imprisoned in my blinded tower, to mourn and wander it for ever.
I cannot abide the thought. To put behind me this excrescence of a crown, as though out of my sight it will cease to exist, I make to pass down those steep treads again, into the stability of the tower’s core. Glancing around me, I see who has come to visit me.
At first I think it is a clotting in the mist out there, it has to be. Even with that human form of black caped shoulders and sou’westered head, beyond the white bisected parody of helm outside the glass there, it’s a clotting in the fog, it has to be. I want it to be.
Then I’m thinking it must be somehow a reflection of myself, I need it to be.
But now there’s as a second, beyond him to my left of him, in glistening black oilskin and sou’wester too; and now to my right of him a third, the same. Their features I cannot see but I feel from them a burning grief and rage. Accused, ashamed, I cannot meet that gaze of theirs I do not see. Yet I dare not take my eyes from one then the other then the other then the first again, for fear in that instant of my looking away from any of them I find each stepped through and into this cage of glass where I am, to be with me, for ever.
Then all is dark out there, the fog is black as night and they cannot be seen. Now I dare not go down into the tower again, for fear they are waiting there to take me to that place of damnation from where they come.
*
I sit on the floor, sleepless, my back to the wall, staring in terror toward the void where the companion-way would bring them up into here. Who are they I dread any moment will appear there? I’d thought the first was somehow a reflection of myself in the glass. Now I’m thinking, in a deeper sense perhaps he was. Perhaps they all were? I had been a keeper here: had they been keepers too? And the sorrow and rage I feel burning from them I feel because I have betrayed the light they kept? Yet of all the keepers there have been, of all that line of them who could have come to reproach me, why only these three?
I stare transfixed toward that handrail leading up from that emptiness where my light had been, and I could shake with tears of shame.
*
No tears come. No accusers come.
With night and the storm come the rage and weeping, hurtling and rattling up from the south-west across that Celtic Sea, at every buffet of wind the tower shocked and shaken, and everywhere within her the doors rattling and straining; out there in the dark, the piled waters heard breaking and pounding sharp as cannon-shot on the rock her foothold; squalls of solid rain hurled against her glass in cataracts of tears as though to shatter it.
*
‘Sleepless,’ I say. What sleep there can be for who I am? For I begin to know what it is, that darkness I become between my times of seeing. Yet I must have, however fitfully, returned there. And when I next—for want of any other word—awake, it is to silence; stillness in the tower; light.
Outside away below there, the sea is driving strongly from the north-west, ridden by spuming white horses. Her lustrous sapphire-green is clotted with grey – reflections from scuds of leaden cloud above, among the flocks of fleece up there amid the washed blue sky. It has all the fresh beginning of a bright March morning, and I’m feeling a lightness I have long not known.
In light of this morning I am seeing more clearly what’s mounted in the frames on the wall above the companion-way head. Printed pages, the sketch-map, old drawings, photographs… One white-on-black drawing, done on scraper-board, shows a strange scene: by night, on a stone tower-top a man feeding coal into a blazing brazier sparking upwards into the dark. I think how unkind the task of the keeper of such a light, ever at the inconstant mercy of wind and weather.
A stray thought snags at my mind: might he be one of the visitants I saw?
The map shows the headland, and marks three lighthouse sites. One is marked 1714 COAL. The second, on the cliffline, is marked 1793, and has a drawn line leading from it to a bordered caption, immaculately penned ...
OIL
Argand burner
silvered copper reflectors
Demolished 1866 due to cliff erosion
A third site, a little inland of it, is doubly captioned: 1867 OIL Matthews burner then in a different hand 1958 CONNECTED TO MAINS and last in larger black lettering FRESNEL LENS—
Fresnel. The name tolls in me like the muffled knell of a fogbuoy. And I begin to see. A coal brazier, two oil burners, all in turn replaced: to each a last keeper. Three lost lights. Then electricity: Fresnel lens. My light. Fresnel. That was the name for it. A three-and-a-half-ton weight of reflective and refractive lens, floating on a half-ton bed of mercury, amplifying the light of a single three-kilowatt bulb to an intensity that at 25 sea-miles’ distance can be seen.
*
I look down into the roundel where it was. To my seeing, now it seems more coldly empty than before. Memoriless. Almost as though it had never been there, that marvel I so husbanded. As though those visitants had never come. Yet I saw them. Why had they come? If to sorrow with me in my sorrow, yet they had after them each a greater light to come. I had none. My sorrow is beyond their sorrow. They came to me in anger then? Oh angry they would be, and have a right. Mine was our last light of them all: and in my keeping it went dark for ever.
No. Is even that anger enough to have them make that crossing from the dead? For some deeper reason had they come. Or I brought them to me. I cannot fathom it.
I will go down into my tower now. In this still morning, she is footed to the earth; and I am held prisoner to her by guilt and shame. Yet I’m thinking, what choice had I? The light was not taken from my keeping: my keeping was taken from the light.
Then suddenly a new question comes, and like that vision I have awakened to this fresh March morning, the sight of that lustrous blue-green sea clotted with leaden shadows and driven by white horses, it astonishes my heart. A new, and unexpected question, and it lights up in me like a setting-free.
What if those three last keepers came to tell me, Let it go?
*
I have paused as I make to descend, and I hear new voices come to haunt me. Is there no end to the hauntings in this place? These are a young woman and two children.
Oh look mummy what’s this?
Where love?
On this window-sill mummy look.
I don’t know dear. It’s a sort of sailing boat. You’ll have to ask uncle Jamie when he comes. He knows about boats.
And an older woman: I’m cold. Can you find where the thermostat is and tweak it up?
Then the youngest voice, a boy: Mummy look at this!
It’s a telescope. Don’t lift it Arnie, put it back!
And all in one obliterating moment, I see what I am. Those hearings and sightings I’d thought were sent to wake and afflict me – the people in the black armchairs, the sleeper risen from the bed—they are the real. Not I.
That will be a great toil to me to learn.
A silence now. I know the little boy is down there. At the foot of the carpeted companion-way, hatching some disobedience…
No Arnie! Not up there! Wait till Daddy comes. He’ll take you up there. Arnie no!
Next I hear sounds of her lifting and carrying him kicking and screaming away. But soon, I know, he’ll be laughing.
What shall I call this tower now? Wrath Light, for my useless anger? Sore Light, for my lonely sorrow?
Then the little girl’s voice: Do you like this lighthouse, grandma? I wish we could live here…
Sad Light, for her desolation and abandonment? None of these. Glad Light. There will be a new joy here, and laughter.
Glad Light.
But for me, that too will be a toil to learn.
And when they all come up here, in such excitement, I’ll have to turn my face away. Not meet their eye, any of them. Or they shall see me.
Must not be seen. That too will be a toil.
Hardest task of all, to let my lantern go.
*
Think now. The light entrusted me has shone its shining in the world.
In the beam of it, courses have been safely steered, landfall and homecoming
made, lives not lost but saved to live. Lighthouse-keeper, want no more. Let it go.
I had not thought a dead man could have so much work to do.
Order RUDKIN’s shorezone from strange attractor direct.
David Rudkin was born in 1936 of Irish and English parentage. His first play, Afore Night Come, written while he was reading Classics at Oxford, was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. In a career spanning sixty years—across theatre, cinema, television, radio and musical theatre—he has worked with, among others, François Truffaut, Fred Zinnemann, Peter Hall, Peter Brook and Pierre Audi. His screenplay, Testimony—drawn from the disputed memoirs of Shostakovich—was awarded the Gold Medal for Screenplay at the New York Film Festival, 1988. He has also translated Schoenberg, and plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, Ibsen and Genet from their original languages for stage and radio. A full-length opera (with Param Vir) on the Buddha, AWAKENING, was recently performed by Theater Bonn for their Beethoven 250th anniversary season, on hold from 2020.
Back to Rehearsal.
An elsewhere-epilogue to a collection of stories,
Shorezone (Strange attractor, 2026) ...
* * *
I feel as though they woke me. Voices before me in the dark: of two men, then an older woman then an older man, quite animated and then all suddenly laughing. I take a step forward to see who they are—they flash upon my sight, dark shapes, seated on half a dozen black leather-looking armchairs as though before a fire—but no firelight. The moment I see them they stop laughing and look up startled at me. Yet I think they don’t see me.
Then there’s only this dark again.
How long was I asleep?
*
What dark is this?
What is ‘I’?
Something I remembered then!
Thought I did.
Gone.
Where is this place I am?
*
Daylight now.
I’m searching.
I’m somewhere else I don’t know.
This wall I’m passing in here is cladded and painted white. It’s curving out slowly before me; and splays a little to where it meets the slate-tile floor. I seem to be skirting the foot of a great white-clad bell.
Now I’m passing in through a doorway deep-set into it, and come before another doorway, open onto a little room almost filled by a single bed spread with a coverlet in silky-looking blue-sea-green. The wall beyond it is concave, curved in away from me. This little room is round, I notice, as though I am inside the bell.
Who sleeps here? In this strange round little room in this bell, whose bed is this?
A sudden thought. Where do I sleep? Where is my bed?
*
Or do I sleep?
I remember no going to sleep. I remember only those voices waking me and those people I saw. Then waking again, already passing that white-cladded wall and in through the deep-set doorway in it to where it brought me. Between these seeings, there is a darkness I am. It must be sleep.
*
I’m searching again. In a new place—No. Somewhere I have been before. I’m in that big wide room again where the people were. They’re not here now. The black leatherish armchairs are empty. And it’s day. In here too the wall is cladded white, but straight. Above, all the way along, its angle with the ceiling is braided with thick dark rope. Why does that make me think of the sea?
*
Now I’m deeper into this room, the curve of empty black armchairs is side-on to me, and I’m passing a glass-fronted cabinet, mahogany I’d say, with mirrored backing where I see the whole room behind me reflected before me. In the cabinet, displayed like a precious relic but half in shadow, is a bottle-green float, pure globe in a net. On the next, white-cladded window-sill is a childishly made model of a two-master ketch; in the next cabinet, a brass storm-lantern, a teak double pulley-block—
Suddenly I’m sensing there is someone with me in this place. I look up again, sharply, into the room’s reflection there before me: the black soft leathery backs of the empty chairs are behind me now, and beyond them something I’ve not noticed before, an oval dining-table spread with a white cloth and set with silver for eight, wine glasses and all. Away to my left of it in the reflection, an interior door stands open, by which I sense I must have entered here. And framed beyond that, in dim interior daylight, a cold hallway, side-on to it a convex arc of white-cladded wall splaying—yes, I have dreamed that before—splaying out a little where it meets the slate-tiled floor—like a great white-clad bell—
Yes, I have been there. This is all one place. And the moment I see that, I glimpse before that white an obscure dark form already passing and gone—
I feel a shock of deep cold. Was that a ghost? Then no, that was surely myself, glimpsed in reflection of a shadow I somehow cast. Myself: it has to be. How, I cannot explain. But somehow myself. It has to be.
I become aware, for the first time in this place since these wakings and wanderings began, that I am hearing from outside there somewhere the seethe and drone of the sea. I know it instantly. And that sound is with me now as, with no sensation of coming here, already I’m before the doorway onto the little round room again, with the single bed with the blue-sea-green bedspread. But this time the bedding has been disturbed. On the side toward the daylight, it’s been untidily thrust aside. Someone has been in this bed, and stood from it.
And gone where?
I look around me. Before this doorway, I’m inside the cladded bell, splayed where it rests on the ground. Left of me, I see now, a section of spiral staircase rises tight to the inside curve of the wall.
Something it reminds me of. Something I’m remembering here…
*
… I’m suddenly thinking, This is no bell. This is… This is… I cannot see what it is. But something else I see. I see again that fragment of a memory that almost came to me, and backed away. It stays now.
I begin to see, I have been a darkness. Before that darkness, I was a consciousness then too? I glimpse this fragment of a remembering that backed away before: it is in me now. Is it a memory of what I am?
All I can remember, from that earlier consciousness, was a light I felt shining in my head. I shone it out from in my head, and shared it with the dark. That was what I was, just as for that sea out there I’m hearing, its way of being is to rear and fall and carve the rock. That light in my head, how or what it was, I cannot answer. Only this I see now. My light is fallen dark.
*
Secretly, feeling a trespasser, I’m passing up this first flight of curving staircase now. Twelve shallow treads, carpeted in a weave-like motif of close-packed narrow stripes of red, black, fawn and gold, leading onward, upward… As they bring me to a landing, I pass a narrow window deep-set in the cladded wall—but it too is cladded over and painted white, like a closed eye. On its blind sill rests an old brass storm-lamp. It looks as though it has spent long years in some wreck on the sea bed.
I look around where I have come. I sense I have been here before. But I have seen nothing like this before.
The landing is round, and central down into it hangs a chandelier. Opposite me, their backs to the ascending stair-rail, sits a leathered banquette with three cushions. Beside it stands an artist’s easel, empty. As I turn from it to look to where the staircase resumes its curving climb, I see that it passes on the wall, mounted on a vertical slab of grey slate, the icon of a white lighthouse—
Lighthouse.
Instantly I look up above me. I see there, as though by some nightmare dislocation, the round ceiling is the underside of a massive wheel.
I cannot be truly seeing this. Even more jarring in what I see, it’s from the centre of that wheel’s hub the chandelier is hanging.
Yet wheel it is. Ten-spoked, painted over in a sickly cream, rivet-heads and all.
What colour it was before, I cannot see now. But a wheel there, I know I have seen before. Exactly there.
Of everything around me, that alone has right to be there. It is – or was – a wheel, and once it turned, and slowly rotated a monstrous burden that it bore above it there. Now it is stilled. And painted over.
I know where I am now. I know now why this place so shackles me. Suddenly I am flooded with a living emotion, wrenching me. I feel as though I am a mariner, come home from sea to find my loved ones butchered and still bleeding.
*
Stunned, I am passing up this next curve of slowly winding stair, as though in spite of all I hope to see it, that fearsome weight the wheel once bore.
As I draw up level with it, I pass only a blank heavy cream-painted circular casing like a concrete drum, and into it is set… nothing, only the next, and here a little smaller, circular landing, its round floor bare but for more of the narrow-striped carpet in its red and black and fawn and gold. Silent, all but empty, actionless. I look across it. Against the further ever-cladded concave arc of wall two upright chairs, false-leathered in an ox-blood red, face across to a deep-set window looking west, as though for an aging couple to gaze out at the setting sun.
I pass toward them across the deathly emptiness where the glory of this tower should be. By the chairs there I turn, and look back across the nothing where it was. I gather and reassemble the reality of it in my head. Three-and-a-half-ton weight of reflective-refractive lens floating on a four-inch bed of mercury, ceaselessly turning on its wheel full circle through every twenty seconds between four occluding panels so spaced and angled that twice in each rotation the light briefly escapes, its brightness multiplied by the lens to an intensity that as far as 25 sea-miles out can be seen.
That is the light I was.
And now here, nothing, but beyond that ubiquitous thin-stripe carpet again a deep-set window, this the narrowest of them all, and out there a sea, heaving unheard and grey, and rising up there before it, thrashed from somewhere unseen below, silent shreddings of its spray. As though it weeps out there, as in here could I. Here was my light, and it is gone.
My eye is torn from my head. I am in pain and rage. What can I call this perverted tower now? Wrath Light.
*
And by that window onto the muted sea, the last stairs lead up, steep almost as a wall, less staircase, more a companion-way, into the tower-head above. I dare not imagine what will be up there now.
Even these treads are carpeted now, but beneath my feet I’m seeing not sound-dulling stripe-motif but naked latticed echoing steps in industrial iron. Thirteen—I count them—bring me to raise my head and stand up into somewhere utterly unrecognisable. With a shock I pass as though into another universe.
What was dome is straight, rectangular, a gallery square-glassed on three sides, southward to the headland, forward over sea to the horizon, north to clifftops and islands beyond. The impression is of a wheelhouse – and so must someone have intended. At the centre of the seaward glass, on the sill stands a half-helm white as chalk: no sturdy wheel but a light little thing—seize it to turn it, it will lift away in your hand, I can see that. Joke on him, who would play the helmsman here.
Here too are items of alien flotsam beached on the sills: a disembodied porthole, a crude model coaster with a cheap tin smoke-stack, a deep-red sandstone pebble worn smooth by centuries of sea; flat on its back in ignominy, a framed display, mounted on snooker-table green, of mariners’ knots – a reef-knot, a clove-hitch, a sheet-bend, a bowline… And on the wall beside where the companion-way enters the gallery, a montage of drawings, printed pages, a hand-drawn map of the headland…
I become aware I am hearing from somewhere out there a sound I do not recognise. I know it should be the dark mournful boom of a foghorn but it’s more like the thin clinking of a length of chain paid slowly again and again through an iron ring—it doesn’t sound even so real as that, more like a radio effect. How can so mean a trickle of sound be heard out at sea?
Glancing out through the southward glass, I see the green of the grassy clifftop is suddenly veiled in incoming mist. As I turn and glimpse a herring gull in flight past the northward glass, his grey turns dusty, his body evaporates and vanishes, printing a white flash on my eye. Already the light around this look-out has thickened to a dirty grey, clotted and wreathing. Blindfold by the fog, the wheelhouse feels suddenly adrift: I fancy I could look out and over, and see below me no tower anchoring me to the ground. Unfooted from the earth, the wheelhouse would sway and fall…
Irrationally I pull back, as though so close to the window I might overbalance the tower. From the top of the companion-way I face down into the roundel where my magnificent lantern once blazed and turned and twice every 20 seconds sent out a beam to sweep and scythe the dark. Nothing there now. I feel as though wakened from the dead, to find myself imprisoned in my blinded tower, to mourn and wander it for ever.
I cannot abide the thought. To put behind me this excrescence of a crown, as though out of my sight it will cease to exist, I make to pass down those steep treads again, into the stability of the tower’s core. Glancing around me, I see who has come to visit me.
At first I think it is a clotting in the mist out there, it has to be. Even with that human form of black caped shoulders and sou’westered head, beyond the white bisected parody of helm outside the glass there, it’s a clotting in the fog, it has to be. I want it to be.
Then I’m thinking it must be somehow a reflection of myself, I need it to be.
But now there’s as a second, beyond him to my left of him, in glistening black oilskin and sou’wester too; and now to my right of him a third, the same. Their features I cannot see but I feel from them a burning grief and rage. Accused, ashamed, I cannot meet that gaze of theirs I do not see. Yet I dare not take my eyes from one then the other then the other then the first again, for fear in that instant of my looking away from any of them I find each stepped through and into this cage of glass where I am, to be with me, for ever.
Then all is dark out there, the fog is black as night and they cannot be seen. Now I dare not go down into the tower again, for fear they are waiting there to take me to that place of damnation from where they come.
*
I sit on the floor, sleepless, my back to the wall, staring in terror toward the void where the companion-way would bring them up into here. Who are they I dread any moment will appear there? I’d thought the first was somehow a reflection of myself in the glass. Now I’m thinking, in a deeper sense perhaps he was. Perhaps they all were? I had been a keeper here: had they been keepers too? And the sorrow and rage I feel burning from them I feel because I have betrayed the light they kept? Yet of all the keepers there have been, of all that line of them who could have come to reproach me, why only these three?
I stare transfixed toward that handrail leading up from that emptiness where my light had been, and I could shake with tears of shame.
*
No tears come. No accusers come.
With night and the storm come the rage and weeping, hurtling and rattling up from the south-west across that Celtic Sea, at every buffet of wind the tower shocked and shaken, and everywhere within her the doors rattling and straining; out there in the dark, the piled waters heard breaking and pounding sharp as cannon-shot on the rock her foothold; squalls of solid rain hurled against her glass in cataracts of tears as though to shatter it.
*
‘Sleepless,’ I say. What sleep there can be for who I am? For I begin to know what it is, that darkness I become between my times of seeing. Yet I must have, however fitfully, returned there. And when I next—for want of any other word—awake, it is to silence; stillness in the tower; light.
Outside away below there, the sea is driving strongly from the north-west, ridden by spuming white horses. Her lustrous sapphire-green is clotted with grey – reflections from scuds of leaden cloud above, among the flocks of fleece up there amid the washed blue sky. It has all the fresh beginning of a bright March morning, and I’m feeling a lightness I have long not known.
In light of this morning I am seeing more clearly what’s mounted in the frames on the wall above the companion-way head. Printed pages, the sketch-map, old drawings, photographs… One white-on-black drawing, done on scraper-board, shows a strange scene: by night, on a stone tower-top a man feeding coal into a blazing brazier sparking upwards into the dark. I think how unkind the task of the keeper of such a light, ever at the inconstant mercy of wind and weather.
A stray thought snags at my mind: might he be one of the visitants I saw?
The map shows the headland, and marks three lighthouse sites. One is marked 1714 COAL. The second, on the cliffline, is marked 1793, and has a drawn line leading from it to a bordered caption, immaculately penned ...
OIL
Argand burner
silvered copper reflectors
Demolished 1866 due to cliff erosion
A third site, a little inland of it, is doubly captioned: 1867 OIL Matthews burner then in a different hand 1958 CONNECTED TO MAINS and last in larger black lettering FRESNEL LENS—
Fresnel. The name tolls in me like the muffled knell of a fogbuoy. And I begin to see. A coal brazier, two oil burners, all in turn replaced: to each a last keeper. Three lost lights. Then electricity: Fresnel lens. My light. Fresnel. That was the name for it. A three-and-a-half-ton weight of reflective and refractive lens, floating on a half-ton bed of mercury, amplifying the light of a single three-kilowatt bulb to an intensity that at 25 sea-miles’ distance can be seen.
*
I look down into the roundel where it was. To my seeing, now it seems more coldly empty than before. Memoriless. Almost as though it had never been there, that marvel I so husbanded. As though those visitants had never come. Yet I saw them. Why had they come? If to sorrow with me in my sorrow, yet they had after them each a greater light to come. I had none. My sorrow is beyond their sorrow. They came to me in anger then? Oh angry they would be, and have a right. Mine was our last light of them all: and in my keeping it went dark for ever.
No. Is even that anger enough to have them make that crossing from the dead? For some deeper reason had they come. Or I brought them to me. I cannot fathom it.
I will go down into my tower now. In this still morning, she is footed to the earth; and I am held prisoner to her by guilt and shame. Yet I’m thinking, what choice had I? The light was not taken from my keeping: my keeping was taken from the light.
Then suddenly a new question comes, and like that vision I have awakened to this fresh March morning, the sight of that lustrous blue-green sea clotted with leaden shadows and driven by white horses, it astonishes my heart. A new, and unexpected question, and it lights up in me like a setting-free.
What if those three last keepers came to tell me, Let it go?
*
I have paused as I make to descend, and I hear new voices come to haunt me. Is there no end to the hauntings in this place? These are a young woman and two children.
Oh look mummy what’s this?
Where love?
On this window-sill mummy look.
I don’t know dear. It’s a sort of sailing boat. You’ll have to ask uncle Jamie when he comes. He knows about boats.
And an older woman: I’m cold. Can you find where the thermostat is and tweak it up?
Then the youngest voice, a boy: Mummy look at this!
It’s a telescope. Don’t lift it Arnie, put it back!
And all in one obliterating moment, I see what I am. Those hearings and sightings I’d thought were sent to wake and afflict me – the people in the black armchairs, the sleeper risen from the bed—they are the real. Not I.
That will be a great toil to me to learn.
A silence now. I know the little boy is down there. At the foot of the carpeted companion-way, hatching some disobedience…
No Arnie! Not up there! Wait till Daddy comes. He’ll take you up there. Arnie no!
Next I hear sounds of her lifting and carrying him kicking and screaming away. But soon, I know, he’ll be laughing.
What shall I call this tower now? Wrath Light, for my useless anger? Sore Light, for my lonely sorrow?
Then the little girl’s voice: Do you like this lighthouse, grandma? I wish we could live here…
Sad Light, for her desolation and abandonment? None of these. Glad Light. There will be a new joy here, and laughter.
Glad Light.
But for me, that too will be a toil to learn.
And when they all come up here, in such excitement, I’ll have to turn my face away. Not meet their eye, any of them. Or they shall see me.
Must not be seen. That too will be a toil.
Hardest task of all, to let my lantern go.
*
Think now. The light entrusted me has shone its shining in the world.
In the beam of it, courses have been safely steered, landfall and homecoming
made, lives not lost but saved to live. Lighthouse-keeper, want no more. Let it go.
I had not thought a dead man could have so much work to do.
Order RUDKIN’s shorezone from strange attractor direct.
David Rudkin was born in 1936 of Irish and English parentage. His first play, Afore Night Come, written while he was reading Classics at Oxford, was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. In a career spanning sixty years—across theatre, cinema, television, radio and musical theatre—he has worked with, among others, François Truffaut, Fred Zinnemann, Peter Hall, Peter Brook and Pierre Audi. His screenplay, Testimony—drawn from the disputed memoirs of Shostakovich—was awarded the Gold Medal for Screenplay at the New York Film Festival, 1988. He has also translated Schoenberg, and plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, Ibsen and Genet from their original languages for stage and radio. A full-length opera (with Param Vir) on the Buddha, AWAKENING, was recently performed by Theater Bonn for their Beethoven 250th anniversary season, on hold from 2020.
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