The Last Lighthouse Keeper

by Alan Titchmarsh

  “One of life’s bitter ironies?” Will said.

  “Something like that. The longer I do this job the less I try to understand the things that happen. Life’s a funny old thing.”

  “Yes. Thank you for telling me.”

  “Oh, and again, sir. Under your hat if you would.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  The sergeant smiled sympathetically as Will plunged his hands deep into his pockets and walked out into the bright, sunny day. If he had known how quickly he would have to return he would not have bothered leaving. He shopped for food in St Petroc then caught the bus home.

  ♦

  The police car intercepted him as he walked along the lane at Pencurnow from the bus stop. A uniformed constable was at the wheel and leaned over to wind down the window.

  “Do you think you could get in, sir?”

  Will opened the passenger door. “But I’ve just – ”

  “I’m afraid the sergeant needs to see you again.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Didn’t say, sir. Just asked if I’d pick you up and take you there.”

  On the way back to St Petroc, Will’s mind worked overtime, trying to understand what could be the reason for his return to the police station. It dawned on him as the sergeant walked into the interview room. “It wasn’t there, was it?”

  “No, sir. No sign. Just empty lobster pots. All six.”

  “You found six?”

  “Yes, sir. All empty.”

  Will felt silly. “Well, it was there this morning, that’s all I can say.”

  “Mmm. Did anyone see you around Bill’s Island?”

  “No. Not as far as I’m aware – no, I’m sure not.”

  “And you saw no boats in the vicinity?”

  “Mine was the only one.”

  “Mmm. Bit of a bugger, that. Someone’s been there between your visit and mine. But we don’t know who.”

  Will sat at the Formica-topped table feeling like a schoolboy being interviewed by his headmaster. The sergeant did not question Will’s honesty, but a hint of incredulity crept into his voice. He came at the problem from a number of angles and, finally realizing that he was not getting any further, agreed that Will could leave. He seemed annoyed, and Will hoped that the cause was the unresolved situation rather than his own involvement.

  “Do you think I could have my chart back?” Will asked.

  “Yes, of course you can.” The policeman led the way from the interview room to the counter at the front of the station, and reached below it to retrieve the chart, now folded up and tucked neatly into a polythene bag. He dangled it in the air and looked at it. “Never understand these. Know where you are with a map, roads and that, but not one of these.”

  Will looked at him questioningly and the sergeant read his mind. “Oh, don’t worry, sir. I wasn’t on my own, I was with the coastguard. He can understand them. And so can the person who got to the stuff before we did,” he added, under his breath. “Be in touch, sir.” And with that he walked into the room behind the counter.

  Twenty-Three

  Beachy Head

  “I just don’t want to go. They’re awful people.”

  Amy snuggled up to him.

  “Well, sometimes we all have to do things we don’t want to do.”

  “Beast!” She dug him in the ribs with her elbow and he collapsed with a peal of laughter.

  They were lying side by side in her bed at the studio. For the last week they had revelled in each other’s company, Amy trying to put Will’s voyage to the back of her mind, convincing herself that he might not go after all, and Will busying himself during the day with further work on the boat, and telling himself it would be a good while yet before she was ready.

  It was early on a Sunday morning and the MacDermotts’ ‘drinkies’ party was just a few hours away. Will pulled her closer and she curled into him.

  “What a way to ruin a Sunday.”

  Out of the skylight Will could see plump white clouds. “It’ll probably rain on them. Anyway, it’s only for a couple of hours. We can arrive late and leave early. Say you’ve got the studio to attend to.”

  “Which is true. Angela can only stay a couple of hours.”

  “How’s she been?” He stroked her pale back.

  “OK. She’s very quiet. No danger of her providing Primrose with any useful information.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  “But at least I’ve managed to paint.”

  “How many?”

  “Three.”

  “When can I see them?”

  “Soon. I’ve got some finishing off to do and I don’t want you to look until they’re done.”

  “I suppose we could get out of going.”

  “It was you who said we ought to go, not me,” Amy reproved him.

  “I’ve changed my mind. I’d rather stay here with you. All day.”

  “No. You were right the first time. The MacDermotts spent a lot of money at the studio and I could do with more of their business.”

  “Oh, I see. Getting serious now, are we? Businesswoman of the Year all of a sudden?”

  She grinned. “Well, I suppose we don’t have to get up just yet, do we?” She slid her hand down underneath the quilt and his stomach muscles contracted.

  It was another hour before they emerged.

  ♦

  It was a quarter to one when they walked up the hill towards Benbecula, holding hands, Amy grumbling quietly and Will trying to suppress a smile, though he, too, was hardly looking forward to an hour or more of small-talk with the denizens of Pencurnow Cove. He was, he told himself, only there to provide moral support. He looked out across the deep turquoise sea and at the blue sky, gradually filling with cumulus clouds, then squeezed her hand reassuringly. It was a soft, delicate hand with long, fine-boned fingers, and he loved the feel of the tender skin in his own.

  He darted a look at her face, shadowed by a wide-brimmed straw hat. The feeling of complete pleasure in her company grew daily. Often it was simply enough to be in the same room. He felt no need to say anything: he could draw strength and warmth from her presence alone. At other times he wanted to hold her so tightly that her body almost passed through his. And soon there would be his voyage. He put that thought to the back of his mind and held her hand tighter as they crested the brow of the hill and heard voices at the garden party.

  Benbecula was a Victorian gentleman’s residence built of granite and planted squarely at the top of the lane where it commanded a fine view of the cove. Stone gateposts topped with pineapples supported ornate wrought-iron gates, which opened on to a gravel drive that led, in a sweeping curve, to the white-painted front door set in a generous porch equipped with a shiny brass ship’s bell. There were two sets of mullioned bay windows at either side of the door on the ground floor, and four gabled dormer windows protruded from the blue slate roof. Virginia creeper, in its shiny late-May livery, caressed mullion and finial with its rampant tentacles, softening the harsh, chiselled lines of the architecture. It was a solid house, not elegant in the Regency sense but robust Victorian. William Ewart Gladstone rather than Beau Brummel.

  The rear of the house overlooked the bay, and handwritten notices pinned to wooden stakes directed guests along the drive and round the side of the house towards the striped lawn. A sprinkling of tables decorated the turf alongside a newly created putting green speckled with scarlet flags. The terrace alongside the house boasted a tall white flagpole, and strings of bunting led from it to the surrounding trees of macrocarpa, bent by years of onshore breezes into crouched wizened shrouds of greenery.

  “It looks like the vicarage fete,” whispered Will.

  “And here comes the vicar,” murmured Amy, as Jerry MacDermott strode across the lawn in his pink sweater and white trousers, the ubiquitous cigar clenched between his teeth and a glass in his left hand.

  “Glad you could make it,” he boomed, patting Amy on the back. Will thought the wide-brimme
d hat must have put MacDermott off giving Amy a kiss: the prospect of negotiating access with a glass in one hand and a cigar in the other might have been more than he could manage without one of them coming to grief.

  “Squire,” MacDermott acknowledged Will. “Come and meet everybody.”

  Will’s heart sank as they were dragged across the lawn, where a Pimm’s was thrust into their hands by a local girl dragooned into waitressing.

  “Great place, eh? Bloody good views of the cove.”

  “Wonderful,” Will admitted, truthfully. Benbecula might not have been the prettiest house in Pencurnow, but it was certainly the largest and boasted the best panorama of the bay. Beyond the house, the lawns sloped away towards the sea between banks of feathery tamarisk. Bill’s Island rose up from the ocean, looking even more like a whale than it did from the shore of the cove, and Prince Albert Rock Lighthouse pointed immaculately skywards from its granite promontory.

  “You should come and paint up here,” suggested MacDermott – with the merest hint, thought Amy, that the location might improve her technique. She smiled noncommittally.

  “Said to the missus when we bought it that it was the best house in the area. No point in settling for anything less, eh? Course, we had to do a fair bit of work on it. Decoration a bit on the dreary side. Still, the missus has a flair for that sort of thing. You’re artistic, come and have a look.”

  Before either of them could demur, Will and Amy found themselves propelled towards the french windows at the back of the house to peer into a room that made the Sistine Chapel seem lacklustre. Gone was the country chintz favoured by the previous owners, and in had come silken curtains, fringed with gold and gathered in great folds and ruches on either side of every window by fat tie-backs that swept up yards of sumptuous fabric. The sofas and chairs were white and richly padded, coffee tables of gilt and onyx held glossy books devoted to racing cars and stylish interiors, and glass shelves on either side of the new marble fireplace displayed a quantity of Lladro and Capo di Monte that could have restocked Lower Regent Street.

  The telephone was an ornate pseudo-Victorian confection in amber and gold, and Amy guessed that even the lavatory pan was probably equipped with swags and tails.

  The two gazed on the profligate display of newly acquired wealth in silent bewilderment.

  “Done well, hasn’t she?” said their host, with pride. “Knows just what to put with what. No point asking me – I’m colour blind.”

  It was at this point that Amy noticed the two sculptures she had sold the MacDermotts. They were standing at either side of the double doors leading from the ornate sitting room into the hall, each placed centrally on a goatskin rug. Her heart sank when she thought that she had provided something that was to the MacDermotts’ taste. But then she saw the funny side and wondered what Oliver would have said if he had known where his works of art had ended up. Poetic justice. She shivered, remembering his letter and his promise of a return visit, but her thoughts were interrupted by Jerry MacDermott’s voice.

  “Who do you know?” he asked, wheeling them away from his Aladdin’s cave towards the scattered tables on the lawn.

  Unless Will acted quickly they might be saddled with a detailed itinerary involving visits to most of the local population. He waved at a figure a couple of tables away. “Look, there’s – ” he stopped himself in the nick of time from mentioning Hovis’s Christian name – “Aitch. We’ll go and say hello.”

  Hovis hailed them. “Hallo, me dears. How are we?” He was sitting with a couple of old ladies from the village who ran the tea-shop. He rose, doffed his battered Panama and pecked Amy on the cheek. The two ladies beetled off in search of another gin.

  Will glanced at the diverse groups of people seated at tables and standing chatting. “A bit like an Agatha Christie whodunit, eh?” Hovis remarked.

  “Mmm?” Will was preoccupied.

  “All gathered in the garden for the inspector’s revelations.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the likelihood is that someone here knows about the…er…catch you made. All the usual suspects are present.” He indicated the far end of the garden by the cliff, where Len Gryler, standing alone in a shirt of unusual whiteness, was swigging from a bottle of Newcastle Brown.

  Hovis warmed to his subject. “Then there’s the nouveau-riche set.” Will looked towards the house, where Trudie MacDermott, her blonde hair whipped into an even more spectacular froth than usual, was giggling in the company of an elderly but distinguished man in a navy-blue blazer with gold buttons. She wore a short, tight white miniskirt and a pink T-shirt that left little to the imagination. Her red-faced companion was having trouble in lifting his eyes from her cleavage but she seemed to mind not at all.

  “The Admiral’s happy, then,” observed Hovis.

  “The Admiral?” asked Amy.

  “Old Scalder. Very keen on the ladies. His wife’s the one with the moustache leaning against the drinks table.”

  Amy sipped her Campari. “That’s very wicked of you.”

  “Perhaps. But it’s true.”

  She watched as the Admiral’s bushy eyebrows twitched. He grinned lasciviously at Trudie, the icecubes rattling in his gin and tonic.

  “Is he really an admiral?”

  “No,” chipped in Will. “Ernie used to say that he was a petty officer with delusions of grandeur. Sidney Calder, known to his shipmates as Scalder. Always getting into hot water with the ladies. Harmless enough, though.”

  “Unless you’re a lady,” added Hovis.

  Will chuckled. “Unless you’re not a lady!”

  Amy looked around. “I didn’t realize there were so many people in the cove I didn’t know.”

  “They only come out in summer,” said Hovis. “Spend most of the winter tucked away in their cottages making ships in bottles.”

  “Watch it,” said Will, threateningly.

  “Ah. Sorry about that. Bit near home, eh?” Hovis sipped his Scotch and water.

  “How long do you think we’ll have to stay?” asked Will.

  “Well, we can’t go yet,” admonished Amy. “We’ve only just arrived.”

  “You don’t look the most reluctant people here,” remarked Hovis. “I’d say there were two others who will want to stay as short a time as possible.” He nodded in the direction of a couple standing alone lower down on the lawn towards the sea.

  Will shielded his eyes from the sun and looked in the direction of Hovis’s gesture. “It’s the Morgan-Gileses. I’m surprised they came.”

  “Very surprised,” agreed Hovis. “It must be upsetting to be a guest at a house you once owned. Especially when the new incumbents are not exactly of the same water.”

  “Come on,” said Amy, “let’s go and have a word. They look really uncomfortable.”

  “But – ” Will tried to stop her, but she was already crossing the lawn. He looked exasperatedly towards Hovis, who shrugged. Will sighed, then followed her.

  The Morgan-Gileses brightened at Amy’s approach. “How nice to see you.” Hugo offered her his hand. His wife nodded and smiled distantly.

  “We thought you looked a bit out of it,” said Amy, as Will caught her up.

  “Oh, well, you know…” Hugo’s good manners prevented him from expressing his real feelings. “It’s nice to be able to take in the view again, isn’t it, Mouse?”

  His wife lowered her eyes before turning them towards the terrace, where Trudie MacDermott was now walking with the Admiral, whose deep laugh echoed across the lawn. The four onlookers watched as she took the blazered old boy by the arm, clattering in her stilettos across the York stone flags that led to the old conservatory.

  “Lovely vine, you know,” remarked Hugo.

  “Sorry?” asked Amy.

  “In the conservatory. Wonderful grapes. ‘Muscat of Alexandria’. Isobel was a dab hand at thinning, weren’t you, dear?”

  Mrs Morgan-Giles, her discomfort growing, finished the drop of sherry
in the bottom of her glass, then looked at her watch. “I think we ought to be going now. The joint will be ready soon.”

  Hugo looked embarrassed at his wife’s eagerness to leave. “Yes. Yes, I suppose we must. Would you excuse us? It’s lamb and we do like it pink.” He shook hands again with both of them and held out an arm to shepherd her towards the gate of the garden they had once tended together. Isobel Morgan-Giles barely acknowledged them as she hurried across the turf, her husband following her with his hands clasped behind his back. They looked, thought Will, just like the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, making a state visit to a country that had once been part of the Empire but which was now an independent territory. The Morgan-Gileses’ Union Flag no longer flew from Benbecula’s flagstaff: it had been supplanted by cheap bunting.

  Twenty-Four

  Royal Sovereign

  They left each other at the entrance to the Crooked Angel, Amy to take over from Primrose’s niece at the studio, and Will to visit May Hallybone in St Petroc. The sky looked angry: vast grey-bottomed clouds blotted out most of the blue, and a sharp breeze whipped at the waves in the cove. Will grabbed a jacket from Boy Jack and unfastened the padlock of his newly acquired bike. Tiring of frequent bus journeys into St Petroc, he had bought the old green Raleigh a few days previously from an advert in Primrose’s window. He had chained it to the stanchions on the boat for safety. Already one or two new faces were appearing at the yard – like the surly youth with the day-boat who had turned up on pontoon number one. He looked shifty and seemed obsessed with his ropes. Will became more security-conscious and reminded himself to lock up whenever he left.

  He wheeled the bike along the pontoon and on to the jetty, mounting as he approached the new shower block. Len Gryler walked out of his hut as Will cycled past, the white shirt now replaced by the familiar oily overalls and the Newcastle Brown with a pint pot of tea. He nodded silently, and watched as Will pedalled slowly up the lane, past Benbecula and on to the St Petroc road.

  It was a steep climb for the first couple of miles, but he enjoyed the physical exertion after the hour of enforced politeness at the MacDermotts’. At the top of the lane the road flattened out. To the right were fields of sheep surrounded by hedgebanks, and to the left, rougher countryside of bracken and foxgloves, vetches and coarse grasses, running down to the sea-pink-studded turf that topped the cliffs.