The Lighthouse

by Alison Moore

  There is nothing of interest in there, just clothes, and a few books at the bottom. Except, in amongst the clothes in which he arrived, in the pocket of his gravy-stained trousers, there is a silver lighthouse. About ten centimetres tall and three or four in diameter, it fits rather nicely inside her encircling hand. It has a four-sided tower and a lantern room with tiny storm panes and a domed top. In relief on one side it says ‘DRALLE’, the name of an old Hamburg perfumery. This ornate silver case ought to contain a cut-glass vial of a very expensive perfume, but Ester finds that it is empty, the scent missing.

  When Ester was a child, her mother worked for a toiletries company, travelling a lot and leaving Ester with an au pair. Ester’s mother always came home with samples in her luggage. Having worn the same scent all her adult life, she gave her unwanted vials of perfume to Ester who collected them in a box on her dressing table and used them liberally, often sitting down to breakfast with a different scent on each pulse point.

  Ester wanted to be a perfumier. She knew the names of many perfume houses – old and new, large and small – and their fragrances. She decided to create her own scent and went through her mother’s kitchen cupboards, combining lemon juice, peach juice, vanilla essence, herbs and spices, imagining that she was making the ultimate scent, one sniff of which would make someone fall in love with her. Completing it with shredded petals from her mother’s prized rose bush, Ester went to her parents’ bedroom and took her mother’s perfume from the dressing table. She poured it – her mother’s Eau de Parfum, her signature scent – down the sink and refilled the empty bottle with her own first perfume, a sticky concoction which she called ‘Ester’, presenting it as a gift to her mother when she came home.

  Ester was given no more sample scents after that. The next person to give her perfume was Bernard.

  Ester hears the shower being turned off, the shower curtain being drawn back, the clatter of the hoops being pulled along the rail. She drops the lighthouse back onto the pile of clothes and begins to leave. Halfway across the room, she hesitates, turns around and takes a step back towards the bed with her eye on the lighthouse. But she can hear him moving towards the bathroom door, still singing. She turns away again.

  When the bathroom door opens, she is out in the corridor, heading for the stairs, the door to room six closing slowly behind her.

  At the opposite end of the corridor, just past room ten, there is a door marked ‘PRIVATE’, and it divides the guest rooms from those occupied by Ester and her husband.

  Bernard, coming through this door, sees his wife hurriedly leaving room six and heading downstairs. Moments later, a man appears in the doorway of the same room, leaning out and looking towards the stairs. The man is partially hidden behind the door, but Bernard sees a bare shoulder, the knobbles of the man’s spine, a white leg, a blue-veined foot on the hallway carpet. The man turns his head and sees Bernard and withdraws into his room looking embarrassed. The door clicks shut and a key is turned in the lock.

  In the night, there will be a storm. It will be brief, if a little violent, and hardly anyone will even realise it has occurred, although they might hear it raging, thundering, in their dreams.

  In the morning, by the time people are up and about, the sun will be out again, and the rain-soaked pavements will be dry, and there will be very little evidence of damage.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sun Cream

  In the small, low-ceilinged bathroom, Futh fills his tooth glass at the sink and takes big gulps before realising that he is drinking water from the hot tap. He has heard the stories about people finding dead pigeons in hot water tanks. He pours away what is left and refills his glass with cold water, which he still does not much like the taste of. He goes back to the bedroom. It is very early – he woke, thirsty, long before his alarm – but it is light and he could do with an early start anyway.

  The night before, his supper miraculously appeared in his room while he was taking a shower. He ate in his pyjamas, standing at the window, looking out at the river.

  He has got into the habit of always determining an escape route from a room in which he is staying, imagining emergency scenarios in which his exit is blocked by fire or a psychopath. This began, he thinks, when he was in his twenties and living in an attic flat. His Aunt Frieda, worrying about stair fires and burglars, gave him a rope ladder. It seems important that he should always know a way out.

  Putting down his supper plate, he opened the window – looking, in the dark, for a roof to climb on to, a pipe to hold on to, a soft landing – and a moth flew in. Underneath the window, there was pavement, and it looked a long way down. He wondered if it was possible to jump from such a height without breaking anything.

  Having finished his meal, he brushed and flossed his teeth and went straight to bed. Finding a mint on his pillow, he heard his Aunt Frieda in his head warning him about tooth decay, the dangers of sweets, but he ate it anyway, sucking it down to nothing.

  He opened a book and tried to read but could not concentrate, kept reading the same lines over and over and reaching the bottom of the first page without having taken it in. He was distracted by the moth flying at his lamp. He got out of bed again and opened the curtains and the window to let it out, knowing that this disoriented moth was really after the moon, its navigational aid, although Futh could not see the moon from where he was standing. Getting back into bed, he turned over his pillow to get the cool side and noticed the stain of a stranger’s mascara like a spider on his pillowcase. He resumed his reading and the moth flew away from the lamplight, the artificial light, towards the open window.

  Still his thoughts drifted, towards home and Angela and where he had gone wrong. She had always been irritated by his awkwardness around people, around women in particular. He knew her mother found him strange. He was introspective, insufficiently aware, Angela often said, of other people and how they might see things.

  The moth flew out of a fold in the curtains and back towards the lamplight, bumping and fluttering against the hot bulb. Futh shut his book and put it down on the bedside table. He got up to find the map he would need for the next day’s walk and lay down again to study his route. But he could not stop thinking about all the ways in which he had annoyed his wife during their marriage.

  He was a bad listener, apparently, bewilderingly incapable sometimes of following simple instructions. He was always late leaving the house, late arriving anywhere, even when he had to meet Angela. And he never apologised, even when he was clearly in the wrong. These were small things but he supposed they built up, amounted to something. He imagined things being different. He had a reverie in which he said and did the right thing and Angela did not leave him. But it was too late, it had already happened.

  Having nodded off with the light on, and having slept deeply before waking early with the map creased under his cheek, Futh now stands once more at the window looking down at the quiet street below. There is not yet anybody about and nothing is open. It is, he realises, not only early, it is also a Sunday.

  He turns away from the window and in the early morning light he notices the colour of the bedroom walls, which are painted a deep pink – the colour of rare meat, the colour of his sunburnt arm.

  He dresses for the day’s hiking, strapping his watch onto his unburnt wrist and putting the silver lighthouse in the pocket of his shorts. He goes downstairs, taking his supper plate with him. The landlady is sitting on her stool at the bar with her back to him, drinking a cup of coffee and eating an orange. He approaches her, putting his dirty plate down on the bar in front of her, thanking her in German. She turns, and he sees the new bruise on her face, despite the make-up she has applied. He thanks her again and she nods. He stands for a moment just smiling. He thinks to ask her about breakfast but before he has put the sentence together in his head she has climbed down from her stool and is walking away with the empty plate. He stands there watching her go. He can smell the zest of her orange, and good coffee, and an undern
ote of disinfectant.

  Futh looks around, taking in the various bare tables and vacant chairs, the bar stools and the padded window seats, wondering where he should sit. There is a man standing behind the bar and Futh walks over to him. On the wall, there is an oversized clock. Futh did not see it last night when he arrived and he can’t believe he missed it. It is enormous. The bar reeks of furniture polish and Futh detects a note of camphor. The man has his hands flat on the bar, his fingers splayed, his manicured nails like the display of eyes on a peacock’s tail. He is well-dressed, although there is a fly, Futh notices, on the collar of his shirt. Futh recognises him as the man he saw in the corridor the night before. He took him for another guest but clearly he is a member of the hotel staff. Futh, speaking carefully in German, asks about breakfast.

  Bernard shakes his head.

  ‘What time is breakfast?’ persists Futh.

  Bernard looks him silently in the eye for a moment and says, ‘You should go.’

  Futh does not understand. He is not certain what the man has just said, does not know his tenses. He thinks he might know what was said but it makes no sense. He has paid the bed and breakfast rate but there appears to be some problem which he can’t comprehend. He tries again to get an answer to his query, but the man only stares at him, saying nothing more.

  Futh gives up, returns to his room and packs.

  His suitcase will be collected from his room after he has left. It will – unless there is some problem with this service too – be taken to the next hotel on his circuit and be waiting for him when he arrives this afternoon.

  Although good weather is forecast, Futh packs his waterproofs in his rucksack. He has maps and a compass, a guidebook and an English-German dictionary; he has drinks and snacks; he has a spare pair of walking socks and first-aid supplies; he even has cutlery and an emergency sewing kit. He already has his silver lighthouse in his pocket and can think of nothing else he needs. At the last moment, he remembers his book which is still lying on the bedside table underneath the lamp. Fetching it, he finds, lying on the cover, last night’s moth.

  He puts his rucksack on his back and begins to leave the room but, having lost out on breakfast, does not make it past the coffee-making facilities. He fills the kettle from the bathroom tap and, while he is waiting for the kettle to boil, empties the sachet of coffee granules and the little pot of UHT milk into a cup. He thinks about Carl’s mother, about the breakfast she might have made for Carl, with cafetiere coffee and home baking. He wonders if he might have made a mistake.

  The kettle boils. He fills up his cup and brings his coffee briefly to his lips, testing its heat, before setting it down on the windowsill to cool. He puts the packet of complimentary biscuits in his pocket and then idly checks inside the drawers and the wardrobe. He does not recall putting anything in them – he has not unpacked – but, he thinks, he always manages to leave something behind. Invariably, he overlooks a coat still hanging in a wardrobe, his passport at the back of a drawer or in the pocket of the coat in the wardrobe, pyjamas tangled up in the bedding, something plugged into the wall, or a toothbrush, countless toothbrushes, although they are easy to replace.

  Getting down on his knees, he looks under the bed, just in case he has lost anything under there. There is something unidentifiable right in the middle. He reaches under and fishes it out. It is soft, some small piece of balled-up clothing, covered in dust and fluff and stray pillow feathers. Standing, shaking out and dusting off and looking at what he has retrieved, he finds in his hand a pair of knickers. He wonders how long they have been there.

  Remembering his coffee, he turns back to the window and picks up his cup. While he drinks, he watches the few people now passing in the street below. He thinks about all the dust which he has just shaken from the knickers now being in the air which he is breathing, and most of that dust, he thinks, is strangers’ dead skin.

  He finishes his coffee, puts the empty cup back by the kettle and leaves the room.

  In the lift, he realises that he is still holding the knickers. They are clenched in his closed hand, slivers of pink satin showing between his fingers. He does not know what to do with them, who to give them to. Entering the bar, he hesitates before putting them down – very carefully, as if they were fragile – on the landlady’s check-in desk, next to her ledger. Embarrassed, glancing around, he finds himself observed by the barman who refused him breakfast.

  Futh, making his way to the door to the street and stepping out into the sunshine, is aware of the barman watching him go.

  The east-facing frontage of the hotel is bathed in sunlight. Walking away, turning back to see, he has to squint, it is so bright.

  He walks alongside the Rhine to the ferry point. Waiting on the slip for the boat to come across from the far side, he takes his packet of biscuits out of his pocket and eats one. He is bewildered by the lack of breakfast, and by the man behind the bar who said, ‘You should go.’

  The little ferry arrives and Futh embarks. He leans against the side and eats the other biscuit, gazing back at Hellhaus and its backdrop of green hills and rocky outcrops.

  The boat pulls away from the shore and the broad, grey-green river flows fast around and beneath it.

  Futh, who is wearing shorts for the first time in years, takes the sun cream out of his rucksack and applies it to the exposed parts of his white legs, his forearms, the small triangle of bare chest where he has left his top two buttons undone. The crossing is short and he has barely finished rubbing the cream into the back of his neck before they reach the other side.

  Futh sets off, following his printed directions, walking briskly, relishing the exercise, the doing of something physical, enjoying the clean, fresh air and the sound of twigs cracking beneath his feet. He follows his route along the river, which curves initially towards the west. He walks with the heat of the sun on his back, his hiking boots gathering dust from the dry path.

  His last pair of hiking boots was bought especially for the trip he took with his father. The two of them were not used to hiking together. He had never seen his father wearing hiking boots before. Futh’s boots were a bit big, even with two pairs of thick socks, as if they were expected to last for many years, but he probably never wore them again and has not had another pair until now.

  These new boots are only a few days old. The lady in the shop said, ‘Wear them in at home first, just around the house, and then take them out for little walks, building up the distance gradually.’ But Futh did not do that. He packed them in his suitcase with the price tag still attached.

  ‘You have to be careful,’ his father had said, as they picked their way slowly down a steep embankment, ‘of women, or before you know it you’re married, and there are children, and then you’re ruined.’

  Twelve-year-old Futh, on the slope, trying to descend steadily, held on to the grass and low branches and found that they came away in his hands, coming with him as he stumbled and slid to the bottom.

  ‘We can do without her,’ his father said as they walked on. But Futh knew that every woman his father brought into the hotel room was a substitute for her. Some of them even looked like her. And Futh, seeing the women going into the bathroom, watching them in the mirror in the middle of the night, desired them himself.

  It would be some years before Futh went to bed with a girl, and more before he met Angela, and even then it was often these women he found himself thinking about as he came.

  He met Angela at a motorway service station. It was a Sunday and he had been to his father’s place for lunch. His father had, by then, moved out of his sister’s house and into a flat. It was less than an hour’s drive down the motorway from where Futh lived, but at the time Futh still could not drive. He had hitchhiked there, and then his father had driven him half the way back, dropping him off at the service station so that Futh could find someone else to take him the rest of the way home.

  Futh got himself a cup of coffee from a vending machine and then stood
outside, beside the slip road, with his thumb out, waiting for a lift. It was not late but it was winter and already getting dark, and it was raining. Vehicle after vehicle drove by while the rain got heavier, but finally a little car slowed and stopped just past him. He hurried to the passenger door and looked in through the window. The driver had put the light on and was leaning across the seat to open the door, but Futh did not yet recognise her.

  ‘How far are you going?’ she asked. He told her and she said, ‘That’s not far from me. I can drop you there.’ With relief, Futh clambered in and closed the door.

  He was aware of the smell of his own rain-wet coat mixing with the smell of cigarette smoke which filled the inside of her car. Futh did not smoke himself but sometimes he found the smell of cigarette smoke almost painfully pleasant.

  She said, ‘My name’s Angela.’

  ‘That’s my mother’s name,’ said Futh, buckling up.

  Angela switched off the light, turned the blower on the misting windscreen and set off. While she negotiated her way onto the dark motorway, Futh was looking at her closely, struck by something about her which seemed familiar, trying to think what it was.

  His wet hair was dripping onto his face and down the back of his neck. Spotting a towel in the footwell, he reached for it, saying, ‘Do you mind if I . . .’ and when she looked, opening her mouth to reply, he was already using it, rubbing his face and his hair and the back of his neck and his throat with it.

  As she turned away again, he realised where he knew her from. On his first day of secondary school, he had developed a crush on a girl in his year. She had never noticed him and they had never spoken, except for the very first time he saw her, when he got in her way on the stairs and she said, pushing past him, ‘Fuck’ or ‘Fucking’ something. With her irritated face an inch or two from his, she had looked right at him and said through lightly glossed lips, ‘Fuck’ or ‘Fucking’. He had noted the incident in his diary along with her sugary scent. She had not been in any of his classes but he used to catch sight of her at the school gates, in assembly, in the corridor, and sometimes – through a classroom window – on the sports field.