The Lighthouse

by Alison Moore

  She was impressive as a girl. She remembers the look on Bernard’s face the first time he laid eyes on her. She was twenty-one, with platinum blond hair in a pixie cut. She was slender and shapely, her figure flattered by the pink satin dress she was wearing for her engagement party. The dress was sleeveless and backless, the hemline just above the knee.

  She was in her stilettos phase and had a collection of high heels in black and white and silver and pink and all sorts. She kept them in their boxes with Polaroids of the empty shoes stuck to the front. But when she met Bernard, she was wearing his mother’s slippers.

  Ida had welcomed Ester into the family the moment Conrad brought her home. She called Ester her daughter-in-law long before Ester and Conrad became engaged. When Ester visited, she spent most of the time in Ida’s kitchen, helping her with the cooking. It was a standing joke that Ida saw more of Ester than Conrad did.

  Being in Ida’s kitchen reminded Ester of cooking with Lotte, the au pair she’d had as a child while her mother was away from home, travelling for the toiletries company. Ester had been very fond of Lotte and some of her favourite memories were of being in the kitchen while Lotte was cooking, being given jobs to do such as peeling potatoes and greasing baking trays.

  Ester was no cook really, but she did like being in Ida’s kitchen, being Ida’s assistant, and while they worked, they talked.

  Ida told Ester about the off-the-rails boy she had dated before meeting the man she had married, Conrad and Bernard’s father, and Ester told Ida about a married man with whom she had been involved before Conrad. Ida told Ester how scared she had been when she first discovered she was pregnant with Bernard, when she was not yet married to his father, and Ester told Ida that she had been pregnant once, when she was with the married man, and that she had been very scared and had not in the end been able to go through with it.

  ‘Is that dreadful?’ she said to Ida who stood quietly stirring the gravy.

  ‘You were young,’ said Ida.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ester, ‘if I want children at all.’

  ‘You’re still young,’ said Ida, turning off the gas and emptying the saucepan into the gravy boat and carrying it through to the dining room where the men were waiting.

  On the day of the engagement party, while Conrad was getting drunk in the living room, Ester was in the kitchen with Ida, icing buns with an apron on and her high heels off, a spare pair of Ida’s slippers on her feet, when the doorbell rang. A delivery of flowers was expected, arrangements of pink roses for the party. Ester, dusting off her icing-sugared hands, said, ‘I’ll get that.’

  Walking towards the front door, she saw the figure of a man through the patterned glass, the sun behind him. She had never met Bernard, Conrad’s older brother, who did not live nearby and rarely visited, but when she opened the door she recognised the eyes which gazed at her, taking her in, and the mouth which smiled and licked its lips, and even something in the voice which said, ‘You must be Ester.’ She knew without needing to ask that this was Bernard, who moved towards her and then past her and stood in the hallway removing his coat and his shoes, while Ester stood holding on to the open door, the sun coming in.

  She could have sworn that it happened for both of them at that same moment. When, much later, he said that it had not happened for him until after that, it was like her having heard a fire engine or an ambulance going by as he stood there on the doorstep, and Bernard claiming to have heard it perhaps hours later when he and she and everyone else were outside on the patio. It had happened for him, said Bernard, while he was looking at her calves, slim and sleek between the hem of her dress and the ankle straps of her stilettos.

  Before the end of Bernard’s visit, Ester had taken up with him and broken off her engagement to Conrad. The first time Bernard came back to see her, they met at Ida’s house. Everyone, said Bernard, letting her in, was out for the day. As he no longer lived at home, and slept, when he was there, on a sofa bed in the living room, he suggested that they go into Conrad’s bedroom, but Ester did not want to. Bernard was less keen on using his parents’ bed but in the end he settled for that. Afterwards, while Bernard was in the shower, Ester stood looking through the things on Ida’s dressing table, admiring a hairbrush inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Hearing the front door slam, she dressed quickly and picked up her handbag, ready to go. But she was not sure what to do and stood for a while on this side of the bedroom door. Hearing nothing, she opened the door and went to the top of the stairs, and at that moment Bernard came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist, and Conrad came up the stairs. She would not have minded a scene, but Conrad just looked at her and at Bernard and went without speaking into his room and that was unbearable.

  Ester did meet Bernard at Ida’s house again, but she did not go in. Ester remembers Ida opening the front door, turning away to call for Bernard and then turning back and looking silently at Ester until Bernard appeared in the hallway and took Ester away. Ida did not say, ‘You’ve got a nerve coming here.’ She did not say, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ She did not say, ‘The sight of you makes me sick.’

  Even Bernard once said to Ester, ‘What kind of woman does that?’

  ‘It was you too,’ she reminded him. ‘He was your brother.’

  ‘Well, I never liked him,’ said Bernard, ‘but he was your fiancé.’

  Opening one of her dressing table drawers, Ester rummages through the jumbled contents, until, at the back, at the bottom, she finds what she is looking for – the perfume which Bernard gave to her as a wedding present. The case, like the one she found in the suitcase in room six, is designed to resemble a lighthouse, but this one is wooden, cylindrical rather than squared beneath the domed top, and less detailed than the silver one, but it does still have its vial of perfume inside. She takes it out. On one side of the glass vial, ‘DRALLE’ is written in relief. On the other side there is a sticker which says, ‘Veilchen’. On the handle of the stopper there is an engraving of a dove, or a pigeon. She has not worn the perfume for years. She takes the stopper out of the bottle, puts it to her nose and smells the essence of violets.

  Bernard married her quickly, as if he were afraid that she would change her mind, go back to his brother, or on to some other man. She went with him to the small town in which he was living. He liked, she was sure, to keep her far away from his brother and her old boyfriends and everyone she knew, as if loneliness were sure to keep her faithful.

  Getting on for twenty years later, Bernard has aged well. He is a big man but he works out, lifts weights. He takes pride in his appearance. He is always well groomed. He smells of camphor, swearing by this essential oil which is, amongst other things, a disinfectant, a decongestant, an anaesthetic and a stimulant and which he adds to his bathwater every morning. He dresses nicely and wears polished shoes with segs in to make the soles and heels last, and his feet tippety-tap across the wooden floorboards.

  She returns the perfume to her dressing table drawer and moves to the bed. Slipping off her shoes, she lies down on her side, sinks her head into the soft pillow and closes her eyes. Her breathing slows and her bare feet twitch as she falls quickly into sleep.

  In her dreams, she hears the slow, teasing start of a tap dance, and when she wakes up there is a blanket over her, covering her exposed midriff and her bare legs.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Stewed Apples

  Futh sleeps badly before waking early, aching and sweating in twisted bedclothes. Getting stiffly out of bed, he finds a radiator blazing despite the hot weather. The small room is stifling. He turns the radiator off and tries to open the French windows but they are locked and there is no key. Taking off his damp pyjamas, he gets back into bed. He is unused to sleeping naked. He remembers how naked he felt the first time he went back to Angela’s house and slept there without his pyjamas.

  He had been in a bar. It was some months since he had seen Angela, since she had given him the lift home from the motorway servic
e station. He had arrived at the bar with some people from work but they had all gone and he was alone with a woman. They were sitting on a very soft sofa which he found difficult to get out of. The soles of his shoes were stuck to the tacky floor. She was sitting close to him, this woman, leaning against him. She had syrupy gloss on her lips and glitter glue on her oily skin. Beneath the studs sparkling in her ear lobes, there were scars suggestive of earrings having been torn out.

  ‘You’re young,’ she said. He was thirty. ‘And you’re not married? I usually meet married men.’

  ‘No,’ he said, finishing his drink and reaching forward to put the empty cocktail glass down on the glass table in front of them, ‘I’m not married.’

  ‘You need another drink,’ she said.

  Struggling to his feet, Futh went to fetch another round, but before he reached the bar he was surprised by the sight of Angela breaking away from a small group of people and crossing the room towards him.

  ‘I know her,’ she said when she reached him. ‘You don’t want to be with her. You don’t want to be here.’ She ushered him towards the exit and he went with her without asking any questions. They were almost at the door when it banged open and a small man darted in, glaring at Futh and Angela as he pushed past them. He made a beeline for the shiny, sticky woman sunk into the soft sofa on the far side of the room, kicking the glass table in front of her as he arrived, making the cocktail glasses jump, and shouting, ‘Where is he? Where the fuck is he?’ But Futh was already halfway through the door. The man began to harass bystanders, who backed away. The woman remained on the sofa sipping her drink and eating crisps.

  Futh, outside on the pavement with Angela, his heart racing, said, ‘My jacket’s inside.’ It was lying over the arm of the sofa. There was nothing in the pockets though – his wallet was in his hand – and it was not a cold night. He could still hear the small man shouting. He could hear things breaking.

  ‘You’d better go,’ said Angela.

  ‘You’d better come with me,’ said Futh as the fighting grew louder, moving closer.

  ‘You could come back to my house,’ said Angela.

  Futh, remembering that Angela lived with her mother, said, ‘I’d like that. I’d like to meet your mother.’

  ‘She’ll have taken her sleeping pill by now,’ said Angela. ‘She’ll be out like a light until morning.’

  People had started spilling out of the doors, escaping up and down the street, dispersing in pairs and groups, and Futh and Angela, moving on too now, looked like any other couple walking away.

  He wakes again having dreamt about Angela. He knows that he should get up so as not to miss breakfast but he can’t bring himself to move. He lies there naked and dozing and drifting back into his dream, and he is still there when he hears, through his semi-sleep, a knock at the door. He opens his eyes but he is not certain that the knock was at his door or whether there was a knock at all. After only a couple of seconds, he hears the door being unlocked, sees from his bed the door handle turning, the door opening, and then a maid standing in the doorway, stopped in her tracks. Futh raises himself up on his elbows and smiles at her. The maid says nothing but gives him a look which makes him shrink and then she leaves the room, pulling the door to behind her.

  He gets up, washes at the sink and then dresses, putting on his shorts and a clean short-sleeved shirt. He goes down to breakfast in his socks, with big plasters over his raw heels. The kitchen is closed but people are still finishing what is already out and Futh helps himself to the scraps. He eats some bread and cheese and pockets a hard-boiled egg in its shell for his lunch.

  There are little vases of mixed flowers on each table, and he recognises, amongst other things, violets. He takes one out of his vase and puts it to his nose but he can’t smell anything.

  He planted violets in the garden when he and Angela first moved into their house. There was a huge bed of them and yet there was no scent at all.

  ‘That’s violets for you,’ said Angela. ‘You can’t smell them.’

  And so, to show her their scent, to demonstrate that you could smell them, he bought her a set of violet toiletries – bath oil, shampoo, soap, body lotion, eau de toilette. Angela looked at the gifts and said, ‘I’m not your mother.’

  At the table next to his, an attractive young woman is sitting alone. It occurs to Futh that at the time of that first trip to Germany, his father would have been about the same age as Futh is now. Futh can’t imagine his newly single father – he can’t imagine himself – in a hotel bar or some other bar or just in passing, starting up a conversation with a strange woman which would lead to his taking her back to his hotel room. What had his father said? My son’s asleep in the bedroom but there’s a bathroom? Futh imagined conducting a conversation with the young woman at the next table. How did one move so quickly from Hello to a hotel bathroom?

  He has always courted women slowly, over months, starting with coffee in cafés and walks in the park, moving on to restaurants and art galleries and museums, not that it always got even that far. With Angela it was different. She was the one to take him to bed. After that first time at her mother’s house, she came round to his place and when she arrived he took her coat and offered her a cup of tea and a scone and she rolled her eyes and said, ‘I’m not your mother.’

  Occasionally, and always in bed, she would talk about this married man who had been her boyfriend. ‘He’s always under a car or taking something apart,’ she said after asking Futh whether he could look at her car, fix a headlight which wasn’t working, and discovering that he could not. ‘You’re all in your head. He’s more physical. Good with his hands.’ She always talked about him in the present tense.

  Futh, coming to the end of his breakfast and glancing again at the young woman sitting at the next table, finds that she has been joined by her rather large boyfriend. Futh finishes and leaves.

  He eats his hard-boiled egg in the woods, enjoying the shade. He remembers his father carefully shattering the shell of a boiled egg while he talked about the powder, the egg substitute, which he had been fed as a child. ‘It was OK,’ he said. ‘You make do.’

  Futh had been anxious about spending a week with just his father, but, he had thought, how bad could a holiday be? And as it turned out, in spite of the ferry and the women in the hotel bathroom and his father saying, ‘We can do without her,’ and things like that, Futh enjoyed their holiday. Futh – taking an egg from his father and holding it in his hand for a moment to admire its perfection before bringing it to his opening mouth – did not want it to end, did not want to have to go home ever again.

  In the months between the decision that he and Angela would separate and his actually moving out, Futh had been visiting the parks and art galleries and museums which the two of them had never in fact been to, keeping out of her way. He visited the aviary, saw the exhibitions, sat in the cafés, and felt very much like his adolescent self on his climbing frame in the dark, putting off the moment when he would have to climb down and go in.

  In the meantime, Angela was packing his belongings into self-assembly cardboard boxes, and each time he came home he found more of them stacked up in the spare room in which he had recently been sleeping.

  ‘Come and keep me company,’ Gloria had said, standing on the other side of the fence in her nightie. She had not brought out the rubbish this time, she had just come out and walked over to where he was sitting on his climbing frame, and Futh wondered how easily she could see him from inside her house. He had thought himself pretty much invisible sitting there in the dark. He wondered if she had noticed him watching her.

  Futh tried to decline her invitation, but she lingered, leaning over the fence, cajoling him. Futh was also alone and he’d had no supper. He imagined Gloria putting something nice on the table just for him. Agreeing then to go with her, he climbed down and clambered over the fence, following Gloria over her lawn and into her house.

  He sat on a bench at her kitchen table and wa
tched her making drinks – putting ice in two glasses, adding something, a liqueur, which made the ice crack and shift. She brought the glasses to the table and handed him one, sitting down beside him, and Futh moved along the bench, into the corner. He took a sip of his drink and turned his face away towards the open window, through which he could clearly see his climbing frame looming over the little fence, the cloud-blurred moon above it.

  On the window ledge, there was a Venus flytrap, its bright red leaves wide open. Gloria, sitting down, seeing him looking at her plant, said, ‘It’s a beauty, isn’t it? Your daddy doesn’t like it but I just love it. It catches every little thing that comes by.’ Futh reached towards it, an outstretched finger poised to poke at a trap, to tickle its trigger hairs, to feel it close around him, and Gloria said, ‘Don’t do that.’ He withdrew his hand, turning back to his drink, trying a little bit more, and Gloria said, ‘It’s caught a moth.’ Futh looked. A trap had closed and there was something inside it, legs and the edges of wings poking out between the cilia. He wondered how it had managed that. He had not looked away for long. He was sorry to have missed it.

  Years later, in his twenties, he would visit Japan, and he would see clingfilm-wrapped sea creatures in supermarket refrigerators slowly and uselessly moving their legs, and he would be reminded of the moth in the Venus flytrap in Gloria’s kitchen.

  ‘What happens now?’ he asked.

  ‘In a week or so,’ said Gloria, ‘the trap will open again. What’s left will blow away.’

  As Futh watched the moth struggling between the plant’s tightly shut leaves, he felt a fingertip touching the back of his neck and the top of his back, underneath his T-shirt. ‘You’ve caught the sun,’ said Gloria. Futh stayed still, looking out at the darkness, feeling the slight weight of her touch on his skin, the warmth of her fingertip, and the line she had traced from the nape of his neck to the top of his spine, and then he heard her doing something on the far side of the kitchen and he realised that she was no longer touching him and probably had not been for a while.