The Lighthouse

by P. D. James

  He was accepted as part of the island’s life but she sensed that his privileged, hardly overworked existence caused some unspoken resentment among the other staff. He had his own unwritten job specification but even in the rare emergencies never offered to help. They thought he was devoted to her as the last of the Holcombes; she thought that unlikely and wouldn’t have welcomed it. But she did admit to herself that he was in danger of becoming indispensable.

  Moving into her bedroom with its two windows giving a view both over the sea and across the island, she walked to the northerly window and opened the casement. It had been a blustery night but the wind had now moderated to a lively breeze. Beyond the land leading to the front porch the ground rose gently and on the ridge stood a silent figure, as firmly rooted as a statue. Nathan Oliver was gazing fixedly at the cottage. He was only some sixty feet distant and she knew that he must have seen her. She drew back from the window but still watched him as intently as she knew he was watching her. He didn’t move, his motionless body contrasting with his swirling white hair tossed into wildness by the wind. He would have looked like an anathematising Old Testament prophet except for the disconcerting stillness. His eyes were fixed on the cottage with a concentrated desire that she felt went beyond the rational reason he put forward for wanting the place—that he came to Combe Island accompanied always by his daughter Miranda and his copy-editor Dennis Tremlett and required adjacent cottages. Atlantic Cottage, the only one which was semi-detached, was the most desirable on the island. Did he also need, as did she, to live on this dangerous edge, to hear night and day the crash of the tide hurling itself against the cliff face thirty feet below? This, after all, was the cottage in which he had been born and where he had lived until, at sixteen, he left Combe without explanation and began his solitary quest to become a writer. Was that at the heart of it? Had he come to believe that his talent would wither without this place? He was twelve years younger than she, but did he have a premonition that his work, and perhaps his life, were nearing the end and that he couldn’t find rest for his spirit except in the place where he had been born?

  For the first time she felt threatened by the power of his will. And she was never free of him. For the past seven years he had established a habit of coming to the island every three months, staying for two precisely timed weeks. Even if he didn’t succeed in dislodging her—and how could he?—his recurring presence on Combe disturbed her peace. Little frightened her except irrationality. Was Oliver’s obsession an ominous symptom of something even more disturbing? Was he going mad? And still she stood, unwilling to go down to breakfast while he was standing there, and it was five minutes before, finally, he turned and walked away over the ridge.

  2

  * * *

  Nathan Oliver lived by routine when in London and this varied little when he made his quarterly visits to Combe Island. While on Combe he and his daughter followed the general practice of visitors. A light lunch, usually of soup, cold meats and salad, was delivered each morning by Dan Padgett in accordance with Miranda’s telephoned instructions to the housekeeper, Mrs. Burbridge, who conveyed them to the cook. Dinner could be taken either in the cottage or in the main house, but Oliver preferred to eat in Peregrine Cottage and Miranda did the cooking.

  For four hours on Friday morning he had worked with Dennis Tremlett, editing his latest novel. He preferred to edit on preliminary proofs typeset from the manuscript, an eccentricity that, at some inconvenience, his publishers accepted. He edited extensively, even making alterations to the plot, writing on the backs of the typeset pages in his minuscule upright hand, then passing the pages to Tremlett to be copied more legibly onto a second set. At one o’clock they stopped for lunch, and by two the simple meal had been eaten and Miranda had finished the washing up and placed the containers on the shelf in the outside porch for later collection. Tremlett had earlier left to eat with the staff in their dining room. Oliver usually slept in the afternoon until half-past three, when Miranda would wake him for afternoon tea. Today he decided to forgo the rest and walk down to the harbour to be there when the boatman, Jago, brought in the launch. He was anxious to reassure himself that a blood sample taken by Joanna Staveley the previous day had reached the hospital pathology department safely.

  By two-thirty Miranda had disappeared, binoculars slung round her neck, saying that she was going bird-watching on the north-west coast. Shortly afterwards, carefully replacing both sets of proofs in his desk drawer and leaving the cottage door unlocked, he set off along the cliff edge towards the steep stone path which led down to the harbour. Miranda must have walked quickly—scanning the scrubland, he could see no sign of her.

  He was thirty-four when he married, and the decision was less an impulse of sexual or psychological need than a conviction that there was something slightly suspect about a heterosexual who remained openly celibate, a suggestion either of eccentricity or, more shaming, of the inability to attract a suitable mate. Here he expected no great difficulty, but he was prepared to take his time. He was after all a catch; he had no intention of suffering the ignominy of a refusal. But the enterprise, undertaken without enthusiasm, had proved unexpectedly quick and straightforward. It had taken only two months of shared dinners and the occasional overnight visit to a discreet country inn to convince him that Sydney Bellinger would be an appropriate choice, a view she had made it plain that she shared. She had already gained a reputation as a distinguished political journalist; the confusion occasionally caused by her ambivalent forename had been, if anything, an advantage. And if her histrionic good looks owed more to money, expert make-up and an impeccable taste in clothes than to nature, he asked for nothing more, certainly not romantic love. Although he kept his sexual appetite too much in control ever to be ruled by it, their nights together gave him as much pleasure as he expected to receive from a woman. It was she who made the running, he who acquiesced. He assumed that she saw an equal advantage in the match and this seemed to him reasonable; the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

  It might have lasted until now—although he had never relied on permanence—if it hadn’t been for Miranda’s birth. Here he accepted the major responsibility. At thirty-six, and for the first time, he had detected in himself an irrational desire: the wish to have a son, or at least a child, the acceptance that, for a convinced atheist, this should at least provide the hope of vicarious immortality. Parenthood was, after all, one of the absolutes of human existence. His birth had been outside his control, death was inevitable and would probably be as uncomfortable as birth, sex he had more or less brought under control. That left parenthood. Not to engage in this universal tribute to human optimism was, for a novelist, to leave a lacuna of experience which could limit the possibilities of his talent. The birth had been a disaster. Despite the expensive nursing home, the labour had been protracted and mismanaged, the final forceps delivery spectacularly painful, the anaesthesia less effective than Sydney had hoped. The visceral tenderness, which had sparked feebly at his first sight of his daughter’s slimy and bloody nakedness, quickly died. He doubted whether Sydney had ever felt it. Perhaps the fact that the baby had been taken away immediately into Intensive Care hadn’t helped.

  Visiting her, he had said, “Wouldn’t you like to hold the baby?”

  Sydney was twisting her head restlessly on the pillows. “For God’s sake, let me rest! I don’t suppose she wants to be mauled around if she’s feeling as bloody as I am.”

  “What do you want to call her?” It was not something they had discussed.

  “I thought Miranda. It seems a miracle she’s survived. It’s a bloody miracle that I have—and ‘bloody’ is the appropriate word. Come back tomorrow, will you, I’ve got to sleep now. And tell them I don’t want any visitors. If you’re thinking of the family album, wife sitting up in bed, flushed with maternal triumph and holding a presentable infant, put it out of your mind. And I’m telling
you now, I’m finished with this brutal business.”

  She had been a largely absent mother; more affectionate than he would have expected when she was with the child in the Chelsea house, but more often abroad. He had money now, so with their joint incomes there was enough for a nurse, a housekeeper and for daily help. His own study at the top of the house was forbidden territory to the child, but when he did emerge she would follow him around like a puppy, distanced and seldom speaking, apparently content. But it couldn’t last.

  When Miranda was four, Sydney, on one of her visits home, said, “We can’t go on like this. She needs the companionship of other children. There are schools that take kids as young as three. I’ll get Judith to find out about them.”

  Judith was her PA, a woman of formidable efficiency. In this she proved not only efficient but surprisingly sensitive. Brochures were sent for, visits made, references taken up. At the end she managed to get husband and wife together and, file in hand, made her report. “High Trees, outside Chichester, sounds the best. It’s a pleasant house with a very large garden and not too far from the sea. The children seemed happy while I was there and I visited the kitchen and later had a meal with the younger ones in what they call the nursery wing. Many of the children have parents serving overseas and the headmistress seems more concerned with health and general happiness than with academic achievement. That may not matter: you did say Miranda shows no signs of being academically gifted. I think she’d be happy there. I can arrange a visit, if you’d like to meet the headmistress and see round the school.”

  Afterwards Sydney had said, “I can find an afternoon next Wednesday and you’d better come. It wouldn’t look good if people knew we’d shoved her off to school with only one of us caring enough to see where she was going.”

  So they went together, as distanced, as much strangers as if they were official school inspectors. Sydney played the concerned mother to perfection. Her analysis of her daughter’s needs and their hopes for her was impressive. He could hardly wait to get back to his study and write it down. But the children did indeed appear uninhibitedly happy and Miranda was sent there within a week. The school took pupils during the holidays as well as in term time and Miranda seemed to miss High Trees on the few occasions when it was convenient for her to spend part of a holiday at home. After High Trees came a boarding school which offered a reasonably sound education with the kind of quasi-maternal care which Sydney thought desirable. The education didn’t go beyond a few examinations at GCSE level, but Oliver told himself that Miranda hardly qualified for Cheltenham Ladies’ College or St. Paul’s.

  She was sixteen when he and Sydney divorced. He was surprised at the passion with which Sydney catalogued his inadequacies.

  “You really are an appalling man, selfish, rude, pathetic. Don’t you honestly realise how much you suck the life out of other people, use them? Why did you want to be there when Miranda was born? Blood and mess are hardly your thing, are they? And you weren’t there for me. If you felt anything for me it was physical disgust. You thought you might like to write about childbirth, and you did write about childbirth. You have to be there, don’t you? You have to listen, and watch and observe. It’s only when you’ve got the physical details right that you can produce all that psychological insight, all that humanity. What did that last Guardian reviewer write? As close as we’re likely to get to a modern Henry James! And of course you’ve got the words, haven’t you? I’ll give you that. Well, I’ve got my own words. I don’t need your talent, your reputation, your money or your occasional attention in bed. We may as well have a civilised divorce. I’m not keen on advertising failure. It’s helpful that this job in Washington has come up. That’ll tie me down for the next three years.”

  He had said, “And what about Miranda? She seems anxious to leave school.”

  “So you say. The girl hardly communicates with me. She did when she was a kid, but not now. God knows what you’ll do with her. As far as I can tell, she isn’t interested in anything.”

  “I think she’s interested in birds; at least she cuts out pictures of them and sticks them on that board in her room.”

  He had felt a great spurt of self-congratulation. He had noticed something about Miranda which Sydney had missed. His words were an affirmation of responsible parentage.

  “Well, she won’t find many birds in Washington. She’d better stay here. What on earth could I do with her?”

  “What can I do? She should be with her mother.”

  And then she had laughed. “Oh, come on, you can do better than that! Why not let her housekeep for you? You could have holidays on that island where you were born. There should be enough birds there to make her happy. And you’d save on a housekeeper’s wages.”

  He had saved on wages and there had been birds on Combe, although the adult Miranda showed less enthusiasm for bird-watching than she had as a child. The school had at least taught her how to cook. She had left at sixteen with no qualifications other than that and an undistinguished academic record and for the last sixteen years had lived and travelled with him as his housekeeper, quietly efficient, uncomplaining, apparently content. He had never thought it necessary to consult her about the quarterly and almost ceremonial migrations from the Chelsea house to Combe any more than he would have thought it appropriate to consult Tremlett. He took it for granted that both were willing appendages to his talent. If challenged—and he never was, even by the inconvenient inner promptings which he knew others might call conscience—he would have had his answer ready: they had chosen their way of life, were adequately paid, well fed and housed. On his overseas tours they travelled with him in luxury. Neither appeared to want or was qualified for anything better.

  What had surprised him on his first return to Combe, seven years ago, had been the sudden amazed exhilaration with which he had stepped ashore from the launch. He had embraced this euphoria with the romantic imaginings of a boy, a conqueror taking triumphant possession of his hard-won territory, an explorer finding at last the fabled shore. And that night, standing outside Peregrine Cottage and looking out towards the distant Cornish coast, he knew that he had been right to return. Here in this sea-girt peace the inexorable progress of physical decay might be slowed, here his words would come back.

  But he knew, too, from first seeing it again, that he had to have Atlantic Cottage. Here in this stone cottage, which seemed to have grown out of the dangerous cliff below, he had been born and here he would die. This overwhelming need was buttressed by considerations of space and convenience but there was something more elemental, something in his blood responded to the ever-present rhythmic pulse of the sea. His grandfather had been a seaman and had died at sea. His father had been boatman in the old days on Combe and he had lived with him in Atlantic Cottage until he was sixteen and could at last escape his father’s alternate drunken rages and maudlin affection and set out alone to make himself a writer. Throughout those years of hardship, of travel and loneliness, if he thought of Combe, it was as a place of violent emotions, of danger, an island not to be visited since it held in thrall the forgotten traumas of the past. Walking along the cliff towards the harbour, he thought how strange it was that he should return to Combe with such an assurance of coming home.

  3

  * * *

  It was just after three o’clock and in his office on the second floor of the tower of Combe House Rupert Maycroft was at work drawing up estimates for the next financial year. At a similar desk set against the far wall, Adrian Boyde was silently checking the accounts for the quarter ended 30 September. Neither was engaged on his favourite job and each worked in silence, a silence broken only by the rustle of paper. Now Maycroft stretched back in his chair and let his eyes rest on the view from the long curved window. The warm unseasonable weather was continuing. There was only a light wind, and the wrinkled sea stretched as deeply blue as in high summer under an almost cloudless sky. To the right on a spur of rock stood the old lighthouse with its gleaming wh
ite walls topped by the red lantern enclosing the now defunct light, an elegant phallic symbol of the past, lovingly restored but redundant. Sometimes he found its symbolism uncomfortable. To the left he could glimpse the curved arms of the harbour entrance and the stunted towers of the harbour lights. It was this view and this room which had informed his decision to come to Combe.

  Even now, after eighteen months, he could find himself surprised to be on the island. He was only fifty-eight, in good health, his mind, as far as he could judge, functioning unimpaired. And yet he had taken early retirement from his practice as a country town solicitor and been glad to go. The decision had been precipitated by the death two years ago of his wife. The car accident had been shockingly unexpected, as fatal accidents always are, however predicted and warned against. She had been on her way from Warnborough to attend a book-club meeting in a neighbouring village, driving too fast along a narrow country road which had become dangerously familiar. Taking a corner at speed, she had crashed her Mercedes head-on with a tractor. During the weeks following the accident, the edge of grief had been blunted by the necessary formalities of bereavement: the inquest, the funeral, the seemingly endless consolatory letters to be answered, the protracted visit of his son and daughter-in-law while his future domestic comfort was discussed—sometimes, he felt, as if he were not present. When, some two months after her death, grief unexpectedly overwhelmed him, he was as astonished by its power as he was by its unexpectedness, compounded as it was by remorse, guilt and a vague unfocused longing. The Combe Island Trust was among his firm’s clients. The original Trustees had viewed London as the dark heart of duplicitous and crafty machinations designed to entrap innocent provincials and had been happier choosing a local and long-established practice. The firm had continued to act for the Trust, and when it was suggested that he might fill the interregnum between the retirement of the resident secretary and the appointment of his successor, he had seized the opportunity to get away from his practice. Official retirement made the break permanent. Within two months of his appointment at Combe Island, he was told that the job was his if he cared to take it.