Salt and Lantern

TThe Morvoren came up out of the sea at a quarter past ten on a Monday morning in October, a grey needle on a black rock, five miles off the cliffs of West Penwith, with the swell breaking white all round its foot.

Mara sat in the stern of Enoch Treloar's boat with a canvas kitbag between her knees, a new Trinity House cap pulled down against the spray, and watched it grow. It did not grow quickly. For an hour after leaving St Ives it had seemed to stay exactly the same size, a pencil line on the horizon, while the coast fell away behind into a blue haze of cliffs and fields and engine houses with their chimneys standing up like broken teeth. Then, all at once, it was close and enormous: a hundred and ten feet of dovetailed granite rising straight out of the rock, banded with the stains of twenty-five winters, with the lantern at the top catching the sun like a crown of glass.

"There she is," Treloar said, round the stem of his pipe. He was a broad, slow, brown-faced man of sixty with a fisherman's jersey and hands like oak roots. "Morvoren. Means mermaid, in the old tongue. Pretty name for an ugly bit of rock." He nodded to the west, where a long black reef ran out from the lighthouse rock under the swell, showing here and there as a hump of weed and a burst of foam. "And that's the Carns. Keep off the Carns."

Mara was twenty-eight, with auburn hair cut short under the cap and green eyes that had been watching the sea since dawn. Seven months on the supernumerary list had meant seven months of other men's lighthouses: a fortnight here, a month there, filling in for keepers who were sick or on leave, learning the lamps and the lenses and the long rules of the service at stations from the Thames to the Scillies. This was the first post of Mara's own. Assistant Keeper, Morvoren Rock. A pension at the end of it, and a uniform with buttons, and a place.

The boat brought them in under the lee of the rock, where the swell was only a heave, and lay off a stone landing stage cut into its side, with an iron ladder going up and a derrick crane above it on a ledge.

"What are they like? The keepers?"

Treloar took his pipe out and considered. "Tregenza's the Principal. Thirty year in the service. Chapel man. Bark's worse than his bite, and his bite's bad enough. Fair, though. You do your work, he'll never say a word against you." He put the pipe back. "The other's Kitto Pengelly. St Ives boy. I've known him since he was in petticoats. Clever as paint. Writes a hand like an angel." He looked at Mara sideways. "Had a bit of trouble a few years back. Nothing to signify. You'll get on."

The landing took an hour. Stores came up first on the derrick: oil in sealed tins, coal, flour, potatoes, a side of salt beef, a crate of candles, and a small wooden box stencilled TRINITY HOUSE · STATION SUPPLIES · 1897, sealed with wire and lead. Then the outgoing keeper went down the ladder into the boat with his bag, a cheerful man named Uren, no relation, he said, to anyone drowned, who was off to a shore station at last and could not stop smiling. Then Mara went up.

Ezekiel Tregenza, Principal Keeper, shook hands at the top of the ladder with a grip like a vice. Kitto Pengelly, Assistant Keeper, carried Mara's kitbag up all hundred and twenty steps of the spiral stair without being asked. They showed Mara the tower, floor by floor: oil store, store room, kitchen with its curved iron stove, bedroom with three bunks shaped to the round wall, service room, and at the top, up a last steep ladder, the lantern, where the great lens stood in its brass frame like a beehive made of ice, and the whole sea lay round them, blue and enormous, in every direction.

"The rules," Tregenza said, standing beside it. "Light at sunset by the table. Out at sunrise by the table. One man on watch in this room from lighting-up till putting-out. Wind the clock every forty minutes or the lens stops, and if the lens stops the light's a fixed light, and some poor master takes it for another and puts his ship on the Carns. Trim the wicks. Keep the glass clean. Write the journal. And never," he said, "never leave this room while the light is burning on your watch. Not for fire, not for flood, not for the Archangel Gabriel. You call me."

In the service room below he opened the station book and turned it round, and Mara signed it, and then wrote a first line in the journal under Tregenza's eye: the date, the wind, the weather, Relief boat. Asst. Kpr. arrived 11.20 a.m., and initials.

Kitto leaned over to look.

"Now there's a good clear hand," he said, admiringly. "You could set type by that."

Tregenza grunted, which Mara would learn was praise, and blotted the page. Through the window the boat was already a speck going home towards the cliffs, and the sea between was empty, and would stay empty, Mara understood, for a fortnight at least. At twenty to six, by the table, they lit the lamp.