Salt and Tether
The relief keeper is supposed to be met at the landing stage. I was not met, and the lamp had not been lit for three nights, and there was a man in the lamp room who told me quite calmly that he could not sign off.
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Sker Maen is a rock light. That means there is no island — there is a lump of gneiss that clears the water at low springs and does not clear it at high, and there is a tower on it, and there is nothing else for eleven miles in any direction. Three keepers, two-month rotations, relief by boat when the weather allows and by nothing at all when it doesn't.
I was twenty-six and it was my second posting and I was, I thought, prepared for it.
The boat could not get alongside. That happens; you go up by the reeving line, a wire from the boat's derrick to a bracket forty feet up, and you are hauled through the air over the swell with your bag between your knees, and it is the worst four minutes in the service.
Nobody worked the winch. The line was rigged and made fast and the winch turned, and I came up, and the set-off was empty, and the door was open.
---
I found him in the lamp room at the top of the tower, sitting on the floor with his back against the pedestal, and the lens above him dark.
"You'll be Hollis," he said.
I said I was.
"Marrack." He did not get up. "I've been three nights not lighting it and I want you to understand before anything else that it wasn't neglect."
I said the Board would want a great deal more than that, and where were Tregear and Sanderson.
"Gone off on the fourteenth. Proper relief, proper boat." He looked up at me then. He was perhaps forty, grey with tiredness, and his lips were cracked the way they get when you have not drunk enough for days. "It was my turn to go with them. I got as far as the set-off with my bag."
"And?"
"And I couldn't," he said. "I want you to hear the exact shape of it, because if I say it wrong you'll think I'm mad and I'll lose the light. I did not decide to stay. I did not feel unwell. I walked out onto the set-off with my bag in my hand and I could not go down the line, in the way that you cannot lift your own body off the ground. It wasn't a fear. There was nothing in me that was frightened. It was simply not a thing I could do."
---
I lit the lamp that night, because that is the whole of the job and everything else waits.
Then I went and looked at the log.
The log at Sker Maen is kept in a hand not one of the three of them wrote. I want to be precise: the entries for the previous two months are in Tregear's hand, and Sanderson's, and Marrack's, and they are ordinary — weather, oil, wick, shipping. And underneath the last of them, on the fourteenth, in a fourth hand, in the same ink:
*Marrack remains.*
That is the entire entry. Two words and a full stop, in copperplate, in a book that had been locked in a cupboard with one key on Marrack's belt.
I showed it to him. He looked at it for a long time.
"That's not mine," he said.
"I know it's not yours."
"No," he said. "You've misunderstood me. That's not *mine* — that hand is in the book already. Go back."
I went back. It is on page 40 of a book begun in 1911. *Penrose remains.* And on page 112, *Kerrow remains.* And in 1954, and 1961, and 1978, always the same hand, always two words, always on the day of a relief.
Eleven of them.
---
We had five weeks before the next boat.
I will not pretend that they were terrible. That is the part I have never been able to convey at any inquiry or in any pub. We kept the light. We kept it perfectly — I have never in twenty-two years of service kept a light as well as I kept Sker Maen that winter, because there were two of us doing the work of three and because he could not sleep and I would not leave him to it.
He talked. Not at first. By the second week he talked a great deal.
He had a wife in Penzance and two daughters, and he did not talk about them, which told me more than talking would have. He talked instead about the rock. He had been at Sker Maen eleven years, which is far longer than anyone does a rock light, and he said the Board had queried it twice and he had put in for transfer twice and both times had withdrawn the application himself, in his own hand, and had no memory of doing it.
"I liked it here," he said. "That's the thing I want somebody to write down. I've been happy on this rock. Eleven years, and I've been happier than I was ashore, and I've never once been able to work out whether that's the rock's doing."
I said that if it was the rock's doing then it was not happiness.
And he said, "No. But if it isn't, then I've chosen this, and my girls are eleven and fourteen, and I'd rather it was the rock."
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I am going to set down the last part plainly.
On the fourth of February the relief came. Good weather, flat sea, the tender alongside and the line rigged, and a Board officer aboard because of the three unlit nights.
Marrack came out onto the set-off with his bag.
He stood there for a long moment with the wire humming beside him and the officer shouting up from the boat, and then he turned round and looked at me and he said — and this is verbatim, I have never altered a word of it in twenty-two years — "It isn't holding me. I want you to be very clear with them about that. It isn't holding me. I've just found that I don't want to go, and I can't find the join between that and the other thing, and I've been looking for eleven years."
Then he took hold of the reeving line with both hands, and he did not clip on, and I saw what he intended a half-second before he did it, and I got a hand to his collar and the officer got a boathook up and between us we did not let him go into the water.
He was taken off strapped to a stretcher board, shouting nothing, entirely calm, apologising to me for the trouble.
---
He was discharged from the service on medical grounds. He lived another thirty-one years in a house in Penzance, and I visited him four times, and he was, by every measure available to me, a well and ordinary man who did not once in three decades mention Sker Maen.
Except at the last visit, in 2009, when he was dying and past pretending, and he took my wrist and said: "Is it still lit?"
I said it was automated in 1988 and there had been nobody on it in twenty-one years.
And he closed his eyes and said, "Good. Then whatever it wanted us for, it's had to learn to do without."
---
Sker Maen is still there. Solar, now. A helipad where the set-off was.
I looked the log up, before they scanned the archive and put it beyond ordinary asking. It ends in 1988 with the automation entry, in the hand of the last keeper off, and there is nothing after it.
Nothing on the last page. Nothing in that copperplate.
I have decided that this is because the thing that wrote it needed somebody to remain, and there is nobody left to.
I have also considered — and I set this down because I am eighty-one and there is nobody to protect any more — that a light which needs no keeper has not lost anything.
It has simply stopped having to ask.
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