It was hard to believe the surveyors could have been so wrong about the sea level or the weather, to have built something that fell apart after just two years. He would have to do a decent study of the thing, but if there were no windows, he couldn’t stay for the season. Dismayed, he wondered what he was supposed to do then. Report to the Lighthouse Board, probably, but he didn’t know where that was.
A deep part of him hated finding it in ruins, having seen it etched whole on that postcard for so long.
All along the shore of the mainland, points of light shone among the watchtowers, hundreds of feet up from the beach.
Joe had heard about the Harris Wall, which was even more ancient than Hadrian’s, but he hadn’t ever seen a picture. He stood up when he saw the real extent of it. All along the gullied cliffs, there were towers and walls. In some places they had been built from stone, and in others, the masons had cut into the cliff-face. Where the cliffs petered out, more walls bridged the gaps. Lookout towers stood in different stages of decay, some still with their roofs and some tumbled. He looked back out over the water. The next land on from here was America. He couldn’t remember what it was the builders had been trying to keep out.
Someone shouted and the ship slewed to the right, which knocked him off balance. When he looked back, the captain pointed from the cabin to something beyond the rail. There were two pillars in the water, taller than the ship. They must originally have been rock stacks, but they had been carved smooth. Joe held onto the rail as they looped around. They hadn’t needed to; they would have cleared the pillars easily, sailing between the two. It was an exaggerated horseshoe of a manoeuvre to go round the other side. Maybe they marked underwater rocks.
The harbour was on the west side of Lewis and Harris, looking out over the dark sea towards the pillars and Eilean Mòr. On the map, the town was called Aird Uig, but Joe couldn’t work out how you were supposed to pronounce that. The whalers called it the Station. It crouched among the ruins of the wall, looking vulnerable.
One of the whalers told him that there should be rooms at the sailors’ boarding house, which was also the pub, if he could commit to not swearing for the night. The landlord was strict. The whaler stopped, because Joe was staring at him hard, concentrating.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Sorry. My English isn’t so good,’ Joe had to say. It seemed politer than ‘Are you certain you aren’t speaking Norwegian?’
The pebble beach smelled of seaweed and iron. A stairway led up to the boarding house, but the rail had rusted to nothing and someone had left an anchor there to hold on to instead. Joe, who had never been acquainted with any anchors before, was surprised to find it was at least three times as long as a person, and quite well-suited to its new job.
Music came from inside. When the door opened, heat rolled out. Joe and the whalers stopped in the broad entranceway to pull off their coats, slick from the misty rain. In the sudden warmth, the rainwater on Joe’s skin felt unpleasantly like sweat.
Joe followed the others to the bar. A young man started to hand out keys, then paused over Joe and asked, looking doubtful, if he was new to the ship.
‘I’m here for the lighthouse,’ Joe said, for the first time. The whaler captain hadn’t asked him what he wanted passage for and everyone else had seemed too tired to bother with questions. ‘To fix the generator. I’ll need to stay here tonight, though, if there’s space.’
‘Plenty of space,’ the man said slowly. He looked Joe over more carefully than he had before. ‘Five shillings. Firewood’s sixpence per bucket and if you want to sit down here you have to eat something.’
‘You took my money,’ Joe said to the whaler, who sighed but paid for him, looking like he regretted not having handed Joe over to the woman from the Saints.
‘Where are you from anyway?’ the barman said. He looked sceptical.
‘Clerkenwell.’
‘Originally.’
‘Clerkenwell,’ Joe repeated, uneasy. Someone, he couldn’t remember who now, had once said that he looked like he could have been from anywhere except where he was, which was exactly true. ‘I’m not French.’
The barman gave him another unconvinced once-over, then some rum to be getting on with. The food – stew – would arrive when it did. Joe took himself off to a spare table. There were more tables than people to fill them. The place must have been built when the fishing was still good.
Everything was wooden, and there were dead birds and joints of meat hanging from the rafters. It looked how he imagined the frontier settlements would have looked in America. He pulled The Count of Monte Cristo out of his bag to read. He’d brought it because it was a brick and it would keep him going for a bit – or, that had been the theory – but it was exciting and he’d got through a quarter of it already on the train. It was a while before he became aware that some men at the next table were looking at him and his tool case, pushed under the chair now. He set the book down when one of them spoke.
‘You’re here for the lighthouse, you said?’
‘That’s right.’
‘No one’ll take you.’
Joe wondered if this was their way of asking for a bribe to put up with his accent for the duration of the trip across to Eilean Mòr. If it was, he couldn’t see why they were bothering. They all knew he had no more money. He didn’t see what there was to say otherwise either, so he only nodded. Whatever they said, he would have to get across somehow.
Something took a firm hold of the hem of his coat and pulled.
He expected a dog. In fact it was the biggest tortoise he had ever seen and, on its back, someone had painted ‘4’ in white. It blinked at him, beak still fastened on his coat. Tentatively, he stroked its head. Apparently satisfied, the tortoise shuffled over towards the whalers. They seemed to know it well.
There were three other tortoises by the hearth. One had a blanket on. There was a man with them, feeding them pieces of cabbage. He saw Joe looking and lifted his eyebrows to ask what his problem was.
‘Um,’ said Joe, because although it was clearly a good idea to mind his own business in this place, four massive tortoises was going too far. ‘Why have you got four …?’
‘It’s bloody cold. Can’t make them stay in the yard, can I?’ the man said, and went back to shredding cabbage.
Maybe they ate them.
Joe worried about what would be in the stew.
When it came, though, it was just lamb, and he decided he should probably be grateful for small mercies.
The lodging rooms were meant to hold two people each, but there weren’t enough people any more and so there was plenty of space. The window looked out over the sea, which was whipping itself into a fury now beneath a charcoal sky. It wasn’t the kind of weather you ever saw in Londres. It was wild.
He wrote a letter for Alice and Lily and M. Saint-Marie. He didn’t put in anything about the Psychical Society – Alice wouldn’t like that – but he told them about the journey and the border, and the tortoises, and even that took up a couple of pages. He didn’t seal up the envelope, in case there was a chance to add more tomorrow.
Lily would be wondering where he was by now. He had to scrub his hands over his face. Alice wouldn’t understand Lily’s jokes, the made-up animals. He was going to come back to find a sombre child who had been told to be quiet too much. His insides twisted with the already worn-out certainty that he shouldn’t have left her. None of his reasons for coming looked very good now.