Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online Page A

face.
    Dark hesitated with his cargo and lemonade and pies. Would she sit down with him for a moment?
    She nodded.
    They went to a series of tables underneath a spread of palm trees brought from India, and as strange and heady to London as a primeval forest. They sat in rattan chairs, while an Indian waiter in a turban and sash served Coronation Chicken to a family of coal merchants from Newcastle.
    ‘Is the baby…?
    ‘She is quite well, Babel, but she is blind.’
    ‘Blind?’
    And he was back in that terrible day, when she had come to him, soft and helpless, and he had…
    She had another lover – he had always known it. He had watched her walking quickly at night to a house on the other side of town. She was cloaked, shrouded, she hadn’t wanted to be seen.
    When she had gone in, Dark had stood outside the window. A young man came forward. She held out her arms. The man and Molly embraced. Dark had turned away, the pain in his head sharp in the brain-pan. He had felt his fear drop anchor in the soft parts of him. This was the fear that had been sailing towards him through the fog.
    He had set off back to town. He didn’t expect to sleep. Soon he began to walk all night. He couldn’t remember when he had last slept.
    He remembered laughing, and thinking that if he never slept he would be dead. Yes, he felt dead. He felt thin and empty like a dredged shell. He looked in the mirror and saw a highly polished abalone, its inhabitant gone, the shell prized for its surface. He always dressed well.
    Molly had noticed the change in him. She tried to please him, and sometimes he could forget, but then, making love, at the moment when he was most naked, he heard the bell again, and sensed the ribbed ship with its ragged sails coming nearer.
    He had never told her how he shadowed her steps, and when they had met one night at an inn called Ends Meet, and she had told him she was going to have a child, he had pushed her away and run through the town and locked himself in his rooms, wrapped in ragged sails.
    On the walls of his rooms were the drawings that Stevenson had made of the lighthouse at Cape Wrath. The lighthouse looked like a living creature, standing upright on its base, like a seahorse, fragile, impossible, but triumphant in the waves.
    ‘My seahorse,’ Molly had called him, when he swam towards her in their bed like an ocean of drowning and longing.
    The sea cave and the seahorse. It was their game.Their watery map of the world. They were at the beginning of the world. A place before the flood.
    She had come to him that day, soft, open, as he sat motionless by his dying fire. She had begged him and he had hit her, hit two red coals into her cheeks, and then hit her again and again, and she had put up her arms to shield herself, and…
    She broke his thought as she spoke.
    ‘From where I fell.’
    He looked at the child, laughing, gurgling, unseeing, its hands on its mother’s face, its head turning to follow the sounds. Now he knew what he had done, and he would have given his life to put his hand inside time and turn it back.
    ‘I will do anything you ask. Tell me. Anything.’
    ‘We have no wants.’
    ‘Molly – am I her father?’
    ‘She has no father.’
    Molly stood up to leave. Babel jumped after her, spilling the bottles of lemonade. Molly held the baby close, and the baby was quiet, feeling its mother’s alarm.
    ‘Let me hold her.’
    ‘So that you can dash her to the ground?’
    ‘I have thought of you every day since I left. And I have thought of your child. Our child, if you tell me so.’
    ‘I did tell you so.’
    ‘I never thought I would see you again.’
    ‘Nor I you.’
    She paused, and he remembered her that night, that first night, with the moon shining white on her white skin. He put out his hand. She stepped back.
    ‘It is too late, Babel.’
    Yes, too late, and he had made it too late. He should go back, he knew his wife would be waiting for him. He should go back now. But as he