Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online Page B

took a deep breath to go, his will failed him.
    ‘Spend this day with me. This one day.’
    Molly hesitated a long time, while the crowds passed about them, and Dark, looking down, not daring to look up, saw reflections in the polished toe-pieces of his boots.
    She spoke like someone far off. Someone who was a country where he was born.
    ‘This day then.’
    He shone. She made him shine. He took the baby and held it by the hissing engines, and close against thesmooth traction of the wheels. He wanted her to hear pistons pumping and coal shovelling and water drumming against the sides of the giant copper boilers. He took her tiny fingers and ran them over brass rivets, steel funnels, cogs, ratchets, a rubber horn that trumpeted when she squeezed it in her tiny hands, Dark’s hands over hers. He wanted to make for her a world of sounds that was as splendid as the world of sight.
    Some hours later, he saw Molly smile.
    Late now. Crowds were drifting towards the bandstand. Dark bought the baby a clockwork bear made of real bearskin. He rubbed it against her cheek, then he wound it up and the bear brought two cymbals together in its paws.
    It was time for him to go, he knew it was, but still they stood together, as everyone else parted to pass them. Then silently, without him asking, Molly opened her bag and gave him a card with her address in Bath.
    She kissed his cheek, and turned away.
    Dark watched her go, like watching a bird on the horizon, that only you can see, because only you have followed it.
    Then she was gone.
    Late now. Shadows. The flare of gas lamps. His reflection in every pane of glass. One Dark. A hundred. A thousand. This fractured man.
    Dark remembered his wife.
    He pushed his way down the galleries and back to where he had left her. She was still there, hands folded in her lap, her face a mask.
    ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I was delayed.’
    ‘For six hours.’
    ‘Yes.’

Pew – why didn’t my mother marry my father?
    She never had time. He came and went.
    Why didn’t Babel Dark marry Molly?
    He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.
    But they might not be telling you the truth.
    Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
    What do you mean?
    You can’t be another person’s honesty, child, but you can be your own.
    So what should I say?
    When?
    When I love someone?
    You should say it.

A stranger in his own life,
    but not here, not with her.
    The house he bought her in her name. The child he took as his own; his blind daughter, blue-eyed like him, black-haired like him. He loved her.
    He promised himself that he would come back forever. He told Molly that what had begun as a penance had become a responsibility. He couldn’t leave Salts, not now, no, not yet, but soon, yes very soon. And Molly, who had begged to come with him, accepted what he said about his life there, and that it would be no life for their daughter, and no place for the second child that Molly was expecting.
    He said nothing to her about his wife in Salts, and nothing to her about his salty new son, who had been born almost without him noticing.
    April. November. The twice-yearly visits to Molly. Sixty days a year where life is, where love is, where his private planet tracked into the warmth of its sun.
    In April and November, he arrived half frozen, hardly able to speak, the life in him remote. He came to her door and fell inside, and she took him by the fire and talked to him, for hours it seemed, to keep him conscious, to keep him from fainting.
    Whenever he saw her he wanted to faint. He knew it was the sudden rush of blood to his head, and the fact that he forgot to breathe. He knew it was an ordinary symptom and an ordinary cause, but he knew, too, that whenever he saw her, his desiccated, half-stilled body jerked forward, towards the sun. Heat and light. She was heat and light to him, whatever the month.
    In December and May, when it was time for him to leave, he carried the light with him for a while, though