The Lighthouse Keeper’s Last Winter

Aldous had kept the light for forty-one years, and in all that time the sea had never once thanked him.

He did not resent this. The sea was not built for gratitude. It was built for taking things and occasionally, on a whim, giving them back — a boot, a crate of oranges, once a piano that had arrived on the shingle in three pieces and stayed there until the winter finished it off. He had played a single note on it before it went. C sharp, he thought, though he had never been sure.

The letter from the Authority had come in October. Automation, it said. Efficiency, it said. It thanked him for his service in a font that had clearly thanked a great many people for a great many things.

He had written back to ask what would happen to the light itself, and they had replied, with some confusion, that the light would continue. That was rather the point of automation. He had read the reply four times and understood that they had answered a different question than the one he asked.

Now it was the last week of February, and the lamp was turning above him the way it had turned every night since he was twenty-six, and Aldous was making tea.

There was a particular sound the mechanism made at the top of each rotation — a small tick, like a knuckle against a door. Most people, on their first night, could not sleep through it. Aldous had once gone four days on the mainland and been unable to sleep at all, and had come back and slept eleven hours straight, and had understood something about himself that he had never bothered to put into words.

He took the tea up the stairs. Ninety-two of them. He had counted them on his first day and had never had cause to recount.

Through the glass the water was doing its black winter churn, and out past the point he could see the running lights of a trawler heading in, low and slow, riding badly. He watched it for a while. It corrected, eventually. They usually did.

That was the thing the letter had not understood. The light would continue, yes. The bulb would burn and the lens would turn and the beam would sweep the same nineteen miles it had always swept. But nobody would be standing here at four in the morning watching a trawler ride badly and thinking: correct, you fool, correct — and feeling, when it did, the small private satisfaction of a man who has been useful without anybody knowing it.

The automation would not watch. It would only shine.

He finished the tea. He rinsed the cup in the little sink on the landing, because he had rinsed it there every night for forty-one years and he was not going to develop bad habits in his final week.

Then he sat down in the chair by the glass, the one with the cushion worn into the exact shape of him, and he watched the beam go round, and he waited to be needed.

The tick came at the top of the rotation. Like a knuckle on a door.

He was still awake at dawn.