The Last Light

Everybody in the family had sent Angus a present for the end of his working life: a coat, a radio, a book about gardens. Tom had brought nothing.

"My present is my time," he said at the bottom of the tower. "One whole night of it. Nobody else is giving you that."

"We will see," said Angus.

He had climbed the stairs of the tower since he was twenty, and on the last night he climbed them slowly, so that Tom could stay with him. There were a hundred steps, near enough, and he knew each one of them by the sound his boot made on the iron.

At the top the glass was cold. Beyond it the sea moved around the rock in the dark, and the wind came off the water with a low roar that never fully stopped.

Tom pressed his face to the glass and saw nothing at all. That was the point of the place. Nobody built a tower on a rock like this for the view.

"In the morning they come," Angus said, "and they fit the new equipment, and after that the light turns by itself."

"And you?"

"And I go and live in a house with a garden, like an ordinary man."

He said it in the flat manner he kept for things he did not want to discuss, and Tom, who knew him, did not ask again.

He started the light at the exact minute he had started it every night of his life, and the great glass wheel began to spin. The white light swung out across the water, went round, and returned.

Somewhere out in the dark, three boats were working the deep water east of the rock. Angus knew all three by name, and their owners, and the names of their children.

They ate at the small table under the light: bread, cold potato, tea from a pot. Tom asked him what he would miss.

"Nothing," he said. Then, after a while: "The stairs."

Tom laughed. Angus did not.

Tom asked whether he had ever been afraid up here. Angus said that he had, once. He told Tom, because it was the last night and he would never have to tell him again, about the winter his own father held the light. A boat hit the rocks at the north end with nine men on it, and the light burned the whole time, doing everything right, and it made no difference at all.

"A light is not a promise," he said. "It is only a light."

The storm came late, and it came the way storms come at sea, with no warning at all. The first wave broke so high on the rock that Tom felt the tower move under his feet, a slow, wide push, and he looked at his grandfather to see how afraid he ought to be.

Angus was watching the light.

The light had stopped.

For a moment neither of them moved. The white light no longer turned. It stayed on one empty part of the sea and would not leave it.

Angus took the stairs to the room below without a word. Tom heard him pull something open, then swear, then say nothing for a long time.

When Tom came down, his grandfather had the front of the machine off and both hands inside it. Sweat stood on his face, although the room was cold.

"Is it the new part?" Tom asked.

"It is the old part," Angus said. "The part they were going to replace in the morning. There is a joke in there somewhere."

Tom passed him the tools he asked for and learnt their names as he went. Angus worked for an hour. The wheel did not move.

"The radio," said Tom.

Angus shook his head at the radio. "It works. That is not the problem. The problem is that a man on the coast who knows the light is out cannot do a single thing about it. Only we can."

"So what do we do?"

"We turn it," he said.

It took Tom a moment to understand him. The wheel had turned by machine since before his mother was a child, but the machine was only doing what men had done before it, and a wheel is a wheel.

They climbed the stairs again. Angus set his shoulder against the glass wheel and pushed, and the great thing moved: heavy and slow, far slower than it ought to be, but moving. The white light swung out over the water, went round, and returned.

"How long?" Tom asked.

"Until it is light," said Angus. "You told me your present was your time. One whole night of it, you said."

Tom looked at the wheel. "I did say that," he said.

Turning a light through a storm is a stupid, simple, terrible job. You push, and you count, and you push again, and the wind hits the glass a hand away from your face and you cannot hear the person standing next to you. They worked in turn: twenty pushes, then rest, then twenty more, so that neither of them ever stopped. Tom's arms stopped working, then worked again, then stopped again. At some point in the night he was crying and pushing at the same time, and neither of them said anything about it.

Near three in the morning the light found a boat.

It was low in the water and close in, much too close to the rock for any boat, and it was turning hard away as the light caught it.

Angus made a sound Tom had never heard him make. Then he pushed harder.

The dawn came, and all at once the storm was gone from the sea, the way anger can be gone from a man, leaving everything quiet and wet and strange. Tom sat on the floor where he was. Angus stopped the light and stood at the glass with his hands at his sides, and Tom saw that they would not stop shaking.

The council boat came at nine. Two young men in clean coats climbed the stairs with their equipment and found an old man asleep in a chair and a young man who would not let them past until he woke.

They fitted the machine that day. It took them four hours. One of them said the new system was similar to the old one, only better, and that it would never fail.

Angus said that was good news, and asked them if they wanted tea.

The boat from the night belonged to a family he had known since he was a boy. Nobody on it ever said a word to him about that night, and he never said a word to them, which is the manner of that coast.

They left the rock together on the afternoon boat. Tom watched the tower get smaller. When it was dark, out on the coast road in the back of a car, he turned round to see it.

There it was: the white light, swinging out over the black water, exactly on time, turning without him.

Tom looked at his grandfather to see what he thought about that. He was asleep, with his mouth open and his hands still marked from the wheel.

"Next time," said Angus, without opening his eyes, "just buy me a book."