Twenty-four chapters. The first three are on this page.

The Light Runs Whether You Watch It or Not

The gale had taken the felt off the coal shed in the night, and Colm Devane stood in the yard looking at it for longer than the job required. Two strips of it lay out on the grass, black and sodden, one of them wrapped around the base of the clothes pole like something washed in. The rest hung off the roof and lifted and settled, lifted and settled, in what was left of the wind.

He would have had it done by dinnertime once. He went in and put the kettle on instead.

The cottage sat forty yards below the tower on the landward side of the wall, where the Commissioners had put it in 1898 so a man could get from his bed to the light in under two minutes without being taken off the path. Colm had made that walk in fifty-one seconds in a westerly in 1974, timed from the door by Máire with the good watch, and he had never told anybody else, because there was nobody else it would have meant anything to.

The light did not need him now. It had not needed him since the March of ninety-two, when two men came up from Dublin in a van and fitted a lamp the size of a jam jar and a monitor that would ring a telephone in Dún Laoghaire if the lamp so much as flickered. He got the cottage for a nominal rent and a letter thanking him for thirty-one years. Máire read the letter twice, said it was a nice letter, and put it in the drawer with the insurance.

The kettle went. He made the tea in the pot, because making it in the cup was a thing he had decided not to start.

Rita was coming on Friday. That was the whole of it, and it had been sitting on him since Sunday the way weather sits on the west before it arrives: Rita on the half-two bus from Letterkenny, Rita for four days, Rita who would want the back bedroom, and the back bedroom was full.

Not full of anything, and that was the difficulty. If it had been full of coal or netting or a broken washing machine he would have shifted it in an hour and thought no more about it. It was full of Máire's things. Eleven weeks of them, carried in there by degrees and without any plan, because every time he came on something of hers in a room he was trying to live in he had lifted it and brought it down the hall and shut the door on it. Her coat off the hook. Her shoes, the good pair and the other pair. The tin of hairgrips off the windowsill. Two cardigans, a Sunday missal, a hot-water bottle in a knitted cover. The kitchen chair she had liked because it did not rock.

Eleven weeks. He could do that arithmetic without wanting to do it. The seventeenth of February, and it had rained the whole of that day, and the priest had said afterwards that she went easy, and she had not.

He carried the tea down and stood at the door of the back bedroom with the cup in his hand and did not open it, and then he opened it.

It smelled of nothing in particular. He had half expected otherwise. It smelled of a cold room, of the paper on the wall, of the sea the way every room in that house smelled of the sea. He set the cup on the sill and started with the coat, because the coat was the worst of it and there was no sense in working up to a thing.

By eleven he had a black sack half filled and a heap on the bed of what he had not been able to put in it, which was most of it. He had learned by then to hold each thing for a second and then decide, rather than decide and then hold it. It was quicker that way and it cost less.

He left the wardrobe till last. It had been her mother's, brought from Kinlough on a lorry in 1970 and not moved since, and the door had to be lifted on its hinge before it would open at all. At the back of it, under a folded eiderdown, there was a biscuit tin. A Jacob's tin, the round kind, the lid gone soft at the rim from being taken off.

He knew every tin in that house. He did not know this one.

He sat down on the edge of the bed with it on his knees. The room was cold and he did not feel it. He took the lid off.

The Long Way to Sligo

The letters were tied with garden twine, not ribbon, which told him something before he had read a word of them. Máire had used ribbon for the things that were meant to be found.

He counted forty-one. The earliest was dated the March before they married, the latest a fortnight before the diagnosis, and every one of them was addressed in her upright, impatient hand to a man in Sligo whose name meant nothing to him at all.

Outside, the light came round again, and the room went white, and dark, and white. He had lived inside that rhythm for thirty-one years and had stopped noticing it somewhere around the fourth. He noticed it now.

The envelopes were sealed. That was the thing he kept coming back to, sitting there with the tin open on his knees and the afternoon gone out of the window without his leave. Sealed, and none of them stamped, and the address on every one of them written out in full as though the post office would be along for them directly. Mr Aidan Hanratty, 12 Cairnsfoot Row, Sligo. The early ones in biro and the later ones in the fountain pen he had bought her in Derry, and the hand the same all through, only slower at the end.

A sealed envelope is a door. He had spent his working life among things that were either open or shut and nothing in between, and he sat with forty-one of them on his knees and could not decide which they were.

He thought about the twine again. She had a drawer of ribbon in the dresser, good ribbon, kept off the Christmas parcels and rolled up and held with a pin. She had tied the birth certificates with it, and the deeds, and the photographs of her mother. She had used the twine for staking the sweet pea and for the fish she gave away, and once for a parcel to Australia that came back.

At some point he got up and put the light on, and the room came back at him smaller than it had been.

He took the earliest one off the top and opened it with his thumb, and made a bad job of it, and had to tear the last of the flap. There was one sheet inside, folded in three.

Dear Aidan, I am writing this in the room over the shop and the noise below is desperate. I said I would tell you when I had decided and I have decided, so.

He read that far and then read it again and then folded it along its own creases and put it back in its envelope, and put the envelope at the bottom of the pile instead of the top, which he was aware, even doing it, was a thing done for no reason he could have said out loud.

He put the lid on the tin. He carried it out to the kitchen and set it on the table, and then took it off the table and put it on the dresser, because the table was where they ate.

He filled the kettle and stood there while it came to the boil and then switched it off at the wall without making anything. Outside, the sea was doing what it had done every evening of his life, and the light went round, and the field between the house and the wall came up white for a moment and went back to nothing.

Thirty-eight years he had been married to her. He had known her before that, from the dance at Kinlough, and he had thought — not often, but at the times when a man thinks such things, standing a watch at four in the morning with nothing to do but keep his eyes open — that he knew everything about her there was to know, and that this was not a small thing to be able to say.

He said the name out loud, once, to the empty kitchen, to hear what it sounded like in a room.

It sounded like a man who was still alive.

Weather, and Nothing Else

He was awake at four, which was no great novelty, and up at five, which was. He dressed in the dark out of long practice and took the key off the dresser where it had always been kept, and not off the hook by the door where a visitor would look for it, and went up the path to the tower with the wind behind him.

There was no reason to go up. The lamp was doing what it was told and a telephone in Dún Laoghaire would know before he would if it stopped. He went up anyway, ninety-one steps, and stood in the lantern room with his hands on the rail while it got light over Inishowen, and he did not think about the tin at all, or thought about nothing else, which at that hour amounted to the same thing.

On the way down he stopped at the store below the service room.

The official logs had gone to Dublin in ninety-two, boxed and signed for, thirty-one years of them, and that was right and proper and he had no argument with it. What had not gone to Dublin were his own. He had kept a copybook alongside the log from the first winter, because the official form had eleven columns and none of them was for anything he actually wanted to write down, and once a man starts a copybook in October he is unlikely to stop it in November.

There were sixty-two of them in a tea chest with a board over the top. Sixpenny copybooks at the start, ruled feint and margined, and later the hardbacked kind from the stationer's in Carndonagh. He took the board off and the smell came up out of the chest at him, paper kept cold for years, and he found that he had already decided what he was doing there before he had let himself say it.

The letters had dates on them. Every one of them. She had been a woman who dated things.

He carried four of the copybooks down to the kitchen with the wind pushing him along the path, and made the tea in the pot, and sat down with the tin on the dresser behind him where he did not have to look at it. The earliest letter said the fourteenth of March, 1968.

It took him a while to find sixty-eight, because he had numbered the copybooks and not dated them, which had made sense to a man of thirty-three. The fourteenth of March was on the ninth page from the front, in the hand he had before his hand got worse.

Wind SW 5, falling 3 by 1400. Vis 6 miles, closing to 2 in squalls after 1600. Glass rising slowly. Nothing to report.

And beneath it, in the margin, where the ruled line ran out, one more line in the same biro.

M. to Sligo on the early bus. Back Thursday.

He sat and looked at it for a long time. It was his own writing. He had put those seven words on that page himself, at that table or one very like it, thirty-eight years ago, and he had no memory of the day, or of the bus, or of Thursday. He had written it the way he wrote the wind: because it had happened, and because a thing that has happened should be set down.

The kettle had gone cold again. Outside it was full light, and the felt was still off the coal shed, and the tide was out beyond the wall.

He got up and went out to the store and came back with the tea chest, carrying it against his chest with his chin on the board, and had to stop twice on the path, which he would not have had to do in ninety-two. He put it down beside the kitchen table.

Sixty-two copybooks. Thirty-one years of weather, three readings a day, and here and there, when it had struck him as worth the ink, a line about his wife.

Forty-one letters. Forty-one dates.

He was not a clever man and had never claimed to be, but he had spent his life proving one column against another and finding where the error was, and there was only the one way through a thing like this that he knew how to do. He put the tin on the table beside the chest, which was where they ate, and this time he left it there.