Page 24

It is nice to have Fen here for dinner tonight, but almost as soon as we’ve finished eating she picks herself up and draws on her cold-weather gear. I admire the obstinacy of it—there’s not much that could get me out into that wind at this time of night.

I look at her father, who is watching his daughter with an expression of longing. Say something , I will him. Reach for her . Ask her to stay.

It’s Raff who says, “Sleep here, Fenny.”

Fen glances at her dad, then smiles and shakes her head. “I get so antsy up here now. It’s the walls. They make my skin crawl.”

“Go straight to the boathouse,” is all Dominic says.

She nods and then she’s away.

It isn’t long before Dom goes elsewhere too, leaving his sons and me to do the washing up. When we’ve finished cleaning, the boys do some schoolwork. The fog has cleared and the evening is long and violet, and I have nothing else to do so I sit and listen as Orly helps Raff with his readings. He has an L -shaped card that he uses to block out everything on the page except the sentence he’s focused on. Orly reads it to him aloud and then Raff follows suit. He highlights or makes a note beside the text. It’s very slow.

On one sentence Raff stumbles, misreads the words, and stops, frustrated.

“You’re doing so good, Raffy,” Orly tells his big brother, patting his hair like a dog, and it makes Raff smile, and the moment is so tender.

I wonder at the resources Raff’s missing out on, the support systems he can’t access on Shearwater. Although, to be fair, you could do worse than have Orly as your teacher.

I go into the lounge and sit on the rug to stretch my muscles. They feel tired and stiff after a rugged two-day hike, and the movements pull at the scrapes and cuts, but I know I will feel worse tomorrow if I don’t do this now. My thoughts drift around the lighthouse to each of its occupants: to the boys engrossed in their work, to the man somewhere above. They dart down the hill to the beach, to the girl among the seals. I think of parents and children and the choices they make. I think of my mother. I dream of her often, but I don’t usually let myself think of her. Right now I can’t help it, because I know what it’s like to have a parent who chose an unusual place for your childhood, who chose to expose you to something strange. Once, I thought our houseboat was an adventure. I thought we were lucky to chug up and down rivers and along coastlines, to see country and city alike, to explore bays and harbors but also village ports and stretches of forest. But these moments, in reality, were far rarer than the ones we spent moored in smoggy loading docks among freight ships and shouting cargo workers. Far rarer than the ones we spent alone on a cramped and cluttered boat, waiting for our parents to come back from work or making our way to and from school along busy highways, only me to keep the four of us safe, and me not much older than the others. For a while, I looked back on those years and told myself they were idyllic, that we were lucky. But the haze eventually cleared and I saw it for what it was: survival.

I could never resent my mother for that. I am grateful she did her best. But the accident that came after was something else entirely and the truth is I have blamed her for it; I told myself I didn’t but under all the layers of hurt I held a simmering fury for her neglect. And I didn’t set foot on a boat again until the day I stepped onto Yen’s.

I stand, restless, and decide to see what’s at the top of the stairs. I haven’t climbed them all the way before, I haven’t had the energy, but I’ve been dying to see the view. By the time I have climbed every step the world is spinning and what I am met with steals the breath I have left.

It is a huge, glimmering lens. I have never seen one so big or up so close. A dazzling pattern of glass cut into geometric angles, designed to project the light within it a long way out to sea. I don’t know any more about it than that, I don’t know how it functions, but its intricacy is a work of art and I long to see it lit from within.

Belatedly a punching bag swims into view, hanging off to the side, and behind it, Dom. He is red-faced and sweaty. Tape around his hands, some blood on his knuckles.

“It’s a beauty, isn’t it,” he says, of the lens.

I have no words, can only nod.

He hands me his water bottle and I drink.

I take in the windows around us, slowly following their circumference so I can look at Shearwater. From the mountainous peaks to the inky beaches and the research base on its watery isthmus, I can see it all. It’s obvious from this vantage that those buildings will be swallowed soon. An island made of the earth’s crust and rising as those crusts push against each other, and still not quickly enough to escape the sea snapping at its heels.

“Do you know about Fresnel lenses?” Dom asks me.

“No.”

“Come over here.”

I go to his side, to the huge glass prism.

“For a long time, lighthouses didn’t have these kinds of lenses around their flames,” he tells me. “They used reflectors behind the light to beam it out. But then they realized they could get that light to travel a lot farther if they also used a lens in front. Now the lenses they first created for lighthouses had to be big enough to gather all this light and cast it an awfully long way, which made them heavy, so Fresnel came up with this new design. He cut out pieces of the glass like this.” Here Dom runs his fingers over the angles in the glass and I watch them, mesmerized by their path as much as I am by the sound of his voice. “Which maintained the curve you need to focus the light, but it cut away the excess material and stopped the light from getting absorbed by the lens itself.” He smiles. “I’m not the sharpest tool in the toolbox, so it took me a while to figure all that out, make it stick. But I was curious.”

The idea of this lens excites me, the ingenuity of it. “And I guess the ripple of the lens means you can concentrate all these rays into one powerful beam.”

“That’s right.” Our eyes meet.

I take a step away. “Do you spend a lot of time up here?”

“Yeah, the glass takes a bit to clean.” He is nodding at the windows, but I can see from the state of the Fresnel lens that he also painstakingly cleans this glass, every tiny angle of it, despite it having no light to beam. “I do find myself up here,” Dom adds. “Very often in those first years. I’d order books on lighthouse keeping and sit up here reading of an evening after the kids were asleep. Complete waste of time since I had no light to keep.” He smiles ruefully, this man who believes anything that offers pleasure must be time wasted. “This lighthouse was shut down before it had a chance to become electric, so they had to keep the flame alive themselves all night. Most likely there would have been two blokes out here at a time, or a husband and wife, and they’d rotate through four-hour shifts. Four on, four off. Always keeping this light alive, no matter the weather or their own health. Trimming the wicks, keeping the flame clean and strong, making sure there was no smoke, lugging the oil up and down the steps all day and night.”

“It sounds arduous. And lonely.”

He nods. I can see he is swept away by the romance of it. He walks to the window, looking out at the ocean. “It was such a perilous bloody thing, getting aboard a ship back in those days,” he murmurs. “Easiest thing in the world to get lost. Then you had bad weather to contend with. Not just storms but fog, too. Fog was a killer. But they knew they could rely on the two people up in this tower to be calling them in to safety. Their lives were in the hands of the lighthouse keepers.”

Dom opens the door and steps out onto the small balcony that wraps the whole way around the tower, which I’m guessing was built so the keepers could clean the windows. I follow him and feel a battering blast of cold wind; my hands reach quickly for the railing, and then I feel Dom’s on my back, steadying me, making sure I don’t go anywhere.

To the west, the sun hangs heavy on the horizon, staining the sky gold.

“I managed to get hold of an old journal belonging to one of the keepers who was here in 1850.” Dom is standing close so I can hear him over the wind. “What struck me was how often he’d hear from the wives of the sailors who’d set out here. They’d contact him—Morse code back then—and they’d ask if he’d seen this ship or that ship yet, and could he please tell them if William was still aboard and healthy, or John, or whoever. And I started to think about how so much of a keeper’s job is to wait and watch, holding men’s lives in their hands. And I’d dream, in those days, that my wife, that Claire was out on a ship at sea, and I was up here watching for her, and if I could just keep the light on I’d show her the way home.”

My chest aches.

“Hell,” I say softly, and he leans in to hear my voice. “Instead you got me, washing up on your shore.”

Dom studies me. “That I did.”

He guides me back inside and closes the door, shutting out the wind.

“A Fresnel lens and a punching bag,” I comment.

The bag is swinging as though of its own accord, incongruous in the room.

“Helps Raff blow off a bit of steam,” Dom says.

“And you,” I point out.

Dom seems uncomfortable with this, that I have found him up here punching. He looks at his wrapped hands. “I don’t usually…” Shakes his head. “I didn’t ever want this for my boy, I wanted his life to be different. But he has such a temper. There’s a power to it. I try to help him be equal to it.”

“By punching?”

Dom looks at me.

I think of Raff’s violin song, and of the pain in it. It’s not my place to say anything, but we will be gone from here soon and we will never see each other again, and Dom already hates me.

So I say, “Instead of trying to make him as hard as his anger you could help him to be softer than it.”

Dom’s shoulders sag. He turns away from me. Walks to the window and slowly unwraps the tape from his bare knuckles. I watch him, unsure if I should leave, feeling a compulsion to speak again, to sweep the moment from the room, to undo any hurt I’ve caused him.

He beats me to it, taking us elsewhere and leaving my words behind.

“Have a look at this,” Dom says, opening the Fresnel lens and showing me the lamp within. There is an elegant cylindrical flute of glass around the oil-wick burner. “This little glass chimney would have worked like a real chimney, drawing the hot air up through it, the oxygen feeding the flame and making it burn more brightly.”

He takes such clear and simple joy from this feat of engineering, the clever details of invention, and I remember having this precise feeling years ago when I first wanted to understand how things work, and I feel it again now, but it is not this lens I find myself wanting to pick apart, to get to the insides of, to know . It is Dominic Salt.