The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter. Hazel Gaynor

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СКАЧАТЬ turns to face me, arms folded across her chest. “Whose is it then?” she asks. I stiffen at the unexpected question, color running to my cheeks. “What? Did you think we wouldn’t talk about it? Spend our days drinking tea and saying our Hail Marys and pretend you’re a good little Catholic girl?”

      I stare at the whitewashed floorboards. “Of course not. I just don’t want to talk about it right now.” I glance up at her. “We’ve only just met.” I try to sound matter-of-fact but the high pitch to my voice betrays my deep discomfort. I kick off my shoes, suddenly tired of everyone poking around in my life as if I were a pincushion. Exhausted from the journey, fed up with feeling nauseous, and missing Mrs. O’Driscoll more than ever, tears well up in my eyes. I bite my lip to stop them. I don’t want Harriet Flaherty to see me cry. I don’t want her to write to my mother to tell her I’m a homesick little fish out of water, just as she expects me to be. “Besides,” I add, “it’s none of your business.”

      Harriet blanches at this. “Really? And there was me thinking you’d come to live in my house, which makes it very much my business.” Taking my silence as a refusal to be pressed any further on the matter, she walks out of the room, closing the door with a bang behind her. “I’ll be back at sunrise,” she calls, more as an afterthought than to offer me any reassurance.

      After clattering about downstairs, she leaves with a squeak of the screen door, and I’m alone again. Alone with the awful feeling that I’ve just made an enemy of the one person I’d hoped would become my ally.

      “That went well, Matilda,” I say, my sarcasm ripe as summer berries. “That went really well.”

      With nothing else to do, I sulkily hang up my few clothes, place my book on the nightstand, and freshen up in the small bathroom across the corridor. I notice one other room at the end of the landing, which I presume is where Harriet sleeps, if she ever does sleep here. I creep downstairs, pour a bowl of clam chowder down the sink, nibble a piece of bread at the table, and sip a glass of water. I feel like an intruder and retreat back upstairs to the miserable little bedroom where I sit on the end of the bed and look out the window, idly picking up the painted shells from the windowsill. They are a mixture of scallop and cockle shells, all painted white and decorated in deep blue patterns of spirals and fleurs-de-lis. They remind me of the delft my granny once brought back from a trip to Amsterdam. The name Cora is painted on the inside of each shell. Whoever Cora is, she has a steady hand and an eye for beauty. Her delicate little shells feel out of place in this cheerless room, like they don’t belong here. Much like myself.

      Despite my exhaustion, sleep will not come. I flinch at every creak and crack, at every strange sound from the street below, at the sweep of light from the lighthouse as it passes by the window. Everything feels strange. The pillow. The bed. The bare room. The house. Even my body feels unfamiliar: my appetite, my emotions, my sense of smell all altered by the invisible child that I refuse to believe is real.

      I toss and turn until the small hours, when I give up on sleep, flick on the lamp beside the bed, and pick up my book, wishing Mrs. O’Driscoll had been a faster reader and given me her copy of Gone with the Wind. I’m sure Scarlett O’Hara would be far better company than a stuffy old book about lighthouses. Opening the front page, I run my fingers over the neat inscriptions. The first, to Sarah from Grace. The next, to Matilda from her mother, and then all the recipients of the book since, each mother passing it on to her daughter, a list of distant relatives diligently recorded over the years as the book changed ownership. I’ve always felt sorry for poor Grace Rose, her name struck from the page so bluntly. I wonder who she was, and what happened to her. An infant, lost tragically young, no doubt.

      At the back of the book is a folded piece of paper, speckled with age. I remember the first time it had tumbled from the pages into my lap, remember the thrill of reading the neat script, written so long ago by a woman who knew my great-great-granny.

       Alnwick, Northumberland

       September, 1842

       My dearest Sarah,

       My sister tells me you have written several times in the past while, and I must apologize for my lack of response. Since returning from a trip to visit my brother at Coquet Island in the summer, I have been rather weakened and am to stay with my cousin here in Alnwick for a while. They tell me I am a dreadful patient—far too eager to rush my recovery so that I can get back to Longstone. I do not sleep well without the soothing lullaby of the sea at the window.

       I was so happy to hear that you have made a new life in Ireland. I believe it is a very beautiful country. I know you will never forget what happened, but sometimes a different view in the morning, a different shape to the day, can help to heal even the deepest wounds. I hope you will find peace there.

       You might tell George that I was thinking of him, if you hear from him at all. I do think of him often.

       Wishing you God’s strength and courage, always.

       Your friend,

       Grace Darling

      I have learned a little about Grace Darling through snatched fragments of conversation overheard at family gatherings, but I would like to know more. I return the letter to the back of the book, turn back to the start, and begin to read about lighthouse keeping. It turns out to be far more complex, and more interesting, than I’d imagined.

      Eventually, I sleep, albeit intermittently. I doze and wake, doze and wake, the flash from the lighthouse playing at the window, my dreamlike thoughts drifting to Grace Darling and my great-great-granny Sarah, women whose lives are connected to mine and whom I know so little about. I also think about Harriet, an outcast, a loner. Like the little girl who made up stories about the people in the portraits inside her locket, my mind begins to circle and turn, wondering and imagining, eager to fill in the gaps.

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