Light. Margaret Elphinstone

her that her feet were bare, and begrimed with garden soil, as was the hem of her old print gown. The path wound between rushes and cotton grass. She left her bare footprints firmly imprinted in the mud as she walked. Archie trod over them in his heavy boots; the path was narrow and there was no avoiding them.

      They skirted the green knoll, and there was the gable-end of a low stone cottage right in front of them. At the front, the slate roof hung down over two small windows and a central door, so the house looked like a face with beetling eyebrows frowning out to sea. The door stood wide open, and a couple of chickens were pecking at invisible scraps on the threshold. A cockerel and some more chickens – and a motley flock they were – foraged on the green turf outside the door. The pigpen, re-fashioned from ship’s timbers, had been built up against the garden wall. Ben was leaning over the fence and Mally was jumping around inside the pen, clutching a pan of scraps. Either the child or the piglets – it was impossible to tell which – were squealing wildly. Of the other girl – the one who’d run away as soon as they’d landed – there was no sign at all.

      Diya stopped in front of the door, and motioned Archie to go in. ‘If you please to come in, sir.’

      ‘After you, ma’am.’

      He had to duck under the lintel. A stuffy warmth met him, and the smell of broth. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Diya dumped the sack of oatmeal by the door. ‘If you’d like to sit down, Mr Buchanan, the lightkeeper will be here shortly.’

      But the lightkeeper’s been dead five years! Stupid thought – the lightkeeper now was the dead man’s sister – hard to think of a lightkeeper as a woman though. Archie didn’t really want to sit down; he wanted to look about and get on with the job, but somehow the woman’s civil clarity was impossible to withstand. In short, she made him nervous, and that irritated him. It was hard to take his eyes off her. She was not what Archie had expected at all. He sat down gingerly at the end of a bench.

      Diya unfastened her gardening pinafore and hung it on the back of the door. Then she took an earthenware jug from a shelf, poured water into a bowl, and washed her grimy hands with soap. She dried them carefully on a bleach-white towel. Only then did she add more water to the broth pot, and begin to stir it briskly. She was dressed like a peasant, but no peasant Archie knew – and he knew many, none better – poured water and stirred broth as if every gesture were part of an invisible dance. Graceful – that was the word that came to mind – she moved with grace. He felt instinctively that she lived her whole life with grace. But her eyes were so sorrowful. Was that for the death of the lightkeeper, or was it because he, Archie, had arrived on the island? And was silence natural to her, or was it occasioned by his unwanted presence? He swallowed, and spoke to her.

      ‘This is kind of you. The lightkeeper isn’t here just now?’ Silly question: there was only half a mile of land altogether, so the lightkeeper could hardly have gone far.

      ‘She has to sleep, of course.’