The lookout hut on the cliff is manned by volunteers in daylight and locked at dusk, and the log in it is a book, kept since the hut was built, where every sighting is written. Every morning there is a line in it from half past eleven the night before. A light off the point, bearing and distance, in a hand that is not any of ours, and the binoculars on the shelf are warm, and if you go up at half past eleven and look where the line says, there is a light.
I am the station's visits officer, which is a grand name for the one who looks after the lookout hut, and the hut's book is the reason I go up there in the dark.
The hut.
A wooden hut on the cliff above the station, with a window to the sea, a shelf with binoculars, a chair, and a logbook. Volunteers sit in it in daylight and watch, and write down what they see: vessels, swimmers, anything. At dusk it is locked and the book is left on the shelf.
Every morning the book has a line from half past eleven.
The line.
Time, half past eleven. Sighting, a light, white, steady, off the point, bearing and distance given, the distance about two miles. Conditions. Initials, which are not any of ours. The hand is careful and old fashioned and a little shaky and the pencil is the pencil on the string.
The binoculars on the shelf are warm when I unlock the hut at eight in the morning. Warm the way they are after somebody has had them up for an hour.
The light.
I went up at half past eleven. The hut was locked and I unlocked it and sat in the chair and looked where the line says, on the bearing, at the distance, and there was a light. White. Steady. Off the point, where there is no buoy, no mark, no anchorage, where the chart has deep water and nothing else. A light the size of a lamp on a boat, low, the height of a small vessel's deck, and it did not move, and I watched it for an hour, and at about half past twelve it went out, not slowly, out, and the sea was dark.
Behind me, while I watched, the pencil wrote. I heard it. And when I turned the line was there, in the book, below the last, with the bearing I had been looking along, and my own initials were not on it.
What has been checked.
The book, replaced with a new one. The line is in the new one.
The light, from the station, from the boat. We have been out to it. The cox took the boat out at half past eleven on a calm night to the bearing and the distance and there was nothing there. From the boat. From the hut, where I was with the radio, the light was there, and the boat was beside it, and I said so, and the cox said there was nothing, and I watched our boat sit alongside a light that the men on it could not see, for twenty minutes, and the cox said, on the radio, very quietly, that the water alongside them was colder than the water anywhere else, and brought the boat home.
Who.
The station's wall has 1908. A small boat, a family's, fishing, caught out at night off the point, and a light seen from the cliff by the lookout of the day, who was a fisherman's widow who kept the watch because her husband had not had one, and she had written it in the book, the light, the bearing, and had run down to the station, and the boat had launched, and by the time it got to the bearing the light had gone, and the boat had searched till morning, and the family were not found.
Her line is in the old book. The old book is in the station's cabinet. I have compared the hands.
She is keeping the watch. Every night at half past eleven she is in the hut with the glasses and she sees the light, because it is there, because they are there, two miles off the point, with a lamp, waiting to be seen, and she writes it down, and she has been writing it down for more than a century, and nobody has launched.
What is done about it.
The line in the book every morning is logged in the hut's returns as a night sighting, unconfirmed, and the regional office has asked why a hut that is locked at dusk is making night sightings, and I have said, the watch is kept, which is true.
What I do.
I look after the hut.
A sighting from the lookout is reported to the station, and the station decides whether to launch, and the lookout does not decide. She has been sighting and nobody has been deciding.
So I report it. At half past eleven I am in the hut, and when the pencil writes I read the line aloud, into the radio, to the station, the way a lookout does: lookout to station, light sighted, bearing, distance, and the launch authority, who has agreed to this, who is on the other end, says, lookout, received, and then he says what a launch authority has to say about a light that has been off the point since 1908, which is, not launching, and I say, understood, and the pencil, after that, writes one more line, under the sighting, which it did not before, and the line says, reported, and the glasses on the shelf, when I get to them, are cool, because she has put them down.
The light still comes. I think it always will. But it goes out earlier, since she started being answered, and I have started to think that the family with the lamp were waiting for the lookout to be believed, not for the boat, and that they can see the hut from where they are, and that they know the light in it now.