The Lighthouse Keeper

For thirty-one years, Aled kept the light on the western point, and in all that time he was late exactly once.

The lighthouse was two hours from the nearest village by boat, and longer if the weather had opinions. He went across every third Tuesday for supplies, and came back the same evening, and the light came on at dusk whether or not he felt like climbing the stairs.

People asked him whether he was lonely. He said the question assumed something he had never felt. There was the sea, which changed every hour, and there were the ships, which he came to recognise by the way they took the channel. He knew half a dozen captains he had never met.

The one late night was in February. The engine failed on the way back, and he rowed the last stretch in the dark with the wind against him. He reached the door forty minutes after sunset, went up the stairs without taking off his coat, and lit the lamp.

Afterwards he found out that no ship had passed that night. Nobody had needed the light. He said it made no difference at all. The point of a light, he said, is not that someone is looking. It is that if someone were looking, it would be there.