I warn you, though, he's not the happiest corpse in the morgue. Not much of a talker, Neville Whittnish.
M.L. StedmanSoon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.
M.L. StedmanIt’s a hard job, and a busy one. The lightkeepers have no union, not like the men on the store boats – no one strikes for better pay or conditions. The days can leave him exhausted or sore, worried by the look of a storm front coming in at a gallop, or frustrated by the way hailstones crush the vegetable patch. But if he doesn’t think about it too hard, he knows who he is and what he’s for. He just has to keep the light burning. Nothing more.
M.L. StedmanIsabel herself could hardly have put into words the new feeling – excitement, perhaps – she felt every time she saw this man. There was something mysterious about him – as though, behind his smile, he was still far away. She wanted to get to the heart of him.If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn’t safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.
M.L. StedmanAlways slightly off balance. It was a new sensation for him.
M.L. StedmanIt’s like a whole … a whole galaxy waiting for you to find out about. And I want to find out about yours.
M.L. StedmanRalph spoke to the boat in the same way Whittnish referred to the light – living creatures, close to their hearts. The things a man could love, Tom thought. He fixed his eyes on the tower. Life would have changed utterly when he saw it again. He had a sudden pang: would Isabel love Janus as much as he did? Would she understand his world?
M.L. StedmanIsabel sat up, and looked deep into his eyes. ‘What goes on in there, I wonder?
M.L. StedmanIt astounds him that the tiny life of the girl means more to him than all the millennia before it. He struggles to make sense of his emotions – how he can feel both tenderness and unease when she kisses him goodnight, or presents a grazed knee for him to kiss better with the magic power that only a parent has.For Isabel, too, he is torn between the desire he feels for her, the love, and the sense that he cannot breathe. The two sensations grate at one another, unresolved.
M.L. StedmanThe old clock on the kitchen wall still clicked its minutes with fussy punctuality. A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it. The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through the mill. Isabel had managed to sit up a little against the wall, and she sobbed at the sight of the diminutive form, which she had dared to imagine as bigger, as stronger – as a child of this world. ‘My baby my baby my baby my baby,’ she whispered like a magic incantation that might resuscitate him. The face of the creature was solemn, a monk in deep prayer, eyes closed, mouth sealed shut: already back in that world from which he had apparently been reluctant to stray. Still the officious hands of the clock tutted their way around. Half an hour had passed and Isabel had said nothing.
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