Excerpt
Affords there a sight more evocative of joy and triumph than the sun upon the sea? If my weary, battered heart responded thus, how much more inspiring it must be to those younger than I, whose hopes and desires still course strong within their unbowed forms.
"Does this aspect lay hold upon your imagination?" My companion spoke expansively, as might have befitted the commander of a navy's grand flagship, however landbound his actual vessel. "My understanding was that you are of London born and bred. A man of the city; surely the promenades of Mayfair and the dome of St Paul's are more to your liking."
"I have learned to appreciate the rural life." Standing at the great curved windows of the lighthouse's cockpit, I swirled the dregs of claret in my glass. "It is a somewhat quieter, more contemplative existence I lead now, than any of which you might have heard rumour."
The same wine reddened Captain Crowcroft's visage, so much admired by the distaff readership of the broadsheets hawked throughout the land. "I expect so," he replied before turning his gaze from me, out toward the same vista that had momentarily brightened my thoughts. Churning waves threw themselves upon the sharp-edged rocks of the coast of Cornwall; gale winds caught the upflung spray, streaming mist along the south-western extremities of the British mainland. The fancy caught me – I confess myself unused to this extent of imbibing – that the daylit ghosts of drowned sailors had been resurrected from their watery graves, as though the lighthouse were some luminous Saviour newly arrived amongst them. Now they swirled about and dispersed to air, haunting no longer the tides and stones that had ripped open the bellies of storm-driven ships, filling their crews' mouths with brine. No more, no bluidy more, those coarse-voiced angels seemed to chorus above the ocean's heaving ostinato. No more sodden, tattooed corpses washing up on the strand; no more bales undone, crates "pried open, salvage fingered and value estimated by Cornwall's eager wreckers. A twist of a hissing stopcock and Newton's Fiat Lux would be cast to the damp horizon, the lighthouse's beam spangled over those crests that even now gleamed as sun-coppered as a victorious army's upraised shields.
"This is magnificent." The words stumbled over my wine-leadened tongue. I looked away from the sight that had inspired such lofty meditations, as unfamiliar to me as the expensive vintages that had filled my glass, one after another. "How I envy you–"
"Indeed, Mr Dower? How so?"
I blinked in confusion. Instead of Captain Crowcroft's face, with its rectilinear jaw and brow as unfurrowed as that of Grecian statuary, I found myself gazing – once I had tilted my sightline down a bit – into a mustachioed assemblage of red-mapped nasal veins and eyes rheumy with indulgence.
