My name is Anselm. I’m seventy-two and I keep the light at Cape Harrow, a rocky point where the sea is grey even in summer. My son Daniel was a fisherman. Twelve years ago his boat went out into a storm and did not come back.

The coast guard called off the search after nine days. I did not call off mine. Every evening at dusk I climb the two hundred and eleven steps, light the lamp and stand at the gallery rail until dawn, watching the horizon.

The village stopped mentioning it a long time ago. They think I am a man who cannot let go.

Tonight the sea was flat and the fog low. At eleven, far out, below the clouds, a tiny yellow light blinked three times. Then three times again. It was the signal Daniel and I made when he was a boy: three for ‘I’m here’, three for ‘wait for me’.

I answered with the big lamp, three long sweeps, my hands shaking on the lever.

The light came closer all night. By dawn I could see it was a small grey trawler, low in the water, with one man on the deck.

I ran down all two hundred and eleven steps. I don’t remember them.

He stood on the quay with a sea bag over his shoulder. He was thinner and browner. He had a scar across his forehead I did not know.

‘Dad,’ he said.

Daniel had been picked up that night, half-drowned, by a cargo ship bound for the far side of the world. He had lost his memory for nine years. When it came back in pieces, it came back through a smell of tar, a lamp and a sea-grey coast.

It took him three more years to find his way home, working his passage on ships. He had never lost the signal. He had been sending it every night since he remembered.

I did not say anything. I could not. I took his bag and we walked up the road to the village together, and the whole quay watched from behind their curtains.

The lamp at Cape Harrow still burns every night. Daniel climbs the stairs with me now. He says it is the only light in the world he has ever been sure of.

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