THE STAY at Start Point Lighthouse happened almost by accident. With my husband H in long, painful recovery from an operation to remove a tumour from his lung, our summer had felt constrained to the point of claustrophobia. Our son Bert, who at 13  rarely wants to do anything that isn’t on a screen, had begun to petition for a road trip across Europe. This was, of course, unthinkable, but I knew things had to be bad if he was moved to yearn for travel. 

We started to consider a trip to H’s Swiss hometown of Basel, but plans soon stalled. Like everything this year, it fell to me to arrange the whole affair, and I wasn’t feeling it. Given that H could barely manage to cope with an hour outside the house, it was hard to see how he could survive an airport in August. I spent a lot of time trying to work out how we could drive there in stages, but that all very quickly began to look a lot like Bert’s trans-European road trip; impossible. Even if we managed to fathom the route, we would be heavily dependent on H not needing emergency medical care, and that was not a bet I was willing to hedge. I didn’t want to be in charge of another thing, anyway. I told them both that they couldn’t go on holiday.

But that was not what I wanted at all. One of my key contributions to our family is wanderlust. It seems to me that the air gets stale sometimes, and I need to open all the doors to let the wind blow through. I have rarely felt that more strongly than this year, when I have mainly been occupied by driving to and from various medical establishments and wiping down all the surfaces in the house, on repeat. There was a point in the spring when I was committed to being saintly about the whole thing, but that has long passed. I am sick of giving care; caresick. I just want life to feel good again. 

So I didn’t want to drive across Europe for any reason, but cancelling our tentative plans made me feel desolate. H said, ‘We could go to Devon for a few days,’ because he knows I always love it there, and I told him no. Until the rest of the family could take part in the organisation, I was not willing to add any more things to my list. But then, during a writing session one afternoon, my attention drifted over to Airbnb, and to the map of the south coast of Devon, for houses accommodating three people and a dog. There would be nothing at such short notice, I was sure. And yet there, at the very southern tip of the county, jutting into the sea, was an opening - clearly a cancellation, because it was heavily discounted - for just four nights.

I booked without consulting the others, and told them I would be fully willing to go on my own if it didn’t appeal. 

They came.

I drive down the narrow road that leads to the lighthouse at a crawling pace, wondering what on earth will happen if someone comes the other way. Until today, I’d thought that this was a footpath, but apparently it’s wide enough for an entire car. As it happens, H’s people carrier broke down yesterday, and so we’ve had to make the six-hour journey in my little Ford Fiesta. Bert, who is now over six feet tall, is crammed into the backseat with the dog, his knees around his ears. H is next to me, crushed against the dashboard so that Bert can fit behind him. The boot can contain only one suitcase, which is so densely packed that it might be exerting a gravitational pull. I, on the other hand, am allowed plenty of legroom so that I can operate the pedals, but I’ve been driving for most of the day and I’m tired.

To my right is a steep, rocky slope covered in bracken; to my left, a low brick wall and then the land drops away into the sea. It is about four in the afternoon on a blue-sky day, and a low mist is gathering over the sea. We can see it clinging white against the shoreline of Start Bay, which is visible in its entirety from this height, a map of itself.

H winces as he gets out of the car to open the metal gate that says, ‘LIGHTHOUSE’. He swings it open and I drive through, leaving behind the walkers who have gathered there to look at the sea, having reached the furthest extent of their path.

We find ourselves amid a cluster of solid buildings, thickly whitewashed. The lighthouse rises up above them, an icon of solitude. I have been here once before, but I can’t remember when. We took a tour on one of the rare open days, climbing the spiraling stairs to the bright room at the top of the tower, surrounded by diamond-paned glass. There we were shown the Fresnel lens, layered like a woodlouse, that revolves to produce a beam of light. I have a clear memory of being shown the enormous bulb that sat behind it, being told how costly it was to change it. At least, I think that was at Start Point. It could be at any one of the lighthouses I’ve visited over the years. They have a particular romance for me, sitting on the wind-blown edges of the land, the places that make my heart leap.

This lighthouse was first illuminated in 1836, at the time by burning whale oil. Its attendants lived in the tower: Principal Keeper and his family, and the Assistant Keeper, who was obliged to be a single man. Within 10 years, a cottage had been built at the foot of the lighthouse to house them, although its intended first inhabitant, William Shoemack, preferred to stay in the tower.

In the time before motor vehicles, Start Point was a remote, foreboding place, and the people who lived there had to be self-sufficient. The post was generally seen as a punishment. Lighthousemen preferred limited tours of duty on offshore sites, which let their families live more comfortable - and largely separate - lives inland. Here, there was barely a road, and bulk supplies had to be delivered to the bottom of the cliffs by boat. By 1882, a second cottage had been built, and 17 people were living at Start Point, including a third keeper and his family. There were pigsties, chicken coops and a kitchen garden to feed them. To attend their compulsory schooling, the children had to walk four miles in each direction.

Even now, Start Point feels like a world away from anywhere else, a jag of schist reaching into the Atlantic. It is commonly seen as marking the start of a more rugged coastline and the true open seas, but its name derives from the Anglo-Saxon steort, meaning ‘tail’. For me, it represents a break with the mundane world, a chance to leave behind a life in which I am mother, worker, nurse and mule, the person where the buck always stops. Start, I hope, will bracket my usual existence, close a set of parentheses that opened before Christmas.

Nevertheless, I have to unload most of the car myself, carry the bags into the hall, lug the suitcase up the stairs into our bedrooms. I am intercepted in this task by a woman, S, who introduces herself as our neighbour for the week, and shows me a better space to park my car.

‘Have you been before?’ she says.

‘Only as a walker. I’ve never stayed.’

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Well, we come every year, sometimes twice. We have it booked for this Christmas, and we’ve reserved our slot for next summer already. You should do that too. They don’t list it on the website yet, but if you call them, they’re happy to help.’

‘Okay,’ I say. I have yet to close the front door. But when I do, I realise I can see the sea from every window. It glimpses from behind the white roundel of the tower when I stand in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil; it peeps from behind a low wall from the dining room. From the double bedroom, there is nothing but blue, a piercing, absolute landscape. It is a vigilant house, all eyes on the sea. I cannot fathom our luck.

In the kitchen is a bag full of earplugs, in case the foghorn sounds overnight. I walk down the side of the lighthouse, past a bulk of rock speckled with mica, to find our terrace. It is a utilitarian affair, bare gravel and paving slabs with a concrete table. Everything else, presumably, would blow away with the wind, which is soft but persistent. Rock samphire sprouts though any cracks it can find, alive with bees. I set up my portable barbecue and wonder how I’ll ever light it. But the sun is low across the water, casting a golden slant across the tower and the wall behind it. I can see S on her own deck, hoisting an enormous pair of binoculars to her eyes. I wave, and she passes them to her husband, picking up a camera instead.

‘Are you looking for seals?’ I yell.

‘No,’ she calls over. ‘There’s a dog being rescued at sea. I don’t want to miss it!’

It takes me a long time to get to sleep that night. I cannot stop listening to the sea through my wide-open window, a close, chaotic rhythm. We had hoped the skies would be clear enough to see the peak of the Perseid meteors, but the blue sky clouded over at eight, and soon the sea was moody and quilted beneath it. I was exhausted anyway, and H was in pain from the long drive. The work is still all mine.

I wake in the morning to go downstairs and read while everyone else is still asleep. I try to settle myself on the sofa, but soon I notice it, a low note that sounds through the house when it is quiet like this, like the whir of an old refrigerator. It is, I think, the lighthouse itself, transmitting its perpetual work through the walls. I begin to hum along to it, opening the tuning app on my phone to identify an F-natural, low and clear. The whole place reverberates with it, but only g ently, a contented harmony.

It is irresistible then to go outside to trace around the edges of the lighthouse, to try all its green-painted doors, just in case. All of them are locked. I didn’t think last night to go outside and see the light itself; I had assumed that it would be visible from the windows, but apparently it was not. Still, there will be tonight, perhaps with clearer skies.

The sea is slate blue this morning, the sky still grey. I look back on our cottage which is solid rather than pretty, its walls thick and capable. The other cottage has more sea than us, but I don’t suppose it has that lighthouse hum.

My family slumbers on. I begin to worry that the that whole day will run away from us like this, our short time in this place wasted. I get dressed and walk the dog along the path while it is still early and deserted. Usually a reluctant walker, today she pulls me on and on, up the hill toward the car park and then onto the rocky ridge where we meet the South West Coast Path. Cirl buntings flit between the fronds of bracken, already turning brown. The air is clean with salt, voluminous.

Later, as we are finally getting into the car after what seemed like an interminable wait on my part, we meet S in a neat sundress dotted with red sailing boats. She asks if we saw the tuna this morning, and of course we did not. ‘They’ll be back about four,’ she says. They come anticlockwise around the headland, apparently, west to east, sometimes followed by dolphins.’ Common and risso, she says. Every now and then, a whale.

She watches the sea constantly, and I watch her, wanting to be inducted into her arcane knowledge, her intent gaze. We go back into the house to fetch a forgotten bag, and when we return she’s climbed up the bank behind our house and has focused her binoculars toward Prawle Point.

‘You spotted anything?’ I ask.

‘I thought so,’ she says, ‘but no.’ She glares at the sea.

We stop at an outdoor store along our route to buy our own pair of binoculars, considerably smaller. ‘If nothing else,’ I say to H, ‘you can watch the sea.’ It is not really any of my business, but I’m tired of watching him watching the TV. It will be a break for all of us if he could just look somewhere else for a while.

I carry a folding chair onto North Sands beach and he sits by the rocks with the dog as Bert and I swim in the sea. For the first time in a long while, everyone is out together, everyone comfortable, everyone enjoying their day. It feels like a lull in a long war.

When we get back to the lighthouse, there is a small crowd gathered at the gate, looking out to sea. I follow their gaze and see below us two tuna leaping out of the waves as if in formation. They are enormous, with sharp dorsal fins and forked tails, serrated creatures. The sea is a frenzy of their diving, fish popping like fireworks, stirring the blue into white. Then, quite suddenly, they are no longer there, and the spectacle is over. The crowd gazes into a place where nothing is happening, save the rhythmic crashing of water on rock.

The foghorn starts up in the night. I know what it is immediately, even though it’s a strange-sounding foghorn, more of a high peeep than the bass rumble I was expecting. But here is Start Point Lighthouse sounding off on my second night here, in the dog days of summer. I wonder if it will only blast once, but it repeats again and again, every 30 seconds for a quarter of an hour or more.

After a while, I get up and look out of the window. There is a white bank of fog at the end of our yard, masking the sea. In the distance is a flash, and at first I think it’s lightning until I realise that it’s the lighthouse beam passing over the clouds: three flashes and then darkness; three flashes; darkness. The signature pattern of this particular lighthouse, a luminous signpost for those lost at sea.

I ought to feel annoyed at the interruption of my sleep, but I’m delighted by this rude awakening, this demand on my most sacred routines. It feels monastic to me, the bell ringing for matins, stumbling out of bed to meet the incipient day. The intimacy of night offices, of the tired self. No change happens without a change in sleep.

H and Bert do not even stir. They would be terrible lighthouse keepers, but I am vigilant enough for all of us, always.

In the morning, the fog has receded, leaving the terrace drenched. I put on Bert’s hoodie and carry a dry chair out of the front door to sit by the wall drinking tea, looking out toward Beesands.

Soon, S emerges to make her observations, first to the west and then the east. I tell her about the tuna yesterday and she says they were bluefin. She saw a pod of dolphins early afternoon. ‘I nearly knocked for you,’ she says, ‘but then I remembered you were out.’

I would love to see dolphins, but I wonder if I have the patience for them today. My family is indolent and I am restless; I long to watch like S does, my whole body alert to the sea. Instead, I walk the dog to the top of the ridge and survey the blue expanse from every side, following the line of a white yacht as it cuts across the bay.

S is sitting on the wall when I get back, getting crumbling white paint on her pink dress.

‘Seen anything?’ I ask.

‘No,’ she says, her voice thick with concentration. ‘I’m scanning.’

She goes back and forth, left to right, over and back again.

‘My husband says I’m like a typewriter,’ she says, never taking her eyes from the sea. ‘I take it line by line. You have to be methodical.’

H is the methodical one in our family, slow, reasoned. He is approaching his convalescence just as he approaches everything else, with a stoicism that I find almost enraging. I, who have nothing but bluster to offer the world, cannot bear his patience, his surrender. I am tired and frustrated and kept from my work, but most of all I am bored. That is my signature, the pattern of light that flashes from me, even when I can’t see it. Boredom, restlessness, ennui, my noisy gaggle of familiars.

‘I don’t think I could do that,’ I say.

She shrugs. ‘I could do it all day. Unfortunately we have to sometimes go out, so that everyone else can enjoy themselves.’

We go into Dartmouth that day, browse the shops, take the boat across the estuary to ride the vintage railway. It feels like a waste of time. Back home is a lighthouse, waiting for our watching. Nothing else feels quite so compelling, once you know where to look.

Early that evening, while H is resting, I persuade Bert to walk along to Mattiscombe Sands, a beach a little further along the coast that can be reached only on foot. He is reluctant, but he has also promised to swim with me every day; I meet him halfway by driving up the lane to the car park.

From there, we cut across fields and down into a valley, where sheep pause to stare at us. Blackberry brambles are high around us, laden with ripe fruit. We wind down a steep path, the soil loose underfoot, and finally we’re on the beach, the sun fast sinking behind two cones of greenish rock like witches’ hats. No other soul is there. I change into my bathing suit and wade in, the water deep and cold, absolute. Bert follows me, a little more wary of the chill, but soon we are floating together in the blue-grey sea.

I am just trying to point out a peregrine hunting at the top of the cliff when Bert gasps, and hisses, ‘A seal!’

I turn and glimpse behind me a curious face, perhaps 10 yards away. The sea shifts, and it disappears.

‘Oh my god,’ I say. ‘It was looking right at us!’

We watch the spot where the seal had been, but nothing is there now, and I wonder where she has gone. Is she swimming away beneath the waves to warn her colony, or is she coming towards us, getting invisibly closer? The thought of it fills me with a mix of fear and excitement; the sea suddenly feels more vast and unknowable than it did before.

But there she is again, in almost the same spot, just a head, and then gone.

‘Seal!’ I call, ‘Seal! Please don’t go!’

‘Come and see us, seal!’ says Bert. ‘We’re friendly!’

I scrutinise the water, but it is opaque, the light fast fading. Up she comes again, perhaps a little closer, but it is hard to tell. There are no reference points in the open water, no way of judging distance or direction. The seal comes and goes, comes and goes, until she does not come again. It is getting colder, and so I climb out, peel off my costume, wrap myself in a towel. I stand on the shore and feel the water rising and falling in my mammal body, which feels like it belongs here.

‘I’m coming back in!’ I call, and this time I go in naked, feeling more seal than human, my skin alive with the salt water.

Bert says I’m embarrassing as I dry off, but it is hard to see how you can be embarrassed in front of nobody at all, unless you count the seal.

There is a lappet moth on the kitchen surface, which at first I mistake for a dry birch leaf, a sign of autumn. I scoop it into my hands because I know H will be afraid of it, and set it off to fly outside. A few minutes later, Bert calls me in to see a tussock moth, furry as a kitten with broad, feathered antennae.

‘Why are there so many moths?’ he says.

‘It’s a lighthouse,’ says H. ‘What do you expect?’

After dinner, I set up his chair outside, and we sit together in the dark, watching for meteors. Something flames in the air at the other side of the wall, and I say, ‘A firefly!’ But then I remember where we are, and realise it is a moth caught in the lighthouse beam. A gull appears to combust mid-air, white and sudden. Behind us, light sweeps across the cliffs, revealing sheep chewing, transfixed.

I had thought the beam would be more solid, more certain, an arm reaching out to sea. Looking up at the tower, I now see why: Start Point has switched to LED, cheaper and more reliable than incandescent light. The beam is weaker but it is enough, needing no human contact to run every night, regular as clockwork. The keeper’s cottage is a relic of a time before life became safe and easy, before all distances were compressed, before remoteness became a relative concept. It is wrong, probably, to feel mourn that, but still I do: the romance of the lighthouse, of true solitude.

‘Meteor!’ says H, and I look up to see two brief scratches across the sky, a faraway beam.

I am out early to make my observations. The sun makes a yellow stripe across the water, a glinting pathway. I sit on the terrace, my feet propped against the wall, and watch two seals bobbing around the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. There is the usual frenzy of bluefin tuna, still majestic if no longer a surprise. I watch and I watch and I watch, my breathing slow, my eyes soft. It is so vast out there, so finely textured; it is a wonder we see anything at all. But we cannot stop looking, always poised for the break in the pattern, the anomaly.

Something breaches in the line made by the sun, two things, one after the other. Dolphins? I raise my binoculars carefully, mistrustful of my mind’s tendency to mistake waves for faces or fins. But there they are again, rolling into the sea, one after the other. Cetaceans, certainly, but it is so hard to tell. One, two: long, slow bodies, disappearing for good. Minke whales, I think, but I will never be able to say for sure. It is uncertain, this watching. That’s why I can’t tear my eyes away.

H gets up, listens happily to my whale talk, and then goes back to bed again. I walk to the top of the ridgeway with Bert, led by the dog. She finds a cleft of rock at the very top and settles into it, her grey fur matching its striations. We join her, and all three of us settle there for a while, feeling the sun’s heat stored beneath us, enclosed by the sea.

S is in a wetsuit when we return, having swum at the bottom of the cliff. She says we can climb over her wall if we like, and follow the path down to the hidden cove where once the lighthouse was restocked. Sometimes seals rest there, but only at low tide. I accept this invitation with the reverence it deserves: we are crossing into her inner sanctum, the station of her watch. In different times, it might have been an invitation for a drink on her terrace, the gateway to a drunken evening, a furnace of a friendship that lasts only for the days we share the same patch of earth. We are both too old for that now though, too weary, our teenage children in tow. We do not believe it could happen anymore. Instead I wave as I pass under her balcony, and let that be enough.

I tread carefully across the narrow track between eroded cliffs, scattering the grazing sheep. The sea here is bluer than I thought possible. I could be in Turkey or Greece; it is so hot, the air so thick with summer. Soon, the lighthouse is towering above us, a distant icon. But there is still a steep drop beneath us. Bert tenses, startled by the scale of it all.

‘Come on,’ I say, ‘just keep well away from the edge. You’re safe.’

We round a corner, and a set of steps opens up in front of us, cut into the cliff. They are broad and deep, shored up with flaking wood; exposed to the sea at both sides. An impish wind whips between us.

‘I’m not going down there,’ he says.

This is the way to the cove, I reason. This is the good bit. There’s no budging him, though. A child of his time, he is reassured by bag checks at the doors of museums, and guardrails around everything. He likes the world to feel sure underfoot. I crave the moments when the world reveals a rarely trodden path, an invitation, an open question.

‘You stay here, then. I’m going down.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘You’re not safe.’

‘I’m perfectly safe,’ I say. ‘It’s just steps. I’ve climbed down way worse.’

‘I’ve seen you trip over your feet walking down the street,’ he says, and this is true, but it’s different here, when my full attention is taken by the walk itself, the desire.

‘I’ll be concentrating,’ I say. ‘It’s not the same.’

He shakes his head. We are at an impasse, and for 13 years now I have backed down at these moments, wanting him always to feel certain of his world. Today, though, I know that something has passed, a boundary line crossed. I have spent the best part of a year nursing his father, being the force that keeps everyone alive. It has left me with an uneasy binary, a weariness with the domestic that borders on physical nausea, coupled with a conviction of my own robustness, a sense that I can live through anything now, can infinitely keep going. I will climb down those steps because I can, and I must because one day I will no longer be able to do such things. God knows, I have done my staying. It is never enough.

‘I’m going down those steps,’ I say. ‘I can keep myself safe, and I need to do it.’ There is nothing in me that wants to put him through any more stress, but neither is there a part of me that wants to hold back anymore. The scars of this year will not be healed by my perpetual confinement to the kitchen and the living room. I want to show him that life lies at the foot of the cliffs, where the waves crash against uneven rocks.

He sits down on the thin grass, and I begin to descend, one step, two, trying to look steady. It is far from easy, but it is also a joy, a flight towards a wild sea, a dreamscape. I could certainly fall, but surely we both know, now, that safety is not a handrail. When I reach the bottom of the steps, another stone staircase curls in front of me, leading down into the cove. I turn and wave to the small face at the top of the cliff, already so far away.

‘I’m going home,’ he shouts.

‘Okay!’

The stone steps are lighter work, though crumbling underfoot. But I am steady. I follow them down to the rocks where the sea is tantalisingly close. I cannot swim today. The tide is too high and I’m unsure of my way in. But another time, once I have proved myself equal to this climb, I might.

When I get back to the cottage, everyone is calmly watching phone screens, and my adventure is invisible again, a secret pocket in time.

I am standing on the concrete table on our terrace, scanning the sea. It is low tide, and a colony of grey seals have taken up residence on the rocks beneath our terrace. They holler and bask, engage in slow squabbles for territory, let gravity inhabit their flesh. I wonder why they ever choose to leave the sea, where they are agile and free, for this weight, this constraint.

I did half of the packing last night, and now I have the rest to do this morning. We are to leave by 10am. I begin to empty the fridge, to empty the dishwasher into the car, to cram everything into a single suitcase and to fit all our bags around us in the car. As I do it, the sea glints at me from every angle. As I do it, I think, Every bit of work in this house is mine. When H asks if he can help, I snap at him, because we both know he cannot. ‘It would be better to say thank you,’ I say. ‘It would be better to notice that I’m doing all this, while everyone just sits there expecting it to happen.’

And then I say what I’m really thinking, which always comes clear after spite: ‘I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go back to that life. I’m sick of it.’ For just a few days, real life has been suspended, and I had almost begun to believe it might be a change.

When I hear voices by the front door I am crying too hard to be seen, so I shut myself in the kitchen and dry my eyes on a damp tea-towel. I pack the last of our possessions into a carrier bag, and squash it into the top of the suitcase. There is so much to tamp down when you go home again. I draw in sharp breaths to steady myself.

H says that the family next door are leaving too. Soon, someone other than S will be in that house on the edge of a cliff, negligent to the extraordinary parade of sea life that passes by. I splash my face with cold water and go outside to say goodbye.

I find her husband, loading up their own car. ‘You’re going too,’ I say.

He nods. ‘S called the lettings agency this morning to see if we could stay for a few more days. But it’s all booked up, I’m afraid. I don’t think she can come out at the moment.’

We cram into our tiny car, and wind back up the narrow lane towards the mainland, and home. Beneath us, tuna are jumping in the waves, and cirl buntings are flitting between the fronds of fern. Behind us, receding into the background, is the lighthouse, where I imagine my friend crying in her kitchen because she can’t bear to leave the sea.

When we reach the main road, we stop for breakfast, and I call the lettings agency to book for next summer.