The Light Between Oceans / Свет в океане (by M L Stedman, 2012) - аудиокнига на английском

27th April 1926 ON THE DAY of the miracle, Isabel was kneeling at the cliff’s edge, tending the small, newly made driftwood cross. A single fat cloud snailed across the late-April sky, which stretched above the island in a mirror of the ocean below. Isabel sprinkled more water and patted down the soil around the rosemary bush she had just planted. ‘… and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,’ she whispered. For just a moment, her mind tricked her into hearing an infant’s cry. She dismissed the illusion, her eye drawn instead by a pod of whales weaving their way up the coast to calve in the warmer waters, emerging now and again with a fluke of their tails like needles through tapestry. She heard the cry again, louder this time on the early-morning breeze. Impossible. From this side of the island, there was only vastness, all the way to Africa. Here, the Indian Ocean washed into the Great Southern Ocean and together they stretched like an edgeless carpet below the cliffs. On days like this it seemed so solid she had the impression she could walk to Madagascar in a journey of blue upon blue. The other side of the island looked back, fretful, towards the Australian mainland nearly a hundred miles away, not quite belonging to the land, yet not quite free of it, the highest of a string of under-sea mountains that rose from the ocean floor like teeth along a jagged jaw bone, waiting to devour any innocent ships in their final dash for harbour. As if to make amends, the island – Janus Rock – offered a lighthouse, its beam providing a mantle of safety for thirty miles. Each night the air sang with the steady hum of the lantern as it turned, turned, turned; even-handed, not blaming the rocks, not fearing the waves: there for salvation if wanted. The crying persisted. The door of the lighthouse clanged in the distance, and Tom’s tall frame appeared on the gallery as he scanned the island with binoculars. ‘Izzy,’ he yelled, ‘a boat!’ and pointed to the cove. ‘On the beach – a boat!’ He vanished, and re-emerged a moment later at ground level. ‘Looks like there’s someone in it,’ he shouted. Isabel hurried as best she could to meet him, and he held her arm as they navigated the steep, well-worn path to the little beach. ‘It’s a boat all right,’ Tom declared. ‘And – oh cripes! There’s a bloke, but—’ The figure was motionless, flopped over the seat, yet the cries still rang out. Tom rushed to the dinghy, and tried to rouse the man before searching the space in the bow from where the sound came. He hoisted out a woollen bundle: a woman’s soft lavender cardigan wrapped around a tiny, screaming infant. ‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed. ‘Bloody hell, Izzy. It’s—’ ‘A baby! Oh my Lord above! Oh Tom! Tom! Here – give it to me!’ He handed her the bundle, and tried again to revive the stranger: no pulse. He turned to Isabel, who was examining the diminutive creature. ‘He’s gone, Izz. The baby?’ ‘It’s all right, by the looks. No cuts or bruises. It’s so tiny!’ she said, then, turning to the child as she cuddled it, ‘There, there. You’re safe now, little one. You’re safe, you beautiful thing.’ Tom stood still, considering the man’s body, clenching his eyes tight shut and opening them again to check he wasn’t dreaming. The baby had stopped crying and was taking gulps of breath in Isabel’s arms. ‘Can’t see any marks on the fellow, and he doesn’t look diseased. He can’t have been adrift long … You wouldn’t credit it.’ He paused. ‘You take the baby up to the house, Izz, and I’ll get something to cover the body.’ ‘But, Tom—’ ‘It’ll be a hell of a job to get him up the path. Better leave him here until help comes. Don’t want the birds or the flies getting at him though – there’s some canvas up in the shed should do.’ He spoke calmly enough, but his hands and face felt cold, as old shadows blotted out the bright autumn sunshine. Janus Rock was a square mile of green, with enough grass to feed the few sheep and goats and the handful of chickens, and enough top-soil to sustain the rudimentary vegetable patch. The only trees were two towering Norfolk pines planted by the crews from Point Partageuse who had built the light station over thirty years before, in 1889. A cluster of old graves remembered a shipwreck long before that, when the Pride of Birmingham foundered on the greedy rocks in daylight. In such a ship the light itself had later been brought from England, proudly bearing the name Chance Brothers, a guarantee of the most advanced technology of its day – capable of assembly anywhere, no matter how inhospitable or hard to reach. The currents hauled in all manner of things: flotsam and jetsam swirled as if between twin propellers; bits of wreckage, tea chests, whalebones. Things turned up in their own time, in their own way. The light station sat solidly in the middle of the island, the keeper’s cottage and outbuildings hunkered down beside the lighthouse, cowed from decades of lashing winds. In the kitchen, Isabel sat at the old table, the baby in her arms wrapped in a downy yellow blanket. Tom scraped his boots slowly on the mat as he entered, and rested a callused hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ve covered the poor soul. How’s the little one?’ ‘It’s a girl,’ said Isabel with a smile. ‘I gave her a bath. She seems healthy enough.’ The baby turned to him with wide eyes, drinking in his glance. ‘What on earth must she make of it all?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Given her some milk too, haven’t I, sweet thing?’ Isabel cooed, turning it into a question for the baby. ‘Oh, she’s so, so perfect, Tom,’ she said, and kissed the child. ‘Lord knows what she’s been through.’ Tom took a bottle of brandy from the pine cupboard and poured himself a small measure, downing it in one. He sat beside his wife, watching the light play on her face as she contemplated the treasure in her arms. The baby followed every movement of her eyes, as though Isabel might escape if she did not hold her with her gaze. ‘Oh, little one,’ Isabel crooned, ‘poor, poor little one,’ as the baby nuzzled her face in towards her breast. Tom could hear tears in her voice, and the memory of an invisible presence hung in the air between them. ‘She likes you,’ he said. Then, almost to himself, ‘Makes me think of how things might have been.’ He added quickly, ‘I mean … I didn’t mean … You look like you were born to it, that’s all.’ He stroked her cheek. Isabel glanced up at him. ‘I know, love. I know what you mean. I feel the same.’ He put his arms around his wife and the child. Isabel could smell the brandy on his breath. She murmured, ‘Oh Tom, thank God we found her in time.’ Tom kissed her, then put his lips to the baby’s forehead. The three of them stayed like that for a long moment, until the child began to wriggle, thrusting a fist out from under the blanket. ‘Well,’ Tom gave a stretch as he stood up, ‘I’ll go and send a signal, report the dinghy; get them to send a boat for the body. And for Miss Muffet here.’ ‘Not yet!’ Isabel said, as she touched the baby’s fingers. ‘I mean, there’s no rush to do it right this minute. The poor man’s not going to get any worse now. And this little chicken’s had quite enough of boats for the moment, I’d say. Leave it a while. Give her a chance to catch her breath.’ ‘It’ll take hours for them to get here. She’ll be all right. You’ve already quietened her down, poor little thing.’ ‘Let’s just wait. After all, it can’t make much difference.’ ‘It’s all got to go in the log, pet. You know I’ve got to report everything straight away,’ Tom said, for his duties included noting every significant event at or near the light station, from passing ships and weather, to problems with the apparatus. ‘Do it in the morning, eh?’ ‘But what if the boat’s from a ship?’ ‘It’s a dinghy, not a lifeboat,’ she said. ‘Then the baby’s probably got a mother waiting for it somewhere on shore, tearing her hair out. How would you feel if it was yours?’ ‘You saw the cardigan. The mother must have fallen out of the boat and drowned.’ ‘Sweetheart, we don’t have any idea about the mother. Or about who the man was.’ ‘It’s the most likely explanation, isn’t it? Infants don’t just wander off from their parents.’ ‘Izzy, anything’s possible. We just don’t know.’ ‘When did you ever hear of a tiny baby setting off in a boat without its mother?’ She held the child a fraction closer. ‘This is serious. The man’s dead, Izz.’ ‘And the baby’s alive. Have a heart, Tom.’ Something in her tone struck him, and instead of simply contradicting her, he paused and considered her plea. Perhaps she needed a bit of time with a baby. Perhaps he owed her that. There was a silence, and Isabel turned to him in wordless appeal. ‘I suppose, at a pinch …’ he conceded, the words coming with great difficulty, ‘I could – leave the signal until the morning. First thing, though. As soon as the light’s out.’ Isabel kissed him, and squeezed his arm. ‘Better get back to the lantern room. I was in the middle of replacing the vapour tube,’ he said. As he walked down the path, he heard the sweet notes of Isabel’s voice as she sang, ‘Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly, blow the wind south o’er the bonnie blue sea.’ Though the music was tuneful, it failed to comfort him as he climbed the stairs of the light, fending off a strange uneasiness at the concession he had made. CHAPTER 1 16th December 1918 ‘YES, I REALISE that,’ Tom Sherbourne said. He was sitting in a spartan room, barely cooler than the sultry day outside. The Sydney summer rain pelted the window, and sent the people on the pavement scurrying for shelter. ‘I mean very tough.’ The man across the desk leaned forward for emphasis. ‘It’s no picnic. Not that Byron Bay’s the worst posting on the Lights, but I want to make sure you know what you’re in for.’ He tamped down the tobacco with his thumb and lit his pipe. Tom’s letter of application had told the same story as many a fellow’s around that time: born 28 September 1893; war spent in the Army; experience with the International Code and Morse; physically fit and well; honourable discharge. The rules stipulated that preference should be given to ex-servicemen. ‘It can’t—’ Tom stopped, and began again. ‘All due respect, Mr Coughlan, it’s not likely to be tougher than the Western Front.’ The man looked again at the details on the discharge papers, then at Tom, searching for something in his eyes, in his face. ‘No, son. You’re probably right on that score.’ He rattled off some rules: ‘You pay your own passage to every posting. You’re relief, so you don’t get holidays. Permanent staff get a month’s leave at the end of each three-year contract.’ He took up his fat pen and signed the form in front of him. As he rolled the stamp back and forth across the inkpad he said, ‘Welcome’ – he thumped it down in three places on the paper – ‘to the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service.’ On the form, ‘16th December 1918’ glistened in wet ink. The six months’ relief posting at Byron Bay, up on the New South Wales coast, with two other keepers and their families, taught Tom the basics of life on the Lights. He followed that with a stint down on Maatsuyker, the wild island south of Tasmania where it rained most days of the year and the chickens blew into the sea during storms. On the Lights, Tom Sherbourne has plenty of time to think about the war. About the faces, the voices of the blokes who had stood beside him, who saved his life one way or another; the ones whose dying words he heard, and those whose muttered jumbles he couldn’t make out, but who he nodded to anyway. Tom isn’t one of the men whose legs trailed by a hank of sinews, or whose guts cascaded from their casing like slithering eels. Nor were his lungs turned to glue or his brains to stodge by the gas. But he’s scarred all the same, having to live in the same skin as the man who did the things that needed to be done back then. He carries that other shadow, which is cast inward. He tries not to dwell on it: he’s seen plenty of men turned worse than useless that way. So he gets on with life around the edges of this thing he’s got no name for. When he dreams about those years, the Tom who is experiencing them, the Tom who is there with blood on his hands, is a boy of eight or so. It’s this small boy who’s up against blokes with guns and bayonets, and he’s worried because his school socks have slipped down and he can’t hitch them up because he’ll have to drop his gun to do it, and he’s barely big enough even to hold that. And he can’t find his mother anywhere. Then he wakes and he’s in a place where there’s just wind and waves and light, and the intricate machinery that keeps the flame burning and the lantern turning. Always turning, always looking over its shoulder. If he can only get far enough away – from people, from memory – time will do its job. Thousands of miles away on the west coast, Janus Rock was the furthest place on the continent from Tom’s childhood home in Sydney. But Janus Light was the last sign of Australia he had seen as his troopship steamed for Egypt in 1915. The smell of the eucalypts had wafted for miles offshore from Albany, and when the scent faded away he was suddenly sick at the loss of something he didn’t know he could miss. Then, hours later, true and steady, the light, with its five-second flash, came into view – his homeland’s furthest reach – and its memory stayed with him through the years of hell that followed, like a farewell kiss. When, in June 1920, he got news of an urgent vacancy going on Janus, it was as though the light there were calling to him. Teetering on the edge of the continental shelf, Janus was not a popular posting. Though its Grade One hardship rating meant a slightly higher salary, the old hands said it wasn’t worth the money, which was meagre all the same. The keeper Tom replaced on Janus was Trimble Docherty, who had caused a stir by reporting that his wife was signalling to passing ships by stringing up messages in the coloured flags of the International Code. This was unsatisfactory to the authorities for two reasons: first, because the Deputy Director of Lighthouses had some years previously forbidden signalling by flags on Janus, as vessels put themselves at risk by sailing close enough to decipher them; and secondly, because the wife in question was recently deceased. Considerable correspondence on the subject was generated in triplicate between Fremantle and Melbourne, with the Deputy Director in Fremantle putting the case for Docherty and his years of excellent service, to a Head Office concerned strictly with efficiency and cost and obeying the rules. A compromise was reached by which a temporary keeper would be engaged while Docherty was given six months’ medical leave. ‘We wouldn’t normally send a single man to Janus – it’s pretty remote and a wife and family can be a great practical help, not just a comfort,’ the District Officer had said to Tom. ‘But seeing it’s only temporary … You’ll leave for Partageuse in two days,’ he said, and signed him up for six months. There wasn’t much to organise. No one to farewell. Two days later, Tom walked up the gangplank of the boat, armed with a kitbag and not much else. The SS Prometheus worked its way along the southern shores of Australia, stopping at various ports on its run between Sydney and Perth. The few cabins reserved for first-class passengers were on the upper deck, towards the bow. In third class, Tom shared a cabin with an elderly sailor. ‘Been making this trip for fifty years – they wouldn’t have the cheek to ask me to pay. Bad luck, you know,’ the man had said cheerfully, then returned his attention to the large bottle of over-proof rum that kept him occupied. To escape the alcohol fumes, Tom took to walking the deck during the day. Of an evening there’d usually be a card game below decks. You could still tell at a glance who’d been over there and who’d sat the war out at home. You could smell it on a man. Each tended to keep to his own kind. Being in the bowels of the vessel brought back memories of the troop ships that took them first to the Middle East, and later to France. Within moments of arriving on board, they’d deduced, almost by an animal sense, who was an officer, who was lower ranks; where they’d been. Just like on the troop ships, the focus was on finding a bit of sport to liven up the journey. The game settled on was familiar enough: first one to score a souvenir off a first-class passenger was the winner. Not just any souvenir, though. The designated article was a pair of ladies’ drawers. ‘Prize money’s doubled if she’s wearing them at the time.’ The ringleader, a man by the name of McGowan, with a moustache, and fingers yellowed from his Woodbines, said he’d been chatting to one of the stewards about the passenger list: the choice was limited. There were ten cabins in all. A lawyer and his wife – best give them a wide berth; some elderly couples, a pair of old spinsters (promising), but best of all, some toff’s daughter travelling on her own. ‘I reckon we can climb up the side and in through her window,’ he announced. ‘Who’s with me?’ The danger of the enterprise didn’t surprise Tom. He’d heard dozens of such tales since he got back. Men who’d taken to risking their lives on a whim – treating the boom gates at level crossings as a gallop jump; swimming into rips to see if they could get out. So many men who had dodged death over there now seemed addicted to its lure. Still, this lot were free agents now. Probably just full of talk. The following night, when the nightmares were worse than usual, Tom decided to escape them by walking the decks. It was two a.m. He was free to wander wherever he wanted at that hour, so he paced methodically, watching the moonlight leave its wake on the water. He climbed to the upper deck, gripping the stair rail to counter the gentle rolling, and stood a moment at the top, taking in the freshness of the breeze and the steadiness of the stars that showered the night. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a glimmer come on in one of the cabins. Even first-class passengers had trouble sleeping sometimes, he mused. Then, some sixth sense awoke in him – that familiar, indefinable instinct for trouble. He moved silently towards the cabin, and looked in through the window. In the dim light, he saw a woman flat against the wall, pinned there even though the man before her wasn’t touching her. He was an inch away from her face, with a leer Tom had seen too often. He recognised the man from below decks, and remembered the prize. Bloody idiots. He tried the door, and it opened. ‘Leave her alone,’ he said as he stepped into the cabin. He spoke calmly, but left no room for debate. The man spun around to see who it was, and grinned when he recognised Tom. ‘Christ! Thought you were a steward! You can give me a hand, I was just—’ ‘I said leave her alone! Clear out. Now.’ ‘But I haven’t finished. I was just going to make her day.’ He reeked of drink and stale tobacco. Tom put a hand on his shoulder, with a grip so hard that the man cried out. He was a good six inches shorter than Tom, but tried to take a swing at him all the same. Tom seized his wrist and twisted it. ‘Name and rank!’ ‘McKenzie. Private. 3277.’ The unrequested serial number followed like a reflex. ‘Private, you’ll apologise to this young lady and you’ll get back to your bunk and you won’t show your face on deck until we berth, you understand me?’ ‘Yes, sir!’ He turned to the woman. ‘Beg your pardon, Miss. Didn’t mean any harm.’ Still terrified, the woman gave the slightest nod. ‘Now, out!’ Tom said, and the man, deflated by sudden sobriety, shuffled from the cabin. ‘You all right?’ Tom asked the woman. ‘I – I think so.’ ‘Did he hurt you?’ ‘He didn’t …’ – she was saying it to herself as much as to him – ‘he didn’t actually touch me.’ He took in the woman’s face – her grey eyes seemed calmer now. Her dark hair was loose, in waves down to her arms, and her fists still gathered her nightgown to her neck. Tom reached for her dressing gown from a hook on the wall and draped it over her shoulders. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Must have got an awful fright. I’m afraid some of us aren’t used to civilised company these days.’ She didn’t speak. ‘You won’t get any more trouble from him.’ He righted a chair that had been overturned in the encounter. ‘Up to you whether you report him, Miss. I’d say he’s not the full quid now.’ Her eyes asked a question. ‘Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don’t look so different any more to some.’ He turned to go, but put his head back through the doorway. ‘You’ve got every right to have him up on charges if you want. But I reckon he’s probably got enough troubles. Like I said – up to you,’ and he disappeared through the door. CHAPTER 2 POINT PARTAGEUSE GOT its name from French explorers who mapped the cape that jutted from the south-western corner of the Australian continent well before the British dash to colonise the west began in 1826. Since then, settlers had trickled north from Albany and south from the Swan River Colony, laying claim to the virgin forests in the hundreds of miles between. Cathedral-high trees were felled with handsaws to create grazing pasture; scrawny roads were hewn inch by stubborn inch by pale-skinned fellows with teams of shire horses, as this land, which had never before been scarred by man, was excoriated and burned, mapped and measured and meted out to those willing to try their luck in a hemisphere which might bring them desperation, death, or fortune beyond their dreams. The community of Partageuse had drifted together like so much dust in a breeze, settling in this spot where two oceans met, because there was fresh water and a natural harbour and good soil. Its port was no rival to Albany, but convenient for locals shipping timber or sandalwood or beef. Little businesses had sprung up and clung on like lichen on a rock-face, and the town had accumulated a school, a variety of churches with different hymns and architectures, a good few brick and stone houses and a lot more built of weatherboard and tin. It gradually produced various shops, a town hall, even a Dalgety’s stock and station agency. And pubs. Many pubs. Throughout its infancy, the unspoken belief in Partageuse was that real things happened elsewhere. News of the outside world trickled in like rain dripped off the trees, a snippet here, a rumour there. The telegraph had speeded things up a bit when the line arrived in 1890, and since then a few folks had got telephones. The town had even sent troops off to the Transvaal in 1899 and lost a handful, but by and large, life in Partageuse was more of a sideshow, in which nothing too evil or too wonderful could ever happen. Other towns in the West had known things different, of course: Kalgoorlie, for example, hundreds of miles inland, had underground rivers of gold crusted by desert. There, men wandered in with a wheelbarrow and a gold-pan and drove out in a motor car paid for by a nugget as big as a cat, in a town that only half ironically had streets with names like Croesus. The world wanted what Kalgoorlie had. The offerings of Partageuse, its timber and sandalwood, were small beer: it wasn’t flashy boom-time like Kal. Then in 1914 things changed. Partageuse found that it too had something the world wanted. Men. Young men. Fit men. Men who had spent their lives swinging an axe or holding a plough and living it hard. Men who were the prime cut to be sacrificed on tactical altars a hemisphere away. 1914 was just flags and new-smelling leather on uniforms. It wasn’t until a year later that life started to feel different – started to feel as if maybe this wasn’t a sideshow after all – when, instead of getting back their precious, strapping husbands and sons, the women began to get telegrams. These bits of paper which could fall from stunned hands and blow about in the knife-sharp wind, which told you that the boy you’d suckled, bathed, scolded and cried over, was – well – wasn’t. Partageuse joined the world late and in a painful labour. Of course, the losing of children had always been a thing that had to be gone through. There had never been any guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making. Look inside the cover of any family Bible and you’d see the facts. The graveyards, too, told the story of the babies whose voices, because of a snake bite or a fever or a fall from a wagon, had finally succumbed to their mothers’ beseeching to ‘hush, hush, little one’. The surviving children got used to the new way of setting the table with one place fewer, just as they grew accustomed to squishing along the bench when another sibling arrived. Like the wheat fields where more grain is sown than can ripen, God seemed to sprinkle extra children about, and harvest them according to some indecipherable, divine calendar. The town cemetery had always recorded this truthfully, and its headstones, some lolling like loose, grimy teeth, told frankly the stories of lives taken early by influenza and drownings, by timber whims and even lightning strikes. But in 1915, it began to lie. Boys and men from across the district were dying by the score, yet the graveyards said nothing. The truth was that the younger bodies lay in mud far away. The authorities did what they could: where conditions and combat permitted, graves were dug; when it was possible to put together a set of limbs and identify them as a single soldier, every effort was made to do so, and to bury him with a funeral rite of sorts. Records were kept. Later, photographs were taken of the graves, and, for the sum of ?2 1s 6d, a family could buy an official commemorative plaque. Later still, the war memorials would sprout from the earth, dwelling not on the loss, but on what the loss had won, and what a fine thing it was to be victorious. ‘Victorious and dead,’ some muttered, ‘is a poor sort of victory.’ As full of holes as a Swiss cheese the place was, without the men. Not that there had been conscription. No one had forced them to go and fight. The cruellest joke was on the fellows everyone called ‘lucky’ because they got to come back at all: back to the kids spruced up for the welcome home, to the dog with a ribbon tied to his collar so he could join in the fun. The dog was usually the first to spot that something was up. Not just that the bloke was missing an eye or a leg; more that he was missing generally – still missing in action, though his body had never been lost sight of. Billy Wishart from Sadler’s mill, for example – three little ones and a wife as good as a man has a right to hope for, gassed and can’t hold a spoon any more without it sputtering like a chaff-cutter and spraying his soup all over the table. Can’t manage his buttons because of the shakes. When he’s alone at night with his wife he won’t get out of his clothes, and just hugs himself into a ball on the bed and cries. Or young Sam Dowsett, who survived the first Gallipoli landing only to lose both arms and half his face at Bullecourt. His widowed mother sits up at night worrying who’ll take care of her little boy once she’s gone. There’s not a girl in the district’d be silly enough to take him on now. Holes in Swiss cheese. Something missing. For a long time, people wore the bewildered expression of players in a game where the rules had suddenly been changed. They tried hard to take comfort from the fact that the boys hadn’t died in vain: they had been part of a magnificent struggle for right. And there were moments where they could believe that and swallow down the angry, desperate screech that wanted to scrape its way out of their gullets like out of a mother bird. After the war, people tried to make allowances for the men who’d come back a bit too fond of a drink or a stoush, or the ones who couldn’t hold down a job for more than a few days. Business in the town settled down after a fashion. Kelly still had the grocer’s. The butcher was still old Len Bradshaw, though Young Len was itching to take over: you could tell by the way he took up just a bit too much of his dad’s space at the counter when he leaned past him to pick up a chop or a pig’s cheek. Mrs Inkpen (who never seemed to have a Christian name, though her sister called her Popsy in private) took over the farrier’s when her husband Mack didn’t make it back from Gallipoli. She had a face as hard as the iron the lads used to nail onto the horses’ hooves, and a heart to match. Great hulks of men she had working for her, and it was all ‘Yes, Mrs Inkpen. No, Mrs Inkpen. Three bags full, Mrs Inkpen,’ even though any of them could have picked her up with barely more than a finger. People knew who to give credit to, and who to ask for money up front; who to believe when they brought goods back and asked for a refund. Mouchemore’s draper’s and haberdasher’s did best around Christmas and Easter, though the run up to winter brought them a swift trade in knitting wool. Did a profitable line in ladies’ unmentionables, too. Larry Mouchemore used to pat his pointed moustache as he corrected mispronunciations of his name (‘It’s like “move”, not like “mouse”,’), and watched with fear and bile as Mrs Thurkle got it into her head to open a furrier’s next door. A fur shop? In Point Partageuse? If you please! He smiled benignly when it closed within six months, buying up the remaining stock ‘as an act of neighbourly charity’ and selling it at a tidy profit to the captain of a steamer bound for Canada, who said they were mad for that sort of thing there. So by 1920, Partageuse had that mixture of tentative pride and hard-bitten experience that marked any West Australian town. In the middle of the handkerchief of grass near the main street stood the fresh granite obelisk listing the men and boys, some scarcely sixteen, who would not be coming back to plough the fields or fell the trees, would not be finishing their lessons, though many in the town held their breath, waiting for them anyway. Gradually, lives wove together once again into a practical sort of fabric in which every thread crossed and re-crossed the others through school and work and marriage, embroidering connections invisible to those not from the town. And Janus Rock, linked only by the store boat four times a year, dangled off the edge of the cloth like a loose button that might easily plummet to Antarctica. The long, thin jetty at Point Partageuse was made from the same jarrah that rattled along it in rail carriages to be hauled onto ships. The wide bay above which the town had grown up was clear turquoise, and on the day Tom’s boat docked it gleamed like polished glass. Men beetled away, loading and unloading, heaving and wrestling cargo with the occasional shout or whistle. On shore, the bustle continued, as people went about with a purposeful air, on foot or by horse and buggy. The exception to this display of efficiency was a young woman feeding bread to a flock of seagulls. She was laughing as she threw each crust in a different direction and watched the birds squabble and screech, eager for a prize. A gull in full flight caught a morsel in one gulp and still dived for the next one, sending the girl into new peals of laughter. It seemed years since Tom had heard a laugh that wasn’t tinged with a roughness, a bitterness. It was a sunny winter’s afternoon, and there was nowhere he had to go right that minute; nothing he had to do. He would be shipped out to Janus in a couple of days, once he had met the people he needed to meet and signed the forms he needed to sign. But for now, there were no logbooks to write up, no prisms to buff, no tanks to refuel. And here was someone just having a bit of fun. It suddenly felt like solid proof that the war was really over. He sat on a bench near the jetty, letting the sun caress his face, watching the girl lark about, the curls of her dark hair swirling like a net cast on the wind. He followed her delicate fingers as they made silhouettes against the blue. Only gradually did he notice she was pretty. And more gradually still that she was probably beautiful. ‘What are you smiling at?’ the girl called, catching Tom off guard. ‘Sorry.’ He felt his face redden. ‘Never be sorry for smiling!’ she exclaimed, in a voice that somehow had a sad edge. Then her expression brightened. ‘You’re not from Partageuse.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘I am. Lived here all my life. Want some bread?’ ‘Thanks, but I’m not hungry.’ ‘Not for you, silly! To feed the seagulls.’ She offered him a crust in her outstretched hand. A year before, perhaps even a day before, Tom would have declined and walked away. But suddenly, the warmth and the freedom and the smile, and something he couldn’t quite name, made him accept the offering. ‘Bet I can get more to come to me than you can,’ she said. ‘Righto, you’re on!’ said Tom. ‘Go!’ she declared, and the two of them began, throwing the pieces high in the air or at crafty angles, ducking as the gulls squawked and dive-bombed and flapped their wings at one another furiously. Finally, when all the bread was gone, Tom asked, laughing, ‘Who won?’ ‘Oh! I forgot to judge.’ The girl shrugged. ‘Let’s call it a draw.’ ‘Fair enough,’ he said, putting his hat back on and picking up his duffle bag. ‘Better be on my way. Thanks. I enjoyed that.’ She smiled. ‘It was just a silly game.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘thanks for reminding me that silly games are fun.’ He slung the bag over his broad shoulder, and turned toward town. ‘You have a good afternoon now, Miss,’ he added. Tom rang the bell at the boarding house on the main street. It was the domain of Mrs Mewett, a woman of sixty-odd, as stout as a pepper pot, who set upon him. ‘Your letter said you’re a bachelor, and you’re Eastern States, so I’ll thank you for remembering you’re in Partageuse now. This is a Christian establishment, and there’s to be no taking of alcohol or tobacco on the premises.’ Tom was about to thank her for the key in her hand, but she clutched it fiercely as she continued, ‘None of your foreign habits here: I know what’s what. I change the sheets when you leave and I don’t expect to have to scrub them, if you know what I mean. The doors are locked at ten, breakfast is served at six a.m. and if you’re not there you go hungry. Tea’s at five thirty, and likewise applies. Lunch you can find somewhere else.’ ‘Much obliged, Mrs Mewett,’ said Tom, deciding against a smile in case it broke some other rule. ‘Hot water’s an extra shilling a week. Up to you whether you want it. In my book, cold water never did a man your age any harm.’ She thrust the room key at him. As she limped off down the passageway, Tom wondered whether there was a Mr Mewett who had so endeared men to her. In his small room at the back of the house, he unpacked his duffle bag, setting his soap and shaving things neatly on the one shelf provided. He folded his long johns and socks into the drawer, and hung his three shirts and two pairs of trousers, together with his good suit and tie, in the narrow wardrobe. He slipped a book into his pocket and set out to explore the town. Tom Sherbourne’s final duty in Partageuse was dinner with the Harbourmaster and his wife. Captain Percy Hasluck was in charge of all the comings and goings at the port, and it was usual for any new Janus lightkeeper to be invited to dine with him before setting off for the island. Tom washed and shaved again in the afternoon, put Brilliantine in his hair, buttoned on a collar and hauled on his suit. The sunshine of the previous days had been replaced by clouds and a vicious wind that blew straight from Antarctica, so he pulled on his greatcoat for good measure. Still working on Sydney scales, he had left plenty of time to walk the unfamiliar route, and arrived at the house rather early. His host welcomed him with a broad smile, and when Tom apologised for his premature arrival, ‘Mrs Captain Hasluck’, as her husband referred to her, clapped her hands and said, ‘Gracious me, Mr Sherbourne! You hardly need to apologise for gracing us with your presence promptly, especially when you’ve brought such lovely flowers.’ She inhaled the scent of the late roses Tom had negotiated to pick, for a fee, from Mrs Mewett’s garden. She peered up at him from her considerably lower vantage point. ‘Goodness! You’re nearly as tall as the lighthouse yourself!’ she said, and chuckled at her own wit. The Captain took Tom’s hat and coat and said, ‘Come into the parlour,’ after which his wife immediately chimed, ‘Said the spider to the fly!’ ‘Ah, she’s a card, that one!’ exclaimed the Captain. Tom feared it could be a long evening. ‘Now, some sherry? Or there’s port?’ offered the woman. ‘Show some mercy and bring the poor devil a beer, Mrs Captain,’ her husband said with a laugh. He slapped Tom on the back. ‘You have a seat and tell me all about yourself, young man.’ Tom was rescued by the doorbell. ‘Excuse me,’ said Captain Hasluck. Down the hall Tom heard, ‘Cyril. Bertha. Glad you could come. Let me take your hats.’ As Mrs Captain returned to the parlour with a bottle of beer and glasses on a silver tray, she said, ‘We thought we’d invite a few people, just to introduce you to some locals. It’s a very friendly place, Partageuse.’ The Captain ushered in the new guests, a dour couple comprising the plump Chairman of the Local Roads Board, Cyril Chipper, and his wife, Bertha, who was thin as a yard of pump water. ‘Well, what do you make of the roads here?’ launched Cyril as soon as they had been introduced. ‘No politeness, mind. Compared with over East, how would you rate them?’ ‘Oh, leave the poor man alone, Cyril,’ said the wife. Tom was grateful not only for that intervention but also for the doorbell, which rang again. ‘Bill. Violet. Grand to see you,’ said the Captain as he opened the front door. ‘Ah, and you get lovelier by the day, young lady.’ He showed into the parlour a solid man with grey whiskers, and his wife, sturdy and flushed. ‘This is Bill Graysmark, his wife, Violet, and their daughter …’ He turned around. ‘Where’s she got to? Anyway, there’s a daughter here somewhere, she’ll be through soon, I expect. Bill’s the headmaster here in Partageuse.’ ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Tom, shaking the man by the hand and nodding politely to the woman. ‘So,’ said Bill Graysmark, ‘you think you’re up to Janus, then?’ ‘I’ll soon find out,’ Tom said. ‘Bleak out there, you know.’ ‘So I hear.’ ‘No roads on Janus, of course,’ threw in Cyril Chipper. ‘Er, well, no,’ Tom said. ‘Not sure I think much of a place with no roads at all,’ Chipper pursued, in a tone that implied there were moral implications. ‘No roads is the least of your problems, son,’ rejoined Graysmark. ‘Dad, lay off, will you?’ The missing daughter now entered as Tom had his back to the door. ‘The last thing the poor man needs is your tales of doom and gloom.’ ‘Ah! Told you she’d turn up,’ said Captain Hasluck. ‘This is Isabel Graysmark. Isabel – meet Mr Sherbourne.’ Tom stood to greet her and their eyes met in recognition. He was about to make a reference to seagulls, but she silenced him with, ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Sherbourne.’ ‘Tom, please,’ he said, speculating that perhaps she wasn’t supposed to spend afternoons throwing bread to birds, after all. And he wondered what other secrets lay behind her playful smile. The evening proceeded well enough, with the Haslucks telling Tom about the history of the district and the building of the lighthouse, back in the time of the Captain’s father. ‘Very important for trade,’ the Harbourmaster assured him. ‘The Southern Ocean is treacherous enough on the surface, let alone having that under-sea ridge. Safe transport is the key to business, everyone knows that.’ ‘Of course, the real basis of safe transport is good roads,’ Chipper began again, about to launch into another variation on his only topic of conversation. Tom tried to look attentive, but was distracted out of the corner of his eye by Isabel. Unseen by the others, thanks to the angle of her chair, she had begun to make mock-serious expressions at Cyril Chipper’s comments, keeping up a little pantomime that accompanied each remark. The performance went on, with Tom struggling to keep a straight face, until finally a full laugh escaped, which he quickly converted into a coughing fit. ‘Are you all right, Tom?’ asked the Captain’s wife. ‘I’ll fetch you some water.’ Tom couldn’t look up, and, still coughing, said, ‘Thank you. I’ll come with you. Don’t know what set me off.’ As Tom stood up, Isabel kept a perfectly straight face and said, ‘Now, when he comes back, you’ll have to tell Tom all about how you make the roads out of jarrah, Mr Chipper.’ Turning to Tom, she said, ‘Don’t be long. Mr Chipper’s full of interesting stories,’ and she smiled innocently, her lips giving just a momentary tremble as Tom caught her eye. When the gathering drew to a close, the guests wished Tom well for his stay on Janus. ‘You look like you’re made of the right stuff,’ said Hasluck, and Bill Graysmark nodded in agreement. ‘Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to meet you all,’ said Tom, shaking hands with the gentlemen, and nodding to the ladies. ‘And thank you for making sure I got such a thorough introduction to Western Australian road construction,’ he said quietly to Isabel. ‘Pity I won’t have a chance to repay you.’ And the little party dispersed into the wintry night. CHAPTER 3 THE WINDWARD SPIRIT, the store boat for all the light stations along that part of the coast, was an old tub, but trusty as a cattle dog, Ralph Addicott said. Old Ralph had skippered the vessel for donkey’s years, and always boasted he had the best job in the world. ‘Ah, you’ll be Tom Sherbourne. Welcome to my pleasure launch!’ he said, gesturing to the bare wooden decks and the salt-blistered paint as Tom came aboard before dawn for his first journey out to Janus Rock. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Tom as he shook his hand. The engine was idling and the diesel fumes filled his lungs. It wasn’t much warmer in the cabin than in the biting air outside, but at least it blunted the snarl of the wind. A mess of red corkscrew curls emerged through the hatch at the back of the cabin. ‘Reckon we’re ready, Ralph. She’s all fixed now,’ said the young man they belonged to. ‘Bluey, this is Tom Sherbourne,’ said Ralph. ‘Gedday,’ replied Bluey, hauling himself through the hatch. ‘Morning.’ ‘Talk about brass-monkey weather! Hope you’ve packed your woollen underduds. If it’s like this here, it’ll be a bloody sight worse on Janus,’ said Bluey, breathing on his hands. While Bluey showed Tom over the boat, the skipper ran through his final checks. He gave the brine-smeared glass in front of him a wipe with a scrap of old flag, then called, ‘Ropes at the ready now, lad. Prepare to cast off.’ He opened the throttle. ‘Come on, old girl, off we go,’ he muttered, to coax the boat out of its berth. Tom studied the map on the chart table. Even magnified on this scale, Janus was barely a dot in the shoals far off the coast. He fixed his eyes on the expanse of sea ahead and breathed in the thick salt air, not looking back at the shore in case it made him change his mind. As the hours passed, the water deepened below them, its colour taking on the quality of a solid. From time to time Ralph would point out something of interest – a sea eagle, or a school of dolphins playing at the bow of the boat. Once, they saw the funnel of a steamer, just skirting the horizon. Periodically, Bluey emerged from the galley to hand out tea in chipped enamel mugs. Ralph told Tom stories of evil storms and great dramas of the Lights on that part of the coast. Tom talked a little of life at Byron Bay and on Maatsuyker Island, thousands of miles to the east. ‘Well, if you’ve lived through Maatsuyker, there’s a chance you’ll survive Janus. Probably,’ Ralph said. He looked at his watch. ‘Why not grab forty winks while you can? We’ve got a way to go yet, boy.’ When Tom re-emerged from the bunk below, Bluey was speaking in a low voice to Ralph, who was shaking his head. ‘I just want to know if it’s true. No harm in asking him, is there?’ Bluey was saying. ‘Asking me what?’ said Tom. ‘If …’ Bluey looked at Ralph. Torn between his own eagerness and Ralph’s bulldog scowl, he blushed and fell silent. ‘Fair enough. None of my business,’ said Tom, and looked out at the water, which had now turned seal-grey, as the swell rose around them. ‘I was too young. Ma wouldn’t let me bump up me age to join up. And it’s just that I heard …’ Tom looked at him, eyebrows raised in question. ‘Well they reckon you got the Military Cross and that,’ Bluey blurted. ‘Told me it said on your discharge papers – for the Janus posting.’ Tom kept his eyes on the water. Bluey looked crestfallen, then embarrassed. ‘I mean, I’m real proud to be able to say I’ve shaken the hand of a hero.’ ‘A bit of brass doesn’t make anyone a hero,’ Tom said. Most of the blokes who really deserve the medals aren’t around any more. Wouldn’t get too worked up about it if I were you, mate,’ he said, and turned to pore over the chart. ‘There she is!’ exclaimed Bluey, and handed the binoculars to Tom. ‘Home, sweet home, for the next six months,’ Ralph chuckled. Tom looked through the lenses at the landmass which seemed to be emerging from the water like a sea monster. The cliff on one side marked the highest point, from which the island sloped down gently until it reached the opposite shore. ‘Old Neville’ll be glad to see us,’ Ralph said. ‘He didn’t take kindly to being dragged out of retirement for Trimble’s emergency, I can tell you. Still. Once a keeper … There’s not a man in the Service’d leave a light go unattended, however much he carried on about it. I warn you, though, he’s not the happiest corpse in the morgue. Not much of a talker, Neville Whittnish.’ The jetty stretched a good hundred feet out from the shoreline, where it had been built up tall, to withstand the highest of tides and fiercest of storms. The block and tackle was rigged, ready to hoist the supplies up the steep ascent to the outbuildings. A dour, craggy man of sixty-odd was waiting for them as they docked. ‘Ralph. Bluey,’ he said with a perfunctory nod. ‘You’re the replacement,’ was his greeting to Tom. ‘Tom Sherbourne. Pleased to meet you,’ Tom replied, putting out his hand. The older man looked at it absently for a moment before remembering what the gesture meant, and gave it a peremptory tug, as if testing whether the arm might come off. ‘This way,’ he said, and without waiting for Tom to gather his things, started the trudge up to the light station. It was early afternoon, and after so many hours on the swell, it took Tom a moment to get the feel of land again as he grabbed his kitbag and staggered after the keeper, while Ralph and Bluey prepared to unload the supplies. ‘Keeper’s cottage,’ said Whittnish as they approached a low building with a corrugated-iron roof. A trio of large rainwater tanks ranged behind it, beside a string of outbuildings housing stores for the cottage and the light. ‘You can leave your kitbag in the hallway,’ he said, as he opened the front door. ‘Got a lot to get through.’ He turned on his heel and headed straight to the tower. He might be long in the tooth, but he could move like a whippet. Later, when the old man spoke about the light, his voice changed, as though he were talking about a faithful dog or a favourite rose. ‘She’s a beauty, still, after all these years,’ he said. The white stone light tower rested against the slate sky like a stick of chalk. It stood a hundred and thirty feet high, near the cliff at the island’s apex, and Tom was struck not only by how much taller it was than the lights he had worked on, but also by its slender elegance. Walking through its green door, it was more or less what he expected. The space could be crossed in a couple of strides, and the sound of their footsteps ricocheted like stray bullets off the green-gloss-painted floors and curved, whitewashed walls. The few pieces of furniture – two store cupboards, a small table – were curved at the back to fit the roundness of the structure, so that they huddled against the walls like hunchbacks. In the very centre stood the thick iron cylinder which ran all the way up to the lantern room, and housed the weights for the clockwork which had originally rotated the light. A set of stairs no more than two feet wide began a spiral across one side of the wall and disappeared into the solid metal of the landing above. Tom followed the old man up to the next, narrower level, where the helix continued from the opposite wall up to the next floor, and on again until they arrived at the fifth one, just below the lantern room – the administrative heart of the lighthouse. Here in the watch room was the desk with the logbooks, the Morse equipment, the binoculars. Of course, it was forbidden to have a bed or any furniture in the light tower on which one could recline, but there was at least a straight-backed wooden chair, its arms worn smooth by generations of craggy palms. The barometer could do with a polish, Tom noted, before his eye was caught by something sitting beside the marine charts. It was a ball of wool with knitting needles stuck through it, and what looked like the beginnings of a scarf. ‘Old Docherty’s,’ said Whittnish with a nod. Tom knew the variety of activities the keepers used to while away any quiet moments on duty: carving scrimshaw or shells; making chess pieces. Knitting was common enough. Whittnish ran through the logbook and the weather observations, then led Tom to the light itself, on the next level up. The glazing of the light room was interrupted only by the criss-crossing of astragals that kept the panes in place. Outside, the metal gallery circled the tower, and a perilous ladder arched against the dome, up to the thin catwalk just below the weather vane that swung in the wind. ‘She’s a beauty all right,’ said Tom, taking in the giant lens, far taller than himself, atop the rotating pedestal: a palace of prisms like a beehive made from glass. It was the very heart of Janus, all light and clarity and silence. A barely perceptible smile passed over the old keeper’s lips as he said, ‘I’ve known her since I was barely a boy. Ah yes, a beauty.’ The following morning, Ralph stood on the jetty. ‘Nearly ready for the off, then. Want us to bring out all the newspapers you’ve missed next trip?’ ‘It’s hardly news if it’s months old. I’d rather save my money and buy a good book,’ replied Tom. Ralph looked about him, checking everything was in order. ‘Well, that’s that then. No changing your mind now, son.’ Tom gave a rueful laugh. ‘Reckon you’re right on that score, Ralph.’ ‘We’ll be back before you know it. Three months is nothing as long as you’re not trying to hold your breath!’ ‘You treat the light right and she won’t give you any trouble,’ said Whittnish. ‘All you need is patience and a bit of nous.’ ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Tom. Then he turned to Bluey, who was getting ready to cast off. ‘See you in three months then, Blue?’ ‘You bet.’ The boat pulled away, churning the water behind it and battling the wind with a smoky roar. The distance pressed it further and further into the grey horizon like a thumb pushing it into putty, until it was subsumed completely. Then, a moment’s stillness. Not silence: the waves still shattered on the rocks, the wind screeched around his ears, and a loose door on one of the storage sheds banged a disgruntled drumbeat. But something inside Tom was still for the first time in years. He walked up to the cliff top and stood. A goat’s bell clanged; two chickens squabbled. Suddenly these pinpricks of sound took on a new importance: sounds from living things. Tom climbed the 184 stairs to the lantern room and opened the door to the gallery. The wind pounced on him like a predator, slamming him back into the doorway until he gathered the strength to launch himself outward and grip the iron handrail. For the first time he took in the scale of the view. Hundreds of feet above sea level, he was mesmerised by the drop to the ocean crashing against the cliffs directly below. The water sloshed like white paint, milky-thick, the foam occasionally scraped off long enough to reveal a deep blue undercoat. At the other end of the island, a row of immense boulders created a break against the surf and left the water inside it as calm as a bath. He had the impression he was hanging from the sky, not rising from the earth. Very slowly, he turned a full circle, taking in the nothingness of it all. It seemed his lungs could never be large enough to breathe in this much air, his eyes could never see this much space, nor could he hear the full extent of the rolling, roaring ocean. For the briefest moment, he had no edges. He blinked, and shook his head quickly. He was nearing a vortex, and to pull himself back he paid attention to his heartbeat, felt his feet on the ground and his heels in his boots. He drew himself up to his full height. He picked a point on the door of the light tower – a hinge that had worked itself loose – and resolved to start with that. Something solid. He must turn to something solid, because if he didn’t, who knew where his mind or his soul could blow away to, like a balloon without ballast. That was the only thing that had got him through four years of blood and madness: know exactly where your gun is when you doze for ten minutes in your dugout; always check your gas mask; see that your men have understood their orders to the letter. You don’t think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation. He raised the binoculars and scoured the island for more signs of life: he needed to see the goats, the sheep; to count them. Stick to the solid. To the brass fittings which had to be polished, the glass which had to be cleaned – first the outer glass of the lantern, then the prisms themselves. Getting the oil in, keeping the cogs moving smoothly, topping up the mercury to let the light glide. He gripped each thought like the rung of a ladder by which to haul himself back to the knowable; back to this life. That night, as he lit the lamp, he moved as slowly and carefully as one of the priests might have done thousands of years earlier in the first lighthouse at Pharos. He climbed the tiny metal stairs that led to the inner deck around the light itself, ducked through the opening and into the apparatus of the light. He primed the oil by lighting a flame under its dish so that it vaporised and reached the mantle as a gas. He then set a match to the mantle, which transformed the vapour into a white brilliance. He went down to the next level and started the motor. The light began to turn with the exact, even rhythm of the five-second flash. He picked up the pen, and wrote in the wide, leather-bound log: ‘Lit up at 5.09 p.m. Wind N/NE 15 knots. Overcast, squally. Sea 6.’ Then, he added his initials – ‘T.S.’ His handwriting took over the telling of the story where Whittnish had left off only hours before, and Docherty before that – he was part of the unbroken chain of keepers bearing witness to the light. Once he was satisfied everything was in order, he went back to the cottage. His body craved sleep, but he knew too well that if you don’t eat you can’t work. In the larder off the kitchen, tins of bully beef and peas and pears sat on shelves beside sardines and sugar and a big jar of humbugs, of which the late Mrs Docherty had been legendarily fond. For his first night’s supper he cut a hunk of the damper Whittnish had left behind, a piece of cheddar and a wrinkled apple. At the kitchen table, the flame of the oil lamp wavered occasionally. The wind continued its ancient vendetta against the windows, accompanied by the liquid thunder of waves. Tom tingled at the knowledge that he was the only one to hear any of it: the only living man for the better part of a hundred miles in any direction. He thought of the gulls nestled into their wiry homes on the cliffs, the fish hovering stilly in the safety of the reefs, protected by the icy water. Every creature needed its place of refuge. Tom carried the lamp into the bedroom. His shadow pressed itself against the wall, a flat giant, as he pulled off his boots and stripped down to his long johns. His hair was thick with salt and his skin raw from the wind. He pulled back the sheets and climbed in, falling into dreams as his body kept up the sway of the waves and the wind. All night, far above him the light stood guard, slicing the darkness like a sword. CHAPTER 4 ONCE HE HAS extinguished the light at sunrise each morning, Tom sets off to explore another part of his new territory before getting on with the day’s work. The northern side of the island is a sheer granite cliff which sets its jaw stiffly against the ocean below. The land slopes down toward the south and slides gently under the water of the shallow lagoon. Beside its little beach is the water wheel, which carries fresh water from the spring up to the cottage: from the mainland, all the way out along the ocean floor to the island and beyond, there are fissures from which fresh water springs mysteriously. When the French described the phenomenon in the eighteenth century, it was dismissed as a myth. But sure enough, fresh water was to be found even in various parts of the ocean, like a magic trick played by nature. He begins to shape his routine. Regulations require that each Sunday he hoist the ensign and he does, first thing. He raises it too when any ‘man o’ war’, as the rules put it, passes the island. He knows keepers who swear under their breath at the obligation, but Tom takes comfort from the orderliness of it. It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilisation. He sets about fixing things that have fallen into disrepair since the decline of Trimble Docherty. Most important is the lighthouse itself, which needs putty in the astragals of the lantern glazing. Next he gets rottenstone and sands the wood on the desk drawer where it has swollen with the weather, and goes over it with the wolf’s head brush. He patches the green paint on the landings where it is scuffed or worn away: it will be a long while before a crew comes to paint the whole station. The apparatus responds to his attention: the glass gleams, the brass shines, and the light rotates on its bath of mercury as smoothly as a skua gliding on currents of air. Now and again he manages to get down to the rocks to fish, or to walk along the sandy beach of the lagoon. He makes friends with the pair of black skinks which reside in the woodshed, and occasionally gives them some of the chooks’ food. He’s sparing with his rations: he won’t see the store boat for months. It’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. The Father Christmas face, all red cheeks and whiskers, gave a big grin. ‘Well, Tom Sherbourne, how are you surviving?’ Ralph didn’t wait for a reply before throwing him the fat wet rope to wind around the bollard. Tom looked as fit and well after three months as any keeper the skipper had seen. Tom had been waiting for supplies for the light, and had given less thought to the fresh food which would be delivered. He had also forgotten that the boat would bring post, and was surprised when, toward the end of the day, Ralph handed him some envelopes. ‘Almost forgot,’ he said. There was a letter from the District Officer of the Lighthouse Service, retrospectively confirming his appointment and conditions. A letter from the Department of Repatriation set out certain benefits recently allowed to returned servicemen, including incapacity pension or a business loan. Neither applied to him, so he opened the next, a Commonwealth Bank statement confirming that he had earned four per cent interest on the five hundred pounds in his account. He left until last the envelope addressed by hand. He could not think of anyone who might write, and feared it might be some do-gooder sending him news of his brother or his father. He opened it. ‘Dear Tom, I just thought I’d write and check that you hadn’t been blown away or swept out to sea or anything. And that the lack of roads isn’t causing you too many problems …’ He skipped ahead to see the signature: ‘Yours truly, Isabel Graysmark.’ The gist of the middle was that she hoped he wasn’t too lonely out there, and that he should be sure to stop by and say hello before he went off to wherever he was going after his Janus posting. She had decorated the letter with a little sketch of a keeper leaning against his light tower, whistling a tune, while behind him a giant whale emerged from the water, its jaws wide open. She had added for good measure: ‘Be sure not to get eaten by a whale before then.’ It made Tom smile. The absurdity of the picture. More than that, the innocence of it. Somehow his body felt lighter just to hold the letter in his hand. ‘Can you hang on a tick?’ he asked Ralph, who was gathering his things for the journey back. Tom dashed to his desk for paper and pen. He sat down to write, before realising he had no idea what to say. He didn’t want to say anything: just send her a smile. Dear Isabel, Not blown away or swept (any further) out to sea, fortunately. I have seen many whales, but none has tried to eat me so far: I’m probably not very tasty. I am bearing up pretty well, all things considered, and coping adequately with the absence of roads. I trust you are keeping the local birdlife well fed. I look forward to seeing you before I leave Partageuse for – who knows where? – in three months’ time. How should he sign it? ‘Nearly ready?’ called Ralph. ‘Nearly,’ he replied, and wrote, ‘Tom.’ He sealed and addressed the envelope, and handed it to the skipper. ‘Any chance you could post that for me?’ Ralph looked at the address and winked. ‘I’ll deliver it in person. Got to go past that place anyway.’ CHAPTER 5 AT THE END of his six months, Tom savoured the delights of Mrs Mewett’s hospitality once again, for an unexpected reason: the Janus vacancy had become permanent. Far from finding his marbles, Trimble Docherty had lost the few he still had, and had thrown himself over the vast granite cliff-face at Albany known as the Gap, apparently convinced he was jumping onto a boat skippered by his beloved wife. So Tom had been summoned to shore to discuss the post, do the paperwork, and take some leave before he officially took up the job. By now he had proved himself so capable that Fremantle did not bother to look elsewhere to fill the position. ‘Never underestimate the importance of the right wife,’ Captain Hasluck had said when Tom was about to leave his office. ‘Old Moira Docherty could have worked the light herself, she’d been with Trimble for so long. Takes a special kind of woman to live on the Lights. When you find the right one, you want to snap her up, quick smart. Mind you, you’ll have to wait a bit now …’ As Tom wandered back to Mrs Mewett’s, he thought about the little relics at the lighthouse – Docherty’s knitting, his wife’s jar of humbugs that sat untouched in the pantry. Lives gone, traces left. And he wondered about the despair of the man, destroyed by grief. It didn’t take a war to push you over that edge. Two days after his return to Partageuse, Tom sat stiff as a whalebone in the Graysmarks’ lounge room, where both parents watched over their only daughter like eagles with a chick. Struggling to come up with suitable topics of conversation, Tom stuck to the weather, the wind, of which there was an abundance, and Graysmark cousins in other parts of Western Australia. It was relatively easy to steer the conversation away from himself. As Isabel walked him to the gate afterwards she asked, ‘How long till you go back?’ ‘Two weeks.’ ‘Then we’d better make the most of it,’ she said, as though concluding a long discussion. ‘Is that so?’ asked Tom, as amused as he was surprised. He had a sense of being waltzed backwards. Isabel smiled. ‘Yes, that’s so.’ And the way the light caught her eyes, he imagined he could see into her: see a clarity, an openness, which drew him in. ‘Come and visit tomorrow. I’ll make a picnic. We can go down by the bay.’ ‘I should ask your father first, shouldn’t I? Or your mother?’ He leaned his head to one side. ‘I mean, if it’s not a rude question, how old are you?’ ‘Old enough to go on a picnic.’ ‘And in ordinary numbers that would make you …?’ ‘Nineteen. Just about. So you can leave my parents to me,’ she said, and gave him a wave as she headed back inside. Tom set off back to Mrs Mewett’s with a lightness in his step. Why, he could not say. He didn’t know the first thing about this girl, except that she smiled a lot, and that something inside just felt – good. The following day, Tom approached the Graysmarks’ house, not so much nervous as puzzled, not quite sure how it was that he was heading back there so soon. Mrs Graysmark smiled as she opened the door. ‘Nice and punctual,’ she noted on some invisible checklist. ‘Army habits …’ said Tom. Isabel appeared with a picnic basket, which she handed to him. ‘You’re in charge of getting it there in one piece,’ she said, and turned to kiss her mother on the cheek. ‘Bye, Ma. See you later.’ ‘Mind you keep out of the sun, now. Don’t want you spoiling your skin with freckles,’ she said to her daughter. She gave Tom a look which conveyed something sterner than the words, ‘Enjoy your picnic. Don’t be too late back.’ ‘Thanks, Mrs Graysmark. We won’t be.’ Isabel led the way as they walked beyond the few streets that marked out the town proper and approached the ocean. ‘Where are we going?’ asked Tom. ‘It’s a surprise.’ They wandered along the dirt road which led up to the headland, bordered with dense, scrubby trees on each side. These were not the giants from the forest a mile or so further in, but wiry, stocky things, which could cope with the salt and the blasting of the wind. ‘It’s a bit of a walk. You won’t get too tired, will you?’ she asked. Tom laughed. ‘I’ll just about manage without a walking stick.’ ‘Well I just thought, you don’t have very far to walk on Janus, do you?’ ‘Believe me, getting up and down the stairs of the light all day keeps you in trim.’ He was still taking stock of this girl and her uncanny ability to tip him a fraction off balance. The trees began to thin out the further they walked, and the sounds of the ocean grew louder. ‘I suppose Partageuse seems dead boring, coming from Sydney,’ ventured Isabel. ‘Haven’t spent long enough here to know, really.’ ‘I suppose not. But Sydney – I imagine it as huge and busy and wonderful. The big smoke.’ ‘It’s pretty small fry compared to London.’ Isabel blushed. ‘Oh, I didn’t know you’d been there. That must be a real city. Maybe I’ll visit it one day.’ ‘You’re better off here, I’d say. London’s – well, it was pretty grim whenever I was there on furlough. Grey and gloomy and cold as a corpse. I’d take Partageuse any day.’ ‘We’re getting near the prettiest bit. Or I think it’s the prettiest.’ Beyond the trees emerged an isthmus which jutted far out into the ocean. It was a long, bare strip of land a few hundred yards wide and licked by waves on all sides. ‘This is the Point of Point Partageuse,’ said Isabel. ‘My favourite place is down there, on the left, where all the big rocks are.’ They walked on until they were in the centre of the isthmus. ‘Dump the basket and follow me,’ she said, and without warning she whisked off her shoes and took off, running to the black granite boulders which tumbled down into the water. Tom caught her up as she approached the edge. There was a circle of boulders, inside which the waves sloshed and swirled. Isabel lay flat on the ground and leaned her head over the edge. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Just listen to the sound the water makes, like it’s in a cave or a cathedral.’ Tom leaned forward to hear. ‘You’ve got to lie down,’ she said. ‘To hear better?’ ‘No. So you don’t get washed away. Terrible blow hole, this. If a big wave comes without warning, you’ll be down inside the rocks before you know it.’ Tom lay down beside her, and hung his head into the space, where the waves echoed and bellowed and washed about. ‘Reminds me of Janus.’ ‘What’s it like out there? You hear stories, but no one much ever actually goes there except the keeper and the boat. Or a doctor, once, years ago, when a whole ship was quarantined there with typhoid.’ ‘It’s like … Well, it’s like nowhere else on earth. It’s its own world.’ ‘They say it’s brutal, the weather.’ ‘It has its moments.’ Isabel sat up. ‘Do you get lonely?’ ‘Too busy to be lonely. There’s always something needs fixing or checking or recording.’ She put her head on one side, half signalling her doubt, but she let it pass. ‘Do you like it?’ ‘Yep.’ Now it was Isabel who laughed. ‘You don’t exactly yack a lot, do you?’ Tom stood up. ‘Hungry? Must be time for lunch.’ He took Isabel’s hand and helped her up. Such a petite hand, soft, with the palm covered in a fine layer of gritty sand. So delicate in his. Isabel served him roast beef sandwiches and ginger beer, followed by fruitcake and crisp apples. ‘So, do you write to all the lightkeepers who go out to Janus?’ asked Tom. ‘All! There aren’t that many,’ said Isabel. ‘You’re the first new one in years.’ Tom hesitated before venturing the next question. ‘What made you write?’ She smiled at him and took a sip of ginger beer before answering. ‘Because you’re fun to feed seagulls with? Because I was bored? Because I’d never sent a letter to a lighthouse before?’ She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and looked down at the water. ‘Would you rather I hadn’t?’ ‘Oh, no, I wasn’t trying to … I mean …’ Tom wiped his hands on his napkin. Always slightly off balance. It was a new sensation for him. Tom and Isabel were sitting at the end of the jetty at Partageuse. It was almost the last day of 1920, and the breeze played tunes by lapping wavelets against the boat hulls and plucking the ropes on the masts. The harbour lights trailed across the water’s surface, and the sky was swept with stars. ‘But I want to know everything,’ said Isabel, bare feet dangling above the water. ‘You can’t just say, “Nothing else to tell.” She’d extracted the bare details of his private-school education, and his Engineering degree from Sydney University, but was growing more frustrated. ‘I can tell you lots – my gran and how she taught me piano, what I remember about my granddad, even though he died when I was little. I can tell you what it’s like to be the headmaster’s daughter in a place like Partageuse. I can tell you about my brothers, Hugh and Alfie, and how we used to muck around with the dinghy and go off fishing down the river.’ She looked at the water. ‘I still miss those times.’ Curling a lock of hair around her finger, she considered something, then took a breath. ‘It’s like a whole … a whole galaxy waiting for you to find out about. And I want to find out about yours.’ ‘What else do you want to know?’ ‘Well, about your family, say.’ ‘I’ve got a brother.’ ‘Am I allowed to know his name, or have you forgotten it?’ ‘I’m not likely to forget that in a hurry. Cecil.’ ‘What about your parents?’ Tom squinted at the light on top of a mast. ‘What about them?’ Isabel sat up, and looked deep into his eyes. ‘What goes on in there, I wonder?’ ‘My mother’s dead now. I don’t keep in touch with my father.’ Her shawl had slipped off her shoulder, and he pulled it back up. ‘Are you getting a bit chilly? Want to walk back?’ ‘Why won’t you talk about it?’ ‘I’ll tell you if you really want. It’s just I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.’ ‘Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.’ ‘More’s the pity.’ Isabel straightened. ‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s go. Mum and Dad’ll be wondering where we’ve got to,’ she said, and they walked soberly up the jetty. That night as he lay in bed, Tom cast his mind back to the childhood Isabel had been so keen to investigate. He had never really spoken to anyone about it. But exploring the memories now, the jagged pain was like running his tongue over a broken tooth. He could see his eight-year-old self, tugging his father’s sleeve and crying, ‘Please! Please let her come back. Please, Daddy. I love her!’ and his father wiping his hand away like a grubby mark. ‘You don’t mention her again in this house. You hear, son?’ As his father stalked out of the room, Tom’s brother Cecil, five years older and at that stage a good measure taller, gave him a clip on the back of the head. ‘I told you, you idiot. I told you not to say it,’ and followed his father, with the same officious stride, leaving the small boy standing in the middle of the lounge room. From his pocket he took a lace handkerchief, redolent with his mother’s scent, and touched it to his cheek, avoiding his tears and streaming nose. It was the feel of the cloth he wanted, the perfume, not its use. Tom thought back to the imposing, empty house: to the silence that deadened every room with a subtly different pitch; to the kitchen smelling of carbolic, kept spotless by a long line of housekeepers. He remembered that dreaded smell of Lux flakes, and his distress as he saw the handkerchief, washed and starched by Mrs Someone-or-other, who had discovered it in the pocket of his shorts and laundered it as a matter of course, obliterating his mother’s smell. He had searched the house for some corner, some cupboard which could bring back that blurry sweetness of her. But even in what had been her bedroom, there was only polish, and mothballs, as though her ghost had finally been exorcised. In Partageuse, as they sat in the Tea Rooms, Isabel tried again. ‘I’m not trying to hide anything,’ Tom said. ‘It’s just that raking over the past is a waste of time.’ ‘And I’m not trying to pry. Only – you’ve had a whole life, a whole story, and I’ve come in late. I’m only trying to make sense of things. Make sense of you.’ She hesitated, then asked delicately, ‘If I can’t talk about the past, am I allowed to talk about the future?’ ‘We can’t rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine, or wish for. It’s not the same thing.’ ‘OK, what do you wish for, then?’ Tom paused. ‘Life. That’ll do me, I reckon.’ He drew a deep breath and turned to her. ‘What about you?’ ‘Oh, I wish for all sorts of things, all the time!’ she exclaimed. ‘I wish for nice weather for the Sunday-school picnic. I wish for – don’t laugh – I wish for a good husband and a house full of kids. The sound of a cricket ball breaking a window and the smell of stew in the kitchen. The girls’ll sing Christmas carols together and the boys’ll kick the footy … I can’t imagine not having children one day, can you?’ She seemed to drift away for a moment before saying, ‘Of course, I wouldn’t want one yet.’ She hesitated. ‘Not like Sarah.’ ‘Who?’ ‘My friend, Sarah Porter. Used to live down the road. We used to play cubbies together. She was a bit older, and always had to be mother.’ Her expression clouded. ‘She got … in the family way – when she was sixteen. Her parents sent her up to Perth, out of sight. Made her give the baby to an orphanage. They said he’d be adopted, but he had a club foot. ‘Later she got married, and the baby was all forgotten about. Then one day, she asked me if I’d come up to Perth with her, to visit the orphanage, in secret. The “Infant Asylum”, just a few doors down from the proper mad house. Oh, Tom, you’ve never seen such a sight as a ward full of motherless tots. No one to love them. Sarah couldn’t breathe a word to her husband – he’d have sent her packing. He has no idea, even now. Her baby was still there: all she could do was look. The funny thing was, I was the one who couldn’t stop crying. The look on their little faces. It really got to me. You might as well send a child straight to hell as send it to an orphanage.’ ‘A kid needs its mum,’ said Tom, lost in a thought of his own. Isabel said, ‘Sarah lives in Sydney now. I don’t hear from her any more.’ In those two weeks, Tom and Isabel saw each other every day. When Bill Graysmark challenged his wife about the propriety of this sudden ‘stepping out’, she said, ‘Oh, Bill. Life’s a short thing. She’s a sensible girl and she knows her own mind. Besides, there’s little enough chance these days of her finding a man with all his limbs attached. Don’t look a gift horse …’ She knew, also, that Partageuse was small. There was nowhere they could get up to anything much. Dozens of eyes and ears would report the least sign of anything untoward. It surprised Tom how much he looked forward to seeing Isabel. Somehow she had crept under his defences. He enjoyed her stories of life in Partageuse, and its history; about how the French had chosen that name for this spot between oceans because it meant ‘good at sharing’ as well as ‘dividing’. She talked about the time she fell from a tree and broke her arm, the day she and her brothers painted red spots on Mrs Mewett’s goat and knocked on her door to tell her it had measles. She told him quietly, and with many pauses, about their deaths in the Somme, and how she wished she could get her parents to smile again. He was wary, though. This was a small town. She was a lot younger than he was. He’d probably never see her again once he went back out to the light. Other blokes might take advantage, but to Tom, the idea of honour was a kind of antidote to some of the things he’d lived through. Isabel 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. The evening before he was due to go back to Janus, they were walking along the beach. Though January was only two days old, it felt like years since Tom had first landed in Partageuse, six months before. Isabel looked out to sea, where the sun was sliding down the sky and into the grey water at the edge of the world. She said, ‘I was wondering if you’d do me a favour, Tom.’ ‘Yep. What?’ ‘I was wondering,’ she said, not slowing her pace, ‘if you’d kiss me.’ Tom half thought the wind had made the words up, and because she didn’t stop walking, he tried to work out what it could have been that she really said. He took a guess. ‘Of course I’ll miss you. But – maybe I’ll see you next time I’m back on leave?’ She gave him an odd look, and he began to worry. Even in the dying light, her face seemed red. ‘I’m – I’m sorry, Isabel. I’m not too good with words … in situations like this.’ ‘Situations like what?’ she asked, crushed by the thought that this must be something he did all the time. A girl in every port. ‘Like – saying goodbye. I’m all right on my own. And I’m all right with a bit of company. It’s the switching from one to the other that gets me.’ ‘Well, I’ll make it easy for you then, shall I? I’ll just go. Right now.’ She whipped around and started off down the beach. ‘Isabel! Isabel, wait!’ He ran after her and caught her hand. ‘I didn’t want you to just go off without – well, just go off like that. And I will do your favour, I will miss you. You’re – well, you’re good to be with.’ ‘Then take me out to Janus.’ ‘What – you want to come for the trip out?’ ‘No. To live there.’ Tom laughed. ‘God, you come out with some humdingers sometimes.’ ‘I’m serious.’ ‘You can’t be,’ said Tom, though something in her look told him she just might. ‘Why not?’ ‘Well, for about a hundred reasons, just off the top of my head. Most obviously because the only woman allowed on Janus is the keeper’s wife.’ She said nothing, so he inclined his head a fraction more as if that might help him understand. ‘So marry me!’ He blinked. ‘Izz – I hardly know you! And besides, I’ve never even – well, I’ve never even kissed you, for crying out loud.’ ‘At long last!’ She spoke as if the solution were blindingly obvious, and she stood on tiptoes to pull his head down towards her. Before he knew what was happening he was being kissed, inexpertly but with great force. He pulled away from her. ‘That’s a dangerous game to play, Isabel. You shouldn’t go running around kissing blokes out of the blue. Not unless you mean it.’ ‘But I do mean it!’ Tom looked at her, her eyes challenging him, her petite chin set firm. Once he crossed that line, who knew where he would end up? Oh, bugger it. To hell with good behaviour. To hell with doing the right thing. Here was a beautiful girl, begging to be kissed, and the sun was gone and the weeks were up and he’d be out in the middle of bloody nowhere this time tomorrow. He took her face in his hands and bent low as he said, ‘Then this is how you do it,’ and kissed her slowly, letting time fade away. And he couldn’t remember any other kiss that felt quite the same. Finally he drew back, and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. ‘Better get you home or they’ll have the troopers after me.’ He slipped his arm around her shoulder and guided her along the sand. ‘I meant it, you know, about getting married.’ ‘You’d have to have rocks in your head to want to marry me, Izz. There’s not much money in lightkeeping. And it’s a hell of a job for a wife.’ ‘I know what I want, Tom.’ He stood still. ‘Look. I don’t want to sound patronising, Isabel, but you’re – well, you’re quite a bit younger than me: I’m twenty-eight this year. And I’m guessing you haven’t walked out with many fellows.’ He would have wagered, from the attempt at a kiss, that she hadn’t walked out with any. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ ‘Just – well, don’t get confused between a thing itself and the first time you come across it. Think it over. I’ll bet all the tea in China that in twelve months you’ll have forgotten all about me.’ ‘Humour me,’ she said, and reached up to kiss him again. CHAPTER 6 ON CLEAR SUMMER days, Janus seems to stretch up right to its tiptoes: you’d swear it’s higher out of the water at some times than at others, not just because of the rising and ebbing of the tide. It can disappear altogether in rainstorms, disguised like a goddess in a Greek myth. Or sea mists brew up: warm air heavy with salt crystals which obstruct the passage of the light. If there are bushfires, the smoke can reach even this far out, carrying thick, sticky ash which tints the sunsets lavish red and gold, and coats the lantern-room glazing with grime. For these reasons the island needs the strongest, brightest of lights. From the gallery, the horizon stretches forty miles. It seems improbable to Tom that such endless space could exist in the same lifetime as the ground that was fought over a foot at a time only a handful of years ago, where men lost their lives for the sake of labelling a few muddy yards as ‘ours’ instead of ‘theirs’, only to have them snatched back a day later. Perhaps the same labelling obsession caused cartographers to split this body of water into two oceans, even though it is impossible to touch an exact point at which their currents begin to differ. Splitting. Labelling. Seeking out otherness. Some things don’t change. On Janus, there is no reason to speak. Tom can go for months and not hear his own voice. He knows some keepers who make a point of singing, just like turning over an engine to make sure it still works. But Tom finds a freedom in the silence. He listens to the wind. He observes the tiny details of life on the island. Now and then, as if brought in on the breeze, the memory of Isabel’s kiss floats into his awareness: the touch of her skin, the soft wholeness of her. And he thinks of the years when he simply couldn’t have imagined that such a thing existed. Just to be beside her had made him feel cleaner somehow, refreshed. Yet the sensation leads him back into the darkness, back into the galleries of wounded flesh and twisted limbs. To make sense of it – that’s the challenge. To bear witness to the death, without being broken by the weight of it. There’s no reason he should still be alive, un-maimed. Suddenly Tom realises he is crying. He weeps for the men snatched away to his left and right, when death had no appetite for him. He weeps for the men he killed. On the Lights, you account for every single day. You write up the log, you report what’s happened, you produce evidence that life goes on. In time, as the ghosts start to dissolve in the pure Janus air, Tom dares to think of the life ahead of him – a thing that for years has been too improbable to depend on. Isabel is there in his thoughts, laughing in spite of it all, insatiably curious about the world around her, and game for anything. Captain Hasluck’s advice echoes in his memory as he goes to the woodshed. Having chosen a piece of mallee root, he carries it to the workshop. Janus Rock, 15th March 1921 Dear Isabel, I hope this letter finds you well. I am very well. I like it out here. That probably sounds strange, but I do. The quiet suits me. There’s something magical about Janus. It’s like nowhere I’ve ever been. I wish you could see the sunrise and sunset here. And the stars: the sky gets crowded at night, and it is a bit like watching a clock, seeing the constellations slide across the sky. It’s comforting to know that they’ll show up, however bad the day has been, however crook things get. That used to help in France. It put things into perspective – the stars had been around since before there were people. They just kept shining, no matter what was going on. I think of the light here like that, like a splinter of a star that’s fallen to earth: it just shines, no matter what is happening. Summer, winter, storm, fine weather. People can rely on it. Better stop rabbiting on. The point is, I am sending with this letter a little box I have carved for you. I hope it’s useful. You might put jewellery in it, or hairclips and whatnot. By now you have probably changed your mind about things, and I just wanted to say that that is all right. You are a wonderful girl, and I enjoyed the time we spent together. The boat comes tomorrow, so I will give this to Ralph then. Tom Janus Rock, 15th June 1921 Dear Isabel, I am writing this quickly, as the boys are getting ready to leave. Ralph delivered your letter. It was good to hear from you. I am glad you liked the box. Thank you for the photograph. You look beautiful, but not as cheeky as you are in real life. I know just where I will put it in the lantern room, so that you can see out through the window. No, it doesn’t really feel all that strange, your question. If I think about it, in the war I knew plenty of fellows who got spliced on three-day furlough back in England, then came straight back to carry on the show. Most of them thought they might not be around much longer, and probably so did their girls. With a bit of luck I will be a longer-term proposition, so think carefully. I am prepared to risk it if you are. I can apply for exceptional shore leave at the end of December, so you have got time to think it over. If you change your mind, I will understand. And if you don’t, I promise I will take care of you always, and do my very best to be a good husband. Yours, Tom The next six months passed slowly. There had been nothing to wait for before – Tom had grown so used to greeting the days as ends in themselves. Now, there was a wedding date. There were arrangements to be made, permissions to be sought. In any spare minute, he would go around the cottage and find something else to put right: the window in the kitchen that didn’t quite shut; the tap that needed a man’s force to turn it. What would Isabel need, out here? With the last boat back, he sent an order for paint to freshen up the rooms; a mirror for the dressing table; new towels and tablecloths; sheet music for the decrepit piano – he had never touched it, but he knew Isabel loved to play. He hesitated before adding to the list new sheets, two new pillows and an eiderdown. When, finally, the boat arrived to take Tom back for the big day, Neville Whittnish strode onto the jetty, ready to fill in during his absence. ‘Everything in order?’ ‘Hope so,’ said Tom. After a brief inspection, Whittnish said, ‘You know how to treat a light. I’ll give you that much.’ ‘Thanks,’ said Tom, genuinely touched by the compliment. ‘Ready, boy?’ asked Ralph as they were about to cast off. ‘God only knows,’ said Tom. ‘Never a truer word spoken.’ Ralph turned his eyes to the horizon. ‘Off we go, my beauty, got to get Captain Sherbourne, MC and Bar to his damsel.’ Ralph 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? CHAPTER 7 ‘YOU SEE? BECAUSE it’s this high above sea level, the light reaches over the curve of the earth – beyond the horizon. Not the beam itself, but the loom – the glow of it.’ Tom was standing behind Isabel on the lighthouse gallery, arms around her, chin reaching down to rest on her shoulder. The January sun scattered flecks of gold in her dark hair. It was 1922, and their second day alone on Janus. Back from a few days’ honeymoon in Perth and straight out to the island. ‘It’s like seeing into the future,’ said Isabel. ‘You can reach ahead in time to save the ship before it knows it needs help.’ ‘The higher the light, and the bigger the order of lens, the further its beam shines. This one goes just about as far as any light can.’ ‘I’ve never been this high up in all my life! It’s like flying!’ she said, and broke away to circle the tower once more. ‘And what do you call the flash again – there’s that word …’ ‘The character. Every coastal light has a different character. This one flashes four times on each twenty-second rotation. So every ship knows from the five-second flash that this is Janus, not Leeuwin or Breaksea or anywhere else.’ ‘How do they know?’ ‘Ships keep a list of the lights they’ll pass on their course. Time’s money if you’re a skipper. They’re always tempted to cut the corner of the Cape – want to be first to offload their cargo and pick up a new one. Fewer days at sea saves on crew’s wages, too. The light’s here to ward them off, get them to pull their head in.’ Through the glass Isabel could see the heavy black blinds of the lantern room. ‘What are they for?’ she asked. ‘Protection! The lens doesn’t care which light it magnifies. If it can turn the little flame into a million candlepower, imagine what it can do to sunlight when the lens stands still all day. It’s all very well if you’re ten miles away. Not so good to be ten inches away. So you have to protect it. And protect yourself – I’d fry if I went inside it during the day without the curtains. Come inside and I’ll show you how it works.’ The iron door clanged behind them as they went into the lantern room, and through the opening into the light itself. ‘This is a first order lens – about as bright as they come.’ Isabel watched the rainbows thrown about by the prisms. ‘It’s so pretty.’ ‘The thick central bit of glass is the bull’s eye. This one has four, but you can have different numbers depending on the character. The light source has to line up exactly with the height of that so it gets concentrated by the lens.’ ‘And all the circles of glass around the bull’s eyes?’ Separate arcs of triangular glass were arranged around the centre of the lens like the rings of a dartboard. ‘The first eight refract the light: they bend it so that instead of heading up to the moon or down to the ocean floor where it’s no good to anybody, it goes straight out to sea: they make it sort of turn a corner. The rings above and below the metal bar – see? Fourteen of them – they get thicker the further away from the centre they are: they reflect the light back down, so all the light is being concentrated into one beam, not just going off in all directions.’ ‘So none of the light gets away without earning its keep,’ said Isabel. ‘You could say that. And here’s the light itself,’ he said, gesturing to the small apparatus on the metal stand in the very centre of the space, covered in a mesh casing. ‘It doesn’t look much.’ ‘It isn’t, now. But that mesh cover is an incandescent mantle, and it makes the vaporised oil burn bright as a star, once it’s magnified. I’ll show you tonight.’ ‘Our own star! Like the world’s been made just for us! With the sunshine and the ocean. We have each other all to ourselves.’ ‘I reckon the Lights think they’ve got me all to themselves,’ said Tom. ‘No nosy neighbours or boring relatives.’ She nibbled at his ear. ‘Just you and me …’ ‘And the animals. There’s no snakes on Janus, luckily. Some islands down this way are nothing but. There’s one or two spiders’ll give you a nip though, so keep your eyes peeled. There are …’ Tom was having difficulty finishing his point about the local fauna, as Isabel kept kissing him, nipping his ears, reaching her hands back into his pockets in a way that made it an effort to think, let alone speak coherently. ‘It’s a serious …’ he struggled on, ‘point I’m trying to make here, Izz. You need to watch out for—’ and he let out a moan as her fingers found their target. ‘Me …’ she giggled. ‘I’m the deadliest thing on this island!’ ‘Not here, Izz. Not in the middle of the lantern. Let’s …’ he took a deep breath, ‘let’s go downstairs.’ Isabel laughed. ‘Yes, here!’ ‘It’s government property.’ ‘What – are you going to have to record it in the logbook?’ Tom gave an awkward cough. ‘Technically … These things are pretty delicate, and they cost more money than you or I’ll ever see in a lifetime. I don’t want to be the one who has to make up an excuse about how anything got broken. Come on, let’s go downstairs.’ ‘And what if I won’t?’ she teased. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll just have to—’ he hoisted her onto one hip, ‘make you, sweetheart,’ he said, and carried her down the hundreds of narrow stairs. ‘Oh, it’s heaven here!’ Isabel declared the next day as she looked out at the flat, turquoise ocean. Despite Tom’s grim warnings about the weather, the wind had declared a greeting truce and the sun was again gloriously warm. He had brought her to the lagoon, a broad pool of placid ultramarine no more than six feet deep, in which they were now swimming. ‘Just as well you like it. It’s three years till we get shore leave.’ She put her arms around him. ‘I’m where I want to be and with the man I want to be with. Nothing else matters.’ Tom swirled her gently in a circle as he spoke. ‘Sometimes fish find their way in here through the gaps in the rocks. You can scoop them up with a net, or even just with your hands.’ ‘What’s this pool called?’ ‘Hasn’t got a name.’ ‘Everything deserves a name, don’t you think?’ ‘Well, you can give it one then.’ Isabel thought for a moment. ‘I hereby christen this “Paradise Pool”,’ she said, and splashed a handful of water onto a rock. ‘This will be my swimming spot.’ ‘You’re usually pretty safe here. But keep your eyes open, just in case.’ ‘What do you mean?’ asked Isabel as she paddled, only half listening. ‘The sharks can’t usually make it through the rocks, unless there’s a really high tide or a storm or something, so you’re probably safe on that count …’ ‘Probably?’ ‘But you need to be careful about other things. Sea urchins, say. Watch out when you’re walking on submerged rocks, or the spines can snap off in your foot and get infected. And stingrays bury themselves in the sand near the edge of the water – if you tread on the barb in their tail you’re in trouble. If it flicks up and gets you near the heart, well …’ He noticed that Isabel had gone silent. ‘You all right, Izz?’ ‘It feels different somehow, when you just reel it all off like that – when we’re this far from help.’ Tom took her in his arms and pulled her up to the shore. ‘I’ll look after you, sweetheart. Don’t you worry,’ he said with a smile. He kissed her shoulders, and laid her head back on the sand, to kiss her mouth. In Isabel’s wardrobe, beside the piles of thick winter woollens, hang a few floral dresses – easy to wash, hard to hurt as she goes about her new work of feeding the chickens or milking the goats; picking the vegetables or cleaning the kitchen. When she hikes around the island with Tom she wears an old pair of his trousers, rolled up more than a foot and cinched with a cracked leather belt, over one of his collarless shirts. She likes to feel the ground under her feet, and goes without shoes whenever she can, but on the cliffs she endures plimsolls to protect her soles from the granite. She explores the boundaries of her new world. One morning soon after she arrived, a little drunk with the freedom of it, she decided to experiment. ‘What do you think of the new look?’ she said to Tom as she brought him a sandwich in the watch room at noon, wearing nothing at all. ‘I don’t think I need clothes on a day as lovely as this.’ He raised an eyebrow and gave her a half smile. ‘Very nice. But you’ll get sick of it soon enough, Izz.’ As he took the sandwich he stroked her chin. ‘There’s some things you have to do to survive on the Offshore Lights, love – to stay normal: eat at proper times; turn the pages of the calendar …’ he laughed, ‘and keep your clobber on. Trust me, sweet.’ Blushing, she retreated to the cottage and dressed in several layers – camisole and petticoat, shift, cardigan, then heaved on Wellington boots and went to dig up potatoes with unnecessary vigour in the sharp sunshine. Isabel asked Tom, ‘Have you got a map of the island?’ He smiled. ‘Afraid of getting lost? You’ve been here a few weeks now. As long as you go in the opposite direction to the water, you’ll get home sooner or later. And the light might give you a clue too.’ ‘I just want a map. There must be one?’ ‘Of course there is. There are charts of the whole area if you want them, but I’m not sure what good they are to you. There’s nowhere much you can go.’ ‘Just humour me, husband of mine,’ she said, and kissed his cheek. Later that morning, Tom appeared in the kitchen with a large scroll, and presented it with mock ceremony to Isabel. ‘Your wish is my command, Mrs Sherbourne.’ ‘Thank you,’ she replied in the same tone. ‘That will be all, for now. You may go, sir.’ A smile played on Tom’s lips as he rubbed his chin. ‘What are you up to, missie?’ ‘Never you mind!’ For the next few days, Isabel went off on expeditions each morning, and in the afternoon closed the door to the bedroom, even though Tom was safely occupied with his work. One evening, after she had dried the dinner dishes, she fetched the scroll and handed it to Tom. ‘This is for you.’ ‘Thanks, love,’ said Tom, who was reading a dog-eared volume on the tying of rope knots. He looked up briefly. ‘I’ll put it back tomorrow.’ ‘But it’s for you.’ Tom looked at her. ‘It’s the map, isn’t it?’ She gave a mischievous grin. ‘You won’t know until you look, will you?’ Tom unrolled the paper, to find it transformed. Little annotations had appeared all over it, together with coloured sketches and arrows. His first thought was that the map was Commonwealth property and that there would be hell to pay next inspection. New names had sprung up everywhere. ‘Well?’ Isabel smiled. ‘It just seemed wrong that places weren’t called anything. So I’ve given them names, see?’ The coves and the cliffs and the rocks and the grassy fields all bore fine lettering, in which they were christened, as Paradise Pool had been: Stormy Corner; Treacherous Rock; Shipwreck Beach; Tranquil Cove; Tom’s Lookout; Izzy’s Cliff; and many more. ‘I suppose I’d never thought of it as being separate places. It’s all just Janus to me,’ Tom said, smiling. ‘It’s a world of differences. Each place deserves a name, like rooms in a house.’ Tom rarely thought of the house in terms of rooms either. It was just ‘home’. And something in him was saddened at the dissection of the island, the splitting off into the good and the bad, the safe and the dangerous. He preferred to think of it whole. Even more, he was uneasy about parts bearing his name. Janus did not belong to him: he belonged to it, like he’d heard the natives thought of land. His job was just to take care of it. He looked at his wife, who was smiling proudly at her handiwork. If she wanted to give things names, maybe there was no harm in it. And maybe she would come to understand his way of looking at it, eventually. When Tom gets invitations to his battalion reunions, he always writes back. Always sends good wishes, and a bit of money towards the mess. But he never attends. Well, being on the Lights, he couldn’t even if he wanted to. There are some, he knows, who will take comfort in seeing a familiar face, re-telling a story. But he doesn’t want to join in. There were friends he lost – men he’d trusted, fought with, drunk with, and shivered with. Men he understood without a word, knew as if they were an extension of his body. He thinks about the language that bound them together: words that cropped up to cover circumstances no one had ever encountered before. A ‘pineapple’, a ‘pip-squeak’, a ‘plum pudding’: all types of shell which might find their way into your trench. The lice were ‘chats’, the food was ‘scran’, and a ‘Blighty’ was a wound that’d see you shipped back to hospital in England. He wonders how many men can still speak this secret language. Sometimes when he wakes up next to Isabel he’s still amazed, and relieved, that she isn’t dead. He watches closely for her breath, just to make sure. Then he puts his head against her back and absorbs the softness of her skin, the gentle rise and fall of her body as she sleeps on. It is as great a miracle as he has ever seen. CHAPTER 8 ‘MAYBE ALL THE times in my life I could have done without, maybe they were all a test to see if I deserved you, Izz.’ They were stretched on a blanket on the grass, three months after Isabel’s arrival on Janus. The April night was still almost warm, and tinselled with stars. Isabel lay with her eyes closed, resting in the crook of Tom’s arm as he stroked her neck. ‘You’re my other half of the sky,’ he said. ‘I never knew you were a poet!’ ‘Oh, I didn’t invent it. I read it somewhere – a Latin poem? A Greek myth? Something like that, anyway.’ ‘You and your fancy private-school education!’ she teased. It was Isabel’s birthday, and Tom had cooked her breakfast and dinner, and watched her untie the bow on the wind-up gramophone which he had conspired with Ralph and Bluey to ship out to make up for the fact that the piano he had proudly shown her when she arrived was unplayable from years of neglect. All day she had listened to Chopin and Brahms, and now the strains of Handel’s Messiah were ringing from the lighthouse, where they had set it up to let it echo in the natural sound chamber. ‘I love the way you do that,’ said Tom, watching Isabel’s index finger coil a lock of her hair into a spring, then release it and start with another. Suddenly self-conscious, she said, ‘Oh, Ma says it’s a bad habit. I’ve always done it, apparently. I don’t even notice it.’ Tom took a strand of her hair, and wound it around his finger, then let it unfurl like a streamer. ‘Tell me another myth,’ Isabel said. Tom thought for a moment. ‘You know Janus is where the word January comes from? It’s named after the same god as this island. He’s got two faces, back to back. Pretty ugly fellow.’ ‘What’s he god of?’ ‘Doorways. Always looking both ways, torn between two ways of seeing things. January looks forward to the new year and back to the old year. He sees past and future. And the island looks in the direction of two different oceans, down to the South Pole and up to the Equator.’ ‘Yeah, I’d got that,’ said Isabel. She pinched his nose and laughed. ‘Just teasing. I love it when you tell me things. Tell me more about the stars. Where’s Centaurus again?’ Tom kissed her fingertip and stretched her arm out until he had lined it up with the constellation. ‘There.’ ‘Is that your favourite?’ ‘You’re my favourite. Better than all the stars put together.’ He moved down to kiss her belly. ‘I should say, “You two are my favourites,” shouldn’t I? Or what if it’s twins? Or triplets?’ Tom’s head rose and fell gently with Isabel’s breath as he lay there. ‘Can you hear anything? Is it talking to you yet?’ she asked. ‘Yep, it’s saying I need to carry its mum to bed before the night gets too cold.’ And he gathered his wife in his arms and carried her easily into the cottage, as the choir in the lighthouse declared, ‘For unto us a Child is born.’ Isabel had been so proud to write to her mother with the news of the expected arrival. ‘Oh, I wish I could – I don’t know, swim ashore or something, just to let them know. Waiting for the boat is killing me!’ She kissed Tom, and asked, ‘Shall we write to your dad? Your brother?’ Tom stood up, and busied himself with the dishes on the draining board. ‘No need,’ was all he said. His expression, uneasy but not angry, told Isabel not to press the point, and she gently took the tea towel from his hand. ‘I’ll do this lot,’ she said. ‘You’ve got enough to get through.’ Tom touched her shoulder. ‘I’ll get some more done on your chair,’ he said, and attempted a smile as he left the kitchen. In the shed, he looked at the pieces of the rocking chair he was planning to make for Isabel. He had tried to remember the one on which his own mother had rocked him and told him stories. His body remembered the sensation of being held by her – something lost to him for decades. He wondered if their child would have a memory of Isabel’s touch, decades into the future. Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it, he thought, as he considered the path of his own mother’s life. Yet Isabel seemed utterly single-minded about it. ‘It’s nature, Tom. What’s there to be afraid of?’ When he had finally tracked down his mother, he was twenty-one and just finishing his Engineering degree. Finally, he was in charge of his own life. The address the private detective gave him was a boarding house in Darlinghurst. He had stood outside the door, his gut a whirl of hope and terror, suddenly eight again. He caught the sounds of other desperations seeping out under the doors along the narrow wooden passage – a man’s sobs from the next room and a shout of ‘We can’t go on like this!’ from a woman, accompanied by a baby’s screaming; somewhere further off, the fervent rhythm of a headboard as the woman who lay before it probably earned her keep. Tom checked the pencilled scrawl on the paper. Yes, the right room number. He scanned his memory again for the lullaby-gentle sound of his mother: ‘Ups-a-daisy, my young Thomas. Shall we put a bandage on that scrape?’ His knock went unanswered, and he tried again. Eventually, he turned the handle tentatively, and the door gave no resistance. The unmistakable scent rushed to meet him, but it was a split second before he recognised it as tainted – with cheap alcohol and cigarettes. In the closed-in gloom he saw an unmade bed and a tatty armchair, in shades of brown. There was a crack in the window, and a single rose in a vase had long ago shrivelled. ‘Looking for Ellie Sherbourne?’ The voice belonged to a wiry, balding man who had appeared at the door behind him. It was so strange to hear her name spoken. And ‘Ellie’ – he had never imagined ‘Ellie’. ‘Mrs Sherbourne, that’s right. When will she be back?’ The man gave a snort. ‘She won’t. More’s the pity, ’cause she owes me a month’s rent.’ It was all wrong, the reality. He couldn’t make it fit with the picture of the reunion he’d planned, dreamed of, for years. Tom’s pulse quickened. ‘Do you have a forwarding address?’ ‘Not where she’s gone. Died three weeks ago. I was just coming in to clear the last of the stuff out.’ Of all the possible scenes Tom had imagined, none had ended like this. He stood completely still. ‘You planning on moving? Or moving in?’ the man asked sourly. Tom hesitated, then opened his wallet and took out five pounds. ‘For her rent,’ he said softly, and strode down the hallway, fighting tears. The thread of hope Tom had protected so long was snapped: on a back street in Sydney, as the world was on the brink of war. Within a month he’d enlisted, giving his next of kin as his mother, at her boarding house address. The recruiters weren’t fussy about details. Now, Tom ran his hands over the one piece of wood he had lathed, and tried to imagine what he might say in a letter to his mother today, if she were alive – how he might tell her the news of the baby. He took up the tape measure, and turned to the next piece of wood. ‘Zebedee.’ Isabel looked at Tom with a poker face, her mouth twitching just a touch at the corners. ‘What?’ asked Tom, pausing from his task of rubbing her feet. ‘Zebedee,’ she repeated, putting her nose back down in the book so that he could not catch her eye. ‘You’re not serious? What kind of a name—’ A wounded expression crossed her face. ‘That’s my great-uncle’s name. Zebedee Zanzibar Graysmark.’ Tom gave her a look, as she ploughed on, ‘I promised Grandma on her deathbed that if I ever had a son I’d call him after her brother. I can’t go back on a promise.’ ‘I was thinking of something a bit more normal.’ ‘Are you calling my great-uncle abnormal?’ Isabel couldn’t contain herself any longer, and burst out laughing. ‘Got you! Got you good and proper!’ ‘Little minx! You’ll be sorry you did that!’ ‘No, stop! Stop!’ ‘No mercy,’ he said, as he tickled her tummy and her neck. ‘I surrender!’ ‘Too late for that now!’ They were lying on the grass where it gave way to Shipwreck Beach. It was late afternoon and the soft light rinsed the sand in yellow. Suddenly Tom stopped. ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Isabel, peeping out from under the long hair that hung over her face. He stroked the strands away from her eyes, and looked at her in silence. She put a hand to his cheek. ‘Tom?’ ‘It bowls me over, sometimes. Three months ago there was just you and me, and now, there’s this other life, just turned up out of nowhere, like …’ ‘Like a baby.’ ‘Yes, like a baby, but it’s more than that, Izz. When I used to sit up in the lantern room, before you arrived, I’d think about what life was. I mean, compared to death …’ He stopped himself. ‘I’m talking rubbish now. I’ll shut up.’ Isabel put her hand under his chin. ‘You hardly ever talk about things, Tom. Tell me.’ ‘I can’t really put it into words. Where does life come from?’ ‘Does it matter?’ ‘Does it matter?’ he queried. ‘That it’s a mystery. That we don’t understand.’ ‘There are times I wanted an answer. I can tell you that much. Times I saw a man’s last breath, and I wanted to ask him, “Where have you gone? You were here right beside me just a few seconds ago, and now some bits of metal have made holes in your skin, because they hit you fast enough, and suddenly you’re somewhere else. How can that be?”’ Isabel hugged her knees with one arm, and with the other hand pulled at the grass beside her. ‘Do you think people remember this life, when they go? Do you think in heaven, my grandma and granddad, say, are knocking around together?’ ‘Search me,’ Tom said. With sudden urgency, she asked, ‘When we’re both dead, Tom, God won’t keep us apart, will He? He’ll let us be together?’ Tom held her. ‘Now look what I’ve done. Should have kept my silly mouth shut. Come on, we were in the middle of choosing names. And I was just trying to rescue a poor baby from the fate of life as Zebedee blimmin’ Zanzibar. Where are we with girls’ names?’ ‘Alice; Amelia; Annabel; April; Ariadne—’ Tom raised his eyebrows. ‘And she’s off again … “Ariadne!” Hard enough that she’s going to live in a lighthouse. Let’s not lump her with a name people will laugh at.’ ‘Only two hundred more pages to go,’ said Isabel with a grin. ‘We’d better hop to it, then.’ That evening, as he looked out from the gallery, Tom returned to his question. Where had this baby’s soul been? Where would it go? Where were the souls of the men who’d joked and saluted and trudged through the mud with him? Here he was, safe and healthy, with a beautiful wife, and some soul had decided to join them. Out of thin air, in the farthest corner of the earth, a baby was coming. He’d been on death’s books for so long, it seemed impossible that life was making an entry in his favour. He went back into the lantern room, and looked again at the photograph of Isabel that hung on the wall. The mystery of it all. The mystery. Tom’s other gift from the last boat was The Australian Mother’s Manual of Efficient Child-Rearing, by Dr Samuel B. Griffiths. Isabel took to reading it at any available moment. She fired information at Tom: ‘Did you know that a baby’s kneecaps aren’t made of bone?’ Or, ‘How old do you think babies are when they can take food from a teaspoon?’ ‘No idea, Izz.’ ‘Go on, guess!’ ‘Honestly, how would I know?’ ‘Oh, you’re no fun!’ she complained, and dived into the book for another fact. Within weeks the pages were frilly-edged and blotted with grass stains from days spent on the headland. ‘You’re having a baby, not sitting for an exam.’ ‘I just want to do things right. It’s not like I can pop next door and ask Mum, is it?’ ‘Oh, Izzy Bella,’ Tom laughed. ‘What? What’s funny?’ ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I wouldn’t change a thing about you.’ She smiled, and kissed him. ‘You’re going to be a wonderful dad, I know.’ A question came to her eyes. ‘What?’ prompted Tom. ‘Nothing.’ ‘No, really, what?’ ‘Your dad. Why do you never talk about him?’ ‘No love lost there.’ ‘But what was he like?’ Tom thought about it. How could he possibly sum him up? How could he ever explain the look in his eyes, the invisible gap that always surrounded him, so that he never quite made contact? ‘He was right. Always right. Didn’t matter what it was about. He knew the rules and he stuck to them, come hell or high water.’ Tom thought back to the straight, tall figure that overshadowed his childhood. Hard and cold as a tomb. ‘Was he strict?’ Tom gave a bitter laugh. ‘Strict doesn’t begin to describe it.’ He put his hand to his chin as he speculated. ‘Maybe he just wanted to make sure his sons didn’t kick over the traces. We’d get the strap for anything. Well, I’d get the strap for anything. Cecil would always be the one to tell on me – got him off lightly.’ He laughed again. ‘Tell you what, though: made army discipline easy. You never know what you’re going to be grateful for.’ His face grew serious. ‘And I suppose it made it easier being over there, knowing there’d be no one who’d be heartbroken if they got the telegram.’ ‘Oh, Tom! Don’t even say such a thing!’ He drew her head into his chest and stroked her hair in silence. There are times when the ocean is not the ocean – not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most. In the worst of these storms Tom stays with the light all night if need be, keeping warm by the kerosene heater, pouring sweet tea from a thermos flask. He thinks about the poor bastards out on the ships and he thanks Christ he’s safe. He watches for distress flares, keeps the dinghy ready for launch, though what good it would do in seas like that, who knows. That May night, Tom sat with a pencil and notebook in hand, adding up figures. His annual salary was ?327. How much did a pair of children’s shoes cost? From what Ralph said, kids got through them at a rate of knots. Then there were clothes. And schoolbooks. Of course, if he stayed on the Offshore Lights, Isabel would teach the kids at home. But on nights like this, he wondered if it was fair to inflict this life on anyone, let alone children. The thought was nudged out by the words of Jack Throssel, one of the keepers back East. ‘Best life in the world for kids, I swear,’ he had told Tom. ‘All six of mine are right as rain. Always up to games and mischief: exploring caves, making cubbies. A proper gang of pioneers. And the Missus makes sure they do their lessons. Take it from me – raising kids on a light station’s as easy as wink!’ Tom went back to his calculations: how he could save a bit more, make sure there was enough put by for clothes and doctors and – Lord knew what else. The idea that he was going to be a father made him nervous and excited and worried. As his mind drifted back to memories of his own father, the storm thundered about the light, deafening Tom to any other sound that night. Deafening him to the cries of Isabel, calling for his help. CHAPTER 9 ‘SHALL I GET you a cup of tea?’ Tom asked, at a loss. He was a practical man: give him a sensitive technical instrument, and he could maintain it; something broken, and he could mend it, meditatively, efficiently. But confronted by his grieving wife, he felt useless. Isabel did not look up. He tried again. ‘Some Vincent’s Powders?’ The first-aid taught to lightkeepers included ‘restoring the apparently drowned’, treating hypothermia and exposure, disinfecting wounds; even the rudiments of amputation. They did not, however, touch on gynaecology, and the mechanics of miscarriage were a mystery to Tom. It had been two days since the dreadful storm. Two days since the miscarriage had begun. Still the blood came, and still Isabel refused to let Tom signal for help. Having stayed on watch throughout that wild night, he had finally returned to the cottage after putting out the light just before dawn, and his body begged for sleep. But entering the bedroom he had found Isabel doubled up, the bed soaked in blood. The look in her eyes was as desolate as Tom had ever seen. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she had said. ‘So, so sorry, Tom.’ Then another wave of pain gripped her and she groaned, and pressed her hands to her belly, desperate for it to stop. Now she said, ‘What’s the point in a doctor? The baby’s gone.’ Her gaze wandered. ‘How hopeless am I?’ she muttered. ‘Other women have babies as easy as falling off a log.’ ‘Izzy Bella, stop.’ ‘It’s my fault, Tom. It must be.’ ‘That’s just not true, Izz.’ He pulled her head into his chest and kissed her hair over and over. ‘There’ll be another. One day when we’ve got five kids running around and getting under your feet, this’ll all feel like a dream.’ He pulled her shawl around her shoulders. ‘It’s beautiful outside. Come and sit on the verandah. It’ll do you good.’ They sat side by side in wicker armchairs, Isabel covered with a blue checked blanket, and watched the progress of the sun across the late-autumn sky. Isabel recalled how she had been struck by the emptiness of this place, like a blank canvas, when she first arrived; how, gradually, she had come to see into it as Tom did, attuning to the subtle changes. The clouds, as they formed and grouped and wandered the sky; the shape of the waves, which would take their cue from the wind and the season and could, if you knew how to read them, tell you the next day’s weather. She had become familiar, too, with the birds which appeared from time to time, against all odds – carried along as randomly as the seeds borne on the wind, or the seaweed thrown up on the shore. She looked at the two pine trees and suddenly wept at their aloneness. ‘There should be forests,’ she said suddenly. ‘I miss the trees, Tom. I miss their leaves and their smell and the fact there are so many of them – oh, Tom, I miss the animals: I bloody miss kangaroos! I miss it all.’ ‘I know you do, Izzy, darl.’ ‘But don’t you?’ ‘You’re the only thing in this world that I want, Izz, and you’re right here. Everything else will sort itself out. Just give it time.’ A sheer, velvet veil covered everything, no matter how dutifully Isabel dusted – her wedding photograph; the picture of Hugh and Alfie in their uniforms the week they joined up in 1916, grinning as if they’d just been invited to a party. Not the tallest lads in the AIF, but keen as mustard, and so dashing in their brand-new slouch hats. Her sewing box was as neat as it needed to be, rather than pristine like her mother’s. Needles and pins pierced the cushioned pale-green lining, and the panels of a christening gown lay ununited, stopped in mid-stitch like a broken clock. The small string of pearls Tom had given her as a wedding gift sat in the box he had made for her. Her hairbrush and tortoiseshell combs were the only other things on her dressing table. Isabel wandered into the lounge room, observing the dust, the crack in the plaster near the window frame, the frayed edge of the dark-blue rug. The hearth needed sweeping, and the lining of the curtains had begun to shred from constant exposure to extremes of weather. Simply to think of fixing any of it took more energy than she could muster. Only weeks ago she had been so full of expectation and vigour. Now the room felt like a coffin, and her life stopped at its edges. She opened the photograph album her mother had prepared for her as a going-away present, with the pictures of her as a child, the name of the photographer’s studio, Gutcher’s, stamped on the back of each portrait. There was one of her parents on their wedding day; a photograph of home. She trailed her finger over the table, lingering on the lace doily her grandmother had made for her own trousseau. She moved to the piano, and opened it. The walnut was split in places. The gold leaf above the keyboard said Eavestaff, London. She had often imagined its journey to Australia, and the other lives it could have lived – in an English house, or a school, sagging under the burden of imperfect scales played by small, stumbling fingers perhaps, or even on a stage. Yet through the most unlikely of circumstances, its lot was to live on this island, its voice stolen by loneliness and the weather. She pressed middle C, so slowly that it made no sound. The warm ivory key was as smooth as her grandmother’s fingertips, and the touch brought back afternoons of music lessons, of wringing out A flat major in contrary motion, one octave, then two, then three. The sound of the cricket ball on the wood as Hugh and Alfie larked about outside while she, a ‘little lady’, acquired ‘accomplishments’, and listened as her grandmother explained again the importance of keeping her wrists raised. ‘But it’s stupid, contrary motion!’ Isabel would wail. ‘Well, you’d know all about contrary motion, my dear,’ her grandmother remarked. ‘Can’t I play cricket, Gran? Just a bit and then I’ll come back.’ ‘Cricket’s no game for a girl. Now, come on. The Chopin ?tude,’ she would breeze on, opening a book tattooed with pencil marks and small smudged-chocolate fingerprints. Isabel stroked the key again. She felt a sudden longing, not just for the music, but for that time when she could have rushed outside, hitched up her skirt, and stood as wicketkeeper for her brothers. She pressed the other keys, as if they might bring the day back. But the only sound was the muffled clack of the wood against the base of the keyboard, where the felt had worn away. ‘What’s the point?’ she shrugged to Tom as he came in. ‘It’s had it, I reckon. Just like me,’ and she started to cry. Days later, the two of them stood beside the cliff. Tom hammered the small cross he had made from some driftwood, until it was secure in the ground. At his wife’s request he had carved, ‘31 May 1922. Remembered always.’ He took the shovel and dug a hole for the rosemary bush she had moved from the herb garden. He could feel nausea rising in him as a spark of memory arced between the hammering of the cross and digging of the hole. His palms sweated, though the task required little physical effort. Isabel watched from high on the cliff as the Windward Spirit docked on its next run. Ralph and Bluey would make their way up soon enough. No need to go to greet them. They slung the gangplank down, and to her surprise, a third man disembarked with them. No maintenance crews were due. Tom came up the path while the other three lingered at the jetty. The stranger, who carried a black bag, seemed to be having some difficulty righting himself after the journey. Isabel’s face was tight with anger as Tom approached. ‘How dare you!’ Tom reeled. ‘How dare I?’ ‘I told you not to and you went ahead anyway! Well you can just send him back. Don’t bother letting him up here. He’s not wanted.’ Isabel always looked like a child when she was angry. Tom wanted to laugh, and his grin infuriated her even more. She put her hands on her hips. ‘I told you I didn’t need a doctor, but you went behind my back. I’m not having him prodding and poking about to tell me nothing I don’t already know. You should be ashamed of yourself! Well you can look after them, the whole lot of them.’ ‘Izzy,’ Tom called. ‘Izzy, wait! Don’t do your ’nana, love. He’s not …’ But she was already too far off to hear the rest of his words. ‘Well?’ asked Ralph as he reached Tom. ‘How did she take it? Pleased as Punch, I bet!’ ‘Not exactly.’ Tom stuffed his fists in his pockets. ‘But …’ Ralph looked at him in amazement. ‘I thought she’d be real chuffed. It took all Hilda’s charms to persuade him to come, and my wife doesn’t use her charms freely!’ ‘She …’ Tom considered whether to explain. ‘She got the wrong end of the stick about it. Sorry. She’s chucked a wobbly. Once she does that, all you can do is batten down the hatches and wait for it to pass. Means I’ll be making sandwiches for lunch, I’m afraid.’ Bluey and the man approached, and after the introductions, the four of them went inside. Isabel sat in the grass near the cove she had christened Treacherous, and seethed. She hated this – the fact that your dirty washing had to be everybody else’s business. She hated the fact that Ralph and Bluey had to know. They’d probably spent the whole trip out discussing her most private shame and Lord knew what else. That Tom could ship the doctor out against her explicit wishes felt like a betrayal. She sat watching the water, how the breeze fluffed up the waves which had been so smooth and curled earlier in the day. Hours passed. She grew hungry. She grew sleepy. But she refused to go near the cottage while the doctor was there. She concentrated instead on her surroundings. Noticing the texture of each leaf, the precise green of it. Listening to all the different pitches of wind and water and birds. She heard a foreign sound: an insistent note, short, repeated. Coming from the light? From the cottage? It was not the usual clang of metal from the workshop. She heard it again, this time at a different pitch. The wind on Janus had a way of raking sounds into separate frequencies, distorting them as they crossed the island. Two gulls came to land nearby and squabble over a fish, and the noise, faint at best, was lost. She went back to her mulling, until she was arrested by an unmistakeable sound carried on the shifting air. It was a scale: imperfect, but the pitch getting better each time. She had never heard Ralph or Bluey mention the piano, and Tom couldn’t play for toffee. It must be the wretched doctor, determined to put his fingers where they were not wanted. She had never been able to get a tune out of the piano, and now it seemed to be singing. Isabel’s fury drove her up the path, ready to banish the intruder from the instrument, from her body, from her home. She passed the outbuildings, where Tom, Ralph and Bluey were stacking sacks of flour. ‘Afternoon, Isab—’ Ralph attempted, but she marched past him and into the house. She barged into the lounge room. ‘If you don’t mind, that’s a very delicate instru—’ she began, but got no further, flummoxed by the sight of the piano completely stripped down, a box of tools open, and the stranger turning the nut above one of the bass copper wires with a tiny spanner as he hit its corresponding key. ‘Mummified seagull. That’s your problem,’ he said, without looking around. ‘Well, one of them. That and a good twenty years’ worth of sand and salt and God knows what. Once I’ve replaced some of the felts it’ll start to sound better.’ He continued to tap the key and turn the spanner as he spoke. ‘I’ve seen all sorts in my time. Dead rats. Sandwiches. A stuffed cat. I could write a book about the things that end up inside a piano, though I couldn’t tell you how they get there. I’m betting the seagull didn’t fly in by itself.’ Isabel was so taken aback that she couldn’t speak. Her mouth was still open when she felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned to find Tom. She flushed deep red. ‘So much for surprises, eh?’ he said, and kissed her cheek. ‘Well … Well, it was …’ Isabel’s voice trailed off. He slipped a hand around her waist and the two of them stood for a moment, forehead touching forehead, before breaking into laughter. She sat for the next two hours, watching the tuner as he coaxed a brighter sound, getting the notes to ring out once again, louder than ever before, and he finished with a burst of the Hallelujah Chorus. ‘I’ve done my best, Mrs Sherbourne,’ he said as he packed away his tools. ‘Really needs to come into the workshop, but the trip out and back would do as much harm as good. She’s not perfect, by a long chalk, but she’ll do.’ He pulled the piano stool out. ‘Care to give it a burl?’ Isabel sat at the keyboard, and played the A flat major scale in contrary motion. ‘Well, that’s a sight better than before!’ she said. She broke into the beginnings of a Handel aria and was wandering off into memory when someone cleared his throat. It was Ralph, standing behind Bluey in the doorway. ‘Don’t stop!’ Bluey said, as she turned to greet them. ‘I was so rude. I’m sorry!’ she said, about to get up. ‘Not a bit of it,’ said Ralph. ‘And here. From Hilda,’ he said, producing from behind his back something tied with a red ribbon. ‘Oh! Shall I open it now?’ ‘You’d better! If I don’t give her a blow-by-blow report, I’ll never hear the end of it!’ Isabel opened the wrapping and found Bach’s Goldberg Variations. ‘Tom reckons you can play this sort of caper with your eyes shut.’ ‘I haven’t played them for years. But – oh, I just love them! Thank you!’ She hugged Ralph and kissed his cheek. ‘And you too, Bluey,’ she said with a kiss that accidentally caught his lips as he turned. He blushed violently and looked at the ground. ‘I never had much to do with it, I don’t reckon,’ he said, but Tom protested, ‘Don’t believe a word of it. He drove all the way to Albany to fetch him. Took him the whole day yesterday.’ ‘In that case, you get an extra kiss,’ she said, and planted another on his other cheek. ‘And you too!’ she said, kissing the piano tuner for good measure. That night as he checked the mantle, Tom was serenaded by Bach, the orderly notes climbing the stairs of the lighthouse and ringing around the lantern room, flittering between the prisms. Just like the mercury that made the light go around, Isabel was – mysterious. Able to cure and to poison; able to bear the whole weight of the light, but capable of fracturing into a thousand uncatchable particles, running off in all directions, escaping from itself. He went out onto the gallery. As the lights of the Windward Spirit disappeared over the horizon, he said a silent prayer for Isabel, and for their life together. Then he turned to the logbook, and wrote, in the ‘remarks’ column for Wednesday, 13 September 1922, ‘Visit per store boat: Archie Pollock, piano tuner. Prior approval granted.’ PART II CHAPTER 10 27th April 1926 ISABEL’S LIPS WERE pale and her eyes downcast. She still placed her hand fondly on her stomach sometimes, before its flatness reminded her it was empty. And still, her blouses bore occasional patches from the last of the breast milk that had come in so abundantly in the first days, a feast for an absent guest. Then she would cry again, as though the news were fresh. She stood with sheets in her hands: chores didn’t stop, just as the light didn’t stop. Having made the bed and folded her nightgown under the pillow, she headed up to the cliff, to sit by the graves a while. She tended the new one with great care, wondering whether the fledgling rosemary would take. She pulled a few weeds from around the two older crosses, now finely crystalled with years of salt, the rosemary growing doggedly despite the gales. When a baby’s cry came to her on the wind, she looked instinctively to the new grave. Before logic could interfere, there was a moment when her mind told her it had all been a mistake – this last child had not been stillborn early, but was living and breathing. The illusion dissolved, but the cry did not. Then Tom’s call from the gallery – ‘On the beach! A boat!’ – told her this was not a dream, and she moved as quickly as she could to join him on the way to the dinghy. The man in it was dead, but Tom fished a screaming bundle out of the bow. ‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed. ‘Bloody hell, Izzy. It’s—’ ‘A baby! Oh my Lord above! Oh Tom! Tom! Here – give it to me!’ Back in the cottage, Isabel’s belly quickened at the very sight of the baby – her arms knew instinctively how to hold the child and calm her, soothe her. As she scooped warm water over the infant, she registered the freshness of her skin, taut and soft and without a wrinkle. She kissed each of the tiny fingertips in turn, gently nibbling down the nails a fraction so the child would not scratch herself. She cupped the baby’s head in the palm of her hand, and with the silk handkerchief she kept for best, dabbed away a fine crust of mucus from under her nostrils, and wiped the dried salt of tears from around her eyes. The moment seemed to merge into one with another bathing, another face – a single act that had merely been interrupted. Looking into those eyes was like looking at the face of God. No mask or pretence: the baby’s defencelessness was overwhelming. That this intricate creature, this exquisite crafting of blood and bones and skin, could have found its way to her, was humbling. That she could have arrived now, barely two weeks after … It was impossible to see it as mere chance. Frail as a falling snowflake, the baby could so easily have melted into oblivion had the currents not borne her, arrow-true and safe, to Shipwreck Beach. In a place before words, in some other language of creature to creature, with the softening of her muscles, the relaxing of her neck, the baby signalled her trust. Having come so close to the hands of death, life now fused with life like water meets water. Isabel was awash with emotions: awe, at the grip of the miniature hands when they latched onto a single finger of her own; amusement, at the sweet little bottom which was yet to become fully distinct from the legs; reverence, for the breath which drew in the air around and transformed it into blood, into soul. And below all of these hummed the dark, empty ache. ‘Look, you’ve made me cry, my poppet,’ said Isabel. ‘However did you manage that? You tiny little, perfect little thing.’ She lifted the baby from the bath like a sacred offering, laid her on a soft, white towel, and began to dab her dry, like blotting ink so as not to smudge it – as though if she were not careful she could erase it altogether. The baby lay patiently while she was dusted with talcum, a new nappy pinned. Isabel did not hesitate as she went to the chest of drawers in the nursery and chose from the various unworn garments. She took out a yellow dress with ducklings on the bodice, and fitted the child carefully into it. Humming a lullaby, skipping bars here and there, she opened the palm of the tiny hand and considered its lines: there from the moment of birth – a path already mapped, which had brought her here, to this shore. ‘Oh, my beautiful, beautiful little thing,’ she said. But the exhausted baby was now fast asleep, taking small, shallow breaths; occasionally giving a shiver. Isabel held her in one arm as she went about putting a sheet into the cot, shaking out the blanket she had crocheted from soft lambs’ wool. She could not quite bring herself to put the baby down – not just yet. In a place far beyond awareness, the flood of chemicals which until so recently had been preparing her body for motherhood, conspired to engineer her feelings, guide her muscles. Instincts which had been thwarted rushed back to life. She took the baby into the kitchen and rested her on her lap as she searched through the book of babies’ names. A lightkeeper accounts for things. Every article in the light station is listed, stored, maintained, inspected. No item escapes official scrutiny. The Deputy Director of Lights lays claim to everything from the tubes for the burners to the ink for the logs, from the brooms in the cupboard to the boot scraper by the door. Each is documented in the leather-bound Register of Equipment – even the sheep and the goats. Nothing is thrown away, nothing is disposed of without formal approval from Fremantle or, if it is very costly, Melbourne. Lord help the keeper who is down a box of mantles or a gallon of oil and cannot explain it. No matter how remote their lives, like moths in a glass case, the lightkeepers are pinned down, scrutinised, powerless to escape. You can’t trust the Lights to just anyone. The logbook tells the tale of the keeper’s life in the same steady pen. The exact minute the light was lit, the exact minute it was put out the following morning. The weather, the ships that passed. Those that signalled, those that inched by on a squally sea, too intent on dealing with the waves to break into Morse or – still sometimes – International Code, about where they came from or where they were bound. Once in a while, a keeper might have a little joke to himself, decorating the start of a new month with a scroll or a curlicue. He might craftily record that the Inspector of Lights has confirmed his long-service leave, on the basis that there’s no nay-saying what’s written there. But that’s as far as liberties are taken. The log is the gospel truth. Janus isn’t a Lloyds station: it’s not one the ships depend on for forecasts, so once Tom closes the pages on the book, it is unlikely that any eyes will glance at it again, perhaps ever. But he feels a particular peace when he writes. The wind is still measured using the system from the age of sail: ‘calm (0–2, sufficient wind for working ships)’ to ‘hurricane (12 –no sail can stand, even running)’. He relishes the language. When he thinks back to the chaos, the years of manipulating facts, or the impossibility of knowing, let alone describing, what the bloody hell was going on while explosions shattered the ground all around him, he enjoys the luxury of stating a simple truth. It was therefore the logbook that first played on Tom’s mind that day the boat arrived. It was second nature to him to report any little thing that might have significance, bound not only by the rules of his employment, but by Commonwealth law. His information might be only one tiny piece of a puzzle, a piece he alone could contribute, and it was vital that he do so. A distress flare, a wisp of smoke on the horizon, a bit of metal washed up that might turn out to be wreckage – all were recorded in his steady, efficient hand, the letters sloping gently and evenly forward. He sat at the desk below the lantern room, his fountain pen waiting faithfully to report the day. A man was dead. People should be notified; enquiries made. He drew more ink into the pen, even though it was almost full. He checked back over a few details on previous pages, then went to the very first entry he had ever recorded, that grey Wednesday he had arrived on Janus six years before. The days had followed like the rise and fall of the tides since then, and through all of them – when he was dog-tired from urgent repairs, or on watch all night during a storm, or wondering what the hell he was doing there, even the desperate days of Isabel’s miscarriages – there was never one when putting ink to the page made him so uneasy. But she had begged him to wait a day. His thoughts revisited the afternoon just two weeks earlier when he had returned from fishing, to be greeted by Isabel’s cries. ‘Tom! Tom, quick!’ Running into the cottage, he had found her lying on the kitchen floor. ‘Tom! Something’s wrong.’ She was groaning between words. ‘It’s coming! The baby’s coming.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Of course I’m not sure!’ she spat. ‘I don’t know what’s going on! I just – Oh, sweet Jesus, Tom, it hurts!’ ‘Let me help you up,’ he urged, kneeling down beside her. ‘No! Don’t move me.’ She was panting, battling the pain for each breath, moaning the phrases. ‘It hurts too much. Oh God make this stop!’ she cried, as blood seeped through her dress and onto the floor. This was different from before – Isabel was nearly seven months along, and Tom’s previous experience was of little help. ‘Tell me what to do, Izz. What do you want me to do?’ She was fumbling about her clothes, trying to get her bloomers off. Tom lifted her hips and pulled them down and over her ankles as she started to moan more loudly, twisting this way and that, her cries ringing out over the island. The labour was as quick as it was early, and Tom watched helpless as a baby – it was unmistakeably a baby, his baby – emerged from Isabel’s body. It was bloody and small: a mocking, scale-model of the infant they had so long been waiting for, drowned in a wash of blood and tissue and mess from the woman so unprepared for its arrival. About a foot long from head to toe: no heavier than a bag of sugar. It made no movement, uttered no sound. He held it in his hands, torn between wonder and horror, not knowing what he was supposed to do, or feel. ‘Give her to me!’ Isabel screamed. ‘Give me my baby! Let me hold her!’ ‘A little boy,’ was all Tom could think of to say, as he handed the warm body to his wife. ‘It was a little boy.’ The wind had kept up its sullen howl. The late-afternoon sun continued to shine in through the window, laying a blanket of bright gold over the woman and her almost-baby. The 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. ‘I’ll get you a blanket.’ ‘No!’ She grabbed his hand. ‘Don’t leave us.’ Tom sat beside her, his arm around her shoulders as she sobbed against his chest. The blood had started to dry at the edges of the pools on the floor. Death, blood, comforting the wounded – all were familiar. But not like this: a woman, a baby; no explosions or mud. Everything else was exactly as it should be: the willow-pattern plates stood neatly in the dish drainer; the tea towel hung over the oven door. The cake Isabel had made that morning lay upside down on the cooling rack, the tin still covered with a damp cloth. After a while, Tom said, ‘What shall we do? With the – with him?’ Isabel looked at the cold creature in her arms. ‘Light the chip heater.’ Tom glanced at her. ‘Light it, please.’ Still confused, but wary of upsetting her, Tom rose to his feet and went to light the water heater. When he returned, she said, ‘Fill the laundry tub. When the water’s warm.’ ‘If you want a bath I’ll carry you, Izz.’ ‘Not for me. I have to wash him. Then in the linen cupboard, there are the good sheets – the ones I embroidered. Will you bring one?’ ‘Izz, love, there’ll be time for all that. You’re what matters most right now. I’ll go and signal. Get a boat sent out.’ ‘No!’ Her voice was fierce. ‘No! I don’t want – I don’t want anyone else here. I don’t want anyone else to know. Not yet.’ ‘But sweet, you’ve lost so much blood. You’re white as a ghost. We should get a doctor out here to take you back.’ ‘The tub, Tom. Please?’ When the water was warm, Tom filled the metal tub, and lowered it to the floor beside Isabel. He handed her a flannel. She dipped it in the water, and gently, gently, with the cloth covering her fingertip, began to stroke the face, smoothing away the watery blood that covered the translucent skin. The baby stayed at his prayers, locked in some secret conversation with God, as she lowered the cloth into the water to rinse it. She squeezed it and began again, watching closely, perhaps hoping that the eyes might flicker, or the minuscule fingers twitch. ‘Izz,’ Tom said softly, touching her hair, ‘you’ve got to listen to me now. I’m going to make you some tea, with a lot of sugar in it, and I need you to drink it for me, all right? And I’m going to get a blanket to put over you. And I’m going to clean things up here a bit. You don’t have to go anywhere, but you have to let me take care of you now. No arguments. I’m going to give you some morphine tablets for the pain, and some iron pills, and you’re going to take them for me.’ His voice was gentle and calm, simply reciting some facts. Transfixed by ritual, Isabel continued to dab away at the body, the umbilical cord still attached to the afterbirth on the floor. She hardly raised her head as Tom draped a blanket over her shoulders. He came back with a bucket and a cloth, and on his hands and knees, started to sponge up the blood and mess. Isabel lowered the body into the bath to wash it, taking care not to submerge the face. She dried it with the towel, and wrapped it in a fresh one, still with the placenta, so that it was bound up like a papoose. ‘Tom, will you spread the sheet on the table?’ He moved the cake tin aside and laid out the embroidered sheet, folded in half. Isabel handed him the bundle. ‘Lay him down on it,’ she said, and he rested the little body there. ‘Now we need to look after you,’ said Tom. ‘There’s still hot water. Come and let’s get you clean. Come on, lean on me. Slowly does it now. Slowly, slowly.’ Thick drops of scarlet splashed a trail as he led her from the kitchen into the bathroom, where this time it was he who dabbed her face with a flannel, rinsing it in the basin, and starting again. An hour later, in a clean nightgown, her hair tied back in a plait, Isabel lay in bed. As Tom stroked her face, she eventually surrendered to exhaustion and the morphine tablets. Back in the kitchen, he finished cleaning up, and put the soiled linen into the laundry trough to soak. As darkness fell, he sat at the table and lit the lamp. He said a prayer over the little body. The vastness, the tiny body, eternity and the clock that accused the time of passing: it all made even less sense here than it had in Egypt or France. He had seen so many deaths. But there was something about the quietness of this one: as though, in the absence of the gunfire and the shouting, he were observing it un-obscured for the first time. The men he had accompanied to the border of life would be mourned by a mother, but on the battlefield, the loved ones were far away and beyond imagining. To see a child torn away from his mother at the very moment of birth – torn away from the only woman in the world Tom cared about – was a more dreadful kind of pain. He glanced again at the shadows cast by the baby, and beside it, the cake covered with the cloth, like a shrouded twin. ‘Not yet, Tom. I’ll tell them when I’m ready,’ Isabel had insisted the following day, as she lay in bed. ‘But your mum and dad – they’ll want to know. They’re expecting you home on the next boat. They’re expecting their first grandchild.’ Isabel had looked at him, helpless. ‘Exactly! They’re expecting their first grandchild, and I’ve lost him.’ ‘They’ll be worried for you, Izz.’ ‘Then why upset them? Please, Tom. It’s our business. My business. We don’t have to tell the whole world about it. Let them have their dream a bit longer. I’ll send a letter when the boat comes again in June.’ ‘But that’s weeks away!’ ‘Tom, I just can’t.’ A tear dropped on her nightgown. ‘At least they’ll have a few more happy weeks …’ So, he had given in to her wish, and let the logbook stay silent. But that was different – it was a personal matter. The arrival of the dinghy left no such leeway. Now, he began by recording the steamer he had seen that morning, the Manchester Queen bound for Cape Town. Then he noted the calm conditions, the temperature, and put down his pen. Tomorrow. He would tell the whole story of the boat’s arrival tomorrow, once he had sent the signal. He paused for a moment to consider whether to leave a space so that he could come back and fill it in, or whether it was best simply to imply that the boat had arrived later than it had. He left a space. He would signal in the morning and say that they had been too preoccupied with the baby to make contact sooner. The log would tell the truth, but a bit late. Just one day. He caught sight of his reflection in the glass over the ‘Notice under the Lighthouses Act 1911’ which hung on the wall, and for a moment did not recognise the face he saw there. ‘I’m not exactly an expert in this department,’ Tom said to Isabel on the afternoon of the baby’s arrival. ‘And you never will be if you stand around like that. I just need you to hold her while I check the bottle’s warm enough. Come on. She won’t bite,’ she said, smiling. ‘Not for now, at any rate.’ The child was barely the length of Tom’s forearm, but he took her as though he were handling an octopus. ‘Just stay still a minute,’ said Isabel, arranging his arms. ‘All right. Keep them like that. And now …’ she made a final adjustment, ‘she’s all yours for the next two minutes.’ She went through to the kitchen. It was the first time Tom had ever been alone with a baby. He stayed as if standing to attention, terrified of failing inspection. The child started to wriggle, kicking her feet and arms in a manoeuvre which flummoxed him. ‘Steady on! Be fair on a bloke, now,’ he implored as he tried to get a better grip. ‘Remember to keep her head supported,’ Isabel called. Immediately he slipped a hand up to the baby’s scalp, registering its smallness in the palm of his hand. She squirmed again, so he rocked her gently. ‘Come on, be a sport. Play fair with your Uncle Tom.’ As she blinked at him, and looked right into his eyes, Tom was suddenly aware of an almost physical ache. She was giving him a glimpse of a world he would now surely never know. Isabel returned with the bottle. ‘Here.’ She put it into Tom’s hand and guided it to the baby’s mouth, demonstrating how to tap gently at her lips until she latched on. Tom was absorbed by how the process performed itself. The very fact that the baby required nothing of him stirred a sense of reverence for something far beyond his comprehension. When Tom went back to the light, Isabel busied herself around the kitchen, preparing dinner while the child slept on. As soon as she heard a cry, she hurried to the nursery, and lifted her from the cot. The baby was fractious, and again nuzzled into Isabel’s breast, starting to suck at the thin cotton of her blouse. ‘Oh, my darling, are you still hungry? Old Doc Griffiths’ manual says to be careful not to give you too much. But maybe just a drop …’ She warmed a little more milk and offered the bottle to the baby. But this time the child turned her head away from the teat and cried as she pawed instead at the inviting, warm nipple that touched her cheek through the cloth. ‘Come on, here you are, here’s the bottle, sweet thing,’ Isabel cooed, but the baby became more distressed, kicking her arms and legs and turning in to Isabel’s chest. Isabel remembered the fresh agony of the arrival of the milk, making her breasts heavy and sore with no baby to suckle – it had seemed a particularly cruel mechanism of nature. Now, this infant was seeking desperately for her milk, or perhaps just for comfort, now that immediate starvation had been staved off. She paused for a long moment, her thoughts swirling with the crying and the longing and the loss. ‘Oh, little sweetheart,’ she murmured, and slowly unbuttoned her blouse. Seconds later, the child had latched on fast, sucking contentedly, though only a few drops of milk came. They had been like that for a good while when Tom entered the kitchen. ‘How’s the—’ He stopped in mid sentence, arrested at the sight. Isabel looked up at him, her face a mixture of innocence and guilt. ‘It was the only way I could get her to settle.’ ‘But … Well …’ Alarmed, Tom couldn’t even frame his questions. ‘She was desperate. Wouldn’t take the bottle …’ ‘But – but she took it earlier, I saw her …’ ‘Yes, because she was starving. Probably literally.’ Tom continued to stare, completely out of his depth. ‘It’s the most natural thing in the world, Tom. The best possible thing I could do for her. Don’t look so shocked.’ She reached out a hand to him. ‘Come here, darl. Give me a smile.’ He took her hand, but remained bewildered. And deep within, his uneasiness grew. That afternoon, Isabel’s eyes were alive with a light Tom had not seen for years. ‘Come and look!’ she exclaimed. ‘Isn’t she a picture? She fits just beautifully!’ She gestured to the wickerwork cot, in which the child slept peacefully, her tiny chest rising and falling in a miniature echo of the waves around the island. ‘Snug as a walnut in a shell, isn’t she?’ said Tom. ‘I’d say she’s not three months old yet.’ ‘How can you tell?’ ‘I looked it up.’ Tom raised an eyebrow. ‘In Dr Griffiths. I’ve picked some carrots and some turnips, and I’ve made a stew with the last of the mutton. I want to have a special tea tonight.’ Tom frowned, puzzled. ‘We need to welcome Lucy, and say a prayer for her poor father.’ ‘If that’s who he was,’ said Tom. ‘And Lucy?’ ‘Well she needs a name. Lucy means “light”, so it’s perfect, isn’t it?’ ‘Izzy Bella.’ He smiled, then stroked her hair, gently serious. ‘Be careful, sweet. I don’t want to see you upset …’ As Tom lit up for the evening, he still couldn’t drive away the uneasiness, nor could he tell whether it came from the past – reawakened grief – or from foreboding. As he made his way down the narrow, winding stairs, across each of the metal landings, he felt a heaviness in his chest, and a sense of sliding back into a darkness he thought he had escaped. That night, they sat down to dinner accompanied by the snuffling of the child, the occasional gurgle bringing a smile to Isabel’s lips. ‘I wonder what will become of her?’ she pondered aloud. ‘It’s sad to think she could end up in an orphanage. Like Sarah Porter’s little boy.’ Later they made love for the first time since the stillbirth. Isabel seemed different to Tom: assured, relaxed. She kissed him afterwards and said, ‘Let’s plant a rose garden when spring comes. One that’ll be here years after we’re gone.’ ‘I’ll send the signal this morning,’ Tom said just after dawn, as he returned from extinguishing the light. The pearl-shell glow of day stole into the bedroom and caressed the baby’s face. She had woken in the night and Isabel had brought her in to sleep between them. She put her finger to her lips as she nodded towards the sleeping infant, and rose from the bed to lead Tom into the kitchen. ‘Sit down, love, and I’ll make tea,’ she whispered, and marshalled cups, pot and kettle as quietly as she could. As she put the kettle on the stove, she said, ‘Tom, I’ve been thinking.’ ‘What about, Izzy?’ ‘Lucy. It can’t just be a coincidence that she turned up so soon after …’ The sentence did not need completing. ‘We can’t just ship her off to an orphanage.’ She turned to Tom and took his hands in hers. ‘Sweetheart, I think she should stay with us.’ ‘Fair go now, darl! She’s a lovely baby, but she doesn’t belong to us. We can’t keep her.’ ‘Why not? Think about it. I mean, practically speaking, who’s to know she’s here?’ ‘When Ralph and Bluey come in a few weeks, they’ll know, for a start.’ ‘Yes, but it occurred to me last night that they won’t know she’s not ours. Everyone still thinks I’m expecting. They’ll just be surprised she arrived early.’ Tom watched, his mouth open. ‘But … Izzy, are you in your right mind? Do you realise what you’re suggesting?’ ‘I’m suggesting kindness. That’s all. Love for a baby. I’m suggesting, sweetheart,’ she clasped his hands tighter, ‘that we accept this gift that’s been sent to us. How long have we wanted a baby, prayed for a baby?’ Turning to the window, Tom put his hands on his head and started to laugh, then stretched his arms up in appeal. ‘For heaven’s sakes, Isabel! When I tell them about the fellow in the boat, eventually someone will know who he is. And they’ll work out that there was a baby. Maybe not straight away, but in the long run …’ ‘Then I think you shouldn’t tell them.’ ‘Not tell them?’ His tone was suddenly sober. She stroked his hair. ‘Don’t tell them, sweetheart. We’ve done nothing wrong except give shelter to a helpless baby. We can give the poor man a decent burial. And the boat, well – just set it adrift again.’ ‘Izzy, Izzy! You know I’d do anything for you, darl, but – whoever that man is and whatever he’s done, he deserves to be dealt with properly. And lawfully, for that matter. What if the mother’s not dead, and he’s got a wife fretting, waiting for them both?’ ‘What woman would let her baby out of her sight? Face it, Tom: she must have drowned.’ She clasped his hand again. ‘I know how much your rules mean to you, and I know that this is technically breaking them. But what are those rules for? They’re to save lives! That’s all I’m saying we should do, sweetheart: save this life. She’s here and she needs us and we can help her. Please.’ ‘Izzy, I can’t. This isn’t up to me. Don’t you understand?’ Her face darkened. ‘How can you be so hard-hearted? All you care about is your rules and your ships and your bloody light.’ These were accusations Tom had heard before, when, wild with grief after her miscarriages, Isabel had let loose her rage against the only person there – the man who continued to do his duty, who comforted her as best he could, but kept his own grieving to himself. Once again, he sensed her close to a dangerous brink, perhaps closer this time than she had ever been. CHAPTER 11 AN INQUISITIVE GULL watched tom from its seaweed-cushioned rock. It followed him with an implacable eye as he wrapped the body, now pungent with that smell of the dead, in the canvas. It was hard to tell what the man might have been in life. His face was neither very old nor very young. He was slight; blond. He had a small scar on his left cheek. Tom wondered who missed him; who might have cause to love or hate him. The old graves from the shipwreck lay on low ground, near the beach. As he set about digging the fresh hole, his muscles took over, executing their familiar task from blind memory in a ritual he had never expected to repeat. The first time he had reported for the daily burial parade he had vomited at the sight of the corpses stretched out side by side, waiting for his shovel. After a while, it became just a job. He would hope to get the skinny bloke, or the one with his legs blown off, because he was a bloody sight easier to move. Bury them. Mark the grave. Salute, and walk away. That’s how it was. Hoping for the one with the most bits blown off: Tom went cold at the thought that there had seemed nothing strange about that back then. The shovel gave a gasp at each contact with the sandy soil. Once the ground had been patted back into a neat mound, he stopped for a moment to pray for whoever the poor wretch was, but he found himself whispering, ‘Forgive me, Lord, for this, and all my sins. And forgive Isabel. You know how much goodness there is in her. And you know how much she’s suffered. Forgive us both. Have mercy.’ He crossed himself and returned to the boat, ready to drag it back into the water. He gave it a heave, and a ray of light pricked his eyes as the sun glinted off something. He peered into the hull of the dinghy. Something shiny was wedged under the rib of the bow, and resisted his first attempt to grasp it. After pulling for a moment he prised away a cold, hard shape, which came to life, jangling: a silver rattle, embossed with cherubs and hallmarked. He turned it over and over, as if waiting for it to speak to him, to give him some kind of clue. He thrust it in his pocket: any number of stories might account for the arrival of this strange pair on the island, but only telling himself Izzy’s story that the child was an orphan would allow him to sleep at night. It did not bear thinking beyond that, and he needed to avoid any proof to the contrary. He fixed his eyes on the line where the ocean met the sky like a pair of pursed lips. Better not to know. He made sure that the boat had been picked up by the southerly current before wading back in to the beach. He was grateful for the salty stink of the green-black seaweed rotting on the rocks, which washed the smell of death from his nostrils. A tiny purple sand crab ventured out from under a ledge, sidled busily over to a dead blow-fish, swollen and spiky even in death, and began to pincer little pieces from the belly into its own mouth. Tom shivered, and started the steep trek up the path. ‘Most days, there’s nowhere to escape the wind around here. It’s all right if you’re a seagull, or an albatross: see how they just sit on the currents of air, like they’re having a rest?’ As he sat on the verandah, Tom pointed to a great silver bird which had made its way from some other island, and seemed to hang in a still sky on a thread, despite the turbulent air. The baby ignored Tom’s finger and instead gazed into his eyes, mesmerised by the movement of his lips and the deep resonance of his chest. She cooed – a high-pitched half-hiccup. Tom tried to ignore the way his heart kicked in response, and continued his discourse. ‘But in that bay, just that little cove, it’s one spot where you’re most likely to find a bit of peace and quiet, because it faces north, and the wind hardly ever comes in due north. That side’s the Indian Ocean – nice and calm and warm. Southern Ocean’s on the other side – wild and dangerous as anything. You want to keep away from that fella.’ The child flung an arm above her blanket in response, and Tom let her hand wrap around his index finger. In the week since her arrival, he had become accustomed to her gurgles, to her silent, sleeping presence in her cot, which seemed to waft through the cottage like the smell of baking or flowers. It worried him that he could find himself listening out for her to wake in the morning, or going by reflex to pick her up when she started to cry. ‘You’re falling in love with her, aren’t you?’ said Isabel, who had been watching from the doorway. Tom frowned, and she said with a smile, ‘It’s impossible not to.’ ‘All those little expressions she does …’ ‘You’re going to be a beaut dad.’ He shifted in his chair. ‘Izz, it’s still wrong, not reporting it.’ ‘Just look at her. Does she look like we’ve done anything wrong?’ ‘But – that’s just it. We don’t need to do anything wrong. We could report her now and apply to adopt her. It’s not too late, Izz. We can still make it right.’ ‘Adopt her?’ Isabel stiffened. ‘They’d never send a baby to a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere: no doctor; no school. No church probably worries them the most. And even if they did put her up for adoption, they’d want to give her to some couple in a town somewhere. And besides, it takes forever to go through the rigmarole. They’d want to meet us. You’d never get leave to go and see them, and we’re not due back onshore for another year and a half.’ She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I know we’ll cope. I know you’re going to be a wonderful dad. But they don’t.’ She gazed at the baby, and put a finger to her soft cheek. ‘Love’s bigger than rulebooks, Tom. If you’d reported the boat, she’d be stuck in some dreadful orphanage by now.’ She rested her hand on his arm. ‘Our prayers have been answered. The baby’s prayers have been answered. Who’d be ungrateful enough to send her away?’ The simple fact was that, sure as a graft will take and fuse on a rose bush, the rootstock of Isabel’s motherhood – her every drive and instinct, left raw and exposed by the recent stillbirth – had grafted seamlessly to the scion, the baby which needed mothering. Grief and distance bound the wound, perfecting the bond with a speed only nature could engineer. When Tom came down from the lantern room that evening, Isabel was sitting beside the first fire of the autumn, nursing the baby in the rocking chair he had made four years ago now. She hadn’t noticed him, and he watched her in silence for a moment. She seemed to handle the child by sheer instinct, incorporating her into every move. He fought back his gnawing doubt. Perhaps Isabel was right. Who was he to part this woman from a baby? In her hands was the Book of Common Prayer, to which Isabel had turned more frequently after the first miscarriage. Now, she read silently ‘The Churching of Women’, prayers for women after childbirth. ‘ Lo, children and the fruit of the womb: are an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord … The next morning, Isabel stood beside Tom below the lantern room, holding the baby as he tapped out the signal. He had thought carefully about the wording. His fingers were unsteady as he began: he had been dreading sending news of the stillbirth, but this felt much worse. ‘Baby arrived early stop took us both by surprise stop Isabel recovering well stop no need for medical help stop little girl stop Lucy—’ He turned to Isabel. ‘Anything else?’ ‘The weight. People always ask the weight.’ She thought back to Sarah Porter’s baby. ‘Say seven pounds one ounce.’ Tom looked at her in surprise at the ease with which the lie came to her. He turned back to the key and tapped out the figures. When the reply arrived, he transcribed it and noted it in the signals book. ‘Congratulations stop marvellous news stop have officially recorded increase in Janus population as per regulations stop Ralph and Bluey send cheers stop grandparents will be informed pronto stop.’ He sighed, aware of a pressure in his chest, and waited a while before going to report the response to Isabel. In the weeks that followed, Isabel bloomed. She sang as she went about the cottage. She could not keep from showering Tom with hugs and kisses all through the day. Her smile dazzled him with its sheer uninhibited joy. And the baby? The baby was peaceful, and trusting. She did not question the embrace which held her, the hands which caressed her, the lips which kissed her and crooned, ‘Mamma’s here, Lucy, Mamma’s here,’ as she was rocked to sleep. There was no denying that the child was thriving. Her skin seemed to glow with a soft halo. Isabel’s breasts responded to the baby’s suckling by producing milk again within weeks, the ‘relactation’ Dr Griffiths described in clinical detail, and the child fed without a moment’s hesitation, as though the two of them had agreed some sort of contract. But Tom took to staying a fraction longer in the lantern room in the mornings after extinguishing the light. Time and again he would catch himself turning back the page of the log to 27 April, and staring at the blank space. You could kill a bloke with rules, Tom knew that. And yet sometimes they were what stood between man and savagery, between man and monsters. The rules that said you took a prisoner rather than killed a man. The rules that said you let the stretchers cart the enemy off from no man’s land as well as your own men. But always, it would come down to the simple question: could he deprive Isabel of this baby? If the child was alone in the world? Could it really be right to drag her away from a woman who adored her, to some lottery of Fate? At night, Tom began to dream he was drowning, flinging his arms and legs desperately to find ground somewhere, but there was nothing to stand on, nothing to hold him afloat except a mermaid, whose tail he would grasp and who would then pull him deeper and deeper into the dark water until he awoke gasping and sweating, while Isabel slept beatifically beside him. CHAPTER 12 ‘GEDDAY, RALPH. GOOD to see you. Where’s Blue?’ ‘ ‘Back here!’ shouted the deckhand from the stern, hidden from view by some fruit crates. ‘How ya doing, Tom? Glad to see us?’ ‘Always, mate – you’re the blokes with the grog, aren’t you?’ he laughed as he secured the line. The old engine chugged and spluttered as the boat drew alongside, filling the air with thick diesel fumes. It was mid-June, the first time the store boat had visited since the baby’s arrival seven weeks earlier. ‘Flying fox is set up. Got the winch all ready too.’ ‘Struth, you’re a bit keen, Tom!’ Ralph exclaimed. ‘We don’t want to rush things now, do we? It’s a grand day. We can take our time. We’ve got to see the new arrival, after all! My Hilda’s piled me up like a packhorse with things for the little ’un, not to mention the proud grandparents.’ As Ralph strode off the gangway he grabbed Tom in a bear hug. ‘Congratulations, son. Bloody marvellous. Especially after – after all that’s happened before.’ Bluey followed suit. ‘Yeah, good on you. Ma sends all her best too.’ Tom’s eyes wandered to the water. ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.’ As they hiked up the path, Isabel was silhouetted against a washing line of nappies strung out like signal flags flapping in the brisk wind. Strands of her hair escaped from the roll she had just pinned it in. Ralph held his arms out as he approached her. ‘Well, can’t you just tell, hey? Nothing makes a girl bloom like having a littlie. Roses in your cheeks and a shine in your hair, just like my Hilda used to get with each of ours.’ Isabel blushed at the compliment, and gave the old man a quick kiss. She kissed Bluey, too, who bowed his head and muttered, ‘Congratulations, Mrs S.’ ‘Come inside, all of you. Kettle’s boiled, and there’s cake,’ she said. As they sat at the old deal table, Isabel’s glance strayed now and then to the child asleep in her basket. ‘You were the talk of every woman in Partageuse, having your baby on your own like that. Of course, the farmers’ wives didn’t turn a hair – Mary Linford said how she’d had three without any help. But them in town, they were mighty impressed. I hope Tom wasn’t too useless?’ The couple exchanged a look. Tom was about to speak, but Isabel took his hand and squeezed it tight. ‘He’s been wonderful. I couldn’t ask for a better husband.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘She’s a real pretty little thing, from what I can see,’ said Bluey. But all that peeped out from the fluffy blanket was a delicate face in a bonnet. ‘She’s got Tom’s nose, hasn’t she?’ chipped in Ralph. ‘Well …’ Tom hesitated. ‘Not sure my nose is what you want a baby girl to have!’ ‘I take your point!’ Ralph chuckled. ‘Right, Mr Sherbourne, my friend, I need your autograph on the forms. Might as well sort them out now.’ Tom was relieved to get up from the table. ‘Righto. Come through to the office, Captain Addicott, sir,’ he said, leaving Bluey cooing over the basket. The young man reached into the cot and jangled the rattle at the baby, who was now wide awake. She watched it intently, and he jiggled it again. ‘You’re a lucky one, aren’t you, getting a fancy silver rattle! Fit for a princess: I’ve never seen anything so grand! Angels on the handle and everything. Angels for an angel … And your nice fluffy blanket …’ ‘Oh, they were left over from …’ Isabel’s voice dropped, ‘from before.’ Bluey blushed. ‘Sorry. Putting my foot in it. I … Better get on with unloading. Thanks for the cake,’ and he beat a retreat through the kitchen door. Janus Rock, June 1926 Dear Mum and Dad, Well, God has sent us an angel to keep us company. Baby Lucy has captured our hearts! She’s a beautiful little girl – absolutely perfect. She sleeps well and feeds well. She’s never any trouble. I wish you could see her and hold her. Every day she looks a bit different, and I know by the time you see her she’ll have lost her baby looks. She’ll be a toddler when we come back on shore. But in the mean time, here’s the nearest thing to a picture. I dipped the sole of her foot in cochineal! (You have to be inventive on the Lights …) See masterpiece attached. Tom is a wonderful dad. Janus seems so different now that Lucy’s here. At the moment it’s pretty easy to look after her – I pop her in her basket and she comes with me when I have to get the eggs or do the milking. It might be a bit harder when she starts to crawl. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I want to tell you so much about her – how her hair is dark, how beautiful she smells after her bath. Her eyes are quite dark too. But I can’t do her justice. She’s much too wonderful to describe. I’ve only known her a few weeks and already I can’t imagine my life without her. Well, ‘Grandma and Grandpa’ (!), I’d better finish this so that the boat can take it, otherwise it’ll be another three months before you get it! With fondest love, Isabel P.S. I’ve just read your letter from the boat this morning. Thanks for the beautiful bunny rug. And the doll is just lovely. The books are wonderful too. I tell her nursery rhymes all the time, so she’ll like these new ones. P.P.S. Tom says thanks for the jumper. Winter’s starting to bite out here! The new moon was barely a crescent stitched into the darkening sky. Tom and Isabel were sitting on the verandah as the light swept around far above them. Lucy had fallen asleep in Tom’s arms. ‘It’s hard to breathe differently from her, isn’t it?’ he said, gazing at the baby. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘It’s like a kind of spell, isn’t it? Whenever she’s asleep like this, I end up breathing in the same rhythm. A bit like I end up doing things in time to the turning of the light.’ Almost to himself, he said, ‘It scares me.’ Isabel smiled. ‘It’s just love, Tom. No need to be scared of love.’ Tom felt a shiver creep through him. Just as he couldn’t now imagine having lived in this world without meeting Isabel, he realised that Lucy, too, was making her way inside his heart. And he wished she belonged there. Anyone who’s worked on the Offshore Lights can tell you about it – the isolation, and the spell it casts. Like sparks flung off the furnace that is Australia, these beacons dot around it, flickering on and off, some of them only ever seen by a handful of living souls. But their isolation saves the whole continent from isolation – keeps the shipping lanes safe, as vessels steam the thousands of miles to bring machines and books and cloth, in return for wool and wheat, coal and gold: the fruits of ingenuity traded for the fruits of earth. The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focussing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm – the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you’re wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind. So Isabel floats further and further into her world of divine benevolence, where prayers are answered, where babies arrive by the will of God and the working of currents. ‘Tom, I wonder how we can be so lucky?’ she muses. She watches in awe as her blessed daughter grows and thrives. She revels in the discoveries each day brings for this little being: rolling over; starting to crawl; the first, faltering sounds. The storms gradually follow winter to another corner of the earth, and summer comes, bearing a paler blue sky, a sharper gold sun. ‘Up you come,’ Isabel laughs, and hoists Lucy onto her hip as the three of them stroll down the path to the glinting beach for a picnic. Tom picks different leaves – sea-grass, pig-face – and Lucy smells them, chews on their ends, pulling faces at the strange sensations. He gathers tiny posies of rose banjine, or shows her the shimmering scales of a trevally or a blue mackerel he has caught off the rocks on the side of the island where the ocean floor drops away into sudden darkness. On still nights, Isabel’s voice carries across the air in a soothing lilt as she reads Lucy tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the nursery, while Tom works on repairs in the shed. Whatever the rights and the wrongs of it, Lucy was here now, and Isabel couldn’t have been a better mother. Every night in prayer she gave thanks to God for her family, her health, her much-blessed life, and prayed to be worthy of the gifts he showered on her. Days broke and receded like waves on the beach, leaving barely a trace of the time that passed in this tiny world of working and sleeping and feeding and watching. Isabel shed a tear when she put away some of Lucy’s earliest baby things. ‘Seems only yesterday she was tiny, and now look at her,’ she mused to Tom, as she folded them carefully away in tissue paper – a dummy, her rattle, her first baby dresses, a tiny pair of kid booties. Just like any mother might do, anywhere in the world. When the blood didn’t come, Isabel was excited. When she had given up all hope of another child, her expectations were about to be confounded. She would wait a little longer, keep praying, before saying anything to Tom. But she found her thoughts drifting off to daydreams about a brother or sister for Lucy. Her heart was full. Then the bleeding returned with a vengeance, heavier and more painful, in a pattern she couldn’t fathom. Her head would ache, sometimes; she would sweat at night. Then months would pass with no blood at all. ‘I’ll go and see Dr Sumpton when we get our shore leave. No need to fuss,’ she told Tom. She carried on without complaint. ‘I’m strong as an ox, darl. There’s nothing to worry about.’ She was in love – with her husband, and with her baby – and that was enough. The months trailed by, marked with the peculiar rituals of the lighthouse – lighting up, hoisting the ensign, draining the mercury bath to filter out stray oil. All the usual form-filling, and compliance with the bullying correspondence from the Foreman Artificer about how any damage to the vapour tubes could only be caused by lightkeeper negligence, not faulty workmanship. The logbook changed from 1926 to 1927 in mid-page: there was no wasting paper in the CLS – the books were expensive. Tom pondered the institutional indifference to the arrival of a new year – as though the Lights were not impressed by something as prosaic as the mere effluction of time. And it was true – the view from the gallery on New Year’s Day was indistinguishable from that of New Year’s Eve. Occasionally, he would still find himself revisiting the page for 27 April 1926, until the book opened there of its own accord. Isabel worked hard. The vegetable patch thrived; the cottage was kept clean. She washed and patched Tom’s clothes, and cooked the things he liked. Lucy grew. The light turned. Time passed. CHAPTER 13 ‘IT’S COMING UP for a year soon,’ said Isabel. ‘The twenty-seventh of April’s her birthday, near enough.’ Tom was in the workshop, filing away rust from a bent door hinge. He put down the rasp. ‘I wonder – you know, what her real birthday is.’ ‘The day she arrived is good enough for me.’ Isabel kissed the child, who was sitting astride her hip, gnawing on a crust. Lucy reached out her arms to Tom. ‘Sorry, littlie. My hands are filthy. You’re better off with Mamma just now.’ ‘I can’t believe how much she’s grown. She weighs a ton these days.’ Isabel laughed, and gave Lucy a heave to settle her higher on her hip. ‘I’m going to make a birthday cake.’ The child responded by dipping her head into Isabel’s chest and dribbling bits of bread onto her. ‘That tooth’s giving you trouble, isn’t it, sweetie? Your cheeks are so red. Shall we put some teething powder on it?’ Turning to Tom, she said, ‘See you in a while, darl. I’d better get back. Soup’s still on the stove,’ and left for the cottage. The steely light pierced the window and scoured Tom’s workbench. He had to hammer the metal straight, and each blow rang sharply off the walls. Though he found himself striking with more force than was necessary, he couldn’t stop. There was no getting away from the feeling stirred up by talk of birthdays and anniversaries. He set to work with the hammer again, the blows no less heavy, until the metal snapped from the force. He picked up the shattered halves and stared at them. Tom looked up from the armchair. A few weeks had passed since the baby’s birthday celebration. ‘It doesn’t matter what you read to her,’ said Isabel. ‘It’s just good for her to get used to hearing different words.’ She deposited Lucy on his lap and went to finish making the bread. ‘Dadadadad,’ said the child. ‘Bubububub,’ said Tom. ‘So. You want a story?’ The little hand reached out, but instead of pointing to the heavy book of fairy tales on the table beside them, grabbed a beige booklet, and pushed it at him. He laughed. ‘I don’t think you’ll like that one much, bunny rabbit. No pictures in it, for a start.’ He reached for the fairy tales, but Lucy thrust the booklet in his face. ‘Dadadadad.’ ‘If that’s the one you want, littlie!’ he laughed again. The child opened it at a page, and pointed at the words, like she had seen Tom and Isabel do. ‘All right,’ began Tom. ‘Instructions to Lightkeepers. Number twenty-nine: “The Lightkeepers are never to allow any interests, private or otherwise, to interfere with discharge of their duties, which are of the greatest importance to the safety of navigation; and they are reminded that their retention or promotion in the Service depends upon their strict obedience to orders, adherence to the rules laid down for their guidance, industry, sobriety, and the maintenance of cleanliness and good order in their own persons and families as well as in every part of the Lighthouse establishment and premises.” Number thirty: “Misconduct, disposition to quarrel, insobriety or immorality on the part of any keeper”,’ he paused to retrieve Lucy’s fingers from his nostrils, ‘“will render the offender liable to punishment or dismissal. The committing of any such offence by any member of the Lightkeeper’s family will render the offender liable to exclusion from the Lighthouse station.”’ He stopped. A chill had crept through him, and his heart beat faster. He was summoned back to the present by a tiny hand coming to rest on his chin. He pressed it to his lips, absently. Lucy grinned at him and gave him a generous kiss. ‘Come on, let’s read Sleeping Beauty instead,’ he said, and took up the fairy tales, though he found it hard to concentrate. ‘Here you are – tea and toast in bed, ladies!’ said Tom, resting the tray beside Isabel. ‘Careful, Luce,’ said Isabel. She had brought the toddler into bed that Sunday after Tom had gone to extinguish the light, and the child was clambering towards the tray to reach the small cup of tea Tom had made her too – hardly more than warm milk with a drop of colour. Tom sat beside Isabel and pulled Lucy onto his knee. ‘Here we go, Lulu,’ he said, and helped her steady the cup in both hands as she drank. He was concentrating on his task, until he became aware of Isabel’s silence, and turned to see tears in her eyes. ‘Izzy, Izzy, what’s wrong, darl?’ ‘Nothing at all, Tom. Nothing at all.’ He brushed a tear away from her cheek. ‘Sometimes I’m so happy it frightens me, Tom.’ He stroked her hair, and Lucy started to blow bubbles into the tea. ‘Listen, Miss Muffet, you going to drink that, or have you had enough for now?’ The child continued to slobber into the cup, clearly pleased with the sounds. ‘OK, I think we’ll give it a rest for now.’ He eased the cup away from her, and she responded by climbing off him and onto Isabel, still blowing bubbles of spittle. ‘Charming!’ said Isabel, laughing through her tears. ‘Come here you little monkey!’ and she blew a raspberry on her tummy. Lucy giggled and squirmed and said, ‘’gain! ’gain!’ and Isabel obliged. ‘You two are as bad as each other!’ said Tom. ‘Sometimes I feel a bit drunk with how much I love her. And you. Like if they asked me to walk one of those straight lines I couldn’t.’ ‘No straight lines on Janus, so you’re all right on that score,’ said Tom. ‘Don’t mock, Tom. It’s like I was colour-blind before Lucy, and now the world’s completely different. It’s brighter and I can see further. I’m in exactly the same place, the birds are the same, the water’s the same, the sun rises and sets just like it always did, but I never knew what for, Tom.’ She drew the child into her. ‘Lucy’s the what for … And you’re different, too.’ ‘How?’ ‘I think there are bits of you you didn’t know existed until she came along. Corners of your heart that life had shut down.’ She traced a finger along his mouth. ‘I know you don’t like to talk about the war and everything, but – well, it must have made you numb.’ ‘My feet. Made my feet numb more often than not – frozen mud’ll do that to a bloke.’ Tom could manage only half a smile at the attempted joke. ‘Stop it, Tom. I’m trying to say something. I’m being serious, for goodness’ sake, and you just send me packing with some silly joke, like I’m a child who doesn’t understand or can’t be trusted with the truth.’ This time Tom was deadly serious. ‘You don’t understand, Isabel. No civilised person should ever have to understand. And trying to describe it would be like passing on a disease.’ He turned towards the window. ‘I did what I did so that people like you and Lucy could forget it ever happened. So that it would never happen again. “The war to end all wars,” remember? It doesn’t belong here, on this island. In this bed.’ Tom’s features had hardened, and she glimpsed a resolve she’d never seen in him before – the resolve, she imagined, that had got him through everything he’d been through. ‘It’s just …’ Isabel began again, ‘well, we none of us know whether we’re around for another year or another hundred years. And I wanted to make sure you knew how thankful I am to you, Tom. For everything. Especially for giving me Lucy.’ Tom’s smile froze at the last words, and Isabel hurried on. ‘You did, darl. You understood how much I needed her, and I know that cost you, Tom. Not many men would do that for their wife.’ Jolted back from some dream world, Tom could feel his palms sweating. His heart started to race with the urge to run – anywhere, it didn’t matter where, just as long as it was away from the reality of the choice he had made, which suddenly seemed to weigh like an iron collar. ‘Time I was getting on with some work. I’ll leave you two to have your toast,’ he said, and left the room as slowly as he could manage.