М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

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.’