М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

‘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.