М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

‘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?’