М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

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 étude ,’ 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.