М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

‘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.