М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

A lightkeeper accounts for things. Every article in the light station is listed, stored, maintained, inspected. No item escapes official scrutiny. The Deputy Director of Lights lays claim to everything from the tubes for the burners to the ink for the logs, from the brooms in the cupboard to the boot scraper by the door. Each is documented in the leather-bound Register of Equipment – even the sheep and the goats. Nothing is thrown away, nothing is disposed of without formal approval from Fremantle or, if it is very costly, Melbourne. Lord help the keeper who is down a box of mantles or a gallon of oil and cannot explain it. No matter how remote their lives, like moths in a glass case, the lightkeepers are pinned down, scrutinised, powerless to escape. You can’t trust the Lights to just anyone.

The logbook tells the tale of the keeper’s life in the same steady pen. The exact minute the light was lit, the exact minute it was put out the following morning. The weather, the ships that passed. Those that signalled, those that inched by on a squally sea, too intent on dealing with the waves to break into Morse or – still sometimes – International Code, about where they came from or where they were bound. Once in a while, a keeper might have a little joke to himself, decorating the start of a new month with a scroll or a curlicue. He might craftily record that the Inspector of Lights has confirmed his long-service leave, on the basis that there’s no nay-saying what’s written there. But that’s as far as liberties are taken. The log is the gospel truth. Janus isn’t a Lloyds station: it’s not one the ships depend on for forecasts, so once Tom closes the pages on the book, it is unlikely that any eyes will glance at it again, perhaps ever. But he feels a particular peace when he writes. The wind is still measured using the system from the age of sail: ‘ calm (0–2, sufficient wind for working ships) ’ to ‘ hurricane (12 –no sail can stand, even running) ’. He relishes the language. When he thinks back to the chaos, the years of manipulating facts, or the impossibility of knowing, let alone describing, what the bloody hell was going on while explosions shattered the ground all around him, he enjoys the luxury of stating a simple truth.

It was therefore the logbook that first played on Tom’s mind that day the boat arrived. It was second nature to him to report any little thing that might have significance, bound not only by the rules of his employment, but by Commonwealth law. His information might be only one tiny piece of a puzzle, a piece he alone could contribute, and it was vital that he do so. A distress flare, a wisp of smoke on the horizon, a bit of metal washed up that might turn out to be wreckage – all were recorded in his steady, efficient hand, the letters sloping gently and evenly forward.

He sat at the desk below the lantern room, his fountain pen waiting faithfully to report the day. A man was dead. People should be notified; enquiries made. He drew more ink into the pen, even though it was almost full. He checked back over a few details on previous pages, then went to the very first entry he had ever recorded, that grey Wednesday he had arrived on Janus six years before. The days had followed like the rise and fall of the tides since then, and through all of them – when he was dog-tired from urgent repairs, or on watch all night during a storm, or wondering what the hell he was doing there, even the desperate days of Isabel’s miscarriages – there was never one when putting ink to the page made him so uneasy. But she had begged him to wait a day.

His thoughts revisited the afternoon just two weeks earlier when he had returned from fishing, to be greeted by Isabel’s cries. ‘Tom! Tom, quick!’ Running into the cottage, he had found her lying on the kitchen floor.

‘Tom! Something’s wrong.’ She was groaning between words. ‘It’s coming! The baby’s coming.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m not sure!’ she spat. ‘I don’t know what’s going on! I just – Oh, sweet Jesus, Tom, it hurts!’

‘Let me help you up,’ he urged, kneeling down beside her.

‘No! Don’t move me.’ She was panting, battling the pain for each breath, moaning the phrases. ‘It hurts too much. Oh God make this stop!’ she cried, as blood seeped through her dress and onto the floor.

This was different from before – Isabel was nearly seven months along, and Tom’s previous experience was of little help. ‘Tell me what to do, Izz. What do you want me to do?’

She was fumbling about her clothes, trying to get her bloomers off.

Tom lifted her hips and pulled them down and over her ankles as she started to moan more loudly, twisting this way and that, her cries ringing out over the island.

The labour was as quick as it was early, and Tom watched helpless as a baby – it was unmistakeably a baby, his baby – emerged from Isabel’s body. It was bloody and small: a mocking, scale-model of the infant they had so long been waiting for, drowned in a wash of blood and tissue and mess from the woman so unprepared for its arrival.

About a foot long from head to toe: no heavier than a bag of sugar. It made no movement, uttered no sound. He held it in his hands, torn between wonder and horror, not knowing what he was supposed to do, or feel.

‘Give her to me!’ Isabel screamed. ‘Give me my baby! Let me hold her!’

‘A little boy,’ was all Tom could think of to say, as he handed the warm body to his wife. ‘It was a little boy.’

The wind had kept up its sullen howl. The late-afternoon sun continued to shine in through the window, laying a blanket of bright gold over the woman and her almost-baby. The old clock on the kitchen wall still clicked its minutes with fussy punctuality. A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it. The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through the mill.

Isabel had managed to sit up a little against the wall, and she sobbed at the sight of the diminutive form, which she had dared to imagine as bigger, as stronger – as a child of this world. ‘My baby my baby my baby my baby,’ she whispered like a magic incantation that might resuscitate him. The face of the creature was solemn, a monk in deep prayer, eyes closed, mouth sealed shut: already back in that world from which he had apparently been reluctant to stray.

Still the officious hands of the clock tutted their way around. Half an hour had passed and Isabel had said nothing.

‘I’ll get you a blanket.’

‘No!’ She grabbed his hand. ‘Don’t leave us.’

Tom sat beside her, his arm around her shoulders as she sobbed against his chest. The blood had started to dry at the edges of the pools on the floor. Death, blood, comforting the wounded – all were familiar. But not like this: a woman, a baby; no explosions or mud. Everything else was exactly as it should be: the willow-pattern plates stood neatly in the dish drainer; the tea towel hung over the oven door. The cake Isabel had made that morning lay upside down on the cooling rack, the tin still covered with a damp cloth.

After a while, Tom said, ‘What shall we do? With the – with him?’

Isabel looked at the cold creature in her arms. ‘Light the chip heater.’

Tom glanced at her.

‘Light it, please.’

Still confused, but wary of upsetting her, Tom rose to his feet and went to light the water heater. When he returned, she said, ‘Fill the laundry tub. When the water’s warm.’

‘If you want a bath I’ll carry you, Izz.’

‘Not for me. I have to wash him. Then in the linen cupboard, there are the good sheets – the ones I embroidered. Will you bring one?’

‘Izz, love, there’ll be time for all that. You’re what matters most right now. I’ll go and signal. Get a boat sent out.’