М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

‘Oh, little one,’ Isabel crooned, ‘poor, poor little one,’ as the baby nuzzled her face in towards her breast. Tom could hear tears in her voice, and the memory of an invisible presence hung in the air between them.

‘She likes you,’ he said. Then, almost to himself, ‘Makes me think of how things might have been.’ He added quickly, ‘I mean … I didn’t mean … You look like you were born to it, that’s all.’ He stroked her cheek.

Isabel glanced up at him. ‘I know, love. I know what you mean. I feel the same.’

He put his arms around his wife and the child. Isabel could smell the brandy on his breath. She murmured, ‘Oh Tom, thank God we found her in time.’

Tom kissed her, then put his lips to the baby’s forehead. The three of them stayed like that for a long moment, until the child began to wriggle, thrusting a fist out from under the blanket.

‘Well,’ Tom gave a stretch as he stood up, ‘I’ll go and send a signal, report the dinghy; get them to send a boat for the body. And for Miss Muffet here.’

‘Not yet!’ Isabel said, as she touched the baby’s fingers. ‘I mean, there’s no rush to do it right this minute. The poor man’s not going to get any worse now. And this little chicken’s had quite enough of boats for the moment, I’d say. Leave it a while. Give her a chance to catch her breath.’

‘It’ll take hours for them to get here. She’ll be all right. You’ve already quietened her down, poor little thing.’

‘Let’s just wait. After all, it can’t make much difference.’

‘It’s all got to go in the log, pet. You know I’ve got to report everything straight away,’ Tom said, for his duties included noting every significant event at or near the light station, from passing ships and weather, to problems with the apparatus.

‘Do it in the morning, eh?’

‘But what if the boat’s from a ship?’

‘It’s a dinghy, not a lifeboat,’ she said.

‘Then the baby’s probably got a mother waiting for it somewhere on shore, tearing her hair out. How would you feel if it was yours?’

‘You saw the cardigan. The mother must have fallen out of the boat and drowned.’

‘Sweetheart, we don’t have any idea about the mother. Or about who the man was.’

‘It’s the most likely explanation, isn’t it? Infants don’t just wander off from their parents.’

‘Izzy, anything’s possible. We just don’t know.’

‘When did you ever hear of a tiny baby setting off in a boat without its mother?’ She held the child a fraction closer.

‘This is serious. The man’s dead, Izz.’

‘And the baby’s alive. Have a heart, Tom.’

Something in her tone struck him, and instead of simply contradicting her, he paused and considered her plea. Perhaps she needed a bit of time with a baby. Perhaps he owed her that. There was a silence, and Isabel turned to him in wordless appeal. ‘I suppose, at a pinch …’ he conceded, the words coming with great difficulty, ‘I could – leave the signal until the morning. First thing, though. As soon as the light’s out.’

Isabel kissed him, and squeezed his arm.

‘Better get back to the lantern room. I was in the middle of replacing the vapour tube,’ he said.

As he walked down the path, he heard the sweet notes of Isabel’s voice as she sang, ‘ Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly, blow the wind south o’er the bonnie blue sea .’ Though the music was tuneful, it failed to comfort him as he climbed the stairs of the light, fending off a strange uneasiness at the concession he had made.

CHAPTER 1

16th December 1918

‘YES, I REALISE that,’ Tom Sherbourne said. He was sitting in a spartan room, barely cooler than the sultry day outside. The Sydney summer rain pelted the window, and sent the people on the pavement scurrying for shelter.

‘I mean very tough.’ The man across the desk leaned forward for emphasis. ‘It’s no picnic. Not that Byron Bay’s the worst posting on the Lights, but I want to make sure you know what you’re in for.’ He tamped down the tobacco with his thumb and lit his pipe. Tom’s letter of application had told the same story as many a fellow’s around that time: born 28 September 1893; war spent in the Army; experience with the International Code and Morse; physically fit and well; honourable discharge. The rules stipulated that preference should be given to ex-servicemen.

‘It can’t—’ Tom stopped, and began again. ‘All due respect, Mr Coughlan, it’s not likely to be tougher than the Western Front.’

The man looked again at the details on the discharge papers, then at Tom, searching for something in his eyes, in his face. ‘No, son. You’re probably right on that score.’ He rattled off some rules: ‘You pay your own passage to every posting. You’re relief, so you don’t get holidays. Permanent staff get a month’s leave at the end of each three-year contract.’ He took up his fat pen and signed the form in front of him. As he rolled the stamp back and forth across the inkpad he said, ‘Welcome’ – he thumped it down in three places on the paper – ‘to the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service.’ On the form, ‘16th December 1918’ glistened in wet ink.

The six months’ relief posting at Byron Bay, up on the New South Wales coast, with two other keepers and their families, taught Tom the basics of life on the Lights. He followed that with a stint down on Maatsuyker, the wild island south of Tasmania where it rained most days of the year and the chickens blew into the sea during storms.

On the Lights, Tom Sherbourne has plenty of time to think about the war. About the faces, the voices of the blokes who had stood beside him, who saved his life one way or another; the ones whose dying words he heard, and those whose muttered jumbles he couldn’t make out, but who he nodded to anyway.

Tom isn’t one of the men whose legs trailed by a hank of sinews, or whose guts cascaded from their casing like slithering eels. Nor were his lungs turned to glue or his brains to stodge by the gas. But he’s scarred all the same, having to live in the same skin as the man who did the things that needed to be done back then. He carries that other shadow, which is cast inward.

He tries not to dwell on it: he’s seen plenty of men turned worse than useless that way. So he gets on with life around the edges of this thing he’s got no name for. When he dreams about those years, the Tom who is experiencing them, the Tom who is there with blood on his hands, is a boy of eight or so. It’s this small boy who’s up against blokes with guns and bayonets, and he’s worried because his school socks have slipped down and he can’t hitch them up because he’ll have to drop his gun to do it, and he’s barely big enough even to hold that. And he can’t find his mother anywhere.

Then he wakes and he’s in a place where there’s just wind and waves and light, and the intricate machinery that keeps the flame burning and the lantern turning. Always turning, always looking over its shoulder.

If he can only get far enough away – from people, from memory – time will do its job.

Thousands of miles away on the west coast, Janus Rock was the furthest place on the continent from Tom’s childhood home in Sydney. But Janus Light was the last sign of Australia he had seen as his troopship steamed for Egypt in 1915. The smell of the eucalypts had wafted for miles offshore from Albany, and when the scent faded away he was suddenly sick at the loss of something he didn’t know he could miss. Then, hours later, true and steady, the light, with its five-second flash, came into view – his homeland’s furthest reach – and its memory stayed with him through the years of hell that followed, like a farewell kiss. When, in June 1920, he got news of an urgent vacancy going on Janus, it was as though the light there were calling to him.