Every creature needed its place of refuge.
Tom carried the lamp into the bedroom. His shadow pressed itself against the wall, a flat giant, as he pulled off his boots and stripped down to his long johns. His hair was thick with salt and his skin raw from the wind. He pulled back the sheets and climbed in, falling into dreams as his body kept up the sway of the waves and the wind. All night, far above him the light stood guard, slicing the darkness like a sword.
CHAPTER 4
Once he has extinguished the light at sunrise each morning, Tom sets off to explore another part of his new territory before getting on with the day’s work. The northern side of the island is a sheer granite cliff which sets its jaw stiffly against the ocean below. The land slopes down toward the south and slides gently under the water of the shallow lagoon. Beside its little beach is the water wheel, which carries fresh water from the spring up to the cottage: from the mainland, all the way out along the ocean floor to the island and beyond, there are fissures from which fresh water springs mysteriously. When the French described the phenomenon in the eighteenth century, it was dismissed as a myth. But sure enough, fresh water was to be found even in various parts of the ocean, like a magic trick played by nature.
He begins to shape his routine. Regulations require that each Sunday he hoist the ensign and he does, first thing. He raises it too when any “man o’ war,” as the rules put it, passes the island. He knows keepers who swear under their breath at the obligation, but Tom takes comfort from the orderliness of it. It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.
He sets about fixing things that have fallen into disrepair since the decline of Trimble Docherty. Most important is the lighthouse itself, which needs putty in the astragals of the lantern glazing. Next he gets rottenstone and sands the wood on the desk drawer where it has swollen with the weather, and goes over it with the wolf’s-head brush. He patches the green paint on the landings where it is scuffed or worn away: it will be a long while before a crew comes to paint the whole station.
The apparatus responds to his attention: the glass gleams, the brass shines, and the light rotates on its bath of mercury as smoothly as a skua gliding on currents of air. Now and again he manages to get down to the rocks to fish, or to walk along the sandy beach of the lagoon. He makes friends with the pair of black skinks which reside in the woodshed, and occasionally gives them some of the chooks’ food. He’s sparing with his rations: he won’t see the store boat for months.
It’s a hard job, and a busy one. The lightkeepers have no union—not like the men on the store boats—no one strikes for better pay or conditions. The days can leave him exhausted or sore, worried by the look of a storm front coming in at a gallop, or frustrated by the way hailstones crush the vegetable patch. But if he doesn’t think about it too hard, he knows who he is and what he’s for. He just has to keep the light burning. Nothing more.
The Father Christmas face, all red cheeks and whiskers, gave a big grin. “Well, Tom Sherbourne, how are you surviving?” Ralph didn’t wait for a reply before throwing him the fat, wet rope to wind around the bollard. Tom looked as fit and well after three months as any keeper the skipper had seen.
Tom had been waiting for supplies for the light, and had given less thought to the fresh food which would be delivered. He had also forgotten that the boat would bring post, and was surprised when, toward the end of the day, Ralph handed him some envelopes. “Almost forgot,” he said. There was a letter from the District Officer of the Lighthouse Service, retrospectively confirming his appointment and conditions. A letter from the Department of Repatriation set out certain benefits recently allowed to returned servicemen, including incapacity pension or a business loan. Neither applied to him, so he opened the next, a Commonwealth Bank statement confirming that he had earned four per cent interest on the five hundred pounds in his account. He left until last the envelope addressed by hand. He could not think of anyone who might write, and feared it might be some do-gooder sending him news of his brother or his father.
He opened it. “Dear Tom, I just thought I’d write and check that you hadn’t been blown away or swept out to sea or anything. And that the lack of roads isn’t causing you too many problems…” He skipped ahead to see the signature: “Yours truly, Isabel Graysmark.” The gist of the middle was that she hoped he wasn’t too lonely out there, and that he should be sure to stop by and say hello before he went off to wherever he was going after his Janus posting. She had decorated the letter with a little sketch of a keeper leaning against his light tower, whistling a tune, while behind him a giant whale emerged from the water, its jaws wide open. She had added for good measure: “Be sure not to get eaten by a whale before then.”
It made Tom smile. The absurdity of the picture. More than that, the innocence of it. Somehow his body felt lighter just to hold the letter in his hand.
“Can you hang on a tick?” he asked Ralph, who was gathering his things for the journey back.
Tom dashed to his desk for paper and pen. He sat down to write, before realizing he had no idea what to say. He didn’t want to say anything: just send her a smile.
Dear Isabel,
Not blown away or swept (any further) out to sea, fortunately. I have seen many whales, but none has tried to eat me so far: I’m probably not very tasty.
I am bearing up pretty well, all things considered, and coping adequately with the absence of roads. I trust you are keeping the local birdlife well fed. I look forward to seeing you before I leave Partageuse for—who knows where?—in three months’ time.
How should he sign it?
“Nearly ready?” called Ralph.
“Nearly,” he replied, and wrote, “Tom.” He sealed and addressed the envelope, and handed it to the skipper. “Any chance you could post that for me?”
Ralph looked at the address and winked. “I’ll deliver it in person. Got to go past that place anyway.”
CHAPTER 5
At the end of his six months, Tom savored the delights of Mrs. Mewett’s hospitality once again, for an unexpected reason: the Janus vacancy had become permanent. Far from finding his marbles, Trimble Docherty had lost the few he still had, and had thrown himself over the vast granite cliff-face at Albany known as the Gap, apparently convinced he was jumping onto a boat skippered by his beloved wife. So Tom had been summoned to shore to discuss the post, do the paperwork, and take some leave before he officially took up the job. By now he had proved himself so capable that Fremantle did not bother to look elsewhere to fill the position.
“Never underestimate the importance of the right wife,” Captain Hasluck had said when Tom was about to leave his office. “Old Moira Docherty could have worked the light herself, she’d been with Trimble for so long. Takes a special kind of woman to live on the Lights. When you find the right one, you want to snap her up, quick smart. Mind you, you’ll have to wait a bit now…”
As Tom wandered back to Mrs. Mewett’s, he thought about the little relics at the lighthouse—Docherty’s knitting, his wife’s jar of humbugs that sat untouched in the pantry. Lives gone, traces left. And he wondered about the despair of the man, destroyed by grief. It didn’t take a war to push you over that edge.
Two days after his return to Partageuse, Tom sat stiff as a whalebone in the Graysmarks’ lounge room, where both parents watched over their only daughter like eagles with a chick. Struggling to come up with suitable topics of conversation, Tom stuck to the weather, the wind, of which there was an abundance, and Graysmark cousins in other parts of Western Australia. It was relatively easy to steer the conversation away from himself.
As Isabel walked him to the gate afterward she asked, “How long till you go back?”
“Two weeks.”
“Then we’d better make the most of it,” she said, as though concluding a long discussion.
“Is that so?” asked Tom, as amused as he was surprised. He had a sense of being waltzed backward.
“I should ask your father first, shouldn’t I? Or your mother?” He leaned his head to one side. “I mean, if it’s not a rude question, how old are you?”
“Old enough to go on a picnic.”
“And in ordinary numbers that would make you… ?”
“Nineteen. Just about. So you can leave my parents to me,” she said, and gave him a wave as she headed back inside.
Tom set off back to Mrs. Mewett’s with a lightness in his step. Why, he could not say. He didn’t know the first thing about this girl, except that she smiled a lot, and that something inside just felt—good.
The following day, Tom approached the Graysmarks’ house, not so much nervous as puzzled, not quite sure how it was that he was heading back there so soon.
Mrs. Graysmark smiled as she opened the door. “Nice and punctual,” she noted on some invisible checklist.
“Army habits…” said Tom.
Isabel appeared with a picnic basket, which she handed to him. “You’re in charge of getting it there in one piece,” she said, and turned to kiss her mother on the cheek. “Bye, Ma. See you later.”
“Mind you keep out of the sun, now. Don’t want you spoiling your skin with freckles,” she said to her daughter. She gave Tom a look which conveyed something sterner than the words, “Enjoy your picnic. Don’t be too late back.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Graysmark. We won’t be.”
Isabel led the way as they walked beyond the few streets that marked out the town proper and approached the ocean.
“Where are we going?” asked Tom.
“It’s a surprise.”
They wandered along the dirt road which led up to the headland, bordered with dense, scrubby trees on each side. These were not the giants from the forest a mile or so further in, but wiry, stocky things, which could cope with the salt and the blasting of the wind. “It’s a bit of a walk. You won’t get too tired, will you?” she asked.
Tom laughed. “I’ll just about manage without a walking stick.”
“Well I just thought, you don’t have very far to walk on Janus, do you?”
“Believe me, getting up and down the stairs of the light all day keeps you in trim.” He was still taking stock of this girl and her uncanny ability to tip him a fraction off balance.
The trees began to thin out the further they walked, and the sounds of the ocean grew louder. “I suppose Partageuse seems dead boring, coming from Sydney,” ventured Isabel.
“Haven’t spent long enough here to know, really.”
“I suppose not. But Sydney—I imagine it as huge and busy and wonderful. The big smoke.”
“It’s pretty small fry compared to London.”
Isabel blushed. “Oh, I didn’t know you’d been there. That must be a real city. Maybe I’ll visit it one day.”
“You’re better off here, I’d say. London’s—well, it was pretty grim whenever I was there on furlough. Gray and gloomy and cold as a corpse. I’d take Partageuse any day.”
“We’re getting near the prettiest bit. Or I think it’s the prettiest.” Beyond the trees emerged an isthmus which jutted far out into the ocean. It was a long, bare strip of land a few hundred yards wide and licked by waves on all sides. “This is the Point of Point Partageuse,” said Isabel. “My favorite place is down there, on the left, where all the big rocks are.”
They walked on until they were in the center of the isthmus. “Dump the basket and follow me,” she said, and without warning she whisked off her shoes and took off, running to the black granite boulders which tumbled down into the water.
Tom caught her up as she approached the edge. There was a circle of boulders, inside which the waves sloshed and swirled. Isabel lay flat on the ground and leaned her head over the edge. “Listen,” she said. “Just listen to the sound the water makes, like it’s in a cave or a cathedral.”
Tom leaned forward to hear.
“You’ve got to lie down,” she said.
“To hear better?”
“No. So you don’t get washed away. Terrible blowhole, this. If a big wave comes without warning, you’ll be down inside the rocks before you know it.”
Tom lay down beside her and hung his head into the space, where the waves echoed and bellowed and washed about. “Reminds me of Janus.”
“What’s it like out there? You hear stories, but no one much ever actually goes there except the keeper and the boat. Or a doctor, once, years ago, when a whole ship was quarantined there with typhoid.”
“It’s like… Well, it’s like nowhere else on earth. It’s its own world.”
“They say it’s brutal, the weather.”
“It has its moments.”
Isabel sat up. “Do you get lonely?”
“Too busy to be lonely. There’s always something needs fixing or checking or recording.”
She put her head on one side, half signaling her doubt, but she let it pass. “Do you like it?”
“Yep.”
Now it was Isabel who laughed. “You don’t exactly yack a lot, do you?”
Tom stood up. “Hungry? Must be time for lunch.”
He took Isabel’s hand and helped her up. Such a petite hand, soft, with the palm covered in a fine layer of gritty sand. So delicate in his.
Isabel served him roast beef sandwiches and ginger beer, followed by fruitcake and crisp apples.
“So, do you write to all the lightkeepers who go out to Janus?” asked Tom.
“All! There aren’t that many,” said Isabel. You’re the first new one in years.”
Tom hesitated before venturing the next question. “What made you write?”
She smiled at him and took a sip of ginger beer before answering. “Because you’re fun to feed seagulls with? Because I was bored? Because I’d never sent a letter to a lighthouse before?” She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and looked down at the water. “Would you rather I hadn’t?”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t trying to… I mean…” Tom wiped his hands on his napkin. Always slightly off balance. It was a new sensation for him.
Tom and Isabel were sitting at the end of the jetty at Partageuse. It was almost the last day of 1920, and the breeze played tunes by lapping wavelets against the boat hulls and plucking the ropes on the masts. The harbor lights trailed across the water’s surface, and the sky was swept with stars.
“But I want to know everything,” said Isabel, bare feet dangling above the water. “You can’t just say, ‘Nothing else to tell.’” She’d extracted the basic details of his private-school education, and his Engineering degree from Sydney University, but was growing more frustrated. “I can tell you lots—my Gran and how she taught me piano, what I remember about my granddad, even though he died when I was little. I can tell you what it’s like to be the headmaster’s daughter in a place like Partageuse. I can tell you about my brothers, Hugh and Alfie, and how we used to muck around with the dinghy and go off fishing down the river.” She looked at the water. “I still miss those times.” Curling a lock of hair around her finger, she considered something, then took a breath. “It’s like a whole… a whole galaxy waiting for you to find out about. And I want to find out about yours.”
“What else do you want to know?”
“Well, about your family, say.”
“I’ve got a brother.”
“Am I allowed to know his name, or have you forgotten it?”
“I’m not likely to forget that in a hurry. Cecil.”
“What about your parents?”
Tom squinted at the light on top of a mast. “What about them?”
Isabel sat up, and looked deep into his eyes. “What goes on in there, I wonder?”
“My mother’s dead now. I don’t keep in touch with my father.” Her shawl had slipped of
f her shoulder, and he pulled it back up. “Are you getting a bit chilly? Want to walk back?”
“Why won’t you talk about it?”
“I’ll tell you if you really want. It’s just I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.”
“Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.”
“More’s the pity.”
Isabel straightened. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s go. Mum and Dad’ll be wondering where we’ve got to,” she said, and they walked soberly up the jetty.
That night as he lay in bed, Tom cast his mind back to the childhood Isabel had been so keen to investigate. He had never really spoken to anyone about it. But exploring the memories now, the jagged pain was like running his tongue over a broken tooth. He could see his eight-year-old self, tugging his father’s sleeve and crying, “Please! Please let her come back. Please, Daddy. I love her!” and his father wiping his hand away like a grubby mark. “You don’t mention her again in this house. You hear, son?”
As his father stalked out of the room, Tom’s brother, Cecil, five years older and at that stage a good measure taller, gave him a clip on the back of the head. “I told you, you idiot. I told you not to say it,” and followed his father, with the same officious stride, leaving the small boy standing in the middle of the lounge room. From his pocket he took a lace handkerchief, redolent with his mother’s scent, and touched it to his cheek, avoiding his tears and streaming nose. It was the feel of the cloth he wanted, the perfume, not its use.
Tom thought back to the imposing, empty house: to the silence that deadened every room with a subtly different pitch; to the kitchen smelling of carbolic, kept spotless by a long line of housekeepers. He remembered that dreaded smell of Lux flakes, and his distress as he saw the handkerchief, washed and starched by Mrs. Someone-or-other, who had discovered it in the pocket of his shorts and laundered it as a matter of course, obliterating his mother’s smell. He had searched the house for some corner, some cupboard which could bring back that blurry sweetness of her. But even in what had been her bedroom, there was only polish and mothballs, as though her ghost had finally been exorcised.
In Partageuse, as they sat in the tearoom, Isabel tried again.
“I’m not trying to hide anything,” Tom said. “It’s just that raking over the past is a waste of time.”
“And I’m not trying to pry. Only—you’ve had a whole life, a whole story, and I’ve come in late. I’m only trying to make sense of things. Make sense of you.” She hesitated, then asked delicately, “If I can’t talk about the past, am I allowed to talk about the future?”
“We can’t rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine, or wish for. It’s not the same thing.”
“OK, what do you wish for, then?”
Tom paused. “Life. That’ll do me, I reckon.” He drew a deep breath and turned to her. “What about you?”
“Oh, I wish for all sorts of things, all the time!” she exclaimed. “I wish for nice weather for the Sunday-school picnic. I wish for—don’t laugh—I wish for a good husband and a houseful of kids. The sound of a cricket ball breaking a window and the smell of stew in the kitchen. The girls’ll sing Christmas carols together and the boys’ll kick the footy… I can’t imagine not having children one day, can you?” She seemed to drift away for a moment before saying, “Of course, I wouldn’t want one yet.” She hesitated. “Not like Sarah.”
“Who?”
“My friend, Sarah Porter. Used to live down the road. We used to play cubbies together. She was a bit older, and always had to be mother.” Her expression clouded. “She got… in the family way—when she was sixteen. Her parents sent her up to Perth, out of sight. Made her give the baby to an orphanage. They said he’d be adopted, but he had a clubfoot.
“Later she got married, and the baby was all forgotten about. Then one day, she asked me if I’d come up to Perth with her, to visit the orphanage, in secret. The ‘Infant Asylum,’ just a few doors down from the proper madhouse. Oh, Tom, you’ve never seen such a sight as a ward full of motherless tots. No one to love them. Sarah couldn’t breathe a word to her husband—he’d have sent her packing. He has no idea, even now. Her baby was still there: all she could do was look. The funny thing was, I was the one who couldn’t stop crying. The look on their little faces. It really got to me. You might as well send a child straight to hell as send it to an orphanage.”
“A kid needs its mum,” said Tom, lost in a thought of his own.
Isabel said, “Sarah lives in Sydney now. I don’t hear from her any more.”
The Light Between Oceans Page 4