The Light Between Oceans

by M. L. Stedman

  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.

  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, scrutinized, 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 signaled, 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; inquiries 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 gray 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 labor was as quick as it was early, and Tom watched helpless as a baby—it was unmistakably 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—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.”
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  “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.”

  “No!” Her voice was fierce. “No! I don’t want—I don’t want anyone else here. I don’t want anyone else to know. Not yet.”

  “But sweet, you’ve lost so much blood. You’re white as a ghost. We should get a doctor out here to take you back.”

  “The tub, Tom. Please?”

  When the water was warm, Tom filled the metal tub and lowered it to the floor beside Isabel. He handed her a flannel. She dipped it in the water, and gently, gently, with the cloth covering her fingertip, began to stroke the face, smoothing away the watery blood that covered the translucent skin. The baby stayed at his prayers, locked in some secret conversation with God, as she lowered the cloth into the water to rinse it. She squeezed it and began again, watching closely, perhaps hoping that the eyes might flicker, or the minuscule fingers twitch.

  “Izz,” Tom said softly, touching her hair, “you’ve got to listen to me now. I’m going to make you some tea, with a lot of sugar in it, and I need you to drink it for me, all right? And I’m going to get a blanket to put over you. And I’m going to clean things up here a bit. You don’t have to go anywhere, but you have to let me take care of you now. No arguments. I’m going to give you some morphine tablets for the pain, and some iron pills, and you’re going to take them for me.” His voice was gentle and calm, simply reciting some facts.

  Transfixed by ritual, Isabel continued to dab away at the body, the umbilical cord still attached to the afterbirth on the floor. She hardly raised her head as Tom draped a blanket over her shoulders. He came back with a bucket and a cloth, and on his hands and knees, started to sponge up the blood and mess.

  Isabel lowered the body into the bath to wash it, taking care not to submerge the face. She dried it with the towel, and wrapped it in a fresh one, still with the placenta, so that it was bound up like a papoose.

  “Tom, will you spread the sheet on the table?”

  He moved the cake tin aside and laid out the embroidered sheet, folded in half. Isabel handed him the bundle. “Lay him down on it,” she said, and he rested the little body there.

  “Now we need to look after you,” said Tom. “There’s still hot water. Come and let’s get you clean. Come on, lean on me. Slowly does it now. Slowly, slowly.” Thick drops of scarlet splashed a trail as he led her from the kitchen into the bathroom, where this time it was he who dabbed her face with a flannel, rinsing it in the basin, and starting again.

  An hour later, in a clean nightgown, her hair tied back in a plait, Isabel lay in bed. As Tom stroked her face, she eventually surrendered to exhaustion and the morphine tablets. Back in the kitchen, he finished cleaning up, and put the soiled linen into the laundry trough to soak. As darkness fell, he sat at the table and lit the lamp. He said a prayer over the little body. The vastness, the tiny body, eternity and the clock that accused the time of passing: it all made even less sense here than it had in Egypt or France. He had seen so many deaths. But there was something about the quietness of this one: as though, in the absence of the gunfire and the shouting, he were observing it unobscured for the first time. The men he had accompanied to the border of life would be mourned by a mother, but on the battlefield, the loved ones were far away and beyond imagining. To see a child torn away from his mother at the very moment of birth—torn away from the only woman in the world Tom cared about—was a more dreadful kind of pain. He glanced again at the shadows cast by the baby, and beside it, the cake covered with the cloth, like a shrouded twin.

  “Not yet, Tom. I’ll tell them when I’m ready,” Isabel had insisted the following day, as she lay in bed.

  “But your mum and dad—they’ll want to know. They’re expecting you home on the next boat. They’re expecting their first grandchild.”

  Isabel had looked at him, helpless. “Exactly! They’re expecting their first grandchild, and I’ve lost him.”

  “They’ll be worried for you, Izz.”

  “Then why upset them? Please, Tom. It’s our business. My business. We don’t have to tell the whole world about it. Let them have their dream a bit longer. I’ll send a letter when the boat comes again in June.”

  “But that’s weeks away!”

  “Tom, I just can’t.” A tear dropped on her nightgown. “At least they’ll have a few more happy weeks…”

  So, he had given in to her wish, and let the logbook stay silent.

  But that was different—it was a personal matter. The arrival of the dinghy left no such leeway. Now he began by recording the steamer he had seen that morning, the Manchester Queen bound for Cape Town. Then he noted the calm conditions, the temperature, and put down his pen. Tomorrow. He would tell the whole story of the boat’s arrival tomorrow, once he had sent the signal. He paused for a moment to consider whether to leave a space so that he could come back and fill it in, or whether it was best simply to imply that the boat had arrived later than it had. He left a space. He would signal in the morning and say that they had been too preoccupied with the baby to make contact sooner. The log would tell the truth, but a bit late. Just one day. He caught sight of his reflection in the glass over the “Notice under the Lighthouses Act 1911” which hung on the wall, and for a moment did not recognize the face he saw there.

  “I’m not exactly an expert in this department,” Tom said to Isabel on the afternoon of the baby’s arrival.

  “And you never will be if you stand around like that. I just need you to hold her while I check the bottle’s warm enough. Come on. She won’t bite,” she said, smiling. “Not for now, at any rate.”

  The child was barely the length of Tom’s forearm, but he took her as though he were handling an octopus.

  “Just stay still a minute,” said Isabel, arranging his arms. “All right. Keep them like that. And now”—she made a final adjustment—“she’s all yours for the next two minutes.” She went through to the kitchen.

  It was the first time Tom had ever been alone with a baby. He stayed as if standing to attention, terrified of failing inspection. The child started to wriggle, kicking her feet and arms in a maneuver which flummoxed him.

  “Steady on! Be fair on a bloke, now,” he implored as he tried to get a better grip.

  “Remember to keep her head supported,” Isabel called. Immediately he slipped a hand up to the baby’s scalp, registering its smallness in the palm of his hand. She squirmed again, so he rocked her gently. “Come on, be a sport. Play fair with your Uncle Tom.”

  As she blinked at him, and looked right into his eyes, Tom was suddenly aware of an almost physical ache. She was giving him a glimpse of a world he would now surely never know.

  Isabel returned with the bottle. “Here.” She put it into Tom’s hand and guided it to the baby
’s mouth, demonstrating how to tap gently at her lips until she latched on. Tom was absorbed by how the process performed itself. The very fact that the baby required nothing of him stirred a sense of reverence for something far beyond his comprehension.

  When Tom went back to the light, Isabel busied herself around the kitchen, preparing dinner while the child slept on. As soon as she heard a cry, she hurried to the nursery, and lifted her from the cot. The baby was fractious, and again nuzzled into Isabel’s breast, starting to suck at the thin cotton of her blouse.

  “Oh, my darling, are you still hungry? Old Doc Griffith’s manual says to be careful not to give you too much. But maybe just a drop…” She warmed a little more milk and offered the bottle to the baby. But this time the child turned her head away from the teat and cried as she pawed instead at the inviting, warm nipple that touched her cheek through the cloth.

  “Come on, here you are, here’s the bottle, sweet thing,” Isabel cooed, but the baby became more distressed, kicking her arms and legs and turning in to Isabel’s chest.

  Isabel remembered the fresh agony of the arrival of the milk, making her breasts heavy and sore with no baby to suckle—it had seemed a particularly cruel mechanism of nature. Now, this infant was seeking desperately for her milk, or perhaps just for comfort, now that immediate starvation had been staved off. She paused for a long moment, her thoughts swirling with the crying and the longing and the loss. “Oh, little sweetheart,” she murmured, and slowly unbuttoned her blouse. Seconds later, the child had latched on fast, sucking contentedly, though only a few drops of milk came.

  They had been like that for a good while when Tom entered the kitchen. “How’s the—” He stopped in mid-sentence, arrested at the sight.

  Isabel looked up at him, her face a mixture of innocence and guilt. “It was the only way I could get her to settle.”

  “But… Well…” Alarmed, Tom couldn’t even frame his questions.

  “She was desperate. Wouldn’t take the bottle…”

  “But—but she took it earlier, I saw her…”

  “Yes, because she was starving. Probably literally.”

  Tom continued to stare, completely out of his depth.

  “It’s the most natural thing in the world, Tom. The best possible thing I could do for her. Don’t look so shocked.” She reached out a hand to him. “Come here, darl. Give me a smile.”

  He took her hand, but remained bewildered. And deep within, his uneasiness grew.

  That afternoon, Isabel’s eyes were alive with a light Tom had not seen for years. “Come and look!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t she a picture? She fits just beautifully!” She gestured to the wickerwork cot, in which the child slept peacefully, her tiny chest rising and falling in a miniature echo of the waves around the island.

  “Snug as a walnut in a shell, isn’t she?” said Tom.

  “I’d say she’s not three months old yet.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I looked it up.” Tom raised an eyebrow. “In Dr. Griffiths. I’ve picked some carrots and some turnips, and I’ve made a stew with the last of the mutton. I want to have a special tea tonight.”

  Tom frowned, puzzled.

  “We need to welcome Lucy, and say a prayer for her poor father.”

  “If that’s who he was,” said Tom. “And Lucy?”

  “Well she needs a name. Lucy means ‘light,’ so it’s perfect, isn’t it?”

  “Izzy Bella.” He smiled, then stroked her hair, gently serious. “Be careful, sweet. I don’t want to see you upset…”

  As Tom lit up for the evening, he still couldn’t drive away the uneasiness, nor could he tell whether it came from the past—reawakened grief—or from foreboding. As he made his way down the narrow, winding stairs, across each of the metal landings, he felt a heaviness in his chest, and a sense of sliding back into a darkness he thought he had escaped.

  That night, they sat down to dinner accompanied by the snuffling of the child, the occasional gurgle bringing a smile to Isabel’s lips. “I wonder what will become of her?” she pondered aloud. “It’s sad to think she could end up in an orphanage. Like Sarah Porter’s little boy.”

  Later they made love for the first time since the stillbirth. Isabel seemed different to Tom: assured, relaxed. She kissed him afterward and said, “Let’s plant a rose garden when spring comes. One that’ll be here years after we’re gone.”

  “I’ll send the signal this morning,” Tom said just after dawn, as he returned from extinguishing the light. The pearl-shell glow of day stole into the bedroom and caressed the baby’s face. She had woken in the night and Isabel had brought her in to sleep between them. She put her finger to her lips as she nodded toward the sleeping infant, and rose from the bed to lead Tom into the kitchen.

  “Sit down, love, and I’ll make tea,” she whispered, and marshaled cups, pot and kettle as quietly as she could. As she put the kettle on the stove, she said, “Tom, I’ve been thinking.”

  “What about, Izzy?”

  “Lucy. It can’t just be a coincidence that she turned up so soon after…” The sentence did not need completing. “We can’t just ship her off to an orphanage.” She turned to Tom and took his hands in hers. “Sweetheart, I think she should stay with us.”

  “Fair go now, darl! She’s a lovely baby, but she doesn’t belong to us. We can’t keep her.”

  “Why not? Think about it. I mean, practically speaking, who’s to know she’s here?”

  “When Ralph and Bluey come in a few weeks, they’ll know, for a start.”

  “Yes, but it occurred to me last night that they won’t know she’s not ours. Everyone still thinks I’m expecting. They’ll just be surprised she arrived early.”

  Tom watched, his mouth open. “But… Izzy, are you in your right mind? Do you realize what you’re suggesting?”

  “I’m suggesting kindness. That’s all. Love for a baby. I’m suggesting, sweetheart,” she clasped his hands tighter, “that we accept this gift that’s been sent to us. How long have we wanted a baby, prayed for a baby?”

  Turning to the window, Tom put his hands on his head and started to laugh,