“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 off 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.”
In those two weeks, Tom and Isabel saw each other every day. When Bill Graysmark challenged his wife about the propriety of this sudden “stepping out,” she said, “Oh, Bill. Life’s a short thing. She’s a sensible girl and she knows her own mind. Besides, there’s little enough chance these days of her finding a man with all his limbs attached. Don’t look a gift horse…” She knew, also, that Partageuse was small. There was nowhere they could get up to anything much. Dozens of eyes and ears would report the least sign of anything untoward.
It surprised Tom how much he looked forward to seeing Isabel. Somehow she had crept under his defenses. He enjoyed her stories of life in Partageuse, and its history; about how the French had chosen that name for this spot between oceans because it meant “good at sharing” as well as “dividing.” She talked about the time she fell from a tree and broke her arm, the day she and her brothers painted red spots on Mrs. Mewett’s goat and knocked on her door to tell her it had measles. She told him quietly, and with many pauses, about their deaths in the Somme, and how she wished she could get her parents to smile again.
He was wary, though. This was a small town. She was a lot younger than he was. He’d probably never see her again once he went back out to the light. Other blokes might take advantage, but to Tom, the idea of honor was a kind of antidote to some of the things he’d lived through.
Isabel herself could hardly have put into words the new feeling—excitement, perhaps—she felt every time she saw this man. There was something mysterious about him—as though, behind his smile, he was still far away. She wanted to get to the heart of him.
If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn’t safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.
The evening before he was due to go back to Janus, they were walking along the beach. Though January was only two days old, it felt like years since Tom had first landed in Partageuse, six months before.
Isabel looked out to sea, where the sun was sliding down the sky and into the gray water at the edge of the world. She said, “I was wondering if you’d do me a favor, Tom.”
“Yep. What?”
“I was wondering,” she said, not slowing her pace, “if you’d kiss me.”
Tom half thought the wind had made the words up, and because she didn’t stop walking, he tried to work out what it could have been that she really said.
He took a guess. “Of course I’ll miss you. But—maybe I’ll see you next time I’m back on leave?”
She gave him an odd look, and he began to worry. Even in the dying light, her face seemed red.
“I’m—I’m sorry, Isabel. I’m not too good with words… in situations like this.”
“Situations like what?” she asked, crushed by the thought that this must be something he did all the time. A girl in every port.
“Like—saying goodbye. I’m all right on my own. And I’m all right with a bit of company. It’s the switching from one to the other that gets me.”
“Well, I’ll make it easy for you then, shall I? I’ll just go. Right now.” She whipped around and started off down the beach.
“Isabel! Isabel, wait!” He ran after her and caught her hand. “I didn’t want you to just go off without—well, just go off like that. And I will do your favor, I will miss you. You’re—well, you’re good to be with.”
“Then take me out to Janus.”
“What—you want to come for the trip out?”
“No. To live there.”
Tom laughed. “God, you come out with some humdingers sometimes.”
“I’m serious.”
“You can’t be,” said Tom, though something in her look told him she just might.
“Why not?”
“Well, for about a hundred reasons, just off the top of my head. Most obviously because the only woman allowed on Janus is the keeper’s wife.” She said nothing, so he inclined his head a fraction more as if that might help him understand.
“So marry me!”
He blinked. “Izz—I hardly know you! And besides, I’ve never even—well, I’ve never even kissed you, for crying out loud.”
“At long last!” She spoke as if the solution were blindingly obvious, and she stood on tiptoes to pull his head down toward her. Before he knew what was happening he was being kissed, inexpertly but with great force. He pulled away from her.
“That’s a dangerous game to play, Isabel. You shouldn’t go running around kissing blokes out of the blue. Not unless you mean it.”
“But I do mean it!”
Tom looked at her, her eyes challenging him, her petite chin set firm. Once he crossed that line, who knew where he would end up? Oh, bugger it. To hell with good behavior. To hell with doing the right thing. Here was a beautiful girl, begging to be kissed, and the sun was gone and the weeks were up and he’d be out in the middle of bloody nowhere this time tomorrow. He took her face in his hands and bent low as he said, “Then this is how you do it,” and kissed her slowly, letting time fade away. And he couldn’t remember any other kiss that felt quite the same.
Finally he drew back, and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Better get you home or they’ll have the troopers after me.” He slipped his arm around her shoulder and guided her along the sand.
“I meant it, you know, about getting married.”
“You’d have to have rocks in your head to want to marry me, Izz. There’s not much money in lightkeeping. And it’s a hell of a job for a wife.”
“I know what I want, Tom.”
He stood still. “Look. I don’t want to sound patronizing, Isabel, but you’re—well, you’re quite a bit younger than me: I’m twenty-eight this year. And I’m guessing you haven’t walked out with many fellows.” He would have wagered, from the attempt at a kiss, that she hadn’t walked out with any.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Just—well, don’t get confused between a thing itself and the first time you come across it. Think it over. I’ll bet all the tea in China that in twelve months you’ll have forgotten all about me.”
“Humor me,” she said, and reached up to kiss him again.
CHAPTER 6
On clear summer days, Janus seems to stretch up right to its tiptoes: you’d swear it’s higher out of the water at some times than at others, not just because of the rising and ebbing of the tide. It can disappear altogether in rainstorms, disguised like a goddess in a Greek myth. Or sea mists brew up: warm air heavy with salt crystals which obstruct the passage of the light. If there are bushfires, the smoke can reach even this far out, carrying thick, sticky ash which tints the sunsets lavish red and gold, and coats the lantern-room glazing with grime. For these reasons the island needs the strongest, brightest of lights.
From the gallery, the horizon stretches forty miles. It seems improbable to Tom that such endless space could exist in the same lifetime as the ground that was fought over a foot at a time only a handful of years ago, where men lost their lives for the sake of labeling a few muddy yards as “ours” instead of “theirs,” only to have them snatched back a day later. Perhaps the same labeling obsession caused cartographers to split this body of water into two oceans, even though it is impossible to touch an exact point at which their currents begin to differ. Splitting. Labeling. Seeking out otherness. Some things don’t change.
On Janus, there is no reason to speak. Tom can go for months and not hear his own voice. He knows some keepers who make a point of singing, just like turning over an engine to make sure it still works. But Tom finds a freedom in the silence. He listens to the wind. He observes the tiny details of life on the island.
Now and then, as if brought in on the breeze, the memory of Isabel’s kiss floats into his awareness: the touch of her skin, the soft wholeness of her. And he thinks of the years when he simply couldn’t have imagined that such a thing existed. Just to be beside her had made him feel cleaner somehow, refreshed. Yet the sensation leads him back into the darkness, back into the galleries of wounded flesh and twisted limbs. To make sense of it—that’s the challenge. To bear witness to the death, without being broken by the weight of it. There’s no reason he should still be alive, un-maimed. Suddenly Tom realizes he is crying. He weeps for the men snatched away to his left and right, when death had no appetite for him. He weeps for the men he killed.
The Light Between Oceans: A Novel Page 5