The Lightkeeper's Wife

by Karen Viggers

  A frightening void has opened up in me. I picture Mum lying in that lonely Cloudy Bay bed. Perhaps she really is dying. And now I’m truly afraid. Not scared for Mum—she knows what death holds for her. I’m afraid for myself. My feelings for Emma have been my life raft these past weeks: I thought Mum’s death would be my release and Emma would be my future. But Emma’s not the solution I first imagined her to be. Nick is the unexpected factor and I can’t seem to delete him. Now he’s here, in my house.

  Jess jumps onto the bed and curls up beside me. I lay my hand on her head; her soft ears are reassuring beneath my fingers. Sleep floats just beyond reach: I yearn for it, but each time I’m tilting on its downhill edge, consciousness leaps at me, making me jolt, shifting my restless legs. This will be a night of fitful dozing.

  I wake early and take Jess for a walk. Normally, I’d have breakfast and enter the day through the curling steam rising from my first cup of tea. But this morning there are uninvited guests in my house, and I don’t want to listen to them snoring in the lounge room.

  Outside, it’s crisp and cold, and in the east, light is just beginning to glimmer on the horizon. Jess and I head down the hill past Laura’s house. The curtains are drawn and the house is dark, so she must be still asleep. On the beach, I squat on the grey sand and stare across the channel while quiet wavelets lap at the shore. Dawn spreads slowly across the sky and soon a couple of gulls come strutting along the sand, jabbing at crab holes exposed by the tide. Jess is subdued too, picking up on my mood.

  Last night at Jan’s, I agreed to wait for the nine o’clock ferry. But I want to be down at Cloudy Bay now, spinning along the sand in the awakening light, running across the deck, sitting down beside Mum’s bed, holding onto her hand. I pace the beach, hoping I’ll hear Nick’s Commodore start up and that they will both leave before I get back. But there’s no sound from the road and soon Laura comes wandering out of the bush. I’m standing down near the water, and I hope she’ll leave me be. But she meanders up with a hesitant smile.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, keeping it short.

  ‘You’ve been walking up and down for quite a while. I saw you from the road. Are you sure everything’s all right?’

  ‘Yes, it’s fine,’ I say dismissively. I wish she’d leave me alone, but I’m not sure how to send her away tactfully.

  ‘It’s not fine, is it? There’s something wrong. I can feel it.’

  Her concern makes something break inside me and words gush out. ‘My mother’s ill. She’s dying of heart disease. She’s down on Bruny Island in a cabin and I’m stuck here waiting for my sister. But I don’t want to wait. I want to be there. I want to sit beside my mum even if she doesn’t know I’m there.’

  Laura listens silently, her eyes full of compassion. I’m surprised by her empathy, but then perhaps I shouldn’t be—she’s been through a lot with her brother. Suddenly, her company doesn’t feel like an imposition, and I find her quiet attention almost comforting.

  ‘You should go straightaway,’ she says. ‘Don’t hang around. Just get on the road.’

  ‘What about my sister?’

  She shakes her head. ‘She can make her own way down. Don’t wait. You need to be there now.’

  She’s right. I do need to go. A little voice has been telling me that all night. I’m about to hurry off when I remember her trouble. ‘How’s Mouse?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not now. I’ll fill you in later. Just go.’

  I hurry up the beach. She’s given me a gift—the permission to put myself first for once. Before I dive through the bush, I turn and wave to her. I’ll thank her later. I have a feeling she’ll understand.

  Up at the house, Nick and Emma are in the kitchen. Nick has found himself a bowl of cereal and is pouring coffee. He knows exactly how to make himself at home. Emma is slumped at the kitchen bench with a mug and a piece of toast in front of her. She’s holding her head in her hands, and I’m not surprised she feels awful. The smell of beer is still oozing out of their pores.

  She turns slowly when I come in. ‘Tom. Where have you been?’

  I look around for my car keys, I can’t see them. ‘I went for a walk.’

  ‘There was a phone call for you. A man. Something to do with your mother.’

  ‘Was it Leon?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t catch his name.’

  A surge of impatience washes over me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbles. ‘I’m not the best this morning.’

  I pick up the phone. Then I stop and look at them. What are they doing here, sitting in my house, watching me at this time? I want them gone. I take the phone to my bedroom and shut the door to block out their voices. My hands are shaking as I dial Leon’s number.

  There’s no answer and the phone clicks to messagebank: ‘You’ve called Leon Walker from the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service. Please leave your details and I’ ll ring when I can.’

  His phone must be out of range. I leave a message. Perhaps he didn’t call. Maybe it was Gary trying to contact me. Maybe everything is still all right with Mum. I ring Gary’s number and he answers with a grunt.

  ‘Gary. It’s Tom.’

  ‘What is it?’ His voice is slow, like a cat stretching.

  ‘Did you call me?’

  ‘No. I’m having breakfast. You know how it is—don’t ask me questions before I’ve had my first cup of coffee . . .’

  ‘You didn’t call?’

  ‘No. I’m still in Melbourne. We’re trying to rearrange our flights.’

  Who could have called me then? Maybe it was Alex. I hang up and call Alex’s mobile, but it wasn’t him who rang either. He and Jacinta are getting ready to leave. I ask him to pick up Jan so I don’t have to wait for her.

  I go back to the kitchen to find the car keys, avoiding Emma’s eyes.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she asks.

  ‘I have to go,’ I say. ‘Lock the door when you leave.’

  Emma traps my hand. ‘What is it, Tom?’

  I stare right through her; it’s as if I’m talking to air. ‘My mother’s dying.’

  I tug my hand free. Jess is at my heels and we are outside the house, walking down the path. I open the car door. Then Emma is there, tears on her face. ‘Tom.’

  I look at her and feel nothing.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know. You didn’t tell me.’

  I told her the night we drank whisky, but she doesn’t know that. It doesn’t matter now anyway. ‘I have to go,’ I say. ‘I haven’t much time.’

  She grips the open car door and looks down at me. My hand is on the keys in the ignition and I’m ready to go. Her face is stricken. ‘I’m so sorry. If I’d known about your mother things would have been different, I can promise you that. And I’m sorry I brought Nick here. It was the wrong thing to do. Will you call me when you get back?’

  ‘I need to go,’ I say.

  She releases the door. ‘Say you’ll call me. I feel so bad.’

  I can’t reassure her. All I can think of is the road ahead of me, to Kettering and on to Cloudy Bay. Beyond that, nothing else has meaning.

  Then Nick is on the deck waving the phone. ‘Tom,’ he shouts. ‘It’s for you. A guy called Leon.’

  I swing the car door open again and run back up the path, breathing hard.

  30

  Afternoon. Soft mellow light melting through closed curtains. Mary was in her parents’ house, coiled in a chair. Jack was at the lighthouse alone. Rose was gone now, he said, she was leaving the island. Mary had been grimly pleased about this. After all that had happened, the Masons didn’t want Rose back at the farm. They had tolerated her presence all these years, but even they had their limits.

  On the low table in front of Mary was Jack’s letter, begging for her return. She had read it, but felt nothing. It was all too much.

  Slowly she drifted, fragile and damaged. The fire crackled intermittently. Hu
rt and rejection had swallowed themselves and she was numb. She didn’t know what she should do.

  A rap on the door startled her. She knocked her cup of tea from the broad arm of the chair and watched the sepia stain spread across the carpet. The sound came again, but she didn’t have the strength to get up. She was buried by an immense inertia, eyes fixed on the fire, watching the flame trickle lazily along the glowing log. Back and forth. Back and forth. The clock ticked on the mantelpiece. The fire popped and flickered. The house was so quiet with the children and her parents having gone to the circus.

  She heard the click of a handle being turned. Wind gushed through the door and then subsided. She heard footsteps in the hall. Then there was nothing. It was just a trick of the wind. Her eyelids drooped shut.

  She dreamed of a soft hand touching her hair, fingers sliding through her loose brown curls. Soothing fingers massaged her head, warm and real. It had been a long time since she had known such tenderness. She was cold, but these fingers were bringing her back. They belonged to someone alive and warm.

  Gently the fingers crept over her scalp. They circled at her temples and made tracks across her forehead. She felt the soft whisper of exhaled air on her head, heard the steady sound of breathing. The fingers slid down the bridge of her nose, below her eyes, across the arches of her cheeks, around her chin. They lingered on her lips, tracing them. Her heart fluttered and her breathing deepened. She was afraid to open her eyes.

  There was a rustle of movement. A shifting shadow. A body, blocking the light and heat of the fire. She sensed someone kneeling. Her hands were enclosed by strong fingers, warm palms. Hands that belonged to a man. He guided her fingers to his face and drifted them over his cheeks, his eyes, eyebrows, across a corrugated brow. She felt hair—wavy, longish—and hooked her fingers in it, feeling the texture, her breathing light.

  Her hand was drawn to warm lips and then her fingertips were kissed, one at a time, slowly, deliciously.

  She woke, eager; her eyes flew open and he was smiling at her. A mouth that she remembered. Eyes she still fell into. ‘How did you find me?’ she asked.

  ‘Apple season,’ he said. ‘I come looking for you every year. I waited near the house and watched the others leave.’ He smiled, something hidden in his eyes. ‘The girl is you all over again, but darker, less hopeful. I see you in the boy as well.’

  He lifted her left hand. Studied it. Then he turned it over and traced circles in her palm. Goosebumps spread up her arm. His smile was thick with intent. He kissed her palm and the touch of his lips was almost unbearable. She grasped his hair again, this time to push him away, but her hand softened amid its coarseness and her fingers tumbled to his ear, then his cheek.

  ‘What have you done?’ she whispered.

  ‘By coming here? By touching you?’

  She pulled her hand away, trying to withdraw, to hold down the surge in her chest. He sat back, smiling.

  ‘How long has it been?’ His voice was a purr. ‘How old is the girl?’

  ‘Her name is Jan.’

  ‘I don’t need names.’

  No. He didn’t need names. But it reminded her. It recalled her to the fact that she had a life beyond this moment, beyond the liquid depths of his eyes, beyond the heat of his hand resting on her knee. ‘Jan is thirteen. Gary’s eleven.’

  ‘They should have been mine.’

  His eyes flashed and she felt a chill. There was much more to this man than the little she knew. She suspected he had violence within him. But he quickly smoothed his lips to that gentle smile.

  ‘Fourteen years since I saw you last. In the park.’ He lowered his head and touched a finger to her ring. ‘It was torture to see this on your finger. You cheated me. You gave him what was mine.’ His eyes brimmed with tears; he gripped her hand again and the warmth of his touch shot through her.

  ‘I’m still married.’

  Still married. What sort of feeble defence was that? Thank God, he didn’t know the half of it. Married, in what sense of the word? Her husband at the light station dreaming of another woman. And here she was, broken and unable to rise from her chair.

  ‘So where is he now?’ His face was triumphant. He knew. He bent over her hand again, kneaded his thumbs into her palm, kissed her fingertips. She moved to protest, but he slipped her sleeve up and ran his fingers along the underside of her arm, and she sat transfixed, watching him.

  He led her to the couch and her body followed him, her mind receding. She was cold and his fingers had warmed her. She wanted to know more.

  Softly, he made circles on her thigh with his thumb. She was all at once liquid and light and hot. The touch of his lips on her neck was the promise that had faded from her dreams over the years.

  As he kissed her, the pain flowed away, draining like sand through straw. She wanted his hands on her. Wanted him to reach beneath her clothes. Wanted him to take what had always been Jack’s. Surely, it was hers for the giving. Jack hadn’t wanted it for years. She’d been invisible to him. And now, here was a man who made her feel alive again. All need. How could it be wrong?

  It happened in her bedroom. A small death that made her a woman renewed. Afterwards, he lay replete beside her, his sweaty skin sticking softly to hers. She knew she ought to feel guilt, but all she felt was euphoria. What she had done felt right. It felt good. And if she had this past hour over, she’d do it again, and without regret.

  His hands explored her lazily, languorously, a fat smile on his lips. Then he became insistent, teasing her, seeing what was left of her. And she was his all over again, drowning in the delight of it, years of desire unleashed.

  When it was over, he lay looking at her, his cheek on the pillow beside her. ‘You should have seen yourself when you were sixteen,’ he said.

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘You were so beautiful. So untouched . . . That’s the way I always think of you. Young and undamaged. The only woman I’ve ever desired.’

  ‘Everything changes,’ she said. ‘Nobody stays sixteen forever.’

  His eyes were soft with the image of a girl that no longer existed. ‘You don’t have to go back,’ he said.

  She hesitated for a moment before slowly shaking her head. It wasn’t a future she could seriously consider. Maybe in her dreams, but in reality, she had only ever seen herself with Jack. ‘He’s the father of my children.’

  Adam’s face flickered with sadness. ‘So that’s your last word?’

  She nodded silently.

  His smile was resigned. ‘Well, I suppose that’s it then.’ He sat up, swiped moisture from the corner of his eyes. ‘You see, I promised myself this was the last time. All these years my life has been on hold: picking fruit and shifting to the next town. It’s amazing how fast the days slip by. And then your youth is gone and you wonder what you’ve got to show for it. I’ve been hoping you’d come back to me. But I’ve been fooling myself, haven’t I? Using you as an excuse to avoid commitment. You’ve never come seeking me. So I have to stop doing this to myself. There might still be time to find a wife and have a family of my own.’

  Her cheeks were wet with tears for him. She reached out and drew him back down to her. And he took her once more and then dressed and slipped quietly out the door.

  31

  She was lying sprawled, her legs heavy, when the light came on and she thought she heard a murmuring of voices, a conversation far away. The light went off again. And then it came on. Blindingly.

  She dreamed of a voice, vaguely familiar. ‘It’s the sun, Mary. See, it’s come out from behind a cloud.’

  The sun?

  Then it was dark again. And cold. She thought perhaps she wanted to speak. But everything in her was so slow. So weighty. She wanted to open her eyes, but it was too difficult.

  Light, dark, sound, breathing. All of it, a burden.

  Someone was speaking again, a breathy whisper of sound. ‘We’re outside, Mary . . . Let me sit you up a bit. I’m going to cup my hand o
ver your eyes to shield out the sun . . . There it is, blazing from behind a cloud again.’

  She was vaguely aware of movement; somebody shuffling her arms and legs and propping up her torso. She struggled to open her eyes, and tied to focus on the blur before her. Blue and grey, shadow, fog.

  ‘You’re on the beach, Mary,’ the voice said. ‘I’ve brought you out so you can see the sky. I wanted you to feel the wind.’

  The light disappeared once more to bleary grey. She thought she heard a rattling sound. Or maybe she just felt it. Gurgling. Hollow rumbling.

  Everything about her was rigid. Her body, unyielding. She was dissolving into the ground. Cold creeping through her. Such coldness. Her body not her own anymore.

  She forced her eyes open, fluttering, and thought she saw the outline of a face, misty, framed with ginger hair. Her eyelids slid down again thankfully, into darkness.

  ‘Mary. It’s me. I’m here to look after you.’

  Jack was with her. He was holding her. His arms strong around her. He forgave her for everything. Even that which he didn’t know. He had to forgive her. She needed his forgiveness.

  ‘Do you feel the wind on your face, Mary?’

  The wind. Yes, the wind. They had been at home in it together. But she couldn’t feel it now. She couldn’t feel anything. Just heaviness. A great weight. A sense of sliding. Of light fading. Flashes of light returning again.

  ‘I promised I’d bring you out here, didn’t I?’

  She felt Jack’s breath on her face. His head beside hers on the pillow. She had always liked to feel him close to her. Such comfort.

  There were shadows slipping across her face. Then the voice again, like an echo. ‘The clouds are skating across the sky, Mary. There’s a strong wind high up. Cirrus clouds. A front coming in.’

  She struggled to open her eyes again. She was beneath the skies at Cape Bruny. This was a grey she knew and loved. It was the colour of her southern home: the long, shimmering silver light.