by David Brooks
That morning at breakfast he watched each of them closely. Although nothing was outwardly different, every gesture, every movement seemed in his eyes slightly altered, and to have listed perceptibly away from him. But it was perhaps only the early chill, people still partly numbed from sleep. Breakfast over, and laughter returning, the day’s plans made, it all seemed instead only a trick of circumstance, a misreading of signs, something to be pushed as far as possible from the mind. Whatever it was had been something else, something else entirely.
It was an overcast day and a wind had come up. Rather than spend the time indoors, which they might have done anywhere, he suggested that they drive to the lighthouse. The proprietor had told them the evening before that, although the light itself was never open to the public, its grounds were open on the second Sunday of each month for the dramatic cliff- and ocean-views. This was such a Sunday. It was an opportunity not to be missed, not only because the entire area surrounding it was a navy artillery range, and normally strictly off limits – even the lighthouse-keepers could not get out for days at a time because of the firing – but because, with the impending war, he imagined even the Sunday arrangement would soon be suspended.
Although it can’t have been much more than five or six miles by boat across the bay, Point Upright was some thirty-five by road and nearly a two-hour drive, at first away from the coast on unpaved roads through rich dairy country – which Ellen eyed enviously, pointing out the condition of the cows, describing the processes evidently in place, comparing them with her own farm – and then, past turn-offs to increasingly remote fishing villages on both its ocean and its bay sides, along the small peninsula to the firing range where, past an open and unattended check-point – they seemed instead to be monitored from a watch-tower further away – the red earth road narrowed to a rough, pot-holed track climbing gently through low scrub towards what, from this approach, seemed only a low rise topped by a squat white tower, but once reached proved to be a point high above and commanding the bay’s mouth. To their surprise only two other cars were parked on the edge of the lighthouse grounds. The sky had cleared and the wind died down as they drove and when they pulled up the heat of the sun struck them suddenly. Shedding jacket and cardigans and throwing them loosely onto the car seats, they set out at first in different directions, he directly to the lighthouse itself and they toward the solid stone cottages of the keepers, curious to see what they could of the life of the people who so isolated themselves here.
Having walked slowly about the tower, mildly disappointed that he could not see inside, Daniel wandered over to the cliff’s edge, some fifty yards away across a bare, tessellated rock shelf. He stood there for some time, absorbed in the difficult progress of a fishing trawler inward through the heads far below him, then, turning away, spent as much time examining the curious formations of the stone and the movements of some minute darting insects in a pool left by recent rain. It must have been fifteen minutes before he realised that Margaret and Ellen had still not joined him. He turned and, not seeing them anywhere on the broad shelf around him, thought that they must have gone back to the car. Then, to his surprise he saw them waving at him from the stone balcony two-thirds of the way up the tower, motioning to him to come up and join them. He went up to the lighthouse and was further surprised to find a man, presumably the keeper, holding the door open for him, explaining that the ladies, seeing him come from his house with some others (who were in fact relatives of his) had thought it a guided tour and had followed them in. As there were so few other visitors about and he could be confident he was not opening a flood-gate, he could see no harm in showing them what was to be seen. One of the ladies – Ellen, apparently – had told him how the gentleman standing down on the rocks below had wanted to see the lighthouse since he was a child. It would be a pleasure to take him up. He had need to go right to the top, as it happened – had just come down for something he had forgotten – and if they would like, and did not mind the narrow iron staircase, he could show him and the ladies the prism.
They spent an hour examining the workings, having each part of the light’s operation explained to them, entranced especially by the prism itself, a huge cage of crystal turning majestically in utter silence, a different order of being, a machine from an icy planet such as might have been found, Daniel thought, in the pages of Jules Verne, or H.G. Wells. At its centre, glimpsed only once each rotation, like something from a giant’s crystal-set, was the largest lightbulb he had ever seen. He found himself enthralled, transfixed by the great, silent power of the prism, the imagined flash of the absent light. Margaret and Ellen tired of it earlier than he – or perhaps, sensing his fascination, they merely wished to leave him undisturbed with it – and for several minutes he and the keeper stood alone, watching wordlessly, as if even the keeper, long as he had been there, could not tire of its strangeness. At one point, amongst the many other things that were going through his mind, Daniel was seeing Barcelona, the gleaming white, flesh-like lines of the cathedral, wondering how something so curved and sensuous could also have been so crystalline, or how these crystals before him could be so sensuous.
Coming down, they paused on the balcony from which the women had waved, and commenting on the remarkable distance they could see, and from which the light itself could be seen, the keeper asked Daniel, almost as if he should somehow know it already, if he had heard about the William light.
‘The William? Isn’t there a Cape William somewhere to the south of here?’
‘Yes,’ said the keeper, pointing, ‘that’s it there: if you count the heads – they are like paws, do you see? sticking out into the ocean? – it is the third one down.’
‘Is there a lighthouse there also?’
‘Not now, but there was. A jinxed place, so people came to believe. There was only ever the one keeper there, and only for ten years or so. A tragic story. First his wife died in childbirth, then his daughter was shot while she was out hunting with a schoolfriend, and then a few years later the keeper himself was taken by a shark while out fishing with his sons. I don’t know what he was doing in the water; something gone wrong with the boat, maybe, or a fouled line, or perhaps it was just hot and they were swimming, something like that. His own boys brought back what was left of him … And somewhere in all that there was also an assistant keeper who hung himself.’
‘That is awful. An extraordinary story. And so the lighthouse was abandoned? The keeper was never replaced?’
‘No. The ending was just as strange. They were going to close the place anyway. There had been a couple of wrecks on the shoals a bit further south – the Barrow Shoals, about two miles out, south-east of Disaster Bay – and an investigation had found that the lighthouse had been built in the wrong place from the start, that there was a crucial angle, near the shoal, that you couldn’t see the light from. I’ve often thought that must’ve been the problem all along. When you build a lighthouse in the wrong place, then maybe all sorts of things are going to go wrong.
‘You can see it, if you like, or what remains of it.’
‘“What remains”?’
‘Yes. It was going to be too expensive to dismantle it, so they called in the Royal Navy, since we didn’t have an Australian one, to bombard it from the water. All that’s left now is a circle of stones, and the daughter’s grave, in the cemetery in Paradise Bay.’
‘And the keeper? Where is he buried?’
‘I don’t know. Up by the old lighthouse, I think – there are graves there – but I don’t rightly know.’
With this he pushed open the heavy wooden door into the tower and, stepping in himself, held it open for Daniel, gesturing him to start before him down the circular iron stairs.
‘When did all this happen?’
‘I couldn’t tell you the specific dates exactly, though I’m sure it would be easy enough to find out. But it all happened in the 1890s. I’m not sure when they bombarded the place, but they would have had to do that before they bu
ilt this one, or there’d have been confusion. You can’t leave an abandoned lighthouse standing about, especially one built in the wrong place. That one was built in the late 1880s. This one was its replacement, and this was opened in 1902, so my guess would be around 1901. They wouldn’t have wanted to close the one until the other was operational. The State Archives would tell you.’
Outside, they encountered Ellen and Margaret leaning on the lighthouse wall in the late afternoon sunshine, sharing a cigarette. From the sudden, over-bright elevation of Margaret’s voice in greeting, Daniel had a momentary feeling that he and the keeper had interrupted some particular intimacy, but shrugged off the sensation as a ghost of the night’s misapprehension. In the face of some events, albeit only distantly apprehended – he was still thinking about the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, and of the man himself taken by a shark – things that might otherwise be seen quite differently can sometimes seem gratifyingly present and human.
They thanked the lighthouse keeper warmly, and for the first half-hour of the drive back to the guest-house talked animatedly of what they had seen, then fell, in the late sunlight, into a reflective silence that remained almost unbroken until their arrival just after dusk. At one point, reaching up to turn the visor against the glare of the sunset, Daniel had looked into the rear-vision mirror and seen Margaret sleeping beautifully and simply as a child on Ellen’s shoulder and Ellen herself looking out the window almost oblivious, lost in thought.
At dinner he told them about the Cape William light, and although their conversation drifted into other areas, it kept returning to the dead girl and her luckless father, the fate of the school-friend, the life of the sons afterward. They decided – largely at Daniel’s urging, for it was clear that the women were not quite so enthusiastic – that they would drive there if they could, the day after next, or the day following, as a small detour at the beginning of their journey back. As they took their after-dinner drinks to the fire in the lounge, Daniel, who had begun to feel he might be belabouring the subject, did his best to speak about other things, but at three a.m., lying awake listening to the sound of breakers on the beach below, watching on the wall the periodic wash of the distant light as it slipped between blind and window-frame, his mind went back to the story as if its characters had somehow inhabited him and would not yet let him go – so involving him, as he drifted in and out of sleep, that he all but missed, or perhaps only imagined, as people came and went in his half-dream, the slight depression of the mattress as Margaret returned to the bed.
The next day and the one after were days of bright sunshine, perfect for the beach. On the third, the weather having turned colder, threatening rain, they drove directly back to Sydney. At the crossroads, when they might have turned left toward Cape William, Daniel paused the car, hoping that someone might remember, but neither of them seemed to notice, and he took it for a sign.
IV
The Black Beast
Every marriage has its public and its private face. And in every marriage the private has two faces again, the day-to-day and something deeper, rarely exposed, no less a marriage for the fact that the partners may not always recognise one another there. There were many stories he told himself about her blackness, many explanations he arrived at, to try to reconcile himself to it, to give himself what he thought of as the strength, the energy to deal with it. Probably the truth of it, if there was a truth, was some combination of them all. Possibly, as he came eventually to think, it was not her blackness at all, but the blackness, something that had come to live with the two of them, something that fed on them both.
It had gone on for years. If it had not seemed to be there at the start it might only have been that their passion, their excitement in the first stages had masked it. For years, too, the apparent causes varied so much – difficulties with roles, directors, producers, companies, reviews, other singers; the frustration of seeing her career, during her best years, crippled first by the Depression and then war; fear of aging, having no children. And these seemed only the choppy surface of larger waves beneath. There were other events the effects of which were much more profound, much longer lasting – things that could happen overnight but would take years to recede. There had been a miscarriage, for example, about which he learnt only months later, in the heat of an argument, but which had affected deeply – he would sometimes think permanently – their own intimate life. And there had been the strange death of Katherine McKenzie which, although far less dramatically, had disturbed her perhaps even more, though he could never get her to talk about or explain it. As though there were some kind of magnet in it, drawing her, that she had to resist with all the energy she had. Sometimes it was like that: he felt, sometimes, as if they were caught in some kind of tug-of-war, he trying to pull her back from something, some force, that was pulling her away from him, a force not of or in this world, or something on the other, hidden side of it. He read Freud, Jung, in the hope that he might find some clue or guidance in them, but it all seemed a kind of inspired guesswork. He wondered what, if anything, they really knew.
It had taken him, in any case, what seemed in retrospect a ridiculous amount of time to realise that these things, in their endless sequence, were hooks, a symptom only, and that it was the blackness itself that was the constant, with its roots somewhere else. She – or it – would grasp onto the passing reasons as if they were a kind of food, a fuel to keep it going. For a time, having realised this much, he thought the principal reason, its deeper source, was her mother, the ghosts – that craziness – she had instilled in her, that frequency of visitation (for Margaret, trying to explain the power – and pain – of her singing, her strange fear of it, had told him about this) that had made her daughter’s mind a kind of haunted place, so sympathetic and suggestible, with such permeable borders, that it saw and knew what others only heard or read, that it felt where others only abstracted, that it lived what others only sang. But there was her father also, his stubborn antipathy and rejection, his continuing denial of what was most living in her, his strange insistence that she become two – but what abject fear, what appalling experience could have made him wish this? (she had tried to explain this too, told him about the Great War, the aftershock, but it had never seemed enough) – and, deeper still in her, something else, as if a ghost of some kind, a particular ghost, had lodged, had stayed, and would not go.
Certainly he found it easier at last – a story he most persistently reverted to and yet always reluctantly, since it so denied him any power to amend – to see her as in some such way possessed, not in her own keeping. The woman who shouted at him, whose emotions clawed at him, hating him as she could surely only do if she were hating something far larger – as if whatever it was had become concentrated within him, because he was closest, because he was there, and would withstand, would forgive, because he loved – was not Margaret at all, nor even Lilian, but the puppet of something else, bitter and angry within them, flailing about. And thinking this, seeing her at these times as not her, he was able to deal with it better; he could relinquish the desire or demand for consistency; he could, at last, put reason aside, and wrestle unencumbered. Everything changed, became clearer, when he saw himself not as arguing or wrestling with her, his wife, but through her, with something that she too was wrestling in her own way.
But was this too only a dream of her? Was this only a means of survival on his part, all the crueller to her in that it had, in this way, dismantled her, removed her, would not take her whole, not accept that it was her after all? Once, after a night of this raging, when it seemed as it did every such succeeding morning that the fury had passed, he woke before her in the first light, and saw a shadow, an actual shadow, in her face, her body, too deep and pervasive to be something laid upon her by the light, as if a ghost, a dark beast that should have been gone by that hour, had been overtaken by the dawn – and he found himself very consciously searching for a way to wake her so gently that he would not also wake this other, th
at she might somehow – in a way that he could only desperately hope for, not explain – slip from beneath it as from beneath a dark cloth, leaving it to its own fate in the light. And, seeing this, thinking this, he remembered another time, so early in their marriage that he had until now forgotten or repressed it.
It was while they were still in the Centennial Park house. He had been drinking – not a great deal, but friends had been over for the evening and he had consumed enough to ensure him a sound sleep, and something had woken him at what must have been three or four a.m. He had struggled groggily from the bed and made his way to the bathroom, to find Margaret, whom he’d assumed to be sleeping beside him, sitting on the edge of the bath, almost naked, and had been shocked to see, high on each inner thigh, bruises that, for a fleeting moment before she put her leg down and pulled her bathrobe over her, had seemed the clear imprint of a pair of large hands, as if some very strong person, some being, had tried to tear her apart, to force its way in. He had asked her, been unable to stop himself, what they were, how on earth they had got there, and she had snapped at him, cruelly, viciously, is if he were not himself but some other person entirely: ‘Don’t you know?’ And he had retreated, in confusion, never spoken of it again – in truth because, the next morning, he had not known whether he had dreamt or actually experienced it – and so had repressed it as, for one’s own survival, one might repress the experience of staring suddenly into a giddy emptiness. How could he know? What was there to know? Should he?
And one night, another, much later, in insomnia in the second or third year of the War, thinking through it all for what seemed the hundredth, the thousandth time, had sat bolt upright in the bed, having remembered suddenly a look Isobel had once given him, and stared wide-eyed into the darkness, down the long, dim hall to that first marriage, seeing now, too late, any number of foreshadowings of his life with Margaret, as if it had been not two marriages, two people, but one. But who was that person? What was her name? Was it all only an appalling coincidence? But how could it be? How could it not be something more? What was there to connect them but himself? Was the Black Beast – for so, by now, he had come to think of it – somehow in himself also? Was it himself? If that were so – if it were in him, was him (was him!) – was it him alone? or him also? where had it come from? why was it so? He thought back as far as he could in his life, but there was again, as there always was, at the point of earliest memory, a barrier, a bulk-head he could not get through. Something about the death of his mother? An unresolved grief? Could it be that? The only person he might have asked was gone. And yet probably that too was the wrong way to look. It was just as probable that he and Margaret were each of them puppets to something greater, that they were themselves, yes, but also embodiments of principles – was it only male and female? – that divided as much as bound them together, a dependency that was also a fundamental opposition, a situation not necessary or right – those irrelevant words – but somehow built into everything.
