The Light Between Oceans: A Novel

by M. L. Stedman

  On the Lights, you account for every single day. You write up the log, you report what’s happened, you produce evidence that life goes on. In time, as the ghosts start to dissolve in the pure Janus air, Tom dares to think of the life ahead of him—a thing that for years has been too improbable to depend on. Isabel is there in his thoughts, laughing in spite of it all, insatiably curious about the world around her, and game for anything. Captain Hasluck’s advice echoes in his memory as he goes to the woodshed. Having chosen a piece of mallee root, he carries it to the workshop.

  Janus Rock,

  15th March 1921

  Dear Isabel,

  I hope this letter finds you well. I am very well. I like it out here. That probably sounds strange, but I do. The quiet suits me. There’s something magical about Janus. It’s like nowhere I’ve ever been.

  I wish you could see the sunrise and sunset here. And the stars: the sky gets crowded at night, and it is a bit like watching a clock, seeing the constellations slide across the sky. It’s comforting to know that they’ll show up, however bad the day has been, however crook things get. That used to help in France. It put things into perspective—the stars had been around since before there were people. They just kept shining, no matter what was going on. I think of the light here like that, like a splinter of a star that’s fallen to earth: it just shines, no matter what is happening. Summer, winter, storm, fine weather. People can rely on it.

  Better stop rabbiting on. The point is, I am sending with this letter a little box I have carved for you. I hope it’s useful. You might put jewelry in it, or hairclips and whatnot.

  By now you have probably changed your mind about things, and I just wanted to say that that is all right. You are a wonderful girl, and I enjoyed the time we spent together.

  The boat comes tomorrow, so I will give this to Ralph then.

  Tom.

  Janus Rock,

  15th June 1921

  Dear Isabel,

  I am writing this quickly, as the boys are getting ready to leave. Ralph delivered your letter. It was good to hear from you. I am glad you liked the box.

  Thank you for the photograph. You look beautiful, but not as cheeky as you are in real life. I know just where I will put it in the lantern room, so that you can see out through the window.

  No, it doesn’t really feel all that strange, your question. If I think about it, in the war I knew plenty of fellows who got spliced on three-day furlough back in England, then came straight back to carry on the show. Most of them thought they might not be around much longer, and probably so did their girls. With a bit of luck I will be a longer-term proposition, so think carefully. I am prepared to risk it if you are. I can apply for exceptional shore leave at the end of December, so you have got time to think it over. If you change your mind, I will understand. And if you don’t, I promise I will take care of you always, and do my very best to be a good husband.

  Yours,

  Tom.

  The next six months passed slowly. There had been nothing to wait for before—Tom had grown so used to greeting the days as ends in themselves. Now, there was a wedding date. There were arrangements to be made, permissions to be sought. In any spare minute, he would go around the cottage and find something else to put right: the window in the kitchen that didn’t quite shut; the tap that needed a man’s force to turn it. What would Isabel need, out here? With the last boat back, he sent an order for paint to freshen up the rooms; a mirror for the dressing table; new towels and tablecloths; sheet music for the decrepit piano—he had never touched it, but he knew Isabel loved to play. He hesitated before adding to the list new sheets, two new pillows and an eiderdown.

  When, finally, the boat arrived to take Tom back for the big day, Neville Whittnish strode onto the jetty, ready to fill in during his absence.

  “Everything in order?”

  “Hope so,” said Tom.

  After a brief inspection, Whittnish said, “You know how to treat a light. I’ll give you that much.”

  “Thanks,” said Tom, genuinely touched by the compliment.

  “Ready, boy?” asked Ralph as they were about to cast off.

  “God only knows,” said Tom.

  “Never a truer word spoken.” Ralph turned his eyes to the horizon. “Off we go, my beauty, got to get Captain Sherbourne, Military Cross and Bar, to his damsel.”

  Ralph spoke to the boat in the same way Whittnish referred to the light—living creatures, close to their hearts. The things a man could love, Tom thought. He fixed his eyes on the tower. Life would have changed utterly when he saw it again. He had a sudden pang: would Isabel love Janus as much as he did? Would she understand his world?

  CHAPTER 7

  You see? Because it’s this high above sea level, the light reaches over the curve of the earth—beyond the horizon. Not the beam itself, but the loom—the glow of it.” Tom was standing behind Isabel on the lighthouse gallery, arms around her, chin reaching down to rest on her shoulder. The January sun scattered flecks of gold in her dark hair. It was 1922, and their second day alone on Janus. Back from a few days’ honeymoon in Perth and straight out to the island.

  “It’s like seeing into the future,” said Isabel. “You can reach ahead in time to save the ship before it knows it needs help.”

  “The higher the light, and the bigger the order of lens, the further its beam shines. This one goes just about as far as any light can.”

  “I’ve never been this high up in all my life! It’s like flying!” she said, and broke away to circle the tower once more. “And what do you call the flash again—there’s that word…”

  “The character. Every coastal light has a different character. This one flashes four times on each twenty-second rotation. So every ship knows from the five-second flash that this is Janus, not Leeuwin or Breaksea or anywhere else.”

  “How do they know?”

  “Ships keep a list of the lights they’ll pass on their course. Time’s money if you’re a skipper. They’re always tempted to cut the corner of the Cape—want to be first to offload their cargo and pick up a new one. Fewer days at sea saves on crew’s wages, too. The light’s here to ward them off, get them to pull their head in.”

  Through the glass Isabel could see the heavy black blinds of the lantern room. “What are they for?” she asked.

  “Protection! The lens doesn’t care which light it magnifies. If it can turn the little flame into a million candlepower, imagine what it can do to sunlight when the lens stands still all day. It’s all very well if you’re ten miles away. Not so good to be ten inches away. So you have to protect it. And protect yourself—I’d fry if I went inside it during the day without the curtains. Come inside and I’ll show you how it works.”

  The iron door clanged behind them as they went into the lantern room, and through the opening into the light itself.

  “This is a first order lens—about as bright as they come.”

  Isabel watched the rainbows thrown about by the prisms. “It’s so pretty.”

  “The thick central bit of glass is the bull’s eye. This one has four, but you can have different numbers depending on the character. The light source has to line up exactly with the height of that so it gets concentrated by the lens.”

  “And all the circles of glass around the bull’s eyes?” Separate arcs of triangular glass were arranged around the center of the lens like the rings of a dartboard.

  “The first eight refract the light: they bend it so that instead of heading up to the moon or down to the ocean floor where it’s no good to anybody, it goes straight out to sea: they make it sort of turn a corner. The rings above and below the metal bar—See? Fourteen of them—they get thicker the further away from the center they are: they reflect the light back down, so all the light is being concentrated into one beam, not just going off in all directions.”

  “So none of the light gets away without earning its keep,” said Isabel.

  “You could say that. And here’s
the light itself,” he said, gesturing to the small apparatus on the metal stand in the very center of the space, covered in a mesh casing.

  “It doesn’t look much.”

  “It isn’t, now. But that mesh cover is an incandescent mantle, and it makes the vaporized oil burn bright as a star, once it’s magnified. I’ll show you tonight.”

  “Our own star! Like the world’s been made just for us! With the sunshine and the ocean. We have each other all to ourselves.”

  “I reckon the Lights think they’ve got me all to themselves,” said Tom.

  “No nosy neighbors or boring relatives.” She nibbled at his ear. “Just you and me…”

  “And the animals. There’s no snakes on Janus, luckily. Some islands down this way are nothing but. There’s one or two spiders’ll give you a nip though, so keep your eyes peeled. There are…” Tom was having difficulty finishing his point about the local fauna, as Isabel kept kissing him, nipping his ears, reaching her hands back into his pockets in a way that made it an effort to think, let alone speak coherently. “It’s a serious…” he struggled on, “point I’m trying to make here, Izz. You need to watch out for—” and he let out a moan as her fingers found their target.

  “Me…” She giggled. “I’m the deadliest thing on this island!”

  “Not here, Izz. Not in the middle of the lantern. Let’s”—he took a deep breath—“let’s go downstairs.”

  Isabel laughed. “Yes, here!”

  “It’s government property.”

  “What—are you going to have to record it in the logbook?”

  Tom gave an awkward cough. “Technically… These things are pretty delicate, and they cost more money than you or I’ll ever see in a lifetime. I don’t want to be the one who has to make up an excuse about how anything got broken. Come on, let’s go downstairs.”

  “And what if I won’t?” she teased.

  “Well, I suppose I’ll just have to”—he hoisted her onto one hip—“make you, sweetheart,” he said, and carried her down the hundreds of narrow stairs.

  “Oh, it’s heaven here!” Isabel declared the next day as she looked out at the flat, turquoise ocean. Despite Tom’s grim warnings about the weather, the wind had declared a greeting truce and the sun was again gloriously warm.

  He had brought her to the lagoon, a broad pool of placid ultramarine no more than six feet deep, in which they were now swimming.

  “Just as well you like it. It’s three years till we get shore leave.”

  She put her arms around him. “I’m where I want to be and with the man I want to be with. Nothing else matters.”

  Tom swirled her gently in a circle as he spoke. “Sometimes fish find their way in here through the gaps in the rocks. You can scoop them up with a net, or even just with your hands.”

  “What’s this pool called?”

  “Hasn’t got a name.”

  “Everything deserves a name, don’t you think?”

  “Well, you can give it one then.”

  Isabel thought for a moment. “I hereby christen this Paradise Pool,” she said, and splashed a handful of water onto a rock. “This will be my swimming spot.”

  “You’re usually pretty safe here. But keep your eyes open, just in case.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Isabel as she paddled, only half listening.

  “The sharks can’t usually make it through the rocks, unless there’s a really high tide or a storm or something, so you’re probably safe on that count…”

  “Probably?”

  “But you need to be careful about other things. Sea urchins, say. Watch out when you’re walking on submerged rocks, or the spines can snap off in your foot and get infected. And stingrays bury themselves in the sand near the edge of the water—if you tread on the barb in their tail you’re in trouble. If it flicks up and gets you near the heart, well…” He noticed that Isabel had gone silent.

  “You all right, Izz?”

  “It feels different somehow, when you just reel it all off like that—when we’re this far from help.”

  Tom took her in his arms and pulled her up to the shore. “I’ll look after you, sweetheart. Don’t you worry,” he said with a smile. He kissed her shoulders, and laid her head back on the sand, to kiss her mouth.

  In Isabel’s wardrobe, beside the piles of thick winter woolens, hang a few floral dresses—easy to wash, hard to hurt as she goes about her new work of feeding the chickens or milking the goats; picking the vegetables or cleaning the kitchen. When she hikes around the island with Tom she wears an old pair of his trousers, rolled up more than a foot and cinched with a cracked leather belt, over one of his collarless shirts. She likes to feel the ground under her feet, and goes without shoes whenever she can, but on the cliffs she endures plimsolls to protect her soles from the granite. She explores the boundaries of her new world.

  One morning soon after she arrived, a little drunk with the freedom of it, she decided to experiment. “What do you think of the new look?” she said to Tom as she brought him a sandwich in the watch room at noon, wearing nothing at all. “I don’t think I need clothes on a day as lovely as this.”

  He raised an eyebrow and gave her a half smile. “Very nice. But you’ll get sick of it soon enough, Izz.” As he took the sandwich he stroked her chin. “There’s some things you have to do to survive on the Offshore Lights, love—to stay normal: eat at proper times; turn the pages of the calendar”—he laughed—“and keep your clobber on. Trust me, sweet.”

  Blushing, she retreated to the cottage and dressed in several layers—camisole and petticoat, shift, cardigan, then heaved on Wellington boots and went to dig up potatoes with unnecessary vigor in the sharp sunshine.

  Isabel asked Tom, “Have you got a map of the island?”

  He smiled. “Afraid of getting lost? You’ve been here a few weeks now. As long as you go in the opposite direction to the water, you’ll get home sooner or later. And the light might give you a clue too.”

  “I just want a map. There must be one.”

  “Of course there is. There are charts of the whole area if you want them, but I’m not sure what good they are to you. There’s nowhere much you can go.”

  “Just humor me, husband of mine,” she said, and kissed his cheek.

  Later that morning, Tom appeared in the kitchen with a large scroll, and presented it with mock ceremony to Isabel. “Your wish is my command, Mrs. Sherbourne.”

  “Thank you,” she replied in the same tone. “That will be all, for now. You may go, sir.”

  A smile played on Tom’s lips as he rubbed his chin. “What are you up to, missie?”

  “Never you mind!”

  For the next few days, Isabel went off on expeditions each morning, and in the afternoon closed the door to the bedroom, even though Tom was safely occupied with his work.

  One evening, after she had dried the dinner dishes, she fetched the scroll and handed it to Tom. “This is for you.”

  “Thanks, love,” said Tom, who was reading a dog-eared volume on the tying of rope knots. He looked up briefly. “I’ll put it back tomorrow.”

  “But it’s for you.”

  Tom looked at her. “It’s the map, isn’t it?”

  She gave a mischievous grin. “You won’t know until you look, will you?”

  Tom unrolled the paper, to find it transformed. Little annotations had appeared all over it, together with colored sketches and arrows. His first thought was that the map was Commonwealth property and that there would be hell to pay next inspection. New names had sprung up everywhere.

  “Well?” Isabel smiled. “It just seemed wrong that places weren’t called anything. So I’ve given them names, see?”

  The coves and the cliffs and the rocks and the grassy fields all bore fine lettering, in which they were christened, as Paradise Pool had been: Stormy Corner; Treacherous Rock; Shipwreck Beach; Tranquil Cove; Tom’s Lookout; Izzy’s Cliff, and many more.

  “I suppose I’d never thought of i
t as being separate places. It’s all just Janus to me,” Tom said, smiling.

  “It’s a world of differences. Each place deserves a name, like rooms in a house.”

  Tom rarely thought of the house in terms of rooms either. It was just “home.” And something in him was saddened at the dissection of the island, the splitting off into the good and the bad, the safe and the dangerous. He preferred to think of it whole. Even more, he was uneasy about parts bearing his name. Janus did not belong to him: he belonged to it, like he’d heard the natives thought of land. His job was just to take care of it.

  He looked at his wife, who was smiling proudly at her handiwork. If she wanted to give things names, maybe there was no harm in it. And maybe she would come to understand his way of looking at it, eventually.

  When Tom gets invitations to his Battalion reunions, he always writes back. Always sends good wishes, and a bit of money toward the mess. But he never attends. Well, being on the Lights, he couldn’t even if he wanted to. There are some, he knows, who will take comfort in seeing a familiar face, re-telling a story. But he doesn’t want to join in. There were friends he lost—men he’d trusted, fought with, drunk with, and shivered with. Men he understood without a word, knew as if they were an extension of his body. He thinks about the language that bound them together: words that cropped up to cover circumstances no one had ever encountered before. A “pineapple,” a “pipsqueak,” a “plum pudding”: all types of shell which might find their way into your trench. The lice were “chats,” the food was “scran,” and a “Blighty” was a wound that’d see you shipped back to hospital in England. He wonders how many men can still speak this secret language.