The Light Between Oceans: A Novel

by M. L. Stedman

  She looked at the two pine trees and suddenly wept at their aloneness. “There should be forests,” she said suddenly. “I miss the trees, Tom. I miss their leaves and their smell and the fact there are so many of them—oh, Tom, I miss the animals: I bloody miss kangaroos! I miss it all.”

  “I know you do, Izzy, darl.”

  “But don’t you?”

  “You’re the only thing in this world that I want, Izz, and you’re right here. Everything else will sort itself out. Just give it time.”

  A sheer, velvet veil covered everything, no matter how dutifully Isabel dusted—her wedding photograph; the picture of Hugh and Alfie in their uniforms the week they joined up in 1916, grinning as if they’d just been invited to a party. Not the tallest lads in the AIF, but keen as mustard, and so dashing in their brand-new slouch hats.

  Her sewing box was as neat as it needed to be, rather than pristine like her mother’s. Needles and pins pierced the cushioned pale-green lining, and the panels of a christening gown lay un-united, stopped in mid-stitch like a broken clock.

  The small string of pearls Tom had given her as a wedding gift sat in the box he had made for her. Her hairbrush and tortoiseshell combs were the only other things on her dressing table.

  Isabel wandered into the lounge room, observing the dust, the crack in the plaster near the window frame, the frayed edge of the dark blue rug. The hearth needed sweeping, and the lining of the curtains had begun to shred from constant exposure to extremes of weather. Simply to think of fixing any of it took more energy than she could muster. Only weeks ago she had been so full of expectation and vigor. Now the room felt like a coffin, and her life stopped at its edges.

  She opened the photograph album her mother had prepared for her as a going-away present, with the pictures of her as a child, the name of the photographer’s studio, Gutcher’s, stamped on the back of each portrait. There was one of her parents on their wedding day; a photograph of home. She trailed her finger over the table, lingering on the lace doily her grandmother had made for her own trousseau. She moved to the piano, and opened it.

  The walnut was split in places. The gold leaf above the keyboard said Eavestaff, London. She had often imagined its journey to Australia, and the other lives it could have lived—in an English house, or a school, sagging under the burden of imperfect scales played by small, stumbling fingers perhaps, or even on a stage. Yet through the most unlikely of circumstances, its lot was to live on this island, its voice stolen by loneliness and the weather.

  She pressed middle C, so slowly that it made no sound. The warm ivory key was as smooth as her grandmother’s fingertips, and the touch brought back afternoons of music lessons, of wringing out A flat major in contrary motion, one octave, then two, then three. The sound of the cricket ball on the wood as Hugh and Alfie larked about outside while she, a “little lady,” acquired “accomplishments,” and listened as her grandmother explained again the importance of keeping her wrists raised.

  “But it’s stupid, contrary motion!” Isabel would wail.

  “Well, you’d know all about contrary motion, my dear,” her grandmother remarked.

  “Can’t I play cricket, Gran? Just a bit and then I’ll come back.”

  “Cricket’s no game for a girl. Now, come on. The Chopin étude,” she would breeze on, opening a book tattooed with pencil marks and small smudged-chocolate fingerprints.

  Isabel stroked the key again. She felt a sudden longing, not just for the music, but for that time when she could have rushed outside, hitched up her skirt, and stood as wicketkeeper for her brothers. She pressed the other keys, as if they might bring the day back. But the only sound was the muffled clack of the wood against the base of the keyboard, where the felt had worn away.

  “What’s the point?” she shrugged to Tom as he came in. “It’s had it, I reckon. Just like me,” and she started to cry.

  Days later, the two of them stood beside the cliff.

  Tom hammered the small cross he had made from some driftwood, until it was secure in the ground. At his wife’s request he had carved, “31 May 1922. Remembered always.”

  He took the shovel and dug a hole for the rosemary bush she had moved from the herb garden. He could feel nausea rising in him as a spark of memory arced between the hammering of the cross and digging of the hole. His palms sweated, though the task required little physical effort.

  Isabel watched from high on the cliff as the Windward Spirit docked on its next run. Ralph and Bluey would make their way up soon enough. No need to go to greet them. They slung the gangplank down, and to her surprise, a third man disembarked with them. No maintenance crews were due.

  Tom came up the path while the other three lingered at the jetty. The stranger, who carried a black bag, seemed to be having some difficulty righting himself after the journey.

  Isabel’s face was tight with anger as Tom approached. “How dare you!”

  Tom reeled. “How dare I?”

  “I told you not to and you went ahead anyway! Well you can just send him back. Don’t bother letting him up here. He’s not wanted.”

  Isabel always looked like a child when she was angry. Tom wanted to laugh, and his grin infuriated her even more. She put her hands on her hips. “I told you I didn’t need a doctor, but you went behind my back. I’m not having him prodding and poking about to tell me nothing I don’t already know. You should be ashamed of yourself! Well, you can look after them, the whole lot of them.”

  “Izzy,” Tom called. “Izzy, wait! Don’t do your ’nana, love. He’s not…” But she was already too far off to hear the rest of his words.

  “Well?” asked Ralph as he reached Tom. “How did she take it? Pleased as Punch, I bet!”

  “Not exactly.” Tom stuffed his fists in his pockets.

  “But…” Ralph looked at him in amazement. “I thought she’d be real chuffed. It took all Freda’s charms to persuade him to come, and my wife doesn’t use her charms freely!”

  “She…” Tom considered whether to explain. “She got the wrong end of the stick about it. Sorry. She’s chucked a wobbly. Once she does that, all you can do is batten down the hatches and wait for it to pass. Means I’ll be making sandwiches for lunch, I’m afraid.”

  Bluey and the man approached, and after the introductions, the four of them went inside.

  Isabel sat in the grass near the cove she had christened Treacherous, and seethed. She hated this—the fact that your dirty washing had to be everybody else’s business. She hated the fact that Ralph and Bluey had to know. They’d probably spent the whole trip out discussing her most private shame and Lord knew what else. That Tom could ship the doctor out against her explicit wishes felt like a betrayal.

  She sat watching the water, how the breeze fluffed up the waves which had been so smooth and curled earlier in the day. Hours passed. She grew hungry. She grew sleepy. But she refused to go near the cottage while the doctor was there. She concentrated instead on her surroundings. Noticing the texture of each leaf, the precise green of it. Listening to all the different pitches of wind and water and birds. She heard a foreign sound: an insistent note, short, repeated. Coming from the light? From the cottage? It was not the usual clang of metal from the workshop. She heard it again, this time at a different pitch. The wind on Janus had a way of raking sounds into separate frequencies, distorting them as they crossed the island. Two gulls came to land nearby and squabble over a fish, and the noise, faint at best, was lost.

  She went back to her mulling, until she was arrested by an unmistakable sound carried on the shifting air. It was a scale: imperfect, but the pitch getting better each time.

  She had never heard Ralph or Bluey mention the piano, and Tom couldn’t play for toffee. It must be the wretched doctor, determined to put his fingers where they were not wanted. She had never been able to get a tune out of the piano, and now it seemed to be singing. Isabel’s fury drove her up the path, ready to banish the intruder from the instrument, from her body, from
her home.

  She passed the outbuildings, where Tom, Ralph and Bluey were stacking sacks of flour.

  “Afternoon, Isab—” Ralph attempted, but she marched past him and into the house.

  She barged into the lounge room. “If you don’t mind, that’s a very delicate instru—” she began, but got no further, flummoxed by the sight of the piano completely stripped down, a box of tools open, and the stranger turning the nut above one of the bass copper wires with a tiny spanner as he hit its corresponding key.

  “Mummified seagull. That’s your problem,” he said, without looking around. “Well, one of them. That and a good twenty years’ worth of sand and salt and God knows what. Once I’ve replaced some of the felts it’ll start to sound better.” He continued to tap the key and turn the spanner as he spoke. “I’ve seen all sorts in my time. Dead rats. Sandwiches. A stuffed cat. I could write a book about the things that end up inside a piano, though I couldn’t tell you how they get there. I’m betting the seagull didn’t fly in by itself.”

  Isabel was so taken aback that she couldn’t speak. Her mouth was still open when she felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned to find Tom. She flushed deep red.

  “So much for surprises, eh?” he said, and kissed her cheek.

  “Well… Well, it was…” Isabel’s voice trailed off.

  He slipped a hand around her waist and the two of them stood for a moment, forehead touching forehead, before breaking into laughter.

  She sat for the next two hours, watching the tuner as he coaxed a brighter sound, getting the notes to ring out once again, louder than ever before, and he finished with a burst of the Hallelujah Chorus.

  “I’ve done my best, Mrs. Sherbourne,” he said as he packed away his tools. “Really needs to come into the workshop, but the trip out and back would do as much harm as good. She’s not perfect, by a long chalk, but she’ll do.” He pulled the piano stool out. “Care to give it a burl?”

  Isabel sat at the keyboard, and played the A flat major scale in contrary motion.

  “Well, that’s a sight better than before!” she said. She broke into the beginnings of a Handel aria and was wandering off into memory when someone cleared his throat. It was Ralph, standing behind Bluey in the doorway.

  “Don’t stop!” Bluey said, as she turned to greet them.

  “I was so rude. I’m sorry!” she said, about to get up.

  “Not a bit of it,” said Ralph. “And here. From Hilda,” he said, producing from behind his back something tied with a red ribbon.

  “Oh! Shall I open it now?”

  “You’d better! If I don’t give her a blow-by-blow report, I’ll never hear the end of it!”

  Isabel opened the wrapping and found Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

  “Tom reckons you can play this sort of caper with your eyes shut.”

  “I haven’t played them for years. But—oh, I just love them! Thank you!” She hugged Ralph and kissed his cheek. “And you too, Bluey,” she said with a kiss that accidentally caught his lips as he turned.

  He blushed violently and looked at the ground. “I never had much to do with it, I don’t reckon,” he said, but Tom protested.

  “Don’t believe a word of it. He drove all the way to Albany to fetch him. Took him the whole day yesterday.”

  “In that case, you get an extra kiss,” she said, and planted another on his other cheek.

  “And you too!” she said, kissing the piano tuner for good measure.

  That night as he checked the mantle, Tom was serenaded by Bach, the orderly notes climbing the stairs of the lighthouse and ringing around the lantern room, flittering between the prisms. Just like the mercury that made the light go around, Isabel was—mysterious. Able to cure and to poison; able to bear the whole weight of the light, but capable of fracturing into a thousand uncatchable particles, running off in all directions, escaping from itself. He went out onto the gallery. As the lights of the Windward Spirit disappeared over the horizon, he said a silent prayer for Isabel, and for their life together. Then he turned to the logbook and wrote, in the “remarks” column for Wednesday, 13 September, 1922, “Visit per store boat: Archie Pollock, piano tuner. Prior approval granted.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 10

  27th April 1926

  Isabel’s lips were pale and her eyes downcast. She still placed her hand fondly on her stomach sometimes, before its flatness reminded her it was empty. And still, her blouses bore occasional patches from the last of the breast milk that had come in so abundantly in the first days, a feast for an absent guest. Then she would cry again, as though the news were fresh.

  She stood with sheets in her hands: chores didn’t stop, just as the light didn’t stop. Having made the bed and folded her nightgown under the pillow, she headed up to the cliff, to sit by the graves a while. She tended the new one with great care, wondering whether the fledgling rosemary would take. She pulled a few weeds from around the two older crosses, now finely crystalled with years of salt, the rosemary growing doggedly despite the gales.

  When a baby’s cry came to her on the wind, she looked instinctively to the new grave. Before logic could interfere, there was a moment when her mind told her it had all been a mistake—this last child had not been stillborn early, but was living and breathing.

  The illusion dissolved, but the cry did not. Then Tom’s call from the gallery—“On the beach! A boat!”—told her this was not a dream, and she moved as quickly as she could to join him on the way to the dinghy.

  The man in it was dead, but Tom fished a screaming bundle out of the bow.

  “Bloody hell!” he exclaimed. “Bloody hell, Izzy. It’s—”

  “A baby! Oh my Lord above! Oh Tom! Tom! Here—give it to me!”

  Back in the cottage, Isabel’s belly quickened at the very sight of the baby—her arms knew instinctively how to hold the child and calm her, soothe her. As she scooped warm water over the infant, she registered the freshness of her skin, taut and soft and without a wrinkle. She kissed each of the tiny fingertips in turn, gently nibbling down the nails a fraction so the child would not scratch herself. She cupped the baby’s head in the palm of her hand, and with the silk handkerchief she kept for best, dabbed away a fine crust of mucus from under her nostrils, and wiped the dried salt of tears from around her eyes. The moment seemed to merge into one with another bathing, another face—a single act that had merely been interrupted.

  Looking into those eyes was like looking at the face of God. No mask or pretense: the baby’s defenselessness was overwhelming. That this intricate creature, this exquisite crafting of blood and bones and skin, could have found its way to her, was humbling. That she could have arrived now, barely two weeks after… It was impossible to see it as mere chance. Frail as a falling snowflake, the baby could so easily have melted into oblivion had the currents not borne her, arrow-true and safe, to Shipwreck Beach.

  In a place before words, in some other language of creature to creature, with the softening of her muscles, the relaxing of her neck, the baby signaled her trust. Having come so close to the hands of death, life now fused with life like water meets water.

  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 gar
ments. 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.