With fondest love,
Isabel
P.S. I’ve just read your letter from the boat this morning. Thanks for the beautiful bunny rug. And the doll is just lovely. The books are wonderful too. I tell her nursery rhymes all the time, so she’ll like these new ones.
P.P.S. Tom says thanks for the jumper. Winter’s starting to bite out here!
The new moon was barely a crescent stitched into the darkening sky. Tom and Isabel were sitting on the veranda as the light swept around far above them. Lucy had fallen asleep in Tom’s arms.
“It’s hard to breathe differently from her, isn’t it?” he said, gazing at the baby.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like a kind of spell, isn’t it? Whenever she’s asleep like this, I end up breathing in the same rhythm. A bit like I end up doing things in time to the turning of the light.” Almost to himself, he said, “It scares me.”
Isabel smiled. “It’s just love, Tom. No need to be scared of love.”
Tom felt a shiver creep through him. Just as he couldn’t now imagine having lived in this world without meeting Isabel, he realized that Lucy, too, was making her way inside his heart. And he wished she belonged there.
Anyone who’s worked on the Offshore Lights can tell you about it—the isolation, and the spell it casts. Like sparks flung off the furnace that is Australia, these beacons dot around it, flickering on and off, some of them only ever seen by a handful of living souls. But their isolation saves the whole continent from isolation—keeps the shipping lanes safe, as vessels steam the thousands of miles to bring machines and books and cloth, in return for wool and wheat, coal and gold: the fruits of ingenuity traded for the fruits of earth.
The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm—the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you’re wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.
So Isabel floats further and further into her world of divine benevolence, where prayers are answered, where babies arrive by the will of God and the working of currents. “Tom, I wonder how we can be so lucky?” she muses. She watches in awe as her blessed daughter grows and thrives. She revels in the discoveries each day brings for this little being: rolling over; starting to crawl; the first, faltering sounds. The storms gradually follow winter to another corner of the earth, and summer comes, bearing a paler blue sky, a sharper gold sun.
“Up you come.” Isabel laughs, and hoists Lucy onto her hip as the three of them stroll down the path to the glinting beach for a picnic. Tom picks different leaves—sea grass, pig-face—and Lucy smells them, chews on their ends, pulling faces at the strange sensations. He gathers tiny posies of rose banjine, or shows her the shimmering scales of a trevally or a blue mackerel he has caught off the rocks on the side of the island where the ocean floor drops away into sudden darkness. On still nights, Isabel’s voice carries across the air in a soothing lilt as she reads Lucy tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the nursery, while Tom works on repairs in the shed.
Whatever the rights and the wrongs of it, Lucy was here now, and Isabel couldn’t have been a better mother. Every night in prayer she gave thanks to God for her family, her health, her much-blessed life, and prayed to be worthy of the gifts He showered on her.
Days broke and receded like waves on the beach, leaving barely a trace of the time that passed in this tiny world of working and sleeping and feeding and watching. Isabel shed a tear when she put away some of Lucy’s earliest baby things. “Seems only yesterday she was tiny, and now look at her,” she mused to Tom, as she folded them carefully away in tissue paper—a dummy, her rattle, her first baby dresses, a tiny pair of kid booties. Just like any mother might do, anywhere in the world.
When the blood didn’t come, Isabel was excited. When she had given up all hope of another child, her expectations were about to be confounded. She would wait a little longer, keep praying before saying anything to Tom. But she found her thoughts drifting off to daydreams about a brother or sister for Lucy. Her heart was full. Then the bleeding returned with a vengeance, heavier and more painful, in a pattern she couldn’t fathom. Her head would ache, sometimes; she would sweat at night. Then months would pass with no blood at all. “I’ll go and see Dr. Sumpton when we get our shore leave. No need to fuss,” she told Tom. She carried on without complaint. “I’m strong as an ox, darl. There’s nothing to worry about.” She was in love—with her husband, and with her baby—and that was enough.
The months trailed by, marked with the peculiar rituals of the lighthouse—lighting up, hoisting the ensign, draining the mercury bath to filter out stray oil. All the usual form-filling, and compliance with the bullying correspondence from the Foreman Artificer about how any damage to the vapor tubes could only be caused by lightkeeper negligence, not faulty workmanship. The logbook changed from 1926 to 1927 in mid-page: there was no wasting paper in the CLS—the books were expensive. Tom pondered the institutional indifference to the arrival of a new year—as though the Lights were not impressed by something as prosaic as the mere effluction of time. And it was true—the view from the gallery on New Year’s Day was indistinguishable from that of New Year’s Eve.
Occasionally, he would still find himself revisiting the page for 27 April 1926, until the book opened there of its own accord.
Isabel worked hard. The vegetable patch thrived; the cottage was kept clean. She washed and patched Tom’s clothes, and cooked the things he liked. Lucy grew. The light turned. Time passed.
CHAPTER 13
It’s coming up for a year soon,” said Isabel. “The twenty-seventh of April’s her birthday, near enough.”
Tom was in the workshop, filing away rust from a bent door hinge. He put down the rasp. “I wonder—you know, what her real birthday is.”
“The day she arrived is good enough for me.” Isabel kissed the child, who was sitting astride her hip, gnawing on a crust.
Lucy reached out her arms to Tom.
“Sorry, littlie. My hands are filthy. You’re better off with Mamma just now.”
“I can’t believe how much she’s grown. She weighs a ton these days.” Isabel laughed, and gave Lucy a heave to settle her higher on her hip. “I’m going to make a birthday cake.” The child responded by dipping her head into Isabel’s chest and dribbling bits of bread onto her. “That tooth’s giving you trouble, isn’t it, sweetie? Your cheeks are so red. Shall we put some teething powder on it?” Turning to Tom, she said, “See you in a while, darl. I’d better get back. Soup’s still on the stove,” and left for the cottage.
The steely light pierced the window and scoured Tom’s workbench. He had to hammer the metal straight, and each blow rang sharply off the walls. Though he found himself striking with more force than was necessary, he couldn’t stop. There was no getting away from the feeling stirred up by talk of birthdays and anniversaries. He set to work with the hammer again, the blows no less heavy, until the metal snapped from the force. He picked up the shattered halves and stared at them.
Tom looked up from the armchair. A few weeks had passed since the baby’s birthday celebration.
“It doesn’t matter what you read to her,” said Isabel. “It’s just good for her to get used to hearing different words.” She deposited Lucy on his lap and went to finish making the bread.
“Dadadadad,” said the child.
“Bubububub,” said Tom. “So. You want a story?” The little hand reached out, but instead of pointing to the heavy book of fairy tales on the table beside them, grabbed a beige booklet, and pushed it at him. He laughed. “I don’t think you’ll like that one much, bunny rabbit. No pictures in it, for a start.” He reached for the fairy tales, but Lucy thrust the booklet in his face. “Dadadadad.”
“If that’s the one you want, littlie!” He laughed again. The child opened it at a page, and pointed at t
he words, like she had seen Tom and Isabel do. “All right,” began Tom. “Instructions to Lightkeepers. Number twenty-nine: ‘The Lightkeepers are never to allow any interests, private or otherwise, to interfere with discharge of their duties, which are of the greatest importance to the safety of navigation; and they are reminded that their retention or promotion in the Service depends upon their strict obedience to orders, adherence to the rules laid down for their guidance, industry, sobriety, and the maintenance of cleanliness and good order in their own persons and families as well as in every part of the Lighthouse establishment and premises.’ Number thirty: ‘Misconduct, disposition to quarrel, insobriety or immorality on the part of any keeper’”—he paused to retrieve Lucy’s fingers from his nostrils— “‘will render the offender liable to punishment or dismissal. The committing of any such offense by any member of the Lightkeeper’s family will render the offender liable to exclusion from the Lighthouse station.’” He stopped. A chill had crept though him, and his heart beat faster. He was summoned back to the present by a tiny hand coming to rest on his chin. He pressed it to his lips, absently. Lucy grinned at him and gave him a generous kiss.
“Come on, let’s read Sleeping Beauty instead,” he said, and took up the fairy tales, though he found it hard to concentrate.
“Here you are—tea and toast in bed, ladies!” said Tom, resting the tray beside Isabel.
“Careful, Luce,” said Isabel. She had brought the toddler into bed that Sunday after Tom had gone to extinguish the light, and the child was clambering toward the tray to reach the small cup of tea Tom had made her too—hardly more than warm milk with a drop of color.
Tom sat beside Isabel and pulled Lucy onto his knee. “Here we go, Lulu,” he said, and helped her steady the cup in both hands as she drank. He was concentrating on his task, until he became aware of Isabel’s silence, and turned to see tears in her eyes.
“Izzy, Izzy, what’s wrong, darl?”
“Nothing at all, Tom. Nothing at all.”
He brushed a tear away from her cheek.
“Sometimes I’m so happy it frightens me, Tom.”
He stroked her hair, and Lucy started to blow bubbles into the tea. “Listen, Miss Muffet, you going to drink that, or have you had enough for the minute?”
The child continued to slobber into the cup, clearly pleased with the sounds.
“OK, I think we’ll give it a rest for now.” He eased the cup away from her, and she responded by climbing off him and onto Isabel, still blowing bubbles of spittle.
“Charming!” said Isabel, laughing through her tears. “Come here, you little monkey!” and she blew a raspberry on her tummy. Lucy giggled and squirmed and said, “’Gain! ’Gain!” and Isabel obliged.
“You two are as bad as each other!” said Tom.
“Sometimes I feel a bit drunk with how much I love her. And you. Like if they asked me to walk one of those straight lines I couldn’t.”
“No straight lines on Janus, so you’re all right on that score,” said Tom.
“Don’t mock, Tom. It’s like I was color-blind before Lucy, and now the world’s completely different. It’s brighter and I can see further. I’m in exactly the same place, the birds are the same, the water’s the same, the sun rises and sets just like it always did, but I never knew what for, Tom.” She drew the child into her. “Lucy’s the what for… And you’re different too.”
“How?”
“I think there are bits of you you didn’t know existed until she came along. Corners of your heart that life had shut down.” She traced a finger along his mouth. “I know you don’t like to talk about the war and everything, but—well, it must have made you numb.”
“My feet. Made my feet numb more often than not—frozen mud’ll do that to a bloke.” Tom could manage only half a smile at the attempted joke.
“Stop it, Tom. I’m trying to say something. I’m being serious, for goodness’ sake, and you just send me packing with some silly joke, like I’m a child who doesn’t understand or can’t be trusted with the truth.”
This time Tom was deadly serious. “You don’t understand, Isabel. No civilized person should ever have to understand. And trying to describe it would be like passing on a disease.” He turned toward the window. “I did what I did so that people like you and Lucy could forget it ever happened. So that it would never happen again. ‘The war to end all wars,’ remember? It doesn’t belong here, on this island. In this bed.”
Tom’s features had hardened, and she glimpsed a resolve she’d never seen in him before—the resolve, she imagined, that had got him through everything he’d had to endure.
“It’s just…” Isabel began again, “well, we none of us know whether we’re around for another year or another hundred years. And I wanted to make sure you knew how thankful I am to you, Tom. For everything. Especially for giving me Lucy.”
Tom’s smile froze at the last words, and Isabel hurried on. “You did, darl. You understood how much I needed her, and I know that cost you, Tom. Not many men would do that for their wife.”
Jolted back from some dream world, Tom could feel his palms sweating. His heart started to race with the urge to run—anywhere, it didn’t matter where, just as long as it was away from the reality of the choice he had made, which suddenly seemed to weigh like an iron collar.
“Time I was getting on with some work. I’ll leave you two to have your toast,” he said, and left the room as slowly as he could manage.
CHAPTER 14
When Tom’s second three-year term came to an end just before Christmas 1927, the family from Janus Rock made its first journey to Point Partageuse while a relief keeper manned the light station. The couple’s second shore leave, it would be Lucy’s first voyage to the mainland. As Isabel had prepared for the arrival of the boat, she had toyed with finding an excuse to stay behind with the little girl in the safety of Janus.
“You OK, Izz?” Tom had asked when he saw her, suitcase open on the bed, staring blankly through the window.
“Oh. Yes,” she said quickly. “Just making sure I’ve packed everything.”
He was about to leave the room, when he doubled back and put his hand on her shoulder. “Nervous?”
She snatched up a pair of socks and rolled them together in a ball. “No, not at all,” she said as she stuffed them in the case. “Not at all.”
The unease Isabel had tried to hide from Tom vanished at the sight of Lucy in Violet’s arms, when her parents came to greet them at the jetty. Her mother wept and smiled and laughed all at the same time. “At last!” She shook her head in awe, inspecting every inch of the child, touching her face, her hair, her little hand. “My blessed granddaughter. Fancy waiting nearly two years to lay eyes on you! And isn’t she just the image of my old Auntie Clem?”
Isabel had spent months preparing Lucy for exposure to people. “In Partageuse, Luce, there are lots and lots of people. And they’ll all like you. It might be a bit strange at first, but there’s no need to be scared.” At bedtimes, she had told the girl stories of the town, and the people who lived in it.
Lucy responded with great curiosity to the endless supply of humans that now surrounded her. Isabel felt a twinge as she accepted the warm congratulations of townspeople on her pretty daughter. Even old Mrs. Mewett tickled the little girl under the chin when she saw her in the haberdasher’s as she was buying a hairnet. “Ah, little ones,” she said wistfully. “Such blessings,” leaving Isabel to wonder whether she was hearing things.
Almost as soon as they arrived, Violet packed the whole family off to Gutcher’s photographic studio. In front of a canvas backdrop painted with ferns and Greek columns, Lucy had been photographed with Tom and Isabel; with Bill and Violet; and on her own, perched on a grand wicker chair. Copies were ordered to take back to Janus, to send to cousins far afield, to have framed for the mantelpiece and the piano. “Three generations of Graysmark women,” beamed Violet when she saw herself, with Lucy on her knee, sitting beside Isab
el.
Lucy had grandparents who doted on her. God doesn’t make mistakes, thought Isabel. He had sent the little girl to the right place.
“Oh, Bill,” Violet had said to her husband the evening the family arrived. “Thank goodness. Thank goodness…”
Violet had last seen her daughter three years before, still grieving at her second miscarriage, on the couple’s first shore leave. Then, Isabel had sat with her head on her mother’s lap, weeping.
“It’s just nature’s way,” Violet had said. “You have to take a breath, and get up again. Children will come along, if that’s what God wants for you: just be patient. And pray. The praying’s the most important thing.”
She did not tell Isabel the whole truth of it, though. She did not say how often she had seen a child carried to term over the draining, withering summer or the whip-sharp winter, only to be lost to scarlet fever or diphtheria, their clothes folded away neatly until they might fit the next one down. Nor did she touch on the awkwardness of replying to a casual inquiry as to the number of children one had. A successful delivery was merely the first step of a long, treacherous journey. In this house, which had fallen silent years ago, Violet knew that only too well.
Reliable, dutiful Violet Graysmark, respectable wife of a respectable husband. She kept the moths out of the cupboards, the weeds out of the flowerbeds. She deadheaded the roses to persuade them into blooming even in August. Her lemon curd always sold out first at the church fête, and it was her fruitcake recipe which had been chosen for the local CWA booklet. True, she thanked God every night for her many blessings. But some afternoons, as the sunset turned the garden from green to a dull dun while she peeled potatoes over the sink, there just wasn’t enough room in her heart to hold all the sadness. As Isabel had cried during that previous visit, Violet had wanted to wail with her, to tear her hair and tell her she knew the grief of losing the firstborn: how nothing—no person, no money, no thing that this earth could offer—could ever make up for that, and that the pain would never, never go away. She wanted to tell her how it made you mad, made you bargain with God about what offering you could sacrifice to get your child back.
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