The Light Between Oceans (7 page)

Two days after his return to Partageuse, Tom sat stiff as a whalebone in the Graysmarks’ lounge room, where both parents watched over their only daughter like eagles with a chick. Struggling to come up with suitable topics of conversation, Tom stuck to the weather, the wind, of which there was an abundance, and Graysmark cousins in other parts of Western Australia. It was relatively easy to steer the conversation away from himself.

As Isabel walked him to the gate afterwards she asked, ‘How long till you go back?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘Then we’d better make the most of it,’ she said, as though concluding a long discussion.

‘Is that so?’ asked Tom, as amused as he was surprised. He had a sense of being waltzed backwards.

Isabel smiled. ‘Yes, that’s so.’ And the way the light caught her eyes, he imagined he could see into her: see a clarity, an openness, which drew him in. ‘Come and visit tomorrow. I’ll make a picnic. We can go down by the bay.’

‘I should ask your father first, shouldn’t I? Or your mother?’ He leaned his head to one side. ‘I mean, if it’s not a rude question, how old are you?’

‘Old enough to go on a picnic.’

‘And in ordinary numbers that would make you …?’

‘Nineteen. Just about. So you can leave my parents to me,’ she said, and gave him a wave as she headed back inside.

Tom set off back to Mrs Mewett’s with a lightness in his step. Why, he could not say. He didn’t know the first thing about this girl, except that she smiled a lot, and that something inside just felt –
good
.

The following day, Tom approached the Graysmarks’ house, not so much nervous as puzzled, not quite sure how it was that he was heading back there so soon.

Mrs Graysmark smiled as she opened the door. ‘Nice and punctual,’ she noted on some invisible checklist.

‘Army habits …’ said Tom.

Isabel appeared with a picnic basket, which she handed to him. ‘You’re in charge of getting it there in one piece,’ she said, and turned to kiss her mother on the cheek. ‘Bye, Ma. See you later.’

‘Mind you keep out of the sun, now. Don’t want you spoiling your skin with freckles,’ she said to her daughter. She gave Tom a look which conveyed something sterner than the words, ‘Enjoy your picnic. Don’t be too late back.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Graysmark. We won’t be.’

Isabel led the way as they walked beyond the few streets that marked out the town proper and approached the ocean.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Tom.

‘It’s a surprise.’

They wandered along the dirt road which led up to the headland, bordered with dense, scrubby trees on each side. These were not the giants from the forest a mile or so further in, but wiry, stocky things, which could cope with the salt and the blasting of the wind. ‘It’s a bit of a walk. You won’t get too tired, will you?’ she asked.

Tom laughed. ‘I’ll just about manage without a walking stick.’

‘Well I just thought, you don’t have very far to walk on Janus, do you?’

‘Believe me, getting up and down the stairs of the light all day keeps you in trim.’ He was still taking stock of this girl and her uncanny ability to tip him a fraction off balance.

The trees began to thin out the further they walked, and the sounds of the ocean grew louder. ‘I suppose Partageuse seems dead boring, coming from Sydney,’ ventured Isabel.

‘Haven’t spent long enough here to know, really.’

‘I suppose not. But Sydney – I imagine it as huge and busy and wonderful. The big smoke.’

‘It’s pretty small fry compared to London.’

Isabel blushed. ‘Oh, I didn’t know you’d been there. That must be a real city. Maybe I’ll visit it one day.’

‘You’re better off here, I’d say. London’s – well, it was pretty grim whenever I was there on furlough. Grey and gloomy and cold as a corpse. I’d take Partageuse any day.’

‘We’re getting near the prettiest bit. Or I think it’s the prettiest.’ Beyond the trees emerged an isthmus which jutted far out into the ocean. It was a long, bare strip of land a few hundred yards wide and licked by waves on all sides. ‘This is the
Point
of Point Partageuse,’ said Isabel. ‘My favourite place is down there, on the left, where all the big rocks are.’

They walked on until they were in the centre of the isthmus. ‘Dump the basket and follow me,’ she said, and without warning she whisked off her shoes and took off, running to the black granite boulders which tumbled down into the water.

Tom caught her up as she approached the edge. There was a circle of boulders, inside which the waves sloshed and swirled. Isabel lay flat on the ground and leaned her head over the edge. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Just listen to the sound the water makes, like it’s in a cave or a cathedral.’

Tom leaned forward to hear.

‘You’ve got to lie down,’ she said.

‘To hear better?’

‘No. So you don’t get washed away. Terrible blow hole, this. If a big wave comes without warning, you’ll be down inside the rocks before you know it.’

Tom lay down beside her, and hung his head into the space, where the waves echoed and bellowed and washed about. ‘Reminds me of Janus.’

‘What’s it like out there? You hear stories, but no one much ever
actually
goes there except the keeper and the boat. Or a doctor, once, years ago, when a whole ship was quarantined there with typhoid.’

‘It’s like … Well, it’s like nowhere else on earth. It’s its own world.’

‘They say it’s brutal, the weather.’

‘It has its moments.’

Isabel sat up. ‘Do you get lonely?’

‘Too busy to be lonely. There’s always something needs fixing or checking or recording.’

She put her head on one side, half signalling her doubt, but she let it pass. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Yep.’

Now it was Isabel who laughed. ‘You don’t exactly yack a lot, do you?’

Tom stood up. ‘Hungry? Must be time for lunch.’

He took Isabel’s hand and helped her up. Such a petite hand, soft, with the palm covered in a fine layer of gritty sand. So delicate in his.

Isabel served him roast beef sandwiches and ginger beer, followed by fruitcake and crisp apples.

‘So, do you write to all the lightkeepers who go out to Janus?’ asked Tom.

‘All! There aren’t that many,’ said Isabel. ‘You’re the first new one in years.’

Tom hesitated before venturing the next question. ‘What made you write?’

She smiled at him and took a sip of ginger beer before answering. ‘Because you’re fun to feed seagulls with? Because I was bored? Because I’d never sent a letter to a lighthouse before?’ She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and looked down at the water. ‘Would you rather I hadn’t?’

‘Oh, no, I wasn’t trying to … I mean …’ Tom wiped his hands
on
his napkin. Always slightly off balance. It was a new sensation for him.

Tom and Isabel were sitting at the end of the jetty at Partageuse. It was almost the last day of 1920, and the breeze played tunes by lapping wavelets against the boat hulls and plucking the ropes on the masts. The harbour lights trailed across the water’s surface, and the sky was swept with stars.

‘But I want to know everything,’ said Isabel, bare feet dangling above the water. ‘You can’t just say, “Nothing else to tell.” She’d extracted the bare details of his private-school education, and his Engineering degree from Sydney University, but was growing more frustrated. ‘I can tell you lots – my gran and how she taught me piano, what I remember about my granddad, even though he died when I was little. I can tell you what it’s like to be the headmaster’s daughter in a place like Partageuse. I can tell you about my brothers, Hugh and Alfie, and how we used to muck around with the dinghy and go off fishing down the river.’ She looked at the water. ‘I still miss those times.’ Curling a lock of hair around her finger, she considered something, then took a breath. ‘It’s like a whole … a whole galaxy waiting for you to find out about. And I want to find out about yours.’

‘What else do you want to know?’

‘Well, about your family, say.’

‘I’ve got a brother.’

‘Am I allowed to know his name, or have you forgotten it?’

‘I’m not likely to forget that in a hurry. Cecil.’

‘What about your parents?’

Tom squinted at the light on top of a mast. ‘What about them?’

Isabel sat up, and looked deep into his eyes. ‘What goes on in there, I wonder?’

‘My mother’s dead now. I don’t keep in touch with my father.’ Her shawl had slipped off her shoulder, and he pulled it back up. ‘Are you getting a bit chilly? Want to walk back?’

‘Why won’t you talk about it?’

‘I’ll tell you if you really want. It’s just I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.’

‘Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.’

‘More’s the pity.’

Isabel straightened. ‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s go. Mum and Dad’ll be wondering where we’ve got to,’ she said, and they walked soberly up the jetty.

That night as he lay in bed, Tom cast his mind back to the childhood Isabel had been so keen to investigate. He had never really spoken to anyone about it. But exploring the memories now, the jagged pain was like running his tongue over a broken tooth. He could see his eight-year-old self, tugging his father’s sleeve and crying, ‘Please! Please let her come back. Please, Daddy. I love her!’ and his father wiping his hand away like a grubby mark. ‘You don’t mention her again in this house. You hear, son?’

As his father stalked out of the room, Tom’s brother Cecil, five years older and at that stage a good measure taller, gave him a clip on the back of the head. ‘I told you, you idiot. I told you not to say it,’ and followed his father, with the same officious stride, leaving the small boy standing in the middle of the lounge room. From his pocket he took a lace handkerchief, redolent with his mother’s scent, and touched it to his cheek, avoiding his tears and streaming nose. It was the feel of the cloth he wanted, the perfume, not its use.

Tom thought back to the imposing, empty house: to the silence that deadened every room with a subtly different pitch; to the kitchen smelling of carbolic, kept spotless by a long line of housekeepers. He remembered that dreaded smell of Lux flakes, and his
distress
as he saw the handkerchief, washed and starched by Mrs Someone-or-other, who had discovered it in the pocket of his shorts and laundered it as a matter of course, obliterating his mother’s smell. He had searched the house for some corner, some cupboard which could bring back that blurry sweetness of her. But even in what had been her bedroom, there was only polish, and mothballs, as though her ghost had finally been exorcised.

In Partageuse, as they sat in the Tea Rooms, Isabel tried again.

‘I’m not trying to hide anything,’ Tom said. ‘It’s just that raking over the past is a waste of time.’

‘And I’m not trying to pry. Only – you’ve had a whole life, a whole story, and I’ve come in late. I’m only trying to make sense of things. Make sense of you.’ She hesitated, then asked delicately, ‘If I can’t talk about the past, am I allowed to talk about the future?’

‘We can’t rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine, or wish for. It’s not the same thing.’