The Light Between Oceans (13 page)

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 Hilda’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
unmistakeable
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 II

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!’