CHAPTER 12
‘GEDDAY, RALPH. GOOD to see you. Where’s Blue?’ ‘
‘Back here!’ shouted the deckhand from the stern, hidden from view by some fruit crates. ‘How ya doing, Tom? Glad to see us?’
‘Always, mate – you’re the blokes with the grog, aren’t you?’ he laughed as he secured the line. The old engine chugged and spluttered as the boat drew alongside, filling the air with thick diesel fumes. It was mid-June, the first time the store boat had visited since the baby’s arrival seven weeks earlier.
‘Flying fox is set up. Got the winch all ready too.’
‘Struth, you’re a bit keen, Tom!’ Ralph exclaimed. ‘We don’t want to rush things now, do we? It’s a grand day. We can take our time. We’ve got to see the new arrival, after all! My Hilda’s piled me up like a packhorse with things for the little ’un, not to mention the proud grandparents.’
As Ralph strode off the gangway he grabbed Tom in a bear hug. ‘Congratulations, son. Bloody marvellous. Especially after – after all that’s happened before.’
Bluey followed suit. ‘Yeah, good on you. Ma sends all her best too.’
Tom’s eyes wandered to the water. ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.’
As they hiked up the path, Isabel was silhouetted against a washing line of nappies strung out like signal flags flapping in the brisk wind. Strands of her hair escaped from the roll she had just pinned it in.
Ralph held his arms out as he approached her. ‘Well, can’t you just tell, hey? Nothing makes a girl bloom like having a littlie. Roses in your cheeks and a shine in your hair, just like my Hilda used to get with each of ours.’
Isabel blushed at the compliment, and gave the old man a quick kiss. She kissed Bluey, too, who bowed his head and muttered, ‘Congratulations, Mrs S.’
‘Come inside, all of you. Kettle’s boiled, and there’s cake,’ she said.
As they sat at the old deal table, Isabel’s glance strayed now and then to the child asleep in her basket.
‘You were the talk of every woman in Partageuse, having your baby on your own like that. Of course, the farmers’ wives didn’t turn a hair – Mary Linford said how she’d had three without any help. But them in town, they were mighty impressed. I hope Tom wasn’t too useless?’
The couple exchanged a look. Tom was about to speak, but Isabel took his hand and squeezed it tight. ‘He’s been wonderful. I couldn’t ask for a better husband.’ There were tears in her eyes.
‘She’s a real pretty little thing, from what I can see,’ said Bluey. But all that peeped out from the fluffy blanket was a delicate face in a bonnet.
‘She’s got Tom’s nose, hasn’t she?’ chipped in Ralph.
‘Well …’ Tom hesitated. ‘Not sure my nose is what you want a baby girl to have!’
‘I take your point!’ Ralph chuckled. ‘Right, Mr Sherbourne, my friend, I need your autograph on the forms. Might as well sort them out now.’
Tom was relieved to get up from the table. ‘Righto. Come through to the office, Captain Addicott, sir,’ he said, leaving Bluey cooing over the basket.
The young man reached into the cot and jangled the rattle at the baby, who was now wide awake. She watched it intently, and he jiggled it again. ‘You’re a lucky one, aren’t you, getting a fancy silver rattle! Fit for a princess: I’ve never seen anything so grand! Angels on the handle and everything. Angels for an angel … And your nice fluffy blanket …’
‘Oh, they were left over from …’ Isabel’s voice dropped, ‘from before.’
Bluey blushed. ‘Sorry. Putting my foot in it. I … Better get on with unloading. Thanks for the cake,’ and he beat a retreat through the kitchen door.
Janus Rock,
June 1926
Dear Mum and Dad,
Well, God has sent us an angel to keep us company. Baby Lucy has captured our hearts! She’s a beautiful little girl – absolutely perfect. She sleeps well and feeds well. She’s never any trouble.
I wish you could see her and hold her. Every day she looks a bit different, and I know by the time you see her she’ll have lost her baby looks. She’ll be a toddler when we come back on shore. But in the mean time, here’s the nearest thing to a picture. I dipped the sole of her foot in cochineal! (You have to be inventive on the Lights …) See masterpiece attached.
Tom is a wonderful dad. Janus seems so different now that Lucy’s here. At the moment it’s pretty easy to look after her – I pop her in her basket and she comes with me when I have to get the eggs or do the milking. It might be a bit harder when she starts to crawl. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
I want to tell you so much about her – how her hair is dark, how beautiful she smells after her bath. Her eyes are quite dark too. But I can’t do her justice. She’s much too wonderful to describe. I’ve only known her a few weeks and already I can’t imagine my life without her.
Well, ‘Grandma and Grandpa’ (!), I’d better finish this so that the boat can take it, otherwise it’ll be another three months before you get it!
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 verandah 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 realised 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, focussing 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 vapour 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.