CHAPTER 8
‘MAYBE ALL THE times in my life I could have done without, maybe they were all a test to see if I deserved you, Izz.’
They were stretched on a blanket on the grass, three months after Isabel’s arrival on Janus. The April night was still almost warm, and tinselled with stars. Isabel lay with her eyes closed, resting in the crook of Tom’s arm as he stroked her neck.
‘You’re my other half of the sky,’ he said.
‘I never knew you were a poet!’
‘Oh, I didn’t invent it. I read it somewhere – a Latin poem? A Greek myth? Something like that, anyway.’
‘You and your fancy private-school education!’ she teased.
It was Isabel’s birthday, and Tom had cooked her breakfast and dinner, and watched her untie the bow on the wind-up gramophone which he had conspired with Ralph and Bluey to ship out to make up for the fact that the piano he had proudly shown her when she arrived was unplayable from years of neglect. All day she had listened to Chopin and Brahms, and now the strains of Handel’s Messiah were ringing from the lighthouse, where they had set it up to let it echo in the natural sound chamber.
‘I love the way you do that,’ said Tom, watching Isabel’s index finger coil a lock of her hair into a spring, then release it and start with another.
Suddenly self-conscious, she said, ‘Oh, Ma says it’s a bad habit. I’ve always done it, apparently. I don’t even notice it.’ Tom took a strand of her hair, and wound it around his finger, then let it unfurl like a streamer.
‘Tell me another myth,’ Isabel said.
Tom thought for a moment. ‘You know Janus is where the word January comes from? It’s named after the same god as this island. He’s got two faces, back to back. Pretty ugly fellow.’
‘What’s he god of?’
‘Doorways. Always looking both ways, torn between two ways of seeing things. January looks forward to the new year and back to the old year. He sees past and future. And the island looks in the direction of two different oceans, down to the South Pole and up to the Equator.’
‘Yeah, I’d got that,’ said Isabel. She pinched his nose and laughed. ‘Just teasing. I love it when you tell me things. Tell me more about the stars. Where’s Centaurus again?’
Tom kissed her fingertip and stretched her arm out until he had lined it up with the constellation. ‘There.’
‘Is that your favourite?’
‘You’re my favourite. Better than all the stars put together.’
He moved down to kiss her belly. ‘I should say, “You two are my favourites,” shouldn’t I? Or what if it’s twins? Or triplets?’
Tom’s head rose and fell gently with Isabel’s breath as he lay there.
‘Can you hear anything? Is it talking to you yet?’ she asked.
‘Yep, it’s saying I need to carry its mum to bed before the night gets too cold.’ And he gathered his wife in his arms and carried her easily into the cottage, as the choir in the lighthouse declared, ‘For unto us a Child is born.’
Isabel had been so proud to write to her mother with the news of the expected arrival. ‘Oh, I wish I could – I don’t know, swim ashore or something, just to let them know. Waiting for the boat is killing me!’ She kissed Tom, and asked, ‘Shall we write to your dad? Your brother?’
Tom stood up, and busied himself with the dishes on the draining board. ‘No need,’ was all he said.
His expression, uneasy but not angry, told Isabel not to press the point, and she gently took the tea towel from his hand. ‘I’ll do this lot,’ she said. ‘You’ve got enough to get through.’
Tom touched her shoulder. ‘I’ll get some more done on your chair,’ he said, and attempted a smile as he left the kitchen.
In the shed, he looked at the pieces of the rocking chair he was planning to make for Isabel. He had tried to remember the one on which his own mother had rocked him and told him stories. His body remembered the sensation of being held by her – something lost to him for decades. He wondered if their child would have a memory of Isabel’s touch, decades into the future. Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it, he thought, as he considered the path of his own mother’s life. Yet Isabel seemed utterly single-minded about it. ‘It’s nature, Tom. What’s there to be afraid of?’
When he had finally tracked down his mother, he was twenty-one and just finishing his Engineering degree. Finally, he was in charge of his own life. The address the private detective gave him was a boarding house in Darlinghurst. He had stood outside the door, his gut a whirl of hope and terror, suddenly eight again. He caught the sounds of other desperations seeping out under the doors along the narrow wooden passage – a man’s sobs from the next room and a shout of ‘We can’t go on like this!’ from a woman, accompanied by a baby’s screaming; somewhere further off, the fervent rhythm of a headboard as the woman who lay before it probably earned her keep.
Tom checked the pencilled scrawl on the paper. Yes, the right room number. He scanned his memory again for the lullaby-gentle sound of his mother: ‘Ups-a-daisy, my young Thomas. Shall we put a bandage on that scrape?’
His knock went unanswered, and he tried again. Eventually, he turned the handle tentatively, and the door gave no resistance. The unmistakable scent rushed to meet him, but it was a split second before he recognised it as tainted – with cheap alcohol and cigarettes. In the closed-in gloom he saw an unmade bed and a tatty armchair, in shades of brown. There was a crack in the window, and a single rose in a vase had long ago shrivelled.
‘Looking for Ellie Sherbourne?’ The voice belonged to a wiry, balding man who had appeared at the door behind him.
It was so strange to hear her name spoken. And ‘Ellie’ – he had never imagined ‘Ellie’. ‘Mrs Sherbourne, that’s right. When will she be back?’
The man gave a snort. ‘She won’t. More’s the pity, ’cause she owes me a month’s rent.’
It was all wrong, the reality. He couldn’t make it fit with the picture of the reunion he’d planned, dreamed of, for years. Tom’s pulse quickened. ‘Do you have a forwarding address?’
‘Not where she’s gone. Died three weeks ago. I was just coming in to clear the last of the stuff out.’
Of all the possible scenes Tom had imagined, none had ended like this. He stood completely still.
‘You planning on moving? Or moving in?’ the man asked sourly.
Tom hesitated, then opened his wallet and took out five pounds. ‘For her rent,’ he said softly, and strode down the hallway, fighting tears.
The thread of hope Tom had protected so long was snapped: on a back street in Sydney, as the world was on the brink of war. Within a month he’d enlisted, giving his next of kin as his mother, at her boarding house address. The recruiters weren’t fussy about details.
Now, Tom ran his hands over the one piece of wood he had lathed, and tried to imagine what he might say in a letter to his mother today, if she were alive – how he might tell her the news of the baby.
He took up the tape measure, and turned to the next piece of wood.
‘Zebedee.’ Isabel looked at Tom with a poker face, her mouth twitching just a touch at the corners.
‘What?’ asked Tom, pausing from his task of rubbing her feet.
‘Zebedee,’ she repeated, putting her nose back down in the book so that he could not catch her eye.
‘You’re not serious? What kind of a name—’
A wounded expression crossed her face. ‘That’s my great-uncle’s name. Zebedee Zanzibar Graysmark.’
Tom gave her a look, as she ploughed on, ‘I promised Grandma on her deathbed that if I ever had a son I’d call him after her brother. I can’t go back on a promise.’
‘I was thinking of something a bit more normal.’
‘Are you calling my great-uncle abnormal?’
Isabel couldn’t contain herself any longer, and burst out laughing. ‘Got you! Got you good and proper!’
‘Little minx! You’ll be sorry you did that!’
‘No, stop! Stop!’
‘No mercy,’ he said, as he tickled her tummy and her neck.
‘I surrender!’
‘Too late for that now!’
They were lying on the grass where it gave way to Shipwreck Beach. It was late afternoon and the soft light rinsed the sand in yellow.
Suddenly Tom stopped.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Isabel, peeping out from under the long hair that hung over her face.
He stroked the strands away from her eyes, and looked at her in silence. She put a hand to his cheek. ‘Tom?’
‘It bowls me over, sometimes. Three months ago there was just you and me, and now, there’s this other life, just turned up out of nowhere, like …’
‘Like a baby.’
‘Yes, like a baby, but it’s more than that, Izz. When I used to sit up in the lantern room, before you arrived, I’d think about what life was. I mean, compared to death …’ He stopped himself. ‘I’m talking rubbish now. I’ll shut up.’
Isabel put her hand under his chin. ‘You hardly ever talk about things, Tom. Tell me.’
‘I can’t really put it into words. Where does life come from?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Does it matter?’ he queried.
‘That it’s a mystery. That we don’t understand.’
‘There are times I wanted an answer. I can tell you that much. Times I saw a man’s last breath, and I wanted to ask him, “Where have you gone? You were here right beside me just a few seconds ago, and now some bits of metal have made holes in your skin, because they hit you fast enough, and suddenly you’re somewhere else. How can that be?”’
Isabel hugged her knees with one arm, and with the other hand pulled at the grass beside her. ‘Do you think people remember this life, when they go? Do you think in heaven, my grandma and granddad, say, are knocking around together?’
‘Search me,’ Tom said.
With sudden urgency, she asked, ‘When we’re both dead, Tom, God won’t keep us apart, will He? He’ll let us be together?’
Tom held her. ‘Now look what I’ve done. Should have kept my silly mouth shut. Come on, we were in the middle of choosing names. And I was just trying to rescue a poor baby from the fate of life as Zebedee blimmin’ Zanzibar. Where are we with girls’ names?’
‘Alice; Amelia; Annabel; April; Ariadne—’
Tom raised his eyebrows. ‘And she’s off again … “Ariadne!” Hard enough that she’s going to live in a lighthouse. Let’s not lump her with a name people will laugh at.’
‘Only two hundred more pages to go,’ said Isabel with a grin.
‘We’d better hop to it, then.’
That evening, as he looked out from the gallery, Tom returned to his question. Where had this baby’s soul been? Where would it go? Where were the souls of the men who’d joked and saluted and trudged through the mud with him?
Here he was, safe and healthy, with a beautiful wife, and some soul had decided to join them. Out of thin air, in the farthest corner of the earth, a baby was coming. He’d been on death’s books for so long, it seemed impossible that life was making an entry in his favour.
He went back into the lantern room, and looked again at the photograph of Isabel that hung on the wall. The mystery of it all. The mystery.
Tom’s other gift from the last boat was The Australian Mother’s Manual of Efficient Child-Rearing, by Dr Samuel B. Griffiths. Isabel took to reading it at any available moment.
She fired information at Tom: ‘Did you know that a baby’s kneecaps aren’t made of bone?’ Or, ‘How old do you think babies are when they can take food from a teaspoon?’
‘No idea, Izz.’
‘Go on, guess!’
‘Honestly, how would I know?’
‘Oh, you’re no fun!’ she complained, and dived into the book for another fact.
Within weeks the pages were frilly-edged and blotted with grass stains from days spent on the headland.
‘You’re having a baby, not sitting for an exam.’
‘I just want to do things right. It’s not like I can pop next door and ask Mum, is it?’
‘Oh, Izzy Bella,’ Tom laughed.
‘What? What’s funny?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I wouldn’t change a thing about you.’
She smiled, and kissed him. ‘You’re going to be a wonderful dad, I know.’ A question came to her eyes.
‘What?’ prompted Tom.
‘Nothing.’
‘No, really, what?’
‘Your dad. Why do you never talk about him?’
‘No love lost there.’
‘But what was he like?’
Tom thought about it. How could he possibly sum him up? How could he ever explain the look in his eyes, the invisible gap that always surrounded him, so that he never quite made contact? ‘He was right. Always right. Didn’t matter what it was about. He knew the rules and he stuck to them, come hell or high water.’ Tom thought back to the straight, tall figure that overshadowed his childhood. Hard and cold as a tomb.
‘Was he strict?’
Tom gave a bitter laugh. ‘Strict doesn’t begin to describe it.’ He put his hand to his chin as he speculated. ‘Maybe he just wanted to make sure his sons didn’t kick over the traces. We’d get the strap for anything. Well, I’d get the strap for anything. Cecil would always be the one to tell on me – got him off lightly.’ He laughed again. ‘Tell you what, though: made army discipline easy. You never know what you’re going to be grateful for.’ His face grew serious. ‘And I suppose it made it easier being over there, knowing there’d be no one who’d be heartbroken if they got the telegram.’
‘Oh, Tom! Don’t even say such a thing!’
He drew her head into his chest and stroked her hair in silence.
There are times when the ocean is not the ocean – not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most.
In the worst of these storms Tom stays with the light all night if need be, keeping warm by the kerosene heater, pouring sweet tea from a thermos flask. He thinks about the poor bastards out on the ships and he thanks Christ he’s safe. He watches for distress flares, keeps the dinghy ready for launch, though what good it would do in seas like that, who knows.
That May night, Tom sat with a pencil and notebook in hand, adding up figures. His annual salary was ￡327. How much did a pair of children’s shoes cost? From what Ralph said, kids got through them at a rate of knots. Then there were clothes. And schoolbooks. Of course, if he stayed on the Offshore Lights, Isabel would teach the kids at home. But on nights like this, he wondered if it was fair to inflict this life on anyone, let alone children. The thought was nudged out by the words of Jack Throssel, one of the keepers back East. ‘Best life in the world for kids, I swear,’ he had told Tom. ‘All six of mine are right as rain. Always up to games and mischief: exploring caves, making cubbies. A proper gang of pioneers. And the Missus makes sure they do their lessons. Take it from me – raising kids on a light station’s as easy as wink!’
Tom went back to his calculations: how he could save a bit more, make sure there was enough put by for clothes and doctors and – Lord knew what else. The idea that he was going to be a father made him nervous and excited and worried.
As his mind drifted back to memories of his own father, the storm thundered about the light, deafening Tom to any other sound that night. Deafening him to the cries of Isabel, calling for his help.