The Lightkeeper's Wife

9



Morning had always been Mary’s favourite time of day. It was when she was freshest and most positive, and somehow everything seemed cleanest. In this corner of the world, it was also generally the part of the day before the wind came up and the rain closed in. This morning was surprisingly clear. The sea was calm—barely a ripple—and the odd wavelet collapsed noisily in the stillness. Across the bay, the features of the cliffs were emerging—brown and grey and deeply lined with shadows—and the sea reflected silver.

She was standing by the window watching fairy wrens bopping and twittering on the lawn. And she was thinking of her favourite son, Tom.

On peaceful days like this, he used to say the ocean was resting. That it was waiting for the weather to change, preparing to receive a battering when the wind returned. It couldn’t always be quiet, he said, or the cape would become complacent and forget what it was there for; to be torn by wind and weather. He was right, of course. Periods of calm had a purpose. They were times for storing energy. And energy was essential to fuel a soul to deal with life’s challenges.

Sometimes Tom seemed wise, but he did worry her. All that awkwardness and that sad inability to move on with life. Forty-two and on his own. She hadn’t envisaged it that way. She hoped there was someone out there for him, some nice girl who’d understand and nurture him. She’d been relieved when he married Debbie, despite the girl’s imperfections. At least he’d been happy, his face beaming with a quiet steady warmth. For a while he’d lost the faraway look that had followed him from childhood: the legacy of the cape. But then, after Antarctica, the distant look had returned and it had never quite left him. Jess filled a few gaps, but a dog, however attentive, could never fill the void created by lack of human company. Tom needed another wife, and soon. While the chance of children was still within reach. He’d be good with children. She shuffled to the couch and eased herself down, tugging the blanket around her stiff legs.

Weather like this made her think of the cape. This time of the year, it was often overcast—all those grey days; heavy southern skies thick with low cloud weeping moisture. Then there had been miraculous days when the sky was polished clean and the clouds were like puffs of vapour on a mirror. The lighthouse reflected so much white it hurt your eyes, and the sea was a vast smooth sheet, achingly blue, with occasional whitecaps nipping its surface.

If you climbed the hill to gaze south to where the sky fell into the deep arch of the horizon, sometimes you’d see the southern sea stacks glimmering—Pedra Branca and Eddystone Rock, the last pillars of land before the sea stretched beyond imagination to the distant land of ice. On days like that, you could feel pleasure so acute it erased pain and transcended troubles. You could stand for suspended lengths of time when you were supposed to be hanging out washing, gazing instead around the yellow arc of Lighthouse Bay, or watching sea eagles lifting high over the cape on the breeze.

A cough rattled somewhere deep in her chest. She should take her medication. There was fluid in her lungs and the doctor would say she must increase her dose of diuretics. She twisted to peer at the clock. Nearly ten. The ranger might come soon. What was his name? She ought to remember. It was important.

Leon—yes, she was sure that was it. It was annoying the way names slipped from her these days. She had little patience for these memory blanks; they caused her to stumble mid-thought.

She limped to the bench and set out two cups, popped tea bags in them and tipped Arrowroot biscuits onto a plate. Everything must be ready when he came. Her offering looked pitiful, but it was the best she could do. She swallowed her tablets and sat down to wait. Finally she heard the car, then footsteps on the deck, and Leon’s knock shook the door.

‘Come in,’ she called.

She stood up as the door opened, almost losing her balance, and grasped the edge of the couch. He frowned from the doorway as a coughing fit struck her, doubling her over. She’d meant to greet him enthusiastically, but now she was breathless. He moved forward and helped her back onto the lounge. From the skew of his mouth, she could see he was irritated.

‘What are you doing, Mrs Mason? Next time, don’t stand.’

‘I didn’t want you to run away again.’

He glanced at her with shuttered eyes, barely concealing his impatience. ‘I have a job to do.’

‘You resent looking in on me?’

He maintained a sullen silence.

‘I have a cup of tea ready for you,’ she said, struggling up once more. ‘Yesterday you said you’d stay. The water’s just boiled.’

He sank onto the couch with a resigned sigh, pushing the rug aside.

‘Do you like your job, Leon?’ she asked as she lit the stove.

He ran his hands through his hair, head bowed. ‘What I like about it is not talking to people.’

This was not good. ‘Well, I need some things today,’ she said, cajoling. ‘And it’s hard for me to ask without talking, isn’t it?’ There was nothing she needed, but it was an excuse to keep him here. ‘How’s life at Adventure Bay?’

He grunted. ‘Same as usual.’

‘Anything changed?’

‘Not much. New café owner, selling the same crap coffee.’

‘You like coffee? I only have tea.’

‘I like working,’ he said. ‘Not sitting around.’ He scuffed his feet, stared at the floor and then out the window. Looked everywhere, except at her.

‘Why do you live in Adventure Bay if you hate it?’

‘I didn’t say I hated it.’

‘Well, it’s not very common, is it? Young men like yourself living on the island?’

‘I live with my folks.’

She raised both eyebrows at him. ‘How old are you?’

‘A quarter your age.’ He was being insolent now, payback for having to talk to her, she could see.

‘Nowhere else to go?’ She should have bitten her tongue. Young people could be self-focused and oversensitive. He might stand up and walk out.

At first, he didn’t respond. When he eventually spoke, he seemed quiet and subdued. ‘You wouldn’t understand. Sometimes it can be hard to leave. And I don’t want to live across the channel anyway. I’ve been here most of my life.’

‘But there aren’t many opportunities here, are there?’

He glared at her. ‘No. This is it. I check toilets. I check on old women. I get paid.’

She ignored the jab. ‘Perhaps you could get a Parks job elsewhere.’

‘You’re not hearing me. I want to stay on Bruny.’

His face clouded with something she couldn’t interpret. He was afraid of leaving the island, she was sure of it. But why, she was unable to fathom. Most young people were keen to leave home—unless it suited them to stay. She’d heard that children these days were like boomerangs, coming home to sponge whenever life became difficult. Parents were constantly bailing them out, providing financial assistance. It hadn’t been like that when her children were young. She poured hot water into the cups and jiggled the bags. ‘Do you have milk, Leon? Sugar?’

‘Just black.’

Appropriate, she thought. His gingery eyebrows were still furrowed with dark thoughts. He seemed burdened with life. Trying not to spill the tea, she placed his cup and the plate of biscuits on the coffee table and then went to fetch her own cup. Leon didn’t move to assist her. She sat down in the armchair and tried to resume conversation.

‘Did you have a nice walk up on the Head the other day?’

He grunted and stuffed a biscuit into his mouth. ‘I didn’t go up there, remember? I had to scrape you off the beach.’

‘Perhaps you should go there more often. It’s a salve for the soul. When it’s windy, you feel like you could fly.’

His eyes flicked away.

‘I suppose it’s still the same up there,’ she continued, trying to draw him out. ‘Those columns of black rock have been there longer than any of us. And they’ll still be there when we’re all gone. I find that reassuring, don’t you?’

He looked bored, but there was the slightest tinge of curiosity in his voice as he said, ‘When did you first come here?’

‘More than fifty years ago. With my husband, Jack, and his family.’

She thought of Jack’s long legs, pressing through the scrub, the square set of his shoulders, his profile gazing out to sea. He’d been an unfolding mystery to her then, as she learned his body and his mind. After they left the farm, he’d become a question she’d never quite found the answer to. Yet she’d made the best of it, as people of her era had been brought up to do.

‘My husband’s dead now,’ she said. ‘But the rocks are still there. The land still watches south . . . When you walk up there, it takes you away from everything, everything that’s ordinary. And that can be comforting.’

Leon was watching her. ‘What were you doing on Bruny?’

‘Jack was a lighthouse-keeper at the cape. We lived there twenty-six years. Before that he grew up near here on the land, back towards Lunawanna.’

‘I know about the lighthouse.’ Leon’s attention was ensnared. ‘I’ve read about it in the history room at Alonnah. How it was built by convicts to prevent shipwrecks. The tower’s thirteen metres high. And it was first lit in 1838. They used to run it on whale oil.’

Mary smiled. She had him captive at last. ‘Not in my time,’ she said. ‘I’m not quite that old.’

‘What was it like living there?’ he asked.

‘You can find out yourself. They rent out one of the keepers’ cottages. You can stay there. See what it feels like.’

He shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t be the same. Not like when you were there.’

She knew now that she had found his weak spot. Her way in. ‘You want me to tell you about it?’ she asked. His nod was small but affirmative. She lifted her cup and sipped, wondering how far she could push him. ‘Why don’t you take me for a drive, then? I’ll feel more like talking if I get out.’

He sat back, impatient. ‘It wasn’t part of the deal, you know. To drive you about.’

‘A person can get housebound.’

He folded his arms. ‘You chose to come here. You knew what it’d be like. I’m a ranger, not a tour guide.’ He glared at her, brows knit low.

‘Just to the end of the beach,’ she suggested, tremulous with anticipation. Cloudy Corner was the first destination on her list.

He hesitated and then made a face. ‘All right. But we’ll have to make it quick.’

Outside, the breeze caught in Mary’s chest and she covered her cough with a hand. Leon took her elbow and guided her to the car. He was stronger than he looked; with him holding her up, it was like walking on air. He pushed her into the vehicle. ‘Do up your seatbelt,’ he growled. ‘I don’t want to be picking you up off the floor.’

Not very tactful, but he was right. She was weak after two days of sitting. Back in Hobart she was always finding things to do, tasks to get her up out of her chair. But here all she did was sit at the window watching the waves run in.

Banging the door shut, he started the vehicle with a roar and they bounced over the dunes onto the beach. He drove in silence, even when they lurched over a dip where a small stream ran into the sea. She reached for the dashboard to steady herself, but he ignored her and remained focused ahead. Near Cloudy Corner he stopped and pointed. ‘Have a look out there, across the bay.’

Bright sunlight was shining yellow on the cliffs. The sea was silvery blue.

‘Magnificent,’ she said.

He swung the car to face the sea just as Jacinta had done that first day, and switched off the engine. The sound of waves was muffled and small gusts of wind were butting against the windows. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘I’m ready.’

She glanced at him, having already forgotten that this trip was linked to a commitment. Then she remembered. She was supposed to tell him about the light station. Perhaps this hadn’t been such a grand idea after all.

‘Did you like it?’ he asked. ‘Being a keeper’s wife? You must have liked it—to stay so long.’

‘It was wonderful at first,’ she said. She was speaking to Leon, but it was like riding towards Jack on a wave of memory. ‘When we came to the cape we’d been gone from the island too long. We both missed it. Both of us. Bruny was always a place of the heart for us.’

Leon watched her closely.

‘Going to the cape was a reunion with freedom,’ she continued. ‘So much space and air. Birds. Seals. Sometimes dolphins. We slotted in there like cows into a dairy.’

‘You weren’t lonely?’

‘Not to start with. There was so much to do. Jack was busy with work. And I was busy setting up the house. Cows to milk, briquettes to lug, baking and cooking, washing. We had visitors sometimes, but the roads were rough. We were very isolated.’

The lightkeepers’ schedule was busy. Night work and then cleaning during the day. A sheep to butcher. Another coat of paint on the lighthouse. Weather observations. Time off was reserved for a day on the weekend. This had been their time to learn the cape, her and Jack and the children. She thought of the special nook they had discovered, a cove which was reached by scrambling down a steep slope. They’d perch and picnic there on black slabs of broken rock. It was calm and quiet, out of the wind, a sheltered place where they could gaze across the channel to the dimpled folds of Recherche Bay. Often a pod of dolphins would be playing offshore, curling and curving through the waves. Jan and Gary would paddle in the cold shallows, or stand tossing rocks into the water with showery splashes. Afterwards, she and Jack would piggyback the children up the narrow gully, scrabbling in the gravel. When they arrived home, they felt washed clean by tranquillity, smoothed like pebbles rolling in the sea.

She recalled how intimacy had returned for them in those first few months at the lighthouse. When Jack wasn’t too ragged from lack of sleep or the cry of the wind, they clutched each other in the whispering dark, finding solace and release in each other’s bodies. It had been a time for remembering how to love. Yes, it had been good, for a while.

‘How did you get food?’ Leon asked, prodding her back to the present.

‘We had a delivery every month,’ she said. ‘It came by truck off the ferry from North Bruny. When we moved to the cape, the road from Lunawanna to the lighthouse had just been constructed, so the delivery of supplies was much simpler. Before that the lighthouse vessel, Cape York, used to take stores to Jetty Beach and then they had to be transferred to the keepers’ cottages. We had it comparatively easy, although we still welcomed the appearance of the truck.’ She remembered the old Ford grinding across the heath, horn blaring with the news of its arrival. ‘Unpacking was a family affair,’ she said. ‘Jack hefted boxes and we sorted them onto shelves in the storeroom. My daughter Jan liked to do a bucket brigade—passing tins along to Gary and then to me. The sacks of flour were too heavy for the children, so that was my job. We ate simply, stews and dumplings, salted meat, canned vegetables.’

‘What about fresh stuff?’ Leon asked. ‘Surely you had a vegie garden?’

‘Not a successful one,’ Mary admitted. She had dug herself to exhaustion in that sifting sandy soil, and any moisture she’d added had run away. ‘There was plenty of rain, but too much salt. Everything withered.’ Just like Jack, she thought. ‘The island was good to us,’ she said, picking up a more hopeful memory. ‘People sent us anything in season: apples, apricots, cabbages, peas. But gifts like those were irregular and mostly we had to manage with the stores. Food wasn’t the highlight of our existence. Having the cow meant we had plenty of butter, cream and milk. And when Gary caught something edible, we had fresh fish. Our luxury was a roast when one of the sheep was killed.’

‘How many visitors did you have?’

‘Very few.’

‘Not even with the new road?’

‘No. People were preoccupied with their own lives. It was busiest during mutton-bird season, but that all stopped when mutton-birding was banned.’

‘And you definitely weren’t lonely?’ Leon seem fixed on this.

‘It was harder when the children got older,’ she said. ‘They were looking for other company by then. Eventually, we sent them to boarding school.’

‘What about you?’

Mary hadn’t often thought about herself. ‘I managed well enough most of the time,’ she said. And yet there had been times when the solitude was difficult. She’d tried to befriend the other keeper’s wife. However, there was a social hierarchy even out there. Help had been forthcoming in emergencies, but the head keeper’s wife didn’t seek her out. She and her husband didn’t have children, and perhaps Jan and Gary were too wild and noisy.

‘And the weather?’ Leon asked.

Yes, the weather. It had shaped everything they did. ‘On bad days, we were stuck indoors,’ she said. ‘Sometimes the wind was so strong, you couldn’t stand up in it. Only the men ventured out. Anyone else would be blown off the cape. Even the birds were cautious. But on still days, it was heaven on earth. Perfect beyond perfection.’ She remembered the sun kissing the land. The light licking the ocean. The mainland, visible and purplish to the west. Nothing could be better.

‘Was it worth it?’ Leon asked, fetching her back again. ‘Was it a happy place?’

She looked at him and hesitated. Could she really say she’d been happy there over the years? It had been nirvana until things had begun to dissolve. But had that place given her lasting joy? Or had she just coped within a framework she’d come to know and understand, working with whatever fragments she and Jack had been able to give each other?

‘I was content,’ she said. And this was the best she could do. What was happiness, after all? And how many people could say they’d had it?

Drained, she stared seawards and saw herself in the foam as it shattered over the rocks. She hoped Leon would recognise her need for rest. And he did. He started the four-wheel drive and drove up the track to the campground, steering slowly around the loop, past shady campsites nestled beneath stunted coastal stringybarks.

He stopped at a campsite and helped her out. She was stiff and slow, a bit wobbly. He dragged a sawn-off stump into a triangle of light beneath the shifting branches of the trees and left her sitting beside the remains of an old campfire while he picked up his bag of toilet rolls and walked across to the long-drop toilets. The door banged as he went in and then banged again as he came out. He wandered around the campground, keeping his distance from her.

Mary didn’t mind being left alone. It was such a long time since she had camped at Cloudy Corner. She used to come here with the Masons on family outings; they would drive the old truck to the end of the road and then trundle along the sand to the end of the beach. They’d light a campfire under the trees and make tea while she and Jack walked up onto the headland.

The first time she and Jack came here alone was their honeymoon. They’d arrived on an overcast day with brooding skies, having walked from the farm with makeshift packs and panted to the end of the road where the land fell away onto the long flat run of the beach. On the rise overlooking the arc of sand, they’d stopped together, feeling the slow breeze stirring as they inhaled the tang of salt. Mary had been wet with sweat beneath heavy clothes, and was ready to stop, but Jack wanted to walk to the end of the beach. She remembered the joy of this place—she and Jack alone beneath the skies, the glow of light on the water, the late flush of yellow on East Cloudy Head.

At Cloudy Corner, Jack had shouldered through the scrub and she’d followed him into the hushed dark beneath the trees. She’d been keen to sleep on the beach under the spray of stars, but Jack was worried the wind would come up; he thought they’d be more comfortable under the trees. They made camp among the scrub, their bed a piece of canvas on the ground covered by woollen blankets. Then they stripped off and dived and splashed through the freezing waves, chasing each other, stopping to kiss, their skin alive with goosebumps.

Afterwards, they scrubbed themselves dry with a rough towel, prickling with cold, and layered on clothes before wandering along the sand, fossicking for treasures. They picked their way around the base of the headland to a string of rocks where cormorants perched with wings spread wide, trying to dry off in the brisk wind. Further around, they scrunched through mats of pig-face pockmarked by mutton-bird burrows. They found a place to sit on a rock platform above the black sea. Mary sat between Jack’s legs so he could wrap himself around her, and she leaned against him, high on freedom and love.

For dinner, they ate chunks of bread smothered with slabs of melted cheese, and preserved apricots for dessert. She remembered the light of the flames flickering on Jack’s face as he fed sticks into the fire. And the shiver of breeze that flowed up from the beach, rustling the leaves. She could still see Jack squatting by the flames, his legs thin and wiry, his shoulders boxy and broad. His face narrow. His jaw angled, rough with stubble.

After dinner they had walked the beach under the white wash of the moon, stopping to grasp each other in passion, or to lean into each other’s warmth while the air settled bitingly cold around them. That night, they lay together, listening to the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, their bodies enmeshed, warmth rising between them. Intimacy was something they’d dreamed of for years, and yet it was almost overwhelming when reality arrived. All that yearning. So much anticipation. So little experience.

After the farm, there had been the burden of their lives in Hobart; Jack’s retreat into himself and her own misery. The lighthouse gave them a temporary reprieve, but then the wind wore Jack down. Truly, it was a wonder they made it through. If she hadn’t been so patient, so committed, so determined, they could have easily blown away like the marriages of today. But a failed marriage was destitution back then. There were few options for women. A divorce was a public disgrace. And she loved Jack, despite his foibles.

Often she had wished she could teach her children how to prevent a relationship from going into decline. The art of marriage maintenance. But even if she had been able to verbalise all that was in her heart, she couldn’t dictate how they should live their lives. It wasn’t her place to steal from them the bittersweet pain of their own discoveries and mistakes. The resuscitation of a relationship was something you could only learn between the lines of your own history. And grief was not something you could save people from. It was the destiny of everyone. Yet, if she could do those years again, perhaps she would have done them differently.

From the grand plateau of age, she could see where she and Jack had allowed room for slippage. But it had taken her years to understand how words could become lost if they weren’t spoken. And then it was too late to retrieve them. When she began to comprehend the barrier in her relationship with Jack, the thread of contact was already broken. The wind had carried it away, and all that remained was empty air.

Their lives at the cape were dominated by the lighthouse. It was there on the hill each time she looked out the kitchen window. Its rotating beam punctuated the night. And Jack’s alarm woke them each morning at four so he could do the weather observations and then be ready to extinguish the light at dawn. The two keepers were busy: reporting the weather six times a day, servicing and fuelling the generators, washing the lighthouse windows, cleaning the lenses and prisms, painting the tower, maintaining fences and slashing the grass.

While Jack was occupied with keeping the light, Mary maintained the family. She kneaded dough, baked cakes, prepared the evening meal. As she worked, the children did their lessons, bent over books and pencils and little piles of shavings. Outside, she milked the cow twice a day, hung out the washing, cared for the chickens and the pony. In the evenings, she sewed clothes and knitted jumpers and socks. She made butter and cheese, and tended the miserable vegie patch, trying to coax the wilting plants to grow. Always, in the background, the kettle sizzled on the stove, ready for Jack when he came in looking for a cup of tea and some food.

As time wound around them at the lighthouse, the wind had started eating at Jack. It mottled him slowly, grinding him down. His hands, already stiff from working in rain and cold at the farm, began to warp. And there was no escaping the wind in that southern reach of land. At first, it made Jack restless. He came home each night with an edginess that could not be relieved by sleep. Then his mood progressed to grumpiness. Mary had to deflect the children from him, diverting them into their rooms, into books, into games, anything to give him quiet and rest.

On days off, the family retreated to their favourite cove where there was stillness beyond the lash of the wind. Jack sagged in the quiet; something invisible lifted from him, and if they stayed there long enough, there would be small flashes of warmth and engagement. But those moments were brief and increasingly feeble. Distance diffused into their relationship, its invasion so insidious that it spread wide and long before Mary realised what was happening. Somehow, they had evolved into different people, and a bridge had to be remade—a task Mary couldn’t tackle alone.

At night, she lay in bed, listening to Jack’s breathing. Sometimes she reached for him—darkness gave sufficient anonymity to ignore the rift—and they’d take each other raggedly, desperately, trying to clutch onto something they both needed but couldn’t ask for. In the grip of each other’s bodies, they held on in silence and pretended the chasm between them didn’t exist. Then he lost his interest in sex, complaining about his arthritis. She worked to ease his load, busying herself with extra jobs to protect him from labour around the house. If she could just help him a little bit more, she thought, his impatience might soften. He might remember to embrace the children. He might lift his eyes for long enough to see her.

Love-making was the final thread that held them together. But when the wind blew even that away, they were left with nothing but a vast expanse of mist and air, both of them lost in fog.

They should have found a way back to each other in all that time and sky and wilderness. They ought to have found reconnections in a place they both loved. But the only element of Cape Bruny that penetrated their relationship was space—that great expanse of it stretching all around. Eventually, she stopped reaching across the bed for Jack, and he slept facing away. Instead of trying to pull him back, she turned to the children, and allowed Jack to retreat into his silences and his solitude.

It had been easy to lose herself in daily activities. She’d used them as a prop to carry her through. Built routine around her like a fortress. The tasks became the purpose, and everything else became obscured beneath the rigid pattern of life: a structured string of days adding up to a year, and then more years when the passing of seasons and the growth of the children marked the passage of time. Somehow, she and Jack had disengaged until they arrived at a grim place that was neither love nor hatred. They existed in an empty place which, over the years, she came to know as indifference. Left alone there, she was forced to depend on secrets and fantasy to feed her soul—a dangerous place for a woman to go.

Though she didn’t like to remember those times (and she still wasn’t ready to think about them now), she had always blamed the storm, her accident, and all that followed for the near-demise of her relationship with Jack. And, because of that, within the deepest recesses of her being, she had long blamed the lighthouse itself. It had been their making, their breaking, and their making again. The life–death–life cycle of everything. But it had been the fault of neither, really. She and Jack had been already crumbling. The other factors were simply catalysts. They had made choices which led them to a place where there were, perhaps, no choices. They’d created a situation where the actions that came after became the only possibility. And the events that unfolded were consequence, not causality.

The awful truth was that the aftermath to those events became the path which would eventually lead to that letter hidden in her suitcase in the cabin at Cloudy Bay.