“You’re usually pretty safe here. But keep your eyes open, just in case.”
“What do you mean?” asked Isabel as she paddled, only half listening.
“The sharks can’t usually make it through the rocks, unless there’s a really high tide or a storm or something, so you’re probably safe on that count…”
“Probably?”
“But you need to be careful about other things. Sea urchins, say. Watch out when you’re walking on submerged rocks, or the spines can snap off in your foot and get infected. And stingrays bury themselves in the sand near the edge of the water—if you tread on the barb in their tail you’re in trouble. If it flicks up and gets you near the heart, well…” He noticed that Isabel had gone silent.
“You all right, Izz?”
“It feels different somehow, when you just reel it all off like that—when we’re this far from help.”
Tom took her in his arms and pulled her up to the shore. “I’ll look after you, sweetheart. Don’t you worry,” he said with a smile. He kissed her shoulders, and laid her head back on the sand, to kiss her mouth.
In Isabel’s wardrobe, beside the piles of thick winter woolens, hang a few floral dresses—easy to wash, hard to hurt as she goes about her new work of feeding the chickens or milking the goats; picking the vegetables or cleaning the kitchen. When she hikes around the island with Tom she wears an old pair of his trousers, rolled up more than a foot and cinched with a cracked leather belt, over one of his collarless shirts. She likes to feel the ground under her feet, and goes without shoes whenever she can, but on the cliffs she endures plimsolls to protect her soles from the granite. She explores the boundaries of her new world.
One morning soon after she arrived, a little drunk with the freedom of it, she decided to experiment. “What do you think of the new look?” she said to Tom as she brought him a sandwich in the watch room at noon, wearing nothing at all. “I don’t think I need clothes on a day as lovely as this.”
He raised an eyebrow and gave her a half smile. “Very nice. But you’ll get sick of it soon enough, Izz.” As he took the sandwich he stroked her chin. “There’s some things you have to do to survive on the Offshore Lights, love—to stay normal: eat at proper times; turn the pages of the calendar”—he laughed—“and keep your clobber on. Trust me, sweet.”
Blushing, she retreated to the cottage and dressed in several layers—camisole and petticoat, shift, cardigan, then heaved on Wellington boots and went to dig up potatoes with unnecessary vigor in the sharp sunshine.
Isabel asked Tom, “Have you got a map of the island?”
He smiled. “Afraid of getting lost? You’ve been here a few weeks now. As long as you go in the opposite direction to the water, you’ll get home sooner or later. And the light might give you a clue too.”
“I just want a map. There must be one.”
“Of course there is. There are charts of the whole area if you want them, but I’m not sure what good they are to you. There’s nowhere much you can go.”
“Just humor me, husband of mine,” she said, and kissed his cheek.
Later that morning, Tom appeared in the kitchen with a large scroll, and presented it with mock ceremony to Isabel. “Your wish is my command, Mrs. Sherbourne.”
“Thank you,” she replied in the same tone. “That will be all, for now. You may go, sir.”
A smile played on Tom’s lips as he rubbed his chin. “What are you up to, missie?”
“Never you mind!”
For the next few days, Isabel went off on expeditions each morning, and in the afternoon closed the door to the bedroom, even though Tom was safely occupied with his work.
One evening, after she had dried the dinner dishes, she fetched the scroll and handed it to Tom. “This is for you.”
“Thanks, love,” said Tom, who was reading a dog-eared volume on the tying of rope knots. He looked up briefly. “I’ll put it back tomorrow.”
“But it’s for you.”
Tom looked at her. “It’s the map, isn’t it?”
She gave a mischievous grin. “You won’t know until you look, will you?”
Tom unrolled the paper, to find it transformed. Little annotations had appeared all over it, together with colored sketches and arrows. His first thought was that the map was Commonwealth property and that there would be hell to pay next inspection. New names had sprung up everywhere.
“Well?” Isabel smiled. “It just seemed wrong that places weren’t called anything. So I’ve given them names, see?”
The coves and the cliffs and the rocks and the grassy fields all bore fine lettering, in which they were christened, as Paradise Pool had been: Stormy Corner; Treacherous Rock; Shipwreck Beach; Tranquil Cove; Tom’s Lookout; Izzy’s Cliff, and many more.
“I suppose I’d never thought of it as being separate places. It’s all just Janus to me,” Tom said, smiling.
“It’s a world of differences. Each place deserves a name, like rooms in a house.”
Tom rarely thought of the house in terms of rooms either. It was just “home.” And something in him was saddened at the dissection of the island, the splitting off into the good and the bad, the safe and the dangerous. He preferred to think of it whole. Even more, he was uneasy about parts bearing his name. Janus did not belong to him: he belonged to it, like he’d heard the natives thought of land. His job was just to take care of it.
He looked at his wife, who was smiling proudly at her handiwork. If she wanted to give things names, maybe there was no harm in it. And maybe she would come to understand his way of looking at it, eventually.
When Tom gets invitations to his Battalion reunions, he always writes back. Always sends good wishes, and a bit of money toward the mess. But he never attends. Well, being on the Lights, he couldn’t even if he wanted to. There are some, he knows, who will take comfort in seeing a familiar face, re-telling a story. But he doesn’t want to join in. There were friends he lost—men he’d trusted, fought with, drunk with, and shivered with. Men he understood without a word, knew as if they were an extension of his body. He thinks about the language that bound them together: words that cropped up to cover circumstances no one had ever encountered before. A “pineapple,” a “pipsqueak,” a “plum pudding”: all types of shell which might find their way into your trench. The lice were “chats,” the food was “scran,” and a “Blighty” was a wound that’d see you shipped back to hospital in England. He wonders how many men can still speak this secret language.
Sometimes when he wakes up next to Isabel he’s still amazed, and relieved, that she isn’t dead. He watches closely for her breath, just to make sure. Then he puts his head against her back and absorbs the softness of her skin, the gentle rise and fall of her body as she sleeps on. It is as great a miracle as he has ever seen.
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 tinseled 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 favorite?”
“You’re my favorite. Better than all the stars put together.”
He moved down to kiss her belly. “I should say, ‘You two are my favorites,’ 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. At last, he was in charge of his own life. The address the private detective gave him was a boardinghouse 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 penciled 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 recognized it as tainted—with cheap booze 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 shriveled.
“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 boardinghouse 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?” he asked, 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 plowed 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 favor.
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 Doctor 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.”