The Lightkeeper's Wife (3 page)

‘I think so.’

‘Good. A plan.’ Mary liked plans. It meant you were more than halfway to working things out. Alex ought to be ready. Jacinta was a special girl. A bit of nest-making might accelerate things.

As they talked, the ferry had approached the landing, engines grinding, and bumped into position. Deck hands tossed heavy ropes over bollards, then the ramps lowered and the Bruny traffic clunked off and away. Jacinta followed the line of cars onto the ferry. There were few vehicles going across so only the lower deck was loaded. When they were all parked, the ramps were cranked up, and the throb of the engines shuddered through the decks as the ferry pushed away.

They churned out past the headland, swinging slowly south-east. Mary climbed out of the car, donned her coat and hat and walked slowly to the front of the ferry. This was her favourite place, watching the water froth up at the bow and the gulls cruising by on the chill air. She had crossed the channel many times before. Sometimes with the children, attempting to curb their enthusiasm to climb up for a better view. Other times, she’d been alone, with space to dissect her life.

On the surface, happiness seemed little enough to ask for. Mostly, she and Jack had been lucky. They’d managed to sew themselves back together in troubled times. She ought to be proud of what they’d achieved.

Shivering, she gazed towards North Bruny. The water was liquid glass and the cold cut through her like ice. It was a typical late-autumn day. The sort of day that gave the southlands their moodiness. The long, grey, misty light. It made her feel nostalgic.

Jacinta came to stand beside her and they hooked elbows. Warm against cold. Strength against weariness. Eventually, Jacinta led her back to the car. They sat with the engine running and the heaters on, watching the low wooded hills of North Bruny loom closer, widening into pastures with trees and wire fences.

Mary was surprised to find tears again welling in her eyes.

As they drove east over the island, Mary watched the paddocks blur by. Hunched in her seat, she was trying to retain every detail of the scenery. It was different, this trip—knowing she wouldn’t pass this way again. The land was drying out, even here, where it used to be so lush. She remembered a time when rain pounded the whole island and cloaked it in green. These days, the storms that lashed South Bruny wore themselves out by the time they reached the north part of the island, and now it looked as cracked and weathered as her skin.

Her eyes scraped the landscape, seeking the old Bruny, the things she and Jack had loved. She had forgotten the way the road curved over the hills. Black swans were resting on a farm dam. And here were two white geese in a paddock. She was surprised to see piles of weathered grey logs waiting to be burned. With so much of the forest already gone, were people still clearing?

They turned south on the main Bruny road and drove past mudflats where pied oystercatchers waded in the shallows, plucking crabs. In the scrub, yellow wattlebirds clacked. There was a short section of tarred road through Great Bay then they were back on gravel, passing coastal farmland where dirty sheep competed with thickets of bracken.

They came to the Neck; a few cars in the roadside carpark. This was where a wooden walkway crossed the dunes and ascended the hill. Mary knew that path well. Beneath the walkway were the burrows of a thousand mutton birds and little penguins. If you knew where to look, you could see small webbed footprints crisscrossing among the waving grasses.

The road along the isthmus had only been open a few years when she first visited this place with Jack—before that people used to drive on the channel-side sand at low tide. She and Jack sat holding hands on the vast wild ocean beach, watching slick black penguins waddling ashore, moonlight glinting white on their plump bellies. The colony would be empty now. The last fat mutton-bird chicks would have left in late April, labouring on their migration to Siberia.

As the car whizzed low along the narrow passage of the Neck, Mary leaned back and closed her eyes, remembering the climb up the hill. Long ago, the walkway was just a rough track along the ridge. She used to puff her way up there with Jack and the children to marvel at the view—that wide expanse of sky and coast spreading south-east along the isthmus to Adventure Bay and Fluted Cape. There was the hummocky mass of South Bruny, the long lines of breaking surf clawing the beach. To the west, the silhouettes of black swans drifting on the channel. She could remember the heat of the climb. The delicious bite of the wind. The rain sheeting across South Bruny.

Now, the walkway claimed the ridge for tourists. The island had become a
destination
. And the word
isolation
no longer applied here. Bruny was still the place Mary loved, but it wasn’t the same. She had to accept that. Change was the future. She smiled to herself. They called it
progress
. But she knew better. The island was her past. Her life with Jack. Her everything.

2

When the car mounted the rise over the dunes and the silver waters of Cloudy Bay spread out before her, Mary felt a sigh rise from deep within. The great flat stretch of yellow sand was just as it had always been. Quiet. Moody. The epitome of solitude. This place marked her beginnings with Jack. The two of them young and unscathed. They had grown wild in the wild air. Jack still lingered here with the sea mist; she could feel him. He was waiting for her.

As they drove down past the landlocked lagoon onto the sand, a white-faced heron startled from the shore, trailing gangly legs as it lifted into lilting flight. Pacific gulls rose chortling into the air. On the beach, Jacinta stopped the car, and Mary soaked up the ambience.

She opened the door and Jacinta helped her out. Then she patted her granddaughter’s arm and Jacinta stepped away, leaving her to shuffle down the beach on her own. At the high edge of the tide, she bent stiffly to take a handful of sand. It was fine and grey, slightly muddy. Kneading the soggy graininess of it in her palm, she gazed into the distance where the beach arced east to the far headland: Cloudy Corner and East Cloudy Head.

Down by the water, the Pacific gulls had gathered again in loose flocks, facing seawards. Mary knew that if she could run and scare them, they’d lift as a unit into the air and then congregate once more further along the beach. They needed each other’s company to stare so steadfastly south in this lonely light. Everything here was dense with latitude. If you headed south from this beach, there was nothing until Antarctica.

‘Nana, let’s get out of the wind. I don’t want you to get cold.’ Jacinta came up behind her, taking her hand.

Mary pulled gently away. ‘I’ll be all right. I’d like to walk a little more.’

She wandered slowly east, focusing on the distant dark shadow of East Cloudy Head where it humped against the sky. She used to go up there with Jack, pressing through the untracked scrub, scratching herself on bushes. They used to forge a route up towards the southern aspect of the head so they could climb nearer to the sky. They’d stand there, close and exhilarated, with the sea pounding over the rocks below, and the Southern Ocean all around, stretching east, south, west.

She paused to draw breath, taking in the cold stiff air. The hint of seaweed. The thick scent of salt. This place renewed her. It was life itself. She smiled and closed her eyes against the chill. She was right to come here.

‘Nana. Please hop in. It’s cold.’

The car pulled up beside her, and Mary realised she’d forgotten her granddaughter. There was so much within and around her that was not of this time. She glanced into the car, her features flushed, high on memory.

‘Please, Nana. The wind is freezing.’

Jacinta helped her back in and they drove slowly along the sand, windows down so Mary could feel the air. The beach slid smoothly beneath the wheels of the four-wheel drive.

‘Can you take me right down to the end?’ Mary asked. ‘I want to show you Cloudy Corner. There’s a campground just short of the headland. You and Alex might like to camp there sometime.’

When she’d first come to this part of the island—on a camping trip with Jack’s family—there was nobody else around. It was wilderness. They’d camped in the bush. At night they sat on the beach in the dark feeling the waves come in, soothed by the rhythm. And that view south; the arc of the bay, the dramatic cliffs etched with shadows.

‘Does Alex like to camp?’ she asked Jacinta, dragging herself back to the present.

Jacinta sighed. ‘He does. But we don’t seem to fit it in very often. Life’s so busy.’

‘You should bring him here. It might help you slow down. Give you some time for making decisions.’

‘Yes. We need to get out of Hobart more. It hems you in, doesn’t it? City life. Even in a small city. It’s been months since we got away.’

Mary wanted to tell her that it was important to remember how to live. The young thought life was forever. And then, there you were, on the brink of decline, regretting time not used well. Yet if you lived with that knowledge of time passing—driven by intensity—perhaps meaning would evade you in your very quest to find it. Perhaps it was all right to live as Mary had done, letting life’s tide drop experiences in her lap. She’d made the best she could of everything that had washed up over the decades.

‘Thank you for coming here with me,’ Mary said.

Jacinta smiled at her. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’

At the far end of the beach, Jacinta faced the car to the water and they sat quietly absorbing the atmosphere; the gush of the waves riding in, the buffeting of the wind at the windows, the scrub shifting and sighing behind them.

‘I was five when you first brought me here,’ Jacinta said, staring out over the rocks of Cloudy Reef where cormorants sat in a cluster, drying their wings. ‘I thought this must be the end of the earth. You told me that if I sailed directly south for seven days I’d come to the ice. The edge of the land of penguins. That was magic for me.’

‘Just like Tom.’ Mary knew about the draw of Antarctica. She’d almost lost her younger son to its mysterious magnetism.

‘Do you think he’ll go back?’ Jacinta asked.

Mary shook her head. ‘I think he dreams of it. But he lost so much last time. I don’t think he could go through that again.’

‘Perhaps it’d be different if he went now.’

‘And maybe not.’

‘Poor Tom.’

Yes. Poor Tom. He still bore the wounds of his time south.

‘Mum doesn’t come here anymore, does she?’ Jacinta said, looking out to the constant rush of waves. ‘I’ve never understood it.’

‘Maybe you can spend too much time in a place like this.’

‘You don’t feel that way, do you?’

‘No. I miss it every day. But I’m not your mother. Not everyone feels at home in the wind.’

‘It suited you and Grandpa,’ Jacinta said. Then she laughed. ‘Mum says you two were a good match.’

Mary hesitated. ‘Your grandfather and I . . . complemented each other.’ She thought of Jack’s silences, and of her own fortitude. No-one else could have survived those years at the lighthouse with him.

‘I didn’t know Grandpa very well,’ Jacinta said.

‘He was a hard man to know.’

‘Why was that?’

‘He was probably born that way. His childhood wasn’t easy. He worked hard on the farm from a young age. I suppose the lighthouse didn’t help.’

‘I thought he loved it.’

‘Yes, but you can lose yourself in all that space and time.’

Mary often wondered what would have happened if she’d realised this earlier. Maybe she could have done more to help him. Perhaps she could have pulled him back. Stopped the drift. Softened his moods. But that would have required her to be a different person; someone without housewifely duties and children and their lessons. She had done all she could at the time: cooked his favourite meals, kept him warm, deflected the children from his impatience, massaged those poor arthritic fingers, so gnarled and wooden. But the wind was insidious. It had worn him down the same way it erodes rocks, and turns mountains into sand, and makes headlands into beaches.

Jacinta was gazing out to where the wind was picking up the crests of waves and flicking them skywards in fizzing white spume. ‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said. ‘But it’s cold. We should close the windows and turn up the heater.’

‘What? And blow away the smell of the sea?’

Jacinta reached over and squeezed Mary’s hand. ‘Your skin’s like ice, Nana. Remember, you’re my responsibility today. Is there a thermos in the picnic basket?’

‘I forgot the thermos.’ Mary’s face folded into quietness. Now was the time. ‘There’s a cabin back along the beach a way,’ she said, restraining the tension in her voice. ‘Did you notice it as we passed? It’s just over the dunes. Let’s go and see if we can make a cup of tea there.’

Jacinta looked doubtful. ‘Do you think we can do that?’

‘I know the owners. They won’t mind. It’ll be unlocked.’ Mary’s skin tingled and she held her breath as she waited for Jacinta to acquiesce.

‘I suppose we can have a look . . .’

Jacinta turned the car and drove back along the beach while Mary sat tight and still, struggling to subdue her mounting excitement. She waved a casual hand to show Jacinta where the track turned off, but as they swung up over the dunes, lurching over the rise, Mary’s heart was dipping and curving too.