The Light Between Oceans(19)

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 vigour 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 humour 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 coloured 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 towards 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 ‘pip-squeak’, 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