The Light Between Oceans(23)

Isabel did not look up. He tried again. ‘Some Vincent’s Powders?’ The first-aid taught to lightkeepers included ‘restoring the apparently drowned’, treating hypothermia and exposure, disinfecting wounds; even the rudiments of amputation. They did not, however, touch on gynaecology, and the mechanics of miscarriage were a mystery to Tom.

It had been two days since the dreadful storm. Two days since the miscarriage had begun. Still the blood came, and still Isabel refused to let Tom signal for help. Having stayed on watch throughout that wild night, he had finally returned to the cottage after putting out the light just before dawn, and his body begged for sleep. But entering the bedroom he had found Isabel doubled up, the bed soaked in blood. The look in her eyes was as desolate as Tom had ever seen. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she had said. ‘So, so sorry, Tom.’ Then another wave of pain gripped her and she groaned, and pressed her hands to her belly, desperate for it to stop.

Now she said, ‘What’s the point in a doctor? The baby’s gone.’ Her gaze wandered. ‘How hopeless am I?’ she muttered. ‘Other women have babies as easy as falling off a log.’

‘Izzy Bella, stop.’

‘It’s my fault, Tom. It must be.’

‘That’s just not true, Izz.’ He pulled her head into his chest and kissed her hair over and over. ‘There’ll be another. One day when we’ve got five kids running around and getting under your feet, this’ll all feel like a dream.’ He pulled her shawl around her shoulders. ‘It’s beautiful outside. Come and sit on the verandah. It’ll do you good.’

They sat side by side in wicker armchairs, Isabel covered with a blue checked blanket, and watched the progress of the sun across the late-autumn sky.

Isabel recalled how she had been struck by the emptiness of this place, like a blank canvas, when she first arrived; how, gradually, she had come to see into it as Tom did, attuning to the subtle changes. The clouds, as they formed and grouped and wandered the sky; the shape of the waves, which would take their cue from the wind and the season and could, if you knew how to read them, tell you the next day’s weather. She had become familiar, too, with the birds which appeared from time to time, against all odds – carried along as randomly as the seeds borne on the wind, or the seaweed thrown up on the shore.

She looked at the two pine trees and suddenly wept at their aloneness. ‘There should be forests,’ she said suddenly. ‘I miss the trees, Tom. I miss their leaves and their smell and the fact there are so many of them – oh, Tom, I miss the animals: I bloody miss kangaroos! I miss it all.’

‘I know you do, Izzy, darl.’

‘But don’t you?’

‘You’re the only thing in this world that I want, Izz, and you’re right here. Everything else will sort itself out. Just give it time.’



A sheer, velvet veil covered everything, no matter how dutifully Isabel dusted – her wedding photograph; the picture of Hugh and Alfie in their uniforms the week they joined up in 1916, grinning as if they’d just been invited to a party. Not the tallest lads in the AIF, but keen as mustard, and so dashing in their brand-new slouch hats.

Her sewing box was as neat as it needed to be, rather than pristine like her mother’s. Needles and pins pierced the cushioned pale-green lining, and the panels of a christening gown lay ununited, stopped in mid-stitch like a broken clock.

The small string of pearls Tom had given her as a wedding gift sat in the box he had made for her. Her hairbrush and tortoiseshell combs were the only other things on her dressing table.

Isabel wandered into the lounge room, observing the dust, the crack in the plaster near the window frame, the frayed edge of the dark-blue rug. The hearth needed sweeping, and the lining of the curtains had begun to shred from constant exposure to extremes of weather. Simply to think of fixing any of it took more energy than she could muster. Only weeks ago she had been so full of expectation and vigour. Now the room felt like a coffin, and her life stopped at its edges.

She opened the photograph album her mother had prepared for her as a going-away present, with the pictures of her as a child, the name of the photographer’s studio, Gutcher’s, stamped on the back of each portrait. There was one of her parents on their wedding day; a photograph of home. She trailed her finger over the table, lingering on the lace doily her grandmother had made for her own trousseau. She moved to the piano, and opened it.

The walnut was split in places. The gold leaf above the keyboard said Eavestaff, London. She had often imagined its journey to Australia, and the other lives it could have lived – in an English house, or a school, sagging under the burden of imperfect scales played by small, stumbling fingers perhaps, or even on a stage. Yet through the most unlikely of circumstances, its lot was to live on this island, its voice stolen by loneliness and the weather.

She pressed middle C, so slowly that it made no sound. The warm ivory key was as smooth as her grandmother’s fingertips, and the touch brought back afternoons of music lessons, of wringing out A flat major in contrary motion, one octave, then two, then three. The sound of the cricket ball on the wood as Hugh and Alfie larked about outside while she, a ‘little lady’, acquired ‘accomplishments’, and listened as her grandmother explained again the importance of keeping her wrists raised.

‘But it’s stupid, contrary motion!’ Isabel would wail.