The Light Between Oceans(33)

‘I take your point!’ Ralph chuckled. ‘Right, Mr Sherbourne, my friend, I need your autograph on the forms. Might as well sort them out now.’

Tom was relieved to get up from the table. ‘Righto. Come through to the office, Captain Addicott, sir,’ he said, leaving Bluey cooing over the basket.

The young man reached into the cot and jangled the rattle at the baby, who was now wide awake. She watched it intently, and he jiggled it again. ‘You’re a lucky one, aren’t you, getting a fancy silver rattle! Fit for a princess: I’ve never seen anything so grand! Angels on the handle and everything. Angels for an angel … And your nice fluffy blanket …’

‘Oh, they were left over from …’ Isabel’s voice dropped, ‘from before.’

Bluey blushed. ‘Sorry. Putting my foot in it. I … Better get on with unloading. Thanks for the cake,’ and he beat a retreat through the kitchen door.



Janus Rock,

June 1926

Dear Mum and Dad,

Well, God has sent us an angel to keep us company. Baby Lucy has captured our hearts! She’s a beautiful little girl – absolutely perfect. She sleeps well and feeds well. She’s never any trouble.

I wish you could see her and hold her. Every day she looks a bit different, and I know by the time you see her she’ll have lost her baby looks. She’ll be a toddler when we come back on shore. But in the mean time, here’s the nearest thing to a picture. I dipped the sole of her foot in cochineal! (You have to be inventive on the Lights …) See masterpiece attached.

Tom is a wonderful dad. Janus seems so different now that Lucy’s here. At the moment it’s pretty easy to look after her – I pop her in her basket and she comes with me when I have to get the eggs or do the milking. It might be a bit harder when she starts to crawl. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

I want to tell you so much about her – how her hair is dark, how beautiful she smells after her bath. Her eyes are quite dark too. But I can’t do her justice. She’s much too wonderful to describe. I’ve only known her a few weeks and already I can’t imagine my life without her.

Well, ‘Grandma and Grandpa’ (!), I’d better finish this so that the boat can take it, otherwise it’ll be another three months before you get it!

With fondest love,

Isabel

P.S. I’ve just read your letter from the boat this morning. Thanks for the beautiful bunny rug. And the doll is just lovely. The books are wonderful too. I tell her nursery rhymes all the time, so she’ll like these new ones.

P.P.S. Tom says thanks for the jumper. Winter’s starting to bite out here!



The new moon was barely a crescent stitched into the darkening sky. Tom and Isabel were sitting on the verandah as the light swept around far above them. Lucy had fallen asleep in Tom’s arms.

‘It’s hard to breathe differently from her, isn’t it?’ he said, gazing at the baby.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s like a kind of spell, isn’t it? Whenever she’s asleep like this, I end up breathing in the same rhythm. A bit like I end up doing things in time to the turning of the light.’ Almost to himself, he said, ‘It scares me.’

Isabel smiled. ‘It’s just love, Tom. No need to be scared of love.’

Tom felt a shiver creep through him. Just as he couldn’t now imagine having lived in this world without meeting Isabel, he realised that Lucy, too, was making her way inside his heart. And he wished she belonged there.



Anyone who’s worked on the Offshore Lights can tell you about it – the isolation, and the spell it casts. Like sparks flung off the furnace that is Australia, these beacons dot around it, flickering on and off, some of them only ever seen by a handful of living souls. But their isolation saves the whole continent from isolation – keeps the shipping lanes safe, as vessels steam the thousands of miles to bring machines and books and cloth, in return for wool and wheat, coal and gold: the fruits of ingenuity traded for the fruits of earth.

The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focussing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm – the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you’re wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.

So Isabel floats further and further into her world of divine benevolence, where prayers are answered, where babies arrive by the will of God and the working of currents. ‘Tom, I wonder how we can be so lucky?’ she muses. She watches in awe as her blessed daughter grows and thrives. She revels in the discoveries each day brings for this little being: rolling over; starting to crawl; the first, faltering sounds. The storms gradually follow winter to another corner of the earth, and summer comes, bearing a paler blue sky, a sharper gold sun.

‘Up you come,’ Isabel laughs, and hoists Lucy onto her hip as the three of them stroll down the path to the glinting beach for a picnic. Tom picks different leaves – sea-grass, pig-face – and Lucy smells them, chews on their ends, pulling faces at the strange sensations. He gathers tiny posies of rose banjine, or shows her the shimmering scales of a trevally or a blue mackerel he has caught off the rocks on the side of the island where the ocean floor drops away into sudden darkness. On still nights, Isabel’s voice carries across the air in a soothing lilt as she reads Lucy tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the nursery, while Tom works on repairs in the shed.