The Lightkeeper's Wife (10 page)

Soon scientists commenced field work, disappearing over the ice. The days gained a regular sort of rhythm—breakfast, smoko, lunch, smoko, dinner. People whose weight had bloomed on the slow hours of the voyage south expanded further with the calorie-dense meals which were mostly covered with cheese. And all that food had to be prepared. Food for fifty, five times a day. The two chefs were the most important people on station: food was essential for morale. But they couldn’t do all the work alone. Rosters, known as slushy duty, were set up to assist them in the kitchen: hands to peel buckets of potatoes, hands to pack and unpack dishwashers, hands to peel and chop carrots and onions, grate cheese, serve food.

Amid the routine, station dynamics evolved. On Saturday nights parties shaped themselves from nowhere. A birthday was an excuse for a binge. A few musicians formed a rough sort of a band and jammed in the lounge. Gossip was born and grew—some real, some fabricated. Clashes emerged, scuffles over girlfriends. Relationships developed. Others died. Marriages came under strain.

Among all this, I found my own way. I wasn’t into the field-hut drinking trips or the binges on station. When I wasn’t in the shed or in the computer room emailing Debbie I was away, hooking myself onto field trips to assist biologists: counting penguins, marking seals, taking samples from frozen lakes, grinding out ice cores with the glaciologists. One diesel mechanic always had to be on station, so the opportunities for escape from work were few. But scientists often looked for helpers, and they wanted someone quiet and useful.

I patched up my loneliness with the vast landscapes, bizarre animals and luminescent light. I skied out from station, passing Adelie penguins waddling urgently in single file to their colonies on the offshore islands. Among the powdery blues of the towering bergs was an iceberg of magical deep jade, its surfaces scoured by wind. Near the ice edge, a leopard seal was sleeping, its heavy head resting on the ice. The sinuous length of its powerful body stretched, and then it rolled and yawned, showing strings of sharp teeth.

As the season progressed, I assisted wherever I could. This included tagging and marking Adelie penguins on a nearby island. We laughed at their rock-stealing antics as they fought to build the largest nest of stones, the fury of flipper bashings as they squabbled. I sat for hours watching them courting: the ducking and weaving of heads, the slow rhythmic flapping. And always more penguins arriving, waddling towards the island or tobogganing on their bellies, propelled by strong-clawed pink feet. The deafening noise of the place—the chorus of squawking black bodies scattered over rocky hillsides reuniting with returning mates. As the summer unfolded, egg incubation began, and the busy clucking calls subsided to quiet restfulness. Penguins sat belly-flopped on their nests, eyes like slits, the wind ruffling their feathers.

Eventually, the sea ice melted and blew out. My breaks were reduced to snatched days walking the valleys and lakes of the Vestfold Hills, although I managed to score a few days helping with field work on remote islands. When data collection was done for the day, I watched fulmars soaring straight-winged in the stiff breeze. Snow petrels scuffling about the rock faces. Sometimes I sat listening to the water lapping beneath the melting ice that surrounded the island, watching Adelies porpoising in the shallows and the wind drawing patterns on the surface of the sea.

Through all of this, I missed Debbie. Once a week we spoke by telephone. In between, I wrote emails telling her of all that I had seen and done. I wrote of the bergs dotting Prydz Bay, their varied shapes and colours. I wrote of the late sunsets, the ever-lengthening light, the lone emperor penguin in Long Fjord that glided up on its belly and sat beside me for several minutes. I wrote of the ice gradually melting, the bizarreness of twenty-four-hour daylight, the ugliness of station once the snow had gone. I wrote of the long hours in the shed, of the emptiness without her. I wrote to Debbie of how I missed her, of how I thought of her in our little house, and of how we’d soon be back together.

It still amazes me that you can be destroyed without knowing it. Even as it gives, Antarctica takes away. So, after all that happened to me because of that place, why is it I still long to return?

7

It was close to midday when Mary forced herself to make lunch. All morning, she had waited for the arrival of the ranger, and still he had not come. It made her anxious. What if he didn’t show? What would she do? She hadn’t much time to fulfil her debt to Jack, and if the ranger didn’t turn up, all was lost. Her family would come and drag her back to Hobart; Jan’s nursing home loomed terrifyingly large.

At the kitchen bench, she dutifully shook tablets from various vials and gulped them down with icy water. It was essential that she maintain her health as long as possible and not succumb to the absent-mindedness which hovered so close about her. A stream of recollections had stolen chunks of her morning, and she’d forgotten her ten o’clock medication.

She sat on the couch, a sandwich and a mug of tea before her on the coffee table, and stared vacantly out the window, fighting a surge of agitation. If only she could relax and absorb the view. She looked down at the sandwich with apathetic distaste.

Finally, she heard a dull bang outside that could have been a car door closing. Then there were rapid footsteps on the verandah and a shadow passing the window. It must be him, the ranger. A loud knock battered the door. He sounded in a hurry.

‘Come in,’ she called.

The door swung open and a young man stood there in the Parks uniform: khaki shirt and trousers with a green jumper. He was stocky with red hair parted in the middle and pale skin dotted with freckles. His hand was tight on the door handle and his face wore the bland lack of interest of a schoolboy. He frowned at her, saying nothing. Mary’s turmoil increased. Obviously, he didn’t want to be here: this was going to be challenging. She reached for her walking stick and heaved herself up, offering her hand. ‘I’m Mary Mason. Come in and take a seat.’

He released the door handle reluctantly and stepped across the room to shake her hand. She returned his grip as vigorously as she could manage, wanting him to think she was sprightly and interesting, even though she was, in truth, a withered scrap of womanhood. In her enthusiasm, she clutched his hand too long. His eye was already set on the door, but she must not let him leave yet.

‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea.’

He recoiled, tugging his hand loose. ‘Sorry. Not today, Mrs Mason. I’m just making a quick visit to check on you.’

‘Yes. Well, I’m still alive.’

‘You don’t need anything?’

‘Nothing beyond a bit of human company.’

‘That’s good to hear.’ He was already backing towards the door. ‘I’ll look in on you tomorrow.’

‘You won’t stay?’

‘I’ve got other jobs to do.’ His hand was on the door handle again.

‘And your name?’ she asked.

‘Leon.’ His reply was a mumble, almost incoherent. ‘Leon Walker.’

‘How about tomorrow then, Leon?’ she suggested. ‘I’ll have the kettle warm.’

Her persistence finally paid off. ‘All right then,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Tomorrow.’

He left before she could say anything more, and she was piqued. Perhaps he was irritated by old people. Perhaps he was determined not to like her. What could she do? She needed to secure his assistance somehow. She decided to walk out over the dunes—likely he’d gone to check the campground, and he’d probably make a quick circuit of the campsites and return. There should just be enough time for her to get out on the beach, and when he came driving back along the sand, he’d think:
There
goes that old lady, Mary Mason. She’s a game one, out here in this
weather.
It would elevate her in his estimation and he would no longer look at her like a bothersome fly around the barbeque.

She shuffled to the bedroom and dug for her coat amid the clothes draped over a chair. Tugging on the coat, she grasped her cane and hurried out the door. There was a fearsome wind outside, laden with salt and blasting through the scrub on the dunes. It was just as well she was wearing trousers. It wouldn’t do to be out in a dress. Pulling up the collar of her coat, she leaned into the wind and stumbled down the hill. Her cough startled a scarlet robin from a fence post, and Mary paused to watch the bird dip away over the grass.

The track descended into sand. She followed Leon’s tyre marks over the crest of the dunes where the wind seemed to accelerate, gushing up from the beach. With effort, she climbed down the dune, sliding in the loose sand. She was beginning to wonder if she was being sensible. But sensible or not, having come this far, she needed to go on. He had to see her out there. He had to engage with her.

On the beach, she turned her back to the wind and made her best show of striding along the sand. It took only ten metres to realise she was fooling herself.
Striding
was not something a seventy-seven year-old woman with heart failure was capable of. If Leon saw her now he’d think she was mad.

She stopped to watch the sea, feeling sogginess in her chest. She should get out of the wind, but being on the beach was so different from the view through the cabin window. East Cloudy Head was a great hummock rearing south. Across the bay, the grey dolerite cliffs rose and stretched in humps along West Cloudy Head, finishing in a series of jagged rocks. The waves were running in from the south-west and the horizon was a steely band, curving to the edge of the earth. A Pacific gull flapped over, craning down at her then lifting away on the wind. Sea spray tingled on her skin and she could feel the bite of brine. This was home—this air, the cold feel of salt on her cheeks. Life came back to her, became real again. She might be on the cusp of death, but she swore she’d go out living instead of mothballed in a hospice.

She turned away from the sea, pleased with herself, done with her display of independence for the day. And there, just as she’d hoped, was Leon’s four-wheel drive coming down the beach, not fifty metres away. A white Toyota. She could see his frown behind the steering wheel—his eyebrows one angry line. He pulled up and leaped out.

‘Are you sure you should be walking in this weather?’ he asked, his voice shredded by a gust of billowing air.

‘I wanted to feel the wind,’ she called back defiantly.

‘No need to come this far to feel it.’ He jammed his hands in his pockets.

‘And isn’t it a fine day,’ she hollered, choking down an impulse to cough. ‘A fine Cloudy Bay day.’

His eyebrows rose, as if questioning her sanity. Perhaps it
was
lunacy to suggest it was a fine day. But this was Bruny Island, and all was just as it should be. He ought to know that.

‘Do you live nearby?’ she asked, leaning on her stick, trying to divert him with friendly conversation.

‘No,’ he said. He kicked at the desiccated carcase of a mutton bird, partly hidden among withered clumps of seaweed, half covered by sand. She heard the fragile skull crack beneath his heavy boot.

‘So, you come over each day on the ferry from Kettering?’

‘Of course not. I live over at Adventure Bay.’

He was being difficult. Adventure Bay was on the east side of South Bruny, perhaps thirty minutes drive away. A string of famous explorers had landed there: Cook, Bligh, Furneaux, D’Entrecasteaux, Baudin, Flinders. It had been a place of shelter— a suitable location for taking on water and wood, and for neutral meetings with the natives. The indigenous people of Bruny Island had amicably accepted the intruders—the explorers who came and then left; the whalers who stayed until all the southern right whales were gone; and then the settlers, who did not leave. But settlement was disastrous for the Aborigines. Some of their women were abused by whalers and sealers, and disease took most of the others, leaving a small group who were removed to Flinders Island. Adventure Bay was quiet these days, in spite of its sad history.

‘Ah. Adventure Bay. A peaceful little place,’ she said. ‘Are you a peaceful soul, Leon?’ His glare told her she’d overstepped the mark. He was standing astride, hands still firmly in his pockets. ‘How was the campground?’ She tried another tack. ‘Anyone camping?’

‘No-one,’ he said. ‘People don’t like being out when it’s windy like this.’ He emphasised
people
to indicate her diversion from the ordinary.

‘
I
like it,’ she said, accepting the face-off.

He frowned again. ‘But if you don’t look after that cough . . .’

She couldn’t be sure, but it almost sounded like a threat. And now the cough was bubbling up again, betraying her. She jerked her cane out of the sand and planted it, ready for her next step. ‘I’d best be heading back,’ she said. ‘Do enjoy the wind.’

She’d struggled several paces across the sand when the hacking began. It’d be hard work getting back to the cabin, but she was too proud to ask for help. She turned away, trying to swallow the cough, almost gagging.

‘Just wait, Mrs Mason,’ Leon called, his voice condescending and impatient, as if he were speaking to a child. ‘I’m not usually a taxi service, but I’ll give you a lift today. You need it.’

She moved to wave him away, but he gave her no space to protest, grasping her elbow strongly and heaving her into the car. A stiff silence settled between them as he drove back to the cabin, bouncing mercilessly over the dunes. He was clearly impatient with her antics and wanted to be done with her for the day.