The Lightkeeper's Wife (12 page)

‘Did you have a nice walk up on the Head the other day?’

He grunted and stuffed a biscuit into his mouth. ‘I didn’t go up there, remember? I had to scrape you off the beach.’

‘Perhaps you should go there more often. It’s a salve for the soul. When it’s windy, you feel like you could fly.’

His eyes flicked away.

‘I suppose it’s still the same up there,’ she continued, trying to draw him out. ‘Those columns of black rock have been there longer than any of us. And they’ll still be there when we’re all gone. I find that reassuring, don’t you?’

He looked bored, but there was the slightest tinge of curiosity in his voice as he said, ‘When did you first come here?’

‘More than fifty years ago. With my husband, Jack, and his family.’

She thought of Jack’s long legs, pressing through the scrub, the square set of his shoulders, his profile gazing out to sea. He’d been an unfolding mystery to her then, as she learned his body and his mind. After they left the farm, he’d become a question she’d never quite found the answer to. Yet she’d made the best of it, as people of her era had been brought up to do.

‘My husband’s dead now,’ she said. ‘But the rocks are still there. The land still watches south . . . When you walk up there, it takes you away from everything, everything that’s ordinary. And that can be comforting.’

Leon was watching her. ‘What were you doing on Bruny?’

‘Jack was a lighthouse-keeper at the cape. We lived there twenty-six years. Before that he grew up near here on the land, back towards Lunawanna.’

‘I know about the lighthouse.’ Leon’s attention was ensnared. ‘I’ve read about it in the history room at Alonnah. How it was built by convicts to prevent shipwrecks. The tower’s thirteen metres high. And it was first lit in 1838. They used to run it on whale oil.’

Mary smiled. She had him captive at last. ‘Not in my time,’ she said. ‘I’m not quite that old.’

‘What was it like living there?’ he asked.

‘You can find out yourself. They rent out one of the keepers’ cottages. You can stay there. See what it feels like.’

He shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t be the same. Not like when you were there.’

She knew now that she had found his weak spot. Her way in. ‘You want me to tell you about it?’ she asked. His nod was small but affirmative. She lifted her cup and sipped, wondering how far she could push him. ‘Why don’t you take me for a drive, then? I’ll feel more like talking if I get out.’

He sat back, impatient. ‘It wasn’t part of the deal, you know. To drive you about.’

‘A person can get housebound.’

He folded his arms. ‘You chose to come here. You knew what it’d be like. I’m a ranger, not a tour guide.’ He glared at her, brows knit low.

‘Just to the end of the beach,’ she suggested, tremulous with anticipation. Cloudy Corner was the first destination on her list.

He hesitated and then made a face. ‘All right. But we’ll have to make it quick.’

Outside, the breeze caught in Mary’s chest and she covered her cough with a hand. Leon took her elbow and guided her to the car. He was stronger than he looked; with him holding her up, it was like walking on air. He pushed her into the vehicle. ‘Do up your seatbelt,’ he growled. ‘I don’t want to be picking you up off the floor.’

Not very tactful, but he was right. She was weak after two days of sitting. Back in Hobart she was always finding things to do, tasks to get her up out of her chair. But here all she did was sit at the window watching the waves run in.

Banging the door shut, he started the vehicle with a roar and they bounced over the dunes onto the beach. He drove in silence, even when they lurched over a dip where a small stream ran into the sea. She reached for the dashboard to steady herself, but he ignored her and remained focused ahead. Near Cloudy Corner he stopped and pointed. ‘Have a look out there, across the bay.’

Bright sunlight was shining yellow on the cliffs. The sea was silvery blue.

‘Magnificent,’ she said.

He swung the car to face the sea just as Jacinta had done that first day, and switched off the engine. The sound of waves was muffled and small gusts of wind were butting against the windows. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘I’m ready.’

She glanced at him, having already forgotten that this trip was linked to a commitment. Then she remembered. She was supposed to tell him about the light station. Perhaps this hadn’t been such a grand idea after all.

‘Did you like it?’ he asked. ‘Being a keeper’s wife? You must have liked it—to stay so long.’

‘It was wonderful at first,’ she said. She was speaking to Leon, but it was like riding towards Jack on a wave of memory. ‘When we came to the cape we’d been gone from the island too long. We both missed it. Both of us. Bruny was always a place of the heart for us.’

Leon watched her closely.

‘Going to the cape was a reunion with freedom,’ she continued. ‘So much space and air. Birds. Seals. Sometimes dolphins. We slotted in there like cows into a dairy.’

‘You weren’t lonely?’

‘Not to start with. There was so much to do. Jack was busy with work. And I was busy setting up the house. Cows to milk, briquettes to lug, baking and cooking, washing. We had visitors sometimes, but the roads were rough. We were very isolated.’

The lightkeepers’ schedule was busy. Night work and then cleaning during the day. A sheep to butcher. Another coat of paint on the lighthouse. Weather observations. Time off was reserved for a day on the weekend. This had been their time to learn the cape, her and Jack and the children. She thought of the special nook they had discovered, a cove which was reached by scrambling down a steep slope. They’d perch and picnic there on black slabs of broken rock. It was calm and quiet, out of the wind, a sheltered place where they could gaze across the channel to the dimpled folds of Recherche Bay. Often a pod of dolphins would be playing offshore, curling and curving through the waves. Jan and Gary would paddle in the cold shallows, or stand tossing rocks into the water with showery splashes. Afterwards, she and Jack would piggyback the children up the narrow gully, scrabbling in the gravel. When they arrived home, they felt washed clean by tranquillity, smoothed like pebbles rolling in the sea.

She recalled how intimacy had returned for them in those first few months at the lighthouse. When Jack wasn’t too ragged from lack of sleep or the cry of the wind, they clutched each other in the whispering dark, finding solace and release in each other’s bodies. It had been a time for remembering how to love. Yes, it had been good, for a while.

‘How did you get food?’ Leon asked, prodding her back to the present.

‘We had a delivery every month,’ she said. ‘It came by truck off the ferry from North Bruny. When we moved to the cape, the road from Lunawanna to the lighthouse had just been constructed, so the delivery of supplies was much simpler. Before that the lighthouse vessel,
Cape York
, used to take stores to Jetty Beach and then they had to be transferred to the keepers’ cottages. We had it comparatively easy, although we still welcomed the appearance of the truck.’ She remembered the old Ford grinding across the heath, horn blaring with the news of its arrival. ‘Unpacking was a family affair,’ she said. ‘Jack hefted boxes and we sorted them onto shelves in the storeroom. My daughter Jan liked to do a bucket brigade—passing tins along to Gary and then to me. The sacks of flour were too heavy for the children, so that was my job. We ate simply, stews and dumplings, salted meat, canned vegetables.’

‘What about fresh stuff?’ Leon asked. ‘Surely you had a vegie garden?’

‘Not a successful one,’ Mary admitted. She had dug herself to exhaustion in that sifting sandy soil, and any moisture she’d added had run away. ‘There was plenty of rain, but too much salt. Everything withered.’ Just like Jack, she thought. ‘The island was good to us,’ she said, picking up a more hopeful memory. ‘People sent us anything in season: apples, apricots, cabbages, peas. But gifts like those were irregular and mostly we had to manage with the stores. Food wasn’t the highlight of our existence. Having the cow meant we had plenty of butter, cream and milk. And when Gary caught something edible, we had fresh fish. Our luxury was a roast when one of the sheep was killed.’

‘How many visitors did you have?’

‘Very few.’

‘Not even with the new road?’

‘No. People were preoccupied with their own lives. It was busiest during mutton-bird season, but that all stopped when mutton-birding was banned.’

‘And you definitely weren’t lonely?’ Leon seem fixed on this.

‘It was harder when the children got older,’ she said. ‘They were looking for other company by then. Eventually, we sent them to boarding school.’

‘What about you?’

Mary hadn’t often thought about herself. ‘I managed well enough most of the time,’ she said. And yet there had been times when the solitude was difficult. She’d tried to befriend the other keeper’s wife. However, there was a social hierarchy even out there. Help had been forthcoming in emergencies, but the head keeper’s wife didn’t seek her out. She and her husband didn’t have children, and perhaps Jan and Gary were too wild and noisy.

‘And the weather?’ Leon asked.

Yes, the weather. It had shaped everything they did. ‘On bad days, we were stuck indoors,’ she said. ‘Sometimes the wind was so strong, you couldn’t stand up in it. Only the men ventured out. Anyone else would be blown off the cape. Even the birds were cautious. But on still days, it was heaven on earth. Perfect beyond perfection.’ She remembered the sun kissing the land. The light licking the ocean. The mainland, visible and purplish to the west. Nothing could be better.

‘Was it worth it?’ Leon asked, fetching her back again. ‘Was it a happy place?’

She looked at him and hesitated. Could she really say she’d been happy there over the years? It had been nirvana until things had begun to dissolve. But had that place given her lasting joy? Or had she just coped within a framework she’d come to know and understand, working with whatever fragments she and Jack had been able to give each other?

‘I was content,’ she said. And this was the best she could do. What was happiness, after all? And how many people could say they’d had it?

Drained, she stared seawards and saw herself in the foam as it shattered over the rocks. She hoped Leon would recognise her need for rest. And he did. He started the four-wheel drive and drove up the track to the campground, steering slowly around the loop, past shady campsites nestled beneath stunted coastal stringybarks.

He stopped at a campsite and helped her out. She was stiff and slow, a bit wobbly. He dragged a sawn-off stump into a triangle of light beneath the shifting branches of the trees and left her sitting beside the remains of an old campfire while he picked up his bag of toilet rolls and walked across to the long-drop toilets. The door banged as he went in and then banged again as he came out. He wandered around the campground, keeping his distance from her.

Mary didn’t mind being left alone. It was such a long time since she had camped at Cloudy Corner. She used to come here with the Masons on family outings; they would drive the old truck to the end of the road and then trundle along the sand to the end of the beach. They’d light a campfire under the trees and make tea while she and Jack walked up onto the headland.

The first time she and Jack came here alone was their honeymoon. They’d arrived on an overcast day with brooding skies, having walked from the farm with makeshift packs and panted to the end of the road where the land fell away onto the long flat run of the beach. On the rise overlooking the arc of sand, they’d stopped together, feeling the slow breeze stirring as they inhaled the tang of salt. Mary had been wet with sweat beneath heavy clothes, and was ready to stop, but Jack wanted to walk to the end of the beach. She remembered the joy of this place—she and Jack alone beneath the skies, the glow of light on the water, the late flush of yellow on East Cloudy Head.

At Cloudy Corner, Jack had shouldered through the scrub and she’d followed him into the hushed dark beneath the trees. She’d been keen to sleep on the beach under the spray of stars, but Jack was worried the wind would come up; he thought they’d be more comfortable under the trees. They made camp among the scrub, their bed a piece of canvas on the ground covered by woollen blankets. Then they stripped off and dived and splashed through the freezing waves, chasing each other, stopping to kiss, their skin alive with goosebumps.

Afterwards, they scrubbed themselves dry with a rough towel, prickling with cold, and layered on clothes before wandering along the sand, fossicking for treasures. They picked their way around the base of the headland to a string of rocks where cormorants perched with wings spread wide, trying to dry off in the brisk wind. Further around, they scrunched through mats of pig-face pockmarked by mutton-bird burrows. They found a place to sit on a rock platform above the black sea. Mary sat between Jack’s legs so he could wrap himself around her, and she leaned against him, high on freedom and love.

For dinner, they ate chunks of bread smothered with slabs of melted cheese, and preserved apricots for dessert. She remembered the light of the flames flickering on Jack’s face as he fed sticks into the fire. And the shiver of breeze that flowed up from the beach, rustling the leaves. She could still see Jack squatting by the flames, his legs thin and wiry, his shoulders boxy and broad. His face narrow. His jaw angled, rough with stubble.