The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,34

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