The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,37
had taken her years to understand how words could become lost if they weren’t spoken. And then it was too late to retrieve them. When she began to comprehend the barrier in her relationship with Jack, the thread of contact was already broken. The wind had carried it away, and all that remained was empty air.
Their lives at the cape were dominated by the lighthouse. It was there on the hill each time she looked out the kitchen window. Its rotating beam punctuated the night. And Jack’s alarm woke them each morning at four so he could do the weather observations and then be ready to extinguish the light at dawn. The two keepers were busy: reporting the weather six times a day, servicing and fuelling the generators, washing the lighthouse windows, cleaning the lenses and prisms, painting the tower, maintaining fences and slashing the grass.
While Jack was occupied with keeping the light, Mary maintained the family. She kneaded dough, baked cakes, prepared the evening meal. As she worked, the children did their lessons, bent over books and pencils and little piles of shavings. Outside, she milked the cow twice a day, hung out the washing, cared for the chickens and the pony. In the evenings, she sewed clothes and knitted jumpers and socks. She made butter and cheese, and tended the miserable vegie patch, trying to coax the wilting plants to grow. Always, in the background, the kettle sizzled on the stove, ready for Jack when he came in looking for a cup of tea and some food.
As time wound around them at the lighthouse, the wind had started eating at Jack. It mottled him slowly, grinding him down. His hands, already stiff from working in rain and cold at the farm, began to warp. And there was no escaping the wind in that southern reach of land. At first, it made Jack restless. He came home each night with an edginess that could not be relieved by sleep. Then his mood progressed to grumpiness. Mary had to deflect the children from him, diverting them into their rooms, into books, into games, anything to give him quiet and rest.
On days off, the family retreated to their favourite cove where there was stillness beyond the lash of the wind. Jack sagged in the quiet; something invisible lifted from him, and if they stayed there long enough, there would be small flashes of warmth and engagement. But those moments were brief and increasingly feeble. Distance diffused into their relationship, its invasion so insidious that it spread wide and long before Mary realised what was happening. Somehow, they had evolved into different people, and a bridge had to be remade—a task Mary couldn’t tackle alone.
At night, she lay in bed, listening to Jack’s breathing. Sometimes she reached for him—darkness gave sufficient anonymity to ignore the rift—and they’d take each other raggedly, desperately, trying to clutch onto something they both needed but couldn’t ask for. In the grip of each other’s bodies, they held on in silence and pretended the chasm between them didn’t exist. Then he lost his interest in sex, complaining about his arthritis. She worked to ease his load, busying herself with extra jobs to protect him from labour around the house. If she could just help him a little bit more, she thought, his impatience might soften. He might remember to embrace the children. He might lift his eyes for long enough to see her.
Love-making was the final thread that held them together. But when the wind blew even that away, they were left with nothing but a vast expanse of mist and air, both of them lost in fog.
They should have found a way back to each other in all that time and sky and wilderness. They ought to have found reconnections in a place they both loved. But the only element of Cape Bruny that penetrated their relationship was space—that great expanse of it stretching all around. Eventually, she stopped reaching across the bed for Jack, and he slept facing away. Instead of trying to pull him back, she turned to the children, and allowed Jack to retreat into his silences and his solitude.
It had been easy to lose herself in daily activities. She’d used them as a prop to carry her through. Built routine around her like a fortress. The tasks became the purpose, and everything else became obscured beneath the rigid pattern of life: a structured string of days adding up to a year, and