The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,29

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