The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,5

among the waving grasses.

The road along the isthmus had only been open a few years when she first visited this place with Jack—before that people used to drive on the channel-side sand at low tide. She and Jack sat holding hands on the vast wild ocean beach, watching slick black penguins waddling ashore, moonlight glinting white on their plump bellies. The colony would be empty now. The last fat mutton-bird chicks would have left in late April, labouring on their migration to Siberia.

As the car whizzed low along the narrow passage of the Neck, Mary leaned back and closed her eyes, remembering the climb up the hill. Long ago, the walkway was just a rough track along the ridge. She used to puff her way up there with Jack and the children to marvel at the view—that wide expanse of sky and coast spreading south-east along the isthmus to Adventure Bay and Fluted Cape. There was the hummocky mass of South Bruny, the long lines of breaking surf clawing the beach. To the west, the silhouettes of black swans drifting on the channel. She could remember the heat of the climb. The delicious bite of the wind. The rain sheeting across South Bruny.

Now, the walkway claimed the ridge for tourists. The island had become a destination. And the word isolation no longer applied here. Bruny was still the place Mary loved, but it wasn’t the same. She had to accept that. Change was the future. She smiled to herself. They called it progress. But she knew better. The island was her past. Her life with Jack. Her everything.

2

When the car mounted the rise over the dunes and the silver waters of Cloudy Bay spread out before her, Mary felt a sigh rise from deep within. The great flat stretch of yellow sand was just as it had always been. Quiet. Moody. The epitome of solitude. This place marked her beginnings with Jack. The two of them young and unscathed. They had grown wild in the wild air. Jack still lingered here with the sea mist; she could feel him. He was waiting for her.

As they drove down past the landlocked lagoon onto the sand, a white-faced heron startled from the shore, trailing gangly legs as it lifted into lilting flight. Pacific gulls rose chortling into the air. On the beach, Jacinta stopped the car, and Mary soaked up the ambience.

She opened the door and Jacinta helped her out. Then she patted her granddaughter’s arm and Jacinta stepped away, leaving her to shuffle down the beach on her own. At the high edge of the tide, she bent stiffly to take a handful of sand. It was fine and grey, slightly muddy. Kneading the soggy graininess of it in her palm, she gazed into the distance where the beach arced east to the far headland: Cloudy Corner and East Cloudy Head.

Down by the water, the Pacific gulls had gathered again in loose flocks, facing seawards. Mary knew that if she could run and scare them, they’d lift as a unit into the air and then congregate once more further along the beach. They needed each other’s company to stare so steadfastly south in this lonely light. Everything here was dense with latitude. If you headed south from this beach, there was nothing until Antarctica.

‘Nana, let’s get out of the wind. I don’t want you to get cold.’ Jacinta came up behind her, taking her hand.

Mary pulled gently away. ‘I’ll be all right. I’d like to walk a little more.’

She wandered slowly east, focusing on the distant dark shadow of East Cloudy Head where it humped against the sky. She used to go up there with Jack, pressing through the untracked scrub, scratching herself on bushes. They used to forge a route up towards the southern aspect of the head so they could climb nearer to the sky. They’d stand there, close and exhilarated, with the sea pounding over the rocks below, and the Southern Ocean all around, stretching east, south, west.

She paused to draw breath, taking in the cold stiff air. The hint of seaweed. The thick scent of salt. This place renewed her. It was life itself. She smiled and closed her eyes against the chill. She was right to come here.

‘Nana. Please hop in. It’s cold.’

The car pulled up beside her, and Mary realised she’d forgotten her granddaughter. There was so much within and around her that was not of this time. She glanced into the car, her features