The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,6

flushed, high on memory.

‘Please, Nana. The wind is freezing.’

Jacinta helped her back in and they drove slowly along the sand, windows down so Mary could feel the air. The beach slid smoothly beneath the wheels of the four-wheel drive.

‘Can you take me right down to the end?’ Mary asked. ‘I want to show you Cloudy Corner. There’s a campground just short of the headland. You and Alex might like to camp there sometime.’

When she’d first come to this part of the island—on a camping trip with Jack’s family—there was nobody else around. It was wilderness. They’d camped in the bush. At night they sat on the beach in the dark feeling the waves come in, soothed by the rhythm. And that view south; the arc of the bay, the dramatic cliffs etched with shadows.

‘Does Alex like to camp?’ she asked Jacinta, dragging herself back to the present.

Jacinta sighed. ‘He does. But we don’t seem to fit it in very often. Life’s so busy.’

‘You should bring him here. It might help you slow down. Give you some time for making decisions.’

‘Yes. We need to get out of Hobart more. It hems you in, doesn’t it? City life. Even in a small city. It’s been months since we got away.’

Mary wanted to tell her that it was important to remember how to live. The young thought life was forever. And then, there you were, on the brink of decline, regretting time not used well. Yet if you lived with that knowledge of time passing—driven by intensity—perhaps meaning would evade you in your very quest to find it. Perhaps it was all right to live as Mary had done, letting life’s tide drop experiences in her lap. She’d made the best she could of everything that had washed up over the decades.

‘Thank you for coming here with me,’ Mary said.

Jacinta smiled at her. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’

At the far end of the beach, Jacinta faced the car to the water and they sat quietly absorbing the atmosphere; the gush of the waves riding in, the buffeting of the wind at the windows, the scrub shifting and sighing behind them.

‘I was five when you first brought me here,’ Jacinta said, staring out over the rocks of Cloudy Reef where cormorants sat in a cluster, drying their wings. ‘I thought this must be the end of the earth. You told me that if I sailed directly south for seven days I’d come to the ice. The edge of the land of penguins. That was magic for me.’

‘Just like Tom.’ Mary knew about the draw of Antarctica. She’d almost lost her younger son to its mysterious magnetism.

‘Do you think he’ll go back?’ Jacinta asked.

Mary shook her head. ‘I think he dreams of it. But he lost so much last time. I don’t think he could go through that again.’

‘Perhaps it’d be different if he went now.’

‘And maybe not.’

‘Poor Tom.’

Yes. Poor Tom. He still bore the wounds of his time south.

‘Mum doesn’t come here anymore, does she?’ Jacinta said, looking out to the constant rush of waves. ‘I’ve never understood it.’

‘Maybe you can spend too much time in a place like this.’

‘You don’t feel that way, do you?’

‘No. I miss it every day. But I’m not your mother. Not everyone feels at home in the wind.’

‘It suited you and Grandpa,’ Jacinta said. Then she laughed. ‘Mum says you two were a good match.’

Mary hesitated. ‘Your grandfather and I . . . complemented each other.’ She thought of Jack’s silences, and of her own fortitude. No-one else could have survived those years at the lighthouse with him.

‘I didn’t know Grandpa very well,’ Jacinta said.

‘He was a hard man to know.’

‘Why was that?’

‘He was probably born that way. His childhood wasn’t easy. He worked hard on the farm from a young age. I suppose the lighthouse didn’t help.’

‘I thought he loved it.’

‘Yes, but you can lose yourself in all that space and time.’

Mary often wondered what would have happened if she’d realised this earlier. Maybe she could have done more to help him. Perhaps she could have pulled him back. Stopped the drift. Softened his moods. But that would have required her to be a different person; someone without housewifely duties and children and their lessons. She had done all she could at the time: cooked his favourite meals, kept him warm, deflected the children from his impatience, massaged those poor arthritic fingers, so gnarled and wooden. But the wind was insidious. It had worn him down the