wouldn’t give the boy a home and be glad to do it. But Beth and Morag were sisters. They were very close. You don’t mess with closeness like that.’ It was said with such flat simplicity that there was no argument.
He tried to take it all in. He tried. ‘This island’s one big family.’
‘It is,’ May told him, and attempted a faltering smile. ‘In a while…in a little while, when everyone who can be saved has been saved, then this church will be cleared and the funerals will start. When my Morag died, when Beth died, when Beth’s husband David was drowned…every single islander was here to bid them farewell. It’ll be no different this time. As long…’ She faltered and then attempted to recover. She didn’t quite make it. ‘As long as they find Hamish,’ she whispered. ‘If he’s drowned… They must find his body. They can bury him next to my Morag. I…’
But the thought of the loss of her grandson was suddenly overwhelming. She put a hand to her face and turned away. ‘Enough. If there’s any news, let me know. I’ll be up at the tent place that everyone’s calling home. Thank you for tending my hand.’ She hugged the plaque again. ‘And thank you for finding my…for finding my Morag. If I can’t find Hamish…’ She faltered again and closed her eyes, but when she opened them there was a calmness there. A strength. Generations of tragedy had touched this woman and would touch her further, but she was here, here with her people, and life would go on.
‘Take care of your Morag,’ she whispered. ‘She needs it most.’
Doug was waiting in the background with more of his damned facts.
‘It’s impossible,’ he said. ‘There’s no infrastructure. We’d have to pull in really top people from Sydney. This needs an engineer who really knows what he’s doing to supervise, huge manpower to pull it off, tradesmen of all descriptions… Then there’s the medical side. We have a situation where the entire island’s been traumatised, including the local doctor. She’s a single mum. She can’t cope with this long term. The money…the commitment…’
‘The islanders won’t leave.’
‘They won’t have a choice,’ Doug said bluntly. ‘It’s either abandon the island or be cut off from all services. You’ll never get political support for the sort of funding this place needs. And you’ll never get the personnel.’
He should go back to the medical centre. There was still an hour or so before dusk and Jaqui might need him. But Grady’s radio was on his belt and he knew he could be contacted, so he found himself picking his way through the debris until he came to the promontory where the lighthouse stood.
Morag was there. As he’d hoped. He rounded the cliffs that separated the promontory from the township and he saw her, standing at the foot of the lighthouse, staring up at the whitewashed tower.
David and Goliath.
That was what she looked like, he thought. A tiny figure, facing immeasurable odds.
He called and she turned, but she didn’t smile. She simply watched as he made his way down the cobbled walkway that reached out to where the lighthouse tipped the promontory.
‘I hoped I might find you here,’ he said, but there still wasn’t a smile.
‘I need to put out some food for Oscar.’
Oscar. Of course. Sam’s cat.
‘He comes here?’
‘He likes here,’ Morag told him. ‘Oscar’s the most independent cat we know. He lives on Sam’s boat but for some reason he thinks this is his territory, so he visits us each night.’
‘Maybe he likes you,’ Grady said gently, but he still didn’t get a smile.
‘Maybe.’
‘You’re exhausted.’
She nodded. ‘And…defeated. So much death.’
‘You need to go back to Robbie.’
‘I just phoned him. He’s OK. He understands. I just wish…I just wish he didn’t have to.’
‘Let me help you here and I’ll walk you up to Hubert’s’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘It doesn’t help,’ she whispered. ‘If I learn to lean on you.’
There was nothing to say to that. He watched as she scooped a can of cat food out into a crevice beside the lighthouse walkway, out of sight of watchful seagulls but certainly in smelling distance of the tomcat if he cruised past later in the night.
She straightened and looked at him as if she couldn’t quite figure out why he was there. ‘I need to check the light,’ she told him, and it was a dismissal.
‘I want to see.’
‘Grady-’
‘I know.’ He held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘I’m not helping. But I’m curious. I’ve never been in a lighthouse before.’
‘It’s not as good as it used to be.’
‘Why not?’
She hesitated then shrugged, as if she didn’t have the energy to tell him to get lost. Though her shrug said she’d certainly like to. ‘The light used to be fantastic,’ she told him. ‘It was a huge Fresnel lens that once filled the lantern room.’
‘Tell me about it.’ More than anything, he ached to take that look of utter defeat from her face. He could think of no way to deflect her. But she must love this lighthouse.
And it seemed that she did.
‘It was vast,’ she told him. ‘Wonderful. It had about a thousand individual glass prisms mounted in brass. It stood almost twenty feet tall and six feet wide, and was large enough for a man to stand inside. But now… Now we have a small green DCB-24 Aerobeacon. It’s about a hundredth of the size, even though it can still be seen for almost eighteen miles.’
‘Can we go up?’
‘I guess…I guess we can,’ she told him. ‘At least, I can. I usually go up and check the light every couple of days. The globes change automatically-it’s fully automated-but things still go wrong. Once I went up and a sea eagle had somehow smashed through the glass and was beating itself to death trying to get out again. I managed to get it out-amazingly it flew off and even looked like it might survive-but it had damaged the beacon.’
‘You coped with a sea eagle alone?’ he asked, stunned, and she looked at him as if he was stupid.
‘Of course I did. What else was I to do?’
Scream and run? he thought. Call for Air-Sea Rescue?
That’d be him.
Call for him?
‘I can go up now because the lamp’s not burning,’ she told him. ‘After dusk you’ll blind yourself.’
‘I’d like to come.’
She gave him a dubious look. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be busy writing down all the reasons why the island should be declared uninhabitable?’
‘Morag…’
‘It’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?’
And there was no answer but the truth. ‘Yes.’
‘Creep!’
‘Don’t shoot the messenger,’ he said mildly, and got an angry glare for his pains.
‘If people would support us-if the politicians realised how wonderful this place is…’
‘You’re too far from the mainland. Even the lighthouse doesn’t need maintenance any more. It’s been through a tidal wave without a blink.’
‘Go jump, Grady.’
‘Show me your lighthouse,’ he told her. ‘Please.’
‘Fine,’ she snapped. ‘And then will you get out of my life?’ She stomped forward and walked up the three huge stone steps to the lighthouse door, produced a key that was almost as big as her hand-and then paused. Instead of
