The Light Between Oceans

by M. L. Stedman

  CHAPTER 13

  It’s coming up for a year soon,” said Isabel. “The twenty-seventh of April’s her birthday, near enough.”

  Tom was in the workshop, filing away rust from a bent door hinge. He put down the rasp. “I wonder—you know, what her real birthday is.”

  “The day she arrived is good enough for me.” Isabel kissed the child, who was sitting astride her hip, gnawing on a crust.

  Lucy reached out her arms to Tom.

  “Sorry, littlie. My hands are filthy. You’re better off with Mamma just now.”

  “I can’t believe how much she’s grown. She weighs a ton these days.” Isabel laughed, and gave Lucy a heave to settle her higher on her hip. “I’m going to make a birthday cake.” The child responded by dipping her head into Isabel’s chest and dribbling bits of bread onto her. “That tooth’s giving you trouble, isn’t it, sweetie? Your cheeks are so red. Shall we put some teething powder on it?” Turning to Tom, she said, “See you in a while, darl. I’d better get back. Soup’s still on the stove,” and left for the cottage.

  The steely light pierced the window and scoured Tom’s workbench. He had to hammer the metal straight, and each blow rang sharply off the walls. Though he found himself striking with more force than was necessary, he couldn’t stop. There was no getting away from the feeling stirred up by talk of birthdays and anniversaries. He set to work with the hammer again, the blows no less heavy, until the metal snapped from the force. He picked up the shattered halves and stared at them.

  Tom looked up from the armchair. A few weeks had passed since the baby’s birthday celebration.

  “It doesn’t matter what you read to her,” said Isabel. “It’s just good for her to get used to hearing different words.” She deposited Lucy on his lap and went to finish making the bread.

  “Dadadadad,” said the child.

  “Bubububub,” said Tom. “So. You want a story?” The little hand reached out, but instead of pointing to the heavy book of fairy tales on the table beside them, grabbed a beige booklet, and pushed it at him. He laughed. “I don’t think you’ll like that one much, bunny rabbit. No pictures in it, for a start.” He reached for the fairy tales, but Lucy thrust the booklet in his face. “Dadadadad.”

  “If that’s the one you want, littlie!” He laughed again. The child opened it at a page, and pointed at the words, like she had seen Tom and Isabel do. “All right,” began Tom. “Instructions to Lightkeepers. Number twenty-nine: ‘The Lightkeepers are never to allow any interests, private or otherwise, to interfere with discharge of their duties, which are of the greatest importance to the safety of navigation; and they are reminded that their retention or promotion in the Service depends upon their strict obedience to orders, adherence to the rules laid down for their guidance, industry, sobriety, and the maintenance of cleanliness and good order in their own persons and families as well as in every part of the Lighthouse establishment and premises.’ Number thirty: ‘Misconduct, disposition to quarrel, insobriety or immorality on the part of any keeper’”—he paused to retrieve Lucy’s fingers from his nostrils— “‘will render the offender liable to punishment or dismissal. The committing of any such offense by any member of the Lightkeeper’s family will render the offender liable to exclusion from the Lighthouse station.’” He stopped. A chill had crept though him, and his heart beat faster. He was summoned back to the present by a tiny hand coming to rest on his chin. He pressed it to his lips, absently. Lucy grinned at him and gave him a generous kiss.

  “Come on, let’s read Sleeping Beauty instead,” he said, and took up the fairy tales, though he found it hard to concentrate.

  “Here you are—tea and toast in bed, ladies!” said Tom, resting the tray beside Isabel.

  “Careful, Luce,” said Isabel. She had brought the toddler into bed that Sunday after Tom had gone to extinguish the light, and the child was clambering toward the tray to reach the small cup of tea Tom had made her too—hardly more than warm milk with a drop of color.

  Tom sat beside Isabel and pulled Lucy onto his knee. “Here we go, Lulu,” he said, and helped her steady the cup in both hands as she drank. He was concentrating on his task, until he became aware of Isabel’s silence, and turned to see tears in her eyes.

  “Izzy, Izzy, what’s wrong, darl?”

  “Nothing at all, Tom. Nothing at all.”

  He brushed a tear away from her cheek.

  “Sometimes I’m so happy it frightens me, Tom.”

  He stroked her hair, and Lucy started to blow bubbles into the tea. “Listen, Miss Muffet, you going to drink that, or have you had enough for the minute?”

  The child continued to slobber into the cup, clearly pleased with the sounds.

  “OK, I think we’ll give it a rest for now.” He eased the cup away from her, and she responded by climbing off him and onto Isabel, still blowing bubbles of spittle.

  “Charming!” said Isabel, laughing through her tears. “Come here, you little monkey!” and she blew a raspberry on her tummy. Lucy giggled and squirmed and said, “’Gain! ’Gain!” and Isabel obliged.

  “You two are as bad as each other!” said Tom.

  “Sometimes I feel a bit drunk with how much I love her. And you. Like if they asked me to walk one of those straight lines I couldn’t.”

  “No straight lines on Janus, so you’re all right on that score,” said Tom.

  “Don’t mock, Tom. It’s like I was color-blind before Lucy, and now the world’s completely different. It’s brighter and I can see further. I’m in exactly the same place, the birds are the same, the water’s the same, the sun rises and sets just like it always did, but I never knew what for, Tom.” She drew the child into her. “Lucy’s the what for… And you’re different too.”

  “How?”

  “I think there are bits of you you didn’t know existed until she came along. Corners of your heart that life had shut down.” She traced a finger along his mouth. “I know you don’t like to talk about the war and everything, but—well, it must have made you numb.”

  “My feet. Made my feet numb more often than not—frozen mud’ll do that to a bloke.” Tom could manage only half a smile at the attempted joke.

  “Stop it, Tom. I’m trying to say something. I’m being serious, for goodness’ sake, and you just send me packing with some silly joke, like I’m a child who doesn’t understand or can’t be trusted with the truth.”

  This time Tom was deadly serious. “You don’t understand, Isabel. No civilized person should ever have to understand. And trying to describe it would be like passing on a disease.” He turned toward the window. “I did what I did so that people like you and Lucy could forget it ever happened. So that it would never happen again. ‘The war to end all wars,’ remember? It doesn’t belong here, on this island. In this bed.”

  Tom’s features had hardened, and she glimpsed a resolve she’d never seen in him before—the resolve, she imagined, that had got him through everything he’d had to endure.

  “It’s just…” Isabel began again, “well, we none of us know whether we’re around for another year or another hundred years. And I wanted to make sure you knew how thankful I am to you, Tom. For everything. Especially for giving me Lucy.”

  Tom’s smile froze at the last words, and Isabel hurried on. “You did, darl. You understood how much I needed her, and I know that cost you, Tom. Not many men would do that for their wife.”

  Jolted back from some dream world, Tom could feel his palms sweating. His heart started to race with the urge to run—anywhere, it didn’t matter where, just as long as it was away from the reality of the choice he had made, which suddenly seemed to weigh like an iron collar.

  “Time I was getting on with some work. I’ll leave you two to have your toast,” he said, and left the room as slowly as he could manage.

  CHAPTER 14

  When Tom’s second three-year term came to an end just before Christmas 1927, the family from Janus Rock made its first journey to Point
Partageuse while a relief keeper manned the light station. The couple’s second shore leave, it would be Lucy’s first voyage to the mainland. As Isabel had prepared for the arrival of the boat, she had toyed with finding an excuse to stay behind with the little girl in the safety of Janus.

  “You OK, Izz?” Tom had asked when he saw her, suitcase open on the bed, staring blankly through the window.

  “Oh. Yes,” she said quickly. “Just making sure I’ve packed everything.”

  He was about to leave the room, when he doubled back and put his hand on her shoulder. “Nervous?”

  She snatched up a pair of socks and rolled them together in a ball. “No, not at all,” she said as she stuffed them in the case. “Not at all.”

  The unease Isabel had tried to hide from Tom vanished at the sight of Lucy in Violet’s arms, when her parents came to greet them at the jetty. Her mother wept and smiled and laughed all at the same time. “At last!” She shook her head in awe, inspecting every inch of the child, touching her face, her hair, her little hand. “My blessed granddaughter. Fancy waiting nearly two years to lay eyes on you! And isn’t she just the image of my old Auntie Clem?”

  Isabel had spent months preparing Lucy for exposure to people. “In Partageuse, Luce, there are lots and lots of people. And they’ll all like you. It might be a bit strange at first, but there’s no need to be scared.” At bedtimes, she had told the girl stories of the town, and the people who lived in it.

  Lucy responded with great curiosity to the endless supply of humans that now surrounded her. Isabel felt a twinge as she accepted the warm congratulations of townspeople on her pretty daughter. Even old Mrs. Mewett tickled the little girl under the chin when she saw her in the haberdasher’s as she was buying a hairnet. “Ah, little ones,” she said wistfully. “Such blessings,” leaving Isabel to wonder whether she was hearing things.

  Almost as soon as they arrived, Violet packed the whole family off to Gutcher’s photographic studio. In front of a canvas backdrop painted with ferns and Greek columns, Lucy had been photographed with Tom and Isabel; with Bill and Violet; and on her own, perched on a grand wicker chair. Copies were ordered to take back to Janus, to send to cousins far afield, to have framed for the mantelpiece and the piano. “Three generations of Graysmark women,” beamed Violet when she saw herself, with Lucy on her knee, sitting beside Isabel.

  Lucy had grandparents who doted on her. God doesn’t make mistakes, thought Isabel. He had sent the little girl to the right place.

  “Oh, Bill,” Violet had said to her husband the evening the family arrived. “Thank goodness. Thank goodness…”

  Violet had last seen her daughter three years before, still grieving at her second miscarriage, on the couple’s first shore leave. Then, Isabel had sat with her head on her mother’s lap, weeping.

  “It’s just nature’s way,” Violet had said. “You have to take a breath, and get up again. Children will come along, if that’s what God wants for you: just be patient. And pray. The praying’s the most important thing.”

  She did not tell Isabel the whole truth of it, though. She did not say how often she had seen a child carried to term over the draining, withering summer or the whip-sharp winter, only to be lost to scarlet fever or diphtheria, their clothes folded away neatly until they might fit the next one down. Nor did she touch on the awkwardness of replying to a casual inquiry as to the number of children one had. A successful delivery was merely the first step of a long, treacherous journey. In this house, which had fallen silent years ago, Violet knew that only too well.

  Reliable, dutiful Violet Graysmark, respectable wife of a respectable husband. She kept the moths out of the cupboards, the weeds out of the flowerbeds. She deadheaded the roses to persuade them into blooming even in August. Her lemon curd always sold out first at the church fête, and it was her fruitcake recipe which had been chosen for the local CWA booklet. True, she thanked God every night for her many blessings. But some afternoons, as the sunset turned the garden from green to a dull dun while she peeled potatoes over the sink, there just wasn’t enough room in her heart to hold all the sadness. As Isabel had cried during that previous visit, Violet had wanted to wail with her, to tear her hair and tell her she knew the grief of losing the firstborn: how nothing—no person, no money, no thing that this earth could offer—could ever make up for that, and that the pain would never, never go away. She wanted to tell her how it made you mad, made you bargain with God about what offering you could sacrifice to get your child back.

  When Isabel had been safely asleep and Bill was dozing beside the last of the fire, Violet went to her wardrobe and fetched down the old biscuit tin. She fished around inside it, moving aside the few pennies, a small mirror, a watch, a wallet, until she came to the envelope frayed at the edges now from years of opening. She sat on the bed, and by the yellow light of the lamp, set to reading the clumsy script, though she knew the words by heart.

  Dear Mrs. Graysmark,

  I hope you will forgive me writing to you: you don’t know me. My name is Betsy Parmenter and I live in Kent.

  Two weeks ago I was visiting my son Fred, who was sent back from the front on account of bad shrapnel wounds. He was in the 1st Southern General hospital in Stourbridge, and I have a sister who lives nearby, so I was able to visit him every day.

  Well I am writing because one afternoon they brought in a wounded Australian soldier who I understand was your son Hugh. He was in a bad way, on account as you will know of being blinded and lost an arm. He could still manage some words though, and spoke very fondly of his family and his home in Australia. He was a very brave lad. I saw him each day, and at one stage there was high hopes that he would recover, but then it seems he developed blood poisoning, and he went downhill.

  I just wanted you to know that I brought him flowers (the early tulips were just blooming and they’re such lovely things) and some cigarettes. I think my Fred and him got along well. He even ate some fruitcake I brought in one day which was very pleasing to see and it seemed to give him pleasure. I was there the morning when he went downhill, and we all three said the Lord’s Prayer and we sang “Abide With Me.” The doctors eased his pain as best they could, and I think he did not suffer too much at the end. There was a vicar came and blessed him.

  I would like to say how much we all appreciate the great sacrifice that your brave son made. He mentioned his brother, Alfie, and I pray that he comes back to you safe and sound.

  I am sorry for the delay in writing this to you, only my Fred passed away a week after your boy and it has taken a lot of doing things as you can imagine.

  With very best wishes and prayers,

  (Mrs.) Betsy Parmenter

  Hugh would only have known tulips from picture books, Violet thought, and it comforted her that he had perhaps touched one and felt its shape. She wondered whether tulips had a scent.

  She recalled how the postman had looked grave and almost guilty a couple of weeks later as he handed her the parcel: brown paper tied with string, addressed to Bill. She was so upset that she did not even read the printing on the form: she did not need to. Many a woman had received the meager collection of things which constituted her son’s life.

  The receipt form from Melbourne read:

  Dear Sir,

  Forwarded herewith, per separate registered post, is one package containing the effects of the late No. 4497 Pte Graysmark, 28th Bn. received ex “Themistocles” as per inventory attached.

  I shall be much obliged if you would kindly let me know whether it comes safely to hand, by signing and returning the enclosed printed receipt slip.

  Yours faithfully

  J. M. Johnson, Major,

  Officer in Charge, Base Records.

  On a separate slip of paper from “The Kit Store, 110 Greyhound Road, Fulham, London SW” was the inventory of the effects. Violet was struck by something as she read the list: shaving mirror; belt; three pennies; wristwatch with leather strap, harmonica. How odd that Alfie’s mou
th organ was among Hugh’s belongings. Then she looked again at the list, the forms, the letter, the parcel, and read the name more carefully. A. H. Graysmark. Not H. A. Alfred Henry, not Hugh Albert. She ran to find her husband. “Bill! Oh Bill!” she cried. “There’s been the most dreadful mistake!”

  It took a good deal of correspondence, on black-edged paper on the part of the Graysmarks, to find that Alfie had died within a day of Hugh, three days after arriving in France. Joining the same regiment on the same day, the brothers had been proud of their consecutive service numbers. The signalman, who had with his own eyes seen Hugh shipped out alive on a stretcher, disregarded the instruction to send the KIA telegram for A. H. Graysmark, assuming it meant H. A. The first Violet knew of her second son’s death was the bland package in her hands. It was an easy enough mistake to have made on a battlefield, she had said.

  Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers’ deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother’s life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.

  It was as if one of the shells from the French front line had exploded in the middle of her family, leaving a crater that she could never fill or repair. Violet would spend days tidying her sons’ rooms, polishing the silver frames of their photographs. Bill became silent. Whatever topic of conversation Isabel tried to engage him in, he didn’t answer, or even wandered out of the room. Her job, she decided, was not to cause her parents any more bother or concern. She was the consolation prize—what they had instead of their sons.

  Now, her parents’ rapture confirmed to Isabel that she had done the right thing in keeping Lucy. Any lingering shadows were swept away. The baby had healed so many lives: not only hers and Tom’s, but now the lives of these two people who had been so resigned to loss.

  At Christmas lunch, Bill Graysmark said grace and in a choked voice thanked the Lord for the gift of Lucy. In the kitchen later, Violet confided to Tom that her husband had had a new lease of life from the day he had heard about Lucy’s birth. “It’s done wonders. Like a magic tonic.”

  She gazed through the window at the pink hibiscus. “Bill took the news about Hugh hard enough, but when he found out about Alfie, it fair knocked him for six. For a long time he wouldn’t believe it. Said it was impossible that such a thing could have happened. He spent months writing here, there and everywhere, determined to show it was a mistake. In a way, I was glad of it: proud of him for fighting the news. But there were plenty of people hereabouts who’d lost more than one boy. I knew it was true.

  “Eventually the fire went out of him. He just lost heart.” She took a breath. “But these days”—she raised her eyes and smiled in wonder—“he’s his old self again, thanks to Lucy. I’d wager your little girl means as much to Bill as she does to you. She’s given him the world back.” She reached up and kissed Tom’s cheek. “Thank you.”

  As the women did the dishes after lunch, Tom sat out the back on the shady grass with Lucy, where she toddled about, circling back now and again to give him ravenous kisses. “Jeez, thanks, littlie!” he chuckled. “Don’t eat me.” She looked at him, with those eyes that sought his like a mirror, until he pulled her in to him and tickled her again.

  “Ah! The perfect dad!” said a voice from behind. Tom turned to see his father-in-law approaching.

  “Thought I’d come and make sure you were managing. Vi always said I had the knack with our three.” As the last word came out, a shadow flitted across his face. He recovered and stretched out his arms. “Come to Grandpa. Come and pull his whiskers. Ah, my little princess!”

  Lucy tottered over and stretched out her arms. “Up you come,” he said, sweeping her up. She reached for the fob watch in his waistcoat pocket, and tugged it out.

  “You want to know what time it is? Again?” Bill laughed, and he went through the ritual of opening the gold case and showing her the hands. She immediately snapped it shut, and thrust it back at him to reopen. “It’s hard on Violet, you know,” he said to Tom.

  Tom brushed the grass off his trousers as he stood up. “What is, Bill?”

  “Being without Isabel, and now, missing out on this little one…” He paused. “There must be jobs you could get around Partageuse way… ? You’ve got a university degree, for goodness’ sake…”

  Tom shifted his weight uneasily to his other foot.

  “Oh, I know what they say—once a lightkeeper, always a lightkeeper.”

  “That’s what they say,” said Tom.

  “And is it true?”

  “More or less.”

  “But you could leave? If you really wanted to?”

  Tom gave it thought before replying, “Bill, a man could leave his wife, if he really wanted to. Doesn’t make it the right thing to do.”

  Bill gave him a look.