The Light Between Oceans: A Novel

by M. L. Stedman

  Hannah recalled Frank’s lilting tenor voice, as he rocked the cradle. “Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf. Dein Vater hüt’ die Schaf. Die Mutter schüttelt’s Bäumelein, da fällt herab ein Träumelein. Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf.”

  In that little room lit by a paraffin lamp, with a back that was aching, on a chair that needed mending, he had told her, “I cannot imagine a more fortunate existence.” The glow in his face was not from the lamp but from the tiny creature in the cot, whose breathing made that telltale change in rhythm as she finally surrendered to sleep.

  That March, the altar had been decorated with vases of daisies and stephanotis from Frank and Hannah’s garden, and the sweet scent floated all the way across the empty pews to the back of the church. Hannah wore pale blue with a matching low-brimmed felt hat, and Frank his wedding suit, which still fitted, four years on. His cousin Bettina and her husband, Wilf, had come from Kalgoorlie to be godparents, and smiled indulgently at the tiny infant in Hannah’s arms.

  Reverend Norkells stood beside the font, fumbling slightly as he pulled one of the brightly colored tassels to turn to the correct page of the baptism rite. The clumsiness may have been connected to the whiff of alcohol on his breath. “Hath this child already been baptized or no?” he began.

  It was a hot, brooding Saturday afternoon. A fat blowfly buzzed about, coming in periodically to drink at the font, only to be chased away by the godparents. It came in once too often and, swatted by Wilf with his wife’s fan, plummeted into the holy water like a drunk into a ditch. The vicar fished it out without a pause as he asked, “Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all his works… ?”

  “I renounce them all,” the godparents replied in unison.

  As they spoke, the door to the church creaked in response to a tentative push. Hannah’s heart lifted at the sight of her father, led by Gwen, making his way slowly to kneel in the last pew. Hannah and her father had not spoken since the day she left home to be married, and she had expected him to respond to the christening invitation in the usual way—with silence. “I’ll try, Hanny,” Gwen had promised. “But you know what a stubborn old mule he is. I promise you this, though. I’ll be there, whatever he says. This has gone on long enough.”

  Now Frank turned to Hannah. “You see?” he whispered. “God makes everything work out in his own time.”

  “Oh merciful God, grant that the old Adam in this child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in her…” The words echoed off the walls, and the baby snuffled and wriggled as her mother held her. When she started to grizzle, Hannah put the knuckle of her little finger to the tiny lips, which sucked contentedly. The rite continued, and Norkells took the child and said to the godparents, “Name this child.”

  “Grace Ellen.”

  “Grace Ellen, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

  Throughout the rest of the service, the infant stared at the brightly colored glass in the windows, as fascinated as she would be when, two years later, she gazed at it again from beside the font, in another woman’s arms.

  When it was over, Septimus remained in his pew. As Hannah walked slowly down the aisle, the baby stirred in her blanket, winding her head a little this way and that. Hannah stopped beside her father, who stood up as she offered him his grandchild. He hesitated, before putting out his arms to cradle the baby.

  “Grace Ellen. Your mother would be touched,” was all he could manage before a tear escaped, and he gazed with awe at the child.

  Hannah took his arm. “Come and see Frank,” she said, as she led him up the aisle.

  “Please, I’d like you to come in,” Hannah said later, as her father stood at her gate with Gwen. Septimus was hesitant. The little clapboard cottage, barely more than a shack, reminded him of the Flindells’ lean-to affair in which he grew up. Going through the door took him back fifty years in a couple of steps.

  In the front room, he talked stiffly but politely to Frank’s cousins. He complimented Frank on the excellent christening cake, and the small but fine assortment of food. Out of the corner of his eye he kept sizing up the cracks in the plaster, the holes in the rug.

  As he was leaving, he drew Hannah aside and took out his wallet. “Let me give you a little something for—”

  Hannah gently pushed his hand back down. “It’s all right, Dad. We do all right,” she said.

  “Of course you do. But now that you’ve got a little one…”

  She put a hand on his arm. “Really. It’s kind of you, but we can manage on our own. Come and visit soon.”

  He smiled and kissed the baby on the forehead, then his daughter. “Thank you, Hanny.” Then in hardly more than a mumble, he said, “Ellen would have wanted her granddaughter watched over. And I’ve—I’ve missed you.”

  Within a week, gifts for the baby were being delivered from Perth, from Sydney and beyond. A cot, a mahogany chest of drawers. Dresses and bonnets and things for the bath. The granddaughter of Septimus Potts would have the best that money could buy.

  “Your husband is at peace in God’s hands.” Because of the letter, Hannah goes through both a mourning and a renewal. God has taken her husband, but has saved her daughter. She weeps not just with sorrow, but with shame, at her memories of that day.

  The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth, or of the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.

  That’s how life goes on—protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame. Men who came back from the war with stories they could have told about the desperate failings of comrades at the point of death say only that they died bravely. To the outside world, no soldier ever visited a brothel or acted like a savage or ran and hid from the enemy. Being over there was punishment enough. When wives have to hide the mortgage money or the kitchen knives from a husband who’s lost the thread, they do it without a word, sometimes acknowledging it not even to themselves.

  So for Hannah Roennfeldt, her memory of losing Frank is one she has learned she can share with no one. “Raking over coals—what’s the good of that?” people would say, anxious to return to their civilized picture of life in Partageuse. But Hannah remembers.

  Anzac Day. The pubs are full—full of men who were there, or who lost brothers there; fellows back from Gallipoli and the Somme and still not over the shell shock and the mustard gas, even ten years on. The twenty-fifth of April, 1926. The sly two-up games go on in the back bar, where the police turn a blind eye for this one day of the year. Hell, the police join in—it was their war too. And the Emu Bitter flows and the talk gets louder, the songs saucier. There’s a lot to forget. They came back to their work on farms, to their work behind desks and in front of classes, and they got on with it—just bloody got on with it because there was no choice. And the more they drink, the harder the forgetting becomes, the more they want to take a swing at something, or at someone—fair and square, man to man. Bloody Turks. Bloody Huns. Bloody bastards.

  And Frank Roennfeldt will do as well as anything. The only German in town, except he’s Austrian. He’s the nearest thing to the enemy they can find, so as they see him walking down the street with Hannah at dusk, they start to whistle “Tipperary.” Hannah looks nervous, and stumbles. Frank instantly takes baby Grace into his arms, snatches the cardigan draped on his wife’s arm to cover her, and they walk more quickly, heads down.

  The boys in the pub decide this is a fine sport, and spill out onto the street. The fellows from the other pubs along the main drag come out too, then one wag decides it will be a great joke to swipe Frank’s hat, and does.

  “Oh, leave us alone, Joe Rafferty!” scolds Hannah. “Go back to the pub and leave us alone,” and they keep up a brisk p
ace.

  “Leave us alone!” mimics Joe in a high-pitched whimper. “Bloody Fritz! All the same, all cowards!” He turns to the mob. “And look at these two, with their pretty little baby.” He’s slurring his words. “You know Fritz used to eat babies. Roasted them alive, evil bastards.”

  “Go away or we’ll get the police!” shouts Hannah, before freezing at the sight of Harry Garstone and Bob Lynch, the police constables, standing on the hotel veranda, schooners in hand, smirking behind their waxed mustaches.

  Suddenly, like a struck match, the scene’s alight: “Come on, lads, let’s have some fun with the Hun-lovers!” goes up the cry. “Let’s save the baby from being eaten,” and a dozen drunks are chasing the couple and Hannah is falling behind because her girdle stops her from breathing properly and she’s calling, “Grace, Frank! Save Grace!” and he runs with the little bundle away from the mob who are corraling him down the road to the jetty, and his heart is thumping and out of rhythm and pain shoots down his arm as he runs along the rickety planks above the water and jumps into the first rowing boat he can find, and rows out to sea, out to safety. Just until the mob sobers up and things calm down.

  He’s known worse, in his day.

  CHAPTER 18

  As Isabel goes about her day—always moving, always busy—she has a keen physical sense of where Lucy is, attached by an invisible thread of love. She is never angry—her patience with the child is infinite. When food falls to the floor, when grubby hand marks decorate the walls, they are never greeted with a cross word or a disapproving look. If Lucy wakes crying in the night, Isabel comforts her gently, lovingly. She accepts the gift that life has sent her. And she accepts the burdens.

  While the child is asleep in the afternoon, she goes up to the stick crosses on the headland. This is her church, her holy place, where she prays for guidance, and to be a worthy mother. She prays too, in a more abstract way, for Hannah Roennfeldt. Hers is not to question the way things have turned out. Out here, Hannah is just a distant notion. She has no body, no existence, whereas Lucy—Isabel knows every expression of hers, every cry. She has been watching the miracle that is this little girl take shape day by day, like a gift revealed only with the passing of time. A whole personality is emerging, as the girl catches and masters words, and begins to articulate how she feels, who she is.

  So Isabel sits in the chapel without walls or windows or pastor, and thanks God. And if thoughts of Hannah Roennfeldt intrude, her response is always the same. She simply cannot send this child away: it is not for her to risk Lucy’s happiness. And Tom? Tom is a good man. Tom will do the right thing, always: she can rely on that. He will come to terms with things, in the end.

  But a sliver of uncrossable distance has slipped between them: an invisible, wisp-thin no-man’s-land.

  Gradually, the rhythm of life on Janus re-establishes itself, absorbing Tom in the minutiae of its rituals. When he wakes sometimes from dark dreams of broken cradles, and compasses without bearings, he pushes the unease down, lets the daylight contradict it. And isolation lulls him with the music of the lie.

  “And you know what day it is today, don’t you, Luce?” asked Isabel as she pulled the jumper down over the little girl’s head and extracted a hand from the end of each sleeve. Six months had passed since their return to Janus in January 1928.

  Lucy tilted her head upward a fraction. “Ummm,” she said, playing for time.

  “Want a clue?”

  She nodded.

  Isabel pulled on the first little sock. “Come on. Other tootsie. Thaaat’s the way. OK, the clue is that if you’re a very good girl, there might be oranges tonight…”

  “Boat!” cried the girl, sliding off her mother’s knee and jumping up and down, one shoe on her foot and the other in her hand. “Boat coming! Boat coming!”

  “That’s right. So shall we make the house all lovely for when Ralph and Bluey come?”

  “Yes!” Lucy called behind her, as she dashed to the kitchen to say, “Alf and Booey coming, Dadda!”

  Tom picked her up and gave her a kiss. “No flies on you! Did you remember that all by yourself, or has someone been helping you?”

  “Mamma said,” she confessed with a grin, and wriggled to the ground, off to find Isabel again.

  Soon, garbed in galoshes and coats, the two of them set out toward the chook house, Lucy clutching a miniature version of Isabel’s basket.

  “A real fashion parade,” remarked Tom as he passed them on his way to the shed.

  “I’d rather be warm than glamorous,” said Isabel, and gave him a quick kiss. “We’re on an egg expedition.”

  Inside the chicken coop, Lucy used two hands to pick up each egg, the task that would have taken Isabel seconds treated instead as a precious ritual. She put each egg to her cheek and reported either “Still warm!” or “Tone cold” as appropriate, then passed it to Isabel for safe storage, keeping the last one to carry in her own basket. Then, “Thank you, Daphne. Thank you, Speckle…” she began, and went on to thank each hen for her contribution.

  In the vegetable patch, she held the spade handle with Isabel during the potato dig.

  “I think I can see one…” said Isabel, waiting for Lucy to spot the lighter patch in the sandy soil.

  “There!” said Lucy, and put her hand into the hole, retrieving a stone.

  “Almost.” Isabel smiled. “How about next to it? Look a little bit nearer the side.”

  “’Tato!” Lucy beamed as she raised the prize above her head, scattering soil in her hair, then in her eyes, which started her crying.

  “Let’s have a look,” soothed Isabel, wiping her hands on her dungarees before attending to the eye. “There we are, now, blink for Mamma. There, all gone, Luce.” And the little girl continued to open and squint shut her eyes.

  “All gone,” she said eventually. Then, “More ’tato!” and the hunt began again.

  Inside, Isabel swept the floor in every room, gathering the sandy dust into piles in the corner, ready to gather up. Returning from a quick inspection of the bread in the oven, she found a trail leading all through the cottage, thanks to Lucy’s attempts with the dustpan.

  “Look, Mamma! I helping!”

  Isabel took in at the miniature cyclone trail and sighed. “You could call it that…” Picking Lucy up, she said, “Thank you. Good girl. Now, just to make extra sure the floor’s clean, let’s give it an extra sweep, shall we?” With a shake of the head, she muttered, “Ah, Lucy Sherbourne, who’d be a housewife, eh?”

  Later, Tom appeared at the doorway. “She all ready?”

  “Yep,” said Isabel. “Face washed, hands washed. No grubby fingers.”

  “Then up you come, littlie.”

  “Up the stairs, Dadda?”

  “Yes, up the stairs.” And she walked beside him to the tower. At the foot of the steps, she put her arms up so that he could hold her hands from behind. “Now, Bunny, let’s count. One, two, three,” and they proceeded, at an agonizingly slow pace, up the stairs, Tom counting every one aloud, long after Lucy gave up.

  At the top, in the watch room, Lucy held out her hands. “Noclars,” and Tom said, “Binoculars in a minute. Let’s get you up on the table first.” He sat her on top of the charts, then handed her the binoculars, keeping the weight of them in his own hands.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Clouds.”

  “Yep, plenty of those around. Any sign of the boat?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?” Tom laughed. “Wouldn’t want you in charge of the guardhouse. What’s that over there? See? Where my finger is.”

  She kicked her legs back and forward. “Alf and Booey! Oranges.”

  “Mamma says there’ll be oranges, does she? Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

  It was more than an hour before the boat docked. Tom and Isabel stood on the jetty, Lucy on Tom’s shoulders.

  “A whole welcoming committee!” called Ralph.

  “Hello!” called Lucy
. “People! Hello, Alf, hello, Boo.”

  Bluey jumped off onto the jetty, heaving the rope Ralph threw him. “Mind out, Luce,” he called to the child, now on the ground. “Don’t want to get in the way of the rope.” He looked at Tom. “Golly, she’s a real little girl now, isn’t she? No more Baby Lucy!”

  Ralph laughed. “They grow up, you know, babies.”

  Bluey finished securing the rope. “We only see her every few months: just makes it more obvious. Kids in town, you see them every day, so you kind of don’t notice them getting older.”

  “And suddenly they’re great hulks of lads like you!” teased Ralph. As he stepped onto the jetty, he had something in one hand behind his back. “Now, who’s going to help me take the things off the boat?”

  “Me!” said Lucy.

  Ralph gave Isabel a wink as he produced a tin of peaches from behind his back. “Well then, here’s something very, very heavy for you to carry.”

  Lucy took the tin with both hands.

  “Gosh, Luce, better be careful with that! Let’s take it up to the house.” Isabel turned to the men. “Give me something to take up if you like, Ralph.” He clambered back to fish out the mail and a few light parcels. “See you up at the house in a bit. I’ll have the kettle on.”

  After lunch, as the adults finished cups of tea at the kitchen table, Tom said, “Lucy’s a bit quiet…”

  “Hmmm,” said Isabel. “She’s supposed to be finishing her drawing for Mum and Dad. I’ll go and check.” But before she could leave the room, Lucy entered the kitchen, dressed in a petticoat of Isabel’s that trailed to the floor, a pair of her shoes with heels, and the string of blue glass beads that Isabel’s mother had sent out with that morning’s boat.