It pained me that I had to hear of your embarkation through others. I would have welcomed the opportunity to see you in uniform, to see you off, but I gather that since tracing your mother and learning she had passed away, you wish to have nothing further to do with me. Therefore, I leave it up to you. If you choose to reply to this letter, I shall be most pleased. You are, after all, my son, and until you too are a father, you will not fully understand all it means to say that.
If, however, you do not wish to respond, I shall respect your choice, and shall not trouble you again. I shall nonetheless pray for your safety in battle, and your return to these shores, victorious.
Your affectionate father,
Edward Sherbourne
It seemed a lifetime since Tom had spoken to this man. How it must have cost him, to write such a letter. That his father had made an attempt to contact him after their bitter separation was not just a surprise but a shock. Nothing seemed certain any more. Tom wondered whether his father’s coldness protected a wound all along. For the first time he glimpsed something beyond the stony exterior and, just for an instant, he could imagine a man of high principle, hurt by a woman he loved, but unable to show it.
Tom had sought out his mother for a particular reason. As he had stood at the boardinghouse door, shoes polished, fingernails cut, he had rehearsed the words one last time. “I’m sorry I got you into trouble.” At the time he felt as shaky as the child who had waited thirteen years to say the words. He thought he might be sick. “All I said was that I’d seen a motorcar. That there had been a motorcar at the house. I didn’t know—”
It was only years later that he had understood the full magnitude of his tale-telling. She had been declared an unfit mother, and banished from his life. But his pilgrimage to seek forgiveness was too late, and he would never now hear his mother absolve him from the guilt of betrayal, innocent though it had been. Words had a way of getting into all sorts of places they weren’t meant to. Best keep things to yourself in life, he’d learned.
He looked at the picture of his mother in the locket. Perhaps each of his parents had loved him, however brokenly. He felt a sudden surge of anger at his father’s almost casual assumption of the right to separate him from his mother: so sincere, yet so destructive.
It was only when a droplet sent the ink running in miniature rivers that Tom noticed he was crying. “Until you too are a father, you will not fully understand…”
Beside him now on the veranda, Isabel was saying, “Even though you hadn’t seen him for years, he was still your dad. You only ever get one of them. It’s bound to affect you, sweetheart.”
Tom wondered if Isabel caught the irony of her own words.
“Come on, Luce, come and have some cocoa,” she called without pausing.
The little girl ran up and grasped the beaker with both hands. She wiped her mouth with her forearm instead of her grubby hand, then handed back the cup. “Ta-ta!” she called out cheerily. “I riding to Pataterz now to see Grandma and Grandpa,” and ran back to her hobbyhorse.
Tom looked at the locket in the palm of his hand. “For years, I thought she hated me because I gave away her secret. I never knew about the locket…” His lower lip pressed upward and he pursed his mouth. “It would have made a difference.”
“I know there’s nothing I can say. I just wish I could—I don’t know—make it better for you.”
“Mamma, I hungry,” called Lucy as she came back.
“No wonder, with all that running about!” said Isabel, and swept her up in her arms. “Come on. Come and give Dadda a hug. He’s sad today.” And she sat the child on his lap, so that they could both hug him tightly.
“Smile, Dadda,” said the little girl. “Like this,” she said, and grinned.
The light came in crooked through the clouds, seeking refuge from the rain that hovered in the distance. Lucy sat on Tom’s shoulders, beaming at her towering view.
“This way!” she exclaimed, stabbing a finger to her left. Tom altered course and carried her down the field. One of the goats had chewed its way out of a temporary pen, and Lucy had insisted on helping to find it.
There was no sign of the creature in the cove. Well, it couldn’t have got far. “We’ll look somewhere else,” said Tom. He strode up toward the flat of the land once more, and turned in a circle. “Where to now, Lulu? You pick.”
“Down there!” she pointed again, to the other side of the island, and they set off.
“How many words do you know that sound like goat?”
“Boat!”
“That’s right. Any more?”
The child tried again. “Boat?”
Tom laughed. “What do you wear when it’s cold?”
“My jumper.”
“Yes, but what do you wear when it’s cold that sounds like goat? Starts with a ‘kuh’ sound.”
“Coat!”
He tickled her tummy. “Coat, boat, goat. Talking of which… Look, Luce, down there, near the beach.”
“She’s there! Let’s run, Dadda!”
“Let’s not, bunny rabbit. Don’t want to scare her away. We’ll take it quietly.”
Tom was so preoccupied that he hardly noticed at first where the animal had chosen its new pasture.
“Down you get, little one.” He lifted Lucy high over his shoulders and lowered her to the grass. “You be good and stay here while I go and get Flossie. I’m going to tie this rope to her collar, then she’ll come back nice and easy.
“Right, Flossie. Come on, now, no buggering about.” The goat looked up and trotted a few paces away. “Enough of that. Stay still,” Tom caught it by the collar and fastened the rope. “There. That’s that. All right, Lulu—” Turning, he felt a tingling in his arms, a split second before his conscious mind realized why. Lucy was sitting on a slight mound, where the grass grew more thickly than on the flatter land around it. Usually, he avoided this part of the island, which to him seemed permanently shadowed and gloomy, no matter how bright the day.
“Look, I found a seat, Dadda,” she said, beaming.
“Lucy! Off that right now!” he shouted before he could stop himself.
Lucy’s face puckered and tears came at the shock—she had never been shouted at before, and started to bawl.
He raced to pick her up. “Sorry, Lulu. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, ashamed of his response. Trying to hide his horror, he hurried a few steps away. “That’s not a good place to sit, love.”
“Why not?” she wailed. “It’s my special seat. It’s magic.”
“It’s just…” He snuggled her head into the crook of his neck. “It’s just not a good place to sit, sweetie.” He kissed the top of her head.
“Are I naughty?” asked Lucy, confused.
“No. Not naughty. Not you, Lulu.” He kissed her cheek and brushed her fair hair out of her eyes.
But as he held her, he was for the first time in years acutely aware that the hands that now touched her were the hands that had heaved her father into the grave. Eyes closed, he recalled the sensation in his muscles, the weight of the man, and contrasted it with the weight of the daughter. Lucy seemed the heavier of the two.
He felt a patting on his cheeks. “Dadda! Look at me!” the child said.
He opened his eyes, and looked at her in silence. Finally, with a deep breath, he said, “Time to take Flossie home. Why don’t you hold the rope?”
She nodded, and he wrapped it around her hand, carrying the weight of her back up the hill on his hip.
That afternoon, in the kitchen, Lucy was about to climb onto a chair, but first turned to Tom. “Is this a good place to sit, Dadda?”
He didn’t look up from the door handle he was repairing. “Yes, that’s a good place, Lulu,” he replied without thinking.
When Isabel went to sit beside her, Lucy exclaimed, “No! Mamma, off that chair! That’s not a good place to sit.”
Isabel laughed. “It’s where I always sit, sweetie. I think it’s a lovely seat.
”
“It’s not a good place. Dadda says!”
“What’s she talking about, Dadda?”
“I’ll tell you later,” he said, and took up his screwdriver, hoping Isabel would forget.
But she did not.
Once she had tucked Lucy into bed, Isabel asked again, “What was all that palaver about where to sit? She was still worried about it when I sat on her bed for the story. Told me you’d be very cross.”
“Oh, just a game she came up with. She’ll probably have forgotten it by tomorrow.”
But Lucy had summoned up the ghost of Frank Roennfeldt that afternoon, and the memory of his face now haunted Tom every time he looked in the direction of the graves.
“Until you too are a father…” He had thought a great deal about Lucy’s mother, but it was only now that the full sacrilege of his treatment of her father came home to him. Thanks to him, the man could never have a priest or a pastor mark his passing with due ritual; never be allowed to live, even in memory, in Lucy’s heart, as was a father’s right. For a moment, just a few feet of sand had separated Lucy from her true heritage—from Roennfeldt and generations of his family. Tom went cold at the realization that he may have killed relatives—it seemed almost likely—of this man who had created her. Suddenly, vivid and accusing, the faces of the enemy wakened from the tomb beneath memory to which he had confined them.
The next morning, as Isabel and Lucy went to collect the eggs, Tom set about straightening things in the lounge room, putting Lucy’s pencils in a biscuit tin, stacking up her books. Among them, he found the prayer book Ralph had given her at her christening, and from which Isabel often read to her. He flicked through the feathery pages, edged with gold. Morning prayers, communion rites… Going through the psalms, his eyes came to rest on number 37, “Noli aemulari.” “Fret not thyself because of the ungodly: neither be thou envious among the evil-doers. For they shall be cut down like the grass: and be withered even as the green herb.”
Isabel and Lucy, the little girl carried piggyback, came in, laughing at something. “Gosh, this is clean! Have magic pixies been in?” asked Isabel.
Tom shut the book, and put it on top of the pile. “Just trying to put things in order,” he said.
A few weeks later, Ralph and Tom were sitting, backs resting against the stone wall of the storage shed, having unloaded the last of the September supplies. Bluey was down on the boat, sorting out a problem with the anchor chain, and Isabel was in the kitchen with Lucy, making gingerbread men. It had been a hard morning, and the two men sat sharing a bottle of beer in the first tentative spring sunshine.
For weeks, Tom had been anticipating this moment, considering how he could approach the subject when the boat arrived. He cleared his throat before asking, “Have you ever… done anything wrong, Ralph?”
The old man cocked Tom a look. “What the bloody hell’s that supposed to mean?”
The words had come out awkwardly, despite all Tom’s planning. “I’m talking about—well—how you put something right when you’ve buggered it up. How you fix it.” His eyes were focused on the black swan on the beer label, and he struggled to keep his nerve. “I mean something serious.”
Ralph took a swig of beer and looked at the grass as he nodded slowly. “Want to say what? None of my business, of course—not trying to stick me beak in.”
Tom was very still, sensing bodily the relief that would follow the unburdening of the truth about Lucy. “My father dying got me thinking about everything I’ve done wrong in life, and about how to put it right before I die.” He opened his mouth to go on, but an image of Isabel bathing their stillborn son silenced him, and he balked.
“I’ll never even know their names…” He was surprised at how readily the space had been filled with other thoughts, other guilt.
“Whose names?”
Tom hesitated, poised on the edge of a chasm, deciding whether to dive. He drank some beer. “The men I killed.” The words fell, blunt and heavy.
Ralph weighed up his response. “Well, that’s what you do in a bloody war. Kill or be killed.”
“The more time passes, the madder everything I’ve done seems.” Tom had a sense of being physically trapped in each separate past moment, held in some vise that pressed into him every bodily sensation, every guilt-filled thought that had mounted up over years. He struggled for breath. Ralph was completely still, waiting.
Tom turned to him, suddenly shaking. “Jesus Christ, I just want to do the right thing, Ralph! Tell me what the right fucking thing to do is! I—I just can’t stand this! I can’t do it any more.” He threw the bottle to the ground and it shattered on a rock, as his words dissolved into a sob.
Ralph put an arm around him. “There now, boy. Easy does it, easy does it. I’ve been around a shade longer than you. Seen all sorts. Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot ’em both, and then it’s too late.”
He looked at Tom: a long, wordless look. “The question I’d ask is, how would raking over the coals make things better? You can’t put any of that right now.” The words, devoid of judgment or animosity, twisted like a knife in Tom’s guts just the same. “Christ—the quickest way to send a bloke mad is to let him go on re-fighting his war till he gets it right.”
Ralph scraped at a callus on his finger. “If I’d had a son, I’d be proud if he turned out half as well as you. You’re a good bloke, Tom. A lucky bloke, with that wife and daughter of yours. Concentrate on what’s best for your family now. Fella upstairs’s given you a second chance, so I reckon he’s not too fussed about whatever you did or didn’t do back then. Stick to now. Put right the things you can put right today, and let the ones from back then go. Leave the rest to the angels, or the devil or whoever’s in charge of it.”
“The salt. You can never get rid of the salt. It eats away like a cancer if you don’t watch out.” It was the day after his talk with Ralph, and Tom was muttering to himself. Lucy sat beside him inside the giant glass cocoon of the lens, feeding her rag doll imaginary sweets as he buffed and polished the bronze fittings. Her blue eyes beamed up at him.
“Are you Dolly’s dadda too?” she asked.
Tom stopped. “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Dolly?”
She leaned to whisper something to the doll, then announced, “She says no. You’re just my Dadda.”
Her face had lost its round shape, and was now giving hints of her future self—blonde hair rather than the earlier dark shade, and enquiring eyes, fair skin. He wondered whether she would begin to resemble her mother, or her father. He thought back to the face of the blond man he had buried. Dread crawled up his spine as he imagined her asking him harder questions as the years went on. He thought, too, how his reflection in the mirror now offered glimpses of his own father’s face at his age. Likeness lies in wait. Partageuse was small: a mother might fail to recognize her infant in the face of a toddler, but eventually, wouldn’t she see herself in the grown woman? The thought gnawed away at him. He dabbed the rag into the tin of polish and rubbed again, until the sweat trickled into the corners of his eyes.
That evening, Tom was leaning against the veranda post, watching the wind blow the sun into night. He had lit up, and the tower was now settled down until dawn. He had gone over Ralph’s advice again and again. Put right the things you can put right today.
“Here you are, darl,” said Isabel. “She’s gone off to sleep. I had to read Cinderella three times!” She put an arm around Tom and leaned into him. “I love the way she pretends to read as she turns the pages. Knows the stories by heart.”
Tom did not reply, so Isabel kissed him below the ear and said, “We could always have an early night. I’m tired, but not too tired…”
He was still looking out at the water. “What does Mrs. Roennfeldt look like?”
It took a moment for Isabel to register that the reference was to Hannah Potts. “What on earth do you want to know that for?�
��
“Why do you think?”
“She doesn’t look a bit like her! Lucy’s blonde with blue eyes—she must have got that from her father.”
“Well she sure as hell didn’t get it from us.” He turned to face her. “Izzy, we’ve got to say something. We have to tell her.”
“Lucy? She’s too young to—”
“No, Hannah Roennfeldt.”
Isabel looked horrified. “What for?”
“She deserves to know.”
She shivered. In dark moments, she had wondered whether it was worse to believe your daughter was dead, or that she was alive and you would never see her; she had imagined Hannah’s torment. But even a moment’s agreement with Tom would be fatal, she knew. “Tom. We’ve done this one to death. It just isn’t right to put your niggling conscience above Lucy’s welfare.”
“Niggling conscience? For the love of God, Isabel, we’re not talking about swiping sixpence from the collection plate! We’re talking about a child’s life! And a woman’s life, for that matter. Every moment of our happiness is on her tab. That can’t be right, no matter how much we try to think our way out of it.”
“Tom, you’re tired and you’re sad and you’re confused. In the morning you’ll think differently. I’m not going to talk about it any more tonight.” She touched his hand, and fought to mask the tremble in her voice. “We’re—we’re not in a perfect world. We have to live with that.”
He stared at her, seized by the sensation that perhaps she didn’t exist. Perhaps none of this existed, for the inches between them seemed to divide two entirely different realities, and they no longer joined.
Lucy is particularly fond of looking at the photographs taken of her as a baby on her visit to Partageuse. “That’s me!” she tells Tom, as she sits on his knee and points to the picture on the table. “But I was only little then. Now I’m a big girl.”
“You certainly are, sweetie. Four next birthday.”
“That,” she says, pointing authoritatively, “is Mamma’s mamma!”
The Light Between Oceans: A Novel Page 17
