The Light Between Oceans: A Novel

by M. L. Stedman

  The girl, still terrified from her first encounter with him at the police station, stayed mute, and Hannah offered her the jar. “Go on. Any color you like, darling.” But her daughter turned her head away, and took up a strand of hair to curl around her finger.

  “And she’s been wetting the bed, you say?”

  “Often. At her age, surely you’d normally expect—”

  “You hardly need me to remind you that these aren’t normal circumstances.” He rang a bell on his desk and, after a discreet knock, a white-haired woman entered.

  “Mrs. Fripp, take little Grace out to sit with you while I have a word to her mother, would you?”

  The woman smiled. “Come on, dear, let’s see if we can find a biscuit for you somewhere,” she said, and led the listless child away.

  Hannah began. “I don’t know what to do, what to say. She still keeps asking for”—she stumbled—“for Isabel Sherbourne.”

  “What have you said about her?”

  “Nothing. I’ve told her that I’m her mother and I love her and—”

  “Well, you have to say something about Mrs. Sherbourne.”

  “But what?”

  “My suggestion is that you just tell her she and her husband had to go away.”

  “Go away where, why?”

  “It doesn’t really matter at that age. Just as long as she has an answer to her question. She’ll forget eventually—if there’s nothing around to remind her of the Sherbournes. She’ll get used to her new home. I’ve seen it often enough with adopted orphans and so forth.”

  “But she gets into such a state. I just want to do the right thing for her.”

  “You don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, I’m afraid, Mrs. Roennfeldt. Fate’s dealt this little girl a pretty tough set of cards, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Eventually those two will fade from her mind, as long as she doesn’t keep in contact with them. And in the meantime, give her a drop of the sleeping draft if she’s too anxious or unsettled. Won’t do her any harm.”

  CHAPTER 28

  You stay away from that man, you hear me?”

  “I’ve got to go and see him, Ma. He’s been in the lockup for ages! This is all my fault!” lamented Bluey.

  “Don’t talk rubbish. You’ve reunited a baby with her mother, and you’re about to pocket three thousand guineas reward.” Mrs. Smart took the iron from the stove, and pressed the tablecloth harder with each sentence. “Use your loaf, boy. You’ve done your bit, now just keep out of it!”

  “He’s in more trouble than the early settlers, Ma. I don’t reckon this is gonna turn out good for him.”

  “That’s not your lookout, sonny. Now out the back and get on with weeding the rose bed.”

  By reflex, Bluey took a step toward the back door, as his mother muttered, “Oh, to have been left with the halfwit son!”

  He stopped, and to her astonishment, pulled himself up to his full height. “Yeah, well I may be a halfwit, but I’m not a dobber. And I’m not the sort of bloke that deserts his mates.” He turned and headed for the front door.

  “Just where do you think you’re going, Jeremiah Smart?”

  “Out, Ma!”

  “Over my dead body!” she snapped, blocking his way.

  She was all of five feet tall. Bluey topped six foot. “Sorry,” he said as he picked his mother up by the waist as easily as a piece of sandalwood, and put her down lightly to one side. He left her, jaw agape, eyes flaming, as he walked out of the door and down the front path.

  Bluey took in the scene. The tiny space, the slop bucket in the corner, the tin mug on a table that was bolted to the floor. In all the years he had known Tom, he had never seen him unshaven; never seen his hair uncombed, his shirt creased. Now he had dark gulleys under his eyes, and his cheekbones rose like ridges above his square jaw.

  “Tom! Good to see you, mate,” declared the visitor, in a phrase that brought them both back to days of jetty landings and long voyages, when they were, truly, glad to see one another.

  Bluey tried to look at Tom’s face, but could not negotiate the space between the bars, so either the face or the bars were out of focus. He searched for a few moments before coming up with, “How are things?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  Bluey fidgeted with the hat in his hands until he screwed up his courage. “I’m not going to take the reward, mate.” The words tumbled out. “Wouldn’t be right.”

  Tom looked off to his side for a moment. “Thought there must have been some reason you didn’t come out with the troopers.” He sounded uninterested rather than angry.

  “I’m sorry! Ma made me do it. I never should have listened to her. I wouldn’t touch the money with a barge pole.”

  “Might as well be you gets it as some other bloke. Makes no difference to me now.”

  Whatever Bluey was expecting from Tom, it was not this indifference. “What happens next?”

  “Buggered if I know, Blue.”

  “Is there anything you need? Anything I can get you?”

  “A bit of sky and some ocean’d be nice.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.” Tom took a deep breath as he considered a thought. “There is something you could do. You could look in on Izzy for me. She’ll be at her parents’. Just… see she’s OK. She’ll be taking it hard. Lucy meant the world to her,” and he stopped because a crack had found its way into his voice. “Tell her—I understand. That’s all. Tell her that I understand, Bluey.”

  Though the young man felt utterly out of his depth, he took his commission like a sacred charge. He would convey the message as if his own life depended on it.

  Once Bluey had gone, Tom lay down on the bunk, and wondered again how Lucy was; how Isabel was coping. He tried to think of any other way he could have done things, starting from that very first day. Then he remembered Ralph’s words—“no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right.” Instead, he sought comfort in perspective: in his mind’s eye, he mapped out on the ceiling the exact position the stars would be in that night, starting with Sirius, always the brightest; the Southern Cross; then the planets—Venus and Uranus—all easily visible in the sky over the island. He traced the constellations as they slid their way across the roof of the world from dusk till dawn. The precision of it, the quiet orderliness of the stars, gave him a sense of freedom. There was nothing he was going through that the stars had not seen before, somewhere, some time on this earth. Given enough time, their memory would close over his life like healing a wound. All would be forgotten, all suffering erased. Then he remembered the star atlas and Lucy’s inscription: “for ever and ever and ever and ever,” and the pain of the present flooded back.

  He said a prayer for Lucy. “Keep her safe. Let her have a happy life. Let her forget me.” And for Isabel, lost in the darkness, “Bring her home, back to her self, before it’s too late.”

  Bluey shuffled his feet and silently rehearsed his speech again as he stood at the Graysmarks’ front door. When it opened, Violet stood before him, her face wary.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, the formality a shield against any new unpleasantness.

  “Afternoon, Mrs. Graysmark.” When she made no acknowledgment, he said, “I’m Bl— Jeremiah Smart.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “I wonder if—do you think I could have a word with Mrs. Sherbourne?”

  “She’s not up to visitors.”

  “I—” He was about to give up, but remembered Tom’s face, and persisted, “I won’t hold her up. I just have to—”

  Isabel’s voice drifted out from the darkened lounge room. “Let him in, Ma.”

  Her mother scowled. “You’d better come through. Mind you wipe your feet,” and she stared at his boots while he wiped, and wiped them again, on the brush doormat, before following her.

  “It’s all right, Ma. No need to stay,” said Isabel from her chair.

  Isabel looked as bad as Tom
, Bluey thought: gray-skinned and empty. “Thanks for—for seeing me…” He faltered. The rim of his hat was damp where he clutched it. “I’ve been to see Tom.”

  Her face clouded and she turned away.

  “He’s in a real bad way, Mrs. S. A real bad way.”

  “And he sent you to tell me that, did he?”

  Bluey continued to fidget with his hat. “No. He asked me to give you a message.”

  “Oh?”

  “He said to tell you he understands.”

  She could not keep the surprise from her face. “Understands what?”

  “Didn’t say. Just said to tell you.”

  Her eyes remained fixed on Bluey, but she was not looking at him. After a long time, in which he blushed deeper at being stared at, she said, “Well then, you’ve told me.” She rose slowly to her feet. “I’ll show you out.”

  “But—well?” asked Bluey, shocked.

  “Well what?”

  “What should I tell him back? I mean—a message or something?” She didn’t answer. “He’s always been good to me, Mrs. S… You both have.”

  “It’s through here,” she said, guiding him to the front door.

  As she closed it behind him, she leaned her face against the wall, shaking.

  “Oh, Isabel, darling!” her mother exclaimed. “Come and have a lie-down, there’s a girl,” she said, and led her to her room.

  “I’m going to be sick again,” said Isabel, and Violet maneuvered the old china basin onto her daughter’s lap just in time.

  Bill Graysmark prided himself on being a good judge of people. As a headmaster, he got to observe human character in the process of formation. He was rarely wrong about which ones would do well for themselves in life, and which would come a cropper. Nothing in his gut told him Tom Sherbourne was a liar, or a violent man. Just to see him with Lucy was enough to show that the child hadn’t the least fear of him. And he couldn’t have asked for someone to cherish his daughter more.

  But, having lost the only grandchild he would ever have, Bill’s loyalty was to his one surviving child. His instinctive judgment was elbowed aside: blood was thicker than water—God knows he’d learned that the hard way.

  “It’s a terrible business, Vernon. A terrible business. Poor Isabel’s a wreck,” he said, as they sat in the corner of the pub.

  “As long as she gives evidence against Tom,” said Knuckey, “she’s got nothing to worry about.”

  Bill questioned him with a look.

  “She’s not criminally liable for anything he made her do, so she just needs to put her side of the story. She’s what we call ‘competent but not compellable’ as a witness for this sort of case,” the policeman explained. “Her evidence is admissible—the Court says it’s as good as anyone’s. But you can’t force a wife to testify against her husband. And of course, he’s got the right to remain silent. We can’t make him say anything against her either, if he doesn’t want to, and he’s made it quite clear he’s not going to say a word.” He paused. “Isabel—did she ever seem, well, uneasy about the child?”

  Bill shot him a glance. “Let’s not get dragged off the point here, Vernon.”

  Knuckey let it pass. He mused aloud, “Being a lighthouse keeper’s a position of trust, you know. Our whole country—the whole world, if you want to look at it that way—depends on them being men of good character: honest, decent. We can’t have them running around falsifying government records, coercing their wives. Let alone doing whatever it was he did to Frank Roennfeldt before he buried him.” He registered the alarm on Bill’s face, but continued, “No. Best put a stop to that sort of thing right away. Magistrate will be here in a few weeks for the committal hearing. Given what Sherbourne’s said so far, well… He’ll probably be sent to Albany, where the Court’s got power to dish out harsher penalties. Or they could really take against him and drag him up to Perth. Spragg’s looking for any hint that the fellow wasn’t dead when he reached Janus.” As he drained the last of his beer, he said, “Things don’t look good for him, Bill, I can tell you that much.”

  “Do you like books, darling?” Hannah ventured. She had been trying everything she could think of to build a bridge with her daughter. She herself had loved stories as a child, and one of the few memories she could still muster of her own mother was being read The Tale of Peter Rabbit, one sunny afternoon on the lawns of Bermondsey. She remembered clearly the pale blue silk of her mother’s blouse, the scent she wore—something floral and rare. And her mother’s smile—the greatest treasure of all. “What’s that word?” she was asking Hannah. “You know that word, don’t you?”

  “Carrot,” Hannah had proclaimed proudly.

  “Clever Hannah!” Her mother had smiled. “You’re as bright as a button.” The memory faded out there, like the end of a story, so she would start it again, over and over.

  Now she tried to tempt Grace with the same book. “You see? It’s about a rabbit. Come and read it with me.”

  But the child looked at her sullenly. “I want my Mamma. I hate the book!”

  “Oh, come on, you haven’t even looked at it.” She took a breath and tried again. “Just one page. Let’s read one page and if you don’t like it, we’ll stop.”

  The girl snatched the book from her hands and threw it at her, the corner striking Hannah’s cheek, narrowly missing her eye. Then she darted from the room, running straight into Gwen, who was coming in at the same moment.

  “Hey, hey there, missie!” said Gwen. “What have you done to Hannah? Go and say sorry!”

  “Leave her be, Gwen,” said Hannah. “She didn’t mean any harm. It was an accident.” She picked up the book and put it carefully on the shelf. “I thought I might try her with some chicken soup for dinner tonight. Everyone likes chicken soup, don’t they?” she asked, without much conviction.

  Hours later, she was on her hands and knees, mopping up the soup her daughter had vomited on the floor.

  “When you think about it, what did we ever really know about him? All the stories about being from Sydney—that could all be a furphy. All we know for certain is that he’s not from Partageuse.” Violet Graysmark was speaking to Bill when their daughter was safely asleep. “What sort of man is he? Waits until she can’t live without the child, then whisks her away.” Her eyes were on the framed photograph of her granddaughter. She had removed it from the mantelpiece, and was stowing it under the linen in her underwear drawer.

  “But, well, what do you make of it, Vi? Really?”

  “For heaven’s sake. Even if he didn’t hold a gun to her head, he’s still responsible. She was clearly beside herself with losing that third baby. And to blame her for it… It was up to him to stick to the rules then and there, if that’s what he was going to do. Not start backtracking years later, when so many people were affected. We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.”

  Bill said nothing, and as she rearranged the dainty bags of lavender, she continued, “It was rubbing salt in the wound, to put his own guilty conscience above what it would do to Isabel or to Lucy, or”—she put her hand on his—“to us, for that matter, dear. Not a thought for us in any of this business. As if we hadn’t had enough to deal with along the way.” A tear glistened in her eye. “Our little granddaughter, Bill. All that love…” She closed the drawer slowly.

  “Come on, Vi, dear. I know it’s hard on you. I know,” said her husband, and he hugged his wife close, noticing her hair was shot through with gray these days. The two of them stood in the embrace, Violet weeping, Bill saying, “I was such a fool to believe the bad days were over.” Without warning, a great sob escaped him, and he hugged her tighter still, as if it might physically halt this new shattering of his family.

  Having cleaned up the floor, and with her daughter finally asleep, Hannah sits by the little bed and gazes at her. In the day, it is impossible. Grace hides her face if she thinks she is being watched. She turns her back, or runs
into another room.

  Now, by the light of a single candle, Hannah can observe every aspect of her, and in the curve of her cheek, in the shape of her eyebrows, she sees Frank. It makes her heart swell, and she can almost believe that if she spoke to the sleeping figure, it would be Frank who answered. The flame, throwing shadows that twitch with the rhythm of her daughter’s breath, catches the golden glint of her hair, or the glistening of a fine filament of dribble that trails from the corner of the translucent pink mouth.

  Hannah is only slowly aware of the wish that has formed itself at the back of her mind: that Grace could stay asleep, for days, for years, if need be, until all memory of those people, of that life, has ebbed away. She feels that peculiar hollowness inside her, which came the first time she saw distress on the face of the returned child. If only Frank were here. He would know what to do, how to get through this. No matter how many times life knocked him down, he was always straight back on his feet, with a smile and no hard feelings.

  Hannah casts her mind back to see a tinier figure—her perfect baby, a week old—and hears again Frank’s lullaby, “Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf,” “Sleep, little child, sleep.” She recalls the way he would gaze into the cot and whisper to her in German. “I’m whispering her good things for her dreams,” he would say. “As long as one has good things in the mind, one can be happy. This I know.”

  Now, Hannah straightens her back. Just the memory is enough to give her courage to face the next day. Grace is her daughter. Something in the child’s soul will surely remember, recognize her, eventually. She just needs to take things a day at a time, as her father says. Soon enough, the little girl will be hers again, will be the joy she was on the day she was born.

  Quietly, she blows out the candle, and makes her way from the room by the light which slides along the floor from the open door. When she climbs into her own bed, she is struck by how empty it feels.