The Light Between Oceans: A Novel

by M. L. Stedman

  Now, she lay down on her belly in the grass, feeling the strength of the sun sap hers. Exhausted, half aware of the bees and the scent of dandelions beside her, half aware of the sour sops under her fingers where the grass was overgrown, finally she slept.

  Tom still feels the touch of Isabel’s wet skin, even though the cell is now drained, his clothes dry, and his reunion with her yesterday evening just a memory. He wants it both to be real, and to be an illusion. If it’s real, his Izzy has come back to him, as he prayed she would. If it’s an illusion, she’s still safe from the prospect of prison. Relief and dread mix in his gut, and he wonders if he will ever feel her touch again.

  In her bedroom, Violet Graysmark is weeping. “Oh, Bill. I just don’t know what to think, what to do. Our little girl could go to jail. The pity of it.”

  “We’ll get through it, dear. She’ll get through it, too, somehow.” He does not mention his conversation with Vernon Knuckey. Doesn’t want to get her hopes up. But there might be the shadow of a chance.

  Isabel sits alone under the jacaranda. Her grief for Lucy is as strong as ever: a pain that has no location and no cure. Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream. The pain on her mother’s face, the hurt in her father’s eyes, Lucy’s distress, the memory of Tom, handcuffed: she tries to fend off the army of images, and imagines what prison will be like. Finally, she has no more strength. No more fight in her. Her life is just fragments, that she will never be able to reunite. Her mind collapses under the weight of it, and her thoughts descend into a deep, black well, where shame and loss and fear begin to drown her.

  Septimus and his granddaughter are by the river, watching the boats. “Tell you who used to be a good sailor: my Hannah. When she was little. She was good at everything as a little one. Bright as a button. Always kept me on my toes, just like you.” He tousled her hair. “My saving Grace, you are!”

  “No, I’m Lucy!” she insists.

  “You were called Grace the day you were born.”

  “But I want to be Lucy.”

  He eyes her up, taking the measure of her. “Tell you what, let’s do a business deal. We’ll split the difference, and I’ll call you Lucy-Grace. Shake hands on it?”

  Hannah was awoken from her sleep on the grass by a shadow over her face. She opened her eyes to find Grace standing a few feet away, staring. Hannah sat up and smoothed her hair, disoriented.

  “Told you that’d get her attention,” laughed Septimus. Grace gave a faint smile.

  Hannah began to stand but Septimus said, “No, stay there. Now, Princess, why don’t you sit on the grass and tell Hannah all about the boats. How many did you see?”

  The little girl hesitated.

  “Go on, remember how you counted them on your fingers?”

  She held up her hands. “Six,” she said, showing five fingers on one hand, and three on the other, before folding two of them down again.

  Septimus said, “I’ll go and have a rummage in the kitchen and get us some cordial. You stay and tell her about the greedy seagull you saw with that big fish.”

  Grace sat on the grass, a few feet from Hannah. Her blonde hair shone in the sun. Hannah was caught: she wanted to tell her father about Sergeant Knuckey’s visit, ask his advice. But she had never seen Grace this ready to talk, to play, and couldn’t bear to ruin the moment. Out of habit, she compared the child with her memory of her baby, trying to recapture her lost daughter. She stopped. “We always have a choice.” The words ran through her mind.

  “Shall we make a daisy chain?” she asked.

  “What’s a daisy train?”

  Hannah smiled. “Chain. Here, we’ll make you a crown,” she said, and started to pick the dandelions beside her.

  As she showed Grace how to pierce a stem with her thumbnail and thread the next stem through it, she watched her daughter’s hands, the way they moved. They were not the hands of her baby. They were the hands of a little girl she would have to get to know all over again. And who would have to get to know her, too. “We always have a choice.” A lightness fills her chest, as if a great breath has rushed through her.

  CHAPTER 36

  As the sun dangled above the horizon, at the end of the jetty at Partageuse Tom stood waiting. He caught sight of Hannah, approaching slowly. Six months had passed since he had last seen her, and she seemed transformed: her face fuller, more relaxed. When she finally spoke, her voice was calm. “Well?”

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry. And to thank you. For what you did.”

  “I don’t want your thanks,” she said.

  “If you hadn’t spoken up for us it would have been a lot more than three months I spent in Bunbury jail.” Tom said the last two words with difficulty: the syllables felt thick with shame. “And Isabel’s suspended sentence—that was mostly thanks to you, my lawyer said.”

  Hannah looked off into the distance. “Sending her to jail wouldn’t have fixed anything. Nor would keeping you there for years. What’s done’s done.”

  “All the same, it can’t have been an easy decision for you.”

  “The first time I saw you, it was because you came to save me. When I was a complete stranger, and you owed me nothing. That counts for something, I suppose. And I know that if you hadn’t found my daughter, she would have died. I tried to remember that too.” She paused. “I don’t forgive you—either of you. Being lied to like that… But I’m not going to get dragged under by the past. Look what happened to Frank because of people doing that.” She stopped, twisting her wedding ring for a moment. “And the irony is, Frank would have been the first one to forgive you. He’d have been the first one to speak in your defense. In defense of people who make mistakes.

  “It was the only way I could honor him: doing what I know he would have done.” She looked at him, her eyes glistening. “I loved that man.”

  They stood in silence, looking out at the water. Eventually, Tom spoke. “The years you missed with Lucy—we can never give them back. She’s a wonderful little girl.” Hannah’s expression made him add, “We’ll never come near her again, I promise you.”

  His next words caught in his throat, and he tried again. “I’ve got no right to ask anything. But if one day—maybe when she’s grown up—she remembers us and asks about us, if you can bear to, tell her we loved her. Even though we didn’t have the right.”

  Hannah stood, weighing something in her mind.

  “Her birthday’s the eighteenth of February. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “No.” Tom’s voice was quiet.

  “And when she was born, she had the cord wrapped around her neck twice. And Frank… Frank used to sing her to sleep. You see? There are things I know about her that you don’t.”

  “Yes.” He nodded gently.

  “I blame you. And I blame your wife. Of course I do.” She looked straight at him. “I was so scared that my daughter might never love me.”

  “Love’s what children do.”

  She turned her eyes to a dinghy nudging the jetty with each wave, and frowned at a new thought. “No one ever mentions it around here—how Frank and Grace came to be in that boat in the first place. Not a soul ever apologized. Even my father doesn’t like to talk about it. At least you’ve said you’re sorry. Paid the price for what you did to him.”

  After a while, she said, “Where are you living?”

  “In Albany. Ralph Addicott helped find me work at the harbor there when I got out, three months ago now. Means I can be near my wife. The doctors said she needed complete rest. For the moment, she’s better off in the nursing home, where she can be properly cared for.” He cleared his throat. “Best let you go. I hope life turns out well for you, and for Lu—for Grace.”

  “Goodbye,” Hannah said, and made her way back down the jetty.

  The setting sun dipped the gum leaves in gold as Hannah walked up the path at her father’s house to collect her daughter.

  “This little piggy stayed home…�
�� Septimus was saying, giving his granddaughter’s toe a wiggle as she sat on his knee on the veranda. “Oh, look who’s here, Lucy-Grace.”

  “Mummy! Where did you go?”

  Hannah was struck anew by her daughter’s version of Frank’s smile, Frank’s eyes, of his fair hair. “Maybe I’ll tell you one day, little one,” she said, and kissed her lightly. “Shall we go home now?”

  “Can we come back to Granddad tomorrow?”

  Septimus laughed. “You can visit Granddad any time you like, Princess. Any time you like.”

  Dr. Sumpton had been right—given time, the little girl had gradually gotten used to her new—or perhaps it was her old—life. Hannah held out her arms and waited for her daughter to climb into them. Her own father smiled. “That’s the way, girlie. That’s the way.”

  “Come on, darling, off we go.”

  “I want to walk.”

  Hannah put her down and the child allowed herself to be led out through the gate and along the road. Hannah kept her pace slow, so that Lucy-Grace could keep up. “See the kookaburra?” she asked. “He looks like he’s smiling, doesn’t he?”

  The girl paid little attention, until a machine-gun burst of laughter came from the bird as they drew closer. She stopped in astonishment, and watched the creature, which she had never seen so close up. Again, it rattled off its raucous call.

  “He’s laughing. He must like you,” said Hannah. “Or maybe it’s going to rain. The kookas always laugh when the rain’s coming. Can you make his sound? He goes like this,” and she broke into a fair imitation of its call, which her mother had taught her decades ago. “Go on, you have a go at it.”

  The girl could not manage the complicated call. “I’ll be a seagull,” she said, and came out with a pitch-perfect imitation of the bird she knew best, a shrill, harsh barracking. “Now you do it,” she said, and Hannah laughed at her own unsuccessful attempts.

  “You’ll have to teach me, sweetheart,” she said, and the two of them walked on together.

  On the jetty, Tom thinks back to the first time he saw Partageuse. And the last. Between them, Fitzgerald and Knuckey had traded off charges and whittled down Spragg’s “kitchen sink.” The lawyer had been eloquent in showing that the child-stealing charge wouldn’t stand and that all related charges must therefore also fall. The guilty plea to the remaining administrative counts, tried in Partageuse rather than Albany, could still have brought a severe penalty, had Hannah not spoken articulately in their defense, urging clemency. And Bunbury jail, halfway up to Perth, was less brutal than Fremantle or Albany would have been.

  Now, as the sun dissolves into the water, Tom is aware of a nagging reflex. Months after leaving Janus, his legs still prepare to climb the hundreds of stairs to light up. Instead, he sits on the end of the jetty, watching the last few gulls on the lilting water.

  He considers the world that has carried on without him, its stories unfolding, whether he is there to see them or not. Lucy is probably already tucked into bed. He imagines her face, left naked by sleep. He wonders what she looks like now, and whether she dreams about her time on Janus; whether she misses her light. He thinks of Isabel, too, in her little iron bed in the nursing home, weeping for her daughter, for her old life.

  Time will bring her back. He promises her. He promises himself. She will mend.

  The train for Albany will be leaving in an hour. He will wait until dark to walk through town, back to the station.

  In the garden of the nursing home at Albany a few weeks later, Tom sat at one end of the wrought-iron bench, Isabel at the other. The pink zinnias were past their best now, ragged and tinged with brown. Snails had started on the leaves of the asters, and their petals had been carried off in clumps by the southerly wind.

  “At least you’re starting to fill out again, Tom. You looked so dreadful—when I first saw you again. Are you managing all right?” Isabel’s tone was concerned, though distant.

  “Don’t worry about me. It’s you we’ve got to concentrate on now.” He watched a cricket settle on the arm of the bench, and start up a chirrup. “They say you’re all right to leave whenever you want, Izz.”

  She bowed her head and tucked a strand of hair behind an ear. “There’s no going back, you know. There’s no undoing what happened—what we’ve both been through,” she said. Tom looked at her steadily, but she didn’t meet his gaze as she murmured, “And besides, what’s left?”

  “Left of what?”

  “Of anything. What’s left of—our life?”

  “There’s no going back on the Lights, if that’s what you mean.”

  Isabel sighed sharply. “It’s not what I mean, Tom.” She pulled a piece of honeysuckle from the old wall beside her, and examined it. As she shredded a leaf, then another, the fine pieces fell in a jagged mosaic on her skirt. “Losing Lucy—it’s as if something has been amputated. Oh, I wish I could find the words to explain it.”

  “The words don’t matter.” He reached a hand to her, but she shrank away.

  “Tell me you feel the same,” she said.

  “How does saying that make anything better, Izz?”

  She pushed the pieces into a neat pile. “You don’t even understand what I’m talking about, do you?”

  He frowned, struggling, and she looked away at a billowing white cloud which threatened the sun. “You’re a hard man to know. Sometimes living with you was just lonely.”

  He paused. “What do you want me to say to that, Izzy?”

  “I wanted us to be happy. All of us. Lucy got under your skin. Opened up your heart somehow, and it was wonderful to see.” There was a long silence, before her expression changed with the return of a memory. “All that time, and I didn’t know what you’d done. That every time you touched me, every time you—I had no idea you’d been keeping secrets.”

  “I tried to talk about it, Izz. You wouldn’t let me.”

  She jumped to her feet, the fragments of leaf spiraling to the grass. “I wanted to make you hurt, Tom, like you hurt me. Do you realize that? I wanted revenge. Haven’t you got anything to say about that?”

  “I know you did, sweet. I know. But that time’s over.”

  “What, so you forgive me, just like that? Like it’s nothing?”

  “What else is there to do? You’re my wife, Isabel.”

  “You mean you’re stuck with me…”

  “I mean I promised to spend my life with you. I still want to spend my life with you. Izz, I’ve learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future you’ve got to give up hope of ever changing your past.”

  She turned away, and pulled some more honeysuckle from its vine. “What are we going to do? How are we going to live? I can’t go on looking at you every day and resenting you for what you did. Being ashamed of myself, too.”

  “No, love, you can’t.”

  “Everything’s ruined. Nothing can ever be put right.”

  Tom rested a hand on hers. “We’ve put things right as well as we can. That’s all we can do. We have to live with things the way they are now.”

  She wandered along the path beside the grass, leaving Tom on the seat. After a full circuit of the lawn, she returned. “I can’t go back to Partageuse. I don’t belong there any more.” She shook her head and watched the progress of the cloud. “I don’t know where I belong these days.”

  Tom stood up, and put his hand on her arm. “You belong with me, Izz. Doesn’t matter where we are.”

  “Is that true any more, Tom?”

  She was holding the strand of honeysuckle, stroking the leaves absently. Tom plucked one of the creamy blooms from it. “We used to eat these, when we were kids. Did you?”

  “Eat them?”

  He bit the narrow end of the flower and sucked the droplet of nectar from its base. “You only taste it for a second. But it’s worth it.” He picked another, and put it to her lips to bite.

  CHAPTER 37

  Hopetoun, 28th August 1950

  There was nothing much
in Hopetoun now, except for the long jetty that still whispered of the glory days when the town served as the port for the Goldfields. The port itself had closed in 1936, a few years after Tom and Isabel had moved here. Tom’s brother, Cecil, had outlived his father by barely a couple of years, and when he died, the money was enough to buy a farm outside the town. Their property was small by local standards, but still edged the coast for several miles, and the house stood on a ridge just inland, looking down over the sweep of beach below. They lived a quiet life. They went into town occasionally. Farmhands helped with the work.

  Hopetoun, on a wide bay nearly four hundred miles east of Partageuse, was far enough away that they weren’t likely to bump into anyone from there, but close enough for Isabel’s parents to make the journey at Christmas, in the years before they died. Tom and Ralph wrote to each other once in a while—just a greeting, short, plain, but deeply felt all the same. Ralph’s daughter and her family had moved into his little cottage after Hilda died, and looked after him well, though his health was frail these days. When Bluey married Kitty Kelly, Tom and Isabel sent a gift, but they didn’t attend the wedding. Neither of them ever returned to Partageuse.

  And the best part of twenty years flowed past like a quiet country river, deepening its path with time.

  The clock chimes. Almost time to leave. It’s a short drive to town these days, with the sealed roads. Not like when they first arrived. As Tom ties his tie, a stranger with gray hair catches a glimpse of him, just a flick of an eye, then he remembers it’s himself in the mirror. Now, the suit hangs more loosely on his frame, and there is a gap between the collar and the neck inside it.

  Through the window, the waves rise, sacrificing themselves in a blizzard of white, far out to sea. The ocean gives not the slightest hint that any time has passed, ever. The only sound is the buffeting of the August gales.