М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

The community of Partageuse had drifted together like so much dust in a breeze, settling in this spot where two oceans met, because there was fresh water and a natural harbour and good soil. Its port was no rival to Albany, but convenient for locals shipping timber or sandalwood or beef. Little businesses had sprung up and clung on like lichen on a rock-face, and the town had accumulated a school, a variety of churches with different hymns and architectures, a good few brick and stone houses and a lot more built of weatherboard and tin. It gradually produced various shops, a town hall, even a Dalgety’s stock and station agency. And pubs. Many pubs.

Throughout its infancy, the unspoken belief in Partageuse was that real things happened elsewhere. News of the outside world trickled in like rain dripped off the trees, a snippet here, a rumour there. The telegraph had speeded things up a bit when the line arrived in 1890, and since then a few folks had got telephones. The town had even sent troops off to the Transvaal in 1899 and lost a handful, but by and large, life in Partageuse was more of a sideshow, in which nothing too evil or too wonderful could ever happen.

Other towns in the West had known things different, of course: Kalgoorlie, for example, hundreds of miles inland, had underground rivers of gold crusted by desert. There, men wandered in with a wheelbarrow and a gold-pan and drove out in a motor car paid for by a nugget as big as a cat, in a town that only half ironically had streets with names like Croesus. The world wanted what Kalgoorlie had. The offerings of Partageuse, its timber and sandalwood, were small beer: it wasn’t flashy boom-time like Kal.

Then in 1914 things changed. Partageuse found that it too had something the world wanted. Men. Young men. Fit men. Men who had spent their lives swinging an axe or holding a plough and living it hard. Men who were the prime cut to be sacrificed on tactical altars a hemisphere away.

1914 was just flags and new-smelling leather on uniforms. It wasn’t until a year later that life started to feel different – started to feel as if maybe this wasn’t a sideshow after all – when, instead of getting back their precious, strapping husbands and sons, the women began to get telegrams. These bits of paper which could fall from stunned hands and blow about in the knife-sharp wind, which told you that the boy you’d suckled, bathed, scolded and cried over, was – well – wasn’t . Partageuse joined the world late and in a painful labour.

Of course, the losing of children had always been a thing that had to be gone through. There had never been any guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making. Look inside the cover of any family Bible and you’d see the facts. The graveyards, too, told the story of the babies whose voices, because of a snake bite or a fever or a fall from a wagon, had finally succumbed to their mothers’ beseeching to ‘hush, hush, little one’. The surviving children got used to the new way of setting the table with one place fewer, just as they grew accustomed to squishing along the bench when another sibling arrived. Like the wheat fields where more grain is sown than can ripen, God seemed to sprinkle extra children about, and harvest them according to some indecipherable, divine calendar. The town cemetery had always recorded this truthfully, and its headstones, some lolling like loose, grimy teeth, told frankly the stories of lives taken early by influenza and drownings, by timber whims and even lightning strikes. But in 1915, it began to lie. Boys and men from across the district were dying by the score, yet the graveyards said nothing.

The truth was that the younger bodies lay in mud far away. The authorities did what they could: where conditions and combat permitted, graves were dug; when it was possible to put together a set of limbs and identify them as a single soldier, every effort was made to do so, and to bury him with a funeral rite of sorts. Records were kept. Later, photographs were taken of the graves, and, for the sum of £2 1s 6d, a family could buy an official commemorative plaque. Later still, the war memorials would sprout from the earth, dwelling not on the loss, but on what the loss had won, and what a fine thing it was to be victorious. ‘Victorious and dead,’ some muttered, ‘is a poor sort of victory.’

As full of holes as a Swiss cheese the place was, without the men. Not that there had been conscription. No one had forced them to go and fight.

The cruellest joke was on the fellows everyone called ‘lucky’ because they got to come back at all: back to the kids spruced up for the welcome home, to the dog with a ribbon tied to his collar so he could join in the fun. The dog was usually the first to spot that something was up. Not just that the bloke was missing an eye or a leg; more that he was missing generally – still missing in action, though his body had never been lost sight of. Billy Wishart from Sadler’s mill, for example – three little ones and a wife as good as a man has a right to hope for, gassed and can’t hold a spoon any more without it sputtering like a chaff-cutter and spraying his soup all over the table. Can’t manage his buttons because of the shakes. When he’s alone at night with his wife he won’t get out of his clothes, and just hugs himself into a ball on the bed and cries. Or young Sam Dowsett, who survived the first Gallipoli landing only to lose both arms and half his face at Bullecourt. His widowed mother sits up at night worrying who’ll take care of her little boy once she’s gone. There’s not a girl in the district’d be silly enough to take him on now. Holes in Swiss cheese. Something missing.

For a long time, people wore the bewildered expression of players in a game where the rules had suddenly been changed. They tried hard to take comfort from the fact that the boys hadn’t died in vain: they had been part of a magnificent struggle for right. And there were moments where they could believe that and swallow down the angry, desperate screech that wanted to scrape its way out of their gullets like out of a mother bird.

After the war, people tried to make allowances for the men who’d come back a bit too fond of a drink or a stoush, or the ones who couldn’t hold down a job for more than a few days. Business in the town settled down after a fashion. Kelly still had the grocer’s. The butcher was still old Len Bradshaw, though Young Len was itching to take over: you could tell by the way he took up just a bit too much of his dad’s space at the counter when he leaned past him to pick up a chop or a pig’s cheek. Mrs Inkpen (who never seemed to have a Christian name, though her sister called her Popsy in private) took over the farrier’s when her husband Mack didn’t make it back from Gallipoli. She had a face as hard as the iron the lads used to nail onto the horses’ hooves, and a heart to match. Great hulks of men she had working for her, and it was all ‘Yes, Mrs Inkpen. No, Mrs Inkpen. Three bags full, Mrs Inkpen,’ even though any of them could have picked her up with barely more than a finger.

People knew who to give credit to, and who to ask for money up front; who to believe when they brought goods back and asked for a refund. Mouchemore’s draper’s and haberdasher’s did best around Christmas and Easter, though the run up to winter brought them a swift trade in knitting wool. Did a profitable line in ladies’ unmentionables, too. Larry Mouchemore used to pat his pointed moustache as he corrected mispronunciations of his name (‘It’s like “move”, not like “mouse”,’), and watched with fear and bile as Mrs Thurkle got it into her head to open a furrier’s next door. A fur shop? In Point Partageuse? If you please! He smiled benignly when it closed within six months, buying up the remaining stock ‘as an act of neighbourly charity’ and selling it at a tidy profit to the captain of a steamer bound for Canada, who said they were mad for that sort of thing there.