М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

Hannah wasn’t sure how to put her question. ‘How long will they go to prison for?’

Knuckey looked at her. ‘The rest of their lives.’

‘ The rest of their lives? ’

‘I’m not talking about the gaol time. Those two will never be free now. They’ll never get away from what’s happened.’

‘Neither will I, Sergeant.’

Knuckey sized her up, and decided to take a chance. ‘Look, you don’t get a Military Cross for being a coward. And you don’t get a Bar to go with it unless – well, unless you saved a lot of your side’s lives by risking your own. Tom Sherbourne’s a decent man, I reckon. I’d go so far as to say a good man, Mrs Roennfeldt. And Isabel’s a good girl. Three miscarriages she had out there, with no one to help her. You don’t go through the things those two have been through without being bent out of shape.’

Hannah looked at him, her hands still, waiting to see where he was going.

‘It’s a God-awful shame to see a fellow like that in the position he’s in. Not to mention his wife.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m not saying anything that won’t occur to you in a few years’ time. But it’ll be too late by then.’

She turned her head a fraction, as if to understand him better.

‘I’m just asking, is it really what you want? A trial? Prison? You’ve got your daughter back. There might be some other way …’

‘Some other way?’

‘Spragg’ll lose interest now that he’s had to drop his murder malarkey. As long as this is still a Partageuse matter, I’ve got some leeway. And maybe Captain Hasluck could be persuaded to put in a word for him with the Lights. If you were minded to speak up for him too. Ask for clemency …’

Hannah’s face reddened again, and without warning she jumped to her feet. Words that had been building up for weeks, for years, words Hannah didn’t know were there, burst from her. ‘I’m sick of this! I’m sick of being pushed around, of having my life ruined by the whims of other people. You have no idea what it’s like to be in my position, Sergeant Knuckey! How dare you come into my house and make such a suggestion? How bloody dare you!’

‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘Let me finish! I’ve had enough, do you understand me?’ Hannah was shouting now. ‘No one is ever going to tell me how to live my life again! First it’s my father telling me who I can marry, then it’s the whole bloody town turning on Frank like a mob of savages. Then Gwen tries to convince me to give Grace back to Isabel Graysmark, and I agree – I actually agree! Don’t look so shocked: you don’t know everything that goes on around here!

‘And it turns out the woman lied to my face! How dare you? How dare you presume to tell me, to even suggest to me, that I should, yet again, put someone else first!’ She pulled herself up straight. ‘Get out of my house! Now! Just go! Before I – ’ she picked up the thing nearest to hand, a cut glass vase, ‘throw this at you!’

Knuckey was too slow in getting to his feet and the vase caught him on the shoulder, ricocheting against the skirting board, where it smashed in a dazzle of shards.

Hannah stopped, not sure whether she was imagining what she had done. She stared at him, waiting for a clue.

He stood perfectly still. The curtain flapped with the breeze. A fat blowfly buzzed against the fly wire. A last fragment of glass gave a dull tinkle as it finally succumbed to gravity.

After a long silence, Knuckey said, ‘Make you feel better?’

Still Hannah’s mouth was open. She had never in her life hit anyone. She had rarely sworn. And she had definitely never done either to a police officer.

‘I’ve had a lot worse thrown at me.’

Hannah looked at the floor. ‘I apologise.’

The policeman bent to pick up some of the bigger pieces of glass, and put them on the table. ‘Don’t want the little one cutting her feet.’

‘She’s at the river with her grandfather,’ muttered Hannah. Gesturing vaguely towards the glass, she added, ‘I don’t usually …’ but the sentence trailed off.

‘You’ve had enough. I know. Just as well it was me you threw it at and not Sergeant Spragg.’ He allowed a trace of a smile at the thought.

‘I shouldn’t have spoken like that.’

‘People do, sometimes. People who’ve had less to contend with than you. We’re not always in full control of our actions. I’d be out of a job if we were.’ He picked up his hat. ‘I’ll leave you in peace. Let you think about things. But there isn’t a lot of time left. Once the magistrate gets here and sends them off to Albany, there’s nothing I can do about it.’

He walked through the door into the dazzle of daylight, where the sun was burning the last of the clouds away from the east.

Hannah fetched the dustpan and brush, her body moving without any apparent instruction. She swept up the shards of glass, checking carefully for any overlooked splinters. She took the dustpan into the kitchen and emptied it onto old newspaper, wrapping the glass safely and taking it outside to the rubbish bin. She thought of the story of Abraham and Isaac, how God tested Abraham right to the limit, to see whether he would surrender the thing dearest to him in the world. Only as the knife was poised above the child’s neck did God direct him to a lesser sacrifice. She still had her daughter.

She was about to go back inside when she caught sight of the Cape gooseberry bush, and remembered that terrible day after Grace’s return when her daughter had wedged herself behind it. As she sank to her knees on the grass and sobbed, the memory of a conversation with Frank floated into her awareness. ‘But how? How can you just get over these things, darling?’ she had asked him. ‘You’ve had so much strife but you’re always happy. How do you do it?’

‘I choose to,’ he said. ‘I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.’

‘But it’s not that easy.’

He smiled that Frank smile. ‘Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.’ He laughed, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow. ‘I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a very proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No,’ his voice became sober, ‘we always have a choice. All of us.’

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 gaol. 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.