М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

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 gaol.’ 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 gaol 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 defence. In defence of people who make mistakes.

‘It was the only way I could honour 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 apologised. 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 harbour 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 at home …’ Septimus was saying, giving his granddaughter’s toe a wiggle as she sat on his knee on the verandah. ‘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.