М Стедман - The Light Between Oceans - A Novel

‘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 defence, urging clemency. And Bunbury gaol, 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 spiralling to the grass. ‘I wanted to make you hurt, Tom, like you hurt me. Do you realise 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.