The Light Between Oceans (24 page)

Septimus Potts’s delight at the inkling that his daughter had found a local man to step out with turned to dismay when he learned he was the baker. But he remembered his own humble beginnings, and was determined not to hold the man’s trade against him. When, however, he found out he was German, or practically German, his dismay became disgust. The spats with Hannah that had started soon after the courtship began made each of them, stubborn in heart and head, more entrenched in their position.

Within two months, things had come to a head. Septimus Potts paced the drawing room, trying to take in the news. ‘Are you out of your mind, girl?’

‘It’s what I want, Dad.’

‘
Marrying
a Hun!’ He glanced at Ellen’s photo in its ornate silver frame on the mantelpiece. ‘Your mother would never forgive me, for a start! I promised her I’d bring you up properly …’

‘And you have, Dad, you have.’

‘Well something went up the spout if you’re talking about hitching up with a German bloody baker.’

‘He’s Austrian.’

‘What difference does that make? Do I have to take you down to the Repat Home, and show you the boys still gibbering like idiots because of the gas? Me of all people – I paid for the bloody hospital!’

‘You know full well Frank wasn’t even in the war – he was interned. He’s never hurt a soul.’

‘Hannah, show some sense. You’re a decent-looking girl. There’s plenty of fellows hereabouts – hell, in Perth or Sydney or even Melbourne – would be honoured to have you as a wife.’

‘Honoured to have your money, you mean.’

‘So we’re back on that now, are we? You’re too good for my money, are you, my lass?’

‘It’s not that, Dad …’

‘I worked like a dog to get where I am. I’m not ashamed of what I am or where I came from. But you – you’ve got a chance of something better.’

‘I just want a chance to live my own life.’

‘Look, if you want to do charity work you can go and live out with the natives on the mission. Or work in the orphanage. You don’t have to bloody marry it, your charity career.’

His daughter’s face was red, her heart racing at this last slight – not only at the outrage of it, but somewhere beneath that, at the unformed fear that it might be true. What if she had only said yes to Frank to spite the suitors who chased her money? Or if she was just wanting to make up to him for all he had suffered? Then she thought of how his smile made her feel, and that way he lifted his chin to consider things she asked him, and felt reassured.

‘He’s a decent man, Dad. Give him a chance.’

‘Hannah.’ Septimus put a hand on her shoulder. ‘You know you mean the world to me.’ He stroked her head. ‘You wouldn’t let your mother brush your hair, as a little ’un, did you know that? You’d say, “Pa! I want Pa to do it!” And I would. You’d sit on my knee by the fire in the evening, and I’d brush your hair while the crumpets toasted on the flames. We’d make sure Mum didn’t see where the butter had dripped on your dress. And your hair would shine like a Persian princess.

‘Just wait. Just a while,’ her father pleaded.

If all he needed was time to get used to the idea, time to feel differently about it … Hannah was about to concede, when he
continued,
‘You’ll see things my way – see you’re making a bad mistake –’ he took one of the deep, puffed-out breaths she associated with his business decisions, ‘and you’ll thank your lucky stars I talked you out of it.’

She pulled away. ‘I won’t be patronised. You can’t stop me from marrying Frank.’

‘Can’t save you from it, you mean.’

‘I’m old enough to marry without your consent and I will if I want.’

‘You may not give a damn what this will mean for me, but have a care for your sister. You know how folks round here will take this.’

‘Folks round here are xenophobic hypocrites!’

‘Oh, that university education was worth every penny. So now you can put your father down with your fancy words.’ He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I never thought I’d hear myself say this, my girl, but if you marry that man it will be without my blessing. And without my money.’

With the composure that had first drawn Septimus to her mother, Hannah stood straight and very still. ‘If that’s how you want it to be, Dad, that’s how it will be.’

Following a small wedding, which Septimus refused to attend, the couple lived in Frank’s rickety clapboard house at the edge of the town. Life was frugal, there was no doubt. Hannah gave piano lessons and taught some of the timber workers to read and write. One or two took a nasty pleasure in the thought that they employed, if just for an hour a week, the daughter of the man who employed them. But by and large, people respected Hannah’s kindness and straightforward courtesy.

She was happy. She had found a husband who seemed to understand her completely, who could discuss philosophy and classical
mythology,
whose smile dispersed worry and made hardship easy to bear.

As the years passed, a measure of tolerance was afforded to the baker whose accent never entirely disappeared. Some, like Billy Wishart’s wife, or Joe Rafferty and his mother, still made a performance of crossing the street when they saw him, but mostly, things settled down. By 1925, Hannah and Frank decided that life was certain enough, money secure enough, to bring a baby into the world, and in February 1926 their daughter was born.

Hannah recalled Frank’s lilting tenor voice, as he rocked the cradle. ‘
Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf. Dein Vater hüt’ die Schaf. Die Mutter schüttelt’s Bäumelein, da fällt herab ein Träumelein. Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf
.’

In that little room lit by a paraffin lamp, with a back that was aching, on a chair that needed mending, he had told her, ‘I cannot imagine a more fortunate existence.’ The glow in his face was not from the lamp but from the tiny creature in the cot, whose breathing made that tell-tale change in rhythm as she finally surrendered to sleep.

That March, the altar had been decorated with vases of daisies and stephanotis from Frank and Hannah’s garden, and the sweet scent floated all the way across the empty pews to the back of the church. Hannah wore pale blue with a matching low-brimmed felt hat, and Frank his wedding suit, which still fitted, four years on. His cousin Bettina and her husband Wilf had come from Kalgoorlie to be godparents, and smiled indulgently at the tiny infant in Hannah’s arms.

Reverend Norkells stood beside the font, fumbling slightly as he pulled one of the brightly coloured tassels to turn to the correct page of the baptism rite. The clumsiness may have been connected to the whiff of alcohol on his breath. ‘Hath this child already been baptised or no?’ he began.

It was a hot, brooding Saturday afternoon. A fat blowfly buzzed about, coming in periodically to drink at the font, only to be chased away by the godparents. It came in once too often and, swatted by Wilf with his wife’s fan, plummeted into the holy water like a drunk into a ditch. The vicar fished it out without a pause as he asked, ‘Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all his works …?’

‘I renounce them all,’ the godparents replied in unison.

As they spoke, the door to the church creaked in response to a tentative push. Hannah’s heart lifted at the sight of her father, led by Gwen, making his way slowly to kneel in the last pew. Hannah and her father had not spoken since the day she left home to be married, and she had expected him to respond to the christening invitation in the usual way – with silence. ‘I’ll try, Hanny,’ Gwen had promised. ‘But you know what a stubborn old mule he is. I promise you this, though. I’ll be there, whatever he says. This has gone on long enough.’

Now, Frank turned to Hannah. ‘You see?’ he whispered. ‘God makes everything work out in His own time.’

‘Oh merciful God, grant that the old Adam in this child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in her …’ The words echoed off the walls, and the baby snuffled and wriggled as her mother held her. When she started to grizzle, Hannah put the knuckle of her little finger to the tiny lips, which sucked contentedly. The rite continued, and Norkells took the child and said to the godparents, ‘Name this child.’

‘Grace Ellen.’

‘Grace Ellen, I baptise thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’

Throughout the rest of the service, the infant stared at the brightly coloured glass in the windows, as fascinated as she would be when, two years later, she gazed at it again from beside the font, in another woman’s arms.

When it was over, Septimus remained in his pew. As Hannah walked slowly down the aisle, the baby stirred in her blanket, winding her head a little this way and that. Hannah stopped beside her father, who stood up as she offered him his grandchild. He hesitated, before putting out his arms to cradle the baby.

‘Grace Ellen. Your mother would be touched,’ was all he could manage before a tear escaped, and he gazed with awe at the child.

Hannah took his arm. ‘Come and see Frank,’ she said, as she led him up the aisle.

‘Please, I’d like you to come in,’ Hannah said later, as her father stood at her gate with Gwen. Septimus was hesitant. The little clapboard cottage, barely more than a shack, reminded him of the Flindells’ lean-to affair in which he had grown up. Going through the door took him back fifty years in a couple of steps.

In the front room, he talked stiffly but politely to Frank’s cousins. He complimented Frank on the excellent christening cake, and the small but fine assortment of food. Out of the corner of his eye he kept sizing up the cracks in the plaster, the holes in the rug.

As he was leaving, he drew Hannah aside and took out his wallet. ‘Let me give you a little something for—’

Hannah gently pushed his hand back down. ‘It’s all right, Dad. We do all right,’ she said.

‘Of course you do. But now that you’ve got a little one …’

She put a hand on his arm. ‘Really. It’s kind of you, but we can manage on our own. Come and visit soon.’

He smiled and kissed the baby on the forehead, then his daughter. ‘Thank you, Hanny.’ Then in hardly more than a mumble, he said, ‘Ellen would have wanted her granddaughter watched over. And I’ve – I’ve missed you.’

Within a week, gifts for the baby were being delivered from Perth, from Sydney and beyond. A cot, a mahogany chest of
drawers.
Dresses and bonnets and things for the bath. The granddaughter of Septimus Potts would have the best that money could buy.

‘
Your husband is at peace in God’s hands
.’ Because of the letter, Hannah goes through both a mourning and a renewal. God has taken her husband, but has saved her daughter. She weeps not just with sorrow, but with shame, at her memories of that day.

The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth, or of the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.

That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame. Men who came back from the war with stories they could have told about the desperate failings of comrades at the point of death say only that they died bravely. To the outside world, no soldier ever visited a brothel or acted like a savage or ran and hid from the enemy. Being over there was punishment enough. When wives have to hide the mortgage money or the kitchen knives from a husband who’s lost the thread, they do it without a word, sometimes acknowledging it not even to themselves.