The Light Between Oceans (26 page)

‘And suddenly they’re great hulks of lads like you!’ teased Ralph. As he stepped onto the jetty, he had something in one hand behind his back. ‘Now, who’s going to help me take the things off the boat?’

‘Me!’ said Lucy.

Ralph gave Isabel a wink as he produced a tin of peaches from behind his back. ‘Well then, here’s something very, very heavy for you to carry.’

Lucy took the tin with both hands.

‘Gosh, Luce, better be careful with that! Let’s take it up to the house.’ Isabel turned to the men. ‘Give me something to take up if you like, Ralph.’ He clambered back to fish out the mail and a few light parcels. ‘See you up at the house in a bit. I’ll have the kettle on.’

After lunch, as the adults finished cups of tea at the kitchen table, Tom said, ‘Lucy’s a bit quiet …’

‘Hmmm,’ said Isabel. ‘She’s supposed to be finishing her drawing for Mum and Dad. I’ll go and check.’ But before she could leave the room, Lucy entered the kitchen, dressed in a petticoat of Isabel’s that trailed to the floor, a pair of her shoes with heels, and the string of blue glass beads that Isabel’s mother had sent out with that morning’s boat.

‘Lucy!’ said Isabel. ‘Have you been in my things?’

‘No,’ said the girl, eyes wide.

Isabel blushed. ‘I don’t usually parade my underwear around,’ she said to the visitors. ‘Come on, Lucy, you’ll catch your death of cold like that. Let’s get your clothes back on. And let’s have a talk about going through Mamma’s things. And about telling the truth.’ Smiling as she left the room, she didn’t catch the brief expression that crossed Tom’s features at her last remark.

Lucy trots happily behind Isabel as they go to gather the eggs. She is mesmerised by the newly hatched chicks which appear from time to time, and holds them under her chin to feel their golden fluffiness. When she helps pick carrots and parsnips, sometimes she tugs so hard that she tumbles over backwards, showered with soil. ‘Lucy-Goosy!’ laughs Isabel. ‘Up you get now.’

At the piano, she sits on Isabel’s knee and bashes away at notes. Isabel holds her index finger and helps her press out ‘Three Blind Mice’, then the child says, ‘By myself, Mamma,’ and starts her cacophony again.

She sits for hours on the kitchen floor, wielding coloured pencils on the back of obsolete CLS forms, producing random squiggles to which she proudly points and says, ‘This is Mamma,
Dadda,
and Lulu Lighthouse.’ She takes for granted the 130-foot castle-tower in her backyard, with a star in it. Along with words such as ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ – fanciful concepts from books – she masters the more concrete ‘lens’ and ‘prism’ and ‘refraction’. ‘It’s
my
star,’ she tells Isabel one evening as she points to it. ‘Dadda gave it to me.’

She tells Tom snatches of stories, about fish, about seagulls, about ships. As they walk down to the beach, she delights in taking a hand each from Tom and Isabel and getting them to swing her in the air between them. ‘Lulu Lighthouse!’ is her favourite phrase, and she uses it when she draws herself in splodgy pictures, or describes herself in stories.

The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom. Existence here is on a scale of giants. Time is in the millions of years; rocks which from a distance look like dice cast against the shore are boulders hundreds of feet wide, licked round by millennia, tumbled onto their sides so that layers become vertical stripes.

Tom watches Lucy and Isabel as they paddle in Paradise Pool, the girl enraptured by the splashing and the saltiness and the starfish she has found, brilliant blue. He watches her fingers clutch the creature, her face alight with excitement and pride, as though she has made it herself. ‘Dadda, look. My starfish!’ Tom has trouble keeping both time scales in focus: the existence of an island and the existence of a child.

It astounds him that the tiny life of the girl means more to him than all the millennia before it. He struggles to make sense of his emotions – how he can feel both tenderness and unease when she kisses him goodnight, or presents a grazed knee for
him
to kiss better with the magic power that only a parent has.

For Isabel, too, he is torn between the desire he feels for her, the love, and the sense that he cannot breathe. The two sensations grate at one another, unresolved.

Sometimes, alone in the light, he finds his mind seeking out Hannah Roennfeldt. Is she tall? Is she plump? Is there some trace of her in Lucy’s face? When he tries to imagine her, he sees only hands, covering a weeping face. He shudders, and returns to his immediate task.

This child is healthy and happy and adored, in this little world beyond the reach of newspapers and gossip. Beyond the reach of reality. There are weeks at a time when Tom can almost rest in the story of a normal, happy family, as if it is some kind of opiate.

‘We mustn’t let Dadda know. Not until I tell you.’

Lucy looked at Isabel gravely. ‘I mustn’t tell,’ she said, nodding. ‘Can I have a biscuit?’

‘In a minute. Let’s just finish wrapping these.’ The September boat in 1928 had brought several extra parcels, which Bluey had managed to smuggle to Isabel in moments when Ralph distracted Tom with unloading. Engineering a birthday surprise for Tom was no easy feat: it involved writing to her mother months in advance with the list of requests. As Tom was the only one with a bank account, it also required a promise to pay next time they were ashore.

Tom was both easy and difficult to buy for: he would be happy with whatever he got, but he didn’t really want anything. She had settled on a Conway Stewart fountain pen and the latest edition of Wisden: something practical and something entertaining. When she had asked Lucy one night as they sat outside, what she wanted to give Dadda, the little girl had twirled her hair around her finger as she thought for a moment and said, ‘The stars.’

Isabel had laughed. ‘I’m not sure we can manage that, Luce.’

The child had said crossly, ‘But I want to!’

An idea came to Isabel. ‘What if we gave him a
map
of the stars – an atlas?’

‘Yes!’

Now, as they sat in front of the hefty book, Isabel asked, ‘What do you want to write in the front?’ She held the pen, her fingers around Lucy’s, to inscribe in jerky letters, as instructed, ‘For my Dadda, love for ever and ever …’

‘More,’ Lucy insisted.

‘More what?’

‘More “ever”. “Ever and ever and ever and ever …”’

Isabel laughed, and ‘ever and ever and ever and ever’ trailed like a caterpillar across the page. ‘What comes next? Shall we say, “From your loving daughter Lucy”?’

‘From Lulu Lighthouse.’

The little girl started shaping the letters with her mother, but got bored and climbed off her knee in mid-stroke.

‘Mamma finish it,’ she commanded casually.

So Isabel completed the signature, and added in brackets, ‘(Per Isabel Sherbourne, scribe and general factotum of the above-mentioned signatory.)’

When Tom unwrapped the parcel, a difficult manoeuvre with Lucy’s hands over his eyes, he said, ‘It’s a book …’

‘It’s a antless!’ shouted Lucy.

Tom took in the present. ‘
Brown’s Star Atlas, showing all the bright stars, with full instructions how to find and use them for navigational purposes and Board of Trade examinations
.’ He smiled slowly, and turned to Isabel. ‘Lucy’s a clever girl, isn’t she, organising this?’

‘Read, Dadda. Inside. I did writing.’

Opening the cover, Tom saw the long dedication. He still smiled, but there was something about the words ‘For ever
and
ever and ever and ever and ever …’ that stabbed him. Forever was an impossible concept, particularly for this child, in this place. He put his lips to the top of Lucy’s head. ‘It’s just beaut, Lulu Lighthouse. The loveliest present I’ve ever had.’

CHAPTER 19

‘AT LEAST IF
we can win this one, it won’t be a complete washout,’ said Bluey. The Australian cricket team had lost the first four test matches of the 1928/29 Ashes series on home ground, and the March boat arrived while the final test was still going on in Melbourne. Bluey had been regaling Tom with highlights as they did the unloading. ‘Bradman got his century. Still not out. Gave Larwood all sorts of trouble, the paper said. I tell you what, though – the match’s been going four days already. Looks like we’re in for a long one this time.’

While Ralph went to the kitchen to deliver another of Hilda’s regular presents to Lucy, Tom and the deckhand finished stacking away the last of the flour sacks in the shed.

‘I got a cousin works there, you know,’ Bluey said, nodding at the stencil of the Dingo brand on the calico.

‘Up at the flour mill?’ asked Tom.

‘Yeah. Reckons it pays good. And all the free flour he wants.’

‘Every job’s got its perks.’

‘Sure. Like I get as much fresh air as I can breathe, and as much water as I need to swim in.’ Bluey laughed. He looked round, to be sure there was no sign of the skipper. ‘Reckons he can get me a job there any time I want.’ He paused. ‘Or sometimes, I think of
working
– in a grocer’s, maybe,’ he said, making the jump in subject with a studied, casual tone.