The Light Between Oceans (38 page)

Quicksilver. Fascinating, but impossible to predict. It could bear the ton of glass in the light, but try to put your finger on a drop of it, and it would race away in any direction. The image kept coming into Tom’s mind as he sat thinking about Isabel after Knuckey’s questioning. He thought back to the days after the last stillbirth, when he had tried to comfort her.

‘We’ll be all right. If it’s just you and me for the rest of our lives, that’s enough for me.’

Her eyes had slid up to meet his and her expression chilled him. It was despairing. Defeated.

He moved to touch her, but she drew away. ‘You’ll get better. Things’ll get better. Just give it time.’

Without warning, she stood up and rushed to the door, doubling up for a moment from pain, before limping into the night.

‘Izzy! For God’s sake, stop. You’ll hurt yourself!’

‘I’ll do more than that!’

The moon balanced in the warm, windless sky. The long, white nightgown Isabel had worn on their wedding night four years before glowed like a paper lantern as she stood, a tiny white dot, in an ocean of darkness. ‘I can’t bear it!’ she screamed in a voice so loud and shrill that the goats started from their sleep and began to move with a jangle of bells in their paddock. ‘I can’t bear it any more! God, why do you make me live when my children die? I’d be better off dead!’ She stumbled towards the cliff.

He rushed to gather her into his arms. ‘Calm down, Izz.’ But she broke free and ran again, half hobbling when the pain got too bad.

‘Don’t tell me to calm down, you stupid, stupid man! It’s
your
fault. I hate this place! I hate you! I want my baby!’ The light scythed a path far above, leaving her untouched by its beam.

‘You didn’t want him! That’s why he died. He could tell you didn’t care!’

‘Come on, Izz. Come back inside.’

‘You don’t
feel
anything, Tom Sherbourne! I don’t know what you did with your heart but it’s not inside you, that’s for sure!’

A person could only take so much. He’d seen it often enough. Lads who’d turned up full of ginger and ready to give Fritz hell, who’d survived the shelling and the snow and the lice and the mud, for years sometimes. Then something in them just packed up and went
home
– went somewhere deep inside where they couldn’t be touched. Or sometimes they turned on you, came at you with a bayonet, laughing like a maniac and crying at the same time. Christ, when he thought back to his own state by the time it was all over …

Who was he to judge Isabel? She’d reached her edge, that was all. Everyone had one. Everyone. And in taking Lucy away, he had driven her to it.

Late that night, Septimus Potts pulled off his boots and wiggled his toes in his fine woollen socks. He groaned at the familiar creaking of his back. He was sitting on the side of the solid jarrah bed carved out of a tree from his own forest. The only sound in the enormous room was the ticking of the carriage clock on the nightstand. He gave a sigh as he took in the finery – the starched linen, the gleaming furniture, the portrait of his late wife Ellen – by the light of the electric lamps, shaded by frosted rose glass. The image of his granddaughter, distraught and cowering that afternoon, was still vivid: Baby Grace, given up for dead by everyone but Hannah. Life. Who the bloody hell could tell how it was going to turn out?

That distress, that despair at the loss of a mother – he never imagined he would see it again after Ellen’s death, until confronted by his granddaughter in the garden. Just when he thought he’d seen all the tricks life could play, out it came with a new one, like an evil card sharp. He knew what the little girl was going through. A doubt seeped into a corner of his mind. Perhaps – perhaps it was cruel to keep her from the Sherbourne girl …

He looked again at the portrait of Ellen. Grace had the same jawline. Maybe she would grow up to be as beautiful as her grandmother. He wandered off into imaginings of Christmases and birthdays along the way. A happy family, that’s all he wanted. He
thought
of Hannah’s tortured face; remembered with guilt that same look when he’d tried to stop her marrying Frank.

No. This was the place for the child, with her true family. She’d have the top brick off the chimney. Eventually she’d get used to her real home and her real mother. If Hannah could just bear up that long.

He felt tears in his eyes, and anger fought its way to the surface. Someone should pay. Someone should be made to suffer the way his daughter had been made to suffer. Who could possibly come across a tiny baby and keep her, like a driftwood souvenir?

He drove out the intrusive doubt. He couldn’t change the past, and the years he had refused to acknowledge Frank’s existence, but he could make it up to Hannah now. Sherbourne would be punished. He would see to it.

He switched off the lamp, watching the moonlight glimmer on the silver framing Ellen’s photograph. And he pushed away thoughts of what the Graysmarks must be feeling that night.

CHAPTER 27

SINCE HER RETURN
, Isabel found herself constantly on the lookout for Lucy – where had she got to? Was it time for bed? What would she give her for lunch? Then her brain would correct her, remind her how things were now, and she would go through the agony of loss all over again. What was happening to her daughter? Who was feeding her? Undressing her? Lucy would be beside herself.

The image of the little girl’s face as she was forced to swallow the bitter sleeping draught made Isabel’s throat tighten. She tried to blot it out with other memories: Lucy playing in the sand; Lucy holding her nose as she jumped into the water; her face as she slept at night – at ease, safe, perfect. There was no more wonderful sight in the world than your child sleeping. Isabel’s whole body bore the imprint of the little girl: her fingers knew the smoothness of her hair as she brushed it; her hips remembered the weight of her, and the tight locking of her legs around her waist; the warm softness of her cheek.

While she wandered through these scenes, sucking comfort from them like nectar from a dying flower, she was aware of something dark behind her, something she could not bear to look at. It would come to her in dreams, blurred and dreadful. It would call to her, ‘Izzy! Izzy, love …’ but she could not turn around, and her
shoulders
would shoot up to her ears as if to escape a grasp. She would awaken, breathless and sick to the stomach.

All the while, Isabel’s parents took her silence for misplaced loyalty. ‘There’s nothing I can say,’ were her only words that day she first came home, and she repeated them whenever Bill and Violet tried to broach the subject of Tom and what had happened.

The cells at the back of the police station usually had to do no more than keep a drunk long enough to sleep it off, or give an angry husband time to see sense and promise not to take his temper out with his fists. Half the time, whoever was on duty didn’t bother to lock the cell door, and if it was someone they knew, on a shift that was dragging, more often than not they’d have them out in the office playing cards, on the strict understanding that they wouldn’t try to shoot through.

Today, Harry Garstone was particularly excited, at last in charge of a serious criminal. He was still spitting chips that he’d been off duty the night a year ago when they brought in Bob Hitching from Karridale. The fellow had never been right in the head since Gallipoli. Got carried away with a meat cleaver and did in his brother from the next-door farm because they didn’t see eye to eye over their mother’s will. Ended up swinging for it. So now, Garstone was delighting in the niceties of procedure. He got the rulebook out to check that he was following it to the letter.

When Ralph had asked to see Tom, the constable had made a great show of consulting the book, sucking his teeth, and sliding a pout from one side of his letterbox mouth to the other. ‘Sorry, Captain Addicott. I wish I could let you, but it says here—’

‘Don’t give me any of your nonsense, Harry Garstone, or I’ll be on to your mother.’

‘It’s quite specific, and—’

The walls in the station were thin, and the constable was interrupted by the voice of Vernon Knuckey, who rarely bothered to rise from his seat for such communications. ‘Don’t be so bloody wet, Garstone. It’s the lighthouse keeper in the cell, not Ned bloody Kelly. Let the man through.’

The deflated constable gave the keys a vigorous jangle in protest as he led Ralph through a locked door, down some stairs and along a dark corridor until he arrived at a few cells with bars.

In one of them, Tom sat on a canvas bunk that folded out from the wall. He took in Ralph’s face – drawn and grey.

‘Tom,’ said the skipper.

‘Ralph.’ Tom gave a nod.

‘Came as soon as I could. Hilda says hello,’ he said, ‘and Blue,’ emptying his pockets of greetings like small change.

Tom nodded again.

The two sat in silence. After a while, Ralph said, ‘If you’d rather I left you …’

‘No, it’s good to see you. Just not much to say, sorry. All right if we don’t talk for a bit?’

Ralph was full of questions, both his own and his wife’s, but he sat out the silence on a rickety chair. The day was warming up and the wooden walls creaked, like a creature stretching as it awoke. Honey-eaters and willy wagtails chirruped outside. Once or twice a vehicle sputtered down the road, drowning out the clicking of the crickets and cicadas.