The Light Between Oceans (41 page)

But, having lost the only grandchild he would ever have, Bill’s loyalty was to his one surviving child. His instinctive judgement was
elbowed
aside: blood was thicker than water – God knows he’d learned that the hard way.

‘It’s a terrible business, Vernon. A terrible business. Poor Isabel’s a wreck,’ he said, as they sat in the corner of the pub.

‘As long as she gives evidence against Tom,’ said Knuckey, ‘she’s got nothing to worry about.’

Bill questioned him with a look.

‘She’s not criminally liable for anything he made her do, so she just needs to put her side of the story. She’s what we call “competent but not compellable” as a witness for this sort of case,’ the policeman explained. ‘Her evidence is admissible – the Court says it’s as good as anyone’s. But you can’t force a wife to testify against her husband. And of course, he’s got the right to remain silent. We can’t make him say anything against
her
either, if he doesn’t want to, and he’s made it quite clear he’s not going to say a word.’ He paused. ‘Isabel – did she ever seem, well, uneasy about the child?’

Bill shot him a glance. ‘Let’s not get dragged off the point here, Vernon.’

Knuckey let it pass. He mused aloud, ‘Being a lighthouse keeper’s a position of trust, you know. Our whole country – the whole world, if you want to look at it that way – depends on them being men of good character: honest, decent. We can’t have them running around falsifying government records, coercing their wives. Let alone doing whatever it was he did to Frank Roennfeldt before he buried him.’ He registered the alarm on Bill’s face, but continued, ‘No. Best put a stop to that sort of thing right away. Magistrate will be here in a few weeks for the committal hearing. Given what Sherbourne’s said so far, well … He’ll probably be sent to Albany, where the Court’s got power to dish out harsher penalties. Or they could really take against him and drag him up to Perth. Spragg’s looking for any hint that the fellow wasn’t dead when he reached Janus.’ As he drained the last of his beer, he said, ‘Things don’t look good for him, Bill, I can tell you that much.’

‘Do you like books, darling?’ Hannah ventured. She had been trying everything she could think of to build a bridge with her daughter. She herself had loved stories as a child, and one of the few memories she could still muster of her own mother was being read
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
, one sunny afternoon on the lawns of Bermondsey. She remembered clearly the pale-blue silk of her mother’s blouse, the scent she wore – something floral and rare. And her mother’s smile – the greatest treasure of all. ‘What’s that word?’ she was asking Hannah. ‘You know that word, don’t you?’

‘Carrot,’ Hannah had proclaimed proudly.

‘Clever Hannah!’ her mother had smiled. ‘You’re as bright as a button.’ The memory faded out there, like the end of a story, so she would start it again, over and over.

Now she tried to tempt Grace with the same book. ‘You see? It’s about a rabbit. Come and read it with me.’

But the child looked at her sullenly. ‘I want my mamma. I hate the book!’

‘Oh, come on, you haven’t even looked at it.’ She took a breath and tried again. ‘Just one page. Let’s read one page and if you don’t like it, we’ll stop.’

The girl snatched the book from her hands and threw it at her, the corner striking Hannah’s cheek, narrowly missing her eye. Then she darted from the room, running straight into Gwen, who was coming in at the same moment.

‘Hey, hey there, missie!’ said Gwen. ‘What have you done to Hannah? Go and say sorry!’

‘Leave her be, Gwen,’ said Hannah. ‘She didn’t mean any harm. It was an accident.’ She picked up the book and put it carefully on the shelf. ‘I thought I might try her with some chicken soup for
dinner
tonight. Everyone likes chicken soup, don’t they?’ she asked, without much conviction.

Hours later, she was on her hands and knees, mopping up the soup her daughter had vomited on the floor.

‘When you think about it, what did we ever really know about him? All the stories about being from Sydney – that could all be a furphy. All we know for certain is that he’s not from Partageuse.’ Violet Graysmark was speaking to Bill when their daughter was safely asleep. ‘What sort of man is he? Waits until she can’t live without the child, then whisks her away.’ Her eyes were on the framed photograph of her granddaughter. She had removed it from the mantelpiece, and was stowing it under the linen in her underwear drawer.

‘But, well, what do you make of it, Vi? Really?’

‘For heaven’s sake. Even if he didn’t hold a gun to her head, he’s still responsible. She was clearly beside herself with losing that third baby. And to blame her for it … It was up to him to stick to the rules then and there, if that’s what he was going to do. Not start backtracking years later, when so many people were affected. We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.’

Bill said nothing, and as she rearranged the dainty bags of lavender, she continued, ‘It was rubbing salt in the wound, to put his own guilty conscience above what it would do to Isabel or to Lucy, or …’ she put her hand on his, ‘to us, for that matter, dear. Not a thought for us in any of this business. As if we hadn’t had enough to deal with along the way.’ A tear glistened in her eye. ‘Our little granddaughter, Bill. All that love …’ She closed the drawer slowly.

‘Come on, Vi, dear. I know it’s hard on you. I know,’ said her husband, and he hugged his wife close, noticing her hair was shot through with grey these days. The two of them stood in the embrace,
Violet
weeping, Bill saying, ‘I was such a fool to believe the bad days were over.’ Without warning, a great sob escaped him, and he hugged her tighter still, as if it might physically halt this new shattering of his family.

Having cleaned up the floor, and with her daughter finally asleep, Hannah sits by the little bed and gazes at her. In the day, it is impossible. Grace hides her face if she thinks she is being watched. She turns her back, or runs into another room.

Now, by the light of a single candle, Hannah can observe every aspect of her, and in the curve of her cheek, in the shape of her eyebrows, she sees Frank. It makes her heart swell, and she can almost believe that if she spoke to the sleeping figure, it would be Frank who answered. The flame, throwing shadows that twitch with the rhythm of her daughter’s breath, catches the golden glint of her hair, or the glistening of a fine filament of dribble that trails from the corner of the translucent pink mouth.

Hannah is only slowly aware of the wish that has formed itself at the back of her mind: that Grace could stay asleep, for days, for years, if need be, until all memory of those people, of that life, has ebbed away. She feels that peculiar hollowness inside her, which came the first time she saw distress on the face of the returned child. If only Frank were here. He would know what to do, how to get through this. No matter how many times life knocked him down, he was always straight back on his feet, with a smile and no hard feelings.

Hannah casts her mind back to see a tinier figure – her perfect baby, a week old – and hears again Frank’s lullaby, ‘
Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf
’, ‘Sleep, little child, sleep.’ She recalls the way he would gaze into the cot and whisper to her in German. ‘I’m whispering her good things for her dreams,’ he would say. ‘As long as one has good things in the mind, one can be happy. This I know.’

Now, Hannah straightens her back. Just the memory is enough to give her courage to face the next day. Grace is her daughter. Something in the child’s soul will surely remember, recognise her, eventually. She just needs to take things a day at a time, as her father says. Soon enough, the little girl will be hers again, will be the joy she was on the day she was born.

Quietly, she blows out the candle, and makes her way from the room by the light which slides along the floor from the open door. When she climbs into her own bed, she is struck by how empty it feels.

Isabel paces. It is three o’clock in the morning, and she has slipped out through the back door of her parents’ house. A ghost gum has trapped the moon between two of its long branches like spindly fingers. The dry grass crackles faintly under her bare feet as she walks on it – from the jacaranda to the flame tree, from the flame tree to the jacaranda: the place of the old wicket, all those years ago.

She is flicking in and out of understanding, in and out of being, in that fluttering of thoughts that came originally with the loss of her first baby, and grew with the snatching away of two more, and now Lucy. And the Tom she loved, the Tom she married, has disappeared too in the fog of deceit – slipping away when she wasn’t looking: running off with notes to another woman; plotting to take her daughter away.

‘
I understand
.’ Tom’s message is puzzling. Her gut tightens in a knot of fury and longing. Her thoughts fly out in all directions, and just for a moment she has a bodily memory of being nine, on a runaway horse. The tiger snake on the track. A sudden rearing and off the horse shot, between the trunks, heedless of the branches and the child clinging desperately to its mane. Isabel had lain flat against its neck until its fear and its muscles were exhausted, and it finally came
to
a halt in a clearing nearly a mile away. ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ her father had said. ‘Once a horse bolts, you can only say your prayers and hang on for all you’re worth. Can’t stop an animal that’s caught in a blind terror.’

There’s no one she can talk to. No one who will understand. What sense can her life make by itself, without the family she lived for? She runs her fingers over the bark of the jacaranda and finds the scar – the mark Alfie carved in it to show her height, the day before he and Hugh left for France. ‘Now, I’ll be checking how much you’ve grown when we come back, Sis, so mind you get on with it.’

‘When will you be back, really?’ she had asked.

The boys had shot one another a look – both worried and excited. ‘By the time you reach here,’ Hugh had said, and nicked the bark six inches higher. ‘Once you get there, we’ll be home to bother you again, Bella.’