The Light Between Oceans(101)

Now, she lay down on her belly in the grass, feeling the strength of the sun sap hers. Exhausted, half aware of the bees and the scent of dandelions beside her, half aware of the sour sops under her fingers where the grass was overgrown, finally she slept.



Tom still feels the touch of Isabel’s wet skin, even though the cell is now drained, his clothes dry, and his reunion with her yesterday evening just a memory. He wants it both to be real, and to be an illusion. If it’s real, his Izzy has come back to him, as he prayed she would. If it’s an illusion, she’s still safe from the prospect of prison. Relief and dread mix in his gut, and he wonders if he will ever feel her touch again.



In her bedroom, Violet Graysmark is weeping. ‘Oh, Bill. I just don’t know what to think, what to do. Our little girl could go to gaol. The pity of it.’

‘We’ll get through it, dear. She’ll get through it, too, somehow.’ He does not mention his conversation with Vernon Knuckey. Doesn’t want to get her hopes up. But there might be the shadow of a chance.



Isabel sits alone under the jacaranda. Her grief for Lucy is as strong as ever: a pain that has no location and no cure. Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream. The pain on her mother’s face, the hurt in her father’s eyes, Lucy’s distress, the memory of Tom, handcuffed: she tries to fend off the army of images, and imagines what prison will be like. Finally, she has no more strength. No more fight in her. Her life is just fragments, that she will never be able to reunite. Her mind collapses under the weight of it, and her thoughts descend into a deep, black well, where shame and loss and fear begin to drown her.



Septimus and his granddaughter are by the river, watching the boats. ‘Tell you who used to be a good sailor: my Hannah. When she was little. She was good at everything as a little one. Bright as a button. Always kept me on my toes, just like you.’ He tousled her hair. ‘My saving Grace, you are!’

‘No, I’m Lucy!’ she insists.

‘You were called Grace the day you were born.’

‘But I want to be Lucy.’

He eyes her up, taking the measure of her. ‘Tell you what, let’s do a business deal. We’ll split the difference, and I’ll call you Lucy-Grace. Shake hands on it?’



Hannah was awoken from her sleep on the grass by a shadow over her face. She opened her eyes to find Grace standing a few feet away, staring. Hannah sat up and smoothed her hair, disoriented.

‘Told you that’d get her attention,’ laughed Septimus. Grace gave a faint smile.

Hannah began to stand but Septimus said, ‘No, stay there. Now, Princess, why don’t you sit on the grass and tell Hannah all about the boats. How many did you see?’

The little girl hesitated.

‘Go on, remember how you counted them on your fingers?’

She held up her hands. ‘Six,’ she said, showing five fingers on one hand, and three on the other, before folding two of them down again.

Septimus said, ‘I’ll go and have a rummage in the kitchen and get us some cordial. You stay and tell her about the greedy seagull you saw with that big fish.’

Grace sat on the grass, a few feet from Hannah. Her blonde hair shone in the sun. Hannah was caught: she wanted to tell her father about Sergeant Knuckey’s visit, ask his advice. But she had never seen Grace this ready to talk, to play, and couldn’t bear to ruin the moment. Out of habit, she compared the child with her memory of her baby, trying to recapture her lost daughter. She stopped. ‘We always have a choice.’ The words ran through her mind.

‘Shall we make a daisy chain?’ she asked.

‘What’s a daisy train?’

Hannah smiled. ‘Chain. Here, we’ll make you a crown,’ she said, and started to pick the dandelions beside her.

As she showed Grace how to pierce a stem with her thumbnail and thread the next stem through it, she watched her daughter’s hands, the way they moved. They were not the hands of her baby. They were the hands of a little girl she would have to get to know all over again. And who would have to get to know her, too. ‘We always have a choice.’ A lightness fills her chest, as if a great breath has rushed through her.





CHAPTER 36



AS THE SUN dangled above the horizon, at the end of the jetty at Partageuse Tom stood waiting. He caught sight of Hannah, approaching slowly. Six months had passed since he had last seen her, and she seemed transformed: her face fuller, more relaxed. When she finally spoke, her voice was calm. ‘Well?’

‘I wanted to say I’m sorry. And to thank you. For what you did.’

‘I don’t want your thanks,’ she said.

‘If you hadn’t spoken up for us it would have been a lot more than three months I spent in Bunbury gaol.’ Tom said the last two words with difficulty: the syllables felt thick with shame. ‘And Isabel’s suspended sentence – that was mostly thanks to you, my lawyer said.’

Hannah looked off into the distance. ‘Sending her to gaol wouldn’t have fixed anything. Nor would keeping you there for years. What’s done’s done.’

‘All the same, it can’t have been an easy decision for you.’

‘The first time I saw you, it was because you came to save me. When I was a complete stranger, and you owed me nothing. That counts for something, I suppose. And I know that if you hadn’t found my daughter, she would have died. I tried to remember that too.’ She paused. ‘I don’t forgive you – either of you. Being lied to like that … But I’m not going to get dragged under by the past. Look what happened to Frank because of people doing that.’ She stopped, twisting her wedding ring for a moment. ‘And the irony is, Frank would have been the first one to forgive you. He’d have been the first one to speak in your defence. In defence of people who make mistakes.