The Light Between Oceans(102)

‘It was the only way I could honour him: doing what I know he would have done.’ She looked at him, her eyes glistening. ‘I loved that man.’

They stood in silence, looking out at the water. Eventually, Tom spoke. ‘The years you missed with Lucy – we can never give them back. She’s a wonderful little girl.’ Hannah’s expression made him add, ‘We’ll never come near her again, I promise you.’

His next words caught in his throat, and he tried again. ‘I’ve got no right to ask anything. But if one day – maybe when she’s grown up – she remembers us and asks about us, if you can bear to, tell her we loved her. Even though we didn’t have the right.’

Hannah stood, weighing something in her mind.

‘Her birthday’s the eighteenth of February. You didn’t know that, did you?’

‘No.’ Tom’s voice was quiet.

‘And when she was born, she had the cord wrapped around her neck twice. And Frank … Frank used to sing her to sleep. You see? There are things I know about her that you don’t.’

‘Yes,’ he nodded gently.

‘I blame you. And I blame your wife. Of course I do.’ She looked straight at him. ‘I was so scared that my daughter might never love me.’

‘Love’s what children do.’

She turned her eyes to a dinghy nudging the jetty with each wave, and frowned at a new thought. ‘No one ever mentions it around here – how Frank and Grace came to be in that boat in the first place. Not a soul ever apologised. Even my father doesn’t like to talk about it. At least you’ve said you’re sorry. Paid the price for what you did to him.’

After a while, she said, ‘Where are you living?’

‘In Albany. Ralph Addicott helped find me work at the harbour there when I got out, three months ago now. Means I can be near my wife. The doctors said she needed complete rest. For the moment, she’s better off in the nursing home, where she can be properly cared for.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Best let you go. I hope life turns out well for you, and for Lu— for Grace.’

‘Goodbye,’ Hannah said, and made her way back down the jetty.



The setting sun dipped the gum leaves in gold as Hannah walked up the path at her father’s house to collect her daughter.

‘This little piggy stayed at home …’ Septimus was saying, giving his granddaughter’s toe a wiggle as she sat on his knee on the verandah. ‘Oh, look who’s here, Lucy-Grace.’

‘Mummy! Where did you go?’

Hannah was struck anew by her daughter’s version of Frank’s smile, Frank’s eyes, of his fair hair. ‘Maybe I’ll tell you one day, little one,’ she said, and kissed her lightly. ‘Shall we go home now?’

‘Can we come back to Granddad tomorrow?’

Septimus laughed. ‘You can visit Granddad any time you like, Princess. Any time you like.’

Dr Sumpton had been right – given time, the little girl had gradually gotten used to her new – or perhaps it was her old – life. Hannah held out her arms and waited for her daughter to climb into them. Her own father smiled. ‘That’s the way, girlie. That’s the way.’

‘Come on, darling, off we go.’

‘I want to walk.’

Hannah put her down and the child allowed herself to be led, out through the gate and along the road. Hannah kept her pace slow, so that Lucy-Grace could keep up. ‘See the kookaburra?’ she asked. ‘He looks like he’s smiling, doesn’t he?’

The girl paid little attention, until a machine-gun burst of laughter came from the bird as they drew closer. She stopped in astonishment, and watched the creature, which she had never seen so close up. Again, it rattled off its raucous call.

‘He’s laughing. He must like you,’ said Hannah. ‘Or maybe it’s going to rain. The kookas always laugh when the rain’s coming. Can you make his sound? He goes like this,’ and she broke into a fair imitation of its call, which her mother had taught her decades ago. ‘Go on, you have a go at it.’

The girl could not manage the complicated call. ‘I’ll be a seagull,’ she said, and came out with a pitch-perfect imitation of the bird she knew best, a shrill, harsh barracking. ‘Now you do it,’ she said, and Hannah laughed at her own unsuccessful attempts.

‘You’ll have to teach me, sweetheart,’ she said, and the two of them walked on together.



On the jetty, Tom thinks back to the first time he saw Partageuse. And the last. Between them, Fitzgerald and Knuckey had traded off charges and whittled down Spragg’s ‘kitchen sink’. The lawyer had been eloquent in showing that the child-stealing charge wouldn’t stand and that all related charges must therefore also fall. The guilty plea to the remaining administrative counts, tried in Partageuse rather than Albany, could still have brought a severe penalty, had Hannah not spoken articulately in their defence, urging clemency. And Bunbury gaol, halfway up to Perth, was less brutal than Fremantle or Albany would have been.

Now, as the sun dissolves into the water, Tom is aware of a nagging reflex. Months after leaving Janus, his legs still prepare to climb the hundreds of stairs to light up. Instead, he sits on the end of the jetty, watching the last few gulls on the lilting water.