The Light Between Oceans(14)

‘What else do you want to know?’

‘Well, about your family, say.’

‘I’ve got a brother.’

‘Am I allowed to know his name, or have you forgotten it?’

‘I’m not likely to forget that in a hurry. Cecil.’

‘What about your parents?’

Tom squinted at the light on top of a mast. ‘What about them?’

Isabel sat up, and looked deep into his eyes. ‘What goes on in there, I wonder?’

‘My mother’s dead now. I don’t keep in touch with my father.’ Her shawl had slipped off her shoulder, and he pulled it back up. ‘Are you getting a bit chilly? Want to walk back?’

‘Why won’t you talk about it?’

‘I’ll tell you if you really want. It’s just I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.’

‘Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.’

‘More’s the pity.’

Isabel straightened. ‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s go. Mum and Dad’ll be wondering where we’ve got to,’ she said, and they walked soberly up the jetty.

That night as he lay in bed, Tom cast his mind back to the childhood Isabel had been so keen to investigate. He had never really spoken to anyone about it. But exploring the memories now, the jagged pain was like running his tongue over a broken tooth. He could see his eight-year-old self, tugging his father’s sleeve and crying, ‘Please! Please let her come back. Please, Daddy. I love her!’ and his father wiping his hand away like a grubby mark. ‘You don’t mention her again in this house. You hear, son?’

As his father stalked out of the room, Tom’s brother Cecil, five years older and at that stage a good measure taller, gave him a clip on the back of the head. ‘I told you, you idiot. I told you not to say it,’ and followed his father, with the same officious stride, leaving the small boy standing in the middle of the lounge room. From his pocket he took a lace handkerchief, redolent with his mother’s scent, and touched it to his cheek, avoiding his tears and streaming nose. It was the feel of the cloth he wanted, the perfume, not its use.

Tom thought back to the imposing, empty house: to the silence that deadened every room with a subtly different pitch; to the kitchen smelling of carbolic, kept spotless by a long line of housekeepers. He remembered that dreaded smell of Lux flakes, and his distress as he saw the handkerchief, washed and starched by Mrs Someone-or-other, who had discovered it in the pocket of his shorts and laundered it as a matter of course, obliterating his mother’s smell. He had searched the house for some corner, some cupboard which could bring back that blurry sweetness of her. But even in what had been her bedroom, there was only polish, and mothballs, as though her ghost had finally been exorcised.



In Partageuse, as they sat in the Tea Rooms, Isabel tried again.

‘I’m not trying to hide anything,’ Tom said. ‘It’s just that raking over the past is a waste of time.’

‘And I’m not trying to pry. Only – you’ve had a whole life, a whole story, and I’ve come in late. I’m only trying to make sense of things. Make sense of you.’ She hesitated, then asked delicately, ‘If I can’t talk about the past, am I allowed to talk about the future?’

‘We can’t rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine, or wish for. It’s not the same thing.’

‘OK, what do you wish for, then?’

Tom paused. ‘Life. That’ll do me, I reckon.’ He drew a deep breath and turned to her. ‘What about you?’

‘Oh, I wish for all sorts of things, all the time!’ she exclaimed. ‘I wish for nice weather for the Sunday-school picnic. I wish for – don’t laugh – I wish for a good husband and a house full of kids. The sound of a cricket ball breaking a window and the smell of stew in the kitchen. The girls’ll sing Christmas carols together and the boys’ll kick the footy … I can’t imagine not having children one day, can you?’ She seemed to drift away for a moment before saying, ‘Of course, I wouldn’t want one yet.’ She hesitated. ‘Not like Sarah.’

‘Who?’

‘My friend, Sarah Porter. Used to live down the road. We used to play cubbies together. She was a bit older, and always had to be mother.’ Her expression clouded. ‘She got … in the family way – when she was sixteen. Her parents sent her up to Perth, out of sight. Made her give the baby to an orphanage. They said he’d be adopted, but he had a club foot.

‘Later she got married, and the baby was all forgotten about. Then one day, she asked me if I’d come up to Perth with her, to visit the orphanage, in secret. The “Infant Asylum”, just a few doors down from the proper mad house. Oh, Tom, you’ve never seen such a sight as a ward full of motherless tots. No one to love them. Sarah couldn’t breathe a word to her husband – he’d have sent her packing. He has no idea, even now. Her baby was still there: all she could do was look. The funny thing was, I was the one who couldn’t stop crying. The look on their little faces. It really got to me. You might as well send a child straight to hell as send it to an orphanage.’

‘A kid needs its mum,’ said Tom, lost in a thought of his own.