The Light Between Oceans(37)

I would like to say how much we all appreciate the great sacrifice that your brave son made. He mentioned his brother, Alfie, and I pray that he comes back to you safe and sound.

I am sorry for the delay in writing this to you, only my Fred passed away a week after your boy and it has taken a lot of doing things as you can imagine.

With very best wishes and prayers,

(Mrs) Betsy Parmenter

Hugh would only have known tulips from picture books, Violet thought, and it comforted her that he had perhaps touched one and felt its shape. She wondered whether tulips had a scent.

She recalled how the postman had looked grave and almost guilty a couple of weeks later as he handed her the parcel: brown paper tied with string, addressed to Bill. She was so upset that she did not even read the printing on the form: she did not need to. Many a woman had received the meagre collection of things which constituted her son’s life.

The receipt form from Melbourne read:

Dear Sir,

Forwarded herewith, per separate registered post, is one package containing the effects of the late No. 4497 Pte Graysmark, 28th Bn. received ex ‘Themistocles’ as per inventory attached.

I shall be much obliged if you would kindly let me know whether it comes safely to hand, by signing and returning the enclosed printed receipt slip.

Yours faithfully,

J.M. Johnson, Major,

Officer in Charge, Base Records

On a separate slip of paper from ‘The Kit Store, 110 Greyhound Road, Fulham, London SW’ was the inventory of the effects. Violet was struck by something as she read the list: ‘shaving mirror; belt; three pennies; wristwatch with leather strap; harmonica’. How odd that Alfie’s mouth organ was amongst Hugh’s belongings. Then she looked again at the list, the forms, the letter, the parcel, and read the name more carefully. A. H. Graysmark. Not H. A. Alfred Henry, not Hugh Albert. She ran to find her husband. ‘Bill! Oh Bill!’ she cried. ‘There’s been the most dreadful mistake!’

It took a good deal of correspondence, on black-edged paper on the part of the Graysmarks, to find that Alfie had died within a day of Hugh, three days after arriving in France. Joining the same regiment on the same day, the brothers had been proud of their consecutive service numbers. The signalman, who had with his own eyes seen Hugh shipped out alive on a stretcher, disregarded the instruction to send the KIA telegram for A. H. Graysmark, assuming it meant H. A. The first Violet knew of her second son’s death was the bland package in her hands. It was an easy enough mistake to have made on a battlefield, she had said.



Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers’ deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother’s life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.

It was as if one of the shells from the French frontline had exploded in the middle of her family, leaving a crater that she could never fill or repair. Violet would spend days tidying her sons’ rooms, polishing the silver frames of their photographs. Bill became silent. Whatever topic of conversation Isabel tried to engage him in, he didn’t answer, or even wandered out of the room. Her job, she decided, was not to cause her parents any more bother or concern. She was the consolation prize – what they had instead of their sons.

Now, her parents’ rapture confirmed to Isabel that she had done the right thing in keeping Lucy. Any lingering shadows were swept away. The baby had healed so many lives: not only hers and Tom’s, but now the lives of these two people who had been so resigned to loss.

At Christmas lunch, Bill Graysmark said grace and in a choked voice thanked the Lord for the gift of Lucy. In the kitchen later, Violet confided to Tom that her husband had had a new lease of life from the day he had heard about Lucy’s birth. ‘It’s done wonders. Like a magic tonic.’

She gazed through the window at the pink hibiscus. ‘Bill took the news about Hugh hard enough, but when he found out about Alfie, it fair knocked him for six. For a long time he wouldn’t believe it. Said it was impossible that such a thing could have happened. He spent months writing here, there and everywhere, determined to show it was a mistake. In a way, I was glad of it: proud of him for fighting the news. But there were plenty of people hereabouts who’d lost more than one boy. I knew it was true.

‘Eventually the fire went out of him. He just lost heart.’ She took a breath. ‘But these days –’ she raised her eyes and smiled in wonder, ‘he’s his old self again, thanks to Lucy. I’d wager your little girl means as much to Bill as she does to you. She’s given him the world back.’ She reached up and kissed Tom’s cheek. ‘Thank you.’

As the women did the dishes after lunch, Tom sat out the back on the shady grass with Lucy, where she toddled about, circling back now and again to give him ravenous kisses. ‘Jeez, thanks, littlie!’ he chuckled. ‘Don’t eat me.’ She looked at him, with those eyes that sought his like a mirror, until he pulled her in to him and tickled her again.