The Light Between Oceans(42)
‘What about her loving mother? Her living bloody mother! How can this be fair, Izz?’
Her face flushed. ‘Do you think it’s fair that we lost three babies? Do you think it’s fair that Alfie and Hugh are buried thousands of miles away and you’re walking around without a scratch? Of course it’s not fair, Tom, not fair at all! We just have to take what life dishes up!’
She had landed a shot where Tom was most vulnerable. All these years later, he could not shed that sickening sensation of having cheated – not cheated death, but cheated his comrades, having come through unscathed at their expense, even though logic told him it was nothing but luck one way or another. Isabel could see that she had winded him, and softened. ‘Tom, we have to do what’s right – for Lucy.’
‘Izzy, please.’
She cut across him. ‘Not another word, Tom! The only thing we can do is love that little girl as much as she deserves. And never, never hurt her!’ Clutching the doll, she hurried from the room.
Now, as he looked out over the ocean, blustery and whipped white with foam, the darkness was closing in on all sides. The line between the ocean and the sky became harder to judge, as the light faltered second by second. The barometer was falling. There would be a storm before morning. Tom checked the brass handle on the door to the gallery, and watched the light turn, steady, impervious.
As Tom attended to the light that evening, Isabel sat beside Lucy’s cot, watching her drift into sleep. It had taken all her strength to get through the day, and her thoughts still swirled like the gathering storm outside. Now, she sang, almost in a whisper, the lullaby Lucy always insisted on. ‘Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly …’ Her voice struggled to keep the tune. ‘I stood by the lighthouse the last time we parted, Till darkness came down o’er the deep rolling sea, And no longer I saw the bright bark of my lover
When Lucy finally nodded off, Isabel opened her little fingers to remove the pink shell the child had been clasping. The nausea that had been with her since the moment by the memorial stone intensified, and she fought it by tracing the spiral of the shell with her finger, seeking comfort in its perfect smoothness, its exact proportions. The creature that had made it was long dead, and had left only this sculpture. Then the thought taunted her that Hannah Potts’s husband, too, had left his living sculpture, this little girl.
Lucy flung an arm above her head and a frown crossed her features for a moment, as her fingers closed tight around the missing shell.
‘I won’t let anyone hurt you, darling. I promise to keep you safe, always,’ Isabel murmured. Then she did a thing she had not done for some years. She got down on her knees, and bowed her head. ‘God, I can never hope to understand your mystery. I can only try to be worthy of what you’ve called me to do. Give me the strength I need to carry on.’ For a moment, doubt came roaring in, shaking her frame, until she managed to anchor again the rhythm of her breath. ‘Hannah Potts – Hannah Roennfeldt – ’ she said, adjusting to the idea, ‘is safely in your hands too, I know. Grant us peace. All of us.’ She listened to the wind outside, and to the ocean, and felt the distance restoring the sense of safety that the past two days had stripped away. She put the shell beside Lucy’s bed, where she could find it easily when she woke, and left the room quietly, newly resolved.
For Hannah Roennfeldt, the January Monday that followed the christening had been a momentous one.
When she went to the letterbox, she expected to find it empty: she had checked it the previous day as part of the ritual she had crafted to pass the hours since that terrible Anzac Day evening nearly two years earlier. First, she would call at the police station, sometimes giving no more than a questioning look, to which the constable, Harry Garstone, would reply with a silent shake of the head. As she walked out, his colleague Constable Lynch might comment, ‘Poor woman. Fancy ending up like that …’ and he too would shake his head, and carry on with his paperwork. Each day she would walk to a different part of the beach in search of a sign, a clue – bits of driftwood, a fragment of metal from a rowlock.
She would draw from her pocket a letter to her husband and child. Occasionally she enclosed things – a cutting from a newspaper about a circus coming to town; a nursery rhyme she had written by hand and decorated with colours. She would cast the letter into the waves in the hope that, as the ink seeped from the envelope, somewhere, in one or another of the oceans, it would be absorbed by her loved ones.
On the way back she would call at the church and sit silently in the last pew, near the statue of St Jude. Sometimes she would stay until the marri trees laid their lanky shadows across the stained glass, and her votive candles were cold puddles of hard wax. Here, somehow Frank and Grace still existed, for as long as she sat in the shadows. When she could avoid it no longer, she would return home, opening the letterbox only once she felt strong enough to face the disappointment of its emptiness.
For two years, she had written to anyone she could think of – hospitals, port authorities, sea-faring missions: anyone who might have heard tell of a sighting – but had received only courteous assurances that they would let her know if any news of her missing husband and daughter came their way.
That January morning was hot, and magpies carolled their waterfall song – notes that fell in splashes over gum trees beneath the bleached azure sky. Hannah ambled the few yards from the front verandah down the flagstone path as though in a trance. She had long ceased to notice the gardenia and the stephanotis and the proffered consolation of their sweet, creamy scent. The rusty iron letterbox creaked as she coaxed it open – it was as weary and reluctant to move as she. Inside was a scrap of white. She blinked. A letter.