The Light Between Oceans(47)

It was a hot, brooding Saturday afternoon. A fat blowfly buzzed about, coming in periodically to drink at the font, only to be chased away by the godparents. It came in once too often and, swatted by Wilf with his wife’s fan, plummeted into the holy water like a drunk into a ditch. The vicar fished it out without a pause as he asked, ‘Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all his works …?’

‘I renounce them all,’ the godparents replied in unison.

As they spoke, the door to the church creaked in response to a tentative push. Hannah’s heart lifted at the sight of her father, led by Gwen, making his way slowly to kneel in the last pew. Hannah and her father had not spoken since the day she left home to be married, and she had expected him to respond to the christening invitation in the usual way – with silence. ‘I’ll try, Hanny,’ Gwen had promised. ‘But you know what a stubborn old mule he is. I promise you this, though. I’ll be there, whatever he says. This has gone on long enough.’

Now, Frank turned to Hannah. ‘You see?’ he whispered. ‘God makes everything work out in His own time.’

‘Oh merciful God, grant that the old Adam in this child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in her …’ The words echoed off the walls, and the baby snuffled and wriggled as her mother held her. When she started to grizzle, Hannah put the knuckle of her little finger to the tiny lips, which sucked contentedly. The rite continued, and Norkells took the child and said to the godparents, ‘Name this child.’

‘Grace Ellen.’

‘Grace Ellen, I baptise thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’

Throughout the rest of the service, the infant stared at the brightly coloured glass in the windows, as fascinated as she would be when, two years later, she gazed at it again from beside the font, in another woman’s arms.



When it was over, Septimus remained in his pew. As Hannah walked slowly down the aisle, the baby stirred in her blanket, winding her head a little this way and that. Hannah stopped beside her father, who stood up as she offered him his grandchild. He hesitated, before putting out his arms to cradle the baby.

‘Grace Ellen. Your mother would be touched,’ was all he could manage before a tear escaped, and he gazed with awe at the child.

Hannah took his arm. ‘Come and see Frank,’ she said, as she led him up the aisle.

‘Please, I’d like you to come in,’ Hannah said later, as her father stood at her gate with Gwen. Septimus was hesitant. The little clapboard cottage, barely more than a shack, reminded him of the Flindells’ lean-to affair in which he had grown up. Going through the door took him back fifty years in a couple of steps.

In the front room, he talked stiffly but politely to Frank’s cousins. He complimented Frank on the excellent christening cake, and the small but fine assortment of food. Out of the corner of his eye he kept sizing up the cracks in the plaster, the holes in the rug.

As he was leaving, he drew Hannah aside and took out his wallet. ‘Let me give you a little something for—’

Hannah gently pushed his hand back down. ‘It’s all right, Dad. We do all right,’ she said.

‘Of course you do. But now that you’ve got a little one …’

She put a hand on his arm. ‘Really. It’s kind of you, but we can manage on our own. Come and visit soon.’

He smiled and kissed the baby on the forehead, then his daughter. ‘Thank you, Hanny.’ Then in hardly more than a mumble, he said, ‘Ellen would have wanted her granddaughter watched over. And I’ve – I’ve missed you.’

Within a week, gifts for the baby were being delivered from Perth, from Sydney and beyond. A cot, a mahogany chest of drawers. Dresses and bonnets and things for the bath. The granddaughter of Septimus Potts would have the best that money could buy.



‘Your husband is at peace in God’s hands.’ Because of the letter, Hannah goes through both a mourning and a renewal. God has taken her husband, but has saved her daughter. She weeps not just with sorrow, but with shame, at her memories of that day.

The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth, or of the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.

That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame. Men who came back from the war with stories they could have told about the desperate failings of comrades at the point of death say only that they died bravely. To the outside world, no soldier ever visited a brothel or acted like a savage or ran and hid from the enemy. Being over there was punishment enough. When wives have to hide the mortgage money or the kitchen knives from a husband who’s lost the thread, they do it without a word, sometimes acknowledging it not even to themselves.

So for Hannah Roennfeldt, her memory of losing Frank is one she has learned she can share with no one. ‘Raking over coals – what’s the good of that?’ people would say, anxious to return to their civilised picture of life in Partageuse. But Hannah remembers.

Anzac Day. The pubs are full – full of men who were there, or who lost brothers there; fellows back from Gallipoli and the Somme and still not over the shell shock and the mustard gas, even ten years on. The twenty-fifth of April, 1926. The sly two-up games go on in the back bar, where the police turn a blind eye for this one day of the year. Hell, the police join in – it was their war too. And the Emu Bitter flows and the talk gets louder, the songs saucier. There’s a lot to forget. They came back to their work on farms, to their work behind desks and in front of classes, and they got on with it – just bloody got on with it because there was no choice. And the more they drink, the harder the forgetting becomes, the more they want to take a swing at something, or at someone – fair and square, man to man. Bloody Turks. Bloody Huns. Bloody bastards.