The Light Between Oceans(50)

‘Lucy!’ said Isabel. ‘Have you been in my things?’

‘No,’ said the girl, eyes wide.

Isabel blushed. ‘I don’t usually parade my underwear around,’ she said to the visitors. ‘Come on, Lucy, you’ll catch your death of cold like that. Let’s get your clothes back on. And let’s have a talk about going through Mamma’s things. And about telling the truth.’ Smiling as she left the room, she didn’t catch the brief expression that crossed Tom’s features at her last remark.



Lucy trots happily behind Isabel as they go to gather the eggs. She is mesmerised by the newly hatched chicks which appear from time to time, and holds them under her chin to feel their golden fluffiness. When she helps pick carrots and parsnips, sometimes she tugs so hard that she tumbles over backwards, showered with soil. ‘Lucy-Goosy!’ laughs Isabel. ‘Up you get now.’

At the piano, she sits on Isabel’s knee and bashes away at notes. Isabel holds her index finger and helps her press out ‘Three Blind Mice’, then the child says, ‘By myself, Mamma,’ and starts her cacophony again.

She sits for hours on the kitchen floor, wielding coloured pencils on the back of obsolete CLS forms, producing random squiggles to which she proudly points and says, ‘This is Mamma, Dadda, and Lulu Lighthouse.’ She takes for granted the 130-foot castle-tower in her backyard, with a star in it. Along with words such as ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ – fanciful concepts from books – she masters the more concrete ‘lens’ and ‘prism’ and ‘refraction’. ‘It’s my star,’ she tells Isabel one evening as she points to it. ‘Dadda gave it to me.’

She tells Tom snatches of stories, about fish, about seagulls, about ships. As they walk down to the beach, she delights in taking a hand each from Tom and Isabel and getting them to swing her in the air between them. ‘Lulu Lighthouse!’ is her favourite phrase, and she uses it when she draws herself in splodgy pictures, or describes herself in stories.



The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom. Existence here is on a scale of giants. Time is in the millions of years; rocks which from a distance look like dice cast against the shore are boulders hundreds of feet wide, licked round by millennia, tumbled onto their sides so that layers become vertical stripes.

Tom watches Lucy and Isabel as they paddle in Paradise Pool, the girl enraptured by the splashing and the saltiness and the starfish she has found, brilliant blue. He watches her fingers clutch the creature, her face alight with excitement and pride, as though she has made it herself. ‘Dadda, look. My starfish!’ Tom has trouble keeping both time scales in focus: the existence of an island and the existence of a child.

It astounds him that the tiny life of the girl means more to him than all the millennia before it. He struggles to make sense of his emotions – how he can feel both tenderness and unease when she kisses him goodnight, or presents a grazed knee for him to kiss better with the magic power that only a parent has.

For Isabel, too, he is torn between the desire he feels for her, the love, and the sense that he cannot breathe. The two sensations grate at one another, unresolved.

Sometimes, alone in the light, he finds his mind seeking out Hannah Roennfeldt. Is she tall? Is she plump? Is there some trace of her in Lucy’s face? When he tries to imagine her, he sees only hands, covering a weeping face. He shudders, and returns to his immediate task.

This child is healthy and happy and adored, in this little world beyond the reach of newspapers and gossip. Beyond the reach of reality. There are weeks at a time when Tom can almost rest in the story of a normal, happy family, as if it is some kind of opiate.



‘We mustn’t let Dadda know. Not until I tell you.’

Lucy looked at Isabel gravely. ‘I mustn’t tell,’ she said, nodding. ‘Can I have a biscuit?’

‘In a minute. Let’s just finish wrapping these.’ The September boat in 1928 had brought several extra parcels, which Bluey had managed to smuggle to Isabel in moments when Ralph distracted Tom with unloading. Engineering a birthday surprise for Tom was no easy feat: it involved writing to her mother months in advance with the list of requests. As Tom was the only one with a bank account, it also required a promise to pay next time they were ashore.

Tom was both easy and difficult to buy for: he would be happy with whatever he got, but he didn’t really want anything. She had settled on a Conway Stewart fountain pen and the latest edition of Wisden: something practical and something entertaining. When she had asked Lucy one night as they sat outside, what she wanted to give Dadda, the little girl had twirled her hair around her finger as she thought for a moment and said, ‘The stars.’

Isabel had laughed. ‘I’m not sure we can manage that, Luce.’

The child had said crossly, ‘But I want to!’

An idea came to Isabel. ‘What if we gave him a map of the stars – an atlas?’

‘Yes!’

Now, as they sat in front of the hefty book, Isabel asked, ‘What do you want to write in the front?’ She held the pen, her fingers around Lucy’s, to inscribe in jerky letters, as instructed, ‘For my Dadda, love for ever and ever …’