The Light Between Oceans(55)

But she did not.

Once she had tucked Lucy into bed, Isabel asked again, ‘What was all that palaver about where to sit? She was still worried about it when I sat on her bed for the story. Told me you’d be very cross.’

‘Oh, just a game she came up with. She’ll probably have forgotten it by tomorrow.’

But Lucy had summoned up the ghost of Frank Roennfeldt that afternoon, and the memory of his face now haunted Tom every time he looked in the direction of the graves.

‘Until you too are a father …’ He had thought a great deal about Lucy’s mother, but it was only now that the full sacrilege of his treatment of her father came home to him. Thanks to him, the man could never have a priest or a pastor mark his passing with due ritual; never be allowed to live, even in memory, in Lucy’s heart, as was a father’s right. For a moment, just a few feet of sand had separated Lucy from her true heritage – from Roennfeldt and generations of his family. Tom went cold at the realisation that he may have killed relatives – it seemed almost likely – of this man who had created her. Suddenly, vivid and accusing, the faces of the enemy wakened from the tomb beneath memory to which he had confined them.

The next morning, as Isabel and Lucy went to collect the eggs, Tom set about straightening things in the lounge room, putting Lucy’s pencils in a biscuit tin, stacking up her books. Amongst them, he found the prayer book Ralph had given her at her christening, and from which Isabel often read to her. He flicked through the feathery pages, edged with gold. Morning prayers, communion rites … Going through the psalms, his eyes came to rest on number 37, ‘Noli aemulari’. ‘Fret not thyself because of the ungodly: neither be thou envious amongst the evil-doers. For they shall be cut down like the grass: and be withered even as the green herb.’

Isabel and Lucy, the little girl in a piggy-back, came in, laughing at something. ‘Gosh, this is clean! Have magic pixies been in?’ asked Isabel.

Tom shut the book, and put it on top of the pile. ‘Just trying to put things in order,’ he said.



A few weeks later, Ralph and Tom were sitting, backs resting against the stone wall of the storage shed, having unloaded the last of the September supplies. Bluey was down on the boat, sorting out a problem with the anchor chain, and Isabel was in the kitchen with Lucy, making gingerbread men. It had been a hard morning, and the two men sat sharing a bottle of beer in the first tentative spring sunshine.

For weeks, Tom had been anticipating this moment, considering how he could approach the subject when the boat arrived. He cleared his throat before asking, ‘Have you ever … done anything wrong, Ralph?’

The old man cocked Tom a look. ‘What the bloody hell’s that supposed to mean?’

The words had come out awkwardly, despite all Tom’s planning. ‘I’m talking about – well – how you put something right when you’ve buggered it up. How you fix it.’ His eyes were focused on the black swan on the beer label, and he struggled to keep his nerve. ‘I mean something serious.’

Ralph took a swig of beer and looked at the grass as he nodded slowly. ‘Want to say what? None of my business, of course – not trying to stick me beak in.’

Tom was very still, sensing bodily the relief that would follow the unburdening of the truth about Lucy. ‘My father dying got me thinking about everything I’ve done wrong in life, and about how to put it right before I die.’ He opened his mouth to go on, but an image of Isabel bathing their stillborn son silenced him, and he baulked.

‘I’ll never even know their names …’ He was surprised at how readily the space had been filled with other thoughts, other guilt.

‘Whose names?’

Tom hesitated, poised on the edge of a chasm, deciding whether to dive. He drank some beer. ‘The men I killed.’ The words fell, blunt and heavy.

Ralph weighed up his response. ‘Well that’s what you do in a bloody war. Kill or be killed.’

‘The more time passes, the madder everything I’ve done seems.’ Tom had a sense of being physically trapped in each separate past moment, held in some vice that pressed into him every bodily sensation, every guilt-filled thought that had mounted up over years. He struggled for breath. Ralph was completely still, waiting.

Tom turned to Ralph, suddenly shaking. ‘Jesus Christ, I just want to do the right thing, Ralph! Tell me what the right f*cking thing to do is! I – I just can’t stand this! I can’t do it any more.’ He threw the bottle to the ground and it shattered on a rock, as his words dissolved into a sob.

Ralph put an arm around him. ‘There now, boy. Easy does it, easy does it. I’ve been around a shade longer than you. Seen all sorts. Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot ’em both, and then it’s too late.’

He looked at Tom: a long, wordless look. ‘The question I’d ask is, how would raking over the coals make things better? You can’t put any of that right now.’ The words, devoid of judgement or animosity, twisted like a knife in Tom’s guts just the same. ‘Christ – the quickest way to send a bloke mad is to let him go on re-fighting his war till he gets it right.’

Ralph scraped at a callus on his finger. ‘If I’d had a son, I’d be proud if he turned out half as well as you. You’re a good bloke, Tom. A lucky bloke, with that wife and daughter of yours. Concentrate on what’s best for your family now. Fella upstairs’s given you a second chance, so I reckon he’s not too fussed about whatever you did or didn’t do back then. Stick to now. Put right the things you can put right today, and let the ones from back then go. Leave the rest to the angels, or the devil or whoever’s in charge of it.’