The Light Between Oceans(80)

‘Come on, Vi, dear. I know it’s hard on you. I know,’ said her husband, and he hugged his wife close, noticing her hair was shot through with grey these days. The two of them stood in the embrace, Violet weeping, Bill saying, ‘I was such a fool to believe the bad days were over.’ Without warning, a great sob escaped him, and he hugged her tighter still, as if it might physically halt this new shattering of his family.



Having cleaned up the floor, and with her daughter finally asleep, Hannah sits by the little bed and gazes at her. In the day, it is impossible. Grace hides her face if she thinks she is being watched. She turns her back, or runs into another room.

Now, by the light of a single candle, Hannah can observe every aspect of her, and in the curve of her cheek, in the shape of her eyebrows, she sees Frank. It makes her heart swell, and she can almost believe that if she spoke to the sleeping figure, it would be Frank who answered. The flame, throwing shadows that twitch with the rhythm of her daughter’s breath, catches the golden glint of her hair, or the glistening of a fine filament of dribble that trails from the corner of the translucent pink mouth.

Hannah is only slowly aware of the wish that has formed itself at the back of her mind: that Grace could stay asleep, for days, for years, if need be, until all memory of those people, of that life, has ebbed away. She feels that peculiar hollowness inside her, which came the first time she saw distress on the face of the returned child. If only Frank were here. He would know what to do, how to get through this. No matter how many times life knocked him down, he was always straight back on his feet, with a smile and no hard feelings.

Hannah casts her mind back to see a tinier figure – her perfect baby, a week old – and hears again Frank’s lullaby, ‘Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf’, ‘Sleep, little child, sleep.’ She recalls the way he would gaze into the cot and whisper to her in German. ‘I’m whispering her good things for her dreams,’ he would say. ‘As long as one has good things in the mind, one can be happy. This I know.’

Now, Hannah straightens her back. Just the memory is enough to give her courage to face the next day. Grace is her daughter. Something in the child’s soul will surely remember, recognise her, eventually. She just needs to take things a day at a time, as her father says. Soon enough, the little girl will be hers again, will be the joy she was on the day she was born.

Quietly, she blows out the candle, and makes her way from the room by the light which slides along the floor from the open door. When she climbs into her own bed, she is struck by how empty it feels.



Isabel paces. It is three o’clock in the morning, and she has slipped out through the back door of her parents’ house. A ghost gum has trapped the moon between two of its long branches like spindly fingers. The dry grass crackles faintly under her bare feet as she walks on it – from the jacaranda to the flame tree, from the flame tree to the jacaranda: the place of the old wicket, all those years ago.

She is flicking in and out of understanding, in and out of being, in that fluttering of thoughts that came originally with the loss of her first baby, and grew with the snatching away of two more, and now Lucy. And the Tom she loved, the Tom she married, has disappeared too in the fog of deceit – slipping away when she wasn’t looking: running off with notes to another woman; plotting to take her daughter away.

‘I understand.’ Tom’s message is puzzling. Her gut tightens in a knot of fury and longing. Her thoughts fly out in all directions, and just for a moment she has a bodily memory of being nine, on a runaway horse. The tiger snake on the track. A sudden rearing and off the horse shot, between the trunks, heedless of the branches and the child clinging desperately to its mane. Isabel had lain flat against its neck until its fear and its muscles were exhausted, and it finally came to a halt in a clearing nearly a mile away. ‘There’s nothing you can do,’ her father had said. ‘Once a horse bolts, you can only say your prayers and hang on for all you’re worth. Can’t stop an animal that’s caught in a blind terror.’

There’s no one she can talk to. No one who will understand. What sense can her life make by itself, without the family she lived for? She runs her fingers over the bark of the jacaranda and finds the scar – the mark Alfie carved in it to show her height, the day before he and Hugh left for France. ‘Now, I’ll be checking how much you’ve grown when we come back, Sis, so mind you get on with it.’

‘When will you be back, really?’ she had asked.

The boys had shot one another a look – both worried and excited. ‘By the time you reach here,’ Hugh had said, and nicked the bark six inches higher. ‘Once you get there, we’ll be home to bother you again, Bella.’

She never grew that tall.

The scurrying of a gecko brings her back to the present, back to her predicament. The questions harangue her as the moon languishes in the branches above: who is Tom, really? This man she thought she knew so well. How could he be capable of such betrayal? What has her life with him been? And who were the souls – that blending of her blood with his – who failed to find their way into being within her? A goblin thought jumps onto her shoulder: what’s the point of tomorrow?



The weeks following Grace’s return were more harrowing for Hannah than the weeks following her loss, as she was faced with truths which, long pushed away, were now inescapable. Years really had passed. Frank really was dead. Part of her daughter’s life had gone and could never be brought back. While Grace had been absent from Hannah’s days, she had been present in someone else’s. Her child had lived a life without her: without, she caught herself thinking, a moment’s thought for her. With shame, she realised she felt betrayed. By a baby.