The Light Between Oceans(98)

We each get a little turn at life, and if this ends up being how my turn went, it will still have been worth it. My time should have been up years ago. To have met you, when I thought life was over, and been loved by you – if I lived another hundred years I couldn’t ask for better than that. I’ve loved you as best as I know how, Izz, which isn’t saying much. You’re a wonderful girl, and you deserved someone a lot better than me.

You’re angry and hurt and nothing makes sense, and I know what that feels like. If you decide to wash your hands of me, I won’t blame you.

Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did. All I can do is to ask God, and to ask you, to forgive me for the harm I’ve caused. And to thank you for every day we spent together.

Whatever you decide to do, I’ll accept it, and I’ll stand by your choice.

I will always be your loving husband,

Tom

As though it is a picture, not a note, Isabel traces her fingertip over the letters, following the steady lean, the graceful loops – as though that is how to make sense of the words. She imagines his long fingers on the pencil as it travelled across the page. Over and over, she traces ‘Tom’, the word somehow both foreign and familiar. Her mind wanders to the game they would play, where she would draw letters with her finger on his naked back for him to guess, then he would do the same on hers. But the recollection is swiftly countered by the memory of Lucy’s touch. Her baby’s skin. She imagines Tom’s hand again, this time as it wrote the notes to Hannah. Like a pendulum, her thoughts swing back and forward, between hatred and regret, between the man and the child.

She lifts her hand from the paper and reads the letter again, this time trying to make out the meaning of the words on the page, hearing Tom’s voice pronounce them. She reads it over and over, feeling as though her body is being rent in two, until finally, shaking with sobs, she makes her decision.





CHAPTER 35



WHEN IT RAINS in Partageuse, the clouds hurl down water and soak the town to its very bones. Millennia of such deluges have brought forth the forests from the ancient loam. The sky darkens and the temperature plummets. Great gulleys are carved across dirt roads, and flash floods make them impassable by motor cars. The rivers quicken, finally scenting the ocean from which they have so long been parted. They will not be stopped in their urgency to get back to it – to get home.

The town goes quiet. The last few horses stand forlornly with their wagons as the rain drips off their blinkers, and bounces off the motor cars which far outnumber them these days. People stand under the wide verandahs of shops in the main street, arms folded, mouths turned down in grimaces of defeat. At the back of the schoolyard, a couple of tearaways stamp their feet in puddles. Women look in exasperation at washing not retrieved from lines, and cats slink through the nearest convenient doorway, meowing their disdain. The water rushes down the war memorial, where the gold lettering is faded now. It springs off the church roof and, through the mouth of a gargoyle, onto the new grave of Frank Roennfeldt. The rain transforms the living and the dead without preference.



‘Lucy won’t be frightened.’ The thought occurs in Tom’s mind, too. He recalls the feeling in his chest – that strange shiver of wonder for the little girl, when she would face down the lightning and laugh. ‘Make it go bang, Dadda!’ she would cry, and wait for the thunder to roll in.

‘Bugger it!’ exclaimed Vernon Knuckey. ‘We’ve sprung a bloody leak again.’ The run-off from the hill above the station was rather more than a ‘leak’. Water was pouring into the back of the building, set lower than the front. Within hours, Tom’s cell was six inches deep in water, entering from above and below. The house spider had abandoned its web for somewhere safer.

Knuckey appeared, keys in hand. ‘Your lucky day, Sherbourne.’

Tom did not understand.

‘Usually happens when it rains this much. The ceiling in this part tends to collapse. Perth’s always saying they’re going to fix it, but they just send some cove to put a bit of flour and water glue on it, as far as I can see. Still, they get a bit dark with us if the prisoners cark it before trial. You’d better come up the front for a while. Till the cell drains.’ He left the key unturned in the lock. ‘You’re not going to be stupid about this, are you?’

Tom looked at him squarely, and said nothing.

‘All right. Out you come.’

He followed Knuckey to the front office, where the sergeant put one handcuff on his wrist and another around an exposed pipe. ‘Not going to be flooded with customers as long as this holds out,’ he said to Harry Garstone. He chuckled to himself at his pun. ‘Ah, Mo McCackie, eat your heart out.’

There was no sound except the rain, thundering down, turning every surface into a drum or a cymbal. The wind had fled, and nothing outside moved except the water. Garstone set to with a mop and some towels, attempting to redeem the situation inside.

Tom sat looking through the window at the road, imagining the view from the gallery at Janus now: the keeper would feel like he was in a cloud, with the sudden air inversion. He watched the hands on the clock inch their way around the dial as if there were all the time in the world.

Something caught his attention. A small figure was making its way towards the station. No raincoat or umbrella, arms folded, and bent forward as though leaning on the rain. He recognised the outline instantly. Moments later, Isabel opened the door. She looked straight ahead as she made for the counter, where Harry Garstone had stripped to the waist and was busy trying to mop up a puddle.