The Light Between Oceans

by M. L. Stedman

  He struggles to make sense of it—all this love, so bent out of shape, refracted, like light through the lens.

  Vernon Knuckey had known Isabel since she was a tot. Her father had taught five of his children. “Best thing you can do is take her home,” he had told Bill gravely. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

  “But what about—”

  “Just take her home, Bill. Take the poor girl home.”

  “Isabel. Darling!” Her mother hugged her as soon as she stepped through the front door. Violet Graysmark was as confused as anyone, but when she saw the state of her daughter, did not dare ask questions. “Your bed’s made up. Bill—fetch her bag through.”

  Isabel drifted in, blank-faced. Violet guided her to an armchair, then hurried to the kitchen and returned with a glass. “Warm water and brandy. For your nerves,” she said. Isabel sipped the drink mechanically, and put the empty glass on the occasional table.

  Violet brought a rug and tucked it over her knees, though the room was perfectly warm. Isabel began to stroke the wool, tracing her index finger in straight lines over the tartan. She was so absorbed that she did not seem to hear when her mother asked, “Is there anything I can get you, pet? Are you hungry?”

  Bill put his head around the door and beckoned Violet out to the kitchen. “Has she said anything?”

  “Not a word. I think she’s in shock.”

  “Well that makes two of us. I can’t make head or tail of it. I’m going to the station first thing in the morning to get a straight story. That Hannah Roennfeldt’s been daft as a brush for years now. And as for old man Potts: thinks he can throw his weight around because of his dough.” He pulled the ends of his waistcoat down over his belly. “I’m not going to be pushed around by some lunatic and her father, no matter how much money he’s got.”

  That night, Isabel lay in her narrow childhood bed, now foreign, constricting. A light wind pushed at the lace curtains, and outside, the chirrup of the crickets reflected the sparkling stars. On a night like this, only moments ago, it seemed, she had lain sleepless and excited at the prospect of her wedding the following morning. She had thanked God for sending her Tom Sherbourne: for letting him be born, for keeping him safe through the war, for wafting him on some breeze of Fate to her shore, where she was the first person he saw as he landed.

  She tried to recall that state of ecstatic anticipation, the sense that life, after all the grief and loss the war had brought, was about to bloom. But the feeling was lost: now it all seemed a mistake, a delusion. Her happiness on Janus was distant, unimaginable. For two years, Tom had been lying with every word and every silence. If she hadn’t noticed that deception, what else had she missed? Why had he never said a word about meeting Hannah Roennfeldt? What was he hiding? In a sickening flash she saw a picture of Tom and Hannah and Lucy, a happy family. The thoughts of betrayal which had assailed her on Janus now came back darker, more insinuating. Perhaps he had other women and other lives. Perhaps he had deserted a wife—wives—back East… and children… Fantasy seemed plausible, compelling, as it poured into the gap between her memory of the eve of her wedding and this dreadful, oppressive present. A lighthouse warns of danger—tells people to keep their distance. She had mistaken it for a place of safety.

  To have lost her child. To have seen Lucy terrified and distraught at being torn from the only people in the world she really knew: this was already unbearable. But to know it had happened because of her own husband—the man she adored, the man she’d given her life to—was simply impossible to grasp. He’d claimed to care for her, yet he’d done the thing guaranteed to destroy her.

  This focusing outward, on Tom, painful as it was, saved her from a more intolerable examination. Slowly, taking shape among the shadows in her mind, was an almost solid sensation: an urge to punish; the fury of a wild thing deprived of her young. Tomorrow, the police would question her. By the time the stars had faded in the wakening sky, she had convinced herself: Tom deserved to suffer for what he had done. And he himself had handed her the weapons.

  CHAPTER 26

  The police station at Point Partageuse, like many of the town’s buildings, was made from local stone, and timber cut from the surrounding forest. It was an oven in summer and an icebox in winter, which led to irregularities in uniform on days of extreme temperatures. When it rained too heavily, the cells flooded and bits of the ceiling sagged—even fell in once, killing a prisoner. Perth was too stingy to stump up the money to fix the structure properly, so it had a permanently wounded air, more bandaged than repaired.

  Septimus Potts was sitting at a table near the front counter, filling in a form with the few details he could recall about his son-in-law. He was able to give Frank’s full name and date of birth—they had featured on the invoice for the memorial stone. But as for place of birth, parents’ names… “Look, I think we can safely assume he had parents, young man. Let’s stick to the point here,” he blustered, putting Constable Garstone onto the back foot with a technique honed over years of business deals. The constable conceded it would do for the writing-up of the initial charge sheet against Tom. The day of the disappearance was easy enough—Anzac Day, 1926; but the date of Frank’s death?

  “You’ll have to ask Mr. Sherbourne that,” Potts was saying sourly, as Bill Graysmark entered the station.

  Septimus turned around, and the men glared at one another like two old bulls. “I’ll just go and get Sergeant Knuckey,” spluttered the constable, sending his chair clattering to the ground as he sprang up. He rapped out a machine-gun knock on the sergeant’s door, and returned after a moment to summon Bill, who barged past Potts and into Knuckey’s office.

  “Vernon!” he launched at the sergeant as soon as the door was closed. “I don’t know what’s been going on, but I demand that my granddaughter be returned to her mother, right now. Dragging her off like that! She’s not even four years old, for goodness’ sake.” He gestured toward the front of the station. “What happened to the Roennfeldts was all very sad, but Septimus Potts can’t just snatch away my granddaughter to make up for what he’s lost.”

  “Bill,” said the sergeant, “I realize how hard this must be for you…”

  “Realize, my foot! Whatever this is, it’s got completely out of hand, presumably on the word of a woman who’s been off with the fairies for years.”

  “Have a drop of brandy…”

  “I don’t need a drop of brandy! I need a drop of common sense, if that’s not too much to ask around here. Since when do you put men in jail on the unsubstantiated claims of—of a madwoman?”

  Knuckey sat down at his desk and rolled his pen between his fingertips. “If you mean Hannah Roennfeldt, she hasn’t said anything against Tom. Bluey Smart started it all—he’s the one identified the rattle.” He paused. “Isabel hasn’t spoken to us at all so far. Refuses to say a word.” He examined the pen as it turned, and said, “That’s pretty odd, don’t you think, if it’s all just a mistake?”

  “Well, she’s clearly overcome, having her child snatched like that.”

  Knuckey looked up. “Can you answer me this, then, Bill: why hasn’t Sherbourne denied it?”

  “Because he…” The words came out before he had registered the policeman’s answer, and he doubled back: “What do you mean, he hasn’t denied it?”

  “Out on Janus, he told us the baby had washed up in a dinghy with a dead man, and that he’d insisted they should keep her. Assumed the mother had already drowned because of a cardigan they found. Said Isabel wanted to report the whole thing and he stopped her. He blamed her for not producing children for him. Looks like it’s all been a pack of lies since then—a complete charade. We’ve got to investigate, Bill.” He hesitated, then lowered his voice. “Then there’s the question of how Frank Roennfeldt died. Who knows what Sherbourne’s got to hide? Who knows what he’s forced Isabel to keep quiet about? It’s a very nasty business.”

  The town had not seen such excitement in years. As the editor of the Sou
th Western Times put it to his colleague in the pub, “It’s the next best thing to Jesus Christ himself turning up and shouting us all a beer. We’ve got a mother and baby reunited, a mysterious death, and old Potts of Money giving away his dough like it’s—well, Christmas! Folks can’t get enough of it.”

  The day after the child’s return, Hannah’s house is still decorated with crêpe-paper streamers. A new doll, its dainty porcelain face glowing in the afternoon light, sits abandoned on a chair in the corner, eyes wide in silent appeal. The clock on the mantelpiece ticks stolidly, and a music box stretches out “Rock-a-bye Baby” with a macabre, threatening air. It is drowned out by the cries coming from the backyard.

  On the grass, the child is screaming, her face puce with fear and fury, the skin on her cheeks stretched tight and her tiny teeth exposed like keys on a miniature piano. She is trying to escape Hannah, who is picking her up each time she wrestles free and screams again.

  “Grace, darling. Shh, shh, Grace. Come on, please.”

  The child yells hopelessly again, “I want my mamma. I want Dadda. Go ’way! I don’t like you!”

  There had been a great to-do when the police had reunited the mother with her child. Photographs had been taken, and thanks and praise lavished on the officers and on God in equal measure. Again, the tongues of the town were busy spreading news, tickling the air with tales of the dreamy look on the face of the child, the joyful smile of the mother. “The poor tot—she was so sleepy by the time she was delivered to her mum. Looked like an angel. You can only thank the good Lord that she was got out of the clutches of that dreadful man!” said Fanny Darnley, who had made it her business to extract the details from Constable Garstone’s mother. Grace had been not drowsy, however, but on the fringes of consciousness, dosed with a strong sleeping draft by Dr. Sumpton when it was clear that she was hysterical at being parted from Isabel.

  Now Hannah was locked in a stand-off with her terrified daughter. She had kept her so close to her heart all these years that it had never occurred to her that the child might not have done the same. When Septimus Potts came into the garden, he would have been hard-pressed to say which of the two figures he saw was more distressed.

  “Grace, I’m not going to hurt you, my darling. Come to Mummy,” Hannah was pleading.

  “I’m not Grace! I’m Lucy!” cried the child. “I want to go home! Where’s Mamma? You’re not my mummy!”

  Wounded more by each outburst, Hannah could only murmur, “I’ve loved you so long. So long…”

  Septimus remembered his own helplessness as Gwen, at about the same age, had continued to demand her mother, as though he were hiding his late wife somewhere about the house. It still got him in the guts.

  Hannah caught sight of her father. His expression betrayed his assessment of the situation, and humiliation washed through her.

  “She just needs some time to get used to you. Be patient, Hanny,” he said. The girl had found a safe nook behind the old lemon tree and the Cape gooseberry, where she stayed poised, ready to dart off.

  “She’s got no idea who I am, Dad. No idea. Of course. She won’t come near me,” Hannah wept.

  “She’ll come round,” said Septimus. “She’ll either get tired and fall asleep there, or get hungry and come out. Either way, it’s just a question of waiting.”

  “I know, I know she has to get used to me again.”

  Septimus put an arm around her shoulder. “There’s no ‘again’ about it. You’re a whole new person for her.”

  “You try. Please, see if you can get her to come out… She ran away from Gwen too.”

  “She’s seen enough new faces for one day, I’d say. She doesn’t need my ugly mug on top of everything else. Just give her a bit of peace and quiet.”

  “What did I do wrong, to deserve all this, Dad?”

  “None of this is your fault. She’s your daughter, and she’s right where she belongs. Just give it time, girlie. Give it time.” He stroked her hair. “And I’ll see to it that that Sherbourne fellow gets what’s coming to him. That’s a promise.”

  As he made his way back through the house, he found Gwen, standing in the shadows of the passageway, watching her sister. She shook her head and whispered, “Oh, Dad, it’s just awful watching the poor little creature. It’s enough to break your heart, all her crying.” She gave a deep sigh. “Perhaps she’ll get used to things,” she said with a shrug, though her eyes said otherwise.

  In the country around Partageuse, every life-form has its defenses. The ones you need to worry about least are the fast-movers, who survive by disappearing: the racehorse goanna, the parrots they call “twenty-eights,” the brush-tailed possum. They’re off at the slightest glint of trouble: retreat, evasion, camouflage—those are their survival tricks. Others are deadly only if you’re the one in their sights. The tiger snake, the shark, the trapdoor spider: they’ll use their means of attack to defend themselves against humans if threatened.

  The ones to fear most stay still, unnoticed, their defenses undetected until you trigger them by accident. They make no distinctions. Eat the pretty heart-leaf poison bush, say, and your heart will stop. Such things are only trying to protect themselves. But Lord help you if you get too close. Only when Isabel Sherbourne was threatened were her defenses awakened.

  Vernon Knuckey sat rapping his fingers on his desk as Isabel waited in the next room to be questioned. Partageuse was a fairly quiet place for a policeman. The odd assault or a bit of drunk and disorderly was the most the average week would dish up. The sergeant could have moved to Perth for promotion, and the chance to witness darker crimes—uglier scars on lives that meant less to him. But he had seen enough strife in the war to last him a lifetime. Petty thieving and fines for sly grog would do him. Kenneth Spragg, on the other hand, was itching to move to the Big Smoke. He’d go to town on this one if he got half a chance. Literally—he’d be treating it as his ticket up the ladder to Perth. He neither knew nor cared about anyone in Partageuse, thought Knuckey: Bill and Violet, for example, and the boys they had lost. He thought of all the years he’d seen little Isabel, with a beautiful voice and a face to match, singing in the church choir at Christmas. Then his thoughts swung to old Potts, devoted to those girls of his since his wife died, and crushed by Hannah’s choice of husband. As for poor Hannah herself… Nothing to write home about on the looks front, but a real brain box, and a very decent sort. Always thought she had a screw loose believing her child would show up after all these years, but just look how things had turned out.

  He took a deep breath as he turned the handle of the door and entered. Addressing Isabel, he was efficient, respectful. “Isabel—Mrs. Sherbourne—I have to ask you some more questions. I know he’s your husband, but this is a very serious matter.” He took the cap off his pen, and rested it on the paper. A puddle of black leaked from the nib, and he stroked it this way and that, stretching the ink out in lines from its central point.

  “He says you wanted to report the boat’s arrival and he stopped you. Is that right?”

  Isabel looked at her hands.

  “Says he resented you for not giving him children, and took things into his own hands.”

  The words struck deep within her. In telling the lie, had Tom revealed a truth?

  “Didn’t you try to talk sense into him?” Knuckey asked.

  Truthfully, she said, “When Tom Sherbourne thinks he’s doing the right thing, there’s no persuading him otherwise.”

  He asked gently, “Did he threaten you? Assault you, physically?”

  Isabel paused, and the fury of her sleepless night flooded back. She clung to silence like a rock.

  Often enough Knuckey had seen the wives and daughters of timber workers bullied into submission with just a look by great hulks of men. “You were afraid of him?”

  Her lips tightened. No words came out.

  Knuckey put his elbows on the desk, and leaned forward. “Isabel, the law recognizes that a wife can be powerless at the hands
of her husband. Under the Criminal Code, you’re not responsible for anything he made you do or stopped you from doing, so you needn’t worry on that score. You won’t be punished for his crimes. Now, I need to ask you a question, and I want you to think very carefully. Remember, you can’t get into trouble for anything he forced you into.” He cleared his throat. “According to Tom, Frank Roennfeldt was dead when the boat washed up.” He looked her in the eye. “Is that true?”

  Isabel was taken aback. She could hear herself saying, “Of course it’s true!” But before her mouth could open, her mind rushed again to Tom’s betrayal. Suddenly overwhelmed—by the loss of Lucy, by anger, by sheer exhaustion, she closed her eyes.

  The policeman prompted softly, “Is it true, Isabel?”

  She fixed her gaze on her wedding ring as she said, “I’ve got nothing to say,” and burst into tears.

  Tom drank the tea slowly, watching the swirling steam vanish in the warm air. The afternoon light angled in through the high windows of the sparsely furnished room. As he rubbed the stubble on his chin, it brought back sensations from the days when shaving was impossible, and washing likewise.

  “Want another one?” asked Knuckey evenly.

  “No. Thanks.”

  “You smoke?”

  “No.”

  “So. A boat washes up at the lighthouse. Out of nowhere.”

  “I told you all this out on Janus.”

  “And you’ll tell me again as many times as I like! So. You find the boat.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s got a baby in it.”

  “Yes.”

  “What state’s the baby in?”

  “Healthy. Crying, but healthy.”

  Knuckey was writing notes. “And there’s a bloke in the boat.”

  “A body.”

  “A man,” said Knuckey.

  Tom looked at him, sizing up the rephrasing.

  “You’re pretty used to being the king of the castle out on Janus, are you?”

  Tom considered the irony, which anyone who knew about life on the Lights would have registered, but he didn’t answer. Knuckey went on, “Reckon you can get away with things. No one around.”

  “It had nothing to do with getting away with things.”

  “And you decided you might as well keep the baby out there. Isabel had lost yours. No one would ever know. That it?”

  “I told you: I made the decision. Made Isabel go along with it.”

  “Knock your wife around, do you?”

  Tom looked at him. “Is that what you think?”

  “That why she lost the baby?”

  Shock registered on Tom’s face. “Did she say that?”

  Knuckey stayed silent, and Tom took a deep breath. “Look, I’ve told you what happened. She tried to talk me out of it. I’m guilty of whatever you say I’m guilty of, so let’s just get this over, and leave my wife out of it.”

  “Don’t try to tell me what to do,” Knuckey snapped. “I’m not your batman. I’ll do what I decide to do when I’m good and ready.” He pushed his chair out from the desk, and folded his arms. “The man in the boat…”

  “What about him?”

  “What state was he in, when you found him?”

  “He was dead.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I’ve seen enough bodies in my time.”

  “Why should I believe you about this one?”

  “Why should I lie?”

  Knuckey paused, and let the question hang in the air, for his prisoner to feel the answer weigh down upon him. Tom shifted in his chair. “Exactly,” said Knuckey. “Why should you lie?”

  “My wife’ll tell you he was dead when the boat washed up.”

  “The same wife you admit you forced to lie?”

  “Look, it’s completely different, sheltering a child and—”

  “Killing someone?” Knuckey cut in.

  “Ask her.”

  “I have,” said Knuckey quietly.

  “Then you know he was dead.”

  “I don’t know anything. She refuses to talk about it.”

  Tom felt a hammer blow to his chest. He avoided Knuckey’s eyes. “What has she said?”

  “That she’s got nothing to say.”

  Tom hung his head. “Christ all bloody mighty,” he muttered under his breath, before responding, “Well all I can do is repeat what I said. I never saw that man alive.” He knitted his fingers together. “If I can just see her, talk to her…”