CHAPTER 14
WHEN TOM’S SECOND three-year term came to an end just before Christmas 1927, the family from Janus Rock made its first journey to Point Partageuse while a relief keeper manned the light station. The couple’s second shore leave, it would be Lucy’s first voyage to the mainland. As Isabel had prepared for the arrival of the boat, she had toyed with finding an excuse to stay behind with the little girl in the safety of Janus.
‘You okay, Izz?’ Tom had asked when he saw her, suitcase open on the bed, staring blankly through the window.
‘Oh. Yes,’ she said quickly. ‘Just making sure I’ve packed everything.’
He was about to leave the room, when he doubled back and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Nervous?’
She snatched up a pair of socks and rolled them together in a ball. ‘No, not at all,’ she said as she stuffed them in the case. ‘Not at all.’
The unease Isabel had tried to hide from Tom vanished at the sight of Lucy in Violet’s arms, when her parents came to greet them at the jetty. Her mother wept and smiled and laughed all at the same time. ‘At last!’ She shook her head in awe, inspecting every inch of the child, touching her face, her hair, her little hand. ‘My blessed granddaughter. Fancy waiting nearly two years to lay eyes on you! And isn’t she just the image of my old Auntie Clem?’
Isabel had spent months preparing Lucy for exposure to people. ‘In Partageuse, Luce, there are lots and lots of people. And they’ll all like you. It might be a bit strange at first, but there’s no need to be scared.’ At bedtimes, she had told the girl stories of the town, and the people who lived in it.
Lucy responded with great curiosity to the endless supply of humans that now surrounded her. Isabel felt a twinge as she accepted the warm congratulations of townspeople on her pretty daughter. Even old Mrs Mewett tickled the little girl under the chin when she saw her in the haberdasher’s as she was buying a hair net. ‘Ah, little ones,’ she said wistfully. ‘Such blessings,’ leaving Isabel to wonder whether she was hearing things.
Almost as soon as they arrived, Violet packed the whole family off to Gutcher’s photographic studio. In front of a canvas backdrop painted with ferns and Greek columns, Lucy had been photographed with Tom and Isabel; with Bill and Violet; and on her own, perched on a grand wicker chair. Copies were ordered to take back to Janus, to send to cousins far afield, to have framed for the mantelpiece and the piano. ‘Three generations of Graysmark women,’ beamed Violet when she saw herself, with Lucy on her knee, sitting beside Isabel.
Lucy had grandparents who doted on her. God doesn’t make mistakes, thought Isabel. He had sent the little girl to the right place.
‘Oh, Bill,’ Violet had said to her husband the evening the family arrived. ‘Thank goodness. Thank goodness …’
Violet had last seen her daughter three years before, still grieving at her second miscarriage, on the couple’s first shore leave. Then, Isabel had sat with her head on her mother’s lap, weeping.
‘It’s just nature’s way,’ Violet had said. ‘You have to take a breath, and get up again. Children will come along, if that’s what God wants for you: just be patient. And pray. The praying’s the most important thing.’
She did not tell Isabel the whole truth of it, though. She did not say how often she had seen a child carried to term over the draining, withering summer or the whip-sharp winter, only to be lost to scarlet fever or diphtheria, their clothes folded away neatly until they might fit the next one down. Nor did she touch on the awkwardness of replying to a casual enquiry as to the number of children one had. A successful delivery was merely the first step of a long, treacherous journey. In this house, which had fallen silent years ago, Violet knew that only too well.
Reliable, dutiful Violet Graysmark, respectable wife of a respectable husband. She kept the moths out of the cupboards, the weeds out of the flowerbeds. She deadheaded the roses to persuade them into blooming even in August. Her lemon curd always sold out first at the church fête, and it was her fruitcake recipe which had been chosen for the local CWA booklet. True, she thanked God every night for her many blessings. But some afternoons, as the sunset turned the garden from green to a dull dun while she peeled potatoes over the sink, there just wasn’t enough room in her heart to hold all the sadness. As Isabel had cried during that previous visit, Violet had wanted to wail with her, to tear her hair and tell her she knew the grief of losing the firstborn: how nothing – no person, no money, no thing that this earth could offer – could ever make up for that, and that the pain would never, never go away. She wanted to tell her how it made you mad, made you bargain with God about what offering you could sacrifice to get your child back.
When Isabel had been safely asleep and Bill was dozing beside the last of the fire, Violet went to her wardrobe and fetched down the old biscuit tin. She fished around inside it, moving aside the few pennies, a small mirror, a watch, a wallet, until she came to the envelope frayed at the edges now from years of opening. She sat on the bed, and by the yellow light of the lamp, set to reading the clumsy script, though she knew the words by heart.
Dear Mrs Graysmark,
I hope you will forgive me writing to you: you don’t know me. My name is Betsy Parmenter and I live in Kent.
Two weeks ago I was visiting my son Fred, who was sent back from the front on account of bad shrapnel wounds. He was in the 1st Southern General hospital in Stourbridge, and I have a sister who lives nearby, so I was able to visit him every day.
Well I am writing because one afternoon they brought in a wounded Australian soldier who I understand was your son Hugh. He was in a bad way, on account as you will know of being blinded and lost an arm. He could still manage some words though, and spoke very fondly of his family and his home in Australia. He was a very brave lad. I saw him each day, and at one stage there was high hopes that he would recover, but then it seems he developed blood poisoning, and he went downhill.
I just wanted you to know that I brought him flowers (the early tulips were just blooming and they’re such lovely things) and some cigarettes. I think my Fred and him got along well. He even ate some fruitcake I brought in one day which was very pleasing to see and it seemed to give him pleasure. I was there the morning when he went downhill, and we all three said the Lord’s Prayer and we sang Abide With Me. The doctors eased his pain as best they could, and I think he did not suffer too much at the end. There was a vicar came and blessed him.
I would like to say how much we all appreciate the great sacrifice that your brave son made. He mentioned his brother, Alfie, and I pray that he comes back to you safe and sound.
I am sorry for the delay in writing this to you, only my Fred passed away a week after your boy and it has taken a lot of doing things as you can imagine.
With very best wishes and prayers,
(Mrs) Betsy Parmenter
Hugh would only have known tulips from picture books, Violet thought, and it comforted her that he had perhaps touched one and felt its shape. She wondered whether tulips had a scent.
She recalled how the postman had looked grave and almost guilty a couple of weeks later as he handed her the parcel: brown paper tied with string, addressed to Bill. She was so upset that she did not even read the printing on the form: she did not need to. Many a woman had received the meagre collection of things which constituted her son’s life.
The receipt form from Melbourne read:
Dear Sir,
Forwarded herewith, per separate registered post, is one package containing the effects of the late No. 4497 Pte Graysmark, 28th Bn. received ex ‘Themistocles’ as per inventory attached.
I shall be much obliged if you would kindly let me know whether it comes safely to hand, by signing and returning the enclosed printed receipt slip.
Yours faithfully,
J.M. Johnson, Major,
Officer in Charge, Base Records
On a separate slip of paper from ‘The Kit Store, 110 Greyhound Road, Fulham, London SW’ was the inventory of the effects. Violet was struck by something as she read the list: ‘shaving mirror; belt; three pennies; wristwatch with leather strap; harmonica’. How odd that Alfie’s mouth organ was amongst Hugh’s belongings. Then she looked again at the list, the forms, the letter, the parcel, and read the name more carefully. A. H. Graysmark. Not H. A. Alfred Henry, not Hugh Albert. She ran to find her husband. ‘Bill! Oh Bill!’ she cried. ‘There’s been the most dreadful mistake!’
It took a good deal of correspondence, on black-edged paper on the part of the Graysmarks, to find that Alfie had died within a day of Hugh, three days after arriving in France. Joining the same regiment on the same day, the brothers had been proud of their consecutive service numbers. The signalman, who had with his own eyes seen Hugh shipped out alive on a stretcher, disregarded the instruction to send the KIA telegram for A. H. Graysmark, assuming it meant H. A. The first Violet knew of her second son’s death was the bland package in her hands. It was an easy enough mistake to have made on a battlefield, she had said.
Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers’ deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother’s life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.
It was as if one of the shells from the French frontline had exploded in the middle of her family, leaving a crater that she could never fill or repair. Violet would spend days tidying her sons’ rooms, polishing the silver frames of their photographs. Bill became silent. Whatever topic of conversation Isabel tried to engage him in, he didn’t answer, or even wandered out of the room. Her job, she decided, was not to cause her parents any more bother or concern. She was the consolation prize – what they had instead of their sons.
Now, her parents’ rapture confirmed to Isabel that she had done the right thing in keeping Lucy. Any lingering shadows were swept away. The baby had healed so many lives: not only hers and Tom’s, but now the lives of these two people who had been so resigned to loss.
At Christmas lunch, Bill Graysmark said grace and in a choked voice thanked the Lord for the gift of Lucy. In the kitchen later, Violet confided to Tom that her husband had had a new lease of life from the day he had heard about Lucy’s birth. ‘It’s done wonders. Like a magic tonic.’
She gazed through the window at the pink hibiscus. ‘Bill took the news about Hugh hard enough, but when he found out about Alfie, it fair knocked him for six. For a long time he wouldn’t believe it. Said it was impossible that such a thing could have happened. He spent months writing here, there and everywhere, determined to show it was a mistake. In a way, I was glad of it: proud of him for fighting the news. But there were plenty of people hereabouts who’d lost more than one boy. I knew it was true.
‘Eventually the fire went out of him. He just lost heart.’ She took a breath. ‘But these days –’ she raised her eyes and smiled in wonder, ‘he’s his old self again, thanks to Lucy. I’d wager your little girl means as much to Bill as she does to you. She’s given him the world back.’ She reached up and kissed Tom’s cheek. ‘Thank you.’
As the women did the dishes after lunch, Tom sat out the back on the shady grass with Lucy, where she toddled about, circling back now and again to give him ravenous kisses. ‘Jeez, thanks, littlie!’ he chuckled. ‘Don’t eat me.’ She looked at him, with those eyes that sought his like a mirror, until he pulled her in to him and tickled her again.
‘Ah! The perfect dad!’ said a voice from behind. Tom turned to see his father-in-law approaching.
‘Thought I’d come and make sure you were managing. Vi always said I had the knack with our three.’ As the last word came out, a shadow flitted across his face. He recovered and stretched out his arms. ‘Come to Grandpa. Come and pull his whiskers. Ah, my little princess!’
Lucy tottered over and stretched out her arms. ‘Up you come,’ he said, sweeping her up. She reached for the fob watch in his waistcoat pocket, and tugged it out.
‘You want to know what time it is? Again?’ Bill laughed, and he went through the ritual of opening the gold case and showing her the hands. She immediately snapped it shut, and thrust it back at him to re-open. ‘It’s hard on Violet, you know,’ he said to Tom,
Tom brushed the grass off his trousers as he stood up. ‘What is, Bill?’
‘Being without Isabel, and now, missing out on this little one …’ He paused. ‘There must be jobs you could get around Partageuse way …? You’ve got a university degree, for goodness’ sake …’
Tom shifted his weight uneasily to his other foot.
‘Oh, I know what they say – once a lightkeeper, always a lightkeeper.’
‘That’s what they say,’ said Tom.
‘And is it true?’
‘More or less.’
‘But you could leave? If you really wanted to?’
Tom gave it thought before replying, ‘Bill, a man could leave his wife, if he really wanted to. Doesn’t make it the right thing to do.’
Bill gave him a look.
‘Hardly fair to let them train you up, get the experience, and then leave them in the lurch. And you get used to it.’ He glanced up at the sky as he considered. ‘It’s where I belong. And Isabel loves it.’
The child reached out her arms to Tom, who transferred her to his hip in a reflex movement.
‘Well, you mind you look after my girls. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘I’ll do my best. I promise you that.’
The most important Boxing Day tradition in Point Partageuse was the Church Fête. A gathering of residents from the town and far beyond, it had been established long ago, by someone with an eye for business who had seen the advantage of holding the fund-raising event on a day when no one had an excuse to say they were too busy with work to attend. And, it being still Christmas time, they had no excuse not to be generous either.
As well as the sale of cakes and toffees, and jars of jam that occasionally exploded in the fierce sun, the event was famous for its sports and novelty events: the egg and spoon race, three-legged race, sack race – all were staples of the day. The coconut shy still ran, though they’d given up on the shooting gallery after the war, because the newly honed skills of the local men meant it started to lose money.
The events were open to all, and participation was something of a three-line whip. Families made a day of it, and patties and sausages were barbecued over half a forty-four-gallon drum, and sold off at sixpence a go. Tom sat with Lucy and Isabel on a blanket in the shade, eating sausages in buns, while Lucy dismantled her lunch and redistributed it on the plate beside her.
‘The boys were great runners,’ Isabel said. ‘Even used to win the three-legged race. And I think Mum’s still got the cup I won for the sack race one year.’
Tom smiled. ‘Didn’t know I’d married a champion athlete.’
She gave him a playful slap on the arm. ‘I’m just telling you the Graysmark family legends.’
Tom was attending to the mess that threatened to spill over from Lucy’s plate when a boy with a marshal’s rosette appeared beside them. Clasping a pad and pencil, he said, ‘’Scuse me. That your baby?’
The question startled Tom. ‘Pardon?’
‘Just asking if that’s your baby.’
Though words came from Tom’s mouth, they were incoherent.
The boy turned to Isabel. ‘That your baby, Missus?’
Isabel frowned for a second, and then gave a slow nod as she understood. ‘You on the round-up for the dads’ race?’
‘That’s right.’ He lifted the pencil to the page and asked Tom, ‘How do you spell your name?’
Tom looked again at Isabel, but there was no trace of discomfort in her face. ‘I can spell it if you’ve forgotten how,’ she teased.
Tom waited for her to understand his alarm, but her smile didn’t waiver. Finally, he said, ‘Not really my strong point, running.’
‘But all the dads do it,’ said the boy, at what was clearly the first refusal he’d come across.
Tom chose his words carefully. ‘I wouldn’t make the qualifying round.’
As the boy wandered off to find his next conscript, Isabel said lightly, ‘Never mind, Lucy. I’ll go in the mums’ race instead. At least one of your parents is prepared to make a fool of themselves for you.’ But Tom didn’t return her smile.
Dr Sumpton washed his hands as, behind the curtain, Isabel dressed again. She had kept her promise to Tom to see the doctor while they were back in Partageuse.
‘Nothing wrong, mechanically speaking,’ he said.
‘So? What is it? Am I sick?’
‘Not at all. It’s just the change of life,’ the doctor said as he wrote up his notes. ‘You’re lucky enough to have a baby already, so it’s not as hard on you as it is on some women, when it comes unusually early like this. As for the other symptoms, well, I’m afraid you just have to grin and bear it. They’ll pass in a year or so. It’s just the way of things.’ He gave her a jolly smile. ‘And then, it’ll be a blessed relief: you’ll be past all the problems of menses. Some women would envy you.’
As she walked back to her parents’ house, Isabel tried not to cry. She had Lucy; she had Tom – at a time when many women had lost forever those they loved most. It would be greedy to want anything more.
A few days later, Tom signed the paperwork for another three-year term. The District Officer, who came down from Fremantle to see to the formalities, again paid close attention to his handwriting and signature, comparing them to his original documentation. Any sign of a tremor creeping into his hand and he wouldn’t be allowed back. Mercury poisoning was common enough: if they could catch it at the stage where it just caused shaky handwriting, they could avoid sending out a keeper who like as not would be mad as a meat axe by the end of his next stint.