CHAPTER 18
AS ISABEL GOES about her day – always moving, always busy – she has a keen physical sense of where Lucy is, attached by an invisible thread of love. She is never angry – her patience with the child is infinite. When food falls to the floor, when grubby hand marks decorate the walls, they are never greeted with a cross word or a disapproving look. If Lucy wakes crying in the night, Isabel comforts her gently, lovingly. She accepts the gift that life has sent her. And she accepts the burdens.
While the child is asleep in the afternoon, she goes up to the stick crosses on the headland. This is her church, her holy place, where she prays for guidance, and to be a worthy mother. She prays too, in a more abstract way, for Hannah Roennfeldt. Hers is not to question the way things have turned out. Out here, Hannah is just a distant notion. She has no body, no existence, whereas Lucy – Isabel knows every expression of hers, every cry. She has been watching the miracle that is this little girl take shape day by day, like a gift revealed only with the passing of time. A whole personality is emerging, as the girl catches and masters words, and begins to articulate how she feels, who she is.
So Isabel sits in the chapel without walls or windows or pastor, and thanks God. And if thoughts of Hannah Roennfeldt intrude, her response is always the same. She simply cannot send this child away: it is not for her to risk Lucy’s happiness. And Tom? Tom is a good man. Tom will do the right thing, always: she can rely on that. He will come to terms with things, in the end.
But a sliver of un-crossable distance has slipped between them: an invisible, wisp-thin no man’s land.
Gradually, the rhythm of life on Janus re-establishes itself, absorbing Tom in the minutiae of its rituals. When he wakes sometimes from dark dreams of broken cradles, and compasses without bearings, he pushes the unease down, lets the daylight contradict it. And isolation lulls him with the music of the lie.
‘And you know what day it is today, don’t you, Luce?’ asked Isabel as she pulled the jumper down over the little girl’s head and extracted a hand from the end of each sleeve. Six months had passed since their return to Janus in January 1928.
Lucy tilted her head upwards a fraction. ‘Ummm,’ she said, playing for time.
‘Want a clue?’
She nodded.
Isabel pulled on the first little sock. ‘Come on. Other tootsie. Thaaat’s the way. OK, the clue is that if you’re a very good girl, there might be oranges tonight …’
‘Boat!’ cried the girl, sliding off her mother’s knee and jumping up and down, one shoe on her foot and the other in her hand. ‘Boat coming! Boat coming!’
‘That’s right. So shall we make the house all lovely for when Ralph and Bluey come?’
‘Yes!’ Lucy called behind her, as she dashed to the kitchen to say, ‘Alf and Booey coming, Dadda!’
Tom picked her up and gave her a kiss. ‘No flies on you! Did you remember that all by yourself, or has someone been helping you?’
‘Mamma said,’ she confessed with a grin, and wriggled to the ground, off to find Isabel again.
Soon, garbed in galoshes and coats, the two of them set out towards the chook house, Lucy clutching a miniature version of Isabel’s basket.
‘A real fashion parade,’ remarked Tom as he passed them on his way to the shed.
‘I’d rather be warm than glamorous,’ said Isabel, and gave him a quick kiss. ‘We’re on an egg expedition.’
Inside the chicken coop, Lucy used two hands to pick up each egg, the task that would have taken Isabel seconds treated instead as a precious ritual. She put each egg to her cheek and reported either ‘Still warm!’ or ‘Tone cold’ as appropriate, then passed it to Isabel for safe storage, keeping the last one to carry in her own basket. Then, ‘Thank you, Daphne. Thank you, Speckle …’ she began, and went on to thank each hen for her contribution.
In the vegetable patch, she held the spade handle with Isabel during the potato dig.
‘I think I can see one …’ said Isabel, waiting for Lucy to spot the lighter patch in the sandy soil.
‘There!’ said Lucy, and put her hand into the hole, retrieving a stone.
‘Almost.’ Isabel smiled. ‘How about next to it? Look a little bit nearer the side.’
‘’Tato!’ Lucy beamed as she raised the prize above her head, scattering soil in her hair, then in her eyes, which started her crying.
‘Let’s have a look,’ soothed Isabel, wiping her hands on her dungarees before attending to the eye. ‘There we are, now, blink for Mamma. There, all gone, Luce.’ And the little girl continued to open and squint shut her eyes.
‘All gone,’ she said eventually. Then, ‘More ’tato!’ and the hunt began again.
Inside, Isabel swept the floor in every room, gathering the sandy dust into piles in the corner, ready to gather up. Returning from a quick inspection of the bread in the oven, she found a trail leading all through the cottage, thanks to Lucy’s attempts with the dustpan.
‘Look, Mamma! I helping!’
Isabel took in the miniature cyclone trail and sighed. ‘You could call it that …’ Picking Lucy up, she said, ‘Thank you. Good girl. Now, just to make extra sure the floor’s clean, let’s give it an extra sweep, shall we?’ With a shake of the head, she muttered, ‘Ah, Lucy Sherbourne, who’d be a housewife, eh?’
Later, Tom appeared at the doorway. ‘She all ready?’
‘Yep,’ said Isabel. ‘Face washed, hands washed. No grubby fingers.’
‘Then up you come, littlie.’
‘Up the stairs, Dadda?’
‘Yes, up the stairs.’ And she walked beside him to the tower. At the foot of the steps, she put her arms up so that he could hold her hands from behind. ‘Now, bunny, let’s count. One, two, three,’ and they proceeded, at an agonisingly slow pace, up the stairs, Tom counting every one aloud, long after Lucy gave up.
At the top, in the watch room, Lucy held out her hands. ‘Noclars,’ and Tom said, ‘Binoculars in a minute. Let’s get you up on the table first.’ He sat her on top of the charts, then handed her the binoculars, keeping the weight of them in his own hands.
‘Can you see anything?’
‘Clouds.’
‘Yep, plenty of those around. Any sign of the boat?’
‘No.’
‘You sure?’ Tom laughed. ‘Wouldn’t want you in charge of the guardhouse. What’s that over there? See? Where my finger is.’
She kicked her legs back and forwards. ‘Alf and Booey! Oranges.’
‘Mamma says there’ll be oranges, does she? Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed.’
It was more than an hour before the boat docked. Tom and Isabel stood on the jetty, Lucy on Tom’s shoulders.
‘A whole welcoming committee!’ called Ralph.
‘Hello!’ called Lucy. ‘People! Hello, Alf, hello, Boo.’
Bluey jumped off onto the jetty, heaving the rope Ralph threw him. ‘Mind out, Luce,’ he called to the child, now on the ground. ‘Don’t want to get in the way of the rope.’ He looked at Tom. ‘Golly, she’s a real little girl now, isn’t she? No more Baby Lucy!’
Ralph laughed. ‘They grow up, you know, babies.’
Bluey finished securing the rope. ‘We only see her every few months: just makes it more obvious. Kids in town, you see them every day, so you kind of don’t notice them getting older.’
‘And suddenly they’re great hulks of lads like you!’ teased Ralph. As he stepped onto the jetty, he had something in one hand behind his back. ‘Now, who’s going to help me take the things off the boat?’
‘Me!’ said Lucy.
Ralph gave Isabel a wink as he produced a tin of peaches from behind his back. ‘Well then, here’s something very, very heavy for you to carry.’
Lucy took the tin with both hands.
‘Gosh, Luce, better be careful with that! Let’s take it up to the house.’ Isabel turned to the men. ‘Give me something to take up if you like, Ralph.’ He clambered back to fish out the mail and a few light parcels. ‘See you up at the house in a bit. I’ll have the kettle on.’
After lunch, as the adults finished cups of tea at the kitchen table, Tom said, ‘Lucy’s a bit quiet …’
‘Hmmm,’ said Isabel. ‘She’s supposed to be finishing her drawing for Mum and Dad. I’ll go and check.’ But before she could leave the room, Lucy entered the kitchen, dressed in a petticoat of Isabel’s that trailed to the floor, a pair of her shoes with heels, and the string of blue glass beads that Isabel’s mother had sent out with that morning’s boat.
‘Lucy!’ said Isabel. ‘Have you been in my things?’
‘No,’ said the girl, eyes wide.
Isabel blushed. ‘I don’t usually parade my underwear around,’ she said to the visitors. ‘Come on, Lucy, you’ll catch your death of cold like that. Let’s get your clothes back on. And let’s have a talk about going through Mamma’s things. And about telling the truth.’ Smiling as she left the room, she didn’t catch the brief expression that crossed Tom’s features at her last remark.
Lucy trots happily behind Isabel as they go to gather the eggs. She is mesmerised by the newly hatched chicks which appear from time to time, and holds them under her chin to feel their golden fluffiness. When she helps pick carrots and parsnips, sometimes she tugs so hard that she tumbles over backwards, showered with soil. ‘Lucy-Goosy!’ laughs Isabel. ‘Up you get now.’
At the piano, she sits on Isabel’s knee and bashes away at notes. Isabel holds her index finger and helps her press out ‘Three Blind Mice’, then the child says, ‘By myself, Mamma,’ and starts her cacophony again.
She sits for hours on the kitchen floor, wielding coloured pencils on the back of obsolete CLS forms, producing random squiggles to which she proudly points and says, ‘This is Mamma, Dadda, and Lulu Lighthouse.’ She takes for granted the 130-foot castle-tower in her backyard, with a star in it. Along with words such as ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ – fanciful concepts from books – she masters the more concrete ‘lens’ and ‘prism’ and ‘refraction’. ‘It’s my star,’ she tells Isabel one evening as she points to it. ‘Dadda gave it to me.’
She tells Tom snatches of stories, about fish, about seagulls, about ships. As they walk down to the beach, she delights in taking a hand each from Tom and Isabel and getting them to swing her in the air between them. ‘Lulu Lighthouse!’ is her favourite phrase, and she uses it when she draws herself in splodgy pictures, or describes herself in stories.
The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom. Existence here is on a scale of giants. Time is in the millions of years; rocks which from a distance look like dice cast against the shore are boulders hundreds of feet wide, licked round by millennia, tumbled onto their sides so that layers become vertical stripes.
Tom watches Lucy and Isabel as they paddle in Paradise Pool, the girl enraptured by the splashing and the saltiness and the starfish she has found, brilliant blue. He watches her fingers clutch the creature, her face alight with excitement and pride, as though she has made it herself. ‘Dadda, look. My starfish!’ Tom has trouble keeping both time scales in focus: the existence of an island and the existence of a child.
It astounds him that the tiny life of the girl means more to him than all the millennia before it. He struggles to make sense of his emotions – how he can feel both tenderness and unease when she kisses him goodnight, or presents a grazed knee for him to kiss better with the magic power that only a parent has.
For Isabel, too, he is torn between the desire he feels for her, the love, and the sense that he cannot breathe. The two sensations grate at one another, unresolved.
Sometimes, alone in the light, he finds his mind seeking out Hannah Roennfeldt. Is she tall? Is she plump? Is there some trace of her in Lucy’s face? When he tries to imagine her, he sees only hands, covering a weeping face. He shudders, and returns to his immediate task.
This child is healthy and happy and adored, in this little world beyond the reach of newspapers and gossip. Beyond the reach of reality. There are weeks at a time when Tom can almost rest in the story of a normal, happy family, as if it is some kind of opiate.
‘We mustn’t let Dadda know. Not until I tell you.’
Lucy looked at Isabel gravely. ‘I mustn’t tell,’ she said, nodding. ‘Can I have a biscuit?’
‘In a minute. Let’s just finish wrapping these.’ The September boat in 1928 had brought several extra parcels, which Bluey had managed to smuggle to Isabel in moments when Ralph distracted Tom with unloading. Engineering a birthday surprise for Tom was no easy feat: it involved writing to her mother months in advance with the list of requests. As Tom was the only one with a bank account, it also required a promise to pay next time they were ashore.
Tom was both easy and difficult to buy for: he would be happy with whatever he got, but he didn’t really want anything. She had settled on a Conway Stewart fountain pen and the latest edition of Wisden: something practical and something entertaining. When she had asked Lucy one night as they sat outside, what she wanted to give Dadda, the little girl had twirled her hair around her finger as she thought for a moment and said, ‘The stars.’
Isabel had laughed. ‘I’m not sure we can manage that, Luce.’
The child had said crossly, ‘But I want to!’
An idea came to Isabel. ‘What if we gave him a map of the stars – an atlas?’
‘Yes!’
Now, as they sat in front of the hefty book, Isabel asked, ‘What do you want to write in the front?’ She held the pen, her fingers around Lucy’s, to inscribe in jerky letters, as instructed, ‘For my Dadda, love for ever and ever …’
‘More,’ Lucy insisted.
‘More what?’
‘More “ever”. “Ever and ever and ever and ever …”’
Isabel laughed, and ‘ever and ever and ever and ever’ trailed like a caterpillar across the page. ‘What comes next? Shall we say, “From your loving daughter Lucy”?’
‘From Lulu Lighthouse.’
The little girl started shaping the letters with her mother, but got bored and climbed off her knee in mid-stroke.
‘Mamma finish it,’ she commanded casually.
So Isabel completed the signature, and added in brackets, ‘(Per Isabel Sherbourne, scribe and general factotum of the above-mentioned signatory.)’
When Tom unwrapped the parcel, a difficult manoeuvre with Lucy’s hands over his eyes, he said, ‘It’s a book …’
‘It’s a antless!’ shouted Lucy.
Tom took in the present. ‘Brown’s Star Atlas, showing all the bright stars, with full instructions how to find and use them for navigational purposes and Board of Trade examinations.’ He smiled slowly, and turned to Isabel. ‘Lucy’s a clever girl, isn’t she, organising this?’
‘Read, Dadda. Inside. I did writing.’
Opening the cover, Tom saw the long dedication. He still smiled, but there was something about the words ‘For ever and ever and ever and ever and ever …’ that stabbed him. Forever was an impossible concept, particularly for this child, in this place. He put his lips to the top of Lucy’s head. ‘It’s just beaut, Lulu Lighthouse. The loveliest present I’ve ever had.’