CHAPTER 37
Hopetoun, 28th August 1950
THERE WAS NOTHING much in Hopetoun now, except for the long jetty that still whispered of the glory days when the town served as the port for the Goldfields. The port itself had closed in 1936, a few years after Tom and Isabel had moved here. Tom’s brother, Cecil, had outlived his father by barely a couple of years, and when he died, the money was enough to buy a farm outside the town. Their property was small by local standards, but still edged the coast for several miles, and the house stood on a ridge just inland, looking down over the sweep of beach below. They lived a quiet life. They went into town occasionally. Farmhands helped with the work.
Hopetoun, on a wide bay nearly four hundred miles east of Partageuse, was far enough away that they weren’t likely to bump into anyone from there, but close enough for Isabel’s parents to make the journey at Christmas, in the years before they died. Tom and Ralph wrote to each other once in a while – just a greeting, short, plain, but deeply felt all the same. Ralph’s daughter and her family had moved into his little cottage after Hilda died, and looked after him well, though his health was frail these days. When Bluey married Kitty Kelly, Tom and Isabel sent a gift, but they didn’t attend the wedding. Neither of them ever returned to Partageuse.
And the best part of twenty years flowed past like a quiet country river, deepening its path with time.
The clock chimes. Almost time to leave. It’s a short drive to town these days, with the sealed roads. Not like when they first arrived. As Tom ties his tie, a stranger with grey hair catches a glimpse of him, just a flick of an eye, then he remembers it’s himself in the mirror. Now, the suit hangs more loosely on his frame, and there is a gap between the collar and the neck inside it.
Through the window, the waves rise, sacrificing themselves in a blizzard of white, far out to sea. The ocean gives not the slightest hint that any time has passed, ever. The only sound is the buffeting of the August gales.
Having placed the envelope in the camphor chest, Tom closes the lid reverently. Soon enough, the contents will lose all meaning, like the lost language of the trenches, so imprisoned in a time. Years bleach away the sense of things until all that’s left is a bone-white past, stripped of feeling and significance.
The cancer had been finishing its work for months, nibbling the days from her, and there had been nothing to do but wait. He had held her hand for weeks, sitting by her bed. ‘Remember that gramophone?’ he would ask, or ‘I wonder whatever happened to old Mrs Mewett?’ And she would smile faintly. Sometimes, she mustered the energy to say, ‘Don’t forget the pruning, will you?’ Or, ‘Tell me a story, Tom. Tell me a story with a happy ending,’ and he would stroke her cheek and whisper, ‘Once upon a time there was a girl called Isabel, and she was the feistiest girl for miles around …’ And as he told the story, he would watch the sunspots on her hand, and notice how the knuckles swelled slightly, these days, and the ring moved loosely on the skin between the joints.
Towards the end, when she could no longer sip water, he had given her the corner of a damp flannel to suck, and smeared lanoline on her lips to stop them cracking with the dryness. He had caressed her hair, now shot-through with silver, tied in a heavy plait down her back. He had watched her thin chest rise and fall with that same uncertainty he remembered in Lucy’s when she first arrived on Janus: each breath a struggle and a triumph.
‘Are you sorry you ever met me, Tom?’
‘I was born to meet you, Izz. I reckon that’s what I was put here for,’ he said, and kissed her cheek.
His lips remembered that very first kiss decades before, on the windy beach in the setting sun: the bold, fearless girl guided only by her heart. He remembered her love for Lucy, instant and fierce and without question – the sort of love that, had things been different, would have been returned for a lifetime.
He had tried to show Isabel his love, in every act of every day for thirty years. But now, there would be no more days. There could be no more showing, and the urgency drove him on. ‘Izz,’ he said, hesitating. ‘Is there anything you want to ask me? Anything you want me to tell you? Anything at all. I’m not very good at this, but, if there is, I promise I’ll try my best to answer.’
Isabel attempted a smile. ‘Means you must think it’s nearly over then, Tom.’ She nodded her head a little, and patted his hand.
He held her gaze. ‘Or maybe that I’m just finally ready to talk …’
Her voice was weak. ‘It’s all right. There’s nothing more I need, now.’
Tom stroked her hair, looking a long while into her eyes. He put his forehead to hers, and they stayed, unmoving, until her breathing changed, growing more ragged.
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ she said, clutching his hand. ‘I’m so scared, love. So scared. What if God doesn’t forgive me?’
‘God forgave you years ago. It’s about time you did too.’
‘The letter?’ she asked anxiously. ‘You’ll look after the letter?’
‘Yes, Izz. I’ll look after it.’ And the wind shook the windows as it had done decades ago on Janus.
‘I’m not going to say goodbye, in case God hears and thinks I’m ready to go.’ She squeezed his hand again. After that, words were beyond her. Now and then she would open her eyes and there would be a sparkle in them, a light that brightened as her breathing got shallower and harder, as if she had been told a secret and suddenly understood something.
Then, on that last evening, just as the waning moon parted wintry clouds, her breathing changed in the way Tom knew all too well, and she slipped away from him.
Even though they had electricity, he sat with just the soft glow of the kerosene lamp to bathe her face: so much gentler, the light of a flame. Kinder. He stayed by the body all night, waiting until dawn before telephoning the doctor. Standing to, like in the old days.
As Tom walks down the path, he snaps off a yellow bud from one of the rose bushes Isabel planted when they first moved here. Its fragrance is already strong, and takes him back almost two decades to the picture of her, kneeling in the freshly dug bed, hands pressing down the earth around the young bush. ‘We’ve finally got our rose garden, Tom,’ she had said. It was the first time he had seen her smile since she had left Partageuse, and the image stayed with him, as clear as a photograph.
There is a small gathering at the church hall after the funeral. Tom stays as long as politeness demands. But he wishes the people really knew who they were mourning: the Isabel he had met on the jetty, so full of life and daring and mischief. His Izzy. His other half of the sky.