CHAPTER 11
AN INQUISITIVE GULL watched tom from its seaweed-cushioned rock. It followed him with an implacable eye as he wrapped the body, now pungent with that smell of the dead, in the canvas. It was hard to tell what the man might have been in life. His face was neither very old nor very young. He was slight; blond. He had a small scar on his left cheek. Tom wondered who missed him; who might have cause to love or hate him.
The old graves from the shipwreck lay on low ground, near the beach. As he set about digging the fresh hole, his muscles took over, executing their familiar task from blind memory in a ritual he had never expected to repeat.
The first time he had reported for the daily burial parade he had vomited at the sight of the corpses stretched out side by side, waiting for his shovel. After a while, it became just a job. He would hope to get the skinny bloke, or the one with his legs blown off, because he was a bloody sight easier to move. Bury them. Mark the grave. Salute, and walk away. That’s how it was. Hoping for the one with the most bits blown off: Tom went cold at the thought that there had seemed nothing strange about that back then.
The shovel gave a gasp at each contact with the sandy soil. Once the ground had been patted back into a neat mound, he stopped for a moment to pray for whoever the poor wretch was, but he found himself whispering, ‘Forgive me, Lord, for this, and all my sins. And forgive Isabel. You know how much goodness there is in her. And you know how much she’s suffered. Forgive us both. Have mercy.’ He crossed himself and returned to the boat, ready to drag it back into the water. He gave it a heave, and a ray of light pricked his eyes as the sun glinted off something. He peered into the hull of the dinghy. Something shiny was wedged under the rib of the bow, and resisted his first attempt to grasp it. After pulling for a moment he prised away a cold, hard shape, which came to life, jangling: a silver rattle, embossed with cherubs and hallmarked.
He turned it over and over, as if waiting for it to speak to him, to give him some kind of clue. He thrust it in his pocket: any number of stories might account for the arrival of this strange pair on the island, but only telling himself Izzy’s story that the child was an orphan would allow him to sleep at night. It did not bear thinking beyond that, and he needed to avoid any proof to the contrary. He fixed his eyes on the line where the ocean met the sky like a pair of pursed lips. Better not to know.
He made sure that the boat had been picked up by the southerly current before wading back in to the beach. He was grateful for the salty stink of the green-black seaweed rotting on the rocks, which washed the smell of death from his nostrils. A tiny purple sand crab ventured out from under a ledge, sidled busily over to a dead blow-fish, swollen and spiky even in death, and began to pincer little pieces from the belly into its own mouth. Tom shivered, and started the steep trek up the path.
‘Most days, there’s nowhere to escape the wind around here. It’s all right if you’re a seagull, or an albatross: see how they just sit on the currents of air, like they’re having a rest?’ As he sat on the verandah, Tom pointed to a great silver bird which had made its way from some other island, and seemed to hang in a still sky on a thread, despite the turbulent air.
The baby ignored Tom’s finger and instead gazed into his eyes, mesmerised by the movement of his lips and the deep resonance of his chest. She cooed – a high-pitched half-hiccup. Tom tried to ignore the way his heart kicked in response, and continued his discourse. ‘But in that bay, just that little cove, it’s one spot where you’re most likely to find a bit of peace and quiet, because it faces north, and the wind hardly ever comes in due north. That side’s the Indian Ocean – nice and calm and warm. Southern Ocean’s on the other side – wild and dangerous as anything. You want to keep away from that fella.’
The child flung an arm above her blanket in response, and Tom let her hand wrap around his index finger. In the week since her arrival, he had become accustomed to her gurgles, to her silent, sleeping presence in her cot, which seemed to waft through the cottage like the smell of baking or flowers. It worried him that he could find himself listening out for her to wake in the morning, or going by reflex to pick her up when she started to cry.
‘You’re falling in love with her, aren’t you?’ said Isabel, who had been watching from the doorway. Tom frowned, and she said with a smile, ‘It’s impossible not to.’
‘All those little expressions she does …’
‘You’re going to be a beaut dad.’
He shifted in his chair. ‘Izz, it’s still wrong, not reporting it.’
‘Just look at her. Does she look like we’ve done anything wrong?’
‘But – that’s just it. We don’t need to do anything wrong. We could report her now and apply to adopt her. It’s not too late, Izz. We can still make it right.’
‘Adopt her?’ Isabel stiffened. ‘They’d never send a baby to a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere: no doctor; no school. No church probably worries them the most. And even if they did put her up for adoption, they’d want to give her to some couple in a town somewhere. And besides, it takes forever to go through the rigmarole. They’d want to meet us. You’d never get leave to go and see them, and we’re not due back onshore for another year and a half.’ She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I know we’ll cope. I know you’re going to be a wonderful dad. But they don’t.’
She gazed at the baby, and put a finger to her soft cheek. ‘Love’s bigger than rulebooks, Tom. If you’d reported the boat, she’d be stuck in some dreadful orphanage by now.’ She rested her hand on his arm. ‘Our prayers have been answered. The baby’s prayers have been answered. Who’d be ungrateful enough to send her away?’
The simple fact was that, sure as a graft will take and fuse on a rose bush, the rootstock of Isabel’s motherhood – her every drive and instinct, left raw and exposed by the recent stillbirth – had grafted seamlessly to the scion, the baby which needed mothering. Grief and distance bound the wound, perfecting the bond with a speed only nature could engineer.
When Tom came down from the lantern room that evening, Isabel was sitting beside the first fire of the autumn, nursing the baby in the rocking chair he had made four years ago now. She hadn’t noticed him, and he watched her in silence for a moment. She seemed to handle the child by sheer instinct, incorporating her into every move. He fought back his gnawing doubt. Perhaps Isabel was right. Who was he to part this woman from a baby?
In her hands was the Book of Common Prayer, to which Isabel had turned more frequently after the first miscarriage. Now, she read silently ‘The Churching of Women’, prayers for women after childbirth. ‘ Lo, children and the fruit of the womb: are an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord …
The next morning, Isabel stood beside Tom below the lantern room, holding the baby as he tapped out the signal. He had thought carefully about the wording. His fingers were unsteady as he began: he had been dreading sending news of the stillbirth, but this felt much worse. ‘Baby arrived early stop took us both by surprise stop Isabel recovering well stop no need for medical help stop little girl stop Lucy—’ He turned to Isabel. ‘Anything else?’
‘The weight. People always ask the weight.’ She thought back to Sarah Porter’s baby. ‘Say seven pounds one ounce.’
Tom looked at her in surprise at the ease with which the lie came to her. He turned back to the key and tapped out the figures.
When the reply arrived, he transcribed it and noted it in the signals book. ‘Congratulations stop marvellous news stop have officially recorded increase in Janus population as per regulations stop Ralph and Bluey send cheers stop grandparents will be informed pronto stop.’ He sighed, aware of a pressure in his chest, and waited a while before going to report the response to Isabel.
In the weeks that followed, Isabel bloomed. She sang as she went about the cottage. She could not keep from showering Tom with hugs and kisses all through the day. Her smile dazzled him with its sheer uninhibited joy. And the baby? The baby was peaceful, and trusting. She did not question the embrace which held her, the hands which caressed her, the lips which kissed her and crooned, ‘Mamma’s here, Lucy, Mamma’s here,’ as she was rocked to sleep.
There was no denying that the child was thriving. Her skin seemed to glow with a soft halo. Isabel’s breasts responded to the baby’s suckling by producing milk again within weeks, the ‘relactation’ Dr Griffiths described in clinical detail, and the child fed without a moment’s hesitation, as though the two of them had agreed some sort of contract. But Tom took to staying a fraction longer in the lantern room in the mornings after extinguishing the light. Time and again he would catch himself turning back the page of the log to 27 April, and staring at the blank space.
You could kill a bloke with rules, Tom knew that. And yet sometimes they were what stood between man and savagery, between man and monsters. The rules that said you took a prisoner rather than killed a man. The rules that said you let the stretchers cart the enemy off from no man’s land as well as your own men. But always, it would come down to the simple question: could he deprive Isabel of this baby? If the child was alone in the world? Could it really be right to drag her away from a woman who adored her, to some lottery of Fate?
At night, Tom began to dream he was drowning, flinging his arms and legs desperately to find ground somewhere, but there was nothing to stand on, nothing to hold him afloat except a mermaid, whose tail he would grasp and who would then pull him deeper and deeper into the dark water until he awoke gasping and sweating, while Isabel slept beatifically beside him.