1918

The thought lived inside him now like a second pulse.

There were mornings when Thomas woke before dawn and lay listening to the sea beyond the darkness. The house would still be sleeping. Beside him his wife breathed softly beneath the blankets, her breath rising and falling with the same slow rhythm as the tide beyond Peggy’s. Beyond the weatherboards, the wind moved through the she-oaks with that peculiar voice possessed only by coastal trees, a sound that seemed neither wind nor branch but something older born from the endless conversation between land and sea. Somewhere down at the Gulch a halyard tapped gently against a timber mast. Somewhere farther away a dog barked once and then surrendered again to silence. The whole town seemed suspended between sleeping and waking, held within that fragile hour before light remembered the world.

Those were the moments he thought of his son most.

Not during the day when there were nets to mend or cray pots to haul or fences to repair. Work occupied the hands and distracted the mind. The sea demanded attention. A man focused on tides and weather had little room for sorrow. But in the quiet hours before dawn memory returned. In the spaces between sounds. In the pauses between heartbeats. In those moments when the world seemed to hesitate long enough for longing to find him.

Lying there in the darkness, he would picture the bay beyond the window though he could not see it. He knew every contour of it by heart. The curve of the beach. The granite outcrops rising from the water like the backs of ancient creatures sleeping beneath the sea. The shallow reefs lurking beneath the surface. The hidden channels winding between submerged rocks. He knew where the swell wrapped around Governor Island before softening into Waubs Bay. He knew where the crayfish sheltered beneath ledges stained dark by generations of tide and salt. He knew where his son had first learned to row and where he had later rowed alone, standing a little taller each summer as childhood loosened its hold.

The landscape existed inside him now as completely as memory itself.

Sometimes he imagined that same sea stretching endlessly northward through the darkness. Beyond Bass Strait. Beyond Australia. Beyond oceans and continents and battlefields. Water connecting places that reason insisted were impossibly distant. The same moonlight touching Waubs Bay tonight might, weeks later, touch a harbour in France. The same tide rolling against Governor Island might eventually reach some foreign shore where his son had stood looking out across another sea and thinking, perhaps, of home.

The thought settled him.

And unsettled him.

For if the sea connected all things, then it connected him also to places where boys disappeared.

Places where sons became names carved into stone.

Places where fathers waited.

By first light the bay would begin to reveal itself. Darkness slowly lifting from the water. Governor Island emerging from shadow. The first gulls circling above the shoreline. Smoke beginning to rise from chimneys throughout the township below. Bicheno waking one house at a time.

The transformation happened so gradually it felt less like morning arriving than the world remembering itself.

First the sea.

Then the granite.

Then the weathered rooftops silvered by salt and sunlight.

Then the gravel roads winding through the town.

Then the people.

Always the people.

Until the town appeared once more from the darkness, unchanged and yet somehow altered by another night of waiting.

He often stood at the gate then.

The road to Waub’s beneath him still empty.

The grass silvered with dew.

The air carrying the mingled scents of salt, woodsmoke, damp earth and distant kelp drying along the shoreline.

Spiderwebs shimmered amongst the banksias. The eastern horizon glowed softly beyond Diamond Island. Somewhere a rooster announced the morning as though the sun itself required encouragement. The first rays of light caught upon windows and corrugated iron roofs, turning them briefly into fragments of scattered gold.

Below him fishermen moved through the half-light preparing their boats for the day. Their figures appeared small against the vastness of the sea. Voices drifted faintly across the water. A lantern swung gently from a jetty post. Oars knocked softly against timber hulls polished smooth by decades of tide and weather. The sounds belonged not merely to a morning but to a century.

Thomas found something close to peace in that.

The repetition.

The certainty.

The knowledge that while so much of the world had surrendered itself to madness, the sea still obeyed its own ancient rhythms.

The tide still arrived.

The tide still departed.

The seasons still turned.

The crayfish still moved across the reefs.

The gulls still followed the boats.

The granite still gathered warmth from the afternoon sun.

The sea asked for no explanations. It neither celebrated victories nor mourned defeats. It carried on according to laws older than memory and older than grief.

There was reassurance in such things.

Yet even these routines seemed altered now.

The war had reached Bicheno in ways no one had imagined possible.

Not with guns.

Not with trenches.

Not with artillery.

But with absence.

Absence sat at breakfast tables.

Absence occupied church pews.

Absence stood beside mothers collecting letters from the post office.

Absence lingered in family photographs.

Absence walked home with men returning from the jetty at dusk.

The town was full of it.

Thomas saw it everywhere.

In the widow standing alone outside the bakery.

In the old fisherman whose youngest son lay buried somewhere in France beneath a sky his father would never see.

In the schoolteacher who still paused each morning beneath the honour roll outside the hall.

In the minister whose prayers seemed longer now.

In the way conversations sometimes faltered when familiar names were spoken.

In the way eyes drifted instinctively towards the harbour whenever a vessel appeared beyond the headland.

Even the post office seemed changed.

Once it had been a place of gossip and community. A place where news arrived from Hobart and Launceston. A place of ordinary arrivals and departures.

Now every letter carried possibility.

Every telegram carried dread.

People approached the building differently.

More cautiously.

As though grief itself might be waiting behind the door.

The war had ended thousands of miles away, yet its shadow stretched all the way across oceans to this small settlement gathered between granite and sea.

Sometimes Thomas thought Bicheno itself was waiting.

Waiting the way the sea waited for the tide.

Waiting the way the banksias waited for spring.

Waiting for ships.

Waiting for letters.

Waiting for boys to come home as men.

The waiting seemed woven into the town.

It lived in the weatherboards silvered by salt and time.

In the fishing sheds crouched beside the foreshore.

In the jetty timbers worn smooth by generations of boots.

In the women standing at garden gates watching the road.

In fathers who lingered a little too long by fences and verandahs.

Waiting had become another season.

Another tide.

Another weather system moving slowly through the lives of everyone who lived there.

By afternoon the township glowed softly beneath the sun. Corrugated iron roofs flashed silver. Laundry billowed on clotheslines. Children wandered barefoot through the dust of Burgess Street. A horse and dray moved slowly towards the jetty. Somewhere near the post office a hammer rang against timber. Somewhere else a screen door slammed shut.

The ordinary sounds of an ordinary day.

Yet beneath them ran another current.

A quieter one.

A sadness woven so deeply into daily life that people rarely spoke of it directly anymore.

It existed in the glance exchanged between neighbours.

In the way conversations faltered when certain names were mentioned.

In the way every vessel entering the bay drew eyes towards the horizon.

As though each arrival might somehow restore something that had been taken away.

Thomas recognised that feeling because he lived inside it.

Some afternoons he would watch the coastal steamer anchored beyond the township and imagine all the journeys it had made. The storms it had weathered. The ports it had visited. The lives it had carried. Somewhere beyond that vessel lay the wider world. A world of cities and battlefields and railway stations and crowded ports filled with returning soldiers.

He tried sometimes to picture his son amongst them.

Stepping onto a dock.

Boarding another ship.

Crossing another ocean.

Coming home.

But the image never remained stable.

The face always blurred.

The years intervened.

And increasingly Thomas realised he was no longer remembering his son.

He was remembering the boy who had left.

The boy who raced across Redbill Beach.

The boy who climbed the granite above the Gulch.

The boy who laughed so easily.

The young man returning would be somebody else.

Somebody altered by places and experiences his father would never fully understand.

That thought frightened him in ways he rarely admitted.

Not because he feared the change.

Because he feared the distance.

The possibility that war had carried his son somewhere beyond the reach of memory itself.

A breeze moved across the hillside.

The banksias whispered together.

Far below, sunlight flashed upon the bay in a thousand fragments of shattered silver. Governor Island stood beyond it all, ancient and unmoving. Storms had broken against its granite flanks for centuries. Whalers had come and gone. Sealers had come and gone. Entire generations had lived and died beneath its gaze.

Yet the island remained.

Patient.

Enduring.

Watching.

It had watched ships arrive.

It had watched ships vanish.

It had watched fathers wait for sons and sons wait for fathers.

It had watched hope survive where reason could not.

The island understood something about time that people never could.

It knew that waiting was simply another form of love.

And so each afternoon Thomas found himself once again at the gate overlooking Waubs Bay, watching the road descend towards the township, listening for the distant sound of an engine and searching the horizon beyond Governor Island for a son who seemed to grow farther away with every passing season.

Yet still he waited.

Because hope, he had discovered, was stubborn.

As stubborn as granite.

As persistent as the tide.

And as impossible to silence as the sea itself.