Delays were commonplace back then. I didn’t get the telegram telling me Magnus Tulloch had been wounded at Amiens until after the armistice in November 1918. He was in a French military hospital. Superficial injuries: that’s what they said.

He would be all right!

And the war was over!

Clementina and I hugged each other, crying. Such joy, such unutterable sadness. When finally we could speak we told each other that everything—everything—would change now, although even then we knew it could never be as it was before. And somehow we buried the words wounded and injuries among the exhilaration of He will be all right! and The war is over!

Magnus Tulloch was shipped home in March—that miracle, that blessing. I can still see him, lambsie, walking to me down Martha Street, pulling the hat from his head. For a brief moment the sky was in his eyes, the sun in his hair, and he was there, nothing but the boy, and I thought: Through it all, you have found your way home. His lips moved but there was so much racket from a flock of twenty-eights flying overhead that I couldn’t hear. What? I asked the boy. What did you say?

It was later that I understood: he had come back to say goodbye.

~

Inside our little cottage, Magnus Tulloch was besieged by a happy, weeping Clementina and a battery of questions from Hal and Jessie, who were eight years old and curious and avid for tales of adventure.

Leave your Uncle Magnus to catch his breath, Clementina scolded.

But I could see in her a need as keen as theirs to shake words from him, find again the man she had lost through the return of this one.

Magnus Tulloch smiled in a nervy kind of way, and begged leave to be gone a wee while.

Wait, I called, following him out, grabbing my hat from the hook by the door, wait an’ I’ll come with ye, we can walk to the sea.

I put my arm through his, but he disentangled himself. Will not be gone for long, he muttered. A clumsy kiss on the cheek.

The kitchen door closed behind me. Clementina’s footsteps. She put her arm around my waist, and in silence we watched Magnus Tulloch wobbling down the road on the bicycle.

~

Of the thousand things I had missed in those years apart, the one that pulled most at my heart was that space in every day when Magnus Tulloch would unpin my hair, unravel its twists and curls, and we would talk. The rhythm of our lives seemed to live in those long, steady brushstrokes, reassuring and calm, commonplace, everyday. A promise made and kept. An always promise.

I thought of this when I heard the bicycle fall against the front wall that first night. It was late. Clementina had gone to bed already, the children long before her. I put the kettle on the stove. But when he let himself in, Magnus Tulloch’s eyes were hazy, his step unsure. He slurred sorry, my Meggie and goodnight and clasped me in a hug that was over before I could lean into it.

Superficial. We did not agree, the army and I, on what it meant.

I heard the music of Emily Dickinson in my head.

There is a word

Which bears a sword

Can pierce an armed man.

It hurls its barbed syllables—

At once is mute again.

Now I knew. I knew the word.

~

Castlemaine took Magnus Tulloch back, and I was always grateful to them for that. But it did not work out as they had hoped. Less than a month, it was, before the coopering shop was too much for him—the noise, the light, the impact of hammer on hoops, jarring nerves that were never still any more. Mrs Laskon, Mr Prentice, the girls at the factory—people were sympathetic, they seemed to want to pat my arm and talk in hushed voices, but I didn’t care about people, only that Magnus Tulloch was alive and had come back to me.

All that skill an’ training, it canna be for nothing? Clementina whispered when Castlemaine put him in the store-room, a packer of bottles, a lifter of the kegs he’d once crafted with special tools brought out from home.

Nothing is for nothing! Fierce. Wishful.

He never slept much at night. I would hear him moving round the house late; sometimes the scrape of bicycle tyres on the limestone outside our window. He told me once that the army doctor’s orders were plain: he must push everything he’d seen, everything he’d done, from his mind.

Just don’t ask me, Meggie. They said it’s best if ye just never ask and things don’t ever get said.

It made sense to him. He had no wish to bring unsayable things from the dark to live with us in the weatherboard cottage in Martha Street. But they did, anyway. Of course they did. I had learned for myself that things like that had to live somewhere.

They took up room, so much space, all the space between us in our bed, space that had never been there in the days when he would sleep curled around my body like a second skin. Now there was no peace for him in snatches of sleep, no comfort in the touch of my hands on his back. Was he awake or asleep when he pulled away from me? Was it me or the world he did not want?

But there were other times when the dark things in him surfaced and I did not recognise the glass in his eyes, the rage in his body as it laboured over me. Was he awake or asleep then? I didn’t know that, either.

I canna write more of these things to you, lambsie. I can write of love, but not that.

But I’ll tell you this: nothing is for nothing.

~

For five months I denied it: the sickness, the gentle rounding of my body, the fluttering of wings that were not mine. I was never one to know when the bleeding would or wouldn’t come, so I held to the notion it was late, was all, just late, and would be upon me still. Finally Clementina, who knew what she was looking at, had had enough. She took my face in her hands and would not let me look away. Ye’re pregnant, quinie, she said, an’ the time for sayin’ otherwise is gone!

Dr Hamilton confirmed it. Twenty-nine and married fourteen years! A miracle baby, this little one, Mrs Tulloch, because no prevention method is that reliable, believe you me. Just ask the mothers of the hundreds of little accidents walking around!

I don’t know. It’s true there were many girls on the farlins whose measures ran aground, in spite of their canny efforts to plan which years they would be in a certain way and when they would leave the season. But I think back now on what the mission ladies used to say about the work and what it did to us, the toll on our bodies. Maybe the miracle was that any of us fell pregnant at all.

I didn’t tell Mills & Ware for a long time. The girls had already guessed, but Management was surprised as I was still slight, little changed beneath the enormous apron. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw Kitta there—her body had barely shown, either.

I walked from the factory on my last day with a bunch of agapanthus and a large tin of Family Assorted and my two aprons under my arm. The end, I told myself. My factory life done.

~

I was afraid the whole time, all of those months, more afraid than I had been of anything. I could not explain it to Clementina. There were no words I could find to say what it was, all that it was, this huge nameless fear, and I never wanted to go back there to the place it came from.

But when Steven was born, in the first week of a new year, 1920, I knew I’d to make a choice between fear and love. And I chose love. I chose him.

Your uncle, lambsie. You never knew you had an uncle, did you.

~

We brought our baby home on the tram from the hospital and walked from the Mandurah road to Martha Street. Then Magnus took off on his bicycle for the late shift at Castlemaine.

Jessie and Hal made such a fuss of the baby, offered him little wooden toys of their own. But Clementina had the two of them tucked into bed by nightfall.

We sat in the hot kitchen, she and I, Clementina mashing vegetables for soup.

It’s a sign, quinie, she told me. A new life for a new decade!

I don’t want any talk of signs. Ye sound like the old ones at home an’ there’s no place for the dark things here.

But somethin’ good has come, for a change. I’ve wanted to be Unty Clementina for more than a wee while.

I examined Steven’s tiny nails, the perfect fingers.

So. Are ye goin’ to call him … She stopped.

I didn’t catch her meaning.

Steven. Are ye goin’ to call him Stivvy?

No!

I’d not meant to sound harsh, and Clementina looked down while I rushed to explain, gentling my words.

He is named to honour Stivvy, aye, but he has a name of his own. I don’t think it’s right to saddle a new wee life with another’s before it’s even begun. D’ye not think so?

Mmmm. And then Clementina grinned. So it’s Fremantle Steven?

I flicked a tea towel in her direction.

Seagull Steven? Milk Arrowroot Steven?

Steven Tulloch is good enough, Unty Clementina.

I thought we might be calling him Gingernut Steven, but will ye look at that. She reached over to tousle the baby’s silken head. Not a ginger hair on him!

I inhaled the sweet smell of baby curls, dark like Magnus’s, like Ma’s and Kitta’s.

Clementina picked up the masher again, though surely the neeps and tatties could scarcely need more. So, quinie. D’ye want us to move now, ye an’ Magnus? Give ye some space with your wee bairn without a pair of nine-year-olds an’ an old herrin’ girl?

No! I clutched at her arm. What would I do without Clementina?

Well, good, that’s all right, then, that’s just grand, she said, her cheeks pink like apples. We’ll work it out, quinie. It will all be grand.

~

Magnus Tulloch would shake silent noises from his head as he rocked the cradle that Mr Brescianini had made for us out of sheoak from his vineyard at Wanneroo. He was wary of holding Steven, Magnus was, in awe of his small body, afraid it would break.

But there isn’t any doubt he loved him.

Did he love me still? I didn’t know that. The boy would have loved me forever, no matter what, but the boy had gone.

~

When Steven was a few months old, a letter arrived, a few sheets of paper that made all three of us silent.

I had written to Gracie after the war, to put her mind at rest that her brother was safe. We’d had no reply, but that was often the way then. Things went astray, mail went missing. When I wrote again to tell her of the child, her nephew, that she had always believed would come, a letter came back to us soon after. Full of happy wishes, Gracie was, though wistful that she would never meet our little boy. And she wrote of how things were on the island.

The herring trade had shrunk almost to nought during the war. We’d known of this from Paulie Garrioch, who Magnus saw sometimes on his way home from the brewery. The government had taken most of the drifters, Gracie said, just a tiny fleet left at home, and Shetland boys had been as quick to sign up as those everywhere else. Karl came home safe, and the Lord be praised for that, but so many others …

Magnus Tulloch put his head in his hands. The names Gracie listed on the page were the names of boys he had grown up with, boys who had become fishers or sailors, or coopers like him.

Some boats are back to sea, but most are idle now, Gracie wrote. And what did they expect? is what I said to Karl. Look at who it was who bought our fine Shetland herring! Who was our biggest customer all them years? Germany, of course, and Germany has its shameful hands full now, too full to be buying fancy things like pickled herring.

I could imagine Gracie waving her finger in Karl’s face, just a little shy of smug. She’d always been suspicious of the herring trade, the way it lured people away from villages.

Aye, she wrote, it’s plain bread that Germany will be wanting now, and all they deserve too.

I pushed the pages aside. I looked up to meet Clementina’s pale face. We both knew what Gracie’s news meant. Fewer boats would mean no farlins, no teams. The girls would remain in the villages where they had come from, and would not be leaving for the season every year. Their lives, changed forever, now forever the same.