The Keeper (6 page)

Maisie frowned. It was no wonder Aletta had turned out the way she had with a mother like that. Queenie wasn’t lighthouse. Everybody knew that. Everyone had told Maans Oosthuizen not to marry her.

And now this wild Aletta.

‘What do you want to do, Aletta?’ Maisie had said calmly.

‘I want to dance.’

Ignoring this, Maisie said, ‘Will Len marry you?’

Aletta had looked at her with that strange equivocal glance of hers. ‘Len?’

So Maisie turned to Queenie.

‘He’s seventeen,’ said Queenie. ‘How’s he going to support her?’

‘He’ll be apprenticed at a light.’

‘I want to dance,’ Aletta had said and gone to the window, beyond their conversation.

‘Aletta should have been a dancer,’ Hannes says to Rika one day. ‘I don’t even know if she was any good. I thought she was, but then – she was Aletta and if I think of her, I think of her dancing. She once said she was only good enough for the back line of the chorus, and anyway, she had to earn a living. Maybe it was true but I sometimes used to watch her when she didn’t know I was there,’ he says. ‘She was like a seabird. That’s the best way to describe her. Light. Very strong.’

Rika listens patiently.

‘When we were at lights in town she went to classes after work,’ Hannes says. ‘I watched her once or twice in local ballroom competitions. She was usually placed, but she never won. If she was disappointed she always used to laugh it off. But on the island she must have felt like a bird with one wing. There was no one for her to dance with. I couldn’t – I’m embarrassing on a dance floor. And anyway, I was not part of Aletta’s idea of dancing. It was what she did with her kind of people – or alone. It was her interest. Not mine. It made her happy. All I could do to help was look after her gramophone and give her a place to practice. Sometimes she danced all day until she was exhausted. I didn’t moan when she didn’t clean the house or cook a proper meal. I let her be.’

It was as if he’d stumbled on a seabird blown off course. Wary, wild and angry.

‘You see,’ he says, ‘unless you’ve been in an isolated lighthouse you can’t begin to understand what living in one means. It sounds romantic. It
is
romantic. But, again, it’s not. Most lights are pretty harsh. Do you know,’ he turns to Rika, ‘I once spoke to the Railways doctor who sometimes dealt with lighthouse staff. I went for my annual medical and we had a chat. Good bloke. Keen fisherman. He told me that treating lighthouse staff at various places was fascinating. Said he wished he’d studied psychology. Apparently we’re an odd lot!’ He smiles. ‘Are we odd?’ He casts a quizzical glance at Rika.

‘Decidedly,’ she says with a laugh.

He puts out his hand very briefly as if to touch hers, then withdraws it calmly.

‘The island is a very healthy place. In fact, it was a joke that every time anyone went on shore leave they brought back some germ or other and we’d all go down for a week until the wind and the stink of guano killed off the bugs and we were well again. Same with the workers. Regular as clockwork. But the doc told me that he’d inherited the medical records from the retired man whose place he took and found them really interesting. Men suffered injuries – fish hooks, breaks, accidents with machinery. The wives were treated, one after the other, for what he called “melancholia”.’

Rika smiles. ‘A rather quaint way of putting it. But it hardly seems surprising.’

‘Except for dear old Maisie. I’m sure no one ever treated her for that.’ He laughs. ‘That woman is like no other.’

‘And how did the doctor deal with “melancholia”?’

‘Shore leave usually sorted it out. Some of the keepers have their own houses in a town if they can afford it and leave their families there if they have a difficult posting like being stuck on one of the islands. Works better for schooling. Mothers and children. Friends. Family. Then it’s like being married to a sailor. You know that in the old days a keeper might be at the same light for years. Now a stint lasts two or three – no more. There was one old bloke though – a contemporary of my father’s – who stayed at one of the most isolated lights for over thirty years. He wouldn’t even take leave.’

‘I assume he wasn’t married!’

‘If he was, we never heard about his wife.’

‘There comes your melancholia!’ Rika says a little dryly.

Hannes looks down at his hands, locks the knuckles. He says, ‘My mother committed suicide. She put weights in her pockets and drowned herself in the island well.’

Rika waits. She knows he is beyond any words of sympathy or comfort.

‘And now Aletta,’ he says. He is silent a moment. ‘Except she is a keeper’s daughter. In a way I always thought she
was
the light.’

And she was – until this island. Its misshapen tides, its hidden reefs.

Until this lighthouse with its prosaic square-rigged tower, somehow without the grandeur or the power, the height, the weight, the dignity of the others where they’d served.

Instead it had a deep, forbidding melancholy.

And yet, for Hannes, it was the only place where he belonged. Enough for him to say he could be buried there.

‘Does the lighthouse depend on the keeper or the keeper on the lighthouse?’ Hannes says. ‘There’s a question for you.’

‘You were speaking of Aletta,’ Rika says, leading him back.

‘I am. They are the same.’

‘It’s difficult dancing in the garage, Hannes. All your stuff is lying around and it’s too small and hot. Can I make a place in the old keeper’s quarters?’ Aletta said.

‘It’s also full of stuff.’

‘There are rooms and rooms.’

‘It hasn’t been lived in since the new houses were built.’

‘So?’

So.

Hannes cast about, looking for objections, not knowing why he was objecting. ‘It’s part of the lighthouse,’ he said. ‘And that’s off limits.’

‘It’s where we would have lived if they hadn’t built this godawful house,’ she said. ‘I could have chosen to live there if I’d wanted.’

‘But you didn’t want.’

‘Nor did you.’

‘No.’

‘Which is hardly the bloody point.’ She was defiant. ‘I just want some space to dance where I’m not disturbed.’

‘Since when have I ever disturbed you?’ he said in surprise.

She did not answer but took up her book and opened it – failing to notice that she was holding it upside down.

The next morning, when Hannes came back from duty, he said, handing her a key, ‘Use the old place if you like, Aletta.’

‘Not off limits any more?’ She raised an eyebrow delicately, half-ironic.

‘Sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I just don’t like going there myself.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘She used to close herself up in the old keeper’s quarters and play the music at full volume. I could even hear it on calm days if I was up in the lantern room. It was as if she invented partners. As if they were there. She was
that
lonely and there was nothing I could do to help. Sometimes I was afraid she was losing her mind. Then, suddenly, she would be herself again and I would run for her.’ He laughs. ‘Or for cover! Depending …’

Flinty or beguiling. There was no telling what would set her off.

‘“
That Aletta!”
Maisie used to say when she couldn’t find her in the house – and it spoke volumes!’ He turns to Rika. ‘You know, Uncle Cecil adored her. Even if he disapproved of her so much he used to act like an old parson when she was around. Yet, I knew.’

Rika smiles, standing serene and unruffled beside his bed, her knot of hair pinned at her nape, her watch and name-tag fastened to attention on her breast. He can just see the shadow at the hollow of her throat.

‘It was fine in the other lighthouses,’ he says. ‘Not in this one.’ He shakes his head. ‘In the end, I couldn’t reach her.’

His need was anguished; hers was angry.

She might have torn his skin off with her teeth and been glad to see him stripped. Or to have heard him weep. In counterpoint, there was a tenderness in Aletta when she danced.

All her gentleness. All her anguish. All her love.

At other times she danced with humour, with hilarity and wit, head flung back. Stamp, stamp, stamp – the rapid fire of her heels on the wooden floor. A leap, a pirouette – but the supporting hand that could have launched her, caught her, was not there to let her fly.

As the music ended she would stand poised, listening to the sea rolling
in along the gullies, the peculiar hiss below the lip of the slope. It was applause, and she would raise her arms slowly, grandly, gathering it up into her outstretched palms.

Then it would die away.

And the cheering crowd was only gannets coming in to roost.

She would subside into silence then. And go and sit for hours in her darkened room.

Maisie might call ‘Cooee’ at the door but Aletta did not answer her. She did not go to open it to let her in and welcome her with tea. And only Hannes, returning from duty, might discover her somewhere in the silent house, sitting wrapped in a rug, her ashtray beside her, the room dank with smoke, sometimes asleep, her head resting on her arm – a bird’s wing folded in over her face.

When Hannes was in the hospital, Rika had spoken once or twice to Maisie Beukes, the woman who came to visit him: she of the cake tin and the springy grey curls, the little sprig of hair defining a wart, the merry laugh, the chuckle in her throat kept for all absurdity. It was as if she found her husband, Cecil, and Hannes Harker quite absurd as they sat hunched and silent under the torrent of her words. She wiped her eyes with laughter, shook her head at them, fond and clucking.

Once she had said to Rika as she left the ward, Cecil lingering at Hannes’s bedside, ‘Thank you for looking after him so well, Sister. He says,’ and she had tapped Rika’s wrist with a plump finger, ‘you are better than the doctor and stronger than a man.’

Rika had laughed and, unaccountably, felt a flush at her neck.

‘No one knows about Hannes,’ Maisie Beukes had said. ‘He is such a silent chap – he only talks to gannets and gulls, you see,’ and she had cackled. ‘I have known him all my life and yet I couldn’t tell you what he thinks.’ She had dabbed at her face with her tissue and tucked it back into the sleeve of her nylon cardigan. ‘So,’ she smiled, ‘if he said that – well!’ She had broken off and twinkled at Rika shrewdly. ‘You must have shaken him up!’

No one knows about Hannes …

Hannes. A man others do not see beyond his competence.

Even Maisie Beukes, who met him when first he came to the tall old lighthouse on The Hill, as a youngster, to train with Cecil, circles him still.

He had had the back room and she had made his meals when he didn’t go off into the town and forage for himself. Where he went she never asked beyond, ‘Been fishing, Hannes?’

And more often than not he had, for his rod was strapped to the bar of his bicycle and his old fishing bag was slung on a peg in the yard.

Sometimes he brought the catch: a
leervis,
a shad, a
poensie
. He usually sold his bag to the Fisheries on the hill, where the Chinaman paid him well and churned out fried fillets and chips doused in vinegar. Sometimes he ate with Maisie and Cecil in their cottage but more often than not he kept to his room, reading, always reading.

Histories, biographies, technical books, naval stories. Even poetry.

But Cecil guessed the source of his isolation – for Cecil had been assistant on the island when Hannes was a boy and his father, Karel Harker, had been the senior keeper. He remembered well the solitary child, desolate without his brother, always searching for his mother.

Cecil knew, too, the well where Hannes’s mother had drowned herself one August, a gale blowing.

August. Always August. When no one put to sea and the guano workers, brewing secret liquor, quarrelled among themselves. They were quarrels that usually festered into fights. In Cecil’s experience, there was nothing unexpected in calling out a doctor at those times.

There had been an argument that August, but Cecil had been ordered away to tend the light by Karel Harker while he went down to the workers’ houses with his sjambok in his hand. As Cecil had glanced from the window on the stairwell, he had seen Karel’s wife, Louisa, half running down the path behind her husband, crying. He saw Karel Harker turn, threateningly, his arm raised. She had stopped then, standing with her face in her hands, sobbing.

Three days later she was dead.

She had drowned herself in the well with stones and pebbles in her pockets.

No one ever mentioned it again for none could dare intrude on Karel Harker’s silence and bewilderment. But ever after, no worker would go near the well to draw water. They believed the place was haunted. They said they had heard a woman crying in the depths below the ground.

‘It’s just the bloody wind, for God’s sake,’ Karel had shouted once when a worker had come with a bucket to the house, complaining. His angry voice had echoed in the vestibule where Cecil was polishing the doorknobs.

But no one believed him.

And, over the years, the various headmen had to do the menial task alone until a pipe was installed that ran the water down the slope to a tank by the guano shed. But when a headman was obliged to check the pump, he always took the great shark hook with him: a reminder of
why
the ghost was there at all.

And why the rules that regulated life on so small an outcrop were immutable. To mix the Fisheries with the Railways and Harbours, their hierarchies and ranks, was sacrilege, to fraternise unthinkable.

Never cross the line.

The story passed, in time, to legend, embellished here and there, depending on the teller: a keeper or a worker. Every headman handed down the myth when he transferred the shark hook to his successor. Every keeper learnt a history of the lighthouse and accepted what he believed to be the facts.

And they were not the same.

Hannes’s father, Karel Harker, had not asked for a transfer when his wife died. He had simply continued to tend the light, working up in the lantern room hour after hour, polishing the glass, cleaning the vents in the murette, buffing each screw and nut and hasp, inhaling the insidious vapours of the mercury bath on which the great light floated, only sometimes coming down to fish. What he had told his sons about their mother’s death was a small part of the truth: she was sick and she had died. Karel Harker had said to Cecil Beukes, his assistant, ‘Do not tell Hannes the details, Cecil. He is too young – and I will deal with Fred myself.’

So Hannes had believed what he was told.

She was sick and she had died.

Mothers often died. There were boys at school who claimed the loss of two. The birth of babies picked them off relentlessly.

The last time he and his older brother, Fred, had seen their mother, she had been standing on the jetty with the solitary island donkey at her side, her arm round its neck, as if the two of them had come together to wave the boys off in their stiff sou’westers, wide as tents. Hannes had looked back both elated and mortified.

It was all too late and it was his fault.

He had screamed and cried to go to school. He had threatened to row himself away in the boat. He had packed a little bundle and resisted his mother as if he hated her, dashing her hand away when – half-laughing – she had tried to cajole him.

Eight years old: ‘I want to go to school.’

And so, at last, he’d gone.

But at the end of the second term they had not been able to get home in the holidays. It had happened to Fred before, but Hannes was stricken with panic. The sea was too wild, the tug would not be able to anchor or the boat launch from the jetty to transfer them. Praying was in vain; the late-winter gale split the sea fitfully against the great stone breakwater of the city’s harbour wall. The boys returned to port and stayed with the minister at the Mission to Seamen in
the old stucco house on a bleak corner above the docks, with a Norfolk pine in the yard. He was a kindly man, a widower, unused to children.

Fred and Hannes went to the winter beach every day and wandered about, as lost as the vagrants who slept under the jetty. After two weeks they returned to school as if nothing had changed. Except that the headmaster had called them in and told them, briefly, that their mother had died, and sent Hannes to the sanatorium for a dose against the onset of stomach cramps and diarrhoea. Fred was not directed to go with him. Instead, he returned to his dormitory alone, too old, it seemed, to seek the solace of the sickroom.

In the long Christmas holidays they returned to the island together and were given tasks by their father round the lighthouse. It was their training for the future. To polish the brass, to clean the panes, to climb the stairs without flinching, to stand on the open catwalk in a gale and feel no fear. To learn the language of the light: the candlepower and the character, the order of the lenses, their focal length, the difference between catoptric and catadioptric. To learn to work the generators, the science of telemetry.

‘It is not a game,’ Karel said – as if they hadn’t known that all their lives.

Fred could swing himself across an outer rail of the balcony, crook it with his knee, leaning back, hands hanging loose, the rocks perilous below –daring the wind, opening his mouth to catch its echo inside his cheek and its fullness in his ears. At other times, he would stand there and shout. The words were too high, too fierce – the scream of a gull – for Hannes to know what he said. But he suspected: Fred blaspheming as he did at school. Daring something horrible.

Hannes would not look as Fred balanced like a rope-walker high above him. He would stand at the outer foot of the building with his small, thin back to the wall, feeling the grainy roughness of the shell-mixed plaster and the great height towering over him. He kept his eyes shut, hearing the far-off sound of Fred’s shouting, out and up into the sky.

For Hannes the light was not to be challenged and rebelled against and cursed, as it was for Fred. It was a deep and comforting presence, protection from the wind, the storms, the crying birds. On one of its landings was a built-in cupboard curved to its inner wall. He would creep in there where Fred couldn’t find him, tuck his mother’s old shawl around him and lie down in the dark until he slept.

Unlike Fred, who never spoke of home when he was at school – as if the fact of being a keeper’s son was suddenly shameful – Hannes longed for the island, a deep homesickness. He longed to crouch against the wall and feel the heartbeat of the light thrumming in his blood; to crawl into the cupboard on the landing or to eat a hard-boiled penguin egg and a piece of biscuit – a little feast, like his mother used to make for him with her careful fingers. When he
curled in the cupboard he was close to her. The wind coming up the stairwell was the flare of her skirt as she ascended the steps.

The light was not the she-devil and bewitcher.

The light was his mother.

If Hannes did not know how his mother died, Fred did. When he was seventeen and had come home for the holidays, he often went fishing alone out towards the reefs, using the rowing boat, taking it sometimes without permission when their father was asleep and the assistant was on duty.

When the tide was low he might go towards Black Rock or Seal Island, where the channels were shallower and reef fish shoaled. He liked to look at the seals on the rock, hear their bark despite the stench of dung, see them power down into the water and dive, surface, float, turn, watch him, almost human in their curiosity.

Venturing out one day, he had come across the headman and a guano worker on the far side of an island. They were killing baby seals with a hook, heavily pronged and vengeful. The butt was used to bludgeon and stun, the prongs to kill, precisely skewering the underbelly. Fred heard the thump as each small body was tossed into the bottom of the boat that swung on its painter in the swell. The barks and calls of the adult seals, the disturbance of the water, the savage distress of mothers – all were deadened by the surge of the tide, obscured by the rock.

Fred rested his oars, slowing, unsure of what to do. Sealing was forbidden to the guano workers – but his being out in the boat alone was forbidden too. If he reported the headman to his father, his father would know what he had done. The boat drifted on the tide. Fred glanced towards the rock again and saw the headman turn and gaze towards him, the great hook in his hand.

Fred retreated, sliding his boat backwards out of view, and headed for the shore.

He fished from the jetty instead, waiting. He saw the boat with the headman and the worker cross a silver sea as the late-afternoon sun lanced down towards the west, a black-plumed cormorant winging swift and low against a seam of surf. The boat made for an inlet further to the west, round the headland, away from the jetty, away from the light. When at last it came back, only the headman was pulling at the oars.

He tied up the boat, hoisted himself on to the jetty – a large man, grizzled as a walrus, his hat dragged low on his head. He carried nothing, walked deliberately. Fred looked up from where he sat, line in the water, two elf lying at his side, shining dully.

The headman said, ‘You speak of this and I will tell the world why your mother died.’

‘My mother?’ Fred’s heart began to thud, as if his blood were drawn up from his limbs, leaving them limp. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Go and read in the Bible about the sins of the fathers.’

And he went, looming up against the sky, leaving the smell of seal blood behind him.

Fred watched him go, his fish forgotten, while the gannets, line on line, screamed their homecoming, plummeting down to nest.

Fred found his father in the lantern room. He pulled himself through the hatch on to the floor, turned to Karel, working at an instrument at his workbench, and said, bluntly, ‘How did she die?’

‘She was sick.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘In her mind.’

‘How did she die?’

Reluctantly Karel replied, ‘She fell down the well.’

‘Fell?’

‘It was her choice.’

‘Her choice?’ The words were an accusation.

Karel looked at Fred, a darkness in the room, the lamp unlit, and said, ‘It is something we will not speak of again. It is shameful thing, especially for a Christian. Hannes must not know. He is too young.’