The Keeper (10 page)

As the weeks of the term dragged by Louisa began to feel as if her children had receded from her reach. They were simply thoughts in her mind rather than real people: transformed and changed and grown while she herself remained the same. They were so distant, so unimaginable, living in a school that she had never seen.

It is an anguish not to be able to place those most loved in a concrete and familiar world. To see them in a certainty – the rooms where they work, the beds where they sleep. She did not even know the people with whom they had become the most familiar themselves, the masters who taught them and who wrote the cryptic words at the end of term:

Frederick Karel Harker: Schoolwork: fair. Games: fair.

A solid member of the boarding house. He occasionally needs correction

for fighting as he has a swift temper.

Does not like change.

How little those masters knew.

Fred’s life was a constant change. Lighthouse to lighthouse. Sea to shore. Solitary as a seabird in a storm and then thrust to conformity with a mass of other lads, like a penguin in a rookery – and adapting without a word of complaint, simply taking himself off to do what he must do. If he had a swift
temper and ready fists, it was not something that she knew about for there was no one on the island with whom to fight. Perhaps, after all, he had inherited his father’s mercurial tongue. But that was not something she recognised in Fred herself. She knew instead – since he was small – the boyish gift of his protection.

What would they say of Hannes when his first report was sent?

How would he transform himself when he was not at home – this quaint, perceptive, silent little fellow?

Morose? Withdrawn?

No. Surely not.

She had seen his heart lift in gladness as he ran whooping along the path to the jetty, leaping on his long thin legs from tussock to tussock, wheeling as the gannets planed in above his head – small boy, face upturned to a sky loud with clamour. A nimble turn and stretch and he would spring on to the low wall of the yard and walk along it, tightrope-boy, arms up as if embracing the great dark column of the lighthouse.

She knew them here, so closely observed, so much part of this environment that they were indivisible from it – from her, from her every thought. They had always been where she could see them, where she could find them.

But at school?

She could not see them there. And what she had imagined was becoming ephemeral, unreal. Only this child – this small, dark-skinned boy – seemed real now. Nothing existed beyond the flat shale, the squabbling gannets, the heaving waves, the southern sweep of space.

And the far green shore – too remote even to imagine.

At this, a quiet devastation overtook Louisa Harker. It was as if memory and reason were slipping from her – a constant, unassuageable desolation. But sometimes, in the night, alone, there was a pungent clarity. She came to believe, incontrovertibly, that one of her sons was ill and no one had noticed.

Hansie was calling for her and had no way of reaching her.

Or Fred had run away.

In these darkest hours of night she knew the truth of this.

Why, when morning came, did her certainty elude her, flatten out with the light that seeped up above the sea and stained the sky? Why, when morning came, could she no longer feel or hear their keen distress?

And yet, each time a pigeon circled in to land, Louisa felt a terrible fear grip her throat, knowing – knowing – that the message would bring news of a disaster. She would fumble for the bird, upsetting it, making it flutter away in alarm. Half-sobbing, she would pinch the phial between her fingers, wrench at the little cap. The pigeon would struggle and push, wanting to escape as she tried, sometimes vainly, to get the paper from the cylinder.

Inside – invariably – a message about the arrival of the tug, confirmation of an order, a weather warning.

There was never anything about her sons.

‘Why does no one send a message?’ she would cry.

And Karel would reply, ‘Because there is nothing to say. Everything is well with them.’

Always the same.

Why then, this stinging fear? As if, lurking – out there in that distance, that yellow haze of nothingness between her and the shore so far away – was something unimaginably final, awaiting its turn to strike.

She prayed.

She prayed as she walked.

She prayed as she cooked.

She prayed as she drew water at the pump in the well that smelled of iron and guano.

She opened her Bible fretfully and she closed it.

The words that loomed at her were full of admonition and fear.

–
Rescue me from those who pursue me for they are too strong for me.

They were same words she had written to send up into the sky with the homing pigeon, flying shoreward.

To whom? It did not matter. To anyone. To no one. To God.

But only her husband Karel had read it. Then he had stalked away in silence.

Indeed, in the weeks since that moment, the only thing that kept the dread at bay became the tiny boy – he with his delicate neck, his fragile fingers, his dusty knees. Bird-like he clung to life in a gale, wind-whipped against the sky he crossed so doggedly to find her. And she, in her anguish, coaxed him to her, taking his hand and luring him at last to pools at low tide to look at sea anemones and crabs. She put the spiny shells into his palms, showing him how to hold them flat so he was not hurt.

If she laughed, he laughed, his black eyes darting sparks of light.

She caressed his knobbly head with a gentle hand, holding it against the warmth of her shawl in the cup of her fingers.

She spoke to him of Jesus. She spoke as if she were reaching back to those who had listened once, who had nurtured her and loved her – far away on that distant seam of shore where trees grew and hills and earth were firm beneath the feet. She told him of a benign and gentle Saviour, someone who did not allow harm to come to those He loved and who loved Him.

To those who asked so fervently for His forgiveness.

–
Suffer the little children to come unto Me.

It was a promise.

‘I never speak of my mother,’ Hannes says. ‘And yet, I honour the anniversary of her death – the sixth of August – every year. It is a private ritual. Otherwise she would simply disappear, especially as my father did not like her mentioned. For some reason, he thought it disrespectful. And yet, she is supposed to wander the island. There is no one who hasn’t claimed to have seen “the spook” even if they have no clue who she really is. She looks different for everyone. Some of the stories are idiotic. But one or two aren’t. If she exists, then I have to believe that she hears me.’

‘So you will say nothing to offend her,’ says Rika.

‘No.’

‘Superstition?’ Rika suggests gently.

‘Perhaps,’ he replies. ‘And yet I feel her presence when I’m there – especially when I’m on my own at the lighthouse.’

‘Does it worry you?’

‘She is not at peace.’

‘Is that your fault?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It is. I went away to school and left her.’ Hannes says it as if he has repeated it to himself a hundred times – some old reproach, some litany to which he clings.

‘As countless others have done before and since!’ Rika says. Her gaze is steady. ‘And why would she think that she would never see you again?’

He is silent.

‘People don’t do what she did when there is hope.’ She chooses her words
with caution. ‘Perhaps her despair was for something else.’

He does not look at her.

‘Maybe’ – and Rika puts out her hand, conciliating, and touches his briefly. ‘Maybe it was remorse. It overrides hope. It’s much more potent than fear.’

Hannes was seven the night Louisa Harker brought her husband, Karel Harker, home, guiding his drifting boat by the light of half a dozen household lamps lit and strung like votive candles round the lantern room. She had not known how to turn the lantern on. And the assistant keeper was on shore, kept away unseasonably from returning in the August weather. All that she could do to replace the pulsing beam was to light the paraffin house lamps and as many candles as could be found.

This is the story that was told over and over among the people in the Service: official sanction for her life, in mitigation for the manner of her death. Louisa Harker’s heroic stand; her inventiveness when she could not fire the light; her nightlong vigil while her husband – all alone – was tossed about at sea. Some say his rowing boat was dragged through the water by a shark, shaken from side to side like a dead seal, and that the shark had breached – since when Karel Harker had never been the same.

All this talk elaborated with the orchestrations of a storm.

–
No, man – a hurricane!

Except it was not Louisa Harker who had brought the lamps and lit them. Not she who had shouted, ‘Light the lamp.’

It was Fred.

Fred who had urged them from the house, across the yard and up the stairs to the lantern room, Fred who had run to the great wick burners, frantic for a way to fire them.

As Fred had circled the light, Hannes had huddled under the workbench listening to the storm outside, cocooned within this inviolable space, ribbed round with iron and shielded by the great thick panes of glass. Outside of the lantern room, the tumult raged with the force of fire.

It was the voice of God.

It seemed that there had never been a storm like this, the sheets of rain shattering against the windows while the walls of the lighthouse shuddered like a great tree in a gale. Any minute, Hannes had believed, the edifice would fall – into the sea, into the nothingness of water.

The last of daylight had been swallowed by the storm. A deep green twilight filled the room. Fred was almost whimpering as their mother walked round and round the chamber, her head bent. She had made no attempt to approach the lantern. She did not even glance up at the dark refractions. It had loomed above her like a watching bird of prey.

‘Light the lamp, Mamma,’ Fred had cried. ‘Light the lamp.’

But she had suddenly stood before it and lifted her head and scanned it with a slow, weary stare and remained, immovable, her arms folded.

–
Light the lamp, Mamma. Light the lamp.

Karel Harker had put the note taken from the pigeon’s leg into his Bible, slipping it randomly between the pages of Revelations. He had not caught the irony. His anger was too great:

–
Rescue me from those who pursue me …

Nothing pursued her on this island – nothing but her superstition, her neediness, her anguish, her tears, her lack of backbone, her inherent weakness. He had thought a farmer’s daughter would be made of sterner stuff. And she had dared to say:

–
There is no God here! Only this devil lighthouse!

So he had left her with rage in his fists, rage in his eyes. He would have been justified in striking her, in chastising her, in beating her small unresponsive body until it broke.

–
Everything about this island and this lighthouse is a blasphemy and lie.

Was that not reason enough to punish her?

Except that she was the mother of his sons.

He had walked away and taken his shark-fishing rig – his Scarborough reel with the 18 cord flax line, the great barbed hooks, the heavy sinkers, the leather palms to protect his hands when the reel smoked from the friction of a great fish pulling out the line. He took a lighter rod to try for live bait. He paid no heed at all to the gathering clouds, the line of weather which he, a keeper, knew better than to ignore. He strode down towards the jetty and the tethered boat.

It was Sunday and the guano workers were asleep in their houses, the chickens pecking in the yard. Leaning against the wall of the headman’s house he had seen the shark hook – that great rusted talisman of office, invested with legend and taboo, used, long ago, to bludgeon seals, employed on occasion, to gaffe sharks. It had been newly oiled. Its thick long rope lay coiled and knotted at its side.

Too angry to ask permission, he had taken it without any sense of presumption. It was there and he had needed it. He was the senior man on the island and he could do as he pleased. He had slung it into the bottom of the boat and pushed off across the edging tide and into deeper water. He had rowed out into the channel, cast his lighter rod and, within a quarter hour, caught a
geelbek.
It was large and strong. He had skewered it through the head with the hook on his shark rod and let it down into the water over the side of the boat, watched it thresh and spin, allowing the boat to drag away from it on the running tide.

He had glanced back at the lighthouse, drifting in a shroud of mist: cool, celestial, aloof. If there was a devil here it was not the lighthouse. Perhaps, more possibly, evil was embodied in the legendary Ring of Death said to encircle the island – a sinister channel haunted by sharks. He would bring one back and clean its jaws and set them as a coat of arms above the lighthouse door as a reminder.

Then she might talk less flippantly of devils.

Karel adjusted his stance, balancing the rod against his left thigh, using it as a fulcrum, crooking his right knee across the pole and sitting on the butt end. The leather palms lay on the bench beside him. The ancient shark hook was stowed ready in the bow, its rope wound around the seat and securely knotted. He knew he would have enormous difficulty in gaffing any very large fish and exhausting it enough to lash it alongside the boat. He also knew he could be towed all over the channel, overturned, dashed on the rocks, outwitted, killed. But he was too angry to care.

On the south-eastern horizon where the sea met the sky, the cloud blistered, heavy and purple with rain.

–
August. Always August. When boats are lost. When men die …

He paid no heed.

‘There was a storm,’ Hannes says to Rika. He has been unable to sleep and dawn is near. She has come to call him in. He no longer needs the wheelchair. The crutches suffice. As he makes his way beside her, measuring the length of the smooth-polished veranda, he laughs ruefully. ‘What am I talking about? There were always storms. But this one …’ He looks out into the clear stillness of the dark above the town, the lights dimmed down now, dawn closer than before. ‘Strangely, the sea wasn’t as wild as the sky. The storm was so big, the rain so hard, it seemed to flatten the waves.’ He looks at her, says, ‘I wonder if you can understand a certain quality of green. It’s the huge heaving guts of the ocean. You never see it near the shore.’

No, she does not know the colour. She has not watched the waves for hours and hours, alert to the nuance of a passing fish, the shadow of a shark above a reef, the sudden warmth of a sun-stream on a breaking crest, the texture and colour of cold, its brittle smokiness. Nor does she know the ocean where no land is and where the sea, so unimaginably deep, swells, unbreaking, into darkness.

‘I was seven,’ Hannes says. ‘It is one of my clearest memories. Everything was green that day – the sky, the gloom in the lantern room, my mother’s shawl, the strange colour of her face as she stood there, doing nothing.’

‘What did you expect of her?’

‘To start the light,’ he says. ‘I suppose she didn’t know how. And Fred was shouting, “The light! The light!” ’

‘What happened?’

‘It was Fred who thought of the lamps and fetched them from the house.’

‘We must light the lamps and the candles. Maybe then he will be able to see where to row.’

Fred was frantic. He had been up and down the stairs – up and down. Up and down. And all their mother had said – mechanically – was, ‘Freddie, do not fall.’

Even when he was no longer in the chamber.

Hannes, hiding, his eyes half-closed against the sound of wind, peered back at the entrance to the stairwell, waiting for the small point of light that would announce Fred’s return.

He came, dripping candle in one hand, laden basket in the other. It was filled with all the paraffin lamps that he could find in the house. He had gathered them, wrapped them round with kitchen cloths and balanced them, one against the other. ‘Be careful with the matches, Mamma,’ Fred had said. ‘Some paraffin has spilled. If you drop one we will all burn.’

He set the lamps along the rim of the low retaining wall below the glass of the lantern house and he lit each one carefully until a small row of flames licked and juddered in their funnels. The chamber was alive with shifting shadows. Then he turned to his mother as if in exasperation and he said, ‘Shall I fetch your Bible, Mamma?’

Louisa answered, ‘No.’

Fred stared back at her, bewildered.

Under the workbench in the deep green gloom, Hannes began to cry.

‘I have been out at sea in storms,’ Hannes says. ‘When I was in the Navy and we were dodging U-boats, I knew all about the fear of drowning. But somehow the throb of the engine under your feet is a comfort. There is something stronger and bigger and more determined to survive than just yourself.’ Hannes sits on a chair, easing his foot. ‘In a small boat it’s different. I cannot begin to think what my father must have felt in that rowing boat out in that weather. All I can remember is the sound outside the lantern house and the strange silence within and Fred moving up and down, relighting any candles that went out.’

‘What did your mother do?’

‘She just stood there facing the dark lantern, her back to the sea.’

There is a primal cry in every being that should not be released. It is inhuman, godless.

Louisa Harker felt that cry inside herself and so she stood quite still, immobile. Paralysed.

And in her immobility was her guilt – her omission.

It was not remorse: that would come much later and for quite a different reason.

The enemy that night was not the storm.

It was the light.

As she had written, committing it to paper like a curse.

She stood before the light as a man stands, at last, before his foe.

The shark hook was gone. It was gone from its place where it had been propped, greased with seal oil, touched only by the headman – his talisman, his insurance against the spirit of the coal-eyed petrel, the breath of evil, which hovered in some dark, wing-swept infinity, waiting.

Finding it gone, the headman hurried from hut to hut demanding of the inmates where it was. No one had seen it. Nor would they have dared to touch it.

It was gone.

The boat was gone.

And a storm was boiling in.

The headman went to stand on the end of the jetty. He surveyed the sea. Already the surface was curdling with the swell of an incoming tide. Far off – far, far off – was the rowing boat. And a man on his own.

The headman could tell, by the size and silhouette of the rod, that he was fishing for shark.

There is a voice in the water and in the wind. There is weather, and there is a force in Nature that is beyond prediction. It is distinguishable only to those who live by its portents as sailors do.

And the headman knew those portents.

–
August. Always August.

Throughout the time that the island had been inhabited – since the first sailors were marooned, since the first lonely lightkeeper came to man his fragile wooden tower, since the first headman took possession of the ancient shark hook – the time of trial had been August.