The Keeper (11 page)

Storms lashed the island, boats were lost, men were drowned, rain flooded the scrapes and burrows of the ground-nesting birds. Disease was even brought by strangers: to the west was the sister island where, not so long ago, a cargo of human souls afflicted with smallpox had been quarantined and died. August, when – of old – the last of the slavers had slunk along the coast, protected by wild weather, to skulk between the islets, the light their only guide. How many emaciated corpses might have been pushed through portholes in the dead of night, to float briefly on the surface of the sea? How many sacrificed to the sudden dull flurry and crush – and then the silence of the swell? Another offering to the sharks that haunted hostile waters.

The fish took the bait, pulling the rod down parallel with the gunwales of the boat as the flax cord sang. Three times Karel Harker struck, then leaned back into his position, feet braced, hearing the line whine, letting it go, reaching then for the leather palm to brake the speed should the fish turn or change direction.

The Scarborough was red-hot even through the leather pad. His right leg, crooked beneath him, had lost its feeling; the left thigh, taking the strain of the rod, felt as if it would break. Still the line whipped out and Karel could see, at last, the small red flannel marker, indicating that only fifty yards of line was left.

The beast would take his line and rod.

His boat. Him.

The motion changed; the fish was swimming now towards him, the line went slack, Karel reeled it in – reeling, reeling – his breath heaving in his chest.

Then the fish breached.

It towered up and twisted – a leviathan – huge against the vast indifference of a death-grey sky.

It was the headman who saw it rise white-bellied from the sea.

And from whom the legend grew.

For Karel Harker never spoke of it again.

The great fish fell in a thunder of water. The trace parted from the flax line, razor-cut against the roughness of a fin.

The shark swam free.

There is a great power in the sudden surge of an escaping fish, the slipstream coiling behind it, folding into denser sinews of water, sucking down beneath the surface to erupt in domes. The boat all but overturned, shipping water in the backwash of the plunge. As Karel baled and baled, the rain began. Steady, strong, calming the sea only momentarily before the wind swept in, coming from the east, dragging in its wake the rolling swells of green.

He turned to find the lighthouse. That dependable, that incorruptible.

But it was dark.

Louisa Harker had challenged her husband. Now she would be punished.

She had defied him.

She had defied the light.

She had made a graven image of it out of shells, reducing its size, its power, its menace; turning what had weight into something whimsical and light; stealing its essence and setting it in opposition to the thing she could not challenge.

That was the first disloyalty.

And God had said to those who worshipped graven images:

All who make idols are nothing,

And the things they worship are worthless.

Not only that: she had sent out words to some unknown recipient – some person, somewhere – who would hear her:

Rescue me from those who pursue me …

That was the second disloyalty.

No person pursued her but her fear of the cold indifference of the light, the insidious poison of the mercury bath and Karel’s fierce obsession, which would send him mad at last and put the shackles round the souls of her sons.

Despite herself, her disloyalty remained – that fault line in her heart. When Karel went in anger from her and took his rod, she saw him, from the window of the silent house, stride down towards the sea, knowing why he went. And when the storm came up, she could not bring herself to go into the lighthouse and light the lantern.

To bring him home.

Even if she had known how.

It was Fred who had urged her up the stairs, shouting, frantic.

She had stood before the light listening to the silence of its unwound chain, breath held. She had stood before her foe, mute. Yet within her being was that keen lament, that primal cry.

And when Fred had said, ‘Shall I fetch your Bible, Mamma?’ she had believed she was a murderer: how could she touch the Book when she wished the sea would swamp the boat and swamp the lighthouse and close its cold green ice across the island?

To end it all.

It was as the rain squalled down and the hillocks of water rose and fell around the boat that Karel Harker, half-blinded by the streaming water, saw the small pricks of light. They did not beam, they did not sweep the sea as the lantern did. They were as far and fragile as the phosphorescence of the waves on quiet nights.

But they gave him his direction.

At times he thought that he imagined them. At times he knew that they were there, shining out, the small beacon-light of altar candles. High, high up in the quiet lantern room.

She had lit them. She had lit them to guide him home.

Shipping water still, the wind in his face, Karel Harker pulled for shore, hearing the wild tumult of an angry sea. For hours he seemed to row – for each stroke forward, he lost another three, the current and the wind dragging
him. He watched the swells, expending energy and grit between the gathering of every wave, inching forward. To round the point, to find a calmer channel seemed impossible. And yet he rowed – for there was nothing else that he could do.

As dawn approached, the storm became a sullen rain. The wind died, the tide abated, the first gloom to grey grew in the east. So imperceptible, so faint, Karel could just see his hands or catch the faint wet gleam of the shark hook lying in the bottom of the boat. It felt as if his eyes had turned to ice. Still he kept his course towards the shore.

With his last unravelling strength he stood as he was swept in towards a deep gully. He dived and struck out, allowing a wave to take him.

All terror gone, he struggled on.

The small strung tendril of lamps and candles in the lantern room of the lighthouse wavered on. He kept them in his sight, surging forward, being sucked back, taking the swell and striking out again.

–
Never leave the light.

The headman found him wedged among rocks, safe from a retreating tide, the skin flayed from his shoulders and his legs where the barnacles had caught him. Towards the point, splintered on a ridge, weighted by the hook, the rowing boat lay wrecked.

The headman took possession of the hook. The guano workers helped Karel Harker clamber over rocks, wade through gullies and struggle up to higher land. He sat exhausted, declining further aid.

A quiet morning broke.

And as the dawn filtered in through the salt-encrusted glass, ash-grey and still, Fred Harker, standing, arms bent up against the panes like a gecko caught in light, saw the figure of his father, slow, dogged, dark against the wash of sky, toiling up the path towards the lighthouse: some great dark pelagic seabird delivered up from the waves.

As Fred ran to hurry down the stairs, Hannes followed and Louisa Harker, watching from the great height of the lantern room, went down on her knees at last and prayed.

Not for Karel Harker – but for her sin.

Rika comes on duty early, sees Hannes in the garden and goes down to him. They walk the narrow circuit of concrete paths between bedraggled shrubs. She will never hear the sound of crutches on a concrete path again without recalling Hannes’s tall frame. She falls in step beside him and Hannes says, as if there has been no break in their conversation from the day before, ‘Towards the end of our second year on the island Cecil and Maisie went on leave. The relief keeper didn’t pitch up at the harbour for the tug which was on its way to fetch them. Apparently, he’d been taken ill – but that’s another story!’ He looks down at the plaster on his foot, adjusts his fingers on the crutches’ grip. ‘Anyway, it was too short notice to find someone else and there were important supplies for us and the guano workers, which couldn’t wait, so they left harbour without him.’ He glances at Rika. ‘Funny that – because of the muddle, it turned out to be the only time Aletta and I were alone at the light. It was the last time we ever really spent together too. It wasn’t even long. About two weeks later the relief came with a fishing boat. They dropped him off.’ He says, evenly, ‘They should have thrown him overboard. That way nothing would have changed.’

Aletta was impatient to be on her own. Impatient for Maisie and Cecil to be gone. They were so kind but they were like protective parents. Always there. Always thoughtful, always helping – when no help was needed. Eager and expectant. Exasperating!

On the day they were to leave, Maisie called Aletta over to her house. ‘Now,
lovey,’ she said, ‘I haven’t finished everything in the fridge. There’s not much but I don’t like waste. I don’t want you to give it to anyone, do you see? That’s a rule, hey?’ Admonishing. ‘We don’t go around giving stuff to the guano workers. It causes trouble and it spoils them.’

‘How can some old mashed potato and cold fish spoil anyone?’ said Aletta.

‘You got to learn, Aletta,’ said Maisie. ‘This is not like town where you can do what you want. If you give to one you must give to all. Otherwise people get jealous and fights start. That’s how it is, hey? That old
skelm
, Misklip, is always whining about something – wanting Uncle Cecil to fix boats and things. Like where does he think he’s going in a boat?’

‘Maybe he wants to escape,’ said Aletta dryly.

‘Escape? Don’t you know that he’s been on this island for over thirty years? Hannes once told me …’

–
When we were on The Hill
, said Aletta under her breath.

‘He said that Misklip was working here when his father was keeper.’

‘
Ja
, Hannes told me.’ Maisie was not the only one he sometimes talked to. ‘How come he was never moved?’

‘No man, he’s used to it.’

‘Who says?
We
all get moved every two years.’

‘Not always,’ said Maisie cautiously. ‘I should think Hannes will stay here until he retires.’

‘What?’ Aletta was incredulous. ‘That’s more than ten years!’ – a gannet’s cry. ‘They would never allow that!’

‘He’s almost the most senior keeper in the Service,’ said Maisie. ‘He can do what he likes.’

‘No he can’t!’ said Aletta.

Maisie looked away, contrite. Her attempt to warn Aletta had been clumsy. She inclined her head self-deprecatingly and put her hand on Aletta’s shoulder, patting it, ‘
Ag
,
jammer
, Aletta. I’m so sorry – I shouldn’t have said that.’ She laughed. ‘They’re all the same, these silly fellows. Sometimes I think they love the lights much more than us.’

Aletta did not reply.

Not any light.
This
light.

Not love. Obsession.

Not duty. Need.

It was not a joke. It was a tragedy.

Aletta turned brusquely away and surveyed Maisie’s kitchen table, piled with odds and ends. She gathered up the flour and white enamel bowl of dripping and the half-finished Pyrex dish of stew, the three potatoes and the handful of carrots. She shoved them in the basket she had brought. She went across to her house, letting the door swing briskly behind her.

Hannes found her cutting up Maisie’s leftover vegetables to make a soup. She was doing execution on the carrots.

‘Soup?’ he enquired.

‘If you can call it that.’

‘Yours is always lovely.’ He dipped into the bowl and fished out a piece of carrot. ‘Will you come down to the jetty to say goodbye to Aunty Maisie and Uncle Cecil and help me bring up the stuff the tug brought?’ He pulled a delivery list from his pocket and looked it over. ‘And you can fix up the soup with something fresh. There’s a box of farm vegetables as well as sacks of potatoes and squash and onions.’

Suddenly elated, Aletta threw down her paring knife and said, ‘We can have a whole dish of greens with butter!’ She brushed him with a lighter hand. How small the things that changed the tenor of her day. She was like a prisoner who eagerly awaits the companionable visits of a mouse or the sight of a bird alighting unexpectedly on a barred window ledge, an emissary from another world.

The first week of their independence was a time of extraordinary late-winter weather – calm, warm, clear – with neither wind nor rain. Limpid days, sea-breathing days when the pods of dolphins curved in perfect unison with the contour of a wave. The birds were far out to sea, travelling south to the edges of the continental shelf through light blue skies. The air was almost silent at midday.

Sometimes, when Hannes had woken and eaten and listened to the midday news, they went fishing off the rocks and, in the late afternoons, when there was still a small reprieve before Hannes went on duty, they lay in their room together with the windows open and the smell of the salt and the waves.

There was no one to hear them in the hush of noon.

No passers-by who would come along the pathway to their door. No Uncle Cecil with enquiries, no Aunty Maisie with a basketful of wool, hoping to listen to a serial.

Nothing to silence them.

Nothing at all.

That surge of waves, that high exhilaration. That crashing shore-break, that thundering reef.

That pitch.

–
Oh, Aletta.

In the second week the weather changed. The cold came back, and the blustering wind, sounding in the chimney like some desolate cry, some seabird lost without a landfall. The sea tossed and fretted, and the strong southeasters,
precursors of the spring, brought flying spume and flung gravelly sand and shell against the house.

Just before he went on duty one evening, Hannes said to Aletta, ‘I’m going to be too busy on my own to keep the log. I would like you to do it instead.’

‘I used to help my father with the log. I wonder if I still remember.’

He fetched the book, called her to sit beside him at the table and opened it. He began explaining the procedure when she – oddly playful and alert – distracted him, winding her leg around his. He looked up and said, ‘Aletta, this is a serious business!’

‘Is it?’

She fixed him with her eyes until he began to laugh. ‘Stop it, woman.’

But she did not stop – and he had no intention of resisting her.

She and the rain beating wildly at the walls.

Aletta took over the logbook and suddenly she became aware of a wider world beyond the shore-break. All around her, barely noticed before, there had been ships and planes, plying their way up and down the coast. The number was astounding. Life, like a double stream, quietly unfolding, dividing round them, moving on while they, marooned, were caught in a present, oblivious of the world beyond.

One day she stood in the yard and watched a Dakota pass high overhead, catching the glint that flashed from a wing, hearing still the drone of an engine that lingered long after it had gone, and wondering about the passengers, the businessmen reading their papers, the anxious travellers, the hostesses in their slim, smart suits and perky caps, the excitement of the journey.

What had once gone unnoticed became a matter of the most intense interest. The vessels that passed by – the cumbersome tankers, the freighters, even a naval frigate – were stirring. And one afternoon, along with the first star in the evening sky, the lilac-grey hull and the wide short red-and-black funnel of a Union Castle liner appeared, closer than she had ever seen one before. She wondered what lay beyond the lighted lines of portholes and the fairy-lit superstructure. Like a mirage of light – an enchanted otherworld – it slipped away out of sight, without sound, far beyond the surf and the clamour of birds.

There was a world of possibilities she had forgotten, a hundred places she had never been. At supper that evening she said to Hannes, ‘Did you see the Castle boat?’

‘Ship,’ he said automatically.

‘I want to go on one some day. We could dance. Do you remember that girl, Bernie, who was Miss Humewood? Aunty Maisie reminded me of her the other day.’

He looked vague.

‘You must,’ she said irritably. ‘She won a trip up the coast as a prize. She told me there was a salon that was always needing hairdressers and girls to dance with the single passengers.’ He did not comment. ‘She had a fling with one of the officers.’

‘Silly girls always have flings with officers,’ he said dryly.

He, too, had been a sailor.

‘Do you ever wonder what the passengers do on those big ships and what they have for dinner?’

‘Why would I care what they have for dinner?’ And he forked up his cottage pie and peas, eating hurriedly and glancing at his watch.

‘
Ja
, why would you?’ And she pushed her plate away. There – those familiar angry tears. So sudden and uncalled for.

Hannes got up from the table and reached for his cap. He said quietly, ‘Do you want to listen to the radio? Let me tune it in for you.’

Aletta said nothing. She pushed her chair back, went through to the kitchen and fetched the ironing board and laundry basket from the scullery. She put two flat irons on the stove to heat. ‘What’s on?’ she said non-committally.

‘Hancock’s Half-Hour.’

She fetched an iron. ‘Bladdy things,’ she muttered. ‘They always singe your shirts.’

He stood a moment and watched her bending across the board. The sound of the wind and surf were momentarily dimmed by the laughter of the studio audience. Then the radio coughed and wheezed and buzzed into static.

‘Shit!’ – Aletta – ‘Why don’t they give us a decent set?’

‘It’s not the set,’ said Hannes patiently. ‘It’s the weather.’

Their trips around the island ceased. The rowing boat was hauled up the beach and overturned to keep the rain from rotting it. Those long, languid hours spent lying on their bed ended. He was perfunctory and brisk, as if the weather had invaded him. His ministrations to the brass-work in the tower were more urgent. The silting and the salt required attention. He cleaned and scraped and polished as if he was a salvager, rescuing a rotting hulk. He woke and ate and pulled his jacket on, tapping the barometer, muttering ‘We’re in for dirty weather,’ as his father always had. He peered at his watch fretfully – ‘My God, it’s late.’ And as he quitted the house, those downcast eyes, that sun-blue warmth, were suddenly cool and distant once again.

The change was swift. It could happen in a moment. Hannes coaxing. And then, suddenly, Hannes turning towards the light, shrugging up his shoulders as if hitching something to his back. Aletta could not follow him inside as he disappeared through the great dark maw of the doorway. If she did, he would turn and warn her off peremptorily, ‘These stairs are dangerous, especially when it’s wet. I do not like you coming up. People fall.’

She had heard it all before.

He had already left: there was something far more urgent, more exacting, more challenging than her. There was even a day in early August – a black southeaster blowing – when he had stayed away for hours, forgetting his meals. When she had asked him what was wrong, he had pointedly ignored her. Childishly, she had written with her lipstick on the bathroom mirror:

6
^th
August 1957

Hello Hannes – my name’s Aletta. Do you know me?

At those times she might run a bath – wearily – and fill it until the warm water ran out. Always tepid, always salty, only just enough to lap across her outstretched legs. She might lie in it, resentful and cold, and gaze up at the oil-gloss of the walls, the thick cream paint, the high bathroom window, the grimy frosted glass, the bubbles of rust on the steel frame. How she hated that window – its ugliness, its stamp of Public Works. She had never bothered to make a curtain to cover it. Anyway, where would she get the material?

She would try to wash away the smell of guano, but it was in the water, it was in her hair. She couldn’t even hang their laundered clothes in the sunshine before everything was spattered. Instead the damp shirts and knickers, the socks and jerseys, were festooned about the kitchen, turning grey with the residue of soap she could never rinse away.

She tried to dissolve the small cubes of Apple Blossom bath salts she’d been given as a gift (how long ago?) or the brightly coloured balls of bath oil that reposed in a fluted jar. The empty gelatin skins bobbed like polyps in the scum, the bath salts were gritty under her. And the smell of guano remained.