The Keeper (12 page)

Too cold to leave the bath, too cold to stay, she would climb out of the water at last and rub herself with a towel and put on her padded nylon dressing gown and slippers and go to the lounge and sit in a chair, her legs drawn up, and light yet another cigarette.

When night came, when the patch of daylight at the window dimmed, Aletta would turn on the radio, searching for something to hustle the silence out of the room.

The six o’clock news.

On the grave signal of the chime announcing the hour, the first beam of the lighthouse would lance out: a great predator shaken from its slumber, stalking the dark.

Twenty seconds, then again. Twenty seconds, then again. Twenty seconds …

She would drag the curtains across the windows, rasping the rusting rings on the rail.

Then she stood quite still in the middle of the room, her heart thumping against her ribs.

If only Maisie were here. If only Maisie were here to keep the silence out. She would run down to her house, burst in at the door. ‘Hello, Aunty Maisie. Tell me about when Hannes was with you at The Hill. Tell me what he ate. Tell me what he said. Tell me what he thought. Tell me who he is.’

Because she didn’t know any more. All she knew was that the light – that long, slow, mesmerising beam – had taken him.

What was he doing up in the lantern chamber now? What rites, what tasks, what solitary rituals?

To whom was he addressing himself?

To her.

The light.

This implacable mistress.

One night, standing in defiance in the dim and silent living room, Aletta decided to finish the shell lighthouse she had found in the cupboard. She did not know why the thought occurred to her, why it should arise at that moment as an answer to this throat-stopping fear, this absolute aloneness.

An act of defiance? Or complicity?

The creation of a thing of beauty – or of hate?

It was her own powerlessness that she hated. She felt marooned, lost among the rocks and reefs and tides and winds. The shadow of the lighthouse seemed to follow her, as inexorable as the wedge of dark cast by the blade of a sundial – the arbiter of hours, the relentless present.

There was nothing she could call her own except her gramophone and her dancing dresses, wilting on the hangers in her wardrobe. There was nothing she could do to challenge this adversary.

Hannes was gone. As gone as any man who has found someone else to love. Absent, despite his presence in a room, despite his body and his hands and the strong sinews of his nape against her palm. Even in sleep he was alert to something else. His first waking thought, his last before he hunched his shoulder from her in the dark.

And if he could have his lighthouse, she would have her own.

Aletta had lived too much in the moment all her life to think about the past. It had never interested her. Her own was barricaded out, something she preferred to abandon. Had she been asked before she came to the island, she might not have recalled Hannes’s mother’s name. It was only on examining the shell lighthouse when she had seen it in the cupboard that it had struck her.

Louisa Harker.

The name had been written in a tentative hand under the base of the model. There was nothing in their house that recalled her – no picture, no object. Nothing to define her but this delicately crafted light.

Why had Louisa Harker made it? Was its creation a simple imitation? Or did it have another meaning? Why had she abandoned it, leaving it unfinished? Or did she die before she could complete it?

There was something so perfect about the placing of each shell, something so precise that it would be impossible to fault Louisa Harker, as if she was determined to match the precision of the original. Aletta recognised – even if she could not find the words – the same resolve, the dedication that she knew she had herself.

And what of
that
lighthouse thrusting from its rock? Had Louisa Harker been barred as well from climbing to the lantern room?

Was this model with its light and airy delicacy made to counteract the thing that had defeated her? Like a voodoo doll, graven in defiance? Or a talisman: protection from some bitter force?

Next day, when Hannes was asleep, Aletta went to the lighthouse carrying a kitchen stool. She climbed the stairs and opened the cupboard on the landing. She placed the stool in front of the open door and stood on it, moving the old logbook and the box of cards, the rope and the instruments. She stretched in, lifting the shawl from the model.

She took it down, turning it, examining its curves and its lines. With care, she counted out the number of shells still missing. She had brought a small notebook and pencil. She drew a sketch of the type she might need and noted the number. Then she replaced the model, pulled the shawl across it and rearranged the cupboard. She closed the door and returned to the house.

She searched drawers, looking for glue, scissors, tweezers. She could find none. Like a prisoner, she cast about for substitutes. She went into Hannes’s workshop and poked about in boxes. She found wood glue almost petrified from disuse. She wondered if she could mix it back to pliancy. She selected a small slip of file, sandpaper, a tiny awl. She dropped them into the pocket of her jacket and went away, fastening the door behind her.

For many days Aletta searched for shells, braving the wind. Whatever she collected she brought back to the house, washed and laid out on the dining-room table on a cloth, telling Hannes she needed something else to do besides dance. Then she sorted them into type and colour, discarding those that were chipped or broken, eagle-eyed for the three or four varieties she needed for the model, finding few – for only the smallest, the most perfect and the rarest had ever been used by Louisa Harker.

She stored what she had gathered in glass jars and bowls around the house as if for decoration. One in the bathroom, one in the lavatory, one on the
windowsill in the lounge where the sunlight shone through it and cast a lacy shadow on the wall.

‘Aren’t they pretty?’ she said to Hannes guilelessly. ‘If I can’t have flowers, at least I can have shells!’

Hannes looked at them. ‘My father hated shells. He wouldn’t let them in the house,’ he said. ‘We were never allowed to collect them.’

‘Why not? ’

Hannes shrugged it off. ‘He said they were dead things.’

‘Well, they’re better than nothing.’

‘You can have as many as you like.’

Hannes even found her an old shell book that had been left by some long-gone keeper. It was a slim volume illustrated with blurred black-and-white photographs. With uncharacteristic absorption Aletta read it as if she’d found a fascinating hobby.

Hannes was puzzled but indulgent. She seemed less irritable. He did not find her sitting alone when he came back from duty, knees drawn up in a darkened room.

‘She seemed much more contented,’ Hannes says to Rika. ‘I didn’t know she was preparing to leave. I don’t think she knew it then herself. It was as if, in making the lighthouse whole, she was giving up something of herself. It was a gift. I don’t believe she was angry with me. She just wanted to survive.’

Even in the dim light of the fading day Rika senses the tremor in the long fingers smoothing the front of his gown. She keeps on walking at his side, her gaze – like his – directed at a vivid face she cannot see.

She knows he would not mind that she had seen him weep.

In the days that follow, Rika goes about her tasks as she always has. Her stint of night duty ends. Her days, juggling sleep and home, return to normal. She is present – or so she thinks – to her family, her life.

‘Riekie?’ Her husband cajoling her into planning their long-deferred family holiday. ‘Shall we buy a caravan?’

‘A
caravan!
’

The plumbing has failed. She organises workmen on her day off. The garden needs digging over – it is spring. She patrols the fabric shops with her daughter, mildly exasperated: the school dance looms.

‘Mom?’

Rika looks up, startled.

‘Are you deaf?’

‘Of course not!’

‘Well, which one then – the pink or the black?’

‘The black is unsuitable and the pink looks like Granny’s knickers.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Accusing. ‘You’re so … weird.’

–
What’s wrong with you?

She pulls herself together and takes charge again. She appears on ward rounds in the morning with the troop of younger nurses following, sunny but brisk. They go from bed to bed, the early light coming in through the tall windows, the potted palms on the veranda rattling gently in the spring wind.

Hannes Harker is allotted his time, his care and his medication.

He no longer needs help in the bathroom or to get in and out of his bed. He is on the mend. He often leaves the ward – brisker now – to patrol the veranda like a captain on his bridge, or a prisoner anxious for parole. He leans heavily on the parapet, palms flat against the red-polished tiles of the coping, looking out across the crown of the sycamore fig in the parking lot towards the sea. Rika, glancing through an open door, might see him, the gown belted tight, those strong wrists protruding from the too-short sleeves, his greying beard neatly trimmed, his thick hair newly brushed.

We are moved so rarely to real tenderness.

At its best it is a holy thing.

Aletta heard the sound of a mouth organ. She stood a moment, turning her ear against the wind to catch its notes. She branched off towards the jetty and the path that led to the guano workers’ huts. Hanging from a wire looped between two poles outside the first was a collection of overalls, drying in the sun. So, too, was an octopus pegged by its head. A pile of perlemoen shells was stacked against the shady wall.

Among them sat a cat.

Aletta gazed, astonished. No domestic animals were allowed on the island except chickens. It was against the rules, ever since sheep and goats had become unnecessary with the arrival of refrigerators. When the solitary pack-donkey of Hannes’s childhood had died, it had not been replaced.

Aletta stood quite still and gazed at the cat. It stared back. It was an enormous animal with the head of a pugilist, its ears rucked and bent, its fur a mole-coloured brown-grey, its massive forehead scarred – no doubt from confrontations with gannets. A wound suppurated at its chin.

The door of the cookhouse was open.

Misklip appeared at the entrance with a fishing rod and bag. He stood and gazed at the sea, then he walked across the yard and down towards the jetty. He caught sight of Aletta and tipped his forelock. ‘
Môre, mevrou.
’

‘Môre, Misklip. Wat gaan jy vandag vang?
’

‘
Leervis, mevrou,
’ he said solemnly. ‘Maybe
’n Franse madam
.’

‘The ones with the big eyes?’

He chuckled. ‘
Soos mevrou s’n
.’

He ducked his head as he passed her and she wandered on. She stopped and bent to the cat but it hissed malevolently and slunk away, tail down, as if she had threatened it.

She went on to a small beach. The shells underfoot crunched and a pair of oyster-catchers swung low across the rocks to land and turn and watch her, further off. She could see Misklip on the jetty, the sun catching the thin thread of his line, glancing off a gleam of light. She wandered back towards him, stooping now and then to pick up a shell, to examine a piece of seaweed. She reached the jetty and stood much nearer, watching.

‘
Watter aas gebruik jy
? Misklip?’ she asked. What bait?

‘
Katvis
,
mevrou
.’

He turned away as if she was not there. She lit a cigarette and gazed out towards the distant shore. The far dune-fields were streaming in the wind, a pink-gold haze above their crowns.

Misklip reeled in, caught the line above the sinker and knelt to re-bait his hook. He tipped a very small octopus from a tin on to a wooden board and cut a length from a tentacle. He secured the bait and twisted a piece of thread around it, knotting it. So quick, so practised, the knobbled fingers were scarred by many fish hooks, healed white as if they had been stitched.

‘Can I have a try?’ said Aletta suddenly. Taken aback, Misklip handed her the rod without a word, the small spout of his lip dipping as he grinned, his tongue a pink shellfish crouched behind his mottled gums.

She cast expertly and he whistled. ‘
Mooi so, mevrou
,’ he said.

He stood a little to the side, watching the line, making gestures with his hands, as if to direct it, to draw it in, just enough to keep it taut against the tug of the sea. Almost at once the line dipped and jerked. Misklip crowed, stretched out his hand, gesturing to hold that moment still – to be sure – and then to strike.

She did not fail him.

He struck as well, mimicking, anticipating just how hard to whip the line back. And then the drag and spin, the slack – poised – until the rod tip bent again, almost jerked from Aletta’s hands. Both cocked their heads to listen to the long, firm singing of the line as she let the fish run.

‘
Stadig
!’ Misklip coming nearer. Slowly, slowly. ‘Play with him,
mevrou
.
Skelmpies, skelmpies
.
Jy moet die boytjie uitoorlê.
’

So she played her fish and Misklip played in mime beside her – until at last they saw the flip and shudder, the silver dip and flash below the surface of the water, and Misklip, on his stomach, lay across the edge of the jetty, arms reaching down to gaff it with his bare hands.

It was a shad.

‘How many pounds?’ Aletta asked.

Misklip squinted at it flapping on the planks, put his hand out as if
measuring, held them one above each other, weighing, transferring the imaginary weight from palm to palm. ‘Three pounds?’ he said.

Aletta waited as he skewered the backbone with his fishing knife, killing it. The fish juddered and lay still, the thin trail of blood congealing on the wood. She went forward and picked it up, hooking her finger at the gill. Then she turned to him. ‘It’s for you,’ she said.

‘
Nooit, mevrou. Gee vir meneer Harker
.’

‘No, Misklip. It is yours.’

She took the fish in both her hands, holding it out, an offering, lying across her palms in its silver weight, still vivid with the sea.

He did not look at her but he smiled his shellfish smile. The fish was a gift – and Misklip had never had a gift from a stranger before.

Aletta said, stepping back from him, ‘Misklip, I am making something with shells. Will you bring me any nice shells you find? Small ones? Like this,’ and she dug in her trouser pockets and brought out a handful, choosing one or two to show him.

‘
Ja, mevrou
,’ he said, nodding. ‘
’n Mens vind dit dikwels.’

‘I want you to look for these little ones for me. And if you find them I want you to keep them for me.
Hoor jy
?
Asseblief
, Misklip.’

‘
Wat maak mevrou met die skulpies
?’

‘I am making something very nice,’ she said.

‘
Soos doilies
?’ He looked at her, anticipating. Then he said, ‘
Wag ’n bietjie,
’ and, taking the fish, trotted back along the path towards his house. She waited, lighting yet another cigarette, holding it gingerly for her fingers smelled strongly of fish.

Misklip came back towards her, almost shyly, his hands behind his back. He stopped a few paces off and then, like a conjurer, produced a small net circle thickly decorated with shells around its edges. ‘
Die doily, mevrou,
I made it myself!’

She examined it. ‘
Nooit
!’

‘S’true!’

The shells were secured with the finest fishing line. Each delicately bored with a hole as neat as if he’d used a dentist’s drill.

He regarded it and her, alternately, the vivid attention of a bird, appraising. The wind tinkled the shells together.

‘
Lieflik
,’ she said taking it and examining it, holding it up to the light, hearing its tiny seashell music. She put it back in his outstretched palm. ‘Bring shells just like these, Misklip,’ said Aletta, pointing at the doily. ‘I would like as many as you can find. Don’t say anything to anyone,
hoor jy
?’ She put her finger to her lips and shook her head very firmly. ‘Keep them here and I will fetch them sometimes.’

He imitated her, finger to his lips, crooked as a winter twig. ‘
Soos die kat …
’ he said softly and with an anxious little grin. He cocked his head in the cat’s direction and then looked at her.

‘Where did you get it?’ she said.

‘At the harbour. Long ago, when I was waiting for the tug. It was that big,’ and he cupped his palm as if he held something very small and fragile.

‘You know they are not allowed.’

‘
Dit was so klein soos ’n muis
,’ he said ruefully. ‘Must I leave it for the rats in the shed to eat it?’

Aletta smiled and offered him a cigarette. It was a bargain. He took it tentatively and slipped it into the top pocket of his overall. ‘
Sal ’it geniet
,
mevrou
.
Dankie, mevrou
.’

She left him and passed round the corner of the huts. The cat had reclaimed its place in the shade. This time it did not move but turned its head and looked at her a moment. It half opened its grey mouth as if to hiss, lifted its muzzle to catch her scent.

It was a look she did not forget – this half-feral beast, so utterly misplaced.

What would Hannes say?

‘I caught a fish!’ Aletta was almost triumphant.

‘Where is it?’ Hannes said, astonished.

‘I gave it to Misklip.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Because I wouldn’t have caught it without him.’

‘Then Misklip caught the fish, not you.’

‘No.’ Aletta brought the lunch dish through from the kitchen and set it on the table, using a cloth to wrestle the lid from a bottled jar of beetroot salad. ‘He was fishing and I asked for a turn.’

‘You mustn’t get familiar with the workers. It’s against the rules.’

‘Whose rules?’

‘I don’t have to tell you whose rules,’ said Hannes, dipping the serving spoon into the bowl of macaroni. He inspected it, turning it up to the light. ‘Bloody weevils again.’

‘Where?’

‘In the macaroni.’

‘I know, in the macaroni. But where? ‘

Hannes laid the spoon down and poked at it with his fork. ‘You should keep it in the fridge.’

‘Is that also a rule?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Well, tell me how I can keep twenty boxes of macaroni in the fridge?’

He did not reply. She was being obtuse. It had nothing to do with the macaroni.

She knew the rules as well as he did – she had lived with them all her life. There are the keepers, there are the workers. All serve a government department and each department has its rules.

Railways directed the keepers, Fisheries the guano workers.

–
Never cross the line.

‘Of course Aletta was right,’ Hannes says. ‘There we all were on the island, guano workers and keepers, avoiding each other as if we lived on different planets. It seemed so much easier not to be involved. Not to know. But Aletta dared. I think, in some ways, she is freer than anyone I have ever known. She doesn’t care what other people say. She just makes damned sure she says what she wants – and pushes everyone to contradict her.’

‘Like anyone who is really afraid,’ says Rika.

‘I don’t think Aletta is afraid.’

‘You should,’ says Rika quietly. ‘The angriest people are always afraid.’

Misklip did not forget about the shells. If he saw Aletta walking down the path or sitting on the rocks near the workers’ houses he would leave his cooking on a pot outside – an old necromancer stirring his cauldron – and trot across to her, delving in his overall pockets or offering her a rusty tin. As she inspected the shells, he would stand with his head to the side, the old knitted cap pushed back and the little spout lip quivering as if, as she counted them, he counted them as well, button-bright, wrinkled as a dried
gaukum
, pointing out some special treasure with a quick gesture.

In return they had a smoke together, rather hasty, rather silent. It was part of the bargain. She might ask after the cat.

‘
Nay
,’ he would say. ‘
Kat is orraait. Hy’s ’n kwaai ou donner
,’ and laugh apologetically and shake his head. ‘
Ou Kat
!’ – affectionate, cajoling. ‘We look out for each other,
Kat en ek
.’

It was in her searching for the last elusive shells that Aletta came, one morning, upon the graves among the mounds of wild spinach and mesembryanthemum. They were so lost in overgrowth, so worn and weathered that they might have passed unnoticed for years. She knew that she was not allowed to stray from the pathways and disturb the nesting birds. It was another of the rules, strictly enforced and religiously respected, the responsibility of the guano headman. In branching off she was trespassing into territory that belonged not to the keepers or the workers but the real inhabitants of the island: the gannets and the penguins and the terns.

Rabbits flitted suddenly from beneath her feet, a nesting penguin lunged
ineffectually at her ankle. But, as a sharp wind blew, waving the tussocks and the sprawling growth this way and that, she had seen what seemed to be thinning patches of weed and stone, way off, in the lee of a faint rise in the ground, which might be a hunting ground for shells. Glancing around to see if she was alone, she picked her way gingerly across the billowing cover.

The vegetation thinned. Rabbit burrows scoured the ground; broken shell lay white and bleached among the tendrils of wild spinach. And there, spaced apart, but in a strange communion, crouched a dozen graves. Some were very old. Bird droppings spattered the flat-hewn rock that marked them. The names were all but indecipherable. There were two small gravestones and a fallen stoneware angel. They must have commemorated children long ago, long before a regular tug, long before Hannes’s time. Turning, at last, to walk away she saw, a little apart from the rest, a stone on which the words were clear, even after thirty-six years. It was carved by an unpractised hand, chiselled deep:

Ons blinkoog seuntjie

Oorlede Augustus 3, 1921

Our small bright-eyed boy.