The Keeper (13 page)

She stood and looked at it a long while and then she stepped away, the wind whipping her hair, stinging it against her cheek. She thrust her hands in her pockets and returned the way she had come, picking over the furrowed and uneven ground, twisting her ankle in a burrow, loosing her shoe momentarily in a boggy patch.

She found Misklip working near the jetty, his rod secured between two struts, its line drifting on the tide while he sanded the upturned boat. His guitar and mouth organ lay on a flat rock nearby. He straightened up when he saw her and saluted.

‘
Môre
, Misklip,’ Aletta said. ‘Have you caught anything?’

‘
Niks, mevrou
,’ he replied. ‘The water is too clear.’

‘Are you going to paint the boat?’

‘
Ja, seker, mevrou
. But you have to scrape it first. Otherwise it doesn’t sail nicely.’ He picked at barnacles, showed her where they had clustered.

‘It’s an old boat, Misklip.’ She bent and touched the keel. ‘How long have you been sailing in it?’

‘Me?’ he laughed. ‘I’m too scared of the sea.
Poep
-scared. But the headmen have been using it for twenty years,
mevrou
.’ He patted it. ‘I always keep it clean for them. It is a good-luck boat.
Dis reguit soos ’n pyl.
’

‘Has it got a name, Misklip?’

He cocked his head, puzzled. ‘
’n Naam
?’

‘All boats have names,’ said Aletta.

‘
Dis mos
a work boat,’ said Misklip, scratching his head under his old red cap.

‘When you paint it you should give it a name.’

‘What name does
mevrou
like?’ Humouring her, his eyes bright, his lip drawn up in a grin showing the stumps of teeth, his vivid little tongue.

‘What about
Blinkogie
?’

It was as if she’d struck him.

‘What’s wrong, Misklip?’ she said.

He did not reply.

She said then, ‘
Wie was die blinkoog seuntjie
? Who was he?’

‘
Weet nie.
’ Almost sullen, he shook his head in denial.

‘I am sorry, Misklip,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s such a
fraai, oulike naam
.’ She looked at him shrewdly. Then she said, ‘I found a little grave over there,’ gesturing inland. ‘It is sad to forget.’

‘We don’t forget!’ he said emphatically.

She looked at him directly then, inquiring, but he turned from her and began to rub the boat again but as if something had since been lost from the task, its goodness and purpose.

He looked at her sideways, rubbing still. ‘Lots of people are buried there,
mevrou
,’ he said. He continued to scratch at the keel, turning the sandpaper round, blowing the dust from it, diverting her. ‘Even a donkey,’ he said suddenly. He looked up at her a moment. ‘It is not a good place. We are not allowed to walk there.
Dis die pikkewyne se plek
.’ The penguins’ place. And he bent to his work and was silent, hunching his back. He said very quietly, as if to himself, ‘God says in the Bible that people must not be buried with animals.’

‘Do you believe that, Misklip?’

He mouthed a moment, the spout lip quivered. He said, almost in anger, ‘Of course!
Hoe kan mevrou iets anners dink
?’

‘There are some graves on the island,’ said Aletta to Hannes that evening at supper.

‘Yes, I know.’ He looked at her sharply. ‘You aren’t supposed to go there. There will be hell to pay with Riefaart if he knows you were walking near the nests.’

‘He didn’t see me.’

‘That’s not the point. It’s a regulation.’

‘Another one,’ she retorted.

‘You know that as well as I do.’

‘Whose are they?’

‘One or two are very old. Shipwrecked sailors marooned here long ago.

Also the odd child’s grave. Keepers’ children, I suppose. Most are well over a hundred years old.’

‘Was your mother buried there?’

‘No.’ He picked up his empty soup plate. ‘The old man and she are both in the cemetery in Humansdorp.’

‘There’s a much more recent little grave – about 1921, I think – with “
Ons blinkoog seuntjie
” carved on it, all squiff with funny letters.’

Hannes turned at the door. ‘Never heard of it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the guano workers haven’t been allowed to bring their children here for years. Not since my father’s time. He had them banned from the island.’

‘What about the wives?’

‘Most of them went back to the mainland with the kids. It’s been a place for migrant workers since.’

‘Then why are the keepers allowed their families and not the guano people?’

‘The keepers are white.’

‘So?’

So …

‘My father said the island was not a place for children. No schools, no proper supervision. And anyway, it’s too dangerous. They might drown.’

‘So might the keepers’ children.’

He did not reply. Aletta looked across at him and she said evenly, ‘Is that why you brought me here? Because we haven’t got any children and I wouldn’t have reason to complain about being stuck on this rock?’

‘I wanted to come home.’

‘Home?’ She did not hide the scorn.

The light was fading over the sea. Hannes looked at his watch. He turned to go.

‘And what would your mother have said,’ resumed Aletta relentlessly, ‘if you had been sent away from the island and she had been left here on her own?’

‘We were,’ he replied quietly. ‘And she died because of it.’

‘Aletta could not have children,’ Hannes says. ‘It was accepted as a “medical problem”. She wouldn’t talk about it. She said it didn’t matter. She didn’t want them. I have never let her know what Maisie told me. If Aletta does not wish to talk about it – it’s her choice …’ Here, the present tense, as if he had seen her just the day before. ‘It’s why, in some ways, being posted to the island was not a problem for us. It is not a place for children. My father even banned the workers’ children from the island when my mother died.’

‘Why?’

‘Some old superstition.’ He pauses, returns a little brusquely to Aletta. ‘It made it easier for her.’

‘Why should it make it easier?’ Rika says it almost involuntarily.

‘It must have.’

‘Nothing makes it easier.’

‘Perhaps.’ He looks at her a moment then – with a quiet emphasis – he says, ‘Len Hendricks arrived. He was sent instead of the relief who was supposed to come when Cecil and Maisie Beukes went on leave. There was a mix-up. Some bloke objecting to being away from his family for five weeks. Len volunteered. Couldn’t wait to get there.’

‘Len?’ Rika asks.

‘Len,’ Hannes repeats. ‘Len was one of those blokes who are hellbent, angry, godless.’

‘And?’

‘Not that he didn’t believe in God. He did. God and the devil. All of that.
But godless. He is silent a moment, searching for words. ‘Do you know what I mean?’ He glances at her. He has her attention.

‘I don’t know how one undoes the influence of men like Len. It’s like … the eyes that watch from under a reef of coral when you’re diving. Not dangerous. Maybe just unsettling. And somehow wrong.’

‘Where is this Len now?’

‘God knows,’ Hannes says.

It is not indifference in his face as he sweeps a hand across his eyes and down. The veins run gaunt along its surface, the long, strong fingers are finely knuckled. Rika wants to take it in hers and smooth the palm, feel the bone beneath the skin.

She sits in silence at his side.

Hannes was in the watch room at the base of the lighthouse tower, waiting to make the daily radio call to shore. He went over the list of supplies that were wanted. Fresh food – eggs and meat and vegetables; a part for the generator; more coal. Most important was to know when the relief keeper would arrive. He didn’t want anyone in the house if he could help it. What if he made space in the old keeper’s cottage? It was damp. It would need to be cleaned and furnished. When, at last, he spoke to the Port Captain in the signal room at the harbour, the man said, ‘The Chief Lighthouse Engineer rang the other day. They’re sending a bloke who didn’t mind being called out at short notice.’

The radio squealed and Hannes held the receiver away from his ear momentarily.

‘Who’re they sending?’

‘Chap called Len Hendricks.’

Hannes said nothing. He had learnt over the years not to overreact. To take time, to mutter expletives once the machine was firmly switched off.

‘Hasn’t he got his own place to look after?’ he said.

‘Seems not. Apparently he volunteered.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘He’s a very keen fisherman. Marlin. Sharks. Trophy stuff,’ shouted the Port Captain. ‘He’s getting a lift on a chokka boat. Said he’d try to reach you by Friday.’

Hannes signed off and stood with his hands on his hips looking from the lower window across the bare yard towards the sea.

Christ Almighty. What would Aletta say?

When she brought him a thermos of tea, her dancing shoes dangling from her hand, he said, not looking at her, ‘The relief is coming by Friday.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Len Hendricks.’

Aletta put the thermos down on the table very carefully. She steadied it from tipping. ‘Oh,’ she said and left the room.

‘I always knew about Aletta and Len,’ says Hannes to Rika. ‘Maisie told me. She said I wanted to rescue Aletta.’ He laughs. ‘I didn’t want to rescue Aletta. I just wanted her. So, when Maisie let me know about what had happened when they were teenagers, how could I possibly blame Len? It was all so long ago. It didn’t seem to matter any more. Aletta had never mentioned him. Not ever. But they were both lighthouse so of course they knew each other. In their teens they were just two rebellious headstrong kids stuck in two lighthouses in the same town. No supervision. Nothing to occupy them except to meet on the beach and mooch about.’

‘That’s what teenagers do,’ says Rika.

‘Yes – but they go home to families and neighbours and friends and gardens and trees …’ He trails off.

‘Sometimes …’

He is silent a long time. ‘And every two years or so you are uprooted and have to start again. You never know where you belong. The only certainty is a light. Some light. Somewhere. And relying on lighthouse people who move the same as you. They’re the ones who really know you. The ones you can rely on.’ He looks at her. ‘A lighthouse either defeats you or it owns you. There is nothing in between.’

Rika glances at him. Here he is, like some old sea dog in his loose dressing gown with his grizzled head, the clipped beard, the fine curve of his cheekbone, the deep hollow of his cheek. And there – the lighthouse. The wind, the waves, the scudding gulls, the groan of the foghorn: a madman’s forlorn lament.

‘It is hugely exhilarating,’ Hannes says. ‘You can feel its power in every muscle when the wind blows or the sea is in a fury. It is a most peculiar thing. If you are born to it, you know it. If you’re not – then it’s simply a light. But it’s not – it is something much, much more …’

Rika gazes out towards the sea, distant beyond the cityscape and houses.

‘Aletta knew all about the light,’ Hannes says. He tries to find an image. ‘And she was powerful – if someone so small can be powerful. And self-reliant. Until we came to the island. And then Len arrived.’ He spreads his hands. ‘He was only there for a short time. Just long enough to cause havoc.’

Aletta put on her music, winding the gramophone handle so vigorously that the box jumped and the needle leapt across the grooves. She lit a cigarette, she walked about the room, bending now and then to peer through the window at the sea as if it was about to deliver something up to her. She scanned the
horizon, she blew smoke at the glass. She ground the stub out in a perlemoen shell that lay heaped with ends near the gramophone.

She pulled on her dancing shoes and her petticoat. She warmed up, resting her foot on the windowsill and flexing her arms at her knee, pushing her head further and further down towards it, straightening her back.

–
How could they send Len Hendricks? How could they?

No lighthouse, no wind and gulls and waves, but a bench at Happy Valley under the dusty palm trees strung with multicoloured lights.

Seventeen years old. Len hammering away.

And afterwards an ice-cream sundae with pink syrup and Aletta strangely full of scorn.

It was almost a cruelty in Aletta: this compulsion and her self-defeating scorn.

‘He’ll have to marry you,’ her mother, Queenie, had said, her stiff, crinkly hair vibrating above the over-powdered brow, the pencilled eyebrows drawn in their arches of constant surprise, spittle dancing.

Len – bravado gone and ready to run – had not married her.

On hasty instructions from a cousin, he had taken her on the bus to South End to a small wood-and-iron house with a broken brown picket fence and a gum in the garden where a mongrel was chained. He went with a sense of conspiracy as if he had made the journey before.

Which he hadn’t.

A small, elderly Chinese woman opened the door and Aletta slipped inside, Len glancing back over his shoulder at the empty rutted road.

All that Aletta could recall of that afternoon – the heat of the tiny room, the sweat and the fear – was a white Chinese vase on the table, painted with spiky blue flowers and stylised chrysanthemums, a fly looping lazily across the ceiling and the sound of the dog’s chain clinking as it moved about the yard.

Len stood outside smoking and glancing furtively over the fence, alert for passers-by. The woman came at last and asked for money in a thin sing-song voice, drying her hands on a dirty towel. Len took Aletta’s dancing-class fees from his pocket and the small amount he’d borrowed from his cousin and gave it to her without looking at her. She counted it deliberately, casting a malevolent glance at him, and put it into the breast of her pinafore. She told him to go away and come back in two hours.

He went down the hill to the harbour and yarned with the crane drivers, bummed a cigarette or two, found himself confiding to a stoker leaning against an idle engine. The man laughed conspiratorially and advised various lewd methods for avoiding this fix in future. Len laughed with him, his eyes darting nonetheless – an official in a uniform, a customs officer? Had a policeman followed him?

He was late returning to the house on the hill, his shirt damp with sweat,
breathless from all the cigarettes and running the last quarter mile, suddenly fearful she had died. When he reached the gate Aletta was sitting on the stoep step.

‘Why you sitting here?’ Len said.

‘Because I’m not the only customer.’

‘Come.’

‘I don’t know if I can walk.’

‘You have to.’

So she had walked and she had kept on walking.

She had put all thoughts of children from her mind, being told, in time, that she could not have them. This had ended her first marriage – that brief, wartime interregnum – discarded with the uniform her soldier had packed away.

–
What’s the point?

That is how Hannes had found her at her father’s lighthouse once again. Frightened. Aimless. Angry.

– I can’t have children, she had said bluntly.

– I don’t want them, he’d returned.

– Why not?

– You’re enough.

For all these years she had been enough – for him, for her – until this island where, being forbidden, the idea of children intruded once again. An undertow in conversation:

–
Is that why you brought me to the island?

–
Because I would have nothing to complain of being stuck on this rock?

That constant penance. That insidious blame.

And now, here was Len.

Did Hannes know?

Surely not.

Len Hendricks had never been referred to in any conversation she had ever had with Hannes, nor by anything she had ever done. Except that he was lighthouse, he did not exist. From the moment she had walked out through the gate of the Chinese woman’s house and followed Len Hendricks down to the bus stop below the hill at South End and sat in silence, her head leaned against the metal wind-shield of the grimy shelter, she had walked away from everything associated with that day – especially Len.

And yet a great underlying weariness remained, weighting her bones, a gravity that would not let her go. It made her old.

And Len? He’d worked on tramp steamers for a year or two, joined up in the War and when he was demobbed, come back to the Lighthouse Services like a dutiful son and got married to a girl from Cannonville.

He’d been posted to Natal; their paths had never crossed.

When Hannes came in from the tower, Aletta said, not looking at him, ‘Why did they send Len Hendricks here?’

‘Only on relief.’

‘You don’t need him.’

‘No.’

‘But it’s the rules?’ Sarcastically.

‘It’s the rules,’ he repeated quietly.

‘He can’t stay here with us.’

‘I thought we could fix up a room in the old cottage.’

‘Not where I dance!’

‘It’s big enough for both of you.’

–
Nothing is big enough for both of us.

‘Why not in Aunty Maisie’s house?’ she said.

‘I would have to ask her.’

‘Well, ask her.’

‘I have no way of contacting her.’

‘Find one.’

‘He’ll have to eat. Perhaps he should eat with us …’

‘He’s a lighthouse keeper. He knows how to cook.’

‘There’s nothing to cook on in the cottage and I don’t think Maisie would be too keen having him gut fish all over her house.’

‘Neither am I. And anyway, who says he’s going to gut fish?’

‘I think he asked to come so he could fish,’ said Hannes, casting about to hide his own confusion.

‘Well, Uncle Cecil fishes too.’

‘Len only goes for the really big ones,’ said Hannes. ‘He’s a trophy hunter.’

‘You don’t say!’ she remarked dryly.

‘I didn’t realise,’ Hannes says, ‘that the trophies he was after weren’t fish. He was sussing out the island for the salvage. Without the chance to work at the light he could never have done it unnoticed. As it was, it was Aletta who found him out. It saved him, of course. Because however much she said she hated him – and she certainly said it clearly – she could not betray him.’ He paused. ‘Or perhaps it was for Misklip.’

‘Misklip?’ says Rika, mystified.

‘Len fed Misklip booze to silence him.’ He glances at her. ‘Len is like an octopus. All those tentacles, fastened on to everything and everyone.’

He came with a chokka boat. A calm day with the sea welling on the reefs, hardly breaking. Hannes took the motorboat to fetch him. Aletta could hear the faint chug of its engine, see it bumping its way across a deep blue sea, the chokka boat bobbing like a toy a quarter mile from shore.