The Keeper (2 page)

It took all night to bring Hannes into port. It was a time of which he was barely conscious. Only of the pain and then the journey. The tug riding the swells, that sturdy butting at the waves. The swilling decks, the smell of the cabin, its cold. The doctor’s needle bringing up a surge of nausea – the taste of iron filings on his tongue, the sense of slipping under the waves, pressed down by the thrumming engine vibrating in his chest as if it were the surging of his blood.

The light is the enemy.

He had found the words, written in his mother’s hand, in a slim green volume of R.L. Stevenson that he had picked up when he had packed his father’s things. She had even dared inscribe them on the page opposite Stevenson’s dedication. It had read:

To Thomas Stevenson, civil engineer, by whose devices the great sea lights in every quarter of the world now shine more brightly.

It was an act of heresy to write ‘
The light is the enemy
’ against so stirring a dedication – she a keeper’s wife who, by her marriage, had bonded herself not just to her husband but to the Service. In the days, too, when commitment to the task held such dangers, such isolations, such vocation.

A lighthouse was not just a piece of masonry with a lantern housed in it.

It was a beacon illuminating the dark, sentinel of shoals, guardian of men, saviour of ships. It was beyond individual significance; it exacted loyalty; it commanded courage. Its being was palpable as the being of a great machine is palpable, beyond its engineering. The spirit of Stevenson resided in it – and transcended him, the individual man. As great cathedrals transcend their architects, their builders and their craftsmen.

What right had she to challenge it? She, who – in counterpoint – had crafted this replica: so delicate, so fragile, so inimical and yet so precisely right.

But Aletta had challenged it too.

Another heresy: for she was a keeper’s daughter, born to the life as others are born to a religion. She knew better.

And he remembered her – her wanton lingering, the way she slid along the rail of the upper stairs, deftly jumping to the landings, impudent and daring.

– Aletta, you will fall.

But Aletta would laugh, half-mocking and sharp, and shake back her hair, flexing her head, her hand on her neck – a flash of ribaldry, a lift of her shoulder, adjusting a strap – and flounce away through the great arched door.

Once, at any other of their postings, he would have followed her, swinging himself down behind her, circling the tower, great-booted, laughing, unable to resist her.

But not here on the island. Not here.

He would turn away.

How often in those two years on the island he had turned away.

His father’s words, exacting:
Never leave the light.

Not any light – but
this
light.

He would be gone for hours. Cogs, rollers, prisms. Checking, trimming, cleaning, polishing.

Caressing.

So exacting a mistress.

No, he never leaves the light. Unless by compulsion.

He was brought into Casualty – just another patient along with the usual drunks and accidents. He had a shattered ankle, broken ribs and a fractured arm. The ankle would need surgery and sustained treatment. There was an immediate danger of infection.

The senior sister on duty that night, Rika du Pre, had said, standing with his chart near the foot of his bed, ‘Why was there a delay in coming here, Mr Harker?’

‘I fell down the tower. I had to wait for them to send a boat. The weather was bad.’

‘A boat?’

‘I’m a lighthouse keeper. The round trip’s seven hours if the sea’s calm. It was rough.’

Sometimes it takes much longer. In the old days the boats never came at all when the gale blew for weeks. Then the carrier pigeons took the messages back and forth and sometimes even they were blown off course, looking for a landfall. Or the goshawks got them. Perhaps they knew to patrol this strange stretch of coast, alert for birds that flew alone. Lost messages, lost birds. All communication at an end until the weather cleared.

Graves on the island were testament to these delays.

The sister said, ‘Have you been on the island long?’

‘On and off all my life.’ He glanced up at her. ‘I’m there now to automate the light. When that’s done, I’ll leave.’

She stood, as if waiting for more.

He said, ‘I grew up there. My father was the keeper for years.’

She smiled down at him. ‘Strange,’ – a small, quirky, gat-toothed smile – ‘I was at school with a lighthouse keeper’s daughter. She once gave a talk to the class. I was intrigued. I have always wanted to go there.’

‘There is nothing to see but gannets.’ His voice was suddenly neutral.

She hesitated, her head inclined.

But he had closed his eyes.

Dismissed, she walked away.

The lighthouse.

It is on the southern side of the island, foot on rock. It stands between its two sturdy sets of outbuildings. The windows in all the structures are small, their frames buried in the walls. Nothing should breach them. The tides suck the gullies while the breakers, rolling in at this south-western tip of the island, thrash across the reef of rocks, three hundred yards across a channel. This water comes from the south, the vast relentless ocean, unharnessed, unshored by any distant coast. Between here and an infinity of ice is only the sea. And the albatrosses, the skuas, the shearwaters.

The wind is a great wing skimming the waves, the breath of the black-eyed storm petrel.

That wind defies the lighthouse and the lighthouse defies the wind. Even when the doors are barred, the wind finds its way in through chinks. But when the lower door is open and the wind comes suddenly, it rushes like a spout twisting up the staircase, up to the third chamber where the wrought-iron ladder begins circling like a scaly green claw beside the wooden casing of the great light’s pendulum chain. At the top, in the light chamber, the wind compresses the thick panes of glass as if in a giant fist. One day, with the force of a gunshot, it will crush the places where the glass has cracked from the heat of the light inside and the freezing ice of a winter squall without.

In the hospital ward Hannes Harker kept to himself. He would lie looking towards the window, ignoring the banter between the other men. Sister Rika, sensing his discomfort, had him moved close to the veranda door, where the curtain breathed wearily in the breeze and the morning sun made patterns on the wall. There was a view of the sea, way off beyond the factories and office blocks, a silver glimpse, darkened sometimes by the trail of a passing ship. Hannes, his thin face intense, watched as if he was waiting for a message.

Sometimes an elderly man in brown corduroys and a home-knitted jersey and a short, merry woman bearing a cake tin came to see him. They would sit by his bed: she a ripple of chatter, both men silent, two gaunt seabirds arrested by the busy capers of a sparrow.

On the long days when no one came, Sister Rika brought him old magazines from the waiting room and yesterday’s newspaper. She would put them on the locker by his bed without speaking. She noticed that he always turned to the column that listed the ships in port. He would run a battered nail down the print past the coastal carriers and pause:
The Pegasus
‘from the high seas’. He seemed to like those words –
from the high seas
.

So did she. The mystery of them, the promise.

‘Were you ever a sailor?’ she asked cautiously.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was in the Navy in the War.’

Hannes Harker stayed in hospital far longer than he had expected. Official policy in a government department was to take no risks with key staff. He could not be discharged until he was completely fit for duty. And there were complications. The ankle break was bad. The operation to repair it had been lengthy. He reacted to the penicillin and he developed an infection. Moving was an agony because of his broken ribs. It even hurt to talk. He dared not laugh.

When Sister Rika brought the thermometer or the medicine cabinet to
his bedside he would submit silently. But he was courteous always, calling her ‘Sister’, never using her name, even though it was clearly printed on the badge on her bodice:
Frederika du Pre
. Once or twice she mentioned the lighthouse but he brushed her aside, glancing across the window towards the sea, always in the same direction as if his gaze could penetrate the buildings. Rika suggested she might telephone someone for him but he said no. His colleagues did not leave their lights. They couldn’t come. No – nor his wife, although, scanning the chart Rika saw her name –
Mrs Aletta Harker
– printed under
Next of Kin
.

There was no address.

He had simply given the name
Cecil Beukes
as a contact in case of emergency. The address was the lighthouse at the Cape, six or seven miles along the coast, lost in dunes and wastes of Port Jackson willow.

And so, respecting his privacy, Rika said no more. She cared for him herself, simply and impressively. She attended to his bed baths, doing so swiftly, without effort – and without conversation, some instinct shielding him from the garrulous young nurses who tended to speak across their patients when straightening beds or changing dressings. Rika had seen Hannes Harker turn his head away and close his eyes when they attended him, removing himself without a word or gesture of impatience. But he did not turn away when she came to him. He followed her with his eyes. That calm still blue, that weary beauty.

The words came to her unexpectedly.

Beauty – in such a tide-worn face?

Her brisk but kindly clarity with other patients was somehow laid aside in the presence of his stillness. She took his care into her own hands, despite her seniority – an impulse she did not care to scrutinise.

Once he said to her, ‘Do you have children?’

‘Three,’ she said, without elaborating.

He half smiled. ‘Of course.’

She glanced inquiringly at him.

‘Your tender hands,’ he said.

Sometimes, at night, Rika would allow Hannes Harker to leave his bed. She would bring a wheelchair and take him on to the long, red-polished veranda looking out across the city lights towards the sea. She would have ordered any other patient back to the ward but there was something of authority in Hannes Harker which precluded it. It would be unthinkable. Besides, sitting in the night air with the gown loose on his great bony shoulders seemed to make him more inclined to sleep towards the morning. To tell a lighthouse keeper to beware of chills seemed absurd. He would have laughed at her.

One night, when the ward was unusually empty, having told the junior nurses where she was, she brought him a cup of tea, drew up a chair and sat beside him.

It was as if he had expected her.

Why does one give a story into another’s keeping – and why, after so many years of silence? Rika did not ponder it but she was sensible of gathering the fragments of a life, shielding them from meaninglessness. In all the years of working in a ward she was aware of transience. There were those who came, those who went: the deaths and the recoveries; the kindly brought but endless streams of cakes and chocolates; all the gestures of regard which momentarily wove her life to the lives of others in an intimacy that could not be replicated outside this hospital. Then in some café or some cinema she might recognise a face. Where from? Ah, it must have been a patient. But when? What for?

Hannes Harker was different.

In the days in which he was in the ward, Rika ministered so quietly it seemed as if she had taken on a trust. There were times when, moving silently from bed to bed in the early hours of the morning, she had found Hannes awake, as if her shadow, touching the edge of his counterpane, aroused him instantly. She would stand above him, ask him if he needed anything to help him sleep. ‘No,’ he always said, as if he dared not sleep too long. As if it would rob him of alertness and precision.

Sometimes she found him turned to the window, an arm stretched painfully to hitch up a corner of the curtain. She would draw it open and stand beside him, the detachment and professionalism she had cultivated all her life suspended.

‘Are you looking for the light?’ she’d say softly.

‘Yes.’

Sitting now on the empty veranda with the potted ferns shaking their shadows across the faded paintwork of the walls, with small moths dipping round the sharp fluorescent flare of the porch light, Hannes Harker talks.

Something has precipitated this need.

And Rika conjures from his words a world which – layer on layer, transparent, thin and tenuous – becomes her own reality of him. She knows she has come to another turning in this strange yet intimate exchange, with its quaint respect, its careful phrases, its absolute propriety. It is here above the town, the fall and grace of ancient rooftops, the sigh of tyres on roads, out of sight but just below the lip of the hill, that she feels pinioned half in and half out of a world that she would never know herself and yet of that, in some extraordinary way, she has become custodian.

She does not say ‘I must go’ when she knows she must. She simply sits,
knowing that this time will end – this lingering dawn, this dark before the first green flush of morning. And that his need to talk will stop – suddenly – even with self-reproach at having said so much. She must not break the spell of words until she had heard them all.

Then Hannes Harker will go.

The full weight of the word arrests her.

To go. To be no longer there.

In the weeks that follow, as he rallies and recuperates, their conversation is pursued in snatches, in quiet lunch-hour moments when Rika wheels him down to the visitors’ waiting room or the bench in the garden. It continues as if the intervening busyness has not intruded – as if their thoughts keep pace even through the absent intervals, the stressful hours of duty, Rika’s departures at the end of a shift. There is a continuity of thought and word, without preamble. And every now and then, after her shift, Rika stays a while to talk to him, walking him up and down the long veranda, the fronds of the potted palms ruffled by the motion of her measured passing steps.