The Keeper (20 page)

‘I watched the movement of the gannets,’ Hannes says. ‘I kept a record of birds. I fished. I finished my little boat and I sailed in it. Misklip helped me launch it. I remember saying to him, “What should I call this boat?” He said, “It’s a workboat. It doesn’t need a name.” And there was nothing I could do to draw him on the subject. So I called it
Aletta
. When Aunty Maisie saw the name, she started to cry. “One day I’ll rescue her in it,” I said. But Maisie only
shook her head. I think she really thought Aletta was a bad woman.’ He turns to Rika. ‘Perhaps she
is
a bad woman. In the beginning, just after she had left, I really believed it …’

As if he wishes to believe it.

‘And perhaps she’s not,’ says Rika.

Aletta worked at the cosmetic counter in the day, glad of the perks – a supply of products, the indulgence of trying all the perfumes in the store when trade was slow – and she had come to know the other girls as they leaned against their counters, chatting.

Those small glass bottles with the silk-covered puffers, displayed in rows.

–
Try this, Aletta, and tell me what you think. Can I have a squirt of yours?

There was no longer the stink of guano, the shrivelling salt wind. In the chill and grubby communal bathroom in the boarding house at night she lathered herself with lashings of face cream.

She was grateful.

But where was Hannes?

She had found the money at the post office, his brief unyielding note.

–
I hope you will be happy.

She had stared at it in disbelief. He had paid her off, wished her well. He wasn’t coming to find her.

Simple as that.

The light had won.

And Len could not have been further from her thoughts.

In defeat she unpacked her dancing dresses and her shoes and she practised in her small room, without the music. She scanned the newspapers for advertisements for dancers. Any show, any cabaret, any Christmas pantomime going to rehearsal. At the first audition – for a nightclub – she wore her favourite frock with the sweetheart neckline, the clinched red elastic belt, her rainbow petticoat. She had done her hair into a French roll. Her eyes were a basilisk’s – gleaming, dark and heavy with midnight-blue glittered shadow.

She sat in the dank and smoky bar of a downtown hotel at 7.00 on a Saturday morning with a group of girls, anxious to begin. She needed to be back in the store by 9.00. The woman from the neighbouring counter to hers, who had agreed to cover for her, dared not drag it out.

They were put through their paces as a group. And then each dancer was given a piece to improvise. Three minutes of music to show off her individual skill.

Aletta knew she was better than the rest.

The director looked them over, choosing four. Aletta was not among them. She had the sass to ask, ‘What did I do wrong?’

The man patted her shoulder patronisingly. ‘You’re rather good,’ he said. Then he lowered his voice. ‘The dancing doesn’t matter quite as much as the look, dear. You could be their mom!’

Aletta packed her frocks away and joined a studio. Working girls after office hours doing a session of ‘modern’. Most had barely danced before. The teacher – distant and bored – could never get her name right. She called her ‘Paulette’ if she called her anything at all. Aletta’s brisk correction went unheeded.

She stayed a month then went away.

The manageress at the department store asked if she would fill in sometimes at the hair salon on Fridays. She did. It was a change within her six-day week. She was good. She soon had an eager clientele.

Sometimes she went out with the other girls for a drink after work. But most of them had boyfriends or husbands or children waiting at home and could not stop. On Sundays she danced alone in her room, eking out the hours. Or she sat in a chair with the curtains closed, lighting one cigarette from another.

Waiting.

Hannes’s time at the island came to an end. He asked to remain but the Lighthouse Authorities thought differently. He was offered promotion – not to another lighthouse, but to the circuit.

Lighthouse Inspector.

It would mean a wandering life but he could buy a house for his retirement and end up in Head Office if he chose.

He did not choose.

Nor did he buy a house.

He based himself at the single quarters at the Cape just as he had done after the war when Aletta’s father had been keeper at the light. He went from there – up the coast, down the coast, solid, dependable, efficient. He carried his books in the boot of his car. He liked the driving – the long lonely distances, the coastal roads, the endless beaches, the camaraderie of the keepers and their families at the end of a tiring day.

Always moving on.

He bought a camera. His pictures of the various lighthouses were unique. He caught their character, their essence. One day, he said to Maisie, ‘Maybe I’ll write a book.’

Head Office sent him to Sweden to study automation. He stayed for months. He toured the lighthouses of Scotland. He toured the lights of France. He knew the fjords of Norway. He took his leave in a croft in the Shetlands. He became a vagabond, a pelagic bird.

He courted women when he could. He loved and left them.

He stayed no place for long enough to settle down. He had no fixed address. No one could pursue him. If he sensed they might, he packed and left.

When he was back, the Chief Lighthouse Engineer said to him, ‘Harker, we’ve selected the lights we’re going to automate first. Will you do it?

‘Yes, I’ll do it.’

Among them was the lighthouse on the island.

It was the light he’d left till last.

‘So I came back to the island,’ he says to Rika. ‘I’d been gone four years.’

‘Were the Beukes’ still there?’

‘No. Cecil had been sent to the lighthouse outside town. To the Cape. It was an easier post. Maisie hadn’t been well. They needed to be close to medical care. He will retire from there. He should have gone a long time ago but they keep him on. It’s so difficult to get replacements nowadays. It’s not a popular job!’

‘Did you have an assistant?’

‘I pulled rank and insisted that I do it on my own. Otherwise they’d have sent some greenhorn along to bother me. The last keeper had a family on shore. He couldn’t wait to leave. I decided to stay in the old cottage where I’d lived as a child. I had a stretcher and a box or two of books and a camp cooker. I moved the paraffin fridge from the keeper’s house. That was one place I didn’t want to be. I couldn’t even look at it.’

Even after four years.

It was as immediate as if Aletta was inside, standing at the ironing board listening to the radio as she pressed his shirts, her forgotten cigarette disintegrating into ash.

‘Misklip was the only one left who I remembered. Funny old bloke. Hardly able to do his job any more. I think the Fisheries keep him because no one else is prepared to stay for long. They start fighting and causing trouble. Riefaart had gone soon after me. There was a new headman. The only continuity was Misklip.’

‘He must have been surprised to see you.’

‘He always thought I’d saved him from the gallows. I saw no need to disillusion him. I wasn’t going to give Len the credit although I’m pretty sure he paid the police warders off. A cut from the salvage. Another deal. I didn’t bother to find out. In a way, I didn’t want to know. It would raise too many other questions. They have to patrol the coast quite carefully now. There are all sorts of syndicates after salvage. It’s become a problem for the penguins and the gannets. I hope, one day, they declare the place a marine reserve.’

‘Misklip?’ She reminds him, guiding him back.

‘He used to sit and play his banjo or his accordion or his guitar. I never
listened to music myself – not after Aletta was gone. I only listened to the news on the radio. But I used to hear old Misklip down near the shed. He didn’t seem to cook much any more and the workers didn’t talk to him. They said he was
malkop
– soft in the head. If it was very cold he would sometimes bring up coal and make a fire for me in the old fireplace or he would help me clean the generator. In the old days I’d have kept my distance. It didn’t seem to matter any more. I guess it was, in a way, some connection with those days. I suppose it was something to do with Aletta. He always said, “
Wanneer kom die kleinmies terug
?”

‘I once said to him, “No, Misklip – she went off with that
skurk,
Hendricks.” And he said, “
Nooit –
I swear it on my mother’s grave.” I didn’t believe him, of course. How could he know?’ Then he smiles. ‘It seemed almost odd,’ he says, ‘that Misklip should have had a mother at all. It was as if he never had been young. He told me she’d been dead two years. He told me she’d prayed for him every day.’

‘I wonder who it helped?’ Rika says. ‘Her or him.’

‘I asked why he needed all those prayers. He said, “Because of the boy.” Then he told me that Aletta had been to visit his mother. Apparently he’d begged her to take a little parcel and see if his mother was all right. He said, “The
kleinmies
never came back so I never heard.” It was only when he visited that Christmas that his mother said to him, “
Ons het saam gebid.
For me and for
kleinmies’s
child.” I told him Aletta didn’t have a child. But Misklip insisted. “
Hulle het saam gebid vir hul seuntjies.
” ’

Hannes looks away then, unable to meet her eye. ‘That’s where Aletta went the day she left me.’

Rika is silent. There is nothing she can say.

‘When I came back to the island last month I found the shell lighthouse with Aletta’s name written underneath, next to my mother’s. It was hidden in a cupboard in the lighthouse. Aletta had never said anything about it. She always liked collecting shells but I didn’t know exactly why until I saw it. I didn’t think she knew much about my mother. I never spoke of her. It was moving to find something they had made. It was as if they had done it together. Knowing. That’s when I fell.’

He looks across at Rika. ‘And that’s why I’m here with you.’

She takes his long hand in hers, lifting it from the arm of the chair. Hers is warm and firm. And in charge.

Then she puts it away slowly, as if replacing something she should not have touched.

‘I often wonder if she finished it for my mother – or for me,’ he says.

‘Perhaps you ought to ask her.’

He is silent.

‘Are you afraid?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘So is she.’

‘Where will I find her?’

‘You said it yourself. Maisie Beukes may know.’

Hannes will be discharged from hospital within a day or two. He has recovered. If he is gaunt and spare and his great bones give him the air of a pinioned albatross, he needs activity and purpose to regain his dexterity and grace.

Rika has been busy with forms. There are the last X-rays to do and a session with the physiotherapist. There is a final appointment with the surgeon. She completes her paperwork and searches for her car keys.

It is her day off.

She leaves the duty station with some relief. She does not wish to be around. She does not trust in her serenity. It has long deserted her. She has no time to talk and the ward is full. She hands over to her colleague briskly. The breakfast trolleys are already starting their rounds. As she passes the door of the ward she sees Hannes’s familiar figure beyond, walking up and down the veranda in his dressing gown.

What will she do when he is gone?

It is a foolish thought. She pushes it aside.

She will do what she has always done: admit the next patient, settle him, complete his paperwork, order his medication, discuss his condition with the doctor. She will see to the student nurses. She will see to the cleaning staff. She must send a note to the kitchen: the soup last night was cold.

The hospital recedes as she drives towards the suburbs, counter to the traffic streaming into town. Her husband will have taken the girls to school, left a note with a funny turn of phrase, a quirky scrap of love. She parks in
the garage and goes upstairs, knowing she should sleep for an hour or two. Instead, she searches for the telephone directory in the pedestal beside her bed. She finds the number for the lighthouse at the Cape. She dials. Cecil Beukes answers. At first it is clear he does not know who is calling, then, realising, is taken aback and cheerfully gives her the telephone number at the house.

She dials again.

‘Hello?’ It is Maisie.

She needs no reminding.

‘Mrs Beukes,’ says Rika. ‘Would it be possible for me to come and see you this morning? I’m off duty and there is something that is worrying me about Mr Harker and he is going to be discharged tomorrow. I shouldn’t be interfering, but it’s important.’

‘To him?’

To me. Rika is too honest with herself to deny it. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Perhaps you could help me clear up something.’

‘Of course, my dear,’ says Maisie. ‘What a surprise! Oh my goodness, I wish I had known earlier. I would have made you my coconut cake but I’m out of coconut and Cecil is on duty and I don’t drive.’

‘I will bring you some coconut if you like,’ says Rika. ‘But really, I don’t need cake. I would just like to see you.’

She showers and changes and, forgoing sleep, backs the car, swinging it round in the gravel driveway. The Labrador is lying in a patch of sun. He wags a lazy tail at her, yawns and stretches. The beds along the lawn are neat and coming into spring bloom. The white marguerites glisten in the morning light. Her bulbs have been a success. There are freesias in a large pot at the entrance. They have a lovely smell. It follows one into the house. Soon the jasmine will be out on the trellis. It is the surest smell of spring. That – and the soft warm rain.

She closes the varnished wooden gate and drops the heavy iron hasp into its cradle. She turns the car into the street. It is lined with flowering gums. She drives through the
kloof
and takes the back road out of town, heading towards the coast past the new drive-in, the township, the racecourse and into the country where smallholdings, punctuated by their paddocks and stables, straggle here and there along the road. Breasting a rise she winds down towards the sea. There is the smell of
blombos
and salt wind. The waves break beyond the orange-stained rocks, dash up gullies rough with barnacles. Landwards, the ubiquitous Port Jackson willows – a dull green swell – undulate in the wind. She slows for a donkey cart laden with logs. There is a man at the side of the road, selling wood. He sits disconsolately on his pile.

No one passes here.

At last she swings into a sandy track leading towards the Cape. She reaches a gate. A sign fastened to the wire warns
No Unauthorised Entry
. She climbs out of the car and wrestles with the chain. The gate is heavy; it catches on the midrib of the road as she swings it open. Beyond, gaunt and tall, rising from its haze of salt mist, is the lighthouse. In front of it, a hideous utilitarian building is marooned in a sea of sand. It is painted a stained cream. It seems to hang within its fretwork of sewerage and water pipes. She gazes at it. If she had been Aletta and asked to live there, she’d have been appalled.

The blueprint from the drawing board at Head Office: it reminds her of a penitentiary. Though it is so at odds with the venerable lighthouse, with the vast sweep of the ocean, the flood of terns and wheeling gulls, it remains strangely apt in its stark, skeletal spareness. No sentiment. No fuss. It is as functional as its staff is meant to be. It has a grave, enduring ugliness.

Rika climbs back into her car and negotiates the track towards the house, bumping through loose drifts of sand. At last, she turns into the yard. Maisie is waiting for her, waving and then clasping her hands before her and waving again. Rika smiles, knowing those gestures well. She has sometimes stood in the doorway of the ward and watched the scene: Maisie with her shaking cheeks, her several dimpled chins, her fluttering gestures, always laughing, always trying to feed Hannes something from a packet or a tin.

Today Rika is her object: she has put out the teacups on a starched doily, she has arranged a packet of Lemon Cream biscuits in a dish, apologising that there is nothing home-baked. If only she had been nearer a shop. She’d have just popped out and bought fresh flour. And the coconut, of course.

The teapot is covered with a knitted cosy – a cottage with knobbly pink hollyhocks. The chimney trails a thread of wool. Maisie has put on the heater. She pulls a chair close to it for Rika. ‘The wind’s got up and it’s chilly,’ she says, puffing cushions, tweaking the corner of the doily straight. She settles herself in her chair and looks expectantly at Rika.

‘I know you’re wondering why I’m here,’ says Rika. ‘But Hannes Harker has told me his story.’

‘Hannes? Never!’ Maisie exclaims. Then she laughs. ‘It’s as I thought! Man, he must have fallen in love with you!’

‘He’s not in love with me,’ says Rika.

Perhaps it is she who is in love with him.

‘He’s in love with Aletta. And they deserve a chance.’

‘It’s been years,’ says Maisie. ‘And, you know, Aletta was such a headstrong girl. She wouldn’t
wait
for anyone.’

‘Hannes says you’ve seen her.’

‘
Might
have. I wish I’d never mentioned it now. I saw straight away that it upset him. I didn’t think it would after all this time. And anyway, it was only
in the distance – and I wonder if I’m even sure. It was at the cosmetics counter in Garlicks. And those girls are so made-up they all look the same. There was just something about her. How she moved. The colour of her hair.’

‘And you told him?’

‘I said I saw someone who looked like Aletta.’ She casts about. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. Because, you know, I don’t think Aletta was good for him. He is better without her. Also, what if she really did go off with that Len Hendricks? They were made for each other, those two. If only Len had married her right at the beginning like I said to Aletta’s mother, Queenie, there wouldn’t have been all this bother and Hannes would have been safe from the start. I always thought he married her to rescue her. Apparently his mother was the same. Always wanting to look after people.’ She looks thoughtfully at Rika, scans her sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap, her chestnut hair coiled at her nape, her strong, fine-boned face. ‘He should have married someone like you – sensible and quiet.’

Sensible and quiet? Was that how others always saw her? A listener, without a story of her own?

‘Hannes has had a raw deal from the start. What with his mother …’ says Maisie.

‘He seems to blame himself for that as well.’

Maisie inclines her head.

‘That’s nonsense of course,’ says Rika. ‘She must have died for some other reason than waiting for her children.’

‘You know, Hannes’s father, Karel, was a very difficult man,’ says Maisie. ‘I never knew him but Cecil did. Lighthouse keepers often go strange. It’s the fumes from the mercury bath. In the old days they didn’t know about the dangers like they do now. It’s still a problem. I keep my eye on Cecil all the time!’ She laughs, making it a joke. Then she says, ‘People can’t take the loneliness either, especially the wives. A lot get very bad depression. Marriages have broken up. That’s why they say a keeper must be a keeper’s son and marry a keeper’s daughter to survive. Hannes’s mother wasn’t a keeper’s daughter.’

‘People do not drown themselves when there is hope,’ says Rika. ‘And Hannes’s mother must have known that sometime – sometime – she would be reunited with her children. But she drowned herself anyway, Hannes told me, her pockets weighted with stones. Where did the real blame lie?’ She looks across at Maisie. ‘Hannes said that your husband was on the island at the time. What did he think?’

‘Cecil?’ Maisie shifts. ‘Cecil never talks about lighthouse business. It’s one of the rules. But he always said Karel Harker was a very tough man. Tough on everyone. Tough on his wife. Even himself. Once he told me that there was trouble on the island with the guano workers and that Karel Harker went after
them with a sjambok. On the island we always stick to ourselves and don’t get involved with other people’s business but that time Karel did. He was very angry because they’d been drinking on a Sunday. Apparently Hannes’s mother took the workers’ side. Fred and Hannes were stuck on shore and couldn’t come back from school. Cecil says she was frantic to get to them. Anyway, Mrs Harker died just after that shindig with the workers, long before her boys ever got home. I believe she was a very kind, quiet, religious woman. She wanted prayers for everyone on the island each week – stretch out a hand and all that. But it was a lesson to all of us to mind our own business.’

Maisie takes the cosy off the teapot and stirs the leaves. She says, ‘We have some old logbooks here. We brought them from the lighthouse on The Hill when that light was automated not so long ago. The lighthouse on the island was in touch with the lighthouse on The Hill for more than a century, you know. Cecil kept the records. He was supposed to send them off to headquarters to their archive long ago but he wants to sort them out first. There are logbooks and messages that go back years. They had a pigeon post.’ Maisie pushes herself up out of her chair. ‘Imagine that, hey? But it wasn’t that reliable. Lots of the poor birds got taken by hawks or blown out to sea and drowned. Still, let me look for them.’

‘Hannes spoke about the pigeons,’ says Rika. ‘He said his brother helped his mother to look after them and that he, Hannes, wasn’t allowed near because he used to squeeze them!’

‘Funny you should say that,’ says Maisie. ‘Cecil saw an article in the
Farmer’s Weekly
some years ago about these people who race pigeons, and one of them was a Fred Harker. I remember him saying, “I wonder if that’s Hannes’s brother?” ’

‘Did he keep the article?’

‘No. It was just in passing. And Hannes was overseas at the time. I never knew that Fred.’

Maisie goes to a desk in the corner of the room. ‘This stuff is mostly about ships and things. But there are some cuttings that old Henderson collected when he was the keeper on The Hill for donkey’s years. He was such a crusty old bugger he must have swallowed the mercury rather than breathed it in!’ She opens the drawer and scratches about in it. ‘There’s a very interesting letter that I want to show you. It was the message that the pigeon took to the island to say that the First World War had ended. Don’t you like that, hey? That’s the only way they got to know it was over. Karel Harker was there then. He gave it back to The Hill because it was sort of historic, and it was one of their pigeons that took the post so they were rather proud of it. There was even an article about it in the paper with a picture of the bird. “
Great News Brought by Pigeon Post
” or something like that.’ She chuckles. ‘It was lucky
that message got through otherwise they might still have been searching for submarines!’

Maisie turns back to the desk. ‘Good grief!’ she says. ‘This is a real shambles!’ She is struggling with a knob of another drawer. ‘This thing is going to come off in my hand,’ she complains. Rika stands quickly and goes to help her. She eases the drawer open. It is full of folders, old envelopes and a set of logbooks.

‘It’s those ones,’ says Maisie. ‘Just haul out that stuff on the top.’

She lifts the papers on to the desk.

‘Let me find that letter about the war.’ Maisie starts thumbing through the old volumes. Bits of paper, scraps of messages, lists of supplies are stuck on to pages with old Sellotape which has flaked and cracked, leaving an outline stained on the page.

Maisie is clucking. ‘Lots of this is junk that should be thrown out but Cecil thinks that if we start doing that someone will sweep him away too, same as the books – long past use!’