The Keeper (23 page)

He draws his breath. He feels the marching of his blood. He is heading out beyond the harbour bar into the open sea.

He sees her at her counter, arranging bottles on a shelf.

–
Oh, Aletta.

She turns and looks directly at him.

He takes his cap off, tucks it beneath his arm and holds a steady course.

He reaches the counter and stands before it. He says, ‘Ma’am, I am a sailor and sailors are superstitious. I’ve been marooned on a rock for years. Do you have a potion that might help a safe return to port?’

She puts her hand up to her neck, flexes it – that slow familiar gesture. ‘What happened to your map?’

‘I failed to read it.’

She turns to the shelves behind her and scans them, pulling down her shoulders, lengthening her back.

Apart and poised, they both draw breath. A moment of reprieve.

Then she turns back to him, puts her hands on her hips and scans him. ‘Hmm!’ Considering. She bends and pulls her handbag from a shelf, puts it on the counter, extracts a lipstick, bows her mouth, outlining it. She presses her lips together, cocks an eyebrow at her image, says sardonically, straightening up, ‘Potions won’t help. Nor maps.’

‘I need a pilot,’ he says quietly.

She comes around the counter. She stands before him. He does not dare put out his hand. Wary as a seabird still, fierce and fragile, she glances up into his face. Then she gives him that wry lopsided smile of hers. ‘I know the way,’ she says. ‘If’ – and she scans him sceptically – ‘you’re not afraid to follow. But, I’m warning you, the sea is usually rough.’

These are the things that Rika has imagined. So many meetings. So many settings.

Aletta. Fred. Fred. Aletta.

She cannot know if this is how it really is.

She will never know.

But it is as real to her as the island and the light that she has taken into her being, as if she had lived there as intensely as he.

There is no need for her to go and see it, its reality and weight. What she has created has its own truth.

It is only later – maybe never – that the consequences of her actions, thoughts, love, remembrance, homage, care – all those ineffable small gifts – may be fully realised or revealed. Or not, as the case may be. It does not diminish them or their essential worth.

It is something she has always known – the core of her believing and her calm.

Later, when Rika returns to her station, the box, labelled with her name, is waiting on her desk. She takes it to the garden and she opens it, sitting on a bench surrounded by the high cream walls of the hospital, the flowering plants.

The note simply says:

For my keeper.

In homage – and with my love.

H.H.

October 1961.

She lifts the shell lighthouse out of its nest and holds it up. The sun catches the red curve of the dome, lighting it. She tilts it and she looks beneath, remembering Hannes’s words about the names inscribed in the wood.

–
Her name was carved beside my mother’s. As if they had created it together, knowing.

Louisa Harker August 1921

A.H. August 1957.

H.H. October 1961.

Sometimes we leave what is most sacred to us in another’s care. To revive the meaning and intent, we choose to give. In giving, the story lives beyond us and our time. An act of faith – of love.

Holding the lighthouse in her lap Rika knows that it is not just a gift. It is so much more.

She places it in its box, returns upstairs to the nurses’ station and slides it into her locker. She drops the key into her pocket. She walks back to the veranda and stands at the railing. The parking place beneath the great sycamore fig is empty, the fallen fruit newly crushed by turning tyres.

She cannot follow where he has gone. She will never know what he decides to do. His world – his brother Fred, his wife Aletta, all their history, the essence of their individual lives – is far beyond her reach or sphere of influence.

Her own life story has remained unknown to him. It is inessential to the story that they shared.

–
You said that ships are safe in harbour but that is not what they are built for.

–
I said – true, but if they put to sea they need a pilot.

He has put to sea.

Rika turns then into the ward and stands a moment at the foot of Hannes’s bed. A new patient has been admitted. She consults his chart, makes a note and smiles at him.

Her ward round has begun.

The End

My warmest thanks and appreciation to:

My publisher, Frederik de Jager and all at Penguin SA, especially Genevieve

Adams, Janet Bartlet and Ellen van Schalkwyk

My editor, Dr Jenefer Shute

My husband, Martin Oosthuizen

Elizabeth de Wet, Cory Library for Historical Research, Grahamstown

Sue Grant-Marshall and Don Marshall

Grizel Hart, Castle Hill Museum, Port Elizabeth

Nellie Somers, Campbell Collections, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Alan Fogarty

Lee Hall

Guy Rogers

Johan Wessels

My family

My friends

Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © Marguerite Poland 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-143-53151-7