The Keeper (4 page)

‘Niks nie, kaptein.’

‘I think it’s methylated spirits, Misklip.’

‘
Nooit, kaptein
.’

It was all that could come to the island legitimately and pass the embargo on drink. And yet, it smelled like brandy – that familiar old Friday-night stink, too close, too familiar to be forgotten. ‘
Brandewyn
, Misklip?’

‘
Nooit
,
kaptein
.’

‘I will have to write a report, Misklip,’ Hannes said. ‘You had better tell me the truth.’

Misklip was silent.

Hannes waited. Then he said, ‘Have you got a family, Misklip?’

‘
Nee, kaptein, net ’n stokou ma
.’ Just an ancient mother. ‘How can you get a family here?’ And he almost grinned, the little spout widening. He pinched it between thumb and forefinger.

‘Riefaart has a family on shore.’

‘He’s the headman,’ Misklip said, looking vacantly off into the far corner. Hannes caught his glance across the room.

So piercing in its sorrow.

Not the sorrow of the deed. Not even fear at what he’d done. Simply the burden of life – as if he couldn’t drag it around with him much longer.

That truth and fact did not always converge, Hannes knew. His life, like Misklip’s, fed on ambiguity. And then there were the contradictions of this wretched little island with its rules and its divisions.

–
Do not leave the light.

–
Do not fall.

–
Do not sail in August.

–
Do not cross the line.

–
Do not touch the shark hook.

The ancient sailors in their caravels had called it Chaos Island with reason. And they had done it long before men came to build the light. In daring to colonise, had they put to flight some vengeful bird of prey? Some dark midnight petrel, some carrion-eating skua that had its lair among the rocks and had left its curse?

Here were the penguins and the gannets, the rabbits and the lost, forlorn and vagrant pigeons, the sharks and seals.

The guano workers and the keepers.

Hannes was aware that Misklip was a victim of something quite beyond the solace of a drink.

The drink bought his silence. For what or why, Hannes did not know. But it had happened suddenly. And the only change on the island in the last few weeks had been the arrival of Len Hendricks as relief when Cecil Beukes went on leave. He with his motoring magazines and his pin-up calendars and his pile of 78 records. He with his unpacked bag.

A vagrant, too – always moving on.

Hannes took Misklip back to his quarters with Riefaart’s orders to take the day to sleep it off. He left him at the door of his room, shabby as a burrow, only his musical instruments polished and set aside, each with its space on the top of three old tea chests. Hannes turned and took the track back to his side of the island, hearing his footfall on the shell-strewn path. He went through a side door into the empty living room. He stood at the window and looked out across the grey scree towards the bulk of the lighthouse. He glanced at the old original keeper’s quarters where he had lived as a child. One of the windows was open, the curtain looped back. Music drifted out.

Aletta would be there, dancing alone in an empty room.

He inclined his head to listen more intently. A rumba? A tango?

How at odds the notes of Aletta’s music with the low, rhythmic sound of the sea, the swell breaking on the shore.

No charge of assault was laid in respect of the convict, Witbooi.

It appeared he had not died – but who he was, why he was in jail, seemed irrelevant. He was simply a guano worker who had laughed.

Hannes had filed a written report on the incident to be returned to Police Headquarters by the warders when the prisoners left the island in a fortnight’s time.

Misklip had not been taken with them.

Nothing more was heard.

Yet, despite the silence, the shadow of the boy remained – for it was by his laugh that something was released. As if the southern horizon had reared up with land-born cloud.

Some impending weather. Some ambiguous thunder.

Besides his report to the police, Hannes wrote another to the lighthouse authorities asking for better medical supplies. Equipment good enough to deal with injuries, assaults or shock.

But there were other maladies as well. They came without fevers or rashes or a worrying cough. Yet how could he say to the Railways doctor, James McLean, who had saved the boy and taken him off,

– Have you a medicine to cure unhappiness, Doctor?

– What unhappiness?

– I cannot tell. It arrived the day the convict, Witbooi, laughed.

That a laugh – so unpremeditated – could spawn such sorrow.

For it was the moment when Misklip – who had taken all his pleasure from playing on a banjo or singing to the tune he wheezed out on his old accordion – rounded on a fear.

To bring it to an end. Any end.

‘Did the boy die?’ Rika asks.

‘No,’ says Hannes. ‘And we heard no more about it. I thought the warders would have taken Misklip with them and have him charged for attempted murder. They did nothing. It didn’t seem to matter to them one way or the other. Too much bother, probably. But Misklip was convinced I’d saved him from them. It seems he always believed it. But I didn’t. It was the warders themselves who chose to say nothing. I have a shrewd suspicion Len paid them off.’ He pauses and there is a small catch in his voice when he speaks again. ‘But somehow I think, in fact, it had more to do with Aletta.’

‘Aletta is my wife,’ Hannes says.

‘I saw her name on your form,’ Rika replies. ‘You gave no address.’ Indeed, her name is one Rika has not dared to mention before. There is an etiquette, a taboo, which precludes intrusion on another, greater intimacy.

‘We lost contact,’ Hannes says. ‘But it seems Maisie Beukes believes she saw her just the other day – even though she’s not a hundred per cent sure it was her. She thinks she is working in a department store in town.’

‘As what?’

‘Maisie says she saw an assistant at a make-up counter who looked just like Aletta. But she was in the distance and Maisie was with someone else so she couldn’t easily go and see.’

Hannes lets his gaze drift, detached from her, detached from everything. But Rika knows it is this recent news that is the reason for his agitation, the reason he has chosen her to hear: we cannot sift our histories alone. Somehow they must exist beyond ourselves.

Ah, Aletta.

How does one begin to describe something that is so essential to life and yet so inimical to it, so dependent and yet so fiercely aloof from everyone – primal, passionate, embittered.

She was a keeper’s daughter. Like him, she had been raised in a lighthouse. She had spent some weeks on the island as a girl when her father was relief keeper for another man on leave. There was something in the wild red-gold of
her tangled plaits that was as familiar to him as the gannets and the penguins and the rabbits in their burrows. She had the spindle-legged alertness of the
kiewietjies
that nested in the short star-flowered turf near any coastal light.

Sea-child, thin-shanked, light as a sanderling.

And yet – with her angry razor-tears edging at the outer corners of her eyes, so often beak and claws – Aletta challenged him. Though he could have snapped her slender neck between his thumb and forefinger if he’d wished – and
how
he’d sometimes wished – she could bend him to her. Deftly, provocatively, taut as a bowstring.

It was an anguish to love her.

‘You can’t marry Aletta!’ Maisie Beukes had said to him, alarmed, when he had told her so many years before.

‘Don’t say that, Mrs Beukes,’ Hannes had retorted. ‘You know nothing about her.’

‘Nonsense, Hannes, I have known her all my life. She’s lighthouse.’

‘Of course she’s lighthouse. How could I marry anyone
but
lighthouse?’

Maisie had gazed at him sadly. ‘You just want to rescue her.’

‘From what?’

‘You are like your mother, Hannes.’

‘You didn’t know my mother.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t – but, I believe, she was a very kind, good woman.’ Her round, red-veined, friendly face was damp. ‘And Aletta is not.’

But he had married her nonetheless. In spite of – or because of – his mother.

In those days, a year after the War, when he had lodged in the dingy single quarters built for relief keepers ready to be posted to any lighthouse on the coast, he had escaped with her, borrowing her father’s car, driving hell-speed along the coastal road, wondering if she’d flinch at every bend he took.

She never did. She laughed instead.

As they drove, the flat sweep of city lights receded behind them and the darkness washed in. They would stop on the grassy hilltop above the bush-strewn dunes and turn the engine off, subsiding from the thrill of speed and danger.

He had brought a bottle of wine. He had brought two tumblers. He had remembered the cigarettes. They would walk along the path down into the sheltered hollow below the cliff and sit on the springy turf, she with her long thin legs drawn up, and sip the warm wine. There was only the turf and the smell of the trickling
brak
water seeping from the dunes to the rock pools and the sound of frogs and the waves, breaking over and over and over, dashing their spray against the gullies.

They did not speak much: they had inherited the silence of the light
between them, an implicit understanding of the duties and the loneliness, the need for self-reliance and the fear of isolation. It was not a bond as much as a dependence. And it was more than that as well. Much more.

Here, there was no one to see them if they ran naked, chasing up the sandy pathways. No one to hear them. Their mewing and the mewing of the gulls were one – lost in the wild wash of waves, the beat of breakers on the distant beach. When, later, they lay on their backs to watch the sky, a cigarette passed between them, they wanted nothing but the swelling of the tide again. Its ebb and its renewal.

Even now – decades on – he wants to howl her name aloud as he had howled it then.

‘Aletta is a keeper’s daughter,’ Hannes says without preamble when they have snatched a lunchtime and have an hour to talk. He senses that Rika will not say her name. ‘She could body surf. She could swim. She could drink. She could …’ He stops himself, looking across at Rika with her hair plaited into her neck, the delicate curve of her throat – so still, so nunlike. The antithesis of Aletta. ‘She could dance,’ he says.

He wonders – has Rika ever sworn? No, maybe not. Who is she married to? The local Rotary Club chairman? The secretary of the Community Chest?

‘My husband is an engineer,’ she had once said simply. ‘We have three children and a Labrador.’

Her words had precluded further enquiry.

‘Aletta is seven years younger than me. I remember her as a child. Her father was Maans Oosthuizen – a tough old rogue. Once he came as relief keeper to the island. Usually he ran the light at the Cape outside town.’

At eighteen, returning to the island from his last year at school, Hannes had been in charge of the keepers’ children on the tug, going home to the island for the Christmas holidays. Aletta had been among them. He had passed the voyage with the tug master, smoked a cigarette, paid scant attention to the children squabbling below – beyond counting heads every hour or so. Aletta was there with her brothers and the third assistant keeper’s three plump, timid daughters doggedly eating sandwiches from lunchboxes on their knees. Aletta had been eleven, thin, lanky, somehow piquant in her fierce autonomy. He had found her hanging upside down from crooked knees on a rust-blistered iron railing, her long plait tipping the deck, her calves twisted tight, ankle to ankle, daring the bucking of the vessel.

‘Get down at once!’ Hannes had said.

She had obeyed but slowly, abstractedly, as though she were suddenly bored with the activity and her acquiescence had nothing to do with him. She slid him a glance from her slanted eyes.

A cool appraisal. But then it wandered on to other things as though she had forgotten him even before she had done with seeing him.

It was fifteen years before he had met her again. And she was just as silent as before. But the frail urchin-child had become sinew and whipcord from her dancing. Twenty-six, once married and divorced – an impulsive wartime tryst, doomed by separation – she had returned to her father’s lighthouse without money or prospects, beyond a job in a hairdressing salon. It was a vocation her mother had insisted on. ‘You know you’ll never make a living as a dancer, Aletta. And you can’t depend on us.’

‘Aletta,’ Rika says the word.

Aletta. This unknown woman. She, with the amber hair.

Nine years after they were married Hannes had brought Aletta to the island. Nine years after postings in a town. Shops. Cinemas. The salons where she’d worked. The dancehalls where she danced. Aletta always on a spree.

When he’d got the call from the Chief Lighthouse Inspector who’d informed him, he’d all but crowed his pleasure.

The man was taken aback. No one wished a posting to the island.

That was the lore among the keepers on the coast.

–
Haunted island

–
Nobody lasts

–
Too dangerous for children

–
Wives go off their heads

‘Cecil Beukes will be your assistant,’ the Senior Lighthouse Inspector had said. ‘Old Mrs Beukes will be a comfort to your wife. She’s a real trooper.’

Even better: with Maisie on the island it was surely going home.

What Aletta might have thought had slipped his mind. When he had told her she had just inclined her head. She knew as well as he: keepers went where they were sent.

Without complaint.

She had packed their things, put her dancing dresses in a trunk and failed to say goodbye to anyone she knew. She had stood silent at his side on the deck of the tug that had taken them to the island, her arms folded, a scarf tied tightly round her head and knotted under her chin. How he had strained to see the once-familiar grey-green tower with its white trim and red-capped dome, wishing it into view long before the low stain of the archipelago came in sight.

It was a day of limpid blue light when the sea breathes as if deep in sleep. He had stood at the tug’s rail and watched the swoop of gulls. The sea was heavy with heat and, as they went, dolphins followed in the shadow of the keel, the arc of their quiet sliding just above the surface of the sea, the sun sparking like a heliograph from their dove-coloured backs.

It was a silent world but for the thrum of the engine and the long fold of the bow wave and the light wind making an echo – the note of a mouth organ fluting in the hollow of the yellow-and-green funnel. Far away a line of clouds, white and low, just edged the horizon. Hannes had kept his eyes to the east, looking for the island – and the lighthouse.

‘Look,’ he’d said, pointing.

Aletta had followed the line of his arm.

There it was, facing the sea, a deep cross in its facade, each end tipped with a small porthole. The glass of the light chamber had burnt with reflected sunlight. On either side the low white buildings of the old keeper’s quarters, where Hannes had lived as a boy, guarded the tower. In front, a wall enclosed a yard.

And then the sky – that unimaginably empty blue-and-white infinity.

She’d walked away from him to light a cigarette. He’d seen her leaning against the bulkhead, her back to the sticky wall. He’d seen her wipe the heel of her hand impatiently across her cheekbone as if dashing off a tear. Then she had drawn on her cigarette and sent up a stream of smoke, swiping at it irritably with her fingers. She’d taken a shred of tobacco from her tongue with a fine, red-painted fingernail. He had turned away from her and back towards the island.

Cecil Beukes had rowed them from the tug to the jetty. Maisie had been waiting at its end, plump and ceremonious, waving and laughing and wringing her hands as Cecil bobbed them towards her over a choppy swell.

‘Don’t slip on the steps, Aletta,’ she had called as they moored. ‘They’re full of seaweed.’

Kisses all round and Maisie taking Aletta’s arm confidingly. ‘I put the furniture in your house when it came with the tug last month. I didn’t know how you’d like it so don’t feel bad about moving it around, see? I didn’t hang the pictures.’

Aletta had disengaged herself.

‘And there are some rusks in a tin in the kitchen and some milk in the fridge for tea,’ Maisie had said, reclaiming her arm. ‘Everything tastes like guano but you’ll get used to it.’

Aletta had looked back at her bleakly.

They had walked up from the jetty together, Maisie never silent, pointing out to Aletta the nests of the gannets, the penguin burrows, the well, the generator shed. Hannes had said nothing. He had simply watched the lighthouse at the far end of the path, approaching it slowly as if from a great distance, strangely elated, strangely moved and hearing – beyond their words – only the suck of the sea in the gullies below. He had stepped, at last, into the deep grey shadow of the tower and stopped. Aletta had looked back at
him impatiently while Maisie and Cecil turned off towards their own cottage, allowing Hannes and Aletta to take the path alone.

Hannes had raised a hand in salute to Cecil and Maisie and followed Aletta along the track to the senior keeper’s house. He had crossed the bare yard with its platoon of rainwater tanks and opened the door for her, stepping back to let her pass in first. She stood, pulling off her scarf.

It was a modern bungalow with an asbestos roof and steel windows. If they rusted they could be scraped and painted. Unlike the moulded wooden windows of the older buildings with their gracious pediments, they did not warp and rot in the wind. But the large panes were stained with salt and bird droppings. Cleaning them was of no avail. Tomorrow a squall would sandblast them with gravelly shell. The bedrooms were very small, just enough for a bed and a wardrobe and a pedestal for the lamp. The living room was bright and faced the sea. The light fittings were the result of some keeper’s wife’s bargain-hunting on shore – a starburst in chrome with yellow cones for shades, which threw a sharp stiletto shadow on the walls. The carpet was a starburst too, in reds and ochres, blues and browns. It clashed with the modern flower-patterned fabric of Aletta’s Parker Knoll chairs, which Maisie had placed each at an angle in a different corner of the room. Aletta’s tea-trolley was set with her pottery cups and veiled with a net cloth, her pictures stacked against a wall. Beyond, the dim kitchen was furnished with a gas stove, a paraffin fridge and a table. There was a garage.