The Keeper (5 page)

‘A garage?’ Aletta had said scornfully, crossing the back yard and opening the side door.

‘The stupid buggers at the office used the same design as for every other keeper’s house on the coast. They forgot that a car has never come here and never will. But they built them anyway because that’s what the plans said!’

‘And so? What do we do with it?’

‘It’s my workshop.’

‘No,’ Aletta had said decisively. ‘It’s where I’ll dance.’

‘And who are you going to dance with?’

‘I do not wish to dance with anyone,’ she had said and her voice was hard and distant. ‘I will dance by myself.’

She had stepped inside the garage. He had followed. Cecil had taken charge of his tools and fixed the spanners and the pliers to hooks on the walls. He had arranged Hannes’s fishing tackle and his ropes. In a corner was the generator, the workbench and lathe, the anvil. Suspended on pulleys was the half-finished boat which had gone – forlornly – from lighthouse to lighthouse, never used, waiting for a launching site.

‘When it’s ready we can sail to Black Rock and Seal Island,’ Hannes had said, ignoring Aletta’s irritation, looping his arm around her shoulder and
speaking against her ear, meaning some secret pirate cove, some hidden inlet on a mythic coast. Some place where he could love her, shouting down the waves, startling the gulls. Eden on the first day.

‘I do not want to sail anywhere in
that
,’ she had said disdainfully, eyeing it aside with that sliding glance of hers. ‘We’ve dragged it round like a body for too long.’

Rebuffed, Hannes had taken his drill from the wall and inspected the bit. He ejected it, caught it as it fell and put it on the workbench.

Aletta had gone outside again and turned back towards the house, walking over the crunching shells of the narrow pathway, her high heels precarious. She had stopped and gazed up at the asbestos roof. It was spattered with guano; the stucco walls were painted a dismal shade of grey. The yard was grey as well, grassless and bare.

‘Jesus!’ Hannes had heard her say.

He’d followed her inside. ‘Shall we have some tea?’

Aletta had not answered. She’d walked across the lounge and opened a window, struggling with the rusty hasp, grating her knuckles on the protective iron bars outside. ‘Are they anxious about burglars here?’ she’d asked sarcastically.

‘What are you talking about?’ said Hannes, suddenly literal. ‘Those are to keep the gannets from breaking the glass.’

All the air was gannets in the dusk, with their black-laced masks and their sea-blue eyes and the long column of their necks. The great darkening tide of them rushing in, the wheel and sway and shout of them as they clamoured to roost. The strident hawking of them, the quarrelling, the murmur of approaching wings rising to a roar, the speed and swirl, the perfect navigation of descent to nest, the still, suspended moment before landing – and, at dawn, the lifting of their wings with the wind to free them for flight.

‘Maisie and Cecil have invited us for supper,’ Hannes had said from the kitchen.

‘I know.’ Aletta’s voice was flat and disengaged. She had taken off her shoes and tossed them into a corner. ‘The floor’s all gritty.’

‘You’ll have to get used to it,’ Hannes had replied, recalling that when the wind blew his mother had taken the broom and shifted sand patiently round and round the house. That endless, fruitless contest with the easterly blast.

Aletta would not have the patience for the task.

And how was she to deal with the stink? The deep lung-numbing stench of guano: the island’s gold. It crept in through the pores and couldn’t be washed away; one breathed it in and then one sweated it out. It was all-pervading.

At dusk Aletta had followed Hannes across the yard and along the windy path to the assistant keeper’s house. It was the same as theirs, only smaller. It
had a garage too. There was a windsock in the yard streaming out from a pole, a tatty silhouette against a violet sky.

Maisie was all delight. She had come to the door, her hair newly curled – small greying sausages bouncing at her cheeks, her face hot from exertions at the stove. Cackle, grunt and gasp, all at once: she’d flapped her dish towel, flurried Cecil into activity over a tray of snacks and ferried Aletta to a seat by the window. Cecil was dressed for duty in his uniform, buttons shining, his hair brushed flat.

He had kissed Aletta and shook Hannes’s hand.

‘Home at last,’ Maisie had said, giving Hannes’s arm a pat. Hannes had caught Aletta’s glance. Its bleak dismay.

‘How many years is it since you were here?’ Maisie had said.

‘Twenty-four.’

‘But it’s just the same?’

‘So it seems.’

Aletta had turned to the window and looked out into the dark, blinded momentarily by the sweep of the light.

Here was Maisie and the happy chaos of her room – the sewing machine on the sideboard, the knitting scattered on a chair, her decorative bottles of coloured sand in rows along the window ledge. Here was Cecil with his ponderous voice, standing almost to attention in front of the paraffin heater in the fireplace. Above it on the wall was Cecil’s best catch – a marlin’s head, its great fin reared, its beak open as if to hiss. The tables, dining chairs and dresser were all made by Cecil. He was a competent carpenter. Solid pine with flourishes of driftwood attached as decoration and varnished dark. A lamp made from a large pink shell, rather anatomical and rude, stood on a starched doily. A spray of orange coral set on a plinth beside it. On the wall, a sad little seahorse in a frame.

Aletta had sat aloof, almost anachronistic in this cluttered room, her bobbed and layered strawberry hair bleached blonder, her make-up flawless, her baby-pink lips outlined in a deeper shade, her eyes heavy with liner, the lashes casting a spiky fringe of shadow on her cheeks. She wore an angora cardigan. Fine filaments of hair drifted round her, raised and lowered themselves on the big puffed sleeves to the faint electricity of movement, like minute antennae.

Against the warm chatter of Maisie, who had recently put her daughter into secretarial college – ‘And she is staying at the YWCA. And they say it’s OK, but you know I saw some of those girls and I’m not so sure now … except Dolores is a good Christian child so perhaps she’ll be all right’ – Hannes could hear the wind beginning to rise. Cecil had been listening too, pausing in mid-forkful to cock an ear.

Cecil checked his watch and pushed his plate aside. ‘Excuse me, Aletta,’ he had said, turning to her. ‘I must go on duty.’ And he had picked up his thermos of tea from the sideboard and patted Maisie on the shoulder as he left the room. Hannes had remained at the table, letting Maisie’s conversation drift across him, her kind enquiries of Aletta, her offers of help to get her settled, her advice about preserving water: ‘You can only wash your hair once in ten days here, Aletta. We have just too little water.’

‘Oh God!’ Aletta’s sharp retort.

Hannes left the table and went to stand with his back to the heater. He could see the livid pulse of the light just above the rim of the pelmet. Every twenty seconds. Even here, snug in this room with a cottage pie made of flaked fish and reconstituted dried potato, it did not leave them. Nor did the sound of the sea thundering on the reef offshore, dulled only by the whistling of the kettle on the stove, announcing tea.

Tea. Always tea, laced with the taint of guano and beads of powdered milk.

Drink had long been banned on the island. It was forbidden by the Chief Lighthouse Engineer.

‘Drink is not allowed,’ Hannes had reminded Aletta when he had found her packing wine glasses some weeks before.

‘What’s wrong with a glass of wine?’

‘Too tempting to lonely keepers.’

‘For God’s sake!’ She had thumped a glass down and it had tipped over on the floor and rolled back and forth. ‘Not even wine sometimes at dinner – for a birthday or something?’

‘Not even then.’

‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘Rules.’

‘Where else does it apply?’

‘Just on the islands.’

‘Shit.’

As they had left Maisie’s house on that first night, Maisie had said, ‘I’ll come tomorrow and help you unpack. Perhaps we can make some coconut cake together. I have a really nice recipe and it keeps very well.’ She had turned to Hannes. ‘Hannes, did you tell her to be careful about mice?’

‘Not yet.’

‘The buggers have got into everything,’ Maisie had said. ‘You can’t leave face cream or lipstick or anything lying around.’

When they had said goodbye and the door closed on them, Hannes had stood a moment and looked up at the sky. The stars were like phosphorescence in a midnight sea of sky. Inverted, far below, the sea itself was black and deep and infinite. The clamour of birds had been silenced by the dark. Again, he
felt a fleeting sense of reverence and awe, as he had that afternoon, standing in the shadow of the lighthouse.

The beam had swept across them. Then it pierced the gloom, far, far out to sea. Sixteen miles – its signal identifying it, its warning clear.

–
It is not the sea the sailor fears. It is the land.

His father’s words, repeating some old lore.

When they reached the house Aletta had said, ‘Don’t bother with the generator. I will take a candle.’

As she passed him on her way to the bathroom, the candle guttered in her fingers, lighting her face from below, sending a long shadow up across the bedroom wall. He was alert to her then, hearing the water in the bath, the knocking of the pipes. He had used his torch to guide him, leaving the lamp unlit. He set it on the pedestal, beam pointing up towards the ceiling and felt with his hand for the edge of the mattress. His fingers met the fluff of the blue candlewick spread Aletta had bought on her last shopping spree.

The bed was hard. It smelled new. He had fumbled with the curtains, waiting for her to come down the long passage from the bathroom on her bare feet. He had stood silently, listening to the sea. That old, old sound, the surge across the reef, that distant splintering of water: it was a music long deferred. He was a child again, kneeling by his bed, his brother, Fred, beside him, shivering in their flannel pyjamas as a sly wind slid in through rattling window frames and their mother said their prayers with them and read her nightly passage from the Bible:

For He will deliver the needy who cry out

The afflicted who have no one to help.

He had drawn his hand down across his eyes then, hearing her voice, shaken.

He heard Aletta’s step on the parquet floor, saw the candle flame waver up and steady as she set it on the bedside table. He did not turn. Every twenty seconds the flash outside swept the ceiling. Then he leaned across and took up his torch and turned it off. He sat on the edge of the bed to unlace his shoes and shrug off his jersey. At last he turned and glanced at Aletta.

She was sitting with her arms wrapped about her knees, her face averted. The candle flame made a halo of light around her.

He did not reach for her. He did not speak.

He went quietly from the room and down the passage and closed the bathroom door, stricken.

Somewhere far outside, he could hear the gathering surge of the wind.

With a sense of naked emptiness, of purity, he stood listening for a voice so long silenced. He waited, alert, feeling its presence in every shadow.

When he went back to the bedroom it was dark. Aletta had extinguished
the candle. She was hunched into her corner, a pillow at her back, her head tucked down, her arm across her face, warning him away.

Maisie came five minutes after Hannes had gone on duty in the lighthouse. No doubt she had watched him cross the yard in his newly brushed uniform and bustled off along the path in his wake, armed with a basket of cake ingredients.

Aletta was standing in her living room with her hands on her hips surveying the doleful furnishings. She took a deep breath, exhaled evenly when she heard Maisie’s ‘Cooee,’ from the back door. She turned slowly and walked deliberately through to the kitchen. ‘Hello, Aunty Maisie,’ she said.

‘I don’t know if you’ve ever had my coconut cake?’ Maisie said cheerfully, aware of the faint look of vexation that had crossed Aletta’s face. ‘But I had rather a lot of the stuff from my last trip and it goes mouldy if you don’t use it up quickly. I always remember Hannes used to like it when he worked with Uncle Cecil at the lighthouse on The Hill.’ Maisie had begun to unpack her basket, plumping the ingredients down on the kitchen table, pushing aside Hannes’s breakfast plate. ‘You lucky,’ she said, eyeing the porridge bowl. ‘Uncle Cecil always has to have a cooked breakfast when he goes on duty, like as if he was living in a hotel and I have nothing better to do!’ Then she laughed and glanced over at Aletta. ‘But that’s true, I suppose – I haven’t got anything better to do!’

Aletta, her head cocked – would it be like this every day? – had examined what Maisie was laying out: flour, baking powder, a block of butter, syrup, coconut, powdered egg. She picked up the tin of egg.

‘You didn’t bring fresh eggs with you, did you?’ asked Maisie. ‘If you could
spare one it makes all the difference! That, and the way you fold in the flour. I always sift it four times before I add it and the cake is really light. Only problem is the stoves here. Mine is so old that it doesn’t warm evenly. The damned cake is always squiff. Maybe yours is better.’ She turned swiftly and opened the oven, peering into it. ‘Got matches?’ she said.

‘Here,’ Aletta had replied. Before she tossed them to Maisie she lit a cigarette, stood with her arms folded. The oven popped alarmingly as it was lit. The smell of gas was heavy and nauseating. ‘No one has used this oven for a long time!’ Maisie closed the door with a snap.

‘Probably not,’ Aletta said. ‘And I obviously haven’t had a chance to try it or to ask. By the way, thank you for dinner last night.’

‘Dinner?
Jis
, when I serve “dinner” there must be candles and proper vegetables and pudding and even a starter. It’s supper on this rock and nothing else.’

‘Have you ever had a dinner here?’

‘No. Not even on an anniversary. My kids might have been sent to boarding school but, if you ask me,
this
is the boarding school. Well, that’s what it seems like. They complained all the time about their food but it was a whole lot better than here. Pudding every night and roast potatoes on Sundays, even in that hostel. Dolores says the food at the Y is awful but I told her to be grateful. She can go to the tea room any time she likes to get a sweet or an ice cream. Still, we mustn’t complain, must we?’ and she twinkled at Aletta. ‘They say we have the healthiest spot on the coast. No one ever gets sick, you know. The only germs that ever get here come when someone has been on shore and brings them back. Old Misklip has been here over thirty years and I can never remember a report about him having anything wrong with him, and the only time the doc’s had to come is for an accident or something like that.’

‘God forbid,’ muttered Aletta.

‘What’s that, lovey?’

‘That anyone should be here for thirty years. Why doesn’t he ask for a transfer?’

‘I don’t expect he knows the word,’ Maisie said. ‘And to what? Guano is guano. You don’t get it except on these islands. I reckon that’s all he knows about.’

‘I am going to make us some tea.’ Aletta was impatient.

‘And bring the radio, Aletta. There’s a serial I listen to and it’s just lovely. Once you get into it you won’t be able to do without it. Do you mind? It’s a very gripping romance.’

‘I know it.’ Aletta fetched the radio from the lounge. It crackled and settled and cleared. The familiar announcer’s voice came through. She almost cried as she heard the signature jingle – so familiar a background to the gurgle of water
in the basins at the salon, the traffic outside, the chatter of the customers, the hum of hairdryers. She said briskly, ‘I do have eggs but not too many. Why don’t we go half-half with fresh and powdered? Pity we can’t use penguin eggs. No shortage of those.’

Maisie, ever conversational, remarked, ‘I sometimes boil them hard and mash them with a bit of vinegar. I know Hannes likes those too. He always used to get excited if someone brought penguin eggs from the island when he was with us on The Hill.’

–
When he was with us on The Hill
.

Aletta gritted her teeth. Hannes was being claimed. Beyond her. Before her.

She lit another cigarette.

‘Aletta!’ Maisie said in mock admonishment, shaking her head at her but smiling, her lip damp. ‘My lovey’ – softening her words – ‘you will make yourself sick if you smoke so much and what you going to do if you run out?’

‘I won’t run out.’

Maisie hesitated briefly, then, smoothing her hands across her apron, she said, ‘Guess what? I once tried penguin eggs in an omelette!’ She chuckled. ‘It was nasty! Anyway, their braying reminds me of donkeys and that puts me off more. You know there used to be a donkey here? It hauled stuff up from the jetty in a little miner’s cocopan. Hannes once told me that when the penguins brayed it brayed back. Shame, poor thing was lonely. It got confused about who it was. He also said that when it saw the tug’s smoke on the horizon it would try and hide because it knew it was going to have to drag heavy loads. That’s amazing, hey? I didn’t know donkeys were so clever, did you? But Uncle Cecil says they are – like pigs. They’re also very clever. Did you know that?’

Aletta said nothing. The serial had started.

‘Hannes told me last night that you were still dancing in your spare time right up till now.’

Again Aletta was silent.

‘What sort of dancing?’

‘Ballroom. Modern. All that sort of stuff.’ She had straightened her shoulders, pulled them down, flexing her neck, tilting it to the side.

‘I remember when you were dancing as a young girl, there at Humerail. All those competitions. Who was your partner again?’

Aletta bridled.
Nosy old cow
… it was the echo of a conversation long ago between her mother and Maisie. She felt as if she was seventeen again, surly and resentful. ‘I had a Portuguese dancing partner. Dino,’ she said flatly.

Maisie brightened. ‘Wasn’t he the son of that old fellow, you know? At the dry-cleaners on the corner of Marine Road and,
ag
what’s the name of that street? You know the one that goes behind the shops there? The Van Aswegens
used to live in a house at the other end. Did you know them? Bernadine won Miss Humewood once.’

‘I know.’ Aletta stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer. ‘I helped with her hair for the competition – just passing the curlers and things.’

‘Shame,’ Maisie exclaimed. ‘She was such a pretty girl. I remember her of course. Now, who did she marry?’

Again Aletta was silent, reaching for the volume control on the radio, wanting to turn it up and drown Maisie’s voice.

‘She married,’ Aletta said at last, ‘that bloke who used to work for some tyre company but he kept changing jobs —’

‘And he was a real Teddy boy,’ Maisie interrupted.

‘Now they are living in a caravan park at Colchester,’ Aletta continued. ‘It’s nearly as bad as here. And she was so beautiful she could have been a model in Paris.’

‘No, but listen, I hear she has got very plump,’ Maisie said, almost confidential.

‘She’s not plump,’ Aletta retorted. ‘She’s fat.’

‘Funny, hey, how people get so fat when they unhappy.’ Maisie glanced at Aletta. ‘People always get fat when they first come here.’ Maisie laughed self-deprecatingly. ‘I did. And I still am! But it’s funny, hey, because I’m not unhappy!’

Aletta filled the teacups with quick impatient gestures, putting the pot down rather hard so that the teaspoons rang. Trying again, Maisie said, ‘I suppose you won’t have any chance to dance now. Shame, lovey. Does Hannes dance?’

‘You might as well try and teach a penguin to tango!’ Aletta snorted

‘What did you do on your holidays then? They always have dances at the weekend in hotels. Everyone dances.’

Aletta picked up the packet of coconut. She said again, ‘Hannes doesn’t dance.’

She searched the pantry for a mixing bowl. ‘I don’t know that Hannes likes coconut so much,’ she remarked.

‘No, man,’ chuckled Maisie. ‘I remember him eating three or four pieces at tea time when …’

‘He was with you on The Hill,’ Aletta quipped, with a touch of asperity.

Maisie glanced up at her. ‘Silly us’ – swooping on the flour and the sieve – ‘we’re missing the serial.’ And she turned the radio towards herself and twiddled the tuning knob minutely. They sat with the forgotten cake ingredients between them and listened to the play. Aletta lit a third cigarette and blew smoke gently through her nostrils, her shoulder turned from Maisie. Maisie folded her plump hands in her lap and sighed.

It might be heavy going after all. Just the two of them here on the island. Just as she had said to Cecil when she’d heard that Hannes had been appointed as senior keeper. ‘That Aletta!’

‘She’s a pretty little thing,’ Cecil had rejoined mildly.

Maisie had compressed her lips, saying nothing more. But she’d flashed a glance at him –
And you don’t know the half of it, my boy!

It is 1937. Aletta is seventeen. Here is the Palm Grove Tea Room. Here the promenade. Here the beach and the Scout Hall where the dancing classes are held. Here ‘Salon Sybil’ where Aletta is apprenticed as a hairdresser. And here is where she comes to town at night – The Phoenix, with the drinkers spilling out into the street and, high above, the beam of The Hill lighthouse.

Aletta does not look up at its incandescent flare. She does not dare. Somewhere up there in the keeper’s cottage by the light, looming over this part of town, is Aunty Maisie Beukes who knows far too much about her.

‘You must watch that girl, Queenie,’ Maisie had once said to her mother, in her hearing, when she was seventeen. ‘She’s a keeper’s daughter, don’t forget.’

‘
Ag
man, Maisie, the girl needs some fun. She’s been cooped up in a light all her life.’

–
The girl needs some fun.

Sometimes, on Saturdays, Aletta ran off and hitched a ride, standing at the edge of the coastal road.

Someone would come.

Someone always did.

Sometimes that someone was Len Hendricks, son of the assistant to Uncle Cecil Beukes on The Hill. He was seventeen as well. He had a motorbike. She rode behind him, purposely not holding on.

He mustn’t get ideas.

Besides she knew him just too well. Lighthouse people usually did. Their parents used to
kuier.
And she and Len would hang about with nowhere to go except the beach or, if they were at The Hill, the windy park with the wrought-iron swings and the roundabout with the track grooved in the sand below its rim.

In the long school holidays Len took a job as a lifeguard – lean-muscled and dark, with a quiff which remained in place even when the wind blew. He used to fancy himself, directing people with a whistle, making sure no one went beyond the cable with its knotted lengths of rope, the last security where the third line of waves broke. Aletta used to sit on the beach with her school friends, wander into the sea, pretend she needed saving.

Len never took it seriously because he didn’t ever take anything too seriously. And then one day it was raining and there was no one on the beach
except the two of them and they went to the Tea Room together. Aletta had saved up some pocket money and they sat in a corner. The lights were red and gold, the air dank with stubbed-out cigarettes.

‘This place always stinks of cat pee,’ Len had said.

After that they often went to the Tea Room together and had secret cigarettes and sundaes: vanilla and strawberry ice cream, and red and green and yellow syrup poured in thin ribbons down the side of the thick tall glass. There was canned fruit at the bottom of the flute and a glacé cherry, always kept for last. If you liked them.

Aletta loved them. She let Len pop his into her mouth, pushing it gently between her teeth.

They might walk along Happy Valley under the lights. It was a nice place. There were benches and things …

Aletta in her Sunday frock, a touch of Queenie’s pale-blue eyeshadow.

–
The girl needs some fun.

Except Queenie Oosthuizen did not say this with quite such conviction when Aletta told her she was pregnant.

Seventeen and only just out of school.

After the obligatory hiding administered by her father in the hope that she’d miscarry, Queenie took her off to Maisie Beukes on The Hill.

Word would not get out beyond the inner circle.

‘Do not tell me, Maisie,’ Queenie said, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke through her wide, flattened nostrils, ‘that I must take them to church. You know as well as I do that those old bitches in the choir will get wind of it and start skinnering as if they’d never had a …’ she exhaled again, ‘you-know-what, in their lives.’