The Keeper (7 page)

There was such a threat implicit in his words that Fred was silenced. Then he said, his voice unsteady, ‘Did she leave a message?’

‘No.’

Fred knew that was a lie.

He knew because he had always helped his mother with the pigeons that carried their messages to shore for supplies, holding a bird while she undid the small phial secured to its leg and inserted the thin film of paper on which his father had written his report, or removed one from a returning bird with word from the lighthouse in town. It was something they had shared: she relied on him to hold the pigeon calm, clucking gently to it, ignoring its scrabbling claws or a sudden peck of frustration. He delighted in this time with her, without intrusion, for Hannes had been too small, too awkward, to help, inclined to squeeze the pigeons into flight. Fred had held them so they did not feel afraid. He could gently undo the cylinder on a leg without upsetting them. Together he and his mother had tended them and fed them and known their several characters.

When Fred had gone to school she had cared for them alone. But for her, always, they were connected with her elder son, and when they winged away, she watched them, imagining that they were flying to him, to the safe haven of his hands.

‘They are such brave birds,’ she’d said to him once as she slid a message into the tube. ‘And they’re our lifeline to the outside world.’ She had touched a tender finger to the breast of the pigeon in his hands. ‘They don’t belong to the sea,’ she’d said. ‘They should be in the sunshine, nesting in trees where the hawks can’t get them or the wind blow them into the water.’

‘Do lots of them drown?’ he’d asked.

‘I think so, Freddie.’ She had laid her hand on his head, smoothing his hair. ‘But I think that is better than being taken by a hawk. I think perhaps that drowning is like going to sleep. I don’t know. But not as frightful as fighting for your life against another.’ Then she added, ‘Some of us are simply not born to be brave.’

He remembered, too, her occasional furtiveness, the struggle to wind tighter and tighter a strip of paper that was just too large for the phial – and when it was secure, saying hastily, ‘Let it go now, Fred.’ He would open his hands and extend them slowly and they would watch together as the bird catapulted from his fingers in a flurry of feathers and then, steadying, gain height with stronger, swifter wingbeats.

‘Godspeed, little one,’ she always said and put her slim hands together briefly in a gesture of prayer.

But then there was the day that his father had come upon them suddenly as they were preparing a pigeon for flight. ‘What are you doing?’ he had said, peremptorily. ‘I haven’t given you a message to send.’

He put out his hand for the phial. She had frozen as if she, like the pigeon, was held captive in a claw. Then she had removed the paper from the phial and given it to him, her face averted. He had glanced at it.

At her.

At Fred.

‘Give it back,’ she had said hoarsely. ‘It is mine.’

‘You will not disobey me again.’ Karel had opened the note and read aloud, so that the words reached Fred in all their weight and anguish, ‘
Rescue me from those who pursue me for they are too strong for me
.’ He looked at her then. ‘God will punish you for taking the words of the Bible in vain.’

‘There is no God here!’ she had retorted. ‘Only this devil lighthouse!’

‘Do not blaspheme.’

Fred had stood poised, ready to strike his father, lash out for his mother’s defencelessness.

‘It is the truth,’ she had whispered. ‘Everything about this island is a lie and a blasphemy!’ She had gestured towards the sea and distant coast. ‘Isn’t this called Chaos Island in the maps?’ She had spoken with the last-ditch fear of an animal at bay. ‘One day it will all disappear under the waves and there will be nothing left. Not us, not it. Not the lighthouse.’

But his father had turned, put the note in his pocket and walked away without a word.

When he was alone, Karel Harker had read the words – so carefully chosen – taken from her nightly readings by candlelight in her room, her slim shadow thrown up against the ceiling, hovering across the book, her shoulder turned from him.

Rescue me from those who pursue me

for they are too strong for me.

He did not confront her again. He put the slip of paper in his own Bible and snapped the covers shut.

Fred looked at his father in the gloom, the great refractory lens catching the beams of the setting sun. ‘Why did she do it?’ he said.

‘She was afraid.’

‘Of what?’

But Karel had turned silently back to his task. Fred had scanned the light chamber, the huge lenses dulled in the gloom of a grey afternoon, the shining brass. And he’d remembered.

Fleeting in his mind he saw the lantern – dark, unlit, as it was now. And beyond, the salted window of the chamber and the gathering storm building like volcanic smoke across the southern sky. That day his mother had stood stark and white and motionless before the lantern as if in defiance of a god.

His mother – so small, so gentle. And yet so defiant.

Something swept across him like the beam of the light, a clarity, a certainty.

It was not fear that had killed her. It was anger.

He turned then – a sudden elation – and, taking the rail in his fist to steady himself, swung down through the hatch on to the iron ladder below the lantern room, moving fast until he reached the vestibule.

He’d walked away. And Hannes, sensing his withdrawal, the sudden change in Fred – his impatience, his silence, the end of stories and fishing and rough-housing and the safety of his protection – crept into the cupboard, wrapped in the gloom of shell dust, confused, and afraid.

Fred went away.

He said to Hannes on the day he left the island, ‘I hate the light. You will hate it too one day.’

‘It is a sin to say that,’ Hannes said. ‘It keeps the ships safe. Without it everyone would drown.’

Fred’s face contorted. ‘Drown?’ Then he’d laughed – a penguin-bray of a laugh that caught in his throat.

Hannes looked after him, bewildered.

That afternoon Hannes stood – as his mother had once stood – with his arm resting along the back of the donkey as Fred was hauled up from the rowing boat on to the tug’s deck. Their father stretched up his hand to his son’s and sought to catch it briefly before Fred had pulled himself out of reach. Then Karel bent to the oars and headed in towards the jetty, riding a swell that ran him deftly to his mooring.

Fred was eighteen, Hannes ten. Their fishing rods stood for many weeks abandoned in the shed, and he and his father never spoke of Fred. And, like the pigeons that were replaced by a radio with headphones and a mouthpiece, a console of squealing knobs, Fred slipped into memory with his mother, beyond his reach.

Like her, he left no known message behind.

He did not write. He left no forwarding address.

He simply disappeared.

In the years that followed, every holiday, returning to the island with the tug, Hannes fished alone. He sat for hours on a rock without the companionship of Fred or the stories he had told of shipwrecked sailors who had lived on the island for a year, waiting to be rescued, surviving off penguins’ eggs and gulls’ eggs and gannets’ eggs and
gaukums
and fish. Each had a history and a personality: the lovelorn Mate, the wily carpenter, the villainous treasure seekers. They, too, drifted away into the haze of sea mist. Nor were there tales of giant sharks with unscathed seals in their bellies or of the fights of heroic headmen against some monster in the channel just beyond the jetty, which Fred once said had risen, open-jawed, to swallow the lighter whole.

When he was older Hannes learnt to dive alone, to pry the perlemoen from the rocks. In a silent world beneath the water, there was neither grief nor joy. And when he broke the surface and turned to take his bearing on the boat, he could always see the lighthouse in the distance – sentinel and safe against a spacious sky.

–
I hate the light. You will hate it too one day.

Fred was wrong: it was himself he hated – not the light.

Hannes knew – especially in the middle of the night when he sat up alone in his bed at school – that it was his fault that his mother had died. Stubbornly insistent on going to school, he had precipitated her death.

If he had stayed on the island, if he had still been her companion, if he had gathered shells with her as she loved to do each afternoon when he was small and sat between her knees, his back against her chest, sorting them into little piles, it would not have happened. Here pink, there mauve; here white, there ochre-tan and black.

‘What do you want them for, Mama?’ he had asked.

‘To make a lighthouse, Hansie,’ she’d said.

‘But we’ve got a lighthouse!’ And he had turned to glance back at the forbidding finger of masonry anchored to the rock.

‘That is not my lighthouse,’ she had said quietly. ‘It is your father’s.’

But when the time had come for Fred to return to school, not even the thought of finishing the lighthouse could beguile Hannes, nor even Fred’s promise that he could take his place in caring for the pigeons.

He had appealed, fretfully, to his father to let him go as well. ‘Please yourself,’ Karel had said. ‘But you will have to take the consequences with your mother.’

Hannes had pleased himself. He had defied both his mother and Fred, raged to leave the island, and felt betrayed by Fred’s impatience.

‘Let the boy go, for God’s sake,’ Karel had said in exasperation. ‘But he mustn’t cry. Listen here, sonny’ – to Hannes – ‘no wailing to come home, see? You make your bed, you lie on it. It’s your choice. Remember that!’ Shaking him by the shoulder, almost roughly.

And so he’d gone – into an unknown world beyond the breakers where she could not reach him.

She had let him go.

And then – just when the novelty had worn off and the second term stretched bleakly ahead – contrite, homesick, frantic to return to her, he had been denied her. And been punished.

In the days that followed on at school, Hannes would often stand at the east dormitory window and look out across the buildings to the bay. Somewhere, beyond the grey indecision of the rain and squalling clouds, was the island.

And on that island, she had died.

It was his fault. He knew it. He had not been there to stop it. Had not his father said, ‘You will have to take the consequences with your mother’?

His father never lied.

When he and Fred came home – at last – the following December, their mother had been dead almost four months. Hannes had no idea of how to ask his father where she was buried. What words to use. Or even to imagine what happened to the dead. Nor did he dare go into his parents’ room – for there would be the large dark cupboard with the tall pediment, her bed with the teak headboard carved into longitudinal flutes with the squat-legged pedestal beside it on which her Bible lay, just the same as it had always been.

Except she wasn’t there.

Jacoba, the boatman’s wife, was brought in to cook while he and Fred were home. Sometimes he crept to her for comfort and she would make him food – little treats as his mother used to do – or tell him stories. Sometimes he would sit quietly in the crook of her arm and she would snuffle at him forlornly. One
morning she had said to him softly, ‘Your mother waited and waited for you,
kleinboet.
Standing on the jetty with the donkey, calling
“Help me, God!”
’

Jacoba had wiped her eyes with a cloth as she fed him soup, thick with potato, in little spoonfuls, coaxing him to eat it. When she worked, she almost crept around the house, singing hymns, as if, in doing so, she could exorcise something that she feared.

And she did.

She feared the shadow she had come across in a quiet corner of the house, just inside the passage window. The spectral mother she believed was looking for the child.

– What child? the startled assistant keeper’s wife had asked, recoiling.

–
Sy kla
, ‘Help me, God.’

– Don’t talk nonsense, woman!

But no one disbelieved her and the story went around of old Jacoba who had seen a ghost: Louisa Harker waiting for her children to be brought from shore.

Hearing this, Karel abruptly banished her from the house and soon afterwards she left the island.

After that Louisa’s name was never mentioned, in deference to Karel. And there was no one on the island who did not fear his blistering silences.

When Hannes came home next holidays, Jacoba had gone.

‘Where is Jacoba?’ he had cried.

‘She has gone,’ said his father. ‘She did not want to live here any more.’

–
She has gone.

As his mother had gone. Without warning. And without a word.

There was nothing to counter the silence of their going, except to be silent himself.

And when the gale blew in August and the waves streamed white with wind along the razorbacks of rocks below the light, the keepers’ wives, through all the years since then, would be inclined to turn up the radio, to close the doors and windows, avoid the outbuildings, the beach of shells.

The island well.

Just in case.

In time – and over forty years – the legend of a ghost remained: some keeper’s wife who finally went mad waiting for her children. An adjunct to a posting, mentioned half in joke.

–
Haunted light, you know. Hope your wife and kids aren’t scared of spooks …

That was the keepers’ lore.

But there was another lore as well.

Quite different.

Passed from headman to headman, handed over ceremonially with the shark hook.

‘Your brother, Fred,’ Rika says. ‘Have you never seen him since?’

‘I know he joined up in thirty-nine. A bloke I bumped into a few years ago who’d been at school with us was in the same regiment. They were up north together. I think he said the D.M.R.’

‘He didn’t tell you where he’d gone?’

‘He didn’t know what happened to him after they were demobbed.’

‘Are you afraid to find him?’