The Keeper (8 page)

Hannes is silent. ‘Perhaps he does not want me to.’

‘And perhaps he does,’ Rika says simply. ‘Perhaps it is exactly what he wants.’

Although she does not look at him directly, she catches the shifting of his face in profile, the deep-sunk downcast eyes. She guesses where his thoughts have turned. She is not surprised when he says, ‘Of course Aletta knew my mother had died when I was young and that Fred had fallen out with my father and gone away. But she seemed so incurious – she never asked about them.’

Rika smiles a little ruefully, folds her hands. In all the time that they have spent together, Hannes has never asked her about her life.

–
I am married to an engineer. I have three children and a Labrador.

A history in parenthesis.

Rika is wise beyond her time, having cared for others every hour of her adult life. She has not nursed dying men in her wards nor found personal contentment the easy way. Even in the nurturing of children – in her tenderness and vigilance, her decency – there is a caution. If she is sustained, intermittently, by notions of an odd transcendence, it remains unspoken. If believing is central to her nature, Belief itself no longer matters.

‘Perhaps your wife felt she couldn’t ask about them,’ she says.

‘Aletta wasn’t scared to say what she felt.’

‘Not too scared to say,’ says Rika. ‘But maybe scared to care too much about the answer.’

Aletta had known a great deal more about Hannes’s mother than he realised. Not from prying, not from asking, but simply from living Louisa’s life vicariously – in protest at her own.

It was through the shell model of the lighthouse that Aletta found Louisa.

An uneasy bond, a strange connection, an unlikely tryst.

Aletta found Louisa’s shell lighthouse on a morning of heavy fog. Hannes was asleep. He had just come off duty. She had given him a meal and washed the plates, heard him close the bedroom door and gone outside to smoke. Her hours, it seemed, were punctuated by the string of twenty – thirty – cigarettes, little beacon lights, marking out her day.

The horn was droning from the lighthouse, the forlorn lament of some stranded sea creature mooing at the mist. The sound was so familiar and yet here, on this island, it had an odd futility. Who – in all this nothingness – would hear it?

She walked across the open ground towards the lighthouse. Penguins waddled from her path. A pair of rabbits scuttered from the wild spinach tufts and, at a distance, turned to watch her. She entered the yard of the lighthouse through the old back gate and pushed open the great door below the tall configuration of a cross that held the windows at each point. Hannes, who had never cared if she followed him to the lantern room in any of the other lighthouses where he’d served, had forbidden her to go into this lighthouse on her own from the day they had arrived.

It was not that it was a higher tower, a more dangerous stairway or treacherous ascent. She sensed it was simply superstition.

What she did not know was that the ban was an insurance, a precaution against whatever Force or Energy or Power Hannes chose to challenge. He had rejected a conventional God years ago. No God would have allowed his mother to have filled her coat pockets with stones and walk into a well, leaving him behind.

Not after all his prayers. Not after hers.

No God could inflict so much terror.

Aletta stood on the first landing and peered through the thickly armoured porthole at the sea beyond, shifting, fragmenting, refracting. She went higher – to the second landing. There was an ancient cupboard built into the wall, finely crafted, its massive panels bevelled round with beading. Tentatively Aletta opened the large brass hasp. The heavy door swung back. Inside, the space was deep and high and fully packed with boxes, ropes, unfamiliar equipment, shelf on shelf.

She had stood a moment in indecision, feeling the silence within, the shifting wind without. And in the stairwell was a strange soft keening as if the wind from the south had left its icy, predawn breath behind. It was a sound beyond the tumult of the waves, echoing up the iron fretwork of the stairway, twisting into darkness high above her head.

She could feel her heart, the beat of blood in her ears, knowing how angry Hannes would be if he found her. How often she had heard, until she had retreated in defeat,

–
Aletta! Don’t start that nonsense with me here! These stairs are dangerous. I do not like you coming here. People fall.

The last section, served by a steel ladder instead of stairs, was indeed precarious. One had to transfer, for a moment, one’s weight and balance from the right to the left without a rail in easy reach and pull oneself through the hatch on to the floor of the lantern room.

Then the presence of the lamp itself: the massive lenses with their facets and refractions, the finely balanced mercury bath, the spine of chain enclosed by wood running down the centre of the shaft. It was a body with a heart and an eye and ribs and a brain.

Mostly a brain: its cool precision; its unfaltering reliability.

Aletta pulled her thin angora cardigan around her and gazed along the overflowing shelves, aware of the smell of damp and salt, the scent of an earlier time in this strange detritus of ropes and antiquated lamps, of boxes of brass screws and quaint, wooden-handled tools. There was a sheaf of old record cards, and half a dozen logbooks were piled on a shelf. She lifted one down and opened it. The second half of it was empty, the first half written in a fine copperplate hand, the ink faded to sepia. It was a day-by-day account of
weather and shipping; the visit of a long-gone Inspector; the Port Captain; the Senior Lighthouse Engineer.

On a higher shelf were pieces of instruments, carefully labelled. She pulled a wooden box from the floor of the cupboard and stood on it so she could see over the lip of the highest shelf. She ran her hand along it. On tiptoe she peered into the gloom. At the back of the shelf was something shrouded in a fleecy cover. It looked like a shawl. She reached in carefully, balancing her shoulder against the shelf, and pulled gently at the fabric until she could get a grip on what it hid and slide it towards her.

It was not heavy and it felt fragile.

She paused a moment, adjusted her stance, bracing her feet more firmly. She took the object down. Then, stepping off, she placed it on the box. She lifted the cover gingerly.

She stood transfixed.

It was a model of the lighthouse.

It was made of shells.

Aletta gazed at it, squatted down beside it, her face level with the slim tall tower. The shells curved one to the other, nesting in rows, graded with the utmost care from cream to petal pink, outlined in tan.

It was a masterpiece of precision and beauty.

She got up and walked around it, hands on her hips, head on one side.

It was unfinished.

The west side of the tower was unadorned. The thin fabric and wood of its framework was without shells, the faint struts of its wooden skeleton delicate beneath the skin of calico. The shell that made the dome was darker pink than the rest, almost red, a small bright bud. She reached out to it with a tentative finger, feeling its perfect curve.

She gazed at it, examining the shells, recognising most. She turned it over and looked at the wooden base. Underneath, etched in a thin, back-sloping hand, were the words
Louisa Harker August 1921
.

Hannes’s mother.

She replaced it in the cupboard carefully and pushed the old shawl around it. She stored the box, the logbook and the catalogue cards and closed the door. When she went back to the house, she heard Hannes in the bathroom. She stood in the kitchen wishing she could tell him what she had found. But she couldn’t – and it was not just because she had gone to the lighthouse where she had been forbidden. It was something else entirely.

Distractedly she washed her hands in the sink and fetched the frying pan from the corner rack and the bottle of cooking oil from the pantry. She opened the fridge, looking for something to make for lunch.

Fish – only fish.

There was only ever fish. And cold boiled rice or macaroni.

‘Hannes,’ she called. ‘Do you want me to cook your fish in batter?’

He came from the bathroom, rubbing his head with a towel. ‘No. Just plain. Is there a lemon?’

‘Finished. So are the vegetables.’

‘Tug’s coming on Friday.’

‘With ten sacks of oranges and nothing else,’ she said crossly.

While Aletta cooked the fillets, Hannes set out the mats from the sideboard.

They were in want of a wash.

Aletta put a plate in front of him. Her own was empty.

‘What are you going to eat?’ Hannes said.

‘Not fish. I never want to see a fish again.’

‘Have some bread then.’

‘It’s stale. It’s always stale. I hate bread that’s been kept in the fridge.’

He was silent, knowing there was no sense in arguing. He said evenly, ‘My mother used to bake our bread with yeast made from a potato. We had it fresh almost every day.’

‘And where am I going to get potatoes?’

‘She grew them,’ Hannes said. ‘She had a patch of them in the yard behind the lighthouse. We had baked potatoes. We had a goat or two for milk. My mother made cheese from whey.’

Aletta said, ‘You know, this is the most you have ever said about your mother,’ adding a little tentatively, ‘You never mention her.’

‘No.’ He was almost rough.

‘Why not?’

‘I can hardly remember her.’ His voice was flat. ‘There is nothing to say.’

He glanced at his watch, continued to eat in silence and then took up his empty plate and went through to the kitchen.

Aletta remained where she was, running her finger around the rim of her glass.

‘Don’t do that,’ said Hannes coolly. ‘You know that it’s bad luck.’

–
Make a glass sing and a sailor will die.

Her father had told her that a hundred times. So had Hannes.

She shrugged – but she stopped. She wiped her finger.

He came back, stood behind her, put his hand on her bare neck – apologetically, tenderly – sweeping his thumb caressingly across the skin. ‘Sorry,
liefie
,’ he said.

She stiffened, twitched her shoulders.

–
Get lost.

But she did not say it.

Quietly, Hannes took up his cap and went away.

Hannes crossed the yard behind the lighthouse where the earth was leached and bare, spattered with gannet droppings, gravelled with broken shell. Nothing grew here now but a web of wild spinach. Once his mother had dug and hoed and carried a heavy can all the way from the well to her patch of potatoes, her onion beds, fenced round to keep the rabbits out.

–
You never speak of her.

No, never.

His father had said nothing. Fred had said nothing. Only Maisie had dared. And what she told him had made sense of an incident when he was fourteen that had remained a vague but troubling recollection. At home one holiday – in those lonely times when Fred had already been gone four years – he had walked down to the well to fetch water for the house, a task he did every day in the holidays for his father. He had approached silently in his sand shoes, the bucket in his hand. The wind had been blowing toward him, bringing voices.

The headman – a bearded elder, dry as storm-wrack – had been standing with a worker at the edge of the well with their backs towards him. They were repairing the windlass. The guano worker had said, ‘I don’t like to come here.’

The headman had answered, ‘The water is quite clean now.’

‘
Allemagtig
!’ the worker had rejoined. ‘It’s not the water. It’s the spook!’

‘
Kak,
man,’ said the headman. ‘Spooks are in people’s heads, that’s all.’

‘I don’t want to meet her here when I’m alone.’

‘You won’t! Anyway, she was a very kind lady,’ said the headman. ‘
Fyn en soet en mooi
.’ And then he had glanced up and caught sight of Hannes and nudged the worker into silence.

–
Fine and sweet and pretty.

Those words could only describe his mother.

–
The water is clean now.

What had the water in the well to do with his mother?

Years later, Maisie Beukes told him the truth, and the meaning of that brief encounter at the well was suddenly revealed.

It was during the time, just after school, when he had lived in the Beukes’ quarters at the lighthouse in the town, assistant to Cecil. He had asked her outright when she had been sitting at her old Singer sewing machine attaching labels to her children’s school shirts and socks. Nothing had prompted him except that Maisie was alone and suddenly – some dredged image from his childhood, the figure sitting at the table bent over sewing – it was essential to know.

‘Aunty Maisie? How did my mother die?’

Startled, Maisie had fumbled with a couple of pins clamped at the corner of her mouth and stuck them carefully into her pincushion. She had shaken out the shirt she had been working on and folded it roughly in her lap. She glanced up at Hannes. ‘Didn’t your father tell you?’

‘No.’

She looked down at her stubby fingers, running a tip along the edge of the shirt collar in her lap. ‘Perhaps Uncle Cecil …’ she began.

‘No,’ said Hannes. ‘He won’t.’

It was true. Cecil wouldn’t talk. She held up the shirt and folded it once more, unaligned. Then she said with decision, ‘She was drowned in the well on the island.’

‘Yes.’

Maisie bridled a moment and then continued; the skin was damp just under her lower lashes and there was a small pink spot at her round, soft throat. ‘You mustn’t judge her,’ she said.

‘I don’t,’ he returned rather fiercely and she glanced up at him: his seabird face, distant and handsome and a little grim.

‘You were born into a lighthouse,’ she said. ‘Your mother wasn’t.’

‘Neither were you, Aunty Maisie – and here you are peacefully sewing.’

‘
Ja.
’ She looked down at the shirt again, rolling the edge of the sleeve back and forth between two fingers. ‘But the town is just outside the window.’

Hannes waited.

‘Uncle Cecil was sent as assistant to your father on the island,’ continued Maisie reluctantly. ‘You were a little chap then. Do you remember Uncle Cecil from that time?’

‘Yes. He sometimes fished with me. He came just before I went to boarding school for the first time.’

‘How old were you? Nine? Ten?’

‘Eight,’ Hannes said.