The Keeper (9 page)

Maisie shook her head slightly, picked up her needle and knotted the end of the thread, dabbing at it with a moistened finger. ‘I didn’t know Uncle Cecil then,’ she said, ‘but I met him not so long afterwards. He told me that your mother …’ – she stopped and put her hands in her lap and looked before her – ‘that she was very lonely, always collecting shells on the side of the island where you can see the land.’ She gestured with her hand, looking straight before her. ‘You know that little place just near the workers’ houses? She collected loads of shells. I don’t know what for. I suppose it was something to do …’

Hannes did not move. Nor did he enlighten her.

‘And then there was the time the tug couldn’t bring you and your brother back from school. You know what the wind is like in August! Always a gale blowing.
Ag
,’ said Maisie, ‘I’ve known lots of visits that had to be cancelled because the weather was bad, or people being hurt on the island and no one able to get to them.’ She held the seam of the shirt she was mending towards the light and adjusted her glasses. ‘Something happened. Cecil said she was fine one day, looking forward to you coming home and getting things ready. Then
the weather closed in for weeks. Then this.’ She looked up at him anxiously, but he did not meet her glance. He stood silent, waiting. ‘Supplies couldn’t come. Food was getting short. There were extra contract workers on the island at the time, digging guano. They couldn’t get off either.’ She looked directly at him. ‘Cecil was fishing to keep everyone fed, even the guano workers. They were killing rabbits every other day and eating that wild spinach. It was a hard time too – everyone was quarrelling and fighting.’

She paused but Hannes did not urge her on.

‘One day she disappeared. They searched for her everywhere. That night they found her body in the well.’

She looked up at him directly, her face a little puckered. ‘I don’t want you listening to people on the island, do you see? You know what happens in places like that. Everything is exaggerated. There’s a story going round about a ghost and the well and a woman looking for little children. You know how these things get invented!’ She stood, coming over to him. ‘If you are ever sent there – and you will be – you are far too sensible to believe that nonsense. It was that old
klonkie,
Jacoba, who started it all and now those foolish island wives like to frighten each other. They’ve got nothing better to do. But they don’t know who they’re talking about because it was all so long ago and anyway, your father forbade her name to be mentioned in a story like that. So don’t pay any attention, do you see?’

‘Jacoba told me how my mother cried for us just before she died.’

‘Stupid woman.’

‘She was not stupid,’ he said. ‘She was the only one till now who ever spoke the truth. I loved her – and she was sent away.’

‘Your father didn’t want her frightening you and it was disrespectful to your mother.’

‘She was never disrespectful to my mother,’ he replied coolly. ‘And if she saw a ghost perhaps it was because she was the only one who truly cared.’

Maisie was silent.

Hannes said, ‘Jacoba was always there when I came back from school. Then, suddenly, she was gone. Just like that.’

–
Like my mother. Like Fred. Like anyone who has ever been important.

Maisie looked down at her hands, unable to find words of comfort or regret.

Hannes said, ‘I have never seen my mother’s grave.’

‘I thought your father would have taken you there.’

‘She wasn’t buried on the island.’

‘No,’ said Maisie. ‘No one would want to be buried there if they could help it.’

Hannes looked at her a moment. Then he said quietly, ‘I would.’

Maisie almost smiled in disbelief. But his face did not invite it. She turned
from him awkwardly. ‘Uncle Cecil said your father told him she would want to be buried near trees.’

‘She is in the cemetery in Humansdorp. That’s where her family came from,’ Hannes said. ‘I did not know about the trees.’

‘Uncle Cecil will remember,’ Maisie said reluctantly.

Cecil did remember. He had helped make the coffin and put it in the vestibule of the lighthouse, which was the coolest place on the island. She had lain in it for three days until – at last – the tug had come. Then it was loaded on the wagon and the donkey was harnessed and the coffin was hauled down to the jetty. The sea was calm that day. Karel Harker, dressed in a black suit, went with it, sitting next to the coffin with his hand on the lid as the headman and his assistant rowed the boat to the tug.

Karel had said, ‘She loved trees. Big ones. So I will take her home.’

At the time, Cecil had not felt able to ask where her home was.

Twenty-two years later, at his own request, Hannes’s father had been buried near those trees himself. To others it might have seemed an odd notion for a man whose life had been the sea, who had known nothing but the light and the rocky shores of a southern coastline. Hannes knew the reason, recalling Maisie’s words.

As a child Hannes had always been wary of trees. They were unfamiliar beings, for none had ever grown on the island. At eight, he had looked in fear at the huge stone pines in the playground of the school – their height, the secret creaking in their branches as they stirred. There was something sinister about the sound: beneath the sough of the wind were small, sly voices deep inside the trunks, eyes peering from the fissures in the patterned bark. And trees might fall – suddenly – like waves crashing in a gale along a reef and crush him.

His father, Karel, was back in service when he died. Like other retired keepers, he had been recalled in 1939 to replace the younger men who had enlisted in the Forces at the outbreak of war. Hannes had joined the Navy. The news of Karel’s death had only reached him a fortnight after the event. When at last he had docked in a home port, it was already a month since the funeral.

At the time Hannes had not seen his father for three years. Karel had been as remote and detached as the unfamiliar lighthouse of his wartime posting at Seal Point, in its ocean of sand dunes and grey-green brush. Flu, it appeared, had become bronchitis; bronchitis, pneumonia. And then there was the disorientation, the creeping confusion. Hannes knew his father well enough to know that he would have ignored his illness. He also knew its real cause: the mercury bath on which the great lenses rested. Years and years of
breathing in its essence – its vapours, its slow debilitating poison. That is what had really killed him in the end.

– Never leave the light …

Even if – ironically – it had remained unlit in wartime, a forbidding hulk against the night sky. The machinery still had to be maintained, the lenses cleaned, the light held in preparation for the signal to rekindle.

Karel Harker’s fellow keepers had been his pall-bearers. No member of the family had been present. The Senior Lighthouse Engineer had written to Hannes, praising his father’s loyalty, his years of dedication. But it was a personal letter too – long and full of anecdote, giving Karel an unaccustomed humanity. The Engineer wrote:

He has served in almost every station along the coast, more reliable himself than any light. I recall visiting him at St Lucia once. It is, perhaps, the most difficult posting. It is so very isolated, devoid of palatable water.

Hannes had been surprised. How could a light on land, tucked among lush coastal dune forest, be as isolated as the island’s windswept gannetry, ringed by the deepest shark-infested channels on the coast?

He killed a mamba in the guest room where I was to stay. It seems the room had been empty for a long time and the snake had made itself quite comfortable and was annoyed at my intrusion.

Hannes remembered the Senior Engineer well, going from light to light, west to east, east to west, year in, year out, in his ancient car, with a wizardry of knowledge in respect of lights and the kindliness of a country doctor when it came to the keepers’ wives and children. He always brought sweets and home-made jams and a box of apples from the Langkloof where his daughter and her husband farmed.

It was good fortune that your father was serving at Seal Point at the time of his illness because his assistant and a local farmer managed to get him to the hospital at Humansdorp after a long trek over the dunes. You will be glad to know he was well cared for before he passed. In fact, after the pneumonia set in, he had specifically told his 2-IC that he wished to be buried in the Humansdorp cemetery, next to your mother.

If Karel had mentioned that his mother was buried in Humansdorp, not once had he suggested showing Hannes the grave or spoken of the presence of trees. Without Maisie – all those years before – Hannes would not have known. When, at last, he had visited his father’s grave, he had taken nothing with him, only cleared the weeds and stood in the fragrant, dusty shade of the huge grey-barked gums. There was the solid headstone that Hannes had ordered himself and that Cecil Beukes had arranged, with the emblem of the Service carved at its head:

Karel Henry Harker

14
^th
February 1872 – 3
^rd
September 1943

The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters,

Yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.

Ps. XCIII: 4

Beside it, a stone cross, pushed askew by the shallow roots of a tree:

Louisa Harriet Harker

3
^rd
April 1882 – 6
^th
August 1921

Oddly matched, the headstone and the cross: one still unweathered, the other crusted with lichen. Her name was the only inscription. But Hannes could have added another: the verse he had found in his mother’s Bible, which he had taken to sea with him when he went to war. Looking for an appropriate inscription for his father’s memorial, he had come across it, scored through – or roughly underlined – in indelible pencil:

Suffer the little children to come unto Me.

Louisa Harker worked at the little table in the living room of the keeper’s quarters. She had set it near the largest window so that she could look out at the sea and glean what light she could, for the glass was thick and the shadows in the room behind her were sombre. The sill was so deep a gull could have roosted with ease on its edge.

She set the lighthouse on the table and worked at it, selecting shells from numerous little bowls, each of which held a group or type, graded by colour. There she felt like a penguin in a burrow, safe from the gannets and gulls. She would work hour on hour when she was not baking bread, hoeing potatoes or making shirts and trousers for her sons. Karel sometimes humoured her, casting a critical eye on her work and saying little but bringing the lamp for her when the light faded and setting it on the table and trimming the wick.

But he did not collect shells with her.

And more and more, with the children gone, he left her to herself, her purpose served. He had no more use for her. And nothing to say. He rarely left the lighthouse, even when his hours of duty were over – as if it were a ship in need of a vigilant steersman. Sometimes he carried his meals there. Even his assistant was unwelcome, essential though he was.

Over the weeks since both the boys had gone, Karel Harker, grim and wordless, haunted the lantern room, liking best the rising dawn that filtered up green and limpid from the sea. He would go to bed at sunrise and Louisa would bring him a tray of tea, setting it beside the bed, dismissed with a tired
hand before she could speak. She would go away, out of the house where she could make no noise, and drift about in search of shells.

Working on the lighthouse became a meditation – a retreat from the silence of her life, almost a prayer. She concentrated on each shell, its place, its colour. This preoccupation helped keep the deep anxiety and longing for Fred and Hansie contained. If she felt her tears and anguish rise, she reached for her small pocket Bible.

She marked the passages she loved with black crosses from her fountain pen. She dared not desecrate the pages further than this pious little mark. But one night, the anguish of her life too stark to bear when Karel had left the house, sweeping past her, leaving her standing in the empty yard, raked every twenty seconds by the revolution of that relentless beam, she had gone inside and taken out the Stevenson book he loved, where the dedication was inscribed to the author’s famous father, the lighthouse engineer.

How often he had read it to her! As if it were a homage once bestowed on him

–
by whose devices the great sea lights in every quarter of the world now shine more brightly.

And she wrote in a fluent, angry hand beside the sacred words:

The light is the enemy
.

She retreated to her desk. It was the only thing that she could call her own. With its view through the window across an endless sea, it had become her sanctuary, the shell lighthouse, she sometimes felt, her altar. For until she had found this task she had searched in vain for a place of reverence and contemplation, a refuge from noise and fear. A retreat from a kindling anger that she feared more than she feared the silence of her husband or the thrashing sea. There was no church on the island and Louisa Harker was a person who had never lived without a church. Not just on Sundays but as part of the ritual of her day. Each week she had helped her mother wash the altar cloths and the vestments after the service in the small whitewashed church that served their scattered farming community. She had done this knowing she was touching holy things, just as she had often polished the candlesticks or wiped down the pews or run a rag with quiet respect around the leading of the stained-glass lights behind the simple wooden altar.

Since coming to the island she had often tried to find somewhere to pray, somewhere still where the gannets – banshee souls – no longer screamed. Soon after Hansie had gone away with Fred to school, she had wished more urgently for such a place. In those first days Louisa – who never cried except when it was fair to cry – would think of her younger son with his big school boots and his mouse ears with the sun shining through them and his clear blue eyes, his downturned brows, and go off to the east side of the island
where no one ever came and lie down on her back on the broken shell beach and let the tears run without sobs, just sliding down her temples, pooling in her ears until she turned her head and they spilled.

How often she and Hansie had sat here sorting shells for her lighthouse, he in her lap, protected from the wind. They would set the shells out on a flat rock, dividing them into type or sift them between their fingers, Hansie’s small head bent just below her chin, rough fingers setting his treasures to one side and scattering the rest back on to the beach.

It was here, in those anguished times, that she would come and gaze landward. Sometimes she drifted, unaware of her surroundings, even of the gannets crying and the constant churning of the surf. She might venture across the spinach pasture, minding her step, picking her way between burrows, and stand at the highest point, catching the warmth of the sun when it shone, eyes fixed not on the far shoreline with its dune-fields but further – further – on the thread of mountains, keen and blue. Sometimes she imagined she could see the Cockscomb, once so familiar and loved, with its strange bubble ridges, budding into a clear sky. There would be plains with scattered farms and empty dams and windmills. There would be no gannets squalling but the
bergwind
breathing quietly and the distant bleat of a sheep, the calm midday sounds of the veld.

Was it as lonely there as it was here? Were the people in that sparse landscape as detached from each other as she felt herself to be, even though there were so many more of them and no sea to divide them?

She had never been lonely as a child. She had lived in a house full of activity and busyness. The kettle steamed on the stove, the dogs clattered over polished floors, the cat lay stretched in sunlight on the windowsill near where her mother sewed. Farmworkers came and went. Her father. Her brothers. She had known the lightness of day, the comfort of dark, the routine of discipline and purpose. Church on Sundays, visits to her grandparents on the first Saturday of every month. Waiting for her older brother to come from school at the end of each term and craning to see the train take the last bend to the station. Feeling airborne with happiness as it hissed itself to rest.

And then the world had changed.

Her brother had gone away to war in 1899, taken by the same friendly train that was suddenly forbidding, malevolent.

And a man called Karel Harker had come as assistant to the senior keeper at the great lighthouse at Seal Point. Crossing rivers, sometimes making his way along the beach, he rode into town once a month for supplies.

Sometimes he had stayed, pitching his tent on the outskirts of the town, and come to church.

He had seen her in her pew. She had seen him.

And when her family took their ox wagon down to the sea at Christmas with the other farmers from the district, he had ridden along the beach again on his big spray-coloured grey, a man emerging from the sea. A titan.

She had married him before she even knew him. She was just eighteen.

If she had often been lonely with her brothers gone, and no companion but the girls she met on Sundays at church or at Christmastime beside the sea, she had never known isolation until they had been posted to the island.

Isolation is very different from loneliness.

Loneliness does not arise so much from something lost as from a longing for something well remembered. Isolation cares nothing for memory.

For Louisa, it was living with the void.

It was on one of these mornings of wandering, her eyes often on the distant shore as she searched for shells, that Louisa saw a child standing on the higher ground, watching her. Small as a hare – as tentative and poised for flight – he gazed down at her. For a moment she thought it was a figment of her longing for her sons, conjuring him out of nowhere. Then she realised it was one of the workers’ children, always kept within the boundaries around the huts at the far side of the island.

Little limbs, not quite nourished, so delicate a neck.

‘Come,’ she said. But he turned and ran away at the sound of her voice.

For days she did not see him. And then, suddenly, he appeared with the donkey following him, two oddments blown along the high ground by the wind. Neither would approach the shore but picked their way precariously between the penguin burrows.

So Louisa went to him herself, taking an apron-f of small shells and climbing up to the place where he sat. She didn’t speak, simply emptied them at his feet and settled down beside him. She began to sort them into type, setting them in small piles. He simply watched, his eyes darting as her hand moved.

But then she put a shell in the wrong place and another and another and – tentatively – his fingers reached out, correcting her. She laughed a little, shaking her head at her foolishness, and let him rearrange them, undisturbed.

And so, each day, when she went out to gather, he came more frequently until, at last, he sat beside her confidently and made mounds of all the colours and the shapes she wanted. They rarely spoke but their fingers worked in harmony, like weavers at a loom, knowing just when and where to feed in the colours.

Then he would look up and smile, triumphant.

Such bright, dark eyes.

Sometimes she would bring him a slice or two of bread in her apron pocket or even a warm potato and watch him eat, taking the smallest pieces, almost
with the tip of his tongue. Once she brought him a precious apple and she watched him look at it a long time – its rosy roundness, quite unfamiliar to him. She put out her finger and wiped his chin where the juice ran down.

But there was one thing she could not coax him to do, even when the tide was low and the water simply breathed beyond the rocks. He would not go to the rock pools with her. He had a terror of the sea. And she had no way of explaining to him that he was safe with her. Only sometimes, he might take her hand and step as cautiously as a sand plover on to the beach and then skitter away from her, seeming to pull the tide behind him as he ran.

If he was afraid of the sea, she was as afraid of allowing him to follow her towards the light – for Karel had always said, ‘Do not go near the workers’ houses. Do not interfere with them.’

The converse was also true. It was a simple rule. One that was never broken.

The keepers were a Service with a chain of command, insignia and codes of conduct. The guano workers were labourers, the lowliest cogs in a government enterprise.

The keepers were white. The workers mostly black, every permutation: a flotsam of provenance from a rural hinterland or urban slum. The workers and the keepers shared no task and had no codependence except, occasionally, when a worker’s wife provided domestic help in a keeper’s house. All they had in common was a few square miles of rock and access to a tug. Nothing more.

Except in an emergency.

So, cautioning herself and him, Louisa would leave the child near the well and shoo him very gently, turning his face homewards, telling him to go. She would walk away firmly, up the shell-scattered path towards the bleak yard of the lighthouse and sometimes turn and see him standing on the rise. He would look back at her, hesitating, anticipating an instruction, even when it was not given. She wondered what he said to his mother. Certainly nothing to alarm her, for no one ever came looking for him. Sometimes – just sometimes – she might see the guano workers on the shore stand to glance across at her, suddenly alert, then bend again to work.

Karel had no idea about the small boy who so often met Louisa on the path to the rocky coves where she searched for shells.

And Louisa, in her turn, ensured that he should not.

In time the small boy would run to Louisa, holding up a fistful of booty. Chipped and broken, whole and perfect, barnacled, flat, conical or screw-shaped, it didn’t matter – she accepted them all and she took them into her apron pocket, out of which she might produce a small potato cake that she had baked for him. In turn, she used his little offerings all around the base of the lighthouse, crushing the broken shells with her rolling pin between two
dishcloths. She made patterns with their colours, to represent vegetation and sand.

It was a joint creation.

In time he began to lose his fear of the seashore. He no longer stood with one foot twisted behind the other, one hand on the donkey, as if for security, as it cropped the greenery at the edge of the shell beds. He would come down, his small shadow jiggering across the blinding white of bleached scree and squat down where she sorted the shells, creeping closer into the folds of her shawl, his small wiry head strange to her fingers and their swift caress.

She had never thought to caress a black child before – he with his tight, springy hair, the delicate angle of his cheek, the flute of his ear, the curve of his small jaw, the fine outline of his lips. He was not like Hansie or Fred. But he was a child – a little wraith blown along the paths and outcrops, seeking, without a word, the quiet companionship of her shadow. He always chose to walk in her shade. He and the old nodding donkey wandering behind, silhouetted now and then against a four-season sky: high and white; deeply grey with rain linking sea to cloud in swift, drifting brushstrokes; blue as periwinkles; still as autumn. They were, it seemed, the only human creatures, the only living things that knew anything of warmth or wonder in this wide indifferent world of wind and weather.