Read Online The Keeper by Marguerite Poland - Free Book Online Page B

and yet I couldn’t tell you what he thinks.’ She had dabbed at her face with her tissue and tucked it back into the sleeve of her nylon cardigan. ‘So,’ she smiled, ‘if he said that – well!’ She had broken off and twinkled at Rika shrewdly. ‘You must have shaken him up!’
    No one knows about Hannes …
    Hannes. A man others do not see beyond his competence.
    Even Maisie Beukes, who met him when first he came to the tall old lighthouse on The Hill, as a youngster, to train with Cecil, circles him still.
    He had had the back room and she had made his meals when he didn’t go off into the town and forage for himself. Where he went she never asked beyond, ‘Been fishing, Hannes?’
    And more often than not he had, for his rod was strapped to the bar of his bicycle and his old fishing bag was slung on a peg in the yard.
    Sometimes he brought the catch: a
leervis,
a shad, a
poensie
. He usually sold his bag to the Fisheries on the hill, where the Chinaman paid him well and churned out fried fillets and chips doused in vinegar. Sometimes he ate with Maisie and Cecil in their cottage but more often than not he kept to his room, reading, always reading.
    Histories, biographies, technical books, naval stories. Even poetry.
    But Cecil guessed the source of his isolation – for Cecil had been assistant on the island when Hannes was a boy and his father, Karel Harker, had been the senior keeper. He remembered well the solitary child, desolate without his brother, always searching for his mother.
    Cecil knew, too, the well where Hannes’s mother had drowned herself one August, a gale blowing.
    August. Always August. When no one put to sea and the guano workers, brewing secret liquor, quarrelled among themselves. They were quarrels that usually festered into fights. In Cecil’s experience, there was nothing unexpected in calling out a doctor at those times.
    There had been an argument that August, but Cecil had been ordered away to tend the light by Karel Harker while he went down to the workers’ houses with his sjambok in his hand. As Cecil had glanced from the window on the stairwell, he had seen Karel’s wife, Louisa, half running down the path behind her husband, crying. He saw Karel Harker turn, threateningly, his arm raised. She had stopped then, standing with her face in her hands, sobbing.
    Three days later she was dead.
    She had drowned herself in the well with stones and pebbles in her pockets.
    No one ever mentioned it again for none could dare intrude on Karel Harker’s silence and bewilderment. But ever after, no worker would go near the well to draw water. They believed the place was haunted. They said they had heard a woman crying in the depths below the ground.
    ‘It’s just the bloody wind, for God’s sake,’ Karel had shouted once when a worker had come with a bucket to the house, complaining. His angry voice had echoed in the vestibule where Cecil was polishing the doorknobs.
    But no one believed him.
    And, over the years, the various headmen had to do the menial task alone until a pipe was installed that ran the water down the slope to a tank by the guano shed. But when a headman was obliged to check the pump, he always took the great shark hook with him: a reminder of
why
the ghost was there at all.
    And why the rules that regulated life on so small an outcrop were immutable. To mix the Fisheries with the Railways and Harbours, their hierarchies and ranks, was sacrilege, to fraternise unthinkable.
    Never cross the line.
    The story passed, in time, to legend, embellished here and there, depending on the teller: a keeper or a worker. Every headman handed down the myth when he transferred the shark hook to his successor. Every keeper learnt a history of the lighthouse and accepted what he believed to be the facts.
    And they were not the same.
    Hannes’s father, Karel Harker, had not asked for a transfer when his wife died. He had simply continued to tend the light, working up in the lantern