The Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page B

the spindle-legged alertness of the
kiewietjies
that nested in the short star-flowered turf near any coastal light.
    Sea-child, thin-shanked, light as a sanderling.
    And yet – with her angry razor-tears edging at the outer corners of her eyes, so often beak and claws – Aletta challenged him. Though he could have snapped her slender neck between his thumb and forefinger if he’d wished – and
how
he’d sometimes wished – she could bend him to her. Deftly, provocatively, taut as a bowstring.
    It was an anguish to love her.
    ‘You can’t marry Aletta!’ Maisie Beukes had said to him, alarmed, when he had told her so many years before.
    ‘Don’t say that, Mrs Beukes,’ Hannes had retorted. ‘You know nothing about her.’
    ‘Nonsense, Hannes, I have known her all my life. She’s lighthouse.’
    ‘Of course she’s lighthouse. How could I marry anyone
but
lighthouse?’
    Maisie had gazed at him sadly. ‘You just want to rescue her.’
    ‘From what?’
    ‘You are like your mother, Hannes.’
    ‘You didn’t know my mother.’
    ‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t – but, I believe, she was a very kind, good woman.’ Her round, red-veined, friendly face was damp. ‘And Aletta is not.’
    But he had married her nonetheless. In spite of – or because of – his mother.
    In those days, a year after the War, when he had lodged in the dingy single quarters built for relief keepers ready to be posted to any lighthouse on the coast, he had escaped with her, borrowing her father’s car, driving hell-speed along the coastal road, wondering if she’d flinch at every bend he took.
    She never did. She laughed instead.
    As they drove, the flat sweep of city lights receded behind them and the darkness washed in. They would stop on the grassy hilltop above the bush-strewn dunes and turn the engine off, subsiding from the thrill of speed and danger.
    He had brought a bottle of wine. He had brought two tumblers. He had remembered the cigarettes. They would walk along the path down into the sheltered hollow below the cliff and sit on the springy turf, she with her long thin legs drawn up, and sip the warm wine. There was only the turf and the smell of the trickling
brak
water seeping from the dunes to the rock pools and the sound of frogs and the waves, breaking over and over and over, dashing their spray against the gullies.
    They did not speak much: they had inherited the silence of the lightbetween them, an implicit understanding of the duties and the loneliness, the need for self-reliance and the fear of isolation. It was not a bond as much as a dependence. And it was more than that as well. Much more.
    Here, there was no one to see them if they ran naked, chasing up the sandy pathways. No one to hear them. Their mewing and the mewing of the gulls were one – lost in the wild wash of waves, the beat of breakers on the distant beach. When, later, they lay on their backs to watch the sky, a cigarette passed between them, they wanted nothing but the swelling of the tide again. Its ebb and its renewal.
    Even now – decades on – he wants to howl her name aloud as he had howled it then.
    ‘Aletta is a keeper’s daughter,’ Hannes says without preamble when they have snatched a lunchtime and have an hour to talk. He senses that Rika will not say her name. ‘She could body surf. She could swim. She could drink. She could …’ He stops himself, looking across at Rika with her hair plaited into her neck, the delicate curve of her throat – so still, so nunlike. The antithesis of Aletta. ‘She could dance,’ he says.
    He wonders – has Rika ever sworn? No, maybe not. Who is she married to? The local Rotary Club chairman? The secretary of the Community Chest?
    ‘My husband is an engineer,’ she had once said simply. ‘We have three children and a Labrador.’
    Her words had precluded further enquiry.
    ‘Aletta is seven years younger than me. I remember her as a child. Her father was Maans Oosthuizen – a tough old