Free The Keeper by Marguerite Poland

room hour after hour, polishing the glass, cleaning the vents in the murette, buffing each screw and nut and hasp, inhaling the insidious vapours of the mercury bath on which the great light floated, only sometimes coming down to fish. What he had told his sons about their mother’s death was a small part of the truth: she was sick and she had died. Karel Harker had said to Cecil Beukes, his assistant, ‘Do not tell Hannes the details, Cecil. He is too young – and I will deal with Fred myself.’
    So Hannes had believed what he was told.
    She was sick and she had died.
    Mothers often died. There were boys at school who claimed the loss of two. The birth of babies picked them off relentlessly.
    The last time he and his older brother, Fred, had seen their mother, she had been standing on the jetty with the solitary island donkey at her side, her arm round its neck, as if the two of them had come together to wave the boys off in their stiff sou’westers, wide as tents. Hannes had looked back both elated and mortified.
    It was all too late and it was his fault.
    He had screamed and cried to go to school. He had threatened to row himself away in the boat. He had packed a little bundle and resisted his mother as if he hated her, dashing her hand away when – half-laughing – she had tried to cajole him.
    Eight years old: ‘I want to go to school.’
    And so, at last, he’d gone.
    But at the end of the second term they had not been able to get home in the holidays. It had happened to Fred before, but Hannes was stricken with panic. The sea was too wild, the tug would not be able to anchor or the boat launch from the jetty to transfer them. Praying was in vain; the late-winter gale split the sea fitfully against the great stone breakwater of the city’s harbour wall. The boys returned to port and stayed with the minister at the Mission to Seamen inthe old stucco house on a bleak corner above the docks, with a Norfolk pine in the yard. He was a kindly man, a widower, unused to children.
    Fred and Hannes went to the winter beach every day and wandered about, as lost as the vagrants who slept under the jetty. After two weeks they returned to school as if nothing had changed. Except that the headmaster had called them in and told them, briefly, that their mother had died, and sent Hannes to the sanatorium for a dose against the onset of stomach cramps and diarrhoea. Fred was not directed to go with him. Instead, he returned to his dormitory alone, too old, it seemed, to seek the solace of the sickroom.
    In the long Christmas holidays they returned to the island together and were given tasks by their father round the lighthouse. It was their training for the future. To polish the brass, to clean the panes, to climb the stairs without flinching, to stand on the open catwalk in a gale and feel no fear. To learn the language of the light: the candlepower and the character, the order of the lenses, their focal length, the difference between catoptric and catadioptric. To learn to work the generators, the science of telemetry.
    ‘It is not a game,’ Karel said – as if they hadn’t known that all their lives.
    Fred could swing himself across an outer rail of the balcony, crook it with his knee, leaning back, hands hanging loose, the rocks perilous below –daring the wind, opening his mouth to catch its echo inside his cheek and its fullness in his ears. At other times, he would stand there and shout. The words were too high, too fierce – the scream of a gull – for Hannes to know what he said. But he suspected: Fred blaspheming as he did at school. Daring something horrible.
    Hannes would not look as Fred balanced like a rope-walker high above him. He would stand at the outer foot of the building with his small, thin back to the wall, feeling the grainy roughness of the shell-mixed plaster and the great height towering over him. He kept his eyes shut, hearing the far-off sound of Fred’s shouting, out and up into the