The Keeper by Marguerite Poland Read Free Book Online

windsock in the yard streaming out from a pole, a tatty silhouette against a violet sky.
    Maisie was all delight. She had come to the door, her hair newly curled – small greying sausages bouncing at her cheeks, her face hot from exertions at the stove. Cackle, grunt and gasp, all at once: she’d flapped her dish towel, flurried Cecil into activity over a tray of snacks and ferried Aletta to a seat by the window. Cecil was dressed for duty in his uniform, buttons shining, his hair brushed flat.
    He had kissed Aletta and shook Hannes’s hand.
    ‘Home at last,’ Maisie had said, giving Hannes’s arm a pat. Hannes had caught Aletta’s glance. Its bleak dismay.
    ‘How many years is it since you were here?’ Maisie had said.
    ‘Twenty-four.’
    ‘But it’s just the same?’
    ‘So it seems.’
    Aletta had turned to the window and looked out into the dark, blinded momentarily by the sweep of the light.
    Here was Maisie and the happy chaos of her room – the sewing machine on the sideboard, the knitting scattered on a chair, her decorative bottles of coloured sand in rows along the window ledge. Here was Cecil with his ponderous voice, standing almost to attention in front of the paraffin heater in the fireplace. Above it on the wall was Cecil’s best catch – a marlin’s head, its great fin reared, its beak open as if to hiss. The tables, dining chairs and dresser were all made by Cecil. He was a competent carpenter. Solid pine with flourishes of driftwood attached as decoration and varnished dark. A lamp made from a large pink shell, rather anatomical and rude, stood on a starched doily. A spray of orange coral set on a plinth beside it. On the wall, a sad little seahorse in a frame.
    Aletta had sat aloof, almost anachronistic in this cluttered room, her bobbed and layered strawberry hair bleached blonder, her make-up flawless, her baby-pink lips outlined in a deeper shade, her eyes heavy with liner, the lashes casting a spiky fringe of shadow on her cheeks. She wore an angora cardigan. Fine filaments of hair drifted round her, raised and lowered themselves on the big puffed sleeves to the faint electricity of movement, like minute antennae.
    Against the warm chatter of Maisie, who had recently put her daughter into secretarial college – ‘And she is staying at the YWCA. And they say it’s OK, but you know I saw some of those girls and I’m not so sure now … except Dolores is a good Christian child so perhaps she’ll be all right’ – Hannes could hear the wind beginning to rise. Cecil had been listening too, pausing in mid-forkful to cock an ear.
    Cecil checked his watch and pushed his plate aside. ‘Excuse me, Aletta,’ he had said, turning to her. ‘I must go on duty.’ And he had picked up his thermos of tea from the sideboard and patted Maisie on the shoulder as he left the room. Hannes had remained at the table, letting Maisie’s conversation drift across him, her kind enquiries of Aletta, her offers of help to get her settled, her advice about preserving water: ‘You can only wash your hair once in ten days here, Aletta. We have just too little water.’
    ‘Oh God!’ Aletta’s sharp retort.
    Hannes left the table and went to stand with his back to the heater. He could see the livid pulse of the light just above the rim of the pelmet. Every twenty seconds. Even here, snug in this room with a cottage pie made of flaked fish and reconstituted dried potato, it did not leave them. Nor did the sound of the sea thundering on the reef offshore, dulled only by the whistling of the kettle on the stove, announcing tea.
    Tea. Always tea, laced with the taint of guano and beads of powdered milk.
    Drink had long been banned on the island. It was forbidden by the Chief Lighthouse Engineer.
    ‘Drink is not allowed,’ Hannes had reminded Aletta when he had found her packing wine glasses some weeks before.
    ‘What’s wrong with a glass of wine?’
    ‘Too tempting to lonely keepers.’
    ‘For God’s