The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  But Harry, on impulse, approached the owner outside the auction and the deal was struck. The car burned oil, lost water, guzzled petrol. It might seize up at any moment. But it had a few months’ tax and the tyres weren’t quite bald. Harry drove it triumphantly away. Wabenzi!

  Now, impatient to see his sister in hospital, he was forced to crawl up the narrow, steep Nantgwynant valley behind a groaning bus. The peaks of Snowdon loomed raw and cold in a shroud of mist, and Harry tugged a scarf around his throat to keep warm in the hoodless car. As the road widened at the crest of the pass, as he accelerated past the bus, he saw a figure sitting and waiting in the distance. He concentrated on driving, shot by the bus and tucked in front of it, still accelerating as hard as he could. The figure was about half a mile ahead, conspicuous in a blue anorak against the grey and green of the hills. It seemed tiny, a little child, motionless until Harry’s car came hurtling nearer, when it raised one hand and a hopeful thumb. Harry did an unusual thing, for someone who thought himself quite a careful and considerate driver: he braked with all his might as he came level with the tiny blue figure, so that the car slithered to a halt in the gravel and dust of the roadside. In his mirror he saw a bank of flashing headlights as the bus pulled out and went by.

  The child stood up and ran to Harry’s door, before realising that the passenger seat was on the other side; running around the long, low bonnet, struggling with the dented door, leaping nimbly over and landing with a crash on the cracked white leather. Harry floored the accelerator. The tyres scrabbled for a grip in the gravel as the car surged forward and howled in pursuit of the bus again. The air whirled with oil smoke.

  Harry’s passenger wasn’t a child. She was a girl, about twenty years old.

  ‘Shit! What a car!’ she yelled above the bellowing exhaust. ‘Are you going to Capel Curig?’

  ‘Of course!’ he answered. Capel Curig was the next village. There was nowhere else he could have been going to.

  ‘Drop me off at the youth hostel, will you?’ And she added, as though she was longing to tell somebody, even a complete stranger, ‘I’m meeting a friend there.’

  Harry slowed down, for two reasons. Firstly, he’d caught up with the bus. It would be senseless to go past it again, only to stop a few miles on. So he eased off the accelerator. Secondly, he wanted to look at his passenger.

  She was indeed very small, like a child. She was wearing a pair of tennis shoes, scuffed and dusty from the roadside; faded denim bell-bottom jeans, mended at the knees with colourful patches; a tie-dyed red and purple T-shirt; the blue anorak.

  ‘Going hill-walking?’ Harry asked, to make the girl look at him.

  She frowned, pursing her pale lips. She was blonde and very pretty, the kind of perfectly obvious prettiness that makes an instant impression but might not last many years. Blowing in the open car, her hair was bronze with sunshine, completely natural and none too clean. Her brows and lashes were almost black. Her pupils had a circle of dark blue around them, giving her pale gull’s eyes an extraordinarily piercing quality. Her face and throat were very brown; a big spot was blooming in the crevice of her right nostril. She frowned at first, surprised to find a carroty, bespectacled man at the wheel of a snorting, red sports car.

  But then she grinned. And Harry Clewe’s stomach turned over.

  He felt such a sudden, incapacitating rush of feeling for this grubby, childlike girl that he thought he’d have to stop the car in case he fainted. It winded him. He had no recollection of why he was driving so fast through Snowdonia towards Shrewsbury. The image he’d had of a rearing horse and lashing hooves and the figure of his sister falling and falling and lying still . . . the image dissolved and was gone. Only there was this girl, with her grey eyes, her neglected blonde hair and golden throat. Nothing else.

  In another minute, long enough for Harry to have surged so close to the bus that the bonnet of his car nearly touched its exhaust pipes, they were in Capel Curig. There was time to find out that the girl wasn’t going hill-walking, that she worked as a waitress in a restaurant in Beddgelert . . . and then she was springing from the car again, moving across the road with hardly a glance at the traffic, as children do. She disappeared through the front door of the youth hostel.

  Harry drove on. For the next hour and a half he travelled very fast, without concentrating as hard as he should have done, arriving in Shrewsbury before he’d remembered why he was going there.

  Chapter Two

  A week later, as Harry Clewe returned to his cottage near Snow­don, he’d made up his mind to visit the girl in her restaurant.

  There’d been emotional scenes in Shrewsbury when it was revealed that Lizzie hadn’t sustained any permanent injuries from her fall. She had to stay in hospital, to recover more from the emergency surgery, which had taken place as the doctors investigated the possibility of damage to her kidneys, than from the accident itself. She was horribly bruised, her ribs were cracked and her spleen was injured, but there was no damage to her spine. The horse had fled into the market-place of the next village, where it was captured once it had kicked over a couple of vegetable stalls and a few tables outside the pub. Harry didn’t find out what would become of the animal. Certainly the little girl wouldn’t ride it or any other horse for many months. But she was intact.

  Harry remained at the family house for a week and visited Lizzie every afternoon. As soon as it was established that she would recover fully, he set off to Wales. It was a brilliant day towards the end of August. He enjoyed the drive, in spite of the congestion of caravans and coaches through Llangollen and into the Welsh hills. He knew the road well and had confidence in the car’s ability to go safely past a line of vehicles when other drivers would have waited. Wabenzi! The car looked rough, but it fairly flew. He surged to the back of a queue of caravans and saloon cars, chose his moment and went bellowing past with a haze of oil smoke erupting from his exhaust. Sometimes he provoked a flash of headlamps from an oncoming vehicle, a gesture from its driver. But Harry tucked in in plenty of time. As he’d seen in Sudan, the power of the Wabenzi was arrogant and apparently limitless.

  He slowed down in Capel Curig with the realisation that he could be in Beddgelert in less than a quarter of an hour. He’d been thinking about the girl all week. Once, he’d begun to tell Lizzie about her, blurting the story of his violent manoeuvre into the loose gravel as he’d stopped for the hitchhiker. But he’d let the story tail away. As the family arranged itself around the hospital bed, he’d remained largely silent among the blooms of carnations and irises, ducking his head behind rows and rows of get-well cards. Lizzie held court, funny and beautiful in spite of the bruising she’d had, her glittering face and flaming hair quite vivid on the snowy, plumped-up pillows. Harry loved her very much; he envied her cheek, her gumption. He envied her talent, for she’d already been recognised as a musician with an exciting future, embracing her cello with her thin arms, straddling it with her thin legs, shining at all kinds of concerts. For a wild moment, he’d wished he could have brought the honey-blonde hitchhiker to Shrewsbury and showed her to his sister . . . Perhaps one day he would. It was a mad idea he kept to himself.

  From time to time he’d answered a question about his new life in Wales. Then his parents would shake their heads and sigh, bewildered that, after ten years at public school, with a university degree and a teaching certificate, their son should have quit the career for which he’d trained in order to wrestle the roots of a rhododendron in a hotel garden.

  ‘Still star-gazing, my lad?’ his father would say, as always. ‘Still got your head in the stars instead of getting down to an honest day’s work?’

  And his mother would tinkle with laughter and put in, as always, ‘Harry’s been seeing stars all his life! The whole world shook the night he was born!’ before launching into an elaborate description of Harry’s birth in a London underground station on the worst night of the Blitz . . .

  Lizzie had smiled at him and winked, so that Harry fel
t his heart rise into his throat and the tears tingle in his eyes, overcome with gratitude for the little girl who understood him and loved him despite his puzzling idiosyncracies. The conversation passed on. Harry had withheld his account of the hitchhiker, although a picture of her face and throat and her slim brown hands remained locked in a deeper layer of his concentration, like fishes in a frozen pond.

  Now, as he came closer to Beddgelert that afternoon, the ice melted around those slim brown fishes. He slowed down. His stomach ached as he thought of seeing the girl again. He was frightened. He tried to think of an excuse for driving straight through Beddgelert and onwards to his cottage. But he stopped in the village and parked his car in the cover of a great, dark yew tree.

  Above the entrance to the restaurant there was a big, clumsily colourful painting. It portrayed the death of Gelert, the faithful hound of Prince Llewelyn, after which the village was named. According to the legend, the prince had returned home from a hunting expedition, having left his baby son in Gelert’s care, to find a startling scene awaiting him. The inside of his lodge was in chaos, the furniture upturned; he was greeted by his dog, whose jaws were running with blood. The child was nowhere to be seen. The prince jumped to the conclusion that Gelert had killed the baby boy. The painting showed Llewelyn, with an owlish expression on his black-bearded face, plunging a sword into the dog’s side . . . although the baby was alive and well and peering at his father from behind an overturned table. Gelert had saved the child’s life by fighting and slaying an enormous wolf which had come into the prince’s lodge; the dead wolf lay partly hidden under a pile of blood-spattered curtains.

  Harry cocked his head this way and that, squinting at the picture to delay going inside the restaurant. The blood was good. At last, he pushed the door open, hoping and hoping that the girl wouldn’t be there.

  She was there. As Harry opened the door, she was carrying a tray of tea and milk and sugar and cups and saucers and scones and jam and butter towards a table in the window. The door caught the corner of the tray.

  She fought to control it, wide-eyed with astonishment and alarm. For a moment, there was the faintest smile of recognition on her mouth as she glanced at the man who’d pushed the door open. Then, with a squeal of pain as the hot water splashed her hands, she dropped everything. The tray smashed to the floor. Women and children sprang away from the splinters with little gasps of surprise. A man began an adolescent cheer, cutting it short when his wife barked his name. The girl stood still, as though immobilised under the weight of broken crockery. Her hands fluttered to her lips. Harry thought she was going to cry.

  There was a sickening silence for a second or two . . . until she started to laugh. She shuddered with laughter, leaning forward to support herself by taking hold of the lapels of Harry’s jacket. Her shoulders shook with silent sobs. Her eyes welled with tears, blurring the dark-blue rings of her pupils.

  Harry found his hands going to her waist. He looked down at the debris, and the shards of a saucer exploded noisily as he shifted his feet when the girl leaned more heavily on him. She wasn’t laugh­ing any more. That had passed as quickly as a charge of electricity through her body. She went limp. And just then, a burly, black-bearded man emerged from the kitchen at the back of the restaurant and strode among the tables towards the scene of the accident. He looked very like Prince Llewelyn on the painting outside: enraged, incredulous, vengeful.

  Harry reacted with uncharacteristic firmness and spontaneity. He moved his hands to the girl’s left arm, gripped her hard, heard himself say, ‘Come on!’ with unusual authority, and manhandled her through the open door. Over the fragments of crockery, the powdered snow of sugar and the steaming tea, avoiding the clots of butter and a great scab of jam on the floor, together they stepped smartly into the sunshine. Harry heard his voice again – ‘Let’s go! Quickly!’ – and then they were running, his hand clenched around her wrist, along the crowded pavement. Before they’d gathered exactly what had happened and what they were doing, Harry and the girl had bounced onto the cracked leather seats of the battered red sports car.

  It was a dream . . . their flight among the tourists in the street, Harry’s hurried reversing from the shade of the yew tree, the thrill of a howling acceleration and the perfume of burning oil as the car sprang out of the village. Hardly a minute after Harry had pushed open the restaurant door, he and the girl were surging along a sunlit mountain road.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she shouted.

  She looked even younger and smaller than she had when he’d first met her. Her eyes were red with tears. She’d had her blonde hair cut shorter at the neck, and now it blew around her ears like a boy’s hair. The spot in the corner of her nose had grown bigger, and she’d dabbed some sort of masking ointment on it which only made it more obvious. In her working clothes, she could have been a schoolgirl of twelve or thirteen: tennis shoes and white ankle socks, a pleated blue skirt, a white cotton blouse, as though she was ready for a netball match against a visiting school team. Her arms and legs were very brown. In the pocket of her blouse there was a notebook and a pen, the orders for tea and cakes which her customers were still waiting for.

  ‘Come and see my cottage!’ he shouted. ‘It’s in Rhyd-ddu, the next village. You can have a wash and I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

  At the mention of tea she gave a little jump in her seat. Her hands flew to her mouth and fluttered there. But she was smiling. The hysteria had passed.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked, as they stopped outside a row of terraced cottages. She tried to open the passenger door, gave up and got out by standing on the seat and slithering her legs across the boot. She stood in the road and appraised the car as Harry felt for his house keys.

  ‘What a monster!’ she said. ‘It looks bloody clapped-out, but it seems to go all right.’

  ‘Harry Clewe,’ he replied. ‘Let’s go inside.’

  She disappeared into the bathroom, which was downstairs, while Harry switched on the kettle in the kitchen. Tiptoeing to the bathroom door, he squeezed his eyes shut and pictured what he could hear her doing: clack of toilet seat, rustle of clothes, trickle and fizz, rattle of toilet roll, rustle of clothes, toilet flushing. He held his breath until his chest hurt, moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue. When he heard her coming out, he dodged back to the kitchen. She’d rinsed her face. She looked ordinary and somewhat older, with her eyes clean and the cream washed off the spot on her nose.

  ‘Don’t make tea for me,’ she said, although at that moment Harry, his hands trembling, was pouring boiling water into the teapot. ‘I just want a little sit-down and a think.’

  ‘We can sit in the garden,’ he said. He opened the back door from the kitchen and let the girl out. He followed her, with a cup of tea he didn’t really want.

  Outside it was very hot. Behind the cottages that lined the road through the village, there were secluded little gardens down to a stream at the bottom. Harry’s garden was overgrown. The cottage had stood empty since the spring, until he’d moved into it in July. Nobody had bothered with the garden, although the landlord had let the cottage for the occasional weekend. To the left and right, the hedges were neatly trimmed and the lawns were cut. In Harry’s garden there was a winding slate path which was almost hidden by a dense tangle of bracken, rhododendron and fuchsia. There was no lawn, only beds of wild grass which filled all the spaces between heather and fern. But it was full of life and colour. A flurry of chaffinches fled from the bushes as Harry and the girl sat on a tumbledown rockery. The stream gurgled at the end of the garden, under a cover of oak and ash which grew tall by the water­side and made the garden completely private.

  The girl arranged her skirt over her knees and stretched her legs out straight, twitching her toes in her tennis shoes. The sun lit every tiny golden hair on her shins. She clasped her hands and laid them in her lap, very brown and still, like sleeping voles snuggled together. She closed her eyes and tipped her face towards the su
n. In this way, quite unconsciously, she became a part of the luxuriant garden . . . for the heads of the bracken did the same and so did the fuchsia, unfolding in the humming heat.

  Harry sipped his tea. He felt giddy as he watched the girl. Her upturned throat fluttered. The hairs on her forearms flared with light, pinpricks of gold on her honey-brown skin. He put his cup down quickly, and it clattered in its saucer. At this, the girl turned towards him, her eyes still closed, before opening them and smiling a brilliant, sun-flushed smile.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ she asked.

  Harry told her, spelling it for her. She repeated his name three times, and Harry was thrilled to hear her say it. Just as he was going to ask her the same question, she closed her eyes tightly and firmly and turned her face to the sun again. He gulped and said nothing.

  Without opening her eyes, the girl leaned forward and untied the laces of her tennis shoes. She slipped her shoes off and took off her socks too. Her toes wriggled, as neat as a row of acorns. Her feet and ankles were very white, and the skin was ribbed by the tight shoes and socks she’d been wearing. She rubbed them until the skin was smooth again. Then she straightened up, hitching her skirt so that the sun was on her thighs, and leaned back to let the sunlight fall on her face. She basked like this, without speaking, with­out opening her eyes, as though Harry wasn’t there. But she smiled, because she knew he was looking at her.

  Harry looked. At her feet and forearms. At her upturned face. At her throat and her smooth brown thighs. His mouth went very dry.

  She reminded him of a lizard that had lived in the yard of his house in Sudan, in the cool shade beneath the sweating clay water pot. Even when it was still, the lizard looked as though it was charged with electricity. It seemed to hum with energy, with heat, with power. There was an electric-blue stripe down its back, from the top of its head to the tip of its tail. He was used to seeing it there, sipping with its long grey tongue at the droplets of water which dripped from the pot. But one day, a shrike had flown into the yard and taken the lizard away, impaling it on the spikes of a thorn bush with the rest of its larder, the sun-baked remains of frogs and snakes and scorpions.