The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  The girl opened her eyes and grinned at Harry. His stomach turned over.

  ‘Thank you for rescuing me, Harry Clewe,’ she said. ‘You saved me from that awful man. Actually he’s my uncle. I’ll have to go back soon. I’m not just an employee who can clear off and bugger the job. He’ll be in the restaurant until six and then at home with my aunt this evening.’

  ‘Do you live with your uncle and aunt?’ Harry asked her.

  ‘Not exactly,’ she answered. ‘They let me use their caravan. It’s in their front garden, so I’m always in and out of the house, for baths and things. I’m bound to see them both this evening.’

  ‘Stay here with me.’ The words sped out of Harry’s mouth; he had no control over them. The girl ignored them, as though they were simply a noise in the garden, like the tumble of the stream or the flutter of finches in the overhanging ash tree. She snapped her eyes shut again and lifted her face to the sun . . . as still as the lizard, before the shrike came.

  ‘I’ve been in lots of trouble with my uncle already this summer,’ she said, ‘so I’m due for a real bollocking this time. He gets at me for being slow in the restaurant, for chatting with the customers. And he seems to think that, because he’s my uncle, he’s been appointed as the guardian of my morals. He keeps nosing around the caravan if I have anyone in there.’

  She flicked at her leg, where an ant was crawling. Harry had seen it there. As the girl was talking, he’d watched its progress from her foot to her knee, to the pale, soft skin on the inside of her left thigh. She let the ant run onto her thumbnail and then she blew it softly into the bracken.

  ‘All I want is another few minutes in your nice jungly garden,’ she said. ‘It’s better like this than all tidy. I’ve only met you twice, Harry Clewe, but I reckon it suits you, this garden. I can’t imagine you wanting to get dirty with weeding and digging. You’re a bit of a toff, aren’t you? With that wreck of a bloody great car, as well.’

  Harry said nothing. He remembered suddenly that he’d have to go back to work the next morning, after his week in Shrewsbury. The job of rebuilding the garden wall at the hotel was barely half finished. All he’d done so far was to make matters worse by bringing down more roots and rubble.

  ‘Since it doesn’t look as though you’re going to ask me,’ the girl said, frowning in the way she’d frowned when she’d first appraised him at the wheel of a red Mercedes-Benz sports car, ‘my name’s Sarah. I only come back to Beddgelert in the holidays. I’m studying zoology at London University. But it’s so bloody expensive down there that I have to work nearly all the summer vacation. This summer, for my wicked uncle.’

  ‘The painting outside the restaurant, of Llewelyn and Gelert,’ Harry blurted, ‘is that supposed to be . . . ?’

  The girl laughed, her hands flying from her thighs to her mouth. ‘Did you recognise him?’ she said. ‘I painted it in London and brought it back with me as a present, something to liven up the front of the restaurant. I think my uncle’s the only person in the village who hasn’t seen the likeness.’

  ‘Yes, I recognised him,’ Harry said. ‘That’s why I wanted to rescue you so quickly. Your uncle had the same murderous expres­sion on his face when he emerged from the kitchen. You wouldn’t have stood a chance . . . he’d have run you through with a cake knife.’

  So saying, he feinted at her with an imaginary weapon. She flinched. He touched her side for a moment. There was a sensation in his stomach of caving in, as though some vital organ had been punctured. She jumped up, so close to him that he could have ducked his head forward and pressed his lips to her thigh.

  ‘I think it’s time for me to get going,’ she said. ‘Sooner or later I’ve got to face the wrathful prince.’ She bent down to pick up her shoes and socks. She paused there, crouching, and then she knelt quickly to the ground. ‘Hey, now look at this!’ she whispered excitedly. ‘Come and have a look, Harry!’

  Harry knelt beside the girl. There was a toad on the path. It had moved through the dense undergrowth of bracken, on its way from the stream to the tumbledown rockery where it lived, running like a mouse, then stopping, pushing aside the blades of wild grasses and treading down the elastic fronds of heather. Now it was still on the path . . . so still that it was hard to imagine it had ever moved. But the jewel-like eyes trembled, golden green with glistening black pupils, blinking smoothly and silently as though the lids were oiled with a secret mucus. To Harry’s surprise, the girl picked the toad up. She sat on the rockery, cupping the creature in both her hands.

  ‘This is quite a find,’ she said softly. ‘Not just any old toad. Look, Harry! Look at the little yellow line down the middle of its head and its back. You’ve got a natterjack in your garden. A natterjack! It’s only the second one I’ve ever seen. How marvellous!’

  Harry bent closer, so that the girl’s hair swung against his cheek. The toad was about three inches long, wrinkled and pimply and brown like an old leather glove, with a narrow yellow line down its back. It hardly moved, only stretching out its tiny fingers, perfectly formed like the fingers of a human foetus, to stroke the girl’s wrist. The eyes alone relieved its prehistoric ugliness, for they were very beautiful.

  ‘Here, Harry! Hold it!’ the girl said, offering the toad to him. She laughed when he writhed away from it. ‘No, maybe you’d better not. Look at these glands here, these bumps on the sides of its head . . . they’ve got a poison inside them which comes out through the skin to frighten dogs or rats, or people, I suppose, who try to pick the toad up. It can burn your hands, like acid. It’s completely relaxed with me, because it can tell I’m not going to hurt it or drop it. Maybe you’d better not touch it. But isn’t it lovely? Bufo calamita, the natterjack toad.’

  The eyes were golden, as big as marbles, brilliantly yellow with elliptical black pupils. The toad blinked slowly. Apart from the eyes, it was repulsive; for Harry, it was revolting to see how the girl caressed the toad with her little brown fingers, dipping her face so close to it that the same golden hair she’d swung on his cheek now swung on the creature’s pimples and wrinkles and blotches. At last she put it down. It sat for a moment like a clod of earth on the slate patch, and then it disappeared into the long grass. The girl rubbed her hands together, wiped them on her pleated blue skirt, sat on the rockery and put on her socks and shoes.

  ‘What luck!’ she said, standing up again. Her face was vivid with excitement. ‘It’s always lucky to find a toad. “The foule toade has a faire stone in his head”, so the legend says. But a natterjack! That’s something else! And all thanks to you, Harry Clewe! You rescue me in your fiery red chariot, carry me back to your lovely garden and show me the natterjack toad! Will you let me come another time? I’d love to try and find it again. My tutors will be very impressed when I tell them about it, when I go back to university.’

  They went through the cottage, climbed into the car, and Harry drove the girl very slowly down to Beddgelert. He wanted her beside him as long as possible. When they reached the village, she wriggled her legs over the car door, slid across the boot and ran towards the restaurant. She’d said she might see him again, if only to rummage for a pimply, poisonous toad in the overgrown garden. That was good enough for Harry Clewe.

  He drove back to his cottage, left hand on the steering wheel, right hand on the warm, white leather where she’d been sitting.

  Chapter Three

  For the next few mornings, Harry Clewe worked in the hotel garden.

  The wall refused to take shape. Somehow, there seemed to be less stone available in his pile of rubble than there’d been when he’d brought it all crashing down. He’d finally removed the remains of the rhododendron bush; there was a great twisted mass of it at the top of the garden. He’d arranged the biggest stones into the soft earth and packed them tightly with more soil, placing the boulders on top of one another until there was none left. The result was unimpressive. Where there had once been a bulging face of stone and rhododendron roots some eight feet high
retaining the terrace above, now there was Harry’s wall: it came up to his waist. Behind that, there was an ugly scree of earth and smaller stones.

  Burning the roots and branches of the rhododendron was an easier and more enjoyable task. He stuffed a bundle of old news­papers into the core of the heap, and, as soon as he lit the paper, aromatic smoke began to drift between the layers of leaves and twigs; there was the whistle and pop of warming wood. The leaves smouldered before exploding into an ill-tempered flame. Bubbles of oil sprang up and hissed with steam. The branches turned black, too thick and damp to burn quickly, but soon they were running with fire, shuddering with heat. The woodland was filled with crack­ling and smoke. The jackdaws moved to the trees of the next-door garden, continuing their clucking conversation. Ashes rose like moths, with the same jerky, aimless flight, settled on the ground and on Harry’s clothes in a monochrome confetti.

  Shifting from time to time to keep out of the smoke as it changed direction with the wind, he picked up a newspaper and began to read. February 1966; it was six months out of date. He crushed the paper and jammed it into the flames, where the pages erupted into a ball of brilliant yellow, like a giant chrysanthemum.

  He stayed at the top of the garden all morning. Anxious about the flames spreading to the woodland, which was very dry after a hot summer, he raked away the leaves until there was a fire break about six feet wide, dropped his rake, unzipped his trousers and urinated into the bare soil. A haze of pungent steam rose into the air. He was filthy. There were ashes and leaves in his ginger hair. The sweat had dried on his face, with all the dust of the bonfire, and his glasses were filmed with dirt. There was dried blood around the nails of his right hand from a gash on his thumb, clotted with soil from his efforts with the wall. When he ran his tongue across his lips, he could taste the smoke and sweat and the ammoniac tang of urine. At one o’clock he left the hotel and walked through the village, to see Sarah.

  Very carefully, he pushed open the restaurant door. Apart from a family in one corner, the place was empty. Harry sat down near the window. Sarah appeared. She must have heard the door open and close. When she saw Harry, she frowned at first, worked her face into a smile and walked to his table.

  ‘Well, Harry Clewe,’ she said, ‘you managed to come in a bit more quietly this time, didn’t you?’ She looked him up and down. ‘What on earth have you been doing, you dirty boy? I’ve a good mind to call the manager and have you thrown out!’

  ‘I just thought I’d let you get me a cup of tea before I go home and get cleaned up,’ he said. ‘I’ve been gardening at the hotel. I work there every morning.’

  The girl raised her eyebrows so high that they disappeared into her hair. She was wearing the same clothes as the last time he’d seen her.

  ‘Gardening? I was wrong, then,’ she said. ‘You’re a bit hard to figure out, aren’t you? The car, the cottage . . . and gardening! You don’t seem to fit into any of them. What are you doing here?’

  Before Harry could reply, before he’d decided whether the girl was asking him what he was doing in Wales or what he was doing in the restaurant, more customers came in and she had to see what they wanted. She was too busy to talk to Harry, although she smiled dazzlingly when she put a cup of tea on his table. Two young men, sitting by the window, looked her up and down and winked at one another; they whispered together and then laughed very noisily, feigning solemnity when Sarah went to take their order. One of them said something which Harry didn’t catch, but Sarah giggled and blushed and slapped the man on the top of his head with her notebook. Harry felt a surge of jealousy, swallowing it with a gulp of tea.

  The manager appeared, big, burly and bearded, red-faced from the heat of the kitchen, and looked around to see that all was well in the restaurant. He stared at Harry, pursing his lips as he recog­nised the gingery hair and the glasses, frowning as he saw the dirt on Harry’s boots and trousers. Sarah pushed past him, going into the kitchen with the young men’s order, and the manager disappeared too.

  Harry finished his tea and went to the counter to pay. He wasn’t going to say anything about her coming to his garden. But, taking his money, she leaned towards him and whispered, ‘It’s my half-day, Harry. I’d love to see your little jungle again and have another look at the natterjack. Can I? I should get out in twenty minutes or so.’

  Something fine and powerful swelled in Harry’s chest. His throat ached. Unable to speak, he grinned and nodded and walked out of the restaurant.

  But, an hour later, there was still no sign of her. Harry sat in his car with a copy of the Caernarfon & Denbigh Herald and read it from end to end. Then he reread it: the personal columns, the parish notices, the classified advertisements. He got out of the car, dropped the newspaper into a bin so that a swarm of wasps rose from a matted heap of banana skins; then, with nothing else to do, he opened the car boot, took out the oil and water he always kept there, opened the bonnet and topped up the levels. The engine was black, the whole compartment was sooted with oil smoke. Wondering how much longer the Wabenzi power would be with him, he slammed down the bonnet and the boot, wiped his hands on his shirt and went back to the restaurant.

  Every table was taken. The windows were steamed up. Harry’s glasses blurred as soon as he stepped inside, so he took them off and smeared them on his trousers as he stepped carefully over out­stretched legs, over handbags and cameras, towards the counter. It was very noisy and suffocatingly hot, smelling of vinegar and cigarette smoke. Before he’d put his glasses back on, the manager loomed in front of him.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said. ‘We’re a bit full up at the moment.’

  Harry fitted his glasses onto his face. When he licked his lips, he could still taste the smoke of the bonfire.

  ‘Can I have a word with Sarah, please?’ he said. ‘I know she’s very busy. Just for half a minute?’

  ‘I’ll give her a shout,’ the man said. ‘But she’s stopping here for the rest of the day. She’s not running off this time. Hang on a minute and I’ll get her.’ He turned to the kitchen, adding over his shoulder, ‘Stay there, stand still, and don’t bloody break anything while you’re waiting.’

  Harry stood still and broke nothing. The customers ignored him, in spite of his dirty clothes and boots and his oily hands; they were all too busy with their children and chips and their postcards to notice the red-headed gardener who leaned on the counter. He looked forward to escaping the restaurant. A tremor of electricity went through him at the simple idea of the sunshine outside and a rapid acceleration from the village . . . to sit in the bird-bright tangle of the garden for ten minutes while the bath was running, to soak away the sweat and the smoke and the urine while the wren and the dunnock moved secretly in the bracken and the blackbird sang in the ash tree; while the toad was feeling with its fingers in the cool undergrowth, blinking its huge, golden eyes from a crevice in the rockery . . .

  The toad! Harry had never heard of the natterjack before. He didn’t know that toads were supposed to be lucky, until the girl had said something about the toadstone . . . Neither he nor the garden could be the same again, now that the girl had been there.

  She came out of the kitchen. Her hair was lank, her face was red and shiny.

  ‘Hello again, Harry,’ she said. She took a pink tissue from the sleeve of her blouse and dabbed her nose. ‘I’m going to be stuck here all afternoon, I’m afraid, now that we’re so busy. No escape this time! You met my uncle?’

  Harry told her what the man had said, that he’d been recognised as a breaker of crockery and a kidnapper of waitresses. As Sarah put away her tissue, pushing the paper into her sleeve, he saw the soft whiteness under her arm.

  ‘What about tomorrow?’ he said. ‘Can I pick you up tomorrow?’

  She frowned, so that Harry wished he hadn’t asked her.

  ‘I’m going climbing with a friend tomorrow,’ she said. ‘On the cliffs at Tremadog. I suppose you could come if you like. I don’t think Patrick will mind.
You’d better say one way or the other, because I’ve got to get back to work now.’ She turned to a man who was waiting to pay, who was brandishing his bill and a pound note, whose wife and children were at the door and ready to go outside.

  ‘I’ll come,’ Harry said. ‘Where shall I meet you?’

  ‘Outside the restaurant at two. All right? See you then.’ Too busy to look at Harry, taking the customer’s money, checking the bill, giving the change, she whirled back into the kitchen.

  Harry drove slowly out of Beddgelert, into the open, high country­side to Rhyd-ddu, the next village, where he was renting a cottage for a few pounds a week. He’d negotiated the use of a corrugated-iron shed in a nearby farmyard, so that he could park the hoodless car under cover; and now he left it there, walked to his front door and let himself in. It was a little stone-built cottage in a terrace of half a dozen other cottages: two up and two down, with a tiny bathroom and kitchen more recently added to the back of it. Pausing to switch on the immersion heater, he continued through the back door and into the garden. In half an hour the water would be lukewarm, good enough for a bath on a summer’s afternoon.

  He sat on the stones of the rockery, closed his eyes and leaned back, tipping his face to the sun. After a minute, keeping his eyes closed, he bent down, took off his boots and peeled off his damp, hot socks. All the time, he had in his mind a picture of the girl, Sarah, who’d done the same thing in the same place; it helped him to focus the picture, repeating her actions as exactly as possible. It was the best he could do, since the girl herself hadn’t come to the garden that afternoon. He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed the ribbings on his feet and ankles that his boots had made, leaned back again and hitched up his trousers to have the sun on his shins . . . As he did all this, he could see the girl sitting on the rockery, with the sun on her throat and her arms and her little white toes. He even felt the ant on his foot, the same ant that had walked on Sarah’s foot, on her calf and her knee and the soft shadow on the inside of her thigh. It was tickling the hair on his instep; but he left it there instead of flicking it off, because it might be the same ant he’d seen on Sarah’s leg. The ant was the tiniest, most exquisite detail that made the picture perfect.