The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  At last the man was forced to pause for breath. Harry managed to repeat that Lizzie was recovering from the shock of her parents’ sudden death, that she was taking the opportunity of enjoying a break she’d never had since she was ten years old. He suggested that it wasn’t such a bad thing if she enjoyed the break a bit longer before returning, refreshed, to her work with the cello. But when he left the man’s study, he felt as though he’d been mauled by a grizzly bear.

  He returned to the hall of residence, where he thought it would be an easier matter to talk to the warden, to unlock Lizzie’s door again and take out the cello and a few clothes. It wasn’t. The warden was suspicious. She was a burly, middle-aged woman with a wall-eye, who insisted on telephoning Lizzie’s tutor to confirm that this tousled young man was really the student’s older brother, who might reasonably have access to the girl’s room and walk away with a valuable musical instrument. There ensued a conversation between the tutor and the warden about the extraordinariness of the student’s removal to a boat in Wales.

  Again it was the Welshness that rankled. When at last the woman put the phone down, she squinted at Harry, barely satisfied by what the tutor had told her, and said, ‘So, she’s in Wales. I wondered where she’d got to. In Wales . . .’ Leading Harry along the corridor to Lizzie’s door, she continued to mutter the word, repeating it over and over, as a child might savour a new obscenity it had picked up in the playground. Harry blew the dust from the heavy black case in which the cello was locked. One of the woman’s eyes followed his every movement as he gathered an armful of socks and underwear from a bedside drawer and packed them into a bag; the other eye watched the ceiling.

  Somehow he wrestled the cello and the bag across London. He wanted to get out of the city as quickly as possible. As the train accelerated into open country, his spirits rose. He leaned back in his seat and thought of the warm, gently rocking cabin of the Ozymandias.

  Chapter Eight

  It was nearly midnight as he walked the last hundred yards along the seashore towards the boat. It was dark and cold, but he was warm enough with the effort of trudging from Caernarfon with the bag and the cello. A tall, unwavering plume of smoke rose from the chimney of the Ozymandias, and a light glowed at the port­holes. Lizzie unlocked the door when he knocked on it and they hugged each other breathless on the swaying deck. She winced when she saw the cello, but said nothing. They went below.

  She’d transformed the cabin. Harry stared around it, surprised and impressed. ‘Good Lord, Lizzie!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ve been busy, haven’t you?’ There was fresh white paint on the walls and the ceiling. Bright curtains hung at the windows, a bright, thick rug lay on the floor, and a colourful quilt lay on the bed. There were flowers in jugs, seashells and unusual pebbles in saucers. The fire burned hot in the stove, throwing out golden flames, and the driftwood stacked in the corner exhaled a breath of the beach.

  ‘It’s terrific!’ he said. ‘What a job! And I was worried that you mightn’t be all right! It looks as though you can cope pretty well. But have you spent a lot of money?’

  They sat down. He was relieved to get out of his coat and drop the cello. The boat rocked on a rising tide, stirred at its moorings. Lizzie assured him that everything she’d bought was from the charity shops in Caernarfon, the rug and the quilt and the remnants she’d used for the curtains, and the paint had been on special offer from the do-it-yourself store.

  ‘Don’t worry anyway,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of money in my account. Mum and Dad made sure of that, to supplement my grant. And what about the will? We’re going to be quite rich, the two of us. Aren’t we?’

  He told her about his meeting with her tutor and her warden. ‘I only stalled them, you know,’ he said. ‘That’s all. We can’t just leave it like that. You’ve only just started the course. They’re expect­ing you back, sooner or later. I practically promised them you’d go back, and I promised that in the meantime you’d be here sawing away at the cello, practising just as you’re supposed to be doing in London. Before I left your room, I checked that there’s plenty of music in the cello case, as well as a few spare strings, your bow and rosin, so there’s no excuse for not practising. You ought to telephone your tutor, that’s the least you can do. This is all marvellous, of course.’ He gestured around the firelit cosiness of the redecorated cabin. ‘It’s all marvellous, Lizzie, but . . .’

  Here, his words dried up. He remembered the horrors of London, the stinks and the dirt and the faceless mobs, and how relieved he’d been to escape. Must his sister go back there? Must she bind herself once more to a regime she hated, straddling the cello with her thin, white legs, bending her body to it? The thought made his stomach squirm.

  ‘But what?’ she said, with a tiny, mysterious smile on her face. ‘But what, Harry? Come on, let’s put this horrible thing away.’

  She took the cello, lugged it into the forward cabin, propped it up beside the chemical toilet and closed the door on it. She sat on the bed, very close to him, and leaned her smiling mouth towards his mouth.

  ‘But what, Harry?’ she whispered. ‘You don’t really want me to go back to London, do you?’

  So a second weekend went by. There was no talk of music, the cello, the Royal College. Harry and Lizzie shelved all that and let the days and nights look after themselves. They remained silent on the whole subject, as though it would go away and leave them alone. Every other day they walked into Caernarfon for showering and shopping, and it was then that Harry’s stomach seemed to buckle at the sight of a telephone kiosk, while Lizzie would tug him past it with a determined smile on her face. She wouldn’t phone.

  Another week slipped by, October into November. Gradually, in their minds, the idea of Lizzie’s commitment to studying in London became dimmer and dimmer, like a dream they’d almost forgotten, a dream which only nagged a little in their memories. The time dissolved into nothing. It didn’t matter what day it was. Harry and Lizzie were engrossed with one another: with their exploration of the estuary for fuel and for treasures, with the tides and the rhythmic movements of the Ozymandias, with the shifting patterns of the birds on the sands, with the fixity of the stars in the sky . . .

  The sky. The seas and the river and the shining mudflats were merely a reflected fragment of it. In the mornings, it was a tow­ering white vault, raising a foam of cloud. In the afternoon, it was a canopy of beaten silver, which silvered everything beneath it. In the evenings, there were flames, as though, just over the horizon, a huge city were besieged and burning. And at night, there were stars on a background of black emptiness.

  The Ozymandias was a speck. Harry and Lizzie were mites, cling­ing so hard together in the swaying, creaking darkness of their boat that they became one mite: microscopic, but alive, breath­ing and warm under an icy heaven.

  A month passed since their parents’ death. And soon, as natural as breathing, as warm and as soft as their breath in the firelit cabin, Harry and Lizzie were lovers.

  Chapter Nine

  Harry continued to nurse the idea that Lizzie might yet return to her studies in London. She might go back after Christmas to start the new term, and these weeks on board the Ozymandias would have been a curious episode, a time in which a brother and sister had fallen in love and become lovers in a way which neither of them could have foreseen or prevented.

  But for Lizzie, the matter was closed. She wore an expression of fierce, formidable happiness. It seemed to say: ‘I was once a child in the care of loving but repressive parents . . . now I’m an adult with my own life to lead. I was once bound to a carcase of highly polished, tightly clenched wood . . . now I live and move freely under a huge sky.’

  She would smile determinedly as she marched ahead of Harry on the shore, as she bent with a cry of excitement to something quaint or bizarre in the debris of the high-water line, as she stum­bled over the slippery boulders with an armful of driftwood. The tilt of her chin and the glitter of her eyes were defiant; here was a joy
she would not relinquish to anyone. It was a joy she shared with Harry. Since it was Harry who’d initiated her removal to this wild, open world of seas and skies, so she loved him. She loved him with a passion that made her giddy.

  The feeling was mutual. He was dazed just by watching her: a movement of her bright, red head or the flex of her slim body would make his stomach plunge. When she turned on the beach, pointed her little white face at him and flashed a smile, his head would reel. To hold her close and love her in the rumpled blankets of their warm cabin was to feel the rest of the world dissolve into nothingness, whether the Ozymandias was becalmed on a bed of mud or riding a driving swell. Harry and Lizzie were utterly ab­sorbed in one another and their place. Still, sometimes, he hoped that she might one day lay a finger on the cello again.

  A postman came with two letters. He was disgruntled, obliged to cycle down the narrow, muddy track to the foreshore, but the address was on the envelopes and it was his duty to deliver. One of the envelopes, originally postmarked in London, was addressed to Miss Elizabeth Clewe at the family house in Shrewsbury, to be forwarded if possible. Someone had redirected it to ‘The Ozymandias (a houseboat), The Estuary, near Carnarvon, North Wales’. There were two notes inside it, from Lizzie’s warden and her tutor, which Lizzie read out loud, her voice ringing clear and high in the little cabin.

  The warden, the wall-eyed woman whom Harry had met, had written to say that the student’s belongings were safe for the time being in her allotted room, but there was a waiting list for places in the hall of residence and another student would be admitted in the New Year if Lizzie had decided not to come back.

  Her tutor wrote:

  ‘Dear Miss Clewe,

  ‘Since I’ve heard no news of you since your brother’s visit, I assume that you will not be taking up your place at the College, at least for this term. What a pity! We are putting on the Dvorak cello concerto at Christmas and would have loved to have heard you play: a great and glorious work! While I am concerned that you are well, following the tragic loss of your parents, I should remind you that your scholarship was contested by a number of other young musicians, who might have grasped the opportunity with more seriousness and maturity. I sincerely hope that you will consider . . .’

  Lizzie stopped reading. She snorted with a strange, uncouth laughter, crumpling the notes in her hand and tossing them into the stove. Her smile remained intact, as hard and as cold as ice. For her, the matter was closed.

  ‘Well, Harry? What’s in the other letter?’ she asked him. ‘Come on, open it. I think it’s from Daddy’s solicitor.’

  She was right. The other envelope was postmarked in Shrews­bury, addressed to Harry and Elizabeth Clewe, their names jux­taposed as though, instead of being brother and sister, they were husband and wife. The letter was about their parents’ will. At first they read it quickly, skimming the lines for the gist. Then, stunned into breathlessness, they slumped on the bed and reread the letter very slowly. It made no difference to Harry, who’d never expected an inheritance, who’d assumed he’d been cut off a long time ago, alienated and estranged from his disappointed parents. But it would have made a difference to Lizzie.

  There was no money. Although the Clewes had kept up appearances, maintaining the house in suburban Shrewsbury, financing Lizzie’s private education and expensive music tuition, there was nothing left, now that they were dead, to benefit their beloved, brilliant daughter. Nothing. The Clewes had been broke, or rather, living precariously on the brink of being broke. They’d lost catastrophically on the stock market. The house was mortgaged and re-mortgaged to the hilt. There were no insurance policies; the solicitor reported bleakly that these had been cashed to see Lizzie through her last few years at school.

  At last, after a long silence, Lizzie said, ‘I’m glad, in a way.’

  Harry’s mouth fell open. He stared at her, agog, and she burst out laughing, the same snorting, uncouth laughter with which she’d greeted the letter from her tutor.

  ‘Well, don’t look so amazed, Harry!’ she cried. ‘Did you think I was going to break down crying? A spoiled little heiress, heart­broken because she hasn’t inherited a fortune from Mummy and Daddy?’ She crumpled the solicitor’s letter and tossed it into the flames. ‘There! That’s the end of it! It’s all gone! We’re on our own now, Harry. We’re adrift on the ocean, on board the Ozymandias. It’s what I wanted. I told you that, didn’t I? Don’t you remember? I told you! It’s what I wanted!’

  She flung herself at him. She hugged him so hard that all his breath was squeezed from him. Still laughing at what she’d said and her brother’s dumbfounded expression, she forced him back­wards on the bed. She smothered his face with her hair. So they lay panting, their bodies joined, and the boat seemed to rock as they rocked, as though they were drifting away from their moorings, further and further out to sea, further and further from the world they’d known. Yes, they were adrift, adrift together.

  Harry hugged Lizzie as hard as she hugged him. His heart seemed to rise in his chest, to swell and burst with the love he felt for her. He stared through her hair, which was soft and fragrant on his face, and he blinked through the tears in his eyes. Yes, oh yes, he wanted her with him, alone, adrift . . . but the letter from her tutor confirmed that the option of her returning to London was still there, if she should choose to take it. He was torn, terribly torn, between wishing she might resume her studies, to nurture her talent instead of letting it waste away, and wanting her to stay with him for ever on board the Ozymandias. As her brother and her lover, he felt the dilemma like a stab of pain inside him.

  Chapter Ten

  It was the beginning of December. Both the brittlestars, the one that Lizzie had found on her first morning and the one that Harry had brought in from the squalling of gulls, were dead. They’d died in their shallow tray. Lizzie had taken them out of the water, thrown the water away, and kept the brittlestars with her other relics of the beach, the bones and feathers and shells she’d brought in and arranged prettily around the cabin. The brittlestars dried and stiffened. They were fragile wafers of the squirming, sinuous creatures they’d been, as dry as biscuit, as dead as ice. Lizzie kept them on the shelf in the corner, where Harry’s bird books, poetry books and star books were neatly stacked together.

  Harry’s flute was there too, in its case, almost invisible between the top of the shelf and the beams of the ceiling. He hadn’t touched it for years, although, in his schooldays, he’d been a com­petent flautist. Mischievously, thinking of Lizzie’s cello left silent and neglected in the forward cabin, he reached for his flute one evening, as he and Lizzie sat in the cabin together. She was flipping the pages of a magazine. She didn’t glance up as he lifted the long, slim, black case from the bookshelf and opened it on the bed.

  The flute shone cold and silver in the firelight. As Harry leafed through a sheaf of sheet music, he saw, from the corner of his eye, that Lizzie was watching him. She was pretending not to, but her breathing was altered. There was a tension in her, as though the chill of the flute had touched her across the quiet, warm cabin.

  ‘It’s years since I had a go with this,’ he said. ‘I was in the school orchestra, you know, at Wrekin. I bet we sounded bloody terrible, wheezing and scraping! I got to grade eight, though. I used to think I was quite good, until you came along, my brainy, brilliant baby sister, and showed me up.’

  She didn’t say anything. She curled herself into the chair, kick­ing off her slippers and folding her legs beneath her, and pretended to be engrossed in reading. As she dipped her head to the magazine, her long red hair fell around her face like a screen. She was hiding from him.

  ‘I’ll be a bit rusty, I expect,’ he went on. ‘My fingers will have seized up. And the flute might be rusty too, although it’s been in its case all the time. Let’s have a go . . .’ He tried a scale, licked his lips and tried again, pleasantly surprised by the tone of the instrument. ‘Hey, it sounds all right, doesn’t it, Lizzie? Quite nic
e acoustics on board the Ozymandias. What do you think?’

  She looked up at him, flicking her hair from her face. Her smile was different, somehow askew. ‘The tone’s fine,’ she said. ‘When you’ve got it warmed up, I expect the tuning will improve. I hope so, anyway.’ She dropped her head to the magazine.

  Undeterred, Harry continued to work. He practised scales and exercises, ran through some of the pieces he’d studied years ago, as a sixth-former in public school. He impressed himself with the way he could still play, although he fluffed and fumbled here and there. His eyes met Lizzie’s as she moved around the cabin to refuel the stove or make coffee. The anxiety caused by the unexpected appearance of the flute, its exhumation, diminished over the course of the evening, as the surprise wore off and Harry’s sensitivity to pitch became keener. Lizzie relaxed again. She dropped the magazine, lay down on the bed and listened as he played. So he grew more and more confident; at first, he’d been nervous with Lizzie as his audience. He steeled himself to the grimace on her face when he was clumsy. He ignored her flinching at his wayward tuning. He played on, sensing her initial misgivings turn to tolerance.

  At last, when he stopped and shut the flute and the music into the case, he lay down beside her on the bed. He whispered into her hair. ‘Now, that didn’t hurt too much, did it? Are your delicate little eardrums still intact? Or is that another piece of your intactness that your big, bad brother has stolen from you? It hurts a bit the first time, but I promise it gets better and better . . .’

  It was the first of successive evenings when he practised with the flute. However, Lizzie made no move to touch the cello, which remained in its case, in its corner, beside the chemical toilet. He wondered how he might encourage her to play again.