The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘Yes, doctor,’ Harry said. ‘We need to ask a few questions.’

  ‘Well, Mr Clewe, there’s really nothing to it.’ He was a young Englishman, fresh-faced, clean-cut, not long out of medical school. ‘You’re both happy about the news?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie answered. ‘We’re very happy about it. But we need your opinion about . . .’ She paused, wringing her fingers in her lap, dropping her head to hide behind her curtain of hair.

  ‘About what, Mrs Clewe?’ the doctor said. ‘Fire away and I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Well, that’s the point,’ Harry put in. ‘Lizzie isn’t Mrs Clewe. We aren’t married.’

  ‘Of course we aren’t married,’ Lizzie blurted, without looking up. ‘We’re brother and sister. That’s why we’ve got the same sur­name. Harry’s my brother.’ She pulled herself upright, her cheeks pink, her eyes bright, and said in a steady voice, ‘We love each other very much and we want the baby. But we’re not sure if it’s all so straightforward in our case.’

  The doctor flushed too. He blinked very rapidly and leaned back in his chair, glowing. ‘How interesting!’ he murmured. He frowned, flustered. ‘It’s really very interesting,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. No, Mr Clewe, and er, Miss Clewe . . . I’m pretty sure there needn’t be anything out of the ordinary, from the medical point of view. Let me see what I can remember, just off the top of my head.’

  Rattled, he talked briefly on the subject of consanguinity, the effect of a close blood relation on the offspring of such a union. He spoke as though he were spouting some half-digested information he’d learned by heart in case the subject came up in his final examinations. Occasionally he glanced at his watch, speeding up his delivery when he saw what time it was. Recent studies in both Japan and the United States, he was saying, had shown that the chances of damage to children resulting from consanguinity, even from the closest relationships such as brother and sister or father and daughter, were negligible; only ignorance and superstition had created taboos. Indeed, there were some societies which positively cultivated inbreeding in order to maintain a pure stock, to preserve existing hierarchies; conversely, in other societies there was such a fear of it that the law had made certain unions illegal.

  The doctor, smiling now, gaining in confidence as he remem­bered more of his recent studies, had started to sort some papers into his bag. He was preparing to set off on his rounds.

  ‘So, you have nothing to worry about,’ he concluded. ‘Your union isn’t illegal, although, admittedly, a certain taboo exists. You’ll learn to live with that, I’m sure. Finally, what you really wanted to know is this: the horror of resulting damage to children is nothing but an old wives’ tale. How’s that?’

  He stood up. So did Harry and Lizzie.

  ‘I’ve got to dash off now,’ the doctor said. ‘But don’t hesitate to call in again, if you want to. Have a word with the receptionist and make an appointment for another time.’

  Harry and Lizzie emerged into the town square, into the chill drizzle of a new year.

  The rain had come on again that evening, obliterating any other sound from the seashore. The boat was stuck in the mud. The fire filled the cabin with smoke, the whining of wood and the popping explosions of bladderwrack. Lizzie lay on the bed, ignoring the magazine beside her. Harry reached for his flute. Cocooned in the Ozymandias, listening to the spitting driftwood and the perpetual patter of raindrops, he felt another night come tiptoeing into the estuary; it stole across the dunes, crept in with the same insidious stealth as the flowing tide . . . to enfold the boat in darkness.

  Harry played scales. He practised exercises. Concentrating hard, he continued to work. When the Ozymandias was lifted from the mud, it seemed that for the first time neither he nor Lizzie noticed it: the moment passed unremarked. Harry was intent on a troublesome phrase, where both the fingering and the breathing eluded him, and he repeated it over and over. Lizzie glared at the ceiling, saying nothing, until she could stand it no longer.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Harry!’ she hissed. She stood up so quickly that the cabin rocked with the suddenness of her movement. ‘Can’t you read it? You’re making it sound bloody impossible!’ She snatched the music from in front of him. ‘Let me have a look, before you drive me completely crazy.’

  He submitted, craning up at her while she scanned the sheet. She seemed to fill all the space. She was all he could see: she eclipsed the fire and towered to the low ceiling. Then she said, ‘It’s not exactly difficult, is it? Look, you’ve marked your breathing in the wrong place. That’s what makes it so hard for you. Try it again, the whole phrase without a breath until you get to bar seven.’ She dropped the music onto the bed.

  He put the instrument to his lips. His mouth was dry. His fingers quivered slightly as they hovered on the cold machinery. As he began to play, Lizzie remained standing over him. And when he faltered again, his hands and his breath refusing to coordinate, she spat a single, unlovely word he’d never heard her use before and she snatched the flute from him.

  ‘Can’t you read?’ she shouted. ‘Or are you just bloody useless?’

  Without another glance at the music, she played the entire phrase from one end to the other, without a pause for breath.

  ‘Like that!’ she snapped, thrusting the instrument towards him. ‘If you can’t do it, Harry, then leave it, please! Otherwise I can’t bear it!’ She spun away from him, up the cabin steps and onto the deck.

  He attended to the stove. He placed among the flames some pieces of an old chair he’d found washed up, to which the seaweed had attached itself. The weed turned from black to grey, until its blisters burst with a spattering like distant gunfire. He squatted there, feeling the warmth on his face, and he wondered where the chair had come from, what kind of rooms it had been in and who’d sat on it before it had been thrown away, arriving as driftwood for him to gather on the shore. The flames grew hotter, driving him onto the bed.

  As he’d expected, Lizzie soon came back, because the rain was still falling hard. She knelt by the fire, her hair sequinned with droplets. She shivered suddenly and very violently, so that the water flew from her head and fizzed into the flames. Having returned from the deck, she filled the cabin again. There was some­thing powerful about her, which Harry had felt as soon as she’d arrived at the Ozymandias, even when it had seemed as though he’d had the ascendancy, on his boat, on his estuary, in his world. Now the power of her personality flooded the cabin of the Ozymandias, pervasive as the pungency of sizzling kelp.

  Overshadowed by her temper and her quicksilver demonstra­tion with the flute, he took up the instrument from the bed. At last, he ran smoothly through the troublesome phrase.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Harry’s pupils came one by one to the boat, once he’d arranged their lessons and negotiated his fee on the telephone. They were beginners, and Harry was sure he was competent to instruct them; but he was nervous at first, more nervous than they were, until he relaxed and concentrated on the work. The novelty of being on a boat on the shore of a wide-open estuary, especially in the evenings when there was a swell and the darkness grew noisy with rain or wind, clearly intrigued the students; so that, even before he’d proved his ability as a teacher, Harry felt that he had their interest. The Ozymandias lent him a little glamour, an eccentricity which impressed his visitors.

  For the arrival of the first pupil, Lizzie had taken pains to make the cabin especially attractive, with flowers and seashells, the rug and the quilt lit up by the flames of a good fire. Moreover, she’d slipped a ring onto the third finger of her left hand; she noticed that Harry had noticed, and they nodded at one another without saying anything.

  Frank was a man of forty, who drove out of Caernarfon and down to the shore in a Morris Minor. He had shoulder-length black hair, very thick and flecked with grey, and he always came in the same blue jeans and khaki combat jacket. He was goggle-eyed when he first stepped into the war
mth and light of the cabin, reluctant to break the spell by taking his flute from its case.

  ‘Hey, this is beautiful, man!’ he drawled. ‘A great place you’ve got here!’ He stared around, rearranging a crooked smile on his face, and said at last, ‘Hey, you don’t mind, do you?’ before performing the ritual of rolling a joint on the sheet music he’d brought with him.

  For Frank, whose hair and dress were the uniform of a harmless nonconformity, these visits to the Ozymandias were evenings of loose, inconsequential chat with Harry Clewe and his fragile young wife, who smiled enigmatically as she knelt by the fire and lowered her coppery head to the flames . . . a chance for Frank to talk about music, of his travels in Afghanistan, Alaska and the Amazon basin, of poems and stars. The boat was the quintessence of the Wales he’d come looking for. His flute playing was breathy and muted; it suited Frank, just as the Ozymandias and its gentle restlessness suited him.

  Lizzie watched and listened, apart. She said little, nor did she accept the proffered joint, although she followed the intricacies of its preparation with a gleam in her eyes and her nostrils flared at the heavy perfume. Harry smoked, and he countered the strangest of Frank’s Third World reminiscences with his stories of Sudan. Lizzie maintained her alertness. She was vigilant, however garrulous her brother might become.

  Dewi cycled from Bontnewydd, the nearest village. Sixteen years old, the boy was so tall that he could hardly stand upright inside the cabin, but held himself like a huge, skinny question mark until he was persuaded to sit down. His face was a minefield of spots, some of which had exploded and left a deep, raw crater, others charged with poison and ready to blow at the slightest touch; for this reason and the spurt of growth which had made him so conspicuous, he was excruciatingly shy. If Lizzie met his eyes, he would drop his head and glow until his ears were purple. If she smiled at him, he would recoil as though he’d been scorched. But Dewi became confident with the flute, blushing at Lizzie’s words of praise, not knowing that she was outstandingly qualified to judge his musicianship. When the boy left, she had kind words for the teacher too, and this made Harry happy.

  The third of the pupils was an Englishwoman in her late thirties. Her name was Helen Ince. She arrived at the mooring in a silver Daimler. She had dark, sleek good looks. She smoked a tiny cigar. During the preliminaries to her lessons, when there was general conversation about the novelty and charm of the Ozymandias and about living in Wales, she recounted the circumstances of her recent divorce from a barrister, the sale of their house in Kingston-­upon-Thames and a flat in Chelsea. With her share of the proceeds, Helen was able to start a new life. Now she was in Wales, the owner of a substantial house on the seashore, not far from Caernarfon, with money left over for living and for work on the property. She’d always wanted to learn the flute. She opened a case and flourished a very expensive instrument.

  ‘Well, what do you think of her?’ Harry had asked Lizzie after the first of Helen’s lessons, when the woman had driven away. ‘Pretty glamorous for these parts, isn’t she?’

  And Lizzie had shrugged, with a sniff and a pout, answering, ‘Money, of course. Expensive clothes and hair, and that’s expensive perfume she’s wearing. Flashy car. I didn’t think much of her. She’ll never play the flute, I can tell you that much.’

  So, as the dark afternoons and evenings of January slipped by, the cabin of the Ozymandias was left with the lingering scents of its three weekly visitors. The fragrance of marijuana remained when Frank had gone, and Lizzie was mellowed by the man’s rueful nostalgia. After Dewi, there was a faintly chemical odour of whatever treatment he was using on his face, and Lizzie had enjoyed watching his progress. Helen Ince swept out in a haze of perfume, while Lizzie affected indifference.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Winter was hard. Harry was used to it, after years on his own aboard the Ozymandias. Lizzie wasn’t. The weather wore her down. The drizzle drove deep into the hull of the boat. Rain found a way through the roof of the cabin, dripping with a fizz onto the hot stove. The winds, which had started in the coldest and drear­iest corners of the world, hurtled over the dunes, raising an icy spray from the estuary which spattered the portholes with salt. Either the Ozymandias lay on the black mud and simply shuddered, or it rode the swell, bucking, trembling, ramming the wall so that the buffers squealed and groaned. Harry and Lizzie were warm enough, as the stove consumed wet wood, but the fog of smoke gave Lizzie headaches and made her eyes stream. Harry tramped the shoreline for fuel, bringing in planks and spars and branches that never quite dried before it was their turn to go into the flames; meanwhile, the salt water dripped from them and ran across the floorboards. Days went by when the world was blanketed in the mist which rolled in from the sea, and then Harry and Lizzie would stay in bed, rising periodically, rubbing their eyes at the sting of smoke, to feed the stove, to make coffee, to cook beans, to use the toilet in the dank darkness of the forward cabin. They lay enfolded in one another’s limbs, in a thrall of lethargy induced by the winter weather, rousing themselves to sluggish action when Frank or Dewi or Helen was expected, so that once more the Ozymandias became a bright and welcoming place.

  In its case, the cello warped and split. It was racked with damp. It seized, like an athlete crippled with arthritis. Abandoned and broken, it was a dead thing.

  Snow covered the mountains. On the coast, although it bore the brunt of the winds from the Irish Sea, it didn’t freeze, even if a snap during the January and February afternoons seemed to threaten a frost. When Lizzie was dispirited, Harry would try to hearten her by the example of the migrant birds whose presence on the estuary proclaimed that these were milder, more sheltered shores than the ones they’d been forced to leave.

  ‘See how lucky we are!’ he would say, aiming his battered binoculars out of the portholes despite the drumming of rain on the roof. ‘Relatively speaking, this is an easy climate! Look at those birds out there – all kinds of waders, some of them weighing no more than a couple of ounces, which have flown thousands of miles to get here, to escape a real winter in Iceland, Greenland, Norway or even Russia. All we’ve got is a bit of rain to put up with.’

  Before Christmas, there had been fieldfare and redwing from Scandinavia, which pillaged the hedgerows for berries: theirs was an invasion, followed by looting. Now that the hawthorn and the rowan were bare, these handsome thrushes worked the land for grubs, among the lapwings and oystercatchers, the starlings and gulls. On the water, a dozen swans had arrived one night from Siberia; they were Bewicks, elegant, aloof, with cold yellow faces.

  But Harry’s jovial references to colder and wetter countries did nothing to alleviate the dreariness of the Ozymandias’s mooring on the estuary. He sensed that Lizzie was sinking. She huddled before the stove and stared into its smouldering fire. February was drowned: it was a month of rain and mist, when everything was clammy. The sky no longer towered like the vaulting of a great cathedral; it flapped like a wet, grey blanket on a washing line. The horizon shrank to a line of matted dunes, beyond which the thunder of surf was only a part of Lizzie’s smoky headache. The days blurred together.

  She grew impatient with the flute lessons, and with Harry’s persistent good humour when his students were due.

  ‘Who’s coming tonight, maestro?’ she would ask. ‘Are you going to end up stoned with Frank or intoxicated with the loveliness of Helen Ince? At least with Dewi we get a bit of music . . . using the term loosely, of course.’

  And Harry would try to disguise his wincing with a smile, turn­ing aside her jibes. ‘Fair’s fair, Lizzie,’ he’d say. ‘You know young Dewi’s in love with you. You can tell by the way he flares up whenever you look at him. And so I’m in love with the glamorous Helen. As for Frank, he’s in love with himself and his idea of exploring the cosmos in Wales. But tonight it’s my tryst with Helen. We’re going to make sweet music together, right here in front of the fire.’

  Then, realising the clumsiness of his banter, seeing Lizzie’s face begin
to crumple, he would hold her very tightly and rock with her on the bed. ‘Come on, my real love,’ he’d whisper to her. ‘Cheer up! In a few weeks the winter will be gone and everything about the Ozymandias will be as wonderful as it was when you first arrived. In fact, it’ll be better: the spring is lovely here. And don’t forget, we have an exciting summer ahead of us!’

  They would kiss, separating at the crunch of tyres on the gravel of the sea wall, rearranging themselves for the footfall on deck. ‘Mean­while, Lizzie,’ he would add, ‘these lessons are paying for a present I’m getting for you. Maybe next week I’ll collect it.’

  Inevitably in such a confined space, her discomfort was transmitted to Harry and his pupils. She would sit in a corner of the cabin and pretend to read, trying not to flinch at the beginners’ ineptitude. Frank didn’t mind. He simply guffawed to see how she winced; she could go so far as to cover her ears with her hands without really offending him. For him, it was a pleasant evening on board the Ozymandias, of which the flute lesson was just a part. However, Dewi was especially vulnerable. Lizzie never interfered, because she could hear that the boy was competent and conscientious, but she could still unnerve him with a glance or a sharp intake of breath.

  She bristled in the presence of Helen Ince. It was a torment for Lizzie to have her in the cabin. It wasn’t only that Helen was a woman whom Harry clearly found attractive; the little space was not enough for her and Lizzie together. During the lessons, Lizzie huffed in her corner. She would get up and fling herself about, feeding the fire or making the coffee with such a clatter that Harry would have to say, ‘Can you hold on a moment, Lizzie, while we do this bit? It’s quite tricky. Maybe I’ll make some coffee when Helen’s finished her lesson.’ Or else, if the wind and rain allowed, Lizzie went on deck those evenings, with blankets, binoculars and one of her brother’s star books, so that Harry and Helen could relax and sit more closely together on the bed. They would hear Lizzie moving overhead, and feel the swaying of the boat. Lizzie followed her route among the constellations, and even the stars would shudder as she fixed them in the dark tunnels of the binoculars, as she heard the fumblings on the flute below. Coming downstairs when Helen had driven away, she found the cabin warm, the quilt rumpled, and the air giddy with the woman’s perfume.