The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  Lizzie brooded on her inactivity. She seldom joined Harry on the beach. She would hear him returning to the Ozymandias, feel the lurch of the boat as he came aboard, watch him drop a load of driftwood by the stove. Then, instead of straight away slipping under the blankets with her, he must stack the wood to let it dry more quickly, he must fetch water from the basins on deck, he must empty the chemical toilet . . . She knew these were things that had to be done, as he’d done them for himself all his years alone on the boat; but it irked her to see him so busy while she grew lumpish.

  And it troubled Harry, as Lizzie became increasingly reluctant to stir from the fireside, that she’d merely exchanged the regime of her adolescence for this confinement on the Ozymandias.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In the first week of March, Harry announced that he would return from his walk into Caernarfon with the present he’d mentioned before.

  ‘Soon be spring,’ he said as he prepared to leave on the shopping expedition, while Lizzie stayed behind. For weeks she hadn’t accompanied him into town, although on her last visit she’d been to the clinic and was pronounced fit; the baby was scheduled to arrive at the end of August. All was well with her pregnancy, in spite of her earlier anxiety. The concept of consanguinity was mentioned here and there by the young doctor and then put aside; it was treated like an interesting but worthless antique, something to be brought out of the attic, gently ridiculed, and returned to the attic until the next time someone asked to see it.

  Harry said, ‘It looks as though we’ve seen off the worst of the winter. I’ve saved up a bit to get something that’ll make life easier for us, something we can both use. Do us good too.’

  So it was that, having taken the usual three-quarters of an hour to walk into town, he returned in less than fifteen minutes – on a bicycle, with the shopping slung in a basket on the handlebars.

  Lizzie came on deck, summoned by the ringing of Harry’s bell. She shivered in the thin afternoon sunshine. Her hair, once so bright, was dull and dark around her face. The roundness of her stomach was already pronounced. She shuddered at her brother’s high spirits, for he was rosy with the exhilaration of his ride along the seashore track. He propped the bicycle against the wall while he handed the shopping to her, and she put the bag down on the deck.

  ‘Come and have a look!’ he said excitedly, helping her ashore. ‘It was advertised in the newsagent’s window. It only took me ten minutes to get back from Caernarfon! Now that the weather’s improving, either of us can go into town whenever we want, instead of feeling as though we’re stuck out here. It’s an easy ride, dead flat all the way!’

  He tilted her pale, pointed face up to his. ‘I know it’s been dismal for you, Lizzie, the last couple of months. It was bound to be, if you think about it, spending the winter on a boat in the middle of nowhere. I’ve got pretty used to it; I’ve even got to like it, in a funny sort of way! You haven’t been out at all. Now there’s no excuse!’

  He grabbed the bicycle and tinkled the bell. ‘Lots of air and exercise this spring! Even in your condition, as they say! There’s no reason why you can’t have a slow and gentle ride along the shore now and then, and into Caernarfon. Well? What do you think?’

  As soon as he let go of her chin, she lowered her eyes and looked away. She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘What’s the matter, Lizzie?’ he said. ‘Aren’t you pleased? I got it for you.’ He took hold of her chin again.

  ‘I can’t ride it,’ she said softly, meeting his eyes. ‘I’ve never been able to, so it’s not much good for me.’ Seeing his surprise and dis­appointment, she added, ‘But thank you, Harry. You’ll be able to use it, won’t you, in and out of town?’ This time it was her hand that went to his face and touched his lips.

  ‘You never learned to ride a bike?’ he asked her, incredulous. ‘You must have! Didn’t Dad ever show you? Didn’t you ever have a bike at home?’

  ‘Dad tried to teach me once, but he didn’t have much patience,’ she answered. ‘Anyway, I was always too busy with my music, and with horses, at least until my accident. No, Harry, I never had a bike. It’s just something I never got round to . . .’

  ‘Well, I’ll show you,’ he said in a brisk, no-nonsense voice. ‘Look, it’s a nice small one, a lady’s, without a crossbar. Just right for you. Come on, Lizzie, I’ll show you . . .’

  But she refused to go near it. With more shrugs and shakes of her head, she tried to elude him, and both of them affected a desperate jollity which masked her fear and his impatience. They appeared to laugh, wrestling with one another, but it was the laughter of stubbornness, through clenched teeth. He picked her up and swung her; he carried her from the deck when she’d retreated there, he carried her and swung her kicking legs. Her giggles started to crack. His encouragement was losing its playfulness. At last their efforts at good humour collapsed. As he heaved her towards the bicycle, which stood waiting against the wall like a patient donkey, she wriggled so hard that he was forced to drop her. She sat heavily on the ground. He stood over her, panting.

  ‘You’re being childish,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘You could at least have a go. Any child can ride a bike. It’s not normally con­sidered a difficult thing to do. If you can ride a bloody great horse, for heaven’s sake, then surely you can manage this!’

  She glowered up at him. Before she could reply, there was an unmistakable sound from along the track, the whirring of wheels and the crunch of tyres on gravel, as someone else approached on a bicycle. As Lizzie got to her feet and they both stared into the distance, they saw the bicycle appear and come fast towards them. They recognised the lanky, angular figure of Dewi. He skidded expertly to a halt.

  ‘Hello, Mr Clewe,’ he said, dismounting. He nodded at Lizzie, mumbled, ‘Hello, Mrs Clewe,’ and ducked his head from her, as though she might assault him with a smile. ‘I just called by to see you, Mr Clewe,’ he went on. ‘I can’t make it for my next lesson, I’m afraid. There’s some sort of a do on at school and I’ve got to be there. I thought I’d call in to excuse myself.’

  ‘That’s fine, Dewi,’ Harry replied. ‘We’ll give it a miss this week. Thanks for coming to tell me.’

  ‘You’ve got yourself a bike,’ the boy said. ‘A lady’s.’ This reference to Lizzie initiated a furious blush, starting on his mottled forehead, suffusing the raw blistering on his nose and chin, draining to his neck. His complexion was worse than ever: he had a face like a pizza. ‘Good idea, Mr Clewe. It’s no time at all from here into town.’ He blurted the words, relieved to see that Lizzie wasn’t looking at him.

  ‘That’s right,’ Harry said. ‘Ten minutes or so. But I’m afraid Lizzie – er, Mrs Clewe – doesn’t like it much.’

  She scowled at him and blushed, not as violently as Dewi had done, but longer, the colour persisting as he said, ‘I was trying to persuade her to have a go, just now, as you arrived. But without success.’ To her he added, ‘Come on, love. Me and Dewi will help you. It was a stroke of luck, wasn’t it, having this young man turn up on his bike to give us a hand? What do you reckon?’

  Dewi grinned, his self-confidence rising with this appeal to his expertise. For once, he managed to address Lizzie directly, without blushing. ‘Can’t you ride a bike, Mrs Clewe? That’s amazing! I’ve never met anyone before who couldn’t. It’s easy! We could teach you in five minutes.’

  Unable to refuse, Lizzie allowed herself to be seated on the bicycle. She essayed a smile, but it disfigured her face like a scar. ‘Don’t let me go, please!’ she cried in a trembling voice. Her knuck­les whitened on the handlebars, and Harry could feel the quivering of her body when he placed a steadying hand on her back.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Try to relax. Just sit there. You don’t have to do anything else. You’ve got me holding you this side and Dewi on the other. Now, we’re going to walk you very slowly along the track. All right, Dewi? Off we go . . .’

  This they did. If the curlew had lifted a quizzical
eye, if the heron had turned its dagger head, they would have seen the ludicrous progress of three people and a bicycle along the edge of the seashore, the three of them bound together by their concentration and the skeleton of the machine to resemble some extraordinary crablike creature which might just then have emerged from the sands. But the estuary ignored them. The crackle of drying weed absorbed the ticking of the wheels. Harry muttered reassurance; Dewi crouched like a mantis; and Lizzie sat bolt upright, like a princess flanked by eunuchs. She was terrified. A flock of peewits somersaulted from the fields, clapping their black and white wings as though to applaud her passing, but she didn’t see them. After a hundred yards, Harry said, ‘We’ll turn round now and head back. Maybe a bit faster this time.’ He exchanged a nod with Dewi.

  Harry and Dewi accelerated to a trot. ‘Keep your feet on the pedals, Mrs Clewe!’ the boy was saying. ‘Look straight ahead, not down at the wheel!’

  So the crab-creature scuttled, faster and faster, until, at the signal of another nod behind Lizzie’s back, its pairs of legs seemed to break from the body . . . and Lizzie was travelling unsupported. Harry and Dewi jogged behind her, without a finger on her or the machine. She stared into the cold wind, narrowing her eyes. When she sensed a growing silence, she dared to glance around, to confirm what her ears had suggested: that the footsteps on the gravel were receding and she was alone, yards ahead of her supporters, gaining distance as the bike gathered speed. She squealed, her feet slipped off the pedals, and she veered towards the shore. Although Harry and Dewi were no more than six feet from her back wheel, they were too far away to grab her, to alter her downward course. The bicycle wobbled as it left the track. It bucked on the pebbles and threw its rider as it struck the uneven, unmoving boulders. Lizzie toppled from it with a loud cry.

  She wasn’t hurt. She’d landed on the soft and pungent rolls of weed which the tide had left along the length of the shore. A cloud of flies roared around her, disturbed from the mat of warm vegetation. But she was winded, unable to catch a breath until Harry manhandled her to her feet and pushed her head between her knees. When at last she could breathe, she sobbed.

  He walked her to the Ozymandias. Dewi sped into the distance on his own bicycle, pumping the pedals so that the machine zig­zagged violently and then vanished around a bend in the track.

  Harry held Lizzie’s heaving little body to him. Her sobbing subsided and turned into anger. With her face against his chest, she cried out, her shouts muffled and wet.

  ‘I told you I couldn’t do it! I said I couldn’t! Why did you have to try and make me? I said I couldn’t do it, didn’t I? But you had to make me, to do your teaching thing! You can’t resist it, can you, Harry? Always teaching something . . . even things you’re not very good at yourself!’

  She wept, in anger and shock and embarrassment, without lifting her face from his body, as though she couldn’t bear to look at him. ‘Always teaching! Why don’t you put another card in the newsagent’s window? “Harry-clever-clever-Clewe: introductions to sex, astronomy, birdwatching, flute and bicycle!” Do you think you’d get plenty of people to practise on?’

  She started to control herself. She threaded her arms around him and squeezed, nuzzling into his shirt to wipe away her tears. ‘Oh Harry, my love! Oh Harry, oh Harry! I can’t hold you hard enough! If I could hold you as hard as I want to hold you, I’d squeeze all the breath out of you!’

  ‘My little Lizzie,’ he said into the top of her head, tasting her hair on his lips. He stared across the estuary. It was darkening into twilight. The dusk was cold, and the surf roared beyond the distant dunes. ‘My little Lizzie,’ he whispered.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As the toad had been the talisman of Harry’s infatuation with Sarah, so the brittlestar was a talisman for him and Lizzie.

  Lizzie had found one on her first morning on the estuary; Harry had found another a few weeks later, by which time brother and sister had become lovers. For a while the brittlestars had meshed in their shallow tray of water, linking their limbs and moving together as Harry and Lizzie did. Once dead, the creatures had dried on the ceiling, pinned to the beams. The brittlestar was a symbol of Lizzie’s transition into womanhood: her separation from her parents, her first home away from the family home, her first love, her first man.

  She’d never found another one, although she looked. There were common starfishes among the huge, translucent jellyfish and the dismembered remains of crabs which the sea had left behind. But never another brittlestar. The spring tides didn’t oblige by bringing one. While the brittlestars still dangled in the cabin, Lizzie’s search for another was desultory, casual, something to give a focus to her occasional walks on the beach. Then, one morning in April, as the Ozymandias lifted from the mud with the rising water, the brittlestars broke from the ceiling, fell to the floorboards and shattered into thousands of dry, salt splinters.

  Lizzie was dashed. All of a sudden, it seemed overwhelmingly important to her to find another brittlestar, which would hang above her as she and Harry lay on their bed, and guide them through the coming months. Its absence assumed the focus of her growing despondency. In spite of the arrival of spring, which Harry had hoped would have lifted her spirits, Lizzie became increas­ingly depressed.

  There was the business of the bicycle. Instead of being glad that Harry was more mobile, Lizzie felt sour. The contrast between her confinement and his mobility was something that rankled. Nearly six months into her pregnancy, she was weary, although regular checks had always shown her to be surprisingly strong for one so little and pale and apparently fragile; the enforced lethargy of winter was replaced by a disinclination to move. It seemed unfair that, having bridled at the narrowness of the cabin during the gales and squalls of the new year, she was still a prisoner now that the weather had improved. Of course, she joined Harry in and out of Caernarfon for her showers at the sports centre; but the walking gave her pains in her back, and she was self-conscious about her ballooning belly in front of strangers. Sometimes she accompanied him simply for the exercise, for the loveliness of the seas and the skies was still a wonder to her; she was thrilled by the movement of the birds and the tides. However, as far as the fetching of supplies was necessary, it made sense to say, ‘No, I’ll stay here, Harry. It’ll only take you ten minutes on the bike. At the rate I go these days, it’s more than an hour if I come with you. Go on, I’ll stay here . . .’

  He’d bought the bicycle to get Lizzie out of the Ozymandias, not for his own convenience; but the result was to compound her immobility. He sped along the seashore with a basket full of clothes for the laundrette. It was a short enough journey to justify the bringing of fish and chips or a curry from the takeaway restaurants. The bicycle made a considerable difference to the convenience of living on the boat. But it irked Lizzie.

  Often, when Harry returned from town, he would find that Lizzie wasn’t there. She spent hours along the beach, leaving soon after the nudge of the hull on the mud told her that the tide was out, and she searched for the brittlestar. So he would sit with his back to the cabin and scan the estuary with his binoculars until he spotted her distant figure, very tiny on the wide, wet sands, bulked in jeans and baggy sweater, moving slowly in black Wellington boots. A flock of gulls blew around her, the duck rose with a roaring of wings. Lizzie was a speck . . . even in the circle of his binoculars, she was an ant, creeping and stopping and creeping again. She looked downwards, always. For her, there were no gulls, there was no sky. Her only interest was in finding another brittlestar.

  That evening, as the light faded, Harry rode steadily back to the Ozymandias with his basket of clean clothes swinging on the handle­bars. A plume of smoke rose from the boat’s chimney. Inside the cabin, Lizzie was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. She hardly flickered her eyes as he came down the steps.

  ‘No luck?’ he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  He started to take out the clothes and hang them over the stove. In spi
te of the fire, the cabin seemed dull, suffocatingly domestic with the clothes hung up to air. There were no flowers; there’d been no flowers for weeks. ‘No luck with the brittlestar?’ he asked.

  She rolled over listlessly and looked at him. ‘The other way round,’ she said.

  He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  She sighed, as though she were struggling to communicate with an imbecile or a foreigner, rolling back to stare at the ceiling again. ‘I mean, dear Harry, the other way round. You said, no luck with the brittlestar. On the contrary: no luck without the brittlestar.’ She patted the bed, so that he sat down beside her. ‘Had a busy time in the big city?’ she asked.

  He kissed her. To his surprise, she recoiled from him and buried her face in the quilt.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Oh, come on, Lizzie, don’t be such a grump! Stop moping! Our luck’s been great so far. We’ve got each other. We’re both in good shape. The spring’s come and – ’

  She interrupted him. ‘Did you think the ride home would blow that smell away?’ she said, her voice muffled by the blankets.

  Puzzled, he sat up. ‘What smell? The beer? Yes, I had a beer while the things were in the wash. I always do. Better than just sitting there watching the clothes go round and round. What’s the matter with you, Lizzie?’ He took her by the shoulders and turned her face towards him. She wrinkled her nostrils.