The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  ‘It’s not the beer,’ she said, grimacing. ‘I don’t mind the beer. But I don’t like who you go drinking with. Can’t you wash it off? It’s horrible!’

  It made no difference, thereafter, to explain to Lizzie that he’d bumped into Helen Ince and they’d gone for a quick drink together. ‘I always go for a drink while the clothes are doing,’ he said. ‘This time I just happened to see Helen in the square and we dropped into the Black Boy for half an hour. Nothing very sinister about that, is there? Everybody who’s been in the Black Boy tonight will be reeking of her perfume, not just me! All over Caernarfon at this very moment, men are having to explain it away to their wives and girlfriends. She’ll probably get banned from the pub if she causes this much trouble.’

  So he laughed it off, winning a rueful smile from Lizzie. ‘I promise you, my love, all my trysts with Helen are conducted right here, under your beady eye, and under the – ’

  Too late to stop himself, he gestured vaguely in the direction of the ceiling, where a couple of drawing pins stuck into the wood were the only reminders of the strange, rare creatures that Lizzie had fixed there. Again, she buried her face from him.

  So the bicycle remained a source of irritation in her mind, that he was so free while she was torpid. Furthermore, from that time on, no amount of banter could quite remove its link with Helen Ince. In the same way that the woman’s perfume lingered, so her name inevitably arose, as a joke that was more than just a joke, whenever he cycled to town. Indeed, there were times over the following months when Harry and Helen met in Caernarfon, not always by coincidence.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Physically, Lizzie remained in excellent health throughout her preg­nancy. Her spirits, however, continued to sink.

  Having thrown off the strictures of her music, she found herself confined on board the Ozymandias. At first it had been an exchange she’d been glad to make, to be with Harry on the boat, as though the two of them were sailing, free and alone, away from everything that had been so oppressive. Now she was discovering that the widest horizon and the tallest sky could be a cage. Having set aside the cello, to which she’d been harnessed throughout her entire adolescence, she began to feel that she was in harness again: the thing that was growing inside her, beating with her pulse, kicking against her, reminded her of the way she’d borne the cello, how she’d borne it for so long that it had seemed to become a part of her. Now the cello was twisted and cracked, garrotting itself in the darkness . . . while the thing was alive inside her, squirming blindly.

  Worse, much worse, there was guilt.

  It gnawed at her. It drained her. What would her mother and father have said, if they’d known what had happened? The idea was a horror for her. Despite Harry’s efforts to reassure her, Lizzie conceived the nightmarish vision of her parents visiting the Ozymandias . . . The more she imagined it, the more realistic the nightmare became. She was on the edge of her nerves. She listened for the crunching of tyres on the gravel, as though a taxi would arrive with her parents in it. Her eyes grew wide, the sockets grew hollow. She would leap with terror at the sound of an engine, which usually turned out to be a light aircraft or a boat. On the evenings when either Frank or Helen was expected for a lesson, when either the Morris Minor or the silver Daimler would roll up to the mooring, she would leap onto deck to confirm who it was. It made no difference to Lizzie that her mother and father were dead, that their bodies were cinders blown into the air. For her, they were alive. She dreaded their visit.

  There was an evening when Harry and Lizzie had been sitting quietly in the firelight, until the beam of a headlamp shone through the cabin window and a car came to a stop on the seashore track. By then, Lizzie was up and pacing, her face contorted in a mask of tears. She wailed, out of control. She wriggled from Harry’s arms as he tried to comfort her. She flashed her eyes around the cabin for a hiding place, and, at the slamming of a car door and the approach of footsteps, she flung herself blindly into the forward cabin, locking herself in.

  There she squatted, a hunted, haunted creature, on the seat of the chemical toilet. The boat swayed as someone came on board. She held her breath and quivered in her lightless confinement, with only the presence of the cello, its dusty black shape like a child standing silently in the corner, and the squirming tumble of the child inside her . . .

  As the Ozymandias settled under the weight of its visitor, as the caterwauling of gulls drifted over the water and filled her ears with grief, Lizzie was entombed: Lizzie and the cello and the child, entombed in a dreadful darkness.

  ‘It’s Frank!’ Harry called to her. She wept with relief, until she was exhausted by weeping. At last, weak and thin and wanly smiling, she emerged into a haze of marijuana smoke. Frank had come to rearrange a lesson, as Dewi had once done.

  She remained in a state of barely tolerable tension. Harry could do nothing to relax her. Her trembling reached a climax one evening in the middle of June.

  Dewi had come for a lesson. Harry reckoned that the boy’s progress over the past months had been remarkable. They were on good form, combining to perfect a duet, an arrangement of English folk songs they’d written together. Lizzie listened from her corner, rocking herself in a chair, her hands clasped across her belly. Having played the piece from beginning to end without a pause or an error, Harry and Dewi beamed at one another with satisfaction. It was the end of the lesson.

  ‘Well, Lizzie? What do you think?’ he asked. He and the boy were putting their flutes away. ‘Give us your professional opinion.’

  Dewi scrambled to his feet, ducking his head to avoid the ceiling. For him, the idea of inviting the young woman’s judgement was excruciating, and he was keen to leave. ‘Look, Mr Clewe, I’d better be off,’ he blurted, his face crimson. ‘I’ve still got my homework to do . . .’

  ‘It was very nice,’ Lizzie said. ‘A nice little arrangement, nicely played.’ She paused, to let the platitudes sink in. ‘But there’s a danger, isn’t there, in writing your own arrangements for your­selves to play? Well, isn’t there?’

  Harry glanced at Dewi, with a grin which was supposed to be reassuring. ‘Is there, Lizzie?’ he asked. ‘What do you mean? Surely it’s good exercise? And good fun?’

  She stared into space, affecting puzzlement.

  ‘Fun?’ she said, frowning as if it were a word she’d never heard before in all her life. ‘Fun? What’s fun got to do with it?’ Her voice went thin and cold. ‘The point is, that when two very ordinary musicians arrange music for themselves to play, they make very ordinary music. They’re bound to. Consciously or not, they write an arrangement which is comfortably within their own limitations. They can’t help it. Now, it might be fun, as you put it, to write and then practise for hours and hours a banal piece of music, which, whether you thought about it or not, you wrote especially to suit your own limitations and mediocrity . . . but it’s a waste of time as far as stretching and improving Dewi’s musicianship is concerned. Yes, it might be fun. But it just panders to your own ordinariness. Worse, it gives Dewi a false sense of achievement. Do you under­stand what I’m saying?’

  After a pause, in which neither Harry nor Dewi spoke, she added, ‘Fun’s all right. It depends what you want to get out of it. But work’s a different thing altogether.’

  Harry managed a smile. He followed Dewi onto the deck. The boy was downcast. ‘See you next week,’ Harry said to him. ‘Don’t worry about what Lizzie was saying. Maybe there was no fun in her music lessons, but there will be in ours. You’re doing fine. Better than fine. You’re doing really well.’ He waved the boy away, still smiling. But he was angry with Lizzie.

  ‘You did ask me,’ she said, pre-empting his outburst as he re­appeared in the cabin. ‘If you don’t want my opinion about your musicianship or your pupils’ musicianship, don’t ask me. Heaven knows, I always got the blunt truth from my teachers.’

  ‘But can’t you see how sensitive Dewi is?’ he shouted at her. ‘I’m not worried about any ba
rbs in my direction, I can tell you that! By the time I was eighteen I knew what my limitations were! I soon found out I was never going to be a bloody genius like you were supposed to be!’

  ‘By the time you were eighteen?’ she retorted, her eyes blazing. ‘Is that when you found out? You mean no one had the ear or the gumption to tell you before that?’

  She leaned forward and put her hot little face close to him. ‘That’s exactly what I was trying to say about Dewi. Stretch him, Harry! Push him! Make him work! But don’t always send him away thinking he’s the bee’s knees, when he obviously isn’t. I had good teachers. They hurt me sometimes. They always told me the truth. If you think you might be a good teacher one day, now that you know you can’t play, you can at least tell your pupils the truth!’

  Breathing hard, both hands on her swollen stomach, she leaned back.

  Harry bent to her and put his own hands on top of hers. She was as warm and round as a pudding. He was still angry with her, but he controlled his voice and spoke softly. ‘Listen, Lizzie, my love. I’ll do the lessons my way. How you learned your music and how I learned mine are poles apart. But here we are on the Ozymandias together. I know what you think of my so-called musicianship. I won’t ask you again for your opinion of my teaching.’

  He straightened up, his hands cooling. His voice rose and shook. ‘But at least I have the guts to do something with my music, knowing it’s so bloody ordinary! All the music you ever learned has been locked in the bloody toilet for a year! Best place for it! That’s where all the waste goes!’

  Seconds later, he was on his bicycle and accelerating hard along the track towards the glow of the town.

  The effort of cycling drained his anger. By the time he reached the footbridge under the bulk of the castle, he was calm. He ima­gined Lizzie alone in the cabin of the Ozymandias; she would be crying, as she’d cried so often in the past few weeks. For a second, he almost turned round and started to cycle back again, but then he rode across the bridge and locked the bike to the railings on the quayside. It was a long time since the matter of his incompetent teaching had been aired, and despite what he’d said about his immunity to barbs, the old hurt was touched. He would wallow a little. As he’d sometimes done in his year as a probationary teacher, and as a well-meaning, ineffectual volunteer in Sudan, he would console himself with beer.

  He sat in a smoky, noisy corner of the Black Boy. Six pints later, he’d spent the price of Dewi’s lesson. He’d spent his melancholy too.

  Relieved, he rode slowly and somewhat unsteadily along the seashore track. It was a still, cool night. The vague summer constellations made up in their shimmering delicacy for what they lacked in definition. He drank the salt air. Stopping to urinate, he discovered that the silence was prickling with tiny sounds, the secret shadow life of the hedgerow, the fields and the foreshore. He cycled on, upright and alert in the saddle. He paused a hundred yards short of the mooring, thinking to walk the rest of the way. Wheeling the bicycle beside him, he approached the Ozymandias, pleased to see from the lighted portholes that Lizzie must still be up. He stopped again.

  There was music, coming from the boat.

  Harry leaned the bicycle into the hedge, not wanting the crunch of the tyres or the ticking of the wheels to give away his arrival, and he tiptoed on the grass verge towards the Ozymandias. Whenever he paused, he heard the music of the cello drifting to him like something from a dream, a part of his own breathing and the thud of the blood in his head. He crept nearer. The playing was deep and mellow and measured despite the condition of the neglected instrument. When he stood on the seawall and looked down on the soft light of the curtain drawn across the porthole, he exhaled softly, trying to still the pounding in his temples until he’d silenced every sound of the summer’s night except the sound of the cello. The sighing of the surf subsided. The estuary itself seemed to hold its breath.

  The playing increased in volume and intensity. The bruising of the bow on the strings became a rapid chopping and stopping, like angry voices in an angry crowd. The bow worked faster and faster, more and more aggressively, used like a hatchet to split up the music. Harry felt himself clench. He ground his teeth until his jaws were aching. Staring up at the dim stars, he watched the sky begin to whirl as the music grew giddier and more frenzied. The bow assaulted the cello, flaying it, raking it, relentlessly sawing. And the constellations billowed, in time with the ugly, discordant, jagged sound which came from the cabin of the Ozymandias . . .

  Harry squeezed his eyes shut. He lifted his hands to his ears to blot out the noise. It was a horror. He felt impotent, as though, through the walls of a hotel room, he could hear the perpetration of a brutal rape and was powerless to stop it. At last, when it seemed that the bow must have hacked and bludgeoned the cello into pieces, there was silence. For a second or two, there was a silence such as that sea and that sky had never heard before, an ebbing, throbbing absence of sound. Then, as Harry opened his eyes and relaxed the clenching of his fists, he let the music of the night wash over him: the roar of the surf, the breeze in the leaves of the hawthorn hedge, the whisper of an incoming tide. Nothing more from the boat.

  He stepped onto the deck and down to the cabin.

  Lizzie was quivering on the bed, her eyes wide open but unseeing. She didn’t turn her head as he came in. She lay on her back with her nightdress pulled up and held the cello on top of her, her legs gripped around its body, her hands around its neck. Oblivious of his presence, she rocked her hips against the polished wood. She thrust upwards. She clenched harder with her legs . . . faster and faster she continued the rhythmic thrusting. The sweat stood on her chalk-white face and glistened in the hollow of her throat. The cello slithered on her wet belly. Until she rolled her eyes and only the whites were blindly staring . . . her mouth opened in a series of dry croaks which accelerated into a long, hoarse yell . . . and, at the same time, she arched herself upwards, grinding the cello between her thighs.

  There she remained for a long second, her body lifted from the bed. With a rattling exhalation which seemed to go on and on for ever, she subsided and lay still. She breathed evenly. Finally, she turned her face towards Harry, smiled the smile of an angel, and closed her eyes.

  Straight away, she was asleep. Harry lifted the cello gently from her, wrapped it in the blue silk scarf in which it was always enfolded, and put it in its case; the bow as well. With a warm towel he wiped the sweat from her face and body, rubbed at her hair which was plastered in wet, red strands around her temples, and then he covered her with blankets.

  He took off his own clothes and slipped into bed. Holding Lizzie in his arms, he was soon asleep too.

  Chapter Eighteen

  From that day, a curious calm fell over Lizzie and remained intact to the day of the birth of her child.

  Curious, because for Harry it was somehow more disquieting than her previous tension had been. The angelic smile remained on her face. Her jaunty defiance filled the Ozymandias and spilled across the estuary. It was unnerving for Harry, to see her trans­formed like this in the space of a few hours, to see her continuing calm as the days went by.

  She said simply, ‘No, Harry, that was just an aberration,’ when he asked her if she would take out the cello and play it again. ‘I must have weakened that night, after what you said about the waste. Now that I’ve got my strength back, the cello stays in its case. Anyway, the damp has wrecked it. It’s split and warped.’ She added, ‘But you might find a use for it one day,’ and then refused to explain what she meant.

  It unnerved him that nothing unnerved her. She was un­flappable. She seemed to have dispelled the nightmare about her parents’ coming to visit. She humoured Frank, encouraging him to talk about his travels in South America, flattering him into a feeling of avuncular seniority; she went so far as to draw on a joint, a concession which won him over completely. She apologised to Dewi for her waspishness, tapping her belly as though to blame its contents for her graceless behaviour, and she
praised him for the progress he’d made. She was friendly to Helen Ince, with tea and cakes to sustain her through her lesson. Once more, there were flowers in the cabin of the Ozymandias, willowherb and yarrow and the viper’s bugloss she’d picked from the hedgerow.

  Lizzie smiled through the final weeks of her pregnancy, utterly calm, utterly relaxed. She clasped her hands across her stomach. She glowed with health, but there was a chill in her invincible glitter that made Harry shiver. She radiated a mysterious resolve: some irrevocable decision had been taken, and the certitude of it flooded her with strength. At the same time, she distanced her­self from her brother, her lover, the father of her child. She was moving further and further off. And Harry felt, with a shudder of helplessness, that he would never have her back again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The baby came sooner than expected.

  Harry was woken by the movement of the boat and by the dancing of shadows on the walls of the cabin. His first impression, which reminded him why he’d been sleeping so deeply, was the lingering fume of marijuana – the previous evening, Frank had been for his lesson. The stove was blazing, although it was a swel­tering night at the end of July, and in the firelight he could see Lizzie standing at the foot of their bed. She was a tiny, pale, elfin figure in nothing but a nightdress, with her belly ballooning and big. She turned to Harry, startled to see him awake, and he could see that she was sweating; her face was glistening like moist cheese. Strands of hair were plastered to her temples.

  He lifted himself onto one elbow. ‘Lizzie? Are you all right? What time is it?’ She was opening and closing the door of the forward cabin.

  She glanced around. She had the cello. For a moment, she tried to conceal it from him by holding it behind her body, before realising he was wide awake and had already seen it.

  ‘Don’t move, Harry,’ she whispered, smiling weakly. ‘Not just yet, anyway. The baby’s coming, quicker than I thought it would. But there’s still a bit of time.’