The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  Frank came too. For him, the telescope was the most wonderful finishing touch to the magic of the Ozymandias. In much the same way that Helen’s flute lessons had been abandoned in favour of sex in front of the open stove, Frank was inclined to ignore his flute in order to pass another evening in a haze of marijuana. Harry submitted, as he submitted to Helen, gladly, resignedly; he inhaled the giddying smoke while Frank talked of Machu Picchu and the Nazca lines, of all things and all places that were truly cosmic. Frank swooned in the easy chair, one eye against the polished tubing of the telescope; and Harry, with only a little more understanding of the machine than Frank had, feigned expertise, naming stars and constellations, adjusting the lenses, so that Frank might think him as serious an astronomer as he seemed to be a flautist. But Harry knew that the telescope, although it afforded some spectacular observations from time to time, was really beyond him.

  Frank was content with goggling at the moon and the glittering Pleiades. So Harry didn’t admit to him that the instrument was inappropriately installed in the first place. The equatorial mounting was wrongly set up; indeed, its adjustment was all but impossible; handcrafted with enormous precision, intended to be based on a concrete plinth for complete stability, the telescope was wasted on the shifting swell of the Ozymandias. Harry knew this, and it made him feel stupid. He didn’t tell Frank or Helen. Still, he thought, doped into apathy, there were beautiful things to be seen through the lenses of the cold, black machine, albeit more by luck than by judgement.

  Dewi became confident with the flute. The lessons progressed and he improved with all the work he did. He was the only student who really persevered with his lessons, in the weeks and months which ran into years in the aftermath of Lizzie’s death. His com­plex­ion improved as a year and then another year went by. He ar­rived and left punctually and expressed no interest whatsoever in the telescope. Only, he looked around the cabin as though he still expected to meet the straight, clear eyes of Mrs Clewe, the young, pretty, red-headed woman who’d winced so hard at his clumsiness with the flute. But she was gone, in extraordinary circumstances he’d barely grasped from local gossip. She was gone, although some­times when he glanced up, his face burning, he seemed to hear her intake of breath. . . . Harry heard it too, because the boy’s mannerism was infectious. But Lizzie was no longer there, pretending to read by the stove. Zoë was there.

  So Helen came, and Frank and Dewi. Who else? What else?

  The gulls came. The gulls, which had lured Harry to the skeleton of the horse, were drawn to the boat, to the child, Zoë. When the days were fine, he put her in the carrycot on the deck. The gulls beat around her. The first time it happened, he dashed to protect her from them, to wave his arms like a madman and shout unlovely words. But when he saw that they were oblivious of him, that he might as well have been invisible, he withdrew and watched from the stern of the boat. The gulls rose and fell around the cot, calling hoarsely into the child’s face, buffeting with their powerful wings. The deck was white with droppings; the cot was splashed, and Zoë had the splatter on her cheeks. She was grinning. She chortled and crowed. Her eyes were aglitter with a brightness that Harry had never seen before, as though her blindness were dispelled, as though the shells of her eyes were stripped and she could see the pearly creatures which dived and screamed around her. She was quite separate from him.

  Zoë had summoned this noisy congregation: Harry was excluded from it. She was more a part of the estuary than he could ever be, like the shooting star which had fallen there. And so the gulls fell to her.

  Harry adjusted himself to her routine, his days and nights in tune with hers. He managed her, earning the praise and approval of the people who visited to see how he was coping; the child was warm and well fed, clean and strong. A social worker came, a young woman, brisk and severe and very Welsh, determined to find fault and to report to her superiors that the Englishman, Harry Clewe, and his home, the Ozymandias, were quite unsuitable for the upbringing of the blind child. She stayed for an hour, angling her peaky, birdlike face this way and that around the cabin. But there was nothing wrong with the man or the place. The Ozymandias was neat and bright, scented with flowers and a hot stove. Harry, with a regular income from his teaching as well as a little nest-egg from the claim on the cello, was managing a good deal better than most of the other single parents on the local authority’s books, who lived in the damp, dilapidated council houses on the outskirts of Caernarfon. So the young woman warmed to Harry Clewe, over coffee and cakes, in front of the crackling fire.

  The coroner dropped by, genial and well-meaning, to see how Harry was coping. Standing on the deck of the Ozymandias, he squinted at the sunlight on the estuary. He watched the heron as it stalked in the shallow waters, held his breath as the bird stabbed into a pool and came up with an eel, which squirmed and writhed in the dagger beak. The man smiled, looking around at the distant dunes and the foam of surf on the horizon. ‘Are you all right, young man?’ he said, gripping Harry’s hand. ‘Yes, I can see you are. . . .’

  Harry was all right. Surrendering himself to the demands of Helen and Frank and Dewi, applying the mighty great eye of the telescope to the changing constellations, he found that the weeks passed.

  And so did the early years of Zoë’s life. He made her a bed of her own, screened into a corner of the cabin. Soon she knew every inch of the boat. Even on the deck, around which he’d constructed a solid, surrounding barrier, she learned to crawl and then to totter as adventurously as if she could see.

  The years slipped by: four years, five years, six years. In the evenings, the child lay and listened to the music, inhaling the scents in the air. She stared at the ceiling, fixing her eyes on the wooden beam and its deeply scored groove, as though she could see it on the empty black screen inside her head. She sensed the presence of the telescope, the star-splitter, for which the cello had been put to the fire. Breathless, dry-eyed, strangely silent, she would listen to her father’s flute; along with the cries of the curlew and widgeon, it was part of the everyday music of the estuary which she was unconsciously assimilating and learning to recognise.

  Zoë would gaze about the cabin, grinning. Her silvery hair was the brightest flame in the room. She swivelled her eyes from the groove in the beam to Harry’s face. And she would laugh, a dry, hoarse laugh, outstaring him. He flinched from her.

  Chapter Eight

  The little girl was sound asleep, breathing evenly, very warm and very soft, with her back and buttocks pressed to Harry’s. He lay still for a while. He saw the sky beginning to lighten through a winter dawn, heard the rain fall loud and heavy on the decks of the boat. The cabin was cold. There was the sharp, resinous tang of pine needles.

  Without waking the girl, he slipped out of bed and squatted in front of the stove. Under a blanket of ashes as fine and as grey as dust, there was still a glow of embers. He teased them, prodding with a piece of wood into the core of the heat, and he built a scaffold of dry spars for the fire to climb. It would soon take the chill from the morning.

  He quickly and silently dressed, his breath white. The telescope loomed in the gloom, a heavy, hard gantry draped with a sheet. Under the covering of the sheet, there was a sudden shifting and beating of wings which were straight away quiet again. Harry held his breath, and once more there was a stillness in the cabin. The only sounds were the rain on the roof and the increasing crackle of the fire. Ready to go out, he leaned over the bed and whispered into the girl’s unconscious face, ‘Happy Christmas, Zoë! I won’t be long.’ He went up to the deck of the Ozymandias.

  He immediately saw that he’d mistaken the tide. The hull of the boat was embedded in the sand, and this motionless solidity had woken him for the same scouring of the estuary he’d religiously performed on Christmas dawn for the past six years. But this time, Zoë’s seventh Christmas and the seventh Christmas since Lizzie’s death, Harry was too late. The tide was coming in fast. It had already covered most of the mudflats, apart from a few shr
inking expanses on which the feeding waders and shelduck were forced closer and closer together. The water was rising through the boulders and weed of the foreshore, lifting a scum of coffee-coloured bubbles, inching towards the hull of the Ozymandias.

  Morose, Harry stood on the deck and stared into the rain. No horizons to a grey and saturated world. No sky, but a lowering of drenching, grey cloud. The rain drummed loudly and hard on the hood of his waterproofs. There was nothing he could do this Christmas morning but watch the rapid and inevitable vanishing of the mudflats. The birds gathered and huddled, until they fled in flocks: the smallest waders, the dunlin and the knot, in a volley of silver arrows; the curlew, hawklike, gull-like; the shelduck, dignified to the brink of pomposity. And once the birds were gone, as the boat groaned a groan of futile resistance before rising from the sand, there was no dry place remaining on the estuary.

  He went below, the rain coursing from the folds of his water­proofs and onto the rugs. The cabin was already much warmer, or so it seemed to him, who’d been standing in the lightening dawn.

  Harry and Zoë exchanged presents in front of the fire, close to the scented pine needles, under the nodding tube of the telescope.

  ‘But Daddy,’ said Zoë, once the cabin was strewn with wrapping paper, ‘we didn’t get anything for Tycho, did we? Poor old Tycho! We forgot all about him! Come here, Tycho! Come on, come to me!’

  From its perch on the telescope, whose gunmetal finish was spattered with white and yellow droppings, the jackdaw beat across the room and landed on Zoë’s wrist. The bird folded its wings. It sidled and ducked, its black and grey plumage in stark contrast to the little girl’s colourlessness. She was so bright, with her white face and arms and her bob of silver hair, that the jackdaw was like a smut on her. Its black feet clenched into her skin. Its beady black eyes glared into her eyes.

  Its beak was broken. The jackdaw had been blown onto the deck of the Ozymandias, where it had lain, shattered and ragged, until Zoë picked it up and carried it inside. Oddly passive in her hands, it quickly recovered its senses. At last, lulled into submission by the girl’s tenderness and firm handling, the bird had consented to Harry’s repair of its beak with glue and a sliver of hard wood he’d whittled into shape. In the course of the repair, which worked well and was still in place this Christmas, more than a month since the arrival of the jackdaw in an autumn storm, he’d told Zoë about the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who’d had his nose cut off in a duel and had rebuilt it himself out of gold, silver and wax.

  ‘You and your stars, Daddy, and your silly telescope!’ she’d said. ‘But Tycho’s a good name for him, isn’t it, with his beak broken and mended?’

  Now, the bird balanced on her arm and cocked its head towards the fire. It had become quite tame. It responded with uncanny readi­ness to the girl’s voice. Their eyes met.

  The jackdaw sprang from her wrist. With two strokes through the air, it settled once more on the telescope. It lifted its tail and eased a mute onto its handmade, exquisitely engineered perch. Zoë laughed, a jangling, discordant laugh like the chimes of the jack­daw, guessing what the bird had done.

  ‘Poor Daddy!’ she giggled. ‘Is Tycho making more of a mess on your telescope? Anyway, Daddy, what are you doing every night, pointing that thing through the roof and into the sky? I keep asking you what you think you can see with it. Tell me again, please, Daddy! What do you see in your funny telescope that I can’t see?’

  And when he explained, as she’d had him try to explain so many times before, about the hugeness of the black space which seemed to be so empty until you saw everywhere there were stars like flashes of white light and blue light and countless sparks and glimmers . . . then she would shrug, fixing him with her unseeing stare and paralysing him with a smile. ‘Oh,’ she would say, ‘so you mean it’s just the same for you, Daddy, as it is for me?’

  The jackdaw shot its droppings the length of the telescope. It pecked at its reflection in the wide, unblinking eye of the lens. And Harry began to realise that, with all the power of the machine he was struggling to understand, perhaps he could see no more of the heavens than the blind child could.

  In the afternoon they went together to the cemetery.

  Zoë held her father’s hand and walked beside him, but often she slipped his grip and skipped ahead. She’d learned to move easily on the foreshore, to work among the boulders with the systematic concentration of the turnstones, searching for shells and pebbles whose shape fitted her hands. In spite of her blindness, or because of it, she had the gift of economy of movement and of effort; she seldom wasted a step by stumbling. It gave her grace, just as the birds were unspectacularly efficient on the shoreline. She found shells to offer at the shrine of her mother’s grave; she hung herself with necklaces of pungent weed with which the headstone would be decorated. Feathers and bones fell to her fingers.

  Harry watched, having taught his daughter to identify such things by touch. She knew the egg masses of whelks, and would crunch them delightedly and explosively in her hands; she could distinguish the mermaid’s purse of the dogfish, horny and smooth, with twisted tendrils, from the hairier capsules of the thornback ray. There was the clicking of stones as she worked among them, the rustle and pop of the rubbery weed. Yes, she was as easy as a bird on the foreshore, as natural a part of the estuary as the birds themselves. Harry watched her bright head bobbing. He saw her pause and bend, straighten and move on, saw that she was always listening to the sounds of the sea and the air and the skies around her. Sometimes she turned to him, knowing exactly where he was, and she beamed the whiteness of her face.

  In the graveyard she did not weep, although Harry did. She smiled as she felt his cheeks and his wet eyes, as she pushed her cold little fingers into his lips and touched the tears there. Then she traced the letters on the stone, spelling out her mother’s name and leaving a wetness which quickly dried in the winter wind. She would ask the questions she always asked, her stare so unwavering that Harry blinked from it.

  ‘Is Mummy really here, Daddy? In the ground?’ Arranging and rearranging the weed and the seashells she’d brought, she’d say with a giggle, ‘That’s silly, Daddy! Putting Mummy in the ground! Why did you do that?’

  She followed the flight of the gulls, which had accompanied the man and the little girl to the churchyard. The birds blew in from the shore, to dice among the bare branches of the sycamores, to swoop among the headstones where the child knelt. She gazed at them, imitating their cries with mews and bleats of her own. When the peewits tumbled by, turned this way and that by the wind, she clapped her hands loudly, over and over, not with the regular beat of applause but irregularly, syncopated, in time with their clapping wings. The wind fell around her and found that she was like the wind, nerveless, bloodless, who didn’t need to see in order to understand the ways of the birds.

  Harry shivered, watching her at her mother’s graveside, for she already knew more about the estuary than he did, about the birds and the tides and the broken things that the sea fetched up . . . about the stars themselves. She seemed to know the mystery of her mother’s death, how the woman had gone into the damp soil.

  Thinking of this, he shivered again. Zoë looked down from the whirling peewits and into his face, as though she could see his punched and puzzled expression, and she said with a quick smile, ‘Let’s get you home, Daddy. You’re cold, aren’t you? Let’s get you home before you catch your death! Come on, Daddy! Come on!’

  She took her father’s hand, stood him up, led him from the cemetery and down to the seashore. She guided him back to the Ozymandias.

  The afternoon grew dark. The tide was falling. He saw that, by the time the sandbanks of the estuary were exposed again, it would be the early night of winter. So there would be nothing on top of the tree this Christmas, no guiding star.

  Together they sat on the bed, with the heat of the fire on their faces, feeling the dropping of the boat as the sea went out. Zoë played wi
th her new toys, dolls and bears and gadgets she could dismantle and rebuild with her nimble fingers. The jackdaw was nervous; it sprang from one end of the telescope to the other, its claws loud on the metallic surface.

  ‘Sit still, Tycho!’ the child called out, pointing her face at the bird. For a while it was quiet, folding and refolding the black wings and preening its breast with the home-made beak. Zoë said little; she had none of the prattle of other six-year-olds. She listened. She and the jackdaw heard sounds from the night outside that Harry couldn’t hear. He found himself excluded when the bird and the girl would suddenly stiffen and hold their breath together, and he knew that they’d caught a cry or a whisper from the distant dunes which was lost to him in the huge, rumbling silence of the estuary. Now, tired of playing, she lay with her face in the blankets of the bed. She asked another familiar question.

  ‘When was Aunty Helen here, Daddy? I can smell her perfume on your pillow.’

  ‘You know when she was here, you monkey!’ he replied, pre­pared to be defensive. ‘She comes in the mornings, when I’ve taken you to school. She often comes, for a chat and sometimes for a flute lesson. She was here the other day, when you were at your Christmas party.’

  The child sniffed long and hard, testing the air with a quivering rodent’s nose. She wagged her finger at him. ‘Only me allowed!’ she said sternly. ‘Daddy’s bed is for Daddy and me! No one else!’ She paused, and before she asked the next question she put up her hands to his mouth, in order to read his expression.

  ‘Do you love Aunty Helen, Daddy? Like you loved Mummy? Will you put Aunty Helen in the ground too?’

  At this, before Harry could frame an answer, the jackdaw launched itself across the cabin, where it battered at the Christmas tree with its wings and scrabbled with its prehensile feet. Showers of needles fell to the floor. Motes and mites swirled in the firelight, the dust from the bird’s feathers. The jackdaw clacked, as it spat­tered mutes like gouts of yogurt.