The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  Harry shuddered. The torch beam zigzagged between the bed and the wardrobe and settled on the dressing table. Despite the dirt on them, the mirrors shone the beam back again, so that Christy could see the man’s face.

  Harry seemed to be smiling. His eyes and teeth were bright in the feeble light, but his skin was white, like the skin of a corpse. He whispered, ‘So, Christine, now you know what the noise is. Only the wind in the chandelier. Are you satisfied now? To tell the truth, I’ve hardly been in here myself over the last ten years or so. Well, don’t just stand there quivering! Put the bottle and the candle down on here.’

  He trod across the room, every footstep raising a cloud of dust which hung in the air like smoke. He balanced the torch upright on the dressing table, and Christy followed him, putting down his candle and the bottle of brandy. As the man grunted and gestured, the boy sat on the chair in front of the mirrors. Harry sat down on the bed, which groaned very loudly. The room seemed warmer, because the candlelight shone in the tarnished glass, on the bot­tles and combs on the dressing table; it gleamed on the brandy and the wine glasses and Harry’s hook. The torchlight was soft on the cobwebby ceiling, like a full moon in shifting cloud. The chandelier was a twinkling constellation. Straight away, a little life and warmth had been breathed into the room, and some of the deadness was gone. Harry leaned forward, took the brandy bottle and poured a generous measure into the two glasses.

  ‘Drink up!’ he said. ‘A toast to you this Christmas! To you and to all the other darling girls who’ve bewildered and confused me over the years! To you, my dear Christine, and all the angels who still haunt me! Cheers!’

  Then, all he would say, as they drank the fiery stuff down, as they refilled the glasses and drank again, was that he and his wife, Helen, had shared the room and the four-poster bed, before Helen had gone and left him alone at Ynys Elyrch, in the big house by the sea, the house which the sea had claimed, and he’d hardly been in the room since her death.

  ‘That’s all you need to know,’ he whispered, his voice hoarse with the heat of the brandy in his throat. ‘All the women I’ve known, all the ones I’ve loved and longed for, have picked me up and put me down again, dropped me and disappeared, gone and left me. Helen was the last one. You’ve seen the photograph on the mantelpiece downstairs? Well, that’s her. She’d sit where you’re sitting, on that chair, and I’d sit where I’m sitting, on this bed, and I’d watch as she brushed her hair and made up her face in those mirrors. Just like this, just like we’re sitting at the moment . . .’

  Christy stared at him, astonished to see the man break down; Harry’s voice began to crack and his eyes grew dim with tears. He smeared at them with the back of his hand. He snorted into a handkerchief which he tugged out of his trouser pocket, and then he tossed back another mouthful of brandy. Taking a deep breath, he added at last, as though to make the beachcomber look at some­thing other than the smudge of the tears on his face, ‘That’s my wife’s brush on the dressing table. It’s still got her hair in it.’

  Christy picked up the silver-backed brush. Yes, as he held it close to the candle, he could see that the bristles were tangled with strands of fine, long hair, hair as fine and long as his own. His belly was warm with the brandy he’d drunk. His eyes were bright in the dusty mirror. He looked at his reflection and he tilted his head to one side so that his hair fell almost to his shoulder. When he parted his lips and licked them, they shone in the tarnished glass. He smiled softly at himself. He smiled at the man, who was sitting behind him and gazing into the mirror, who was holding his breath and staring with tear-filled eyes. Christy tossed his hair. He began to brush it, with rhythmic strokes of the silver-backed brush.

  The air in the candlelit room seemed to crackle with static. Harry leaned forward, now that the tears had dried on his cheeks, until his face was so close to the boy’s neck that he could smell the perfume on it. He smiled into the mirror. Then he stood up from the bed. Gently, he took the brush from Christy’s hand and continued the brushing himself, drawing the bristles through the long, blonde hair. The boy consented to this: he dropped his hands into his lap, moving his head from side to side and tilting his chin up or down so that the man could brush and brush until the hair gleamed in the flickering light.

  Harry glowed with warmth. His body was flooded with joy at the touch of the hair on his hands, at the sweet, shy smile in the mirror. The perfume rose, stronger and stronger the more vigorously he brushed, and he inhaled it, closing his eyes tightly. When he opened them again and looked into the mirror, Christy was still smiling at him. The boy had picked up a lipstick from the dressing table. Parting his lips, moistening them with the tip of his little pink tongue, he started to apply it to his mouth.

  And the room, which had been locked like a tomb for so many years, was hot and alive, in spite of the dusty darkness. For Harry Clewe, it was the bedroom he’d shared with Helen, lit with desire, scented with sex; for Christy, it buzzed with a delicious, dangerous excitement he’d only found in books, only imagined in his turbulent teenage dreams. Even the lipstick tasted good. He put it on and pursed his lips, in the way he’d seen ladies do it in films, and then he giggled to see how lovely he looked, how bright his hair and his eyes, how white his teeth now that his mouth was scarlet. Without asking the man, he poured more brandy into both the glasses; and, as he and the man drank together, staring at one another in the mirror, the boy felt his belly flaming, as though a blaze were lit inside him.

  Eventually Harry stopped brushing. He put down his glass and turned away from the dressing table. Taking the silver-backed hairbrush with him, he moved across the room to the shadowy corner where the wardrobe stood. He pulled the door open and stepped aside, to let the candlelight fall inside it. Christy had watched all this in the mirror, but when he saw the man reach into the wardrobe and rustle the row of dresses hanging there, he swivelled on his chair to see what Harry might bring out. Neither of them spoke. They were too full of brandy to speak, tongue-tied, tingling and breathless. There was nothing they needed to say.

  Christy stood up and crossed the room, away from the candlelit dressing table, as Harry lifted a dress from the wardrobe. Christy took the dress from him. With a nod and a little frown, intimating that the man should turn away and face the other direction, the boy made for the darkest corner of the room, on the further side of the four-poster. There, his chest thudding with the thrill of it, he tugged his baggy pullover over his head and dropped it onto the floor; he unbuttoned his shirt and flung it off; he squirmed out of his vest; he undid his jeans, slipped them down and stepped out of them; he tore off his shoes and socks; then, coursing with heat although he was naked except for his underpants, he lifted the dress and struggled into it, head first, so that the heavy silken material slithered on his shoulders and chest. He wriggled it down his hips. The hem fell smoothly to the floor and rustled on the carpet as he swung to face the man.

  Harry spun round. He peered across the room, his heart pounding with the most delicious anticipation. His whole being was tuned to what he’d heard behind him, as the beachcomber slipped into the dress. Now, his mouth fell open. His hair stood up. His body jolted as a surge of electricity passed through him. He gasped as though a ghost had appeared before him, a vision in a purple gown which gleamed and crackled as the boy walked round the bed and came towards him. The blonde hair shone; the cool, grey eyes caught the flicker of the flame. The boy’s shoulders were silvery white as he turned round so that Harry could tighten the fastenings at waist and back . . .

  Unable to stop himself, his mind reeling, Harry ducked his head and planted a kiss where a little knob of vertebra stood up, below the fall of hair. Christy froze at the touch of lips on his bare skin. But when he whirled around to face the man again, he was smiling a radiant smile: the smile of a bride who knows she is beautiful for her husband.

  It was the first of several dresses that Christy put on. Harry went to and from the wardrobe, the boy went to and from the dark
corner on the other side of the bed, and their pleasure was greater and greater with each different dress. There must have been a dozen of them, in silk and satin and velvet, in scarlet and pink, in midnight blue and purple black. Harry appraised and reappraised his laughing, limber young bride, who swirled and swished before him, who filled the room with life and warmth and perfume. Christy tossed his head and his throat gleamed in the candlelight, so that Harry was ready with a pearl necklace he’d taken from the dressing table, to clasp it round the warm, white neck. Harry laughed too, shaking the chandelier with the booming he made.

  For hours, long after midnight, Harry and Christy lost them­selves in the wonderful game they’d improvised for Christmas. More than a game: it consumed them so much that the rest of the real world was forgotten.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Outside, the storm had got up.

  The tide drove into the house. It surged and sucked in all the downstairs rooms. Great white waves broke through the front door, hurled the piano across the hallway and started to smash it on the staircase. The wind screamed at the holes where the windows had been, flinging spray up the stairs to the landing and along the corridors. The sea foamed around the house and inside the house, which was no longer a part of the land but a piece of wreckage that the waves could tumble and toss as they liked. The storm had come in, huge and black and icy.

  It opened the trap door in the living room, snapping off the bolt and the hinges, and all the water in the cellar forced up and out into the churning tide. Things that had been hidden down there, hidden but never forgotten, swirled to the surface and bumped around the house in the same way that the remaining sticks of furniture were floated from room to room.

  The sheep’s head banged at the panelling. It bounced across the hallway in the undertow of the rollers which crashed through the front door, and at last it jammed in the kitchen, the grey fleece waving like the tendrils of a jellyfish.

  The windsurfer’s head was round as a ball. It spun out of the living room as the current sucked a load of shingle to the staircase and banked it around the capsized piano. The head lodged inside the piano and knocked the remains of its face on the mute strings.

  A body bobbed into the hallway, its flesh rubbery-soft and riddled with wormholes after years in the water. Borne up by the waves, it climbed the stairs, as the storm drove higher and higher. Sometimes it snagged in the banisters and remained there, beached for a few moments, as the sea fell back. Then the skull seemed to grin, as though it could hear the laughter which rang from one of the bedrooms. The swell crashed up the stairs again, lifted the body and dropped it a few steps higher . . .

  The sea lifted these things from the cellar and danced them from room to room. The waves were deep and cold. The storm was very loud. But upstairs in the scented candlelight, the man and the boy hardly heard it.

  Dizzy with laughter, they poured more brandy and drank it down.

  The candle had almost burned out; the wick had collapsed into the molten wax and the dying flame sent a fume of smoke into the air. The torchlight was fading; the yellow moon on the ceiling was all but lost in a cloud of cobwebs. Still the chandelier gleamed like clustered stars. Harry and Christy, pausing for breath, sitting side by side on the enormous bed and raising their glasses in yet another toast, had lost all sense of time and place. The world outside their room, beyond their game, was as distant from them as another planet. The storm, which howled at their window and rattled their door, was the dimmest of background noises; like citydwellers inured to the roar of traffic, they hardly heard it.

  There was one more dress to try on. Harry had been saving it till last. He’d pushed it into the corner of the wardrobe, to be invisible until he brought it out. Taking the empty glasses and setting them down on the dressing table, he left Christy sitting on the bed in a gorgeous creation of crushed black silk, and he returned to the wardrobe. All of a sudden, the exhilaration drained from him. A terrible, debilitating nervousness swept through him at the thought that the beachcomber might not try on the dress he’d been saving until now . . . might not, or might try it on and something would be wrong with it. In a few seconds, all the joy was sapped from him. Instead, he was filled with the horror of an impending impotence. It loomed in his mind like a chill, pale ghost as he reached into the wardrobe for the last time.

  Indeed, in the flickering candlelight, the dress he took out of the wardrobe was like a ghost. It was a vision of white satin, spangled with a thousand sequins, embroidered with a thousand pearls; it shimmered in the silvery points of light reflected from the chandelier. It was Helen’s wedding dress.

  There were white lace gloves too, and white shoes. Harry laid them all on the bed and then he stood back. He gazed at the dress as though it were the body of his wife, warm and alive, as though she were lying on the honeymoon bed. He turned his face from Christy’s. He dreaded the reaction, a wounding or sneering or poking fun, that the rest of the game would be off. Utterly exposed, he hid his face and waited for Christy to say or do something.

  A hush fell on the room, which, a minute before, had been hectic with laughter. For the first time, as the two of them held their breath, they were aware of the storm outside. The gale lashed at the window; the sea roared on the stairs and shook the house to its foundations; the door rattled as though someone very big and very angry was trying to get into the bedroom . . . but Harry and Christy were silent. Neither of them spoke or breathed or moved a muscle.

  They they both moved at once. The game, it seemed, was still on. With a hoot of excitement, the boy seized the dress and the gloves and whisked them away to the furthest corner. And Harry, limp with relief, turned back to the wardrobe.

  Christy wriggled out of the black silk evening dress, tore it over his head and hurled it into the darkness; it vanished completely, but he could hear it settling on the floor, rearranging itself like an animal curling up to sleep. He stood there in his underpants, holding the wedding dress over his right arm, and, although he couldn’t see Harry on the other side of the bed, he could hear him rummaging at the wardrobe, perhaps hanging up and putting away the other dresses. For a moment, Christy waited. The wedding dress was heavy; the sequins and pearls were cold on his bare skin, but when he touched his belly with the fingertips of his left hand he felt how very hot he was. He tugged his underpants down and stepped out of them, so that he could find a way, naked, into the dress.

  It was difficult. At first it seemed to be impossible. In the dim light that came to him from the distant dressing table, he bur­rowed into layer after layer of material. There were yards of it, dense and soft and stubbornly unyielding, and he tore at it with his hands, butted with his face, snuffled in the infuriating stuff, to aim a head­long dive into the body of the dress. At last, at long last, he dis­covered that it might have been easier all the time to have stepped into the dress from the top . . . so now he trod into the frothing, voluminous mass of the skirt, tugged it up to his waist and wormed himself into the bodice. He shook his hair loose. Panting with exertion, tingling with the silken, cold touch of the dress all over his naked body, he reached behind him to try and close as many of the tiny press-studs as he could. He felt for the gloves and put them on, long white lacy gloves that came right up to his elbows. Then he stepped around the bed towards the dressing table.

  At the same time, Harry stepped to the foot of the four-poster. He’d changed too. While Christy had been struggling into the intricate folds of the wedding dress, Harry had found his own suit in the wardrobe. He’d thrown off the cricket pullover and the cavalry-twill trousers and kicked off the brogues. He’d pulled on a dark suit and stepped into a pair of gleaming black leather shoes – his wedding outfit – ready to greet Christine.

  There was no light left. The storm was shaking the house so violently that the chandelier jangled, blurring into a haze of stars. The candle was drowning in a pool of wax. The torch wobbled and fell over, rolled off the dressing table and landed on the floor with a thud
. The beam died. The candle snuffed out.

  Without moving, without breathing, Harry and Christy stood in the pitch blackness. Then they reached out to feel blindly for one another. Their fingers met and locked. They didn’t need to see, any more than they needed to speak. They’d had time, a matter of seconds before the lights went out, to capture the image and imprint it on their minds: of a man, upright and stout in a fine dark suit; of a young woman, breathless and beautiful in a shimmering dress . . . a bride and a groom, alone together in their honeymoon bedroom.

  They lay down side by side, hand in hand, on the vast, groaning bed. That was all they did. It was enough for Harry Clewe that the girl was with him, that he could feel the warmth of her fingers on his. Sometimes, despite the blast of the gale, he could hear the crackling of the wedding dress. Then, once his eyes had grown used to the darkness and the room was suffused with the faintest light from the sea outside, he could make out the froth and foam of white satin, the sparkle of sequins, the gleam of pearls. It wasn’t a dream. She wasn’t a ghost. She was real, lying beside him, warm and alive in the fantastic dress. It was a wonder to him.

  As for the boy, he fell asleep immediately. He was knocked out, after a gluttonous feast, after a dozen glasses of red wine and half a dozen glasses of brandy, after the hilarious game they’d played in the forbidden bedroom. The moment he lay down, he shut his eyes and sank into unconsciousness.