Ellie and the Harpmaker

by Hazel Prior

  But something is not right. Not at all. I would like very much to make it right, but I don’t know how. I have no idea what a man is supposed to do under these circumstances. I am made of the wrong ingredients.

  Ellie plays the harp in the evenings, but only sad songs. I listen and the sounds prod and poke at the tender places inside me. At times I am sorry that I ever gave her the harp because it seems to have led to so much pain, but at other times I think it is the balm that heals the pain.

  | 40 |

  Ellie

  Dan is busy embarking on a new harp. I wander out. It’s not that late, but it’s already getting hard to see. I can make out Phineas in front of the barn, pecking at something on the lane. I go back in, fetch some birdseed, crouch down and hold it out to him. He runs toward me.

  I’m getting fond of the bird. He’s a wonderful listener and it’s a huge relief to talk to someone who doesn’t understand.

  “Phineas, do you think I was right to leave Clive?”

  He gobbles at the seed, ignoring the giver.

  I have no idea if Clive has tried to find me, if he assumes I’ve gone to Vic’s or Christina’s. I wonder if he regrets tearing up my poems, if he misses me.

  “I tried so hard to keep loving him. I did try! He didn’t make it easy for me, though, did he? No, he didn’t.”

  Phineas looks at me sideways.

  “OK, so I wasn’t blameless myself.”

  He finishes the last fragments of seed and looks at me again, hoping for more.

  “I really, really don’t want him to think I was unfaithful. But I suppose he’s bound to think that, especially now I’ve run away. I hope he’s all right. I mean, his drinking was getting pretty bad. And now he’ll be even worse. He’ll be in an awful state. He did love me, I know that. With all his faults, he did love me.”

  Phineas is looking bored now and starting to move off. I offer him another handful of birdseed. I need him to stay.

  “Phineas, listen! I don’t know what to do. I’ve pulled myself loose from my rock, but now I’m floating with the tides and I’ve got no idea where I’ll end up. Up north next, I suppose, to talk it over with Vic. But before that I’ll have to go back home and fetch my things. The thing is, I can’t quite bring myself to do that yet.”

  I’ve had time to think, and time to observe. Dan hasn’t shown any signs of wanting to get back together with Rhoda, which is a blessed relief. But neither has he shown any interest in me beyond steadfast friendship. I have to face the facts.

  I wipe my eyes. “I can’t inflict myself on him much longer, can I? He has his son now.”

  I stroke Phineas on the head, wishing I had more resolve.

  The noise of a car engine startles me. Phineas flees, cawing in alarm. I stand up quickly. There, heading straight toward me in his car, is Clive. My mouth drops open. He slams on the brakes right in front of me. I am rooted to the spot. For him to find me here . . .

  Horror hits, and scorching shame, as if he’s caught me having rampant sex with Dan. Clive’s face is livid. His eyes burn with fury. Even through the windscreen I can see the twitching muscle in his forehead. He swings the car around, avoiding me by an inch. Then spurts forward and roars away, back down the lane.

  I’m shaking all over.

  He’ll see it as confirmation of his worst suspicions. I know he will.

  Clive is a proud man, and when he is hurt, he lashes out. With a horrible, jabbing certainty I sense he’ll crave revenge. Like he did when Jayne was unfaithful to him all those years ago. He took a hammer and destroyed what she loved the most.

  And what I love the most is . . .

  Oh God, oh God!

  | 41 |

  Dan

  The electric lathe is running and I have my earmuffs on. Ellie comes running in, her face white as a lily, her hands gesticulating, her mouth shaping rapid words.

  I stop the lathe and take off my earmuffs. I ask what is wrong.

  “Dan!” she cries. “I must go, and I must go now! Clive was here, just now, just a moment ago, and he saw me.”

  I wonder why Clive was here and if he was here a moment ago, why he isn’t still here now. Surely if he was here, then his purpose was either to visit me or visit Ellie, neither of which it seems he’s done. And why does Ellie suddenly want to go? Does she mean she wants to go back to him? It is all most worrying and confusing.

  I’m not sure which question to ask her first, but before I’ve managed to ask any of them, Ellie bursts into a fit of coughing. The circles under her eyes are bigger; the white of her face is tinged with green; her eyes are brimming with water. She sinks to the floor.

  “Dan, can you bring a bucket? I feel sick,” she murmurs.

  At that moment all the lights go out. Power cuts are fairly common here at this time of year. I keep a large stash of candles in the workbench drawer ready for this eventuality.

  I light several candles and bring her a bucket as quickly as I can. She heaves over it.

  I run for a blanket and wrap it round her shoulders. Her skin is icy.

  “I have to . . . to get out of here . . .” she insists, struggling to her feet.

  I tell her there is only one place she is going and that is bed. Not a bed of cushions and rugs on the floor, a proper bed. My bed.

  She retches again over the bucket. I can see in the flickering light that it is filling with saliva and sicky bits, pale brown, smelly.

  When she can speak again, what she says is this: “Can you put my bag in my car for me?”

  I say on no account will I do that. The thing I will do is to accompany her upstairs and tuck her into the bed and put an extra blanket on.

  She leans on me shakily, almost accepting, then stops.

  “Dan, he knows I’m here. He’ll . . . I don’t know. But we must make him think I’ve gone. He must think I’m somewhere else.”

  I say that if the idea is to make Clive think she’s gone, then there is an easy solution: All we have to do is to hide her car. He will then think she has driven off somewhere else. There is no other evidence as far as I can see.

  She wavers. “Where could we hide the car?”

  I say that I can drive it down to Thomas’s if she likes. He won’t mind if I leave it next to his red van, in his driveway.

  “And if Clive comes here again, you’ll answer the door? And you’ll say I’ve gone away and I’m not coming back?”

  I confirm that, if it’s what she wants, I will.

  “Yes, I do want that. And say it as if it’s true, Dan! Promise me!”

  She is forcing the words out although it’s clearly an effort for her to speak at all.

  Lying is difficult for me, but she is adamant. I say I’ll promise if she will go to bed now and try to relax.

  She lets me take her up to my room and help her into the bed. I light another candle and wedge it into the carved wooden candlestick on the bedside table. While she is getting into her nightclothes I fetch her own rug from the little room for her. She is not well, not at all, and will need to stay warm. I spread it over her and the other bedclothes. In the glimmer her face still looks crumpled and upset.

  “Go and move the car now, Dan, please. Quickly. Please!”

  So I take her car keys and that is what I do.

  * * *

  • • •

  Thomas invited me in for a drink, but I said no. I said Ellie the Exmoor Housewife was in my bed and I’d better get back to her as soon as possible. He looked at me with a gleam in his eyes and said: “Well, in that case, mate, you’d certainly better look lively. I can give you a lift back if you like, boyo.”

  But Thomas’s wife Linda, who is a large and fierce woman, said his dinner was now sitting on the table and there was no way she was going to warm it up for him all over again when he got back.

  “Sorry, mate,”
he said to me.

  It was lucky I’d remembered to take a flashlight. The roads were very icy now. The snow had stopped, but I could see little lacings and tracings of it along the edges of everything in the flashlight beam. The sky was clear and the stars were very bright, just as they were that night when I discovered that I had a son.

  If I tried to count the stars tonight I could probably do a better job of it. The bright band of the Milky Way was draped across the sky over the far pine trees. That would be a good place to start counting. But I decided not to count just now because I wanted to get back quickly and check that Ellie was all right.

  The walk back from Thomas’s house took me twenty-six minutes.

  When I arrived at the barn I stopped to sniff. There was a strong, acrid, chemical smell, not normal in the pure air of the Exmoor night. Then I saw there was a car parked alongside the barn, just where Ellie’s had been. I had only just registered this when there came out of the darkness a loud, frantic squawking. Phineas. I rushed round the back to where the noise came from.

  I waved the flashlight around, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. The squawking had stopped. If he was worried about foxes Phineas might have gone to his second bed in the woodshed. I raced round to the orchard. I was surprised to see a small, round light—the light from another flashlight—shining out from the shed.

  “Phineas?” I called. But Phineas does not have a flashlight. I knew that really.

  “Is someone there?” I called.

  There was a low moan. It did not sound like Phineas. Not at all.

  I came closer. I shone my flashlight round the corners of the woodshed.

  There was a human figure crouching on a log. It was a man rocking to and fro, his head in his hands. The other flashlight lay on the floor by his feet. I picked it up and shone both flashlights at him. The figure did not move. The head in the hands had a receding hairline that I recognized.

  “You are Clive Ellie’s husband,” I said.

  He lifted his head. Then I saw that his face had red scratches across it like claw marks. The man blinked. His eyeballs rolled around a bit, then looked at me.

  There was a moment of silence.

  Then, all at once, he gave a great howl and lurched toward me, his eyes flaring in the flashlight beam, his fists like giant clubs. I had not been expecting this. It was a shock. I dropped the flashlights and tried to duck out of the way. I felt one of his fists slam down on my shoulder. The pain forced a yelp out of my mouth. I don’t know what happened to his other fist, but something crashed loudly. My shoulder stung and the only thing I could see was a patch of light on the ground. I was staggering a bit, but I managed to bend down and pick up a flashlight again. I darted it around quickly.

  Clive Ellie’s husband was sprawled against a log pile at the end of the shed. His arms and legs were struggling to pull him up. I stared. He heaved himself upright and turned to face the light. The muscles of his forehead were pulsing and his fists were clenched again. I could see that he was about to hurl himself at me a second time. His mouth had turned into a great black cave and from that cave came a dragon’s roar. There wasn’t time to think so I did what my instinct told me to do. I waited a few seconds until he was almost upon me, then skirted to the side and stuck out a foot. He tripped over it and plowed onto the floor.

  That was the end of my fight with Clive Ellie’s husband.

  What happened next was that I bent over him and asked if he was OK. He was making spluttery noises. They almost sounded like laughter but not quite. He seemed to be trying to get something out of his pocket. At last he managed it, and held the something out toward me.

  “You’d better take these,” is what he said.

  | 42 |

  Ellie

  I woke up with a throbbing head and stiff limbs, a faint murmur in my ears. I sat up. My nose was blocked, my eyes gummed together. I scraped a hand over my face, forced my eyes open and tried to make out the world around me. No moonlight was visible in the black square of the window, but narrow threads of yellow between the floorboards betrayed some sort of light downstairs. The candle was still burning on the table by the bed.

  Dan’s bedroom door was open. I wrapped the rug around my shoulders and listened. The background murmur was his voice. Had he brought Thomas home, or was he talking to Phineas, as I did? Curiosity awakened, I hauled myself from the bed. Still slightly nauseous, I went to the door, pulling the rug round myself with one hand, clutching the candle with the other. I passed through the little room. My harp stood there in the glow like a still sentinel. I tottered down the first few steps.

  I froze. The rug fell around my feet. There, below me in the workshop, lit by a couple of flashlights on the floor, was my husband. He was seated on one of Dan’s chairs in a slumped position. Dan stood in front of him, talking in hushed tones. He was holding something. It looked like one of my sweaters, but it seemed to be sopping wet. He dropped it onto the floor by his feet, where there was a pile of other damp materials that looked familiar. His voice was a steady torrent, but his hands were becoming more and more manic, wriggling and slicing wildly at the air.

  The events of the past few hours spun round in my head. I had no idea what to do.

  I drew back, breathless. My foot creaked on the stair. At once Dan looked up and saw me. He was wearing his thick brown jacket. He looked extremely alert, but his posture was oddly twisted. His hair stood up in wild sprigs.

  Slowly Clive raised his head too. He stared at me. I could hardly bear to look back at him, but neither could I drag my eyes away. Red streaks of blood ranged across his cheeks and forehead. His face was blotched with dust and bruises. His eyes were bloodshot. But more than all of these it was his expression that alarmed me. Instead of the tight rage that I’d witnessed over the past weeks, it was fraught with indescribable horror.

  I winced. The candle slipped and fell from my grasp. I was aware of my heart hammering, of Clive’s eyes, Dan’s upturned face, the crowd of harps, the flame traveling downward. The moment pulsated between us; stark and grim, full of questions.

  A bright flare sprouted up from the floor of the room below. It seemed to survey the scene for a second, wave gleefully and then burst upward and outward. Clive catapulted out of his chair and Dan staggered back. The damp heap on the floor exploded into a volcano, hurling out wild tongues of fire. The workshop flashed and flickered before my eyes.

  I screamed. I tried to move, but my legs refused to work. I knew I should find a phone, find some water, run, do something, but I couldn’t. I was a wild animal caught in the headlamps, mesmerized by the doom that was hurtling toward me.

  Great amber wings of flame unfurled and spread outward. Fire rushed toward the walls. It swooped and swirled in livid bundles of brightness under the windows. Then it changed direction and lapped back across the floor, a tide of crackling energy. Plumes of smoke rose. The air rippled with heat. Faster and faster the flames multiplied. They skipped hither and thither among the heaps of sawdust. They leaped through the frames of the chairs. They licked up the spines of the harps and danced feverishly among the strings. Everything was engulfed in a seething mass of orange.

  The two men below had become black shapes against the glare. It seemed that one was moving toward me, the other away from me, but I couldn’t be sure. I could hear creaking, hissing, roaring and a half-musical twanging—a dreadful, eerie sound. I realized, with a sharp twist in my heart, that it was the sound of harps tortured, harps dying. I gawped at the jagged wall of fire before me. It pranced like a swarm of demons performing some bloodthirsty ritual. Heat rolled toward me in waves. The brightness seared. My eyes stung. Clive and Dan were now obscured from my line of sight. The wooden banister had caught and the stairs had vanished behind the blaze. My skin began prickling. I was trapped.

  A voice rose above the roar. “Ellie! Ellie! The window! My bedroom window!”

 
At last my body launched into action. Coughing and sputtering, I stumbled backward into the little room and slammed the door shut behind me. I turned and fled through it to Dan’s bedroom in the farthest reaches of the building. I was vaguely aware of the solid wood bed, the books on the bedside table, the diagrams of harps on the walls. I ran to the little hatch of a dormer window. I brushed the collection of pinecones off the sill and threw it open.

  Fresh cold air poured in. Scarcely aware of what I was doing, I hoisted my legs over the sill. The edge pressed painfully through the thin fabric of my pajamas. Below me was a slope of slate roof, coated in frost, gleaming under the stars. I perched there for a second. After the heat and glare, the dark iciness shocked my system. I could still hear sounds of wreckage from behind the closed door. Why oh why did I have to drop that candle? How could I have been so stupid? How was it possible that this total devastation could happen so fast? My limbs were shaking uncontrollably.

  I squeezed myself through the window frame and clambered out.

  All at once everything was slithering downward. My bare feet scudded around, knocking off frozen nodules of moss. My body writhed wildly, but I hung on. And then, finding some sort of balance, the world stilled again.

  I breathed. My fingers didn’t dare loosen their hold on the window ledge so I lay there, dangling, arms stretched up, cheek flattened against the slates.

  Wetness seeped through me. The intense cold was mixing with my body heat and starting to glue me to the roof. If I didn’t die from the fire, I would surely die of cold, or die from falling. A sob rose from deep within me. I wasn’t ready to die.

  Dan, Clive, the harps, the flames, my own dangling body . . . they were all spinning and morphing and becoming a blur. Then, suddenly, my brain short-circuited. I was flung back in time. I was in my bedroom, a mere ten years old, and I’d spilled red paint all over the carpet. My mother’s words came right through, strident now as they were then. “Ellie, I despair of you. You always, always mess things up. Always.”