Chapter Eleven
They agreed to split up for an hour, the next time they walked into Caernarfon. The Christmas lights were on in the streets. The shop windows were bright with decorations. When they came out of the sports centre after their showers, Harry and Lizzie met a darkening afternoon, the pavements glistening under orange neon lights. It was cold, a raw cold which clenched around their wet heads.
‘Maybe I’ll have a browse in some of the shops,’ he suggested. ‘On my own. I’ve got an idea for your Christmas present. A surprise, of course.’
And she answered with an enigmatic smile that she might have a surprise for him too; she would go off to make some enquiries about it. So they separated, having arranged to meet later in one of the tea shops near the castle.
He went into a newsagents, to place an advertisement in the window. Handwritten on a postcard provided by the shop, among the other advertisements offering flats to let, cars and motorcycles for sale, rewards for the return of lost cats and jewellery, it read: ‘Tuition in flute and musical theory. All standards, from beginners to grade eight. If interested, leave phone number in the shop.’ The card cost him a few pence for the week, and the shopkeeper agreed to keep a note of any enquiries until he called in again. This accomplished, having decided to keep it a secret from Lizzie pending a response, he strolled the busy streets of the town and blinked at the twinkling windows until it was time to meet her.
She was already there, in a corner of the tea shop, her hands closed around a mug of coffee.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ she asked, as he sat down and ordered another coffee. ‘Aren’t you going to give me a clue about my present?’
He shook his head. It was hard to talk, because the place was hot and crowded and there was a television blaring: a war film, in black and white, was reaching an explosive climax. Harry sat opposite Lizzie and explained that she’d have to wait until Christmas morning for even a glimpse of what she might get. The film ended. There was a splendid feeling of relief in the tea room that the screaming of shrapnel and the rattle of machine-gun fire were over. The credits rolled on a background of monochrome flames.
‘No,’ he said, now that the place was quieter. ‘No clues about Christmas. But I might have some other news for you soon. It’s a secret. What about you? Did you order my present? Have you been sitting on Santa’s knee in his supermarket grotto?’
She nodded, smiling into her coffee. ‘You’ll have to wait too. It’s a secret. Meanwhile,’ she went on brightly, reaching down to a plastic bag on the floor by her feet, ‘I’ve got some decorations for the Ozymandias. Can we get a bit of a tree and some holly? There must be lots in the hedges along the seashore.’
In this way, they began their preparations for a Christmas on the boat. The only reminder of another world, a previous existence, was Harry’s practice on the flute. Otherwise, their absorption in one another and their isolation on the estuary gave the increasing feeling that their past had been a dream, whose detail, once so sharp and graphic, was blurring. For Harry, all his schooldays and university days, his time as a teacher in England and Sudan, the short, eventful period he’d spent as a gardener in Snowdonia and his mad pursuit of the blonde Sarah . . . it all seemed to fade from him. It was dissolving into nothing, as a dream dissolves, as the memory flickers and fades like old newsreel. For Lizzie, this was a new world. Only the flute reminded her of where she’d come from. She was adrift with her brother, her lover, on a wide sea, under a wide sky.
In such a small space as the cabin of the boat, it took no time to make it festive. With candles, with the festoons of tinsel that Lizzie had bought, with holly and mistletoe raided from the hedgerow, they made a cosy Christmas nest. They couldn’t find a suitable tree among the wind-warped sycamore along the seashore: their one concession to conventionality in such an unconventional setting would be to buy one, as though they were a young couple mortgaged into semi-detached suburbia. This was high on their shopping list, the next time they walked into Caernarfon.
So they separated, to be reunited later, having showered, having accomplished their mysterious errands among the press of Christmas shoppers. By four o’clock the afternoon was dark, with a heavy sky leaning on the streets and the black slab sides of the castle, but the shops were loud with music and laughter, ablaze with lights. Having bought a tree, Harry carried it like an enormous brush in front of him, sweeping a path through the milling crowd. And he was pleased to find there were three replies to his advertisement. Removing his postcard from the newsagent’s window, he went to rejoin Lizzie.
Stepping into the tea room, he was met by a blast of heat and noise. Every seat was occupied; there were people standing, there were children and pushchairs and dogs; red-faced, sweating waitresses fought their way from table to table. This time there was a rugby match on the television, turned up against the din of voices. Harry, newly scrubbed and shaved, his glasses misted in the sudden steam after the cold air outside, stood at the door and peered around for Lizzie; he felt clumsy, claustrophobic, bundled in too many clothes, clutching the tree. About to turn and leave, he heard her voice calling his name. Whipping off his glasses, he spotted her in a far corner, where she was sharing a table with some other customers. He struggled towards her, brandishing the stiff branches of the tree and its battery of needles.
He squeezed onto her chair, jamming the tree beside him. ‘This is bedlam!’ he bellowed, the words barely audible in the uproar.
She was giggling at him, having watched his entry into the tea room and his manoeuvres towards the table. Her thigh was hot against his. Her hair, washed and blown dry in the sports centre, gleamed like copper, and her face was flushed with laughter and the warmth of the crush.
‘Bloody Christmas!’ he shouted, but she couldn’t hear him. ‘Bloody Christmas!’ he mouthed at her, thrilled to see her so happy. It was impossible to talk, so he reached for the spotted red neckerchief he happened to have in his pocket and concentrated on wiping the steam from his glasses. There were children crying, a dog was barking; a try was scored and the commentator was shrill amid the thunder of a distant stadium. The windows were running with condensation. But Harry was happy. Crushed into the corner of an overcrowded café, with no hope of service, sharing his space with bad-tempered strangers and the prickles of a small conifer . . . it was grand, so long as he was with Lizzie.
With a swig from her mug of coffee, he reached for a paper napkin, spread it on the table and took a pen from his pocket. He winked at her, and wrote on the napkin: ‘I’ve got news for you.’
The volume of the television seemed to increase, and so did the clamour of the room. It grew hotter.
Lizzie read the note, took the pen from him and wrote her reply: ‘I’ve got news, too.’
He produced the postcard he’d placed in the newsagent’s window and slid it to her. As she was reading it, he scribbled on the napkin: ‘Got three replies! We’ll be rich!’
She read this too. She glanced up at him, her face momentarily clouded, for the flute was the only thing which nudged her memories of a life before the Ozymandias. But the cloud passed. As she reached for the pen again, she gripped his hand warmly. There was another message to write. Still the room was hotter and noisier and more crowded, with more customers forcing in. Lizzie was writing on the napkin, and Harry could smell the shampoo on her hair as she leaned towards him. When she’d written the note, she folded it once, folded it again, flashed a look at the family who were sharing the table to discourage them from watching, and then hesitated with the napkin in her hand. She held it to her lips, and again there was a cloud on her face, a shadow on the gleam of her smile, as though she might change her mind and withhold the note from him. At last, when Harry put out his hand, she took an enormous breath and proffered the piece of paper.
He unfolded it and read. She’d written: ‘I’m pregnant.’
So the two of them sat at their table, perched on a chair in a corner of that hectic
place, holding their breath, watching one another’s eyes. Harry read the note again, neatly printed on the white napkin. For a few moments his mind was blank. All the noises of the room faded into a rushing silence, as though he’d been sucked through the porthole of a ruptured airliner and was tumbling through an emptiness of cold, thin air. Then the room came back. Lizzie was smiling, and the brilliance of her smile fell on him. He reached for her cup and gulped the dregs of coffee from it. Taking the pen from her fingers, letting his fingers linger on hers for a second, he wrote on the napkin: ‘I love you. Let’s go home.’
Somehow they managed to extricate themselves from the tea shop. The struggle with the tree caused a mixture of hilarity and petulance, invoking a squeal of alarm from a waitress as the friction of the prickles on her nylon pinafore produced a flash of static electricity. It was nothing compared with the charge which was going through Harry, the current which coursed through him from the folded napkin he’d pushed into his pocket.
Soon, they’d walked around the base of the castle, which was floodlit into sharply angled relief against the black sky. They crossed the Seiont footbridge to the other side of the river mouth. Harry held the tree by its stump and let the branches trail behind him; his other hand gripped Lizzie’s hand.
Six o’clock. A December evening. The air was mild and damp. The sky was a single, impenetrable cloud: no moon, no stars. They walked in silence until the lights of the castle had vanished behind them and they’d entered a world of utter darkness. Only the whisper of the waves on the foreshore, the cry of a heron, which flapped away from the sound of footsteps. The rustle of the bristles of the Christmas tree . . .
After a while, Lizzie spoke. Her voice was soft, disembodied. ‘This is just like the first time you walked me along here, Harry,’ she said. ‘Do you remember? Not a light in the world. Just you leading me along. I couldn’t see a thing then, and I can’t see a thing now. It seems ages and ages ago.’
‘It’s only two months,’ he replied. ‘That’s all. Two months since Mum and Dad were killed. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, that something like that should have started something like this? As though their death should start a new life for the two of us.’
‘Three of us,’ she whispered. ‘There’ll be three of us, by the end of next August . . .’ Her grip tightening on his, she huddled to him and clung to him as a wave of panic folded around her. ‘Oh, Harry, what on earth would Mum and Dad have thought of it? What would they have said? What would they have done? Oh, Harry, will it be all right? Are you glad for us, Harry?’
He hugged her until her panic was gone. The shiver of cold she’d felt, like an icicle stabbing between her shoulder blades, melted quickly in the warmth and strength of her brother’s body. Holding her, he stared into the darkness, where the sea was black and the sky was black, where the weed whispered in a black current.
‘Yes, Lizzie, I’m glad for us,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. We’ve done nothing that’s wrong, whatever Mum and Dad might have made of it. Don’t think about them. They’re gone now. It’ll be all right for the two of us, for the three of us. Come on now, home.’
They continued to walk. Their only points of reference in the blindfolded night were the touch of each other’s fingers, the crunch of the shingle beneath their feet, the dragging pursuit of the tree.
In the cabin of the Ozymandias, they set the tree firmly in a corner, wedging the stump between barnacled boulders from the beach. Harry revived the fire with some twisted tentacles of ivy he’d found drying on the high-water line. The driftwood spat. There were blue flames and the golden glow of the lamp. Lizzie was decorating the tree. She hung tinsel on the branches; she knelt and stood and knelt again with all the excitement of a child in the coming of Christmas; she frowned and smiled with the gravity and the joy of her task. The boat moved on the swell of an ebbing tide.
‘Now, what’s missing?’ she said, narrowing her eyes, squinting at the tree. Moving close to her, he could smell the scent of her hair, the pungency of burning ivy, the resinous fragrance of pine needles. ‘We’ve forgotten something,’ she said.
She wriggled free from his embrace. ‘I’ve got it!’ she cried triumphantly. ‘Our talisman, which has brought us so much luck so far!’
In a moment, she’d moved to the bookshelf, crossed the cabin, stretched upwards and down again with the speed and lightness of a cat. ‘There!’ she said. ‘Done it!’
The brittlestar dangled from the topmost point of the Christmas tree.
Chapter Twelve
Lizzie’s pregnancy began well. That is, at first it changed nothing.
Its announcement seemed a natural part of Christmas, the exchanging of gifts. There was a marvellous feeling that perfectly matched their joy and their apprehension at the news: that, for the moment, nothing was different. There was still time for the careless, carefree irresponsibility of a Christmas together before they need do anything differently or begin to think differently. They wanted the baby . . . but not yet, not for a long time. And the summer was a long way away. If there’d been any lingering idea in Harry’s mind that his sister might yet return to her studies, it was now dispelled.
For the time being, they told no one. There was no one to tell. Their union and their privacy on the Ozymandias were ensured. They were castaways, that Christmas. They sailed alone. They navigated by the brittlestar.
But, on New Year’s Day, when the Ozymandias was set down on the mud by the ebbing tide, there was something oddly unnerving in the thump and the creak which shuddered the boat. The stillness, after a night of gentle, rhythmic motion and the sensation of travelling a great distance, announced that the voyage was over. As the boat settled, a shower of dead needles fell from the tree. There was rain, a driving drizzle which obscured the dunes and the estuary and smothered the mountains, and trapped the day in a curious, suffocating opacity. Christmas was nearly over.
There were more days of rain, and for Lizzie the business of gathering driftwood became a chore instead of a game; thrown beside the stove, there was a tangle of damp twigs, to which the seaweed still clung. The fire smoked. It sizzled and sulked, giving little warmth, filling the cabin with a faint, pungent haze which made her eyes sting. She spent her mornings and evenings on the bed, making a feeble concession to wakefulness by sitting up, wrapped in blankets, instead of lying down and sleeping. For her, the afternoon expeditions to town were tedious, in the face of the wind and the wet.
Christmas was really over when they took down the decorations. All of a sudden the cabin was bare. The glamour was gone. Where there’d been tinsel and streamers, there was the woodwork which Lizzie had slapped with paint; where there’d been a tree like something from a child’s picture book, there were floorboards furry with dust. Harry snapped the tree into pieces and fed it to the fire, giving the room a short-lived burst of cheer. Lizzie swept up the needles and they were sparks among the flames, flung fast up the chimney, quenched by the smoke of whining, wet wood. She took the brittlestar, and the other brittlestar which had been on the bookshelf, and pinned them to a beam on the ceiling. From there, they released a fall of salty crumbs.
There were things to be done, to shake Harry and Lizzie from their lethargy.
‘You must write to your tutor,’ he said to her. ‘To your tutor and your warden. It’s only fair, Lizzie. It’s a matter of courtesy. Just write to them, or let me write the letter for you, telling them you’re definitely not going back to college.’
It was the first time the subject had been voiced, ever since Harry’s visit to London, and now the words hung heavily with the smoke from the fire.
‘Make a clean break,’ he went on. ‘Once the letter’s written and posted, you can forget all about it. Maybe it’s not such a bad decision, although people will think it is and say it is – you know, a waste and so on. You’ll still have the talent and the potential, won’t you? All of that’s still there, isn’t it? It hasn’t gone away.’
He thought for a
while, watching Lizzie’s head turned away from him, the blankets pulled up to her face. ‘But it’s just the way it’s happened,’ he said, ‘the way events have overtaken us, starting with Mum and Dad’s accident. All the love and the time, the money too, that Mum and Dad put in – none of that’s been lost. But things have happened to change our lives, to change your life more than mine, I suppose. We couldn’t have foreseen any of this.’
He leaned down to her and made her look at him. He whispered to her, ‘Whatever anyone says, I can tell you, Lizzie, that I’m happy to have been overtaken like this. But we must write to your college. Come on, let’s do it now. There’s no shelving it.’
Suddenly businesslike, she sat up and said, ‘You’re right, Harry. We’ll write to the college, straight and simple. We don’t have to explain to them or justify anything.’ Frowning, she added, ‘But we need to go and see a doctor, about the baby. We need to hear him say that everything’s all right.’
She paused, parrying his puzzled look. Then she said, ‘Hadn’t you thought, Harry, that we ought to check up pretty fast? Neither of us knows much about all this. Well, do we? And there is something just a bit unusual about our pregnancy, isn’t there? Well, isn’t there?’
She was right. They knew nothing. Harry composed a letter to Lizzie’s tutor, informing him in blunt, no-nonsense terms that, for personal reasons, she wasn’t going to resume her studies at the Royal College of Music. Lizzie signed the letter. They enclosed a note to her warden, authorising the disposal of the few things she’d left in her room in the hall of residence. So it was done. Having posted the letter in Caernarfon square, they went together to arrange a visit to the general practitioner who’d confirmed Lizzie’s pregnancy.
‘I can see you right now,’ the doctor said, ushering them into his surgery. ‘You’ve caught me just before I set off on my rounds. Time for a quick chat and then we can fix a proper appointment for another day, if you like. Come in and sit down. About the pregnancy, I suppose?’
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