Zoë breathed more easily, rolling her eyes at the ceiling, inhaling the exotic fumes. Harry reached for the cello itself, and picked up the hatchet from beside the stove.
He turned the ebony pegs to loosen the three remaining strings. Continuing to unwind them until the strings were detached and each one could be extracted from the peg box, he weighed the hard, black screws in his hands, knocking them together like pebbles. Then he threw them into the stove. Without hesitating to see how they burned, he stood up and pressed the cello into a corner of the cabin, to exert as much pressure as necessary to snap the neck from the body: this he did, the maple groaning against his weight as he leaned on it and held the neck in both hands. He forced his knee down; there was a sharp crack like the firing of a starting pistol and the neck was broken, with the simultaneous separation of the ebony fingerboard. He worked with a curious combination of joy and guilt, of exhilaration and furtiveness: a childish joy in the splintering of wood, and guilt in the vandalism of a thing that had been so lovingly created and so lovingly used. Unravelling the strings to free the neck completely from the body, he fed it to the stove. The fist burst into flames . . . soon it was blackened and charred.
There remained the shapely brown torso. Harry placed it on the floor, on its belly. With a glance and a smile at Zoë, who lay breathlessly still as though she were listening to the undoing of the cello with the same relish that her father was enjoying, he put his foot on the back and stepped down hard. The poplar collapsed. Turning it over, he did the same on the belly, easily shattering the wood between the f-holes. In order to see inside, into the entrails, he took the hatchet and smashed the bouts, splintering them to find the all-important label. Amati de Cremona, 1681! He hacked furiously and wildly at the carcase of the cello. And he heard himself laughing, a dry, manic, high-pitched laugh, to see how the purfling was broken, to see how the bee-stings were burst.
Time and again, striking aimlessly at the wreckage, the hatchet rose and fell. In the dancing shadows, it was hard to see what he was hitting. Until, exhausted and almost hysterical, Harry dropped the hatchet, threw all the remains of the cello into the fire, and squatted in front of the blaze to watch it burn.
Colours! Blue and green and golden flame! Perfumes! A breath of bitter-sweetness! The mysteries of colouring and varnish, the gums and resins used in infinite combinations by the great Italian makers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . no more than a sigh from the mouth of the stove for Zoë and Harry to savour before it vanished in the air of the cabin.
By now the heat was intense. Nothing remained in the flames to suggest the sweet curves of the cello or its deep autumnal glow. It was all gone, in the stove, with so much humbler wood that he’d gathered from the mud of the estuary.
Harry was stunned by the heat, and his face had been scorched by sitting so close for so long. He stood up, crossed the cabin and looked down at Zoë. She was still quiet, breathing evenly through the little O of her mouth. Her eyes, unwavering, stared into him when he leaned over her cot.
‘Come with me, Zoë, he whispered to her. ‘I want to show you, while you’re so peaceful. And while it’s so warm outside.’ He lifted her up and carried her onto the deck of the boat.
The fires on the horizon were gone. The stars were dim behind a veil of cloud. Harry inhaled the sea air, after his search for the brittlestar and the discovery of the poem, after his destruction of Lizzie’s cello. He wanted, somehow, to show the child her home, on her first night aboard the Ozymandias. Although she could see nothing, she might know the bigness of the estuary; she might taste the tang of salt, hear the rumble of surf on the further side of the dunes. He wanted no more than that.
Zoë had begun to fidget in his arms. He couldn’t see her face, but she was starting to moan again, softly, insistently. It was well past the time to feed her; they’d both been distracted from it.
Below, Zoë smiled at him, unblinking. Harry met her stare, but somehow, its fixity was too much for him. He looked at the brittlestar. It moved blindly in a swirl of sand.
Chapter Five
The woman was sound asleep, breathing evenly, very warm and very soft, with her back and buttocks pressed to his. She smelled different after a night in bed with him; her scent was quite altered. Harry lay for a while, long enough to be fully awake and to remind himself what day it was. The cabin was still dark, but he could see the sky lightening, changing from black to blue, from grey to silver. It was cold. Contrasting with the scent of the woman’s body, there was the sharp, resinous tang of pine needles.
He slipped out of bed without waking her. Zoë was sleeping, too. Squatting, he reached for some wood and placed it in the stove, the weight disturbing the pale-grey ashes into a tumble of bright-orange embers. There would soon be a good fire to take the chill from the morning.
Harry quickly and silently dressed, his breath white. When he was ready, he crossed the cabin to Zoë’s cot and leaned over it. He whispered into her tiny, unconscious face. ‘Happy Christmas!’ he said. ‘Your first! I’ll be back soon, with luck!’ He went up to the deck of the Ozymandias.
It was a morning of torrential rain, heavy and unrelenting, the drops hammering into the sand flats of the estuary. There was no horizon in any direction, only a blanket of dense cloud. No birds: the impact of the rain was too much for them. Clumsy in his waterproof jacket and trousers, Harry clambered down the ladder from the top of the sea wall and onto the beach, negotiating the slipperiness of the boulders on the foreshore. The tide was right out. The sands were ribbed and polished, corrugated like the roof of his mouth. Soon he was a hundred yards from the boat, the rain loud on the hood of his jacket, where he stood alone in a world of jumbled, unsettling sensations.
No tall sky, only a lowering ceiling of rain. No calling of gulls and waders, only the noise of the raindrops on his head, as dinning as the din of machinery in a factory. His face was cold, he exhaled an icy breath. He licked his lips, and he could taste the woman as he tasted the salt in the air. He thought for a moment, as he altered his focus on this altered world, that perhaps it would be like this for Zoë, for whom every sound and taste and texture and vibration was altogether new. Sightless, she would adjust her perceptions of the environment, like the ghost-blooms of the bindweed which opened and closed and breathed so blindly in the hours of an altering darkness. . . . Exhilarated, disoriented, he trudged further into the morning, pushing aside the curtain of rain.
He came to the skeleton of the horse, knelt beside it and felt among the riddled bones. His fingers ached in the icy, green water. But he was lucky. Again the brittlestars were there, writhing between his hands. Tears of relief welled in his eyes, blurring his vision, stinging with salt. Blinking them away, he stood up with a single, perfect brittlestar on the flat of his palm. He’d wanted it so much on this day, more than he could rationally have explained to anyone . . . except perhaps to Lizzie. But there was no Lizzie. There was Zoë. And he’d wanted this thing for her.
Almost overwhelmed by relief, Harry slipped the creature into the pocket of his jacket and walked quickly through the rain.
The cabin of the boat was warm now, after his walking and his dousing on the estuary. Careful not to waken the sleeping woman nor to disturb the sleeping baby, he tiptoed to the Christmas tree and looped the brittlestar to the topmost point with a piece of thread. The creature shuddered and arched itself, its tentacles writhing as though to burrow to the safety of sand. But it dangled in dry air. Harry freed himself from his clothes. Naked, he moved to the tree, felt the needles hard and sharp on his belly, then he crossed the cabin and slipped into bed beside the woman. Pressing the length of her body with all his coldness, he breathed into her hair and inhaled her perfume.
‘Happy Christmas, Helen,’ he said.
Zoë awoke as he and Helen were making love. The child howled, her cries as vigorously rhythmic as the cries and the lunging of the man and the woman. The baby settled to a steady wail as they subsided; she’d spent
some of her raucousness in sympathy with them, who lay spent together in rumpled sheets.
‘Zoë needs feeding and changing,’ Harry mumbled, with his mouth in the woman’s soft, dark hair.
‘So do I,’ Helen replied. ‘I’ve got people coming to my place who expect a sleek hostess and an elaborate Christmas dinner. You leave me all sweaty and tousled, you do. I mustn’t stay much longer.’
This was always Helen’s signal to move, since their first love-making on board the Ozymandias after one of her flute lessons in October. It suited them both, for her to go away in the silver Daimler to her polished and scented house, until the next time she came for a lesson or for the lesson to be no more than a part of their foreplay. They had bodies that contrasted and yet were complementary: Harry, thirty-two years old by now, was hard, thin and white; Helen, four or five years older, was ripe, soft and full. They were satisfied to fall apart and continue separately, differently, at least for the time being.
She’d asked Harry to come to her Christmas lunch; he’d declined, using the baby as an excuse. Helen was a warm and loving woman, who’d been supportive over the past six months; her presence was a great comfort to Harry. Now she watched him change and feed Zoë, she who’d never had a child. He managed the baby well, holding her with an expertise as relaxed as his expertise with Helen. The woman watched, her eyes soft. She saw the flame-haired man and his silvery-haired, sightless daughter, and she saw the groove in the beam of the ceiling from which the mother, Lizzie Clewe, had hung.
She’d never asked about Lizzie’s death, and Harry was grateful for this. Only, one day, catching him in pensive mood, she’d said, ‘Well, my love, Lizzie’s gone, for ever and ever. But she’s left you with Zoë. That’s something to be thankful for. She meant to finish herself off and she made a pretty thorough job of it, from the rumours I heard. But she meant the baby to be born first, before she did it. It’s all a mystery to me. I thought it was traumatic when my husband walked out on me, but it’s nothing compared with the way your wife left you. Maybe, sooner or later, you’ll tell me what happened. In the meantime, keep it to yourself, as long as you can bear it. . . .’
She didn’t know the peculiarity of Harry’s relationship with Lizzie. She didn’t see the writhing thing that dangled from the top of the Christmas tree; she hadn’t missed the man while he’d been searching the sands. She was outside the orbit of the brittlestar.
‘So, it’s just the two of us,’ Harry said to Zoë when Helen had gone. ‘A year ago, it was just me and your mother. Now it’s just you and me. Our first Christmas together on the Ozymandias.’
That afternoon he lay on the bed, listening to the diminishing rattle of rain on the deck. He watched the brittlestar curl and stiffen.
When the rain stopped, the skies were lit with a curious wash of watery sunshine. This, and the lifting of the boat by the incoming tide, had the effect of reviving him from his daydream; the sunlight and the weightless wallowing of the whole cabin made him feel that he was airborne in a silent airship, high above the dark clouds.
‘Let’s go out,’ he said to Zoë. In no time, she was snug in her carrycot and he was ready in a coat. He took her onto the deck, onto the sea wall, and continued with her along the seashore track.
Having decided where they were going, in the desultory brightness of a Christmas afternoon, he paused several times to drop onto the beach and search for trophies. No, not trophies; they were gifts that he gathered. Zoë rolled her eyes at the sky. She fretted while her father made her wait. He found the skull of a curlew, clean and dry; he found razor-shells with the lustre and colours of enamel; he collected the egg cases of rays, the remains of cuttlefish. All of these things he placed carefully in the carrycot, at the baby’s feet. He took them away from the shore, across the fields to the church and the cemetery where Lizzie was buried.
He put the carrycot on the grave beside Lizzie’s. Weeping, but nursing the happiness he felt at the closeness and the wriggling warmth of the baby, he arranged the Christmas gifts around Lizzie’s headstone.
‘From both of us,’ he said, through a blur of tears. ‘These are from me and Zoë.’
The baby bellowed, her face crumpled and hot, but she didn’t squeeze a tear. Together they cried, the man silent and shuddering, the child in angry spate, until the afternoon was too dark and too cold for them to stay any longer, and they returned to the Ozymandias. When Christmas was over, Harry vowed, when the tree was consigned to the fire, he would bring the brittlestar to the grave as well.
This he did, as he tried to do on subsequent Christmas Days.
Chapter Six
In the meantime, he had the telescope.
He’d been surprised and relieved at the ease with which he’d completed his claim on the cello’s insurance policy. In an accompanying letter, he’d explained the circumstances of Lizzie’s death in just enough detail to suggest the horror he’d experienced, saying that the instrument had gone missing from the boat during the time he’d been in a state of shock in the hospital. The Caernarfon police obliged with a certificate supporting his claim, and the insurance company paid in full.
So, not many weeks after his gleeful destruction of the exquisitely crafted, three-hundred-year-old cello, Harry took delivery of a telescope, superbly hand-built in polished brass and lacquered gun-metal by Ernest J. Elliot of Broadhurst, Clarkson & Fuller, which two men manoeuvred with difficulty into the Ozymandias. The equatorial mounting, on a steel pedestal which the men bolted into the floorboards, cost £170. The telescope itself, a four-inch refractor in a tube nearly five feet long, cost £2,765. With delivery and installation, Harry Clewe had spent £3,000, half the value of the cello. In this way, like the man in Robert Frost’s poem, who’d burned down his house in order to purchase a telescope, he had his own star-splitter.
And from the start, Zoë conspired with the tides to thwart her father’s observation of the night sky. Her howlings seemed to say, ‘If I can see nothing at all, not a thing but a wall of blackness shot with random dazzles and sparks, then why should I let you see any more?’
The best nights for star-gazing from the Ozymandias, with the telescope thrust through the hatch in the cabin roof, and Harry reclining comfortably in a specially sited and tilted easy chair, were the nights when the sky was cold and clear, when the boat was still on the mud of the estuary. Those were the nights when Zoë bellowed. She writhed. She turned from pink to purple and pink again with the effort of bellowing as stridently as possible. There were no tears. Each time Harry went fuming to her cot and leaned over to comfort her, she uttered a little croaking chuckle and smiled a wrinkled smile. She stared at him with her empty eyes. As long as the tide was out and her world was still, she found the strength to shout and wrestle. Perversely, when the boat was up and moving, enough to prevent the use of the telescope, she was quiet.
‘At first I thought it was me she was objecting to,’ Helen said. ‘But it’s the bloody telescope she can’t stand. Of course she can’t! She already hates the thing.’
Helen and Harry spent a good deal of time in bed together. The flute lessons were all but forgotten, although the woman still brought her flute and music with her when she came to the boat. Usually the instrument stayed in its case. Now the telescope dominated the cabin, its black and weighty frame like a gibbet. It was a cold thing, pointing coldly into a cold sky. It had no warmth at all.
‘What a monstrosity!’ the woman said, who was so warm and soft. ‘Why on earth do you want such an ugly machine as that in here? Can you use it properly?’
Harry told her that he could, although he sensed already that he’d bought a highly complicated instrument he might never fully understand. Perhaps he’d spent too much on something he could never use. The thing was too big, too awkward, wrongly sited; worst of all, he admitted to himself, he was really quite ignorant of astronomy. He could have done just as well with a good pair of binoculars, for a mere ogling of the stars. . . .
He la
y close with Helen as she slept against him. He felt the heat of her sweetly sweating body and he thought uneasily of what he’d done. The burning of the cello! A glowing thing, lovingly used for three centuries, touched by living hands, cradled by gentle limbs . . . it was destroyed in the flames of the stove so that Harry Clewe, who knew so little, could own the cold, black tube and stare into cold, black space. He lay with his face in Helen’s breast, so that the telescope’s angular deadness was forgotten in the soft, white warmth of the woman.
‘You what?’ she gasped. ‘Smashed it and burned it? The cello? In the stove? You did what?’
She’d been incredulous, almost speechless, when he confided in her and described what he’d done. She’d stared into the fire as though she might see the bones of the instrument there, the charred skeleton. But not a trace remained.
‘A poem? What bloody poem? Show it to me, for Christ’s sake!’
She read the poem, and she gazed from the flames of the stove to the gantry of the telescope. She continued to read, in silence. At last, shaking her head in disbelief, she put the book down and reached for him, pulling his head to her breast and rocking him to her, as though he were a bewildered child in need of womanly comfort.
Chapter Seven
Helen continued to come to the boat, although Harry never went to her house. Her fragrance lingered in the little cabin. She was fond of him, kind and loving and supportive. He needed her and trusted her. Zoë must have sensed her, understood that the perfume was somehow akin to the movement of the tides, in its coming and going, its headiness and gradual dissipation . . . another element of the days and weeks that went by.
The Blood of Angels Page 22
