Knowing the answer, as she always knew the answer to all the questions she ever asked him, she repeated, ‘And what about Frank, Daddy? Will he be coming again, do you think?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he replied.
He’d already explained that the youth, Dewi, had had the last of his flute lessons, having long ago left school and gone away to college in Chester. With Harry, the boy had briefly bloomed. Then he’d withered, been blighted. For him also, the cabin had been too small a space to share with the child. Zoë had smiled when Harry told her that Dewi had gone. She snuggled closely to her father, and he could feel the heat in her body, the glow reflected from her cap of silvery hair. She knew she needn’t ask about Helen. Her nod at Tycho, her gesture in the direction of the earthenware jug, were signs of her self-assurance, her certainty that the woman was gone too.
And Frank? The time came when he simply hadn’t turned up for his lesson, and that was weeks ago, when the Ozymandias was becalmed in the dead calm of summer. The estuary had started to stink. The mud was exposed to a baking sun, the weed was crisped and burnt and writhing with big, black flies. In the shallow, brackish water, there were dead fish floating: bellies swollen until the gulls broke in with their beaks, eyes staring and glaucous until the magpies had them. The sky was white, a hot poultice on a wounded place. Tourists came, and came and came, leaving the shoreline littered with condoms . . . Frank stopped coming.
The boat had been a novelty for him. Years before, he’d patronised Harry and Lizzie Clewe, playing the dusty traveller with tales of his adventures with the Pathans in the Khyber Pass and the Waorani in the rainforests of Ecuador. But Lizzie was gone. And now there was the child: a blind child, who’d changed quickly from a bellowing baby into a little adult – yes, an adult only seven years old, who smiled at the things Frank said, who smiled a grimacing smile at his stories, who stared sightlessly, unblinkingly, across the cabin at him. He was unmanned. His nerve went, on those sweltering summer’s nights, when Zoë and the jackdaw laughed together, not as one, but antiphonally, at his bleared perception of the stars. At last, unable to bear her scrutiny, realising with the onset of middle age that his travels were old hat, sensing that the cabin of the Ozymandias held a mystery more disquieting than all his accumulated and largely bogus cosmology, he was gone.
‘No, Zoë,’ Harry said. ‘I don’t think Frank will be coming any more. Why? Did you like him? What did you think of our friend Frank?’
She laughed, a chiming laugh not unlike the cry of the jackdaw. ‘He was funny, wasn’t he?’ she said. ‘The smell of that funny smoke! He was a bit of a show-off, wasn’t he, Daddy? Not very clever at all! Why isn’t he coming any more?’
Harry shivered. In spite of the fire, the cabin was cold. Zoë snuggled to him and they leaned more closely to the mouth of the stove.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘He got fed up with us, I suppose. He’s got other friends in town and he goes to talk to them instead.’
The room seemed very small. The fire was not the focus of it: the flicker of the fire on the child’s face was the focus, from which all other things took their light . . . as Harry did. He spun in Zoë’s orbit, as giddy as a moth in the flame of a candle.
‘Frank was funny with your telescope, wasn’t he, Daddy?’ she said. ‘He said he could see things in it that even I know aren’t there! He made it up, to show off to you! He couldn’t really see anything!’ She turned up her eyes to him. ‘Could he, Daddy?’
He didn’t answer. He could feel the heat from her face reflected onto his.
She said, ‘I told the class about the telescope today. Mrs Henderson made me stand up and tell them all about the Ozymandias. It was my turn to do a little talk. I told them about the telescope and I said that my daddy sometimes let me look through it. I made that bit up. They all laughed at me! Even Mrs Henderson was laughing! So I sat down and wouldn’t tell them any more.’
A long silence fell between them. There was a booming tide, but the night was still and cold. The mooring ropes creaked, stretching and straining. The fire burned evenly. It warmed the cabin and heated the water in the tank to an occasional, ill-tempered rumble.
‘Daddy?’ Zoë said, and then she held her breath to get his fullest attention. ‘Daddy? Can I look into the telescope? Please? Don’t laugh at me, Daddy. Can I? Will you show me what’s in it? Please? You could show me like the books I use at school, couldn’t you? Just a little bit? Please, Daddy?’
He stared around the walls of the cabin, into their flame-shadowed corners, focusing and refocusing his eyes to reassure himself that what he was seeing was only a trick of the light. The place was shrinking about him, the room was closing in . . . it felt as though the tide had filled up the cabin, as it filled the swirling rock pools, to sweep away everything and everybody that was too weak, everything that wasn’t prepared to cling. . . .
The Ozymandias rose and fell on a gentle swell. It was full of Zoë. All the light and the heat were concentrated in her. All of it was hers. The grave of her mother was hers, for she was the custodian of the bones. All the estuary was hers, where the birds beat around her bright head. And now the telescope. . . .
‘But, Zoë,’ Harry heard himself saying, his voice lame and bewildered. ‘But, Zoë, what do you mean? How could you possibly do anything with the telescope? How could you? I really don’t see how – ’
‘Show me, Daddy!’ There was a brisk finality in her voice. ‘Show me the stars! Starting tomorrow night! No excuses! It’s winter now, getting cold and frosty, and you’ve told me it’s best for the stars when it’s cold and frosty. You can show me while it’s frosty, starting tomorrow! Bedtime now!’
Without another word, stretching up her mouth for a goodnight kiss, she slipped into his bed and snuggled herself down. Harry gazed into the diminishing glow of the stove. He fed it with driftwood until the flames roared again. Soon, forced to concede that the fire wasn’t the most powerful source of energy on board the Ozymandias, he crawled into bed beside Zoë.
Chapter Fourteen
Returning from town the following morning, having left Zoë at school, Harry stopped near the church and leaned the bicycle into the hedgerow. The track was strewn with seaweed, driftwood, plastic bags, and right into the hedge there was flotsam from the previous night’s high tide. There’d been an early frost. He strolled onto the beach, across the heavy boulders nearest the track, over pebbles and shingle, and onto the flat sand of the estuary. He was looking for something, not the brittlestar this time, but handfuls and pocketfuls of shells. The sand was scattered with them. He bent to examine them, choosing the smoothest and best, the winkles like human fingernails, polished, translucent, varying in size from that of a man’s broad, ribbed nail to a woman’s carefully sculpted ellipse. When he had enough, he returned to the bicycle and rode the rest of the way to the boat.
There, in the cabin, he spent the entire morning in the planning and making of a scale map of the night sky, of the autumn and winter constellations, so that Zoë might be able to form some kind of a mental picture of what he could see through the telescope. He painted part of the wall a uniform midnight blue, and, while it dried, he sorted the shells for size and colour. He found a tube of glue with which to fix the seashells onto the wooden panelling of the cabin where Zoë would be able to touch them.
About to start, he’d had such a shameful thought come to him that he’d bolted to the deck for fresh air, otherwise he would have vomited. He’d disgusted himself. The notion had occurred to him, oozing from some dark and slimy corner of his mind, that he might deliberately construct a false map, a travesty, a fake, so that . . . so that what? So that the child might not . . . might not what? It had nauseated him to think what he could have done to deny the blind girl her access to the stars. Gulping an icy lungful to clear his head, he’d gone below again, where he lost himself in the construction of his map. Zoë’s map.
Accurately, painstakingly, lovingly, he made it.
It seemed to him to be a beautiful thing that he made. It thrilled him. He could barely resist the temptation to describe it to Zoë as he cycled her home that afternoon.
‘The tide was right up last night, Daddy!’ she called out from behind him, where she sat in her pillion seat and held tightly to his waist. ‘There’s seaweed everywhere! Go on, Daddy! Faster! Faster! Pop the seaweed!’ The frost-dried bubbles exploded under the tyres of the bicycle. ‘Did you remember what I asked you yesterday, Daddy?’
‘Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t, young madam!’ he interrupted her cryptically, panting over his shoulder as they sped along. ‘Wait and see!’
He realised the foolishness of what he’d said when she laughed and punched him playfully on the back. The child was in high spirits, sensing the imminent divulgence of a secret. But he wouldn’t give it away until night-time, when he’d be ready to point the telescope through the hatch in the cabin of the Ozymandias. Until then he would say, whenever he saw that Zoë’s inquisitiveness was bringing her close to finding what he’d prepared for her, ‘Mind that bit of wall, Zoë! The paint’s still wet! I only gave it a fresh coat this morning, while you were at school.’
She glanced at him, smiling, the blind eyes settling on him for a moment and continuing past, arcing around the room like searchlights. Harry inspected his handiwork and was pleased. He’d cleaned the telescope too; Tycho’s claws were loud on the polished metal.
The night fell, with a mighty clang of frost. When all was still, when the cabin was warm and quiet, Harry prepared to look at the stars.
‘Now, Zoë,’ he said. ‘What was it you were asking me last night? Something about the telescope, wasn’t it? Let me get the hatch open and we’ll be ready.’
She snuggled to him on the easy chair. She lay breathless beside him. He aimed the telescope skywards and swung it on its silent swivels, to see what he could see.
‘Lovely!’ he said. ‘Perfect! No cloud to hide the stars from us. Not too bright a moon to dazzle us, but bright enough to dampen the fainter stars so that we can see the major constellations clearly. Now, this is always the best place for us to start. . . .’
In the very centre of his vision there hung a single star, Epsilon Orionis, the middle of the three stars that made up Orion’s unmistakable belt. He locked the telescope on it.
‘We’ll leave that there for a moment,’ he said. ‘Right, Zoë, up you get. I want to show you something. Over here, come on.’
He led her by the hand across the cabin, guided her to the wall he’d prepared for her.
‘There . . . put your hand up, both hands, like so . . . that’s it!’ He lifted her fingers to the three white, smooth seashells he’d fixed a few inches apart, the line they formed running slightly downwards from right to left. ‘What can you feel, Zoë, stuck to the wall?’
‘Winkles,’ she answered straight away.
‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘Winkles. Three in a line. Three dots. Imagine they’re the stars I can see right now in the telescope, in a straight line but angled down a bit to the left. Stay there.’ He hurried back to the easy chair and put his eye to the lens. He said, ‘Now I’m going to swing about and find some more stars, and I’ll tell you which way I’m moving so that you can follow me. They’re all on the wall in front of you, big shells and little ones, different colours even, so that I can try and explain to you what they’re like. All right, Zoë?’
He glanced over to her. She had her fingers on the three seashells. She was holding her breath, with her eyes tightly closed. ‘Good girl!’ he said. ‘Here goes!’
He quickly explained that what she was touching was supposed to be something like the belt of a man, a great hunter, that it helped to identify the stars by remembering these ideas even if they were rather hard to imagine.
Sternly, she said to him, ‘I can imagine it, Daddy. You know I can.’
He directed her from there, upwards, straight upwards from the left-hand star until she found a much bigger winkle.
‘Betelgeuse,’ he told her, ‘or Beetlejuice, if you like. A huge orange star which I’m looking at right now, and which you’re touching with your fingers. You’re touching it, Zoë! Isn’t that wonderful?’
It was working. She was quivering with excitement, her face set in a tight smile, her eyes clenched shut.
‘So that’s one of the Hunter’s shoulders,’ he said. They found the other shoulder, Bellatrix; they returned to the belt; they moved down to the big stars, or winkles, which were his feet and established the scale of the constellation.
‘It is like a man, Daddy!’ she cried. ‘A skeleton, anyway! His bones in the sky! His belt and his shoulders and feet!’ Again she ran her fingers from shell to shell. ‘Can you see him, Daddy? Like this?’ She paused, her fingers hesitating on the wall, then she squealed with laughter and turned to her father, opening her eyes wide. ‘What’s this? I think I’ve found his . . . yes, it’s his willy! Just under his belt! Have a look through the telescope, Daddy! Can you see it too?’
Her fingers returned to the cluster of tiny shells he’d placed a few inches beneath the belt, and she giggled tremendously.
Harry laughed too, fixing the Great Nebula in front of him, a magnificent, mysterious cloud of gases. ‘That’s not his willy, you silly madam! It’s supposed to be his dagger, or his sword,’ he told her.
So they laughed together, and he was thrilled that she’d found the nebula before he’d swivelled down to it, even if her interpretation of its shape and position was different from the ancient Greeks’. Her hunter had taken shape. Zoë felt for his bones on the wall of the cabin.
That evening he saw more wonderful things through his telescope than he’d ever seen before. Zoë was showing him.
Quite close to the floor, as though it were appearing over the horizon of black dunes, she found Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars and therefore the biggest seashell on the wall.
‘Sirius is the Hunter’s dog, so we sometimes call it the Dog Star,’ Harry said. She came to Procyon, ‘known as the Announcer,’ he told her, ‘because its arrival each night tells us that Sirius will be up soon afterwards. Imagine all of this swinging slowly upwards, each evening, from the floorboards to the ceiling and moving overhead. That’s what it’s like.’
They travelled on together to the Twins, Castor and Pollux, for which she had to stand on a chair. Almost at the ceiling, she stretched as tall as she could for the wide, ribbed shell he’d put there, which signified Capella, in the constellation of the Charioteer.
‘Get down again,’ he said. ‘You’ll find some lovely stars about head height, not much higher than Orion’s shoulders, but a bit further this way. Just a pace nearer to me. That’s it! There!’
At the same time, he was training the telescope into space until he found what he was looking for: the Pleiades. He explained to Zoë that these were the Seven Sisters, perhaps the most beautiful and most delicate cluster of stars in the entire night sky. They’d never looked so fine before as this time with Zoë. Through the lenses of the telescope, the stars were brilliant, cold and distant and untouchable. And yet, in the same room where Harry Clewe lay in the easy chair and felt the warmth of the stove on his legs, his daughter was chuckling with pleasure at the touch of her own Seven Sisters, a cluster of tiny white seashells stuck to the panels of the wall.
There was more. They completed their circuit of the winter constellations, through the Hyades and the Bull, returning to Orion’s Belt. Harry remembered how Lizzie had thrilled at the same journey, seeing the stars through the pitted and gritty lenses of the old binoculars. Now Zoë could have some kind of understanding of what her father could see. She was up and down, from the floor to the ceiling, on and off the chair, as she went round the circuit again. She found more stars, some shells she hadn’t found the first time, and she asked him their names.
‘Thank you, Daddy!’ she said, nestling close again. ‘They won’t laugh at me in school now! Mrs Henderson won’t laugh whe
n I tell her I’ve been star-spotting with you. I love your shells, all over the walls. They make the Ozymandias seem more like a spaceship than a boat on the water, as though we’re on board a rocket ship, flying with the stars all around us.’
They cuddled, father and daughter, under the nodding black barrel of the telescope, before the shadowy black wall on which the seashell constellations were fixed. The jackdaw was asleep, its head under its wing. Harry and Zoë giggled together, confiding in one another. They went to bed in the glow of the stove, falling asleep as one person.
Chapter Fifteen
Such was the success of Orion, whose seashell skeleton dominated the cabin, that by the following May another part of the wall was studded with winkles. Zoë became familiar with the Plough, fingering the polished surfaces of the seven big shells which Harry had arranged there. He’d included Alcor, to make the double with Mizar in the centre of the Plough’s handle, a double known as the Horse and Rider.
‘He must have fallen off,’ she said, more to herself than to him, as she felt the two components of the double, two winkles separated by inches of empty wall.
She frowned as she worked her imagination around the idea of the Bear, flashing her father a smile as though she had a better suggestion for a name. At least the Lion made sense; she understood the Sickle that comprised its head and front quarters with the big star, Regulus, and could appreciate the shape of its haunches to its tail, Denebola. It started as a joke between the man and the child, her questioning of the constellations, that such a scattering of stars, or indeed seashells, could have come to represent the creatures and objects and people they did.
With the Plough, the Lion and the Crab, together they swivelled to the Crow and the Water Snake, and that section of the wall was as thoroughly explored as the earlier map he’d made. Zoë’s scepticism was a customary ingredient of their evenings with the stars.
The Blood of Angels Page 27
