Chapter Twenty-Three
Harry didn’t return to the shore for months and months after that. Then he came back with Helen.
It was Christmas Day, a fine, cold, sunlit afternoon. She drove him to the mooring where the Ozymandias had been, but the boat wasn’t there any more. Harry got out of the car and walked to the edge of the sea wall, looking down to the mud where the keel used to bed when the sea level dropped. The tide was right out. The sand flats gleamed, as smooth as glass, as far as the dunes on the further side of the estuary. The air was crisp and clean. With a wave at Helen, who was staying in the car, Harry signalled his intention to climb down the ladder and onto the beach. She waved back at him, smiling, and he made his way carefully down the slimy rungs, gripping with his right hand.
In the distance, where the creeks of the river drained to the sea, he saw a great commotion of birds. A flock of gulls, mingled with jackdaws and carrion crows, was shrieking wildly, falling and rising like snow in a whirlwind. Harry crossed the foreshore, over the boulders and the weed, and walked on the hard, flat sand to see what the birds were doing.
He expected to find the skeleton of the horse, a landmark on the estuary which had been there for years; indeed, as he drew closer to the hysterical flock, he thought he could see the ribcage jutting from the sand, although the size and the shape of it were blurred by the clamouring birds. The gulls and the crows gave way to him. They beat about his head and their droppings were wet on his face and his neck. He knelt to the bones, as he’d done so many times before.
But they weren’t the bones of the horse. They were the bones of the Ozymandias.
Nothing much left. Stripped by thieves, smashed by vandals, cut loose from the mooring . . . and then the sea had broken the hull into pieces. All that remained was the keel, sunk in the deep mud, and the spars, which stuck out of the sand like splintered, blackened bones. The swirling tide had made a deep pool inside the skeleton of the boat. Harry knelt to it, to see what the gulls and the crows had been after. He felt with his hand, his right hand, into the cold, green water.
Brittlestars, scores of them. The pool was alive with the writhing, spidery creatures. Closing his fist, he brought a dozen of them to the surface, into the clear, bright sunlight. The gulls were wild around him; the crows beat their sooty wings. For a while, Harry stayed there, kneeling, head down, lowering his face to the brittlestars, and he saw how blindly they groped at his fingers, how blindly they sculled in the palm of his hand. He dropped them back into the water, all but one of them, and he stood up. He would slip the creature into his pocket, take it home with Helen and hang it, surreptitiously, on the Christmas tree . . . in memory of Lizzie.
No. As he turned away from the wreck of the boat, he changed his mind. Lizzie was gone. Zoë was gone. The Ozymandias was all but gone. The nightmare was over. He had a new life with Helen, in her fine, warm house: their home. So he crouched again and flicked the brittlestar into the pool. The water folded around it. It sank and disappeared.
Harry walked to the foreshore. He reached the ladder and climbed, with some difficulty, onto the sea wall. He got into the car and he kissed the soft, fragrant woman who was waiting for him.
‘Let’s go home, Helen,’ he said. ‘It’s all finished here. It’s all gone. Home’s the place to be at Christmas.’
She turned the car round. They drove away from the shore and the gleaming sands, where the birds were at work in the bones of the boat.
Part Four: Ammonite
Chapter One
At last the sea came into the house.
It slithered under the door. Then it burst the door wide open. There was nothing Harry Clewe could do, as wave after wave of brown water, heavy with sand and mud, broke into the downstairs rooms.
All afternoon, the storm had driven the tide inland, over the foreshore, through the hedges, filling the ditches until the fields were flooded. Harry watched from an upstairs window as the sea came closer and closer. The day grew dark at three o’clock, a twilight of howling wind and lashing rain. He saw the waves pour into the drainage ditches and fill the dew pond. He felt the wind grow stronger and stronger, rattling the slates of the roof and making the chimneys shudder. Still the tide kept rising. At four o’clock, seeing in the whirling gloom that the fields were entirely submerged, he went down the staircase and into the hallway in time to see the tide force its way under the front door and surge towards him. The door splintered and burst open. A few minutes later, all the downstairs rooms were slopping with deepening water.
Harry was tired. His hips were hurting. But he splashed from room to room to watch what the sea was doing inside his house. The lights had gone out. He took a torch and trod through the darkened hallway and into the living room, flashing the beam around him. There was a shrieking din of wind and rain, as though, not satisfied with driving the tide this far inland for the first time in living memory, the storm was trying to shake the house to pieces. The living room shutters, which he’d closed and bolted at midday, rattled so hard at the tall windows that he thought they would shatter and fly open. The gale howled into the house, once the front door was broken by the weight of the sea, tearing pictures from the walls and books from their shelves. The water was up to his knees, a sucking current which rammed his legs with pieces of driftwood and entangled him with weed.
He waded to the fireplace and beamed the torch from wall to wall, at the chop of the waves which tugged at the grandfather clock and slopped at the legs of the piano. To balance himself, he grabbed at the mantelpiece; on it, he felt the photograph of Helen and the cold, smooth contours of an ammonite she’d found on their honeymoon, years ago. With difficulty, afraid that he might stumble and fall, he waded back to the hallway and into the dining room, where the water was rough enough to start moving the chairs around the table; then to the drawing room, where the books had been blown from his desk and scattered across the surface of the flood.
There was nothing he could do about it. He stepped onto the staircase and switched the torch off. The wind came straight off the sea, over the fields, through the front door and into his face. He was drenched and very cold, but he sat in the roaring darkness, hearing the smash of the waves on the walls of the house, enduring the sting of salt on his cheeks.
Harry sat on the stairs all night. The tide showed no sign of turning and falling. His house was in the sea. The sea was in his house. At last he went up to the landing, where his dogs were bristling like a pair of great black bears, shut himself in his room and climbed into bed.
From there, even with the blankets pulled over his head and the heavy, warm weight of the dogs beside him, he could still hear the sea downstairs: as though a huge, drunken, furious thief was ransacking the rooms, slamming doors, flinging furniture, smashing and looting and wrecking.
At dawn, when the storm abated and the noises stopped, Harry slept a little.
The flood tides had been forecast for a long time. Harry had heard all about them on his radio. However, unlike hundreds of people along the coast of Wales who’d left their homes in the towns and villages most threatened by high water, he’d decided not to move. Already, that autumn, the tide had come over the beach and into his fields, drowning the ditches, bleaching the grass, tangling the hedges with driftwood and seaweed. Day by day, he’d seen the water come closer and closer. The radio had told him that soon the biggest of all tides would be blown inland. Now the storm had driven the sea into his house.
Harry Clewe was fifty-three years old. He’d become stout and red-faced; his gingery hair had turned peppery grey, grown wild and bushy. Where his left hand had been, he had a black iron hook. He was hard of hearing, short-sighted, short of breath, and, as the pain in his hips got worse, increasingly bad-tempered. His dogs were bad-tempered as well: Gog and Magog were enormous, shaggy, coal-black mongrels, as massive-headed as Great Danes and as thickset as Rottweilers. Harry had lived alone with them for ten years, through the 1980s and into the 1990s, since they we
re gluttonous puppies. Since Helen had gone.
In the meantime he’d done nothing to maintain the house. Long before the storm, there were slates off the roof and cracks in the chimneys wide enough for the jackdaws to nest in; he’d closed the living room, the drawing room and the dining room, each with their corniced ceilings, their exquisite oak panelling and marble fireplaces, leaving them chill and dark; he’d shut the biggest of the bedrooms, too. He and the dogs had retreated to the kitchen, kept warm by a wood-burning stove, and to a spare bedroom upstairs with a driftwood fire and a view across the flat, bare fields to the sea.
The house, called Ynys Elyrch, was the one that Helen had bought when she’d come to Wales after her divorce. It was a fine, big house. But the name, meaning ‘the island of swans’, was inaccurate. It wasn’t built on an island: it stood on a spit on the edge of the estuary, only a few miles from where the Ozymandias had been moored, isolated from the rising ground inland. There were no swans: they never came to the shore or the fields, although a flock of them roosted in the salt marsh on the other side of the estuary.
Harry had moved in with Helen as soon as he’d come out of hospital. She’d insisted on it, and he’d been glad to submit to her. Without consulting him, indeed while he was still in intensive care, she’d taken it upon herself to get all his belongings out of the boat and into her house, spending hours on her own at the Ozymandias, shifting his books and pictures and bedding into the boot of the Daimler and driving them to Ynys Elyrch. Once he was home with her, she’d nursed him back to health. She grew to love him; he was fond of her. Indeed, they’d married, Helen insisting on the white wedding that her first husband had denied her. For a year they’d lived together in her fine, big house.
But then, Helen was gone. Harry Clewe was alone with the dogs.
Bit by bit, year by year, he’d sold acres of land and a number of barns, until all he had left was the neglected house, a few dilapidated stables round a cobbled yard, and the rank, treeless fields which separated the property from the beach. Harry had no disposable money; Helen had spent most of her settlement on Ynys Elyrch, but the threat of flood tides had made it a poor investment. There were no other houses for miles around. For the last ten years, Harry had lived in decaying isolation . . . ever since Helen had gone.
Now, the morning after the storm, he came downstairs to find a state of chaotic disorder. The floors of every room were deep in silted sand and oozing brown mud. A scree of pebbles had been left behind, banked into corners, raked and swirled by the falling tide. There was seaweed everywhere, the knotted black clumps of bladderwrack and the salad leaves of kelp; dead birds, tangled and broken and sodden; the huge, translucent, rubbery remains of jellyfish; all kinds of plastic, polythene and rotten driftwood. The skirtings were buckled and the panelling had split. Some of the furniture had been turned over. Pictures and photographs lay in the pools of water which hadn’t drained out of the house as the tide went down. Books were strewn about. The rain had stopped and the wind had decreased, but the shutters banged and the doors dangled on broken hinges.
Harry spent the day trying to tidy up, although he knew that the sea would come into the house again; he’d heard on his radio that, further along the coast, at Rhyl and Towyn, the storm had breached the sea walls and flooded the towns. The coastguards from Caernarfon came to see him, churning across the waterlogged fields in a Land Rover and driving into the cobbled yard; but they soon gave up trying to persuade him to leave his house and go with them to emergency accommodation inland. He was a stubborn old fool; he was rude and ungrateful. The coastguards had plenty of work elsewhere, with people who wanted to be helped. Glancing warily at his glinting iron hook, they warned him to expect worse storms, jumped back into their Land-Rover as the dogs lunged towards them, and they drove away.
When the coastguards had gone, Harry stomped across the yard to the shed where the Daimler stood. The big, silver car hadn’t moved for years. It was riddled with rust. The tyres were punctured and perished. But when he opened the driver’s door, the interior smelled dry and strangely warm. He climbed in, pulling the door shut with a gentle thud, and he sat at the wheel for a few minutes. It was a quiet, still place. He blew the dust off the clock and the speedometer; he stroked the walnut dashboard; he inhaled the scent of the soft, red leather upholstery. It reminded him of a car he’d had, long ago, when he’d first come to Wales; more than that, it reminded him of Helen and the short time they’d spent together. He though he could smell her perfume.
At last, blinking himself out of his daydream, he remembered why he’d gone to the car: he leaned into the back seat and rummaged for the spade, the rake and the pitchfork among the other tools he kept there, and he climbed out of the car with them. That was all the Daimler was good for nowadays, as a kind of tool shed, because it was dry inside. He carried the tools back to the house.
Gog and Magog climbed the stairs to the landing and flopped down. They watched as Harry shovelled the mud and sand through the front door, as he raked out the seaweed and the litter of dead birds, as he speared the jellyfish with the pitchfork and lifted them outside. He’d adapted to his disability; indeed, he used the hook as a versatile tool. He hammered boards across the broken front door and nailed the shutters into the window frames. Resting from time to time, he splashed through the living room and leaned at the fireplace, where he stared at Helen’s photograph on the mantelpiece. He’d taken the picture himself, on their honeymoon in Lyme Regis. Dark and sleek and beautiful, she was clutching an ammonite she’d found on the beach, although the fossil was so heavy she could hardly hold it for more than a few seconds. Next to the photograph was the ammonite itself. Sometimes Harry would take it from the mantelpiece, heft it in his hand and try to imagine the warmth of the woman in the dead, cold stone.
Back to work. He had an idea to make the job easier. He pulled up the carpet, which was heavy with sand, and rolled it aside, thinking to open the trap door in the floorboards and simply shovel the rest of the debris into the cellar. The cellar was very deep; it was years since he’d looked into it. Now he knelt and peered into the blackness under the living room floor. He flashed his torch. The cellar had filled with water. Holding his breath, he strained his eyes and ears at the glistening darkness. He gagged at the blast of dead, cold air which came up and slapped him in the face, a clammy, rotten smell which seemed to suck the breath from him. He shivered so hard that he almost dropped the torch. Something was moving down there . . . he thought he could hear it, he thought he could see it.
Suddenly so frightened that his scalp prickled and his heart began to thump, he recoiled from the hole, slammed the trap door shut, scrambled to his feet, threw down the torch, grabbed the shovel and flung sand and shingle on top of the trap door as fast as he could . . . to keep it closed.
At last he stopped, breathing very hard, staring wildly around at the disordered room. When the blood had stopped pounding in his ears, he listened again, cocking his head at the floor. He thought he heard something knocking down there. But it was only the slopping of deep, black water.
Chapter Two
The storms continued through October and into November, driving bigger and bigger tides ashore. The waves forced over the fields; they tore up the hedges, broke down the walls and left the grass whitened by salt and the scouring of sand. All day and all night, at high or low water, the wind hurtled off the sea. It was very cold. The sky was grey, boiling with black cloud.
Harry’s efforts to barricade the house proved futile. The front door burst open as soon as the sea leaned on it, and the waves poured into the hallway. Again and again, all the rooms were flooded. The water came higher and the gales grew stronger, until the shutters blew in, the windows exploded in splinters of flying glass and the storm roared into the house more fiercely than ever before. The tide slopped up to the third step on the handsome staircase; another night it slopped at the fourth; then the fifth. The cellar boomed, filling with water which force
d up the floorboards so hard that the trap door would open and shut with a sudden, startling report. It was no good trying to keep the sea outside or clearing the debris once the tide had gone down. So Harry surrendered the ground floor of the house completely.
The rooms filled up with deeper sand and bigger banks of pebbles, forming pools which didn’t drain when the sea receded. Soon, the living room, the drawing room and the dining room were part of the foreshore, bizarrely furnished with tables, chairs, grandfather clock and piano. Furthermore, the sea began a systematic removal job, the better to occupy the house with the things it wanted . . .
Coming downstairs after another night of huddling under the bedcovers, Harry found that most of the furniture had been carried outside. Tables and chairs had been lifted up, swirled about, floated through the hallway and sucked out of the front door by the falling tide. They were dumped in the fields. His books were scattered in the hedges. Seeing that the grandfather clock was missing, he waded through the mud and the debris until he found it floating in a deep ditch, a hundred yards from the house. Even the piano was shifted, a foot here, a foot there, out of the living room and into the hall, until it stuck in the front door.
Harry didn’t care. Like the Daimler, these things were relics of a different life. It had been a fine grandfather clock, a longcase in oak banded with mahogany, made by James Berry in Pontefract in 1774; a solemn moon and a smiling sun rotated above the clock face; its chiming, every fifteen minutes of every hour of every day, had marked the progress of Harry’s gentle convalescence once Helen had settled him into her home. For him, the sound had been part of the house, as much as the scent of polish and cut flowers. The piano was a Bechstein baby grand, which, along with the flute, Helen had been learning to play. The trompe l’oeil painting of a blazing fire, executed with such depth of perspective on the oak panelling that it cast a glow right across the living room, was by Rex Whistler, done at the same time as the artist was working at Plas Newydd for the Marquis of Anglesey. Now it was ruined. All these things were ruined.
The Blood of Angels Page 33
