Chapter Twenty
Harry had shot a swan on the foreshore.
The day was raw and damp. A dense, white mist lay on the estuary, obscuring the horizon. Early that morning, Christmas morning, there’d been a flock of forty swans slapping their wide black feet on the wet black mud, dipping their beaks in the shallow pools that the tide had left behind. Harry, having walked across the fields, across the weed and the rubbled boulders until he was also on the mud, had been amazed to see them there: the first he’d ever seen at Ynys Elyrch, the island of swans. He chose his target as the birds ignored him and continued to feed.
There was a tremendous commotion when he fired. As the explosion of the shotgun reverberated over the estuary, the flock reacted by stampeding madly in all directions, beating into the air with a thrashing of huge white wings. And when the birds had fled to the dunes on the horizon, when the rhythmic whistling of their flight had faded to silence, one of them was left on the foreshore. It lashed and lashed in the mud; it had churned itself into a deep pool before Harry and the dogs could reach it, and by then it was black all over, slick and black as though it had been fouled in oil. It scrabbled with its great leathery feet. It seemed to claw with the bones of its wings. It snaked its neck and croaked horribly, gagging and gasping, blowing mucus bubbles from its nostrils.
The dogs got there first and fell on the bird with their heavy heads and wide mouths. Harry, arriving a few seconds later, banged them away with his hook before he seized the swan by the throat. He turned back towards the beach, dragging the bird behind him as though it were a sheet of filthy, flapping tarpaulin he’d pulled out of the mud. When he snapped its neck, with a sound like the cracking of a walnut, it stopped flapping straight away.
He’d carried the swan across the fields, dunked it in a flooded ditch until it was clean again, and plucked it at the front door of the house, leaving a drift of scattered white feathers all around the capsized piano. He’d cut off the wings, which were huge and waterlogged, and dropped them in the yard. Gog and Magog ate the head and neck, crunching the knobby beak, but they baulked at the rubbery webbed feet. At last, having gutted the bird and fed the entrails to the dogs, Harry trudged across the field again to rinse the carcase in the ditch and nip out a few stubbled quills he’d missed in the plucking. It was a job well done: less than thirty minutes after he’d banged the gun into the flock, less than half an hour since the flock was feeding peacefully in the shallow pools of the estuary, he cradled the warm, pink, naked body in his arms and took it into the house.
The mist clung to the sodden fields and the skeletons of the broken hedges. Harry worked all morning to prepare the house for his visitor. When he was satisfied that everything was ready, he worked on himself. Then he sat and waited.
Christy came at three o’clock in the afternoon.
There’d been a Christmas dinner in the orphanage, but he hadn’t eaten anything at all. Instead, he’d stuffed his pockets with cake and fruit and mince pies, and afterwards, when Mrs Bottomley gathered the boys in front of the television to hear the Queen’s message before settling down for the Christmas-afternoon feature film, it had been easy for him to slip away. He’d gone to the matron’s room to pick up a box of liqueur chocolates he’d spotted there, and he’d used her perfume too, dabbing it so liberally around his ears and on his throat that a splash of the stuff ran down the collar of his shirt; he’d felt it trickling over his belly, into the waistband of his trousers. Then he’d inspected himself in her dressing-table mirror, with a toss of his soft, shining, especially washed blonde hair, a pout and a giggle, before tiptoeing out of the home unnoticed.
The lanes were choked with mist. The world was still and cold and silent. No, not quite silent. He could hear the snorting of invisible cattle in the fields, the croaking of invisible crows which wafted out of the trees as he padded between the high hedgerows. The mist grew thicker and thicker the closer he came to the shore; he seemed to swim through it, pulling it aside with his arms, burrowing into it with his head, and it was clammy like wet cotton wool. When at last he heard the sea, the rhythmic movement of the waves on the shingle, he knew that the tide was coming in, that the mudflats were covered and soon the water would fill the fields and surround Ynys Elyrch.
But he couldn’t see the house at all until he was a stone’s throw from it – a girl’s stone’s throw, at that. Then it loomed before him, huge and blank with tall black chimneys, with gaping black holes where the windows should have been. He sniffed the smell of wood smoke. Pausing, he peered ahead of him and frowned, because, in the monochrome of a dank, grey Christmas, it looked as though a fall of snow had drifted to the front door. Very puzzled, he peered again and saw a pair of enormous, pure white wings . . . as if a Christmas angel had misjudged its flight path and crash-landed in the yard. Blinking, rubbing his eyes to try and make out what these strange apparitions might be, Christy squeezed past the piano and into the house.
It was very dark. As the boy splashed through the shingled pools to the foot of the stairs, the man appeared on the landing and beamed his torch into the hallway.
‘It’s me, Mr Clewe! It’s me! Christine!’ the boy called out, shielding his eyes from the dazzling beam, and the dogs tumbled downstairs to leap around him and try to slap his face with their slobbery tongues. The torch clicked off.
‘Come up!’ Harry shouted as he withdrew from the landing into the little bedroom. ‘What time do you call this? I thought you weren’t bloody coming! Christmas Day’s almost over by now! Come upstairs!’
But Harry was quivering with excitement, however bad-tempered he might have sounded. He grinned so hard that his face ached. His stomach churned as he heard the footsteps on the stairs and then the swish of clothes at the bedroom door.
‘Come in, come in!’ he cried. ‘Come in and see how hard I’ve been working to get it all ready for you!’
The room was transformed. It was lit by a blazing fire and a row of fifteen or twenty candles, too many to count at a glance, arranged along the mantelpiece. In all this glorious flamelight, the boy could see that the stale bedding and the unwashed clothes were tidied away, the books and newspapers stacked in the corners. The bedside table had been moved in front of the hearth, spread with a clean-looking cloth and set with knives, forks, spoons and glasses. There were heaps of driftwood drying in front of the fire, so that the room was sweet with the scent of salt and seaweed. There were bottles gleaming, red and green and pink. A Christmas tree, rooted in a bucket full of pebbles, so tall that it touched the darkly shadowed ceiling, bristled by the window; it exhaled a perfume of sappy resin. And, spitted over the flames of the fire, dripping its juices into a tray of roasted potatoes and roasted parsnips, the biggest fowl that Christy had ever seen, as big as a goose, as big as a . . .
‘Sit down, sit down!’ Harry was saying, flapping his hook in the vague direction of an armchair. ‘Bugger off, you bloody great brutes!’ he was bellowing, as Gog and Magog, uncontrollably excited by Christy’s arrival and the smell of cooking meat, blundered round and round in the confined space. For a few moments, there was confusion. Christy struggled to take his coat off and put it down; Harry dithered between welcoming his guest and kicking the dogs; Gog and Magog veered from the fragrant fireside to the gentle hands of the young visitor.
But at last there was calm. Christy sat down. So did the dogs. Harry knelt to the stack of fuel and laid a spar among the flames. The spar burned blue, crusted with salt, and the man and the boy stared at it without speaking. Then, when the fowl spat a jet of fat which sizzled gold and black, Harry turned from the fire, appraised the room with a smile of indescribable joy and beamed at Christy. He leaned closer and sniffed. His nostrils flared, his face glowed with excitement, his eyes shone with tears of pleasure.
‘That perfume again!’ he whispered. ‘How lovely! And how pretty you’re looking! I’m so glad you’ve come! Do you like the tree? I went up the lane last night and pinched it from the plantation. There
was a guard dog prowling about to try and deter rogues like me, but it was only a piddling Alsatian . . . it took one sniff at Gog and Magog and disappeared. And what do you think of the bird? A swan at the island of swans! I shot it this morning. Did you know that all the swans in Britain belong to Her Majesty the Queen? Did you know that? Well, we’d better make sure it all gets eaten and the evidence is gone for ever, or else we’ll be in trouble, won’t we? Eh?’
Christy winced at this. And then Harry winced, realising what he’d said and what it must have meant to his young visitor. He began to bluster about his own appearance, because, as well as working hard to make the house comfortable and warm for Christmas Day, he’d made a special effort with himself.
‘Well, how do I look?’ he asked, standing up in front of the fire and twirling himself like a mannequin. ‘Not bad for a decrepit old goat, eh? Will I do for a pretty girl like you, if only for a few hours while we have our Christmas feast? Well, will I?’
He’d combed his wild grey hair and plastered it down with pomade; he’d shaved very closely, so that his face was ruddy and raw in the dancing candlelight; his shirt, although frayed at the collar, looked quite clean, and he’d put a tie on, tucked into an ancient, baggy, cricket pullover. Instead of his boots, he was wearing a pair of highly polished brogues, and a pair of cavalry-twill trousers instead of the mud-spattered corduroy bags he usually wore. He grinned, bashful as a sixteen-year-old boy with the girl he was trying to impress.
Christy grinned back at him. ‘You’ll do, Mr Clewe! And all this is great! The tree! The fire! And that bird! All these candles! But you won’t have any left if you burn all of them at the same time. You won’t have any for tomorrow, will you?’
Harry threw back his head and roared with pleasure, so that Gog and Magog heaved themselves to their feet again and shook their jowls; their dangled saliva fizzed on the hearth. Charged with excitement, the boy stood up and clapped his hands. The room was sweet with the scents of pine resin, wood smoke and roasting fowl, and when Christy reached for his coat to pull out the pies and the chocolates he’d brought with him, his fine, long hair swung around his face and wafted the perfume which he’d dabbed on his throat, which he’d spilled down his chest and his belly.
Harry shuddered. He flared his nostrils, inhaling deeply. He reached for one of the bottles which were warming by the fire, gripped it between his thighs and pulled the cork with a triumphant flourish; he filled the glasses so full that some of the rich red wine slopped onto the table. He and Christy toasted one another, swallowing greedily. They licked their lips and swallowed again. So the feast began.
Chapter Twenty-One
Harry carved the carcase of the swan, using the butchering knife that had proved so useful before. He laid the slices of moist, grey meat on the plates that had been warming on the hearth and spooned out the potatoes and parsnips which had cooked in the bubbling juices.
‘Skin?’ he asked, and the boy nodded, licking his lips as Harry lifted a crisp, golden wafer and added it to the plate. ‘A leg?’ The boy nodded again. The limb was huge, a glistening knob of meat on a knob of bone.
The dogs watched every move as they lay on a rug by the door. Their eyes shone with a lust for the sizzling carcase, and spools of saliva dripped from their tongues; but they didn’t get up or try to worm themselves closer, because they feared their master’s sudden shouts and the kicks he might aim at them. Harry filled the glasses again, already the third time, and nodded at the table to indicate that Christy should sit down. Then he sat down too.
For a minute they waited without speaking, relishing the long pause, a deliberate hesitation to heighten the pleasure of eating. Smiling shyly at one another, they reached for their glasses, chinked them together and whispered a Christmas toast. The fire blazed, heaped with driftwood. The candles fluttered in a draught from the chimney. The room was bathed in a soft, golden, glorious light, trembling with dark shadows. The tree shook a fall of needles.
Harry and Christy drank their toast and licked their lips, tasting the wine which was warm in their bellies, feeling the heat of the flames on their faces. At last, they started to eat.
Outside, the mist was thicker than ever. Dusk blurred into a pitchy night. The little light there’d been that grey Christmas Day was gone. If anyone was out there, picking a way through the lanes which wound down to the shore, he might have seen the faintest orange glow from the upstairs window of Ynys Elyrch . . . the only light in all that clammy, fog-bound world. But there was no one. It was very still. The gulls and the geese had gone to roost; their muttered conversation carried from the distant dunes to the fields around the house. A curlew cried, a fox yelped. These voices rang and echoed and faded in the enshrouding mist.
Christmas night. Ynys Elyrch was deep in darkness. And, as the tide rose, filling the ditches, forcing through hedges and tumbledown walls, it was deep in water. Once more, the house was in the sea, and the sea was in the house. The man and the boy were quite cut off.
They ate with enormous appetite. They watched one another eating. Bending to their plates, spearing potatoes, gnawing at bones, they would glance up and their eyes would meet across the littered table. They didn’t talk much, except to confirm again and again that the feast was splendid, mumbling the words through mouthfuls of crackled skin and strongly flavoured meat. Harry would lean to the fire and reach for the carcase, to strip more flesh from the sharp keel of the breastbone. Christy would feel for another potato in the congealing fat. They ate as though this was the last meal they would ever eat, and they washed down the food with wine.
‘There was more of this stuff downstairs than I thought I’d got,’ Harry said. ‘I knew there were a couple of bottles knocking around somewhere in the kitchen cupboards, but I hadn’t realised I’d got as much as this. Come on now, drink up! Finish off the last few drops of this one, and I’ll open another. And look what else I found!’
He swung a bottle of brandy onto the table. Christy giggled, licked his fingers and reached out to touch it; then he squealed and reeled away, throwing himself backwards in his chair, because the bottle was very hot from the flames of the fire. The sudden movement made his head swim. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and when he opened them again he saw that the man was staring at him in a curious way, at his mouth and his hair and his throat . . .
The boy gulped and blinked hard. He heard himself call out, his voice louder and shriller than he’d meant it to be, ‘Hot bottle, Mr Clewe! Hot toddy! Hot toddy bottle, Mr Clewe!’ The words were very silly and very hard to say, so he took a deep breath and returned to the gnawing of the great gleaming knuckle of the swan’s leg.
Christy was enjoying himself immensely. He’d forgotten all about the orphanage. He’d never had a meal like this one, so much meat and so much wine, in such a twinkling, flamelit room with such a gaping, gormless, red-faced man. He’d forgotten about the tide. He grinned and giggled and he swilled another glass of wine. He tore at the meat with his teeth, felt the juice run down his chin. Then, sticking his tongue out as far as it would go and running it round his mouth, he glanced across the table to see how Mr Clewe was staring and staring, how the old goat’s face grew redder and shinier in the glow of the fire.
Harry hadn’t forgotten about the tide. He’d heard it come in. He’d known, an hour ago, that the hallway was flooding, that wave after wave was driving through the front door to the foot of the stairs and into the downstairs rooms. He’d heard the stirring of the water in the wreckage of panelling and furniture, a knock and a bump as though someone was going from room to room, shifting this and moving that to see if there was anything left worth taking. Yes, he’d heard the noises, familiar to him after all the weeks of autumn and winter when the house had been flooded and drained, flooded and drained, every day and every night as regular and as predictable as the waxing and waning of the moon itself . . . and he knew that the house was cut off. The thought of it, as he looked at the beachcomber’s wet mouth and
long white throat, made his stomach flip.
So they continued to eat. They didn’t talk much, although the boy heard himself squealing, his voice high and distant like someone else’s voice; between mouthfuls, Harry bellowed the odd snatch of a few Christmas carols. When they’d gorged themselves so full of meat that they could hardly bear to glance in the direction of the carcase, Harry suddenly reached into the hearth for it. He spiked it on his hook, bellowed crazily, ‘Watch out, girl! The swan’s last flight!’ and swung the whole thing across the table, across the room, so that it flew through the air and thudded into the corner where the dogs were lying.
Gog and Magog had been asleep. They’d given up hope of a windfall from the hilarious feast. But when the swan belly-flopped beside them, they awoke with a terrible snarling. They brawled so furiously to rip the carcase into pieces that they blundered against the Christmas tree and almost knocked it over. With a sharp cry, the boy lurched to his feet and caught the tree as it toppled. He leaned into the branches, the needles prickly and pungent on his face, while Harry lunged forwards to rummage about on the floor and try to secure the stump in the bucket of pebbles. The dogs roared, splintering bones, bolting the meat, slapping their tongues to get every last drop of grease that had spattered on the carpet and the skirting boards. Harry was singing very loudly . . . he fumbled on the floor with his arms between Christy’s legs to get at the precarious tree trunk, while the boy swooned into the needles which stung his eyelids and his lips . . . There was riotous confusion, until the tree was righted and the dogs had devoured the remains of the swan.
At last, when the man and the boy sat down again, they were heaving with exertion. Their faces shone red. They slumped in their seats, their elbows in the wreckage of food that was strewn about the table, and they struggled to regain their breath despite wave after wave of uncontrollable giggling which surged through them. It took a quarter of an hour for them to stop laughing, and even then, from time to time, a bubble of laughter would burst out of Christy like a hiccough, or from Harry, or from both of them at the same time.
The Blood of Angels Page 43
