Chapter Ten

It was the beginning of December. Both the brittlestars, the one that Lizzie had found on her first morning and the one that Harry had brought in from the squalling of gulls, were dead. They’d died in their shallow tray. Lizzie had taken them out of the water, thrown the water away, and kept the brittlestars with her other relics of the beach, the bones and feathers and shells she’d brought in and arranged prettily around the cabin. The brittlestars dried and stiffened. They were fragile wafers of the squirming, sinuous creatures they’d been, as dry as biscuit, as dead as ice. Lizzie kept them on the shelf in the corner, where Harry’s bird books, poetry books and star books were neatly stacked together.

Harry’s flute was there too, in its case, almost invisible between the top of the shelf and the beams of the ceiling. He hadn’t touched it for years, although, in his schooldays, he’d been a com­petent flautist. Mischievously, thinking of Lizzie’s cello left silent and neglected in the forward cabin, he reached for his flute one evening, as he and Lizzie sat in the cabin together. She was flipping the pages of a magazine. She didn’t glance up as he lifted the long, slim, black case from the bookshelf and opened it on the bed.

The flute shone cold and silver in the firelight. As Harry leafed through a sheaf of sheet music, he saw, from the corner of his eye, that Lizzie was watching him. She was pretending not to, but her breathing was altered. There was a tension in her, as though the chill of the flute had touched her across the quiet, warm cabin.

‘It’s years since I had a go with this,’ he said. ‘I was in the school orchestra, you know, at Wrekin. I bet we sounded bloody terrible, wheezing and scraping! I got to grade eight, though. I used to think I was quite good, until you came along, my brainy, brilliant baby sister, and showed me up.’

She didn’t say anything. She curled herself into the chair, kick­ing off her slippers and folding her legs beneath her, and pretended to be engrossed in reading. As she dipped her head to the magazine, her long red hair fell around her face like a screen. She was hiding from him.

‘I’ll be a bit rusty, I expect,’ he went on. ‘My fingers will have seized up. And the flute might be rusty too, although it’s been in its case all the time. Let’s have a go . . .’ He tried a scale, licked his lips and tried again, pleasantly surprised by the tone of the instrument. ‘Hey, it sounds all right, doesn’t it, Lizzie? Quite nice acoustics on board the Ozymandias. What do you think?’

She looked up at him, flicking her hair from her face. Her smile was different, somehow askew. ‘The tone’s fine,’ she said. ‘When you’ve got it warmed up, I expect the tuning will improve. I hope so, anyway.’ She dropped her head to the magazine.

Undeterred, Harry continued to work. He practised scales and exercises, ran through some of the pieces he’d studied years ago, as a sixth-former in public school. He impressed himself with the way he could still play, although he fluffed and fumbled here and there. His eyes met Lizzie’s as she moved around the cabin to refuel the stove or make coffee. The anxiety caused by the unexpected appearance of the flute, its exhumation, diminished over the course of the evening, as the surprise wore off and Harry’s sensitivity to pitch became keener. Lizzie relaxed again. She dropped the magazine, lay down on the bed and listened as he played. So he grew more and more confident; at first, he’d been nervous with Lizzie as his audience. He steeled himself to the grimace on her face when he was clumsy. He ignored her flinching at his wayward tuning. He played on, sensing her initial misgivings turn to tolerance.

At last, when he stopped and shut the flute and the music into the case, he lay down beside her on the bed. He whispered into her hair. ‘Now, that didn’t hurt too much, did it? Are your delicate little eardrums still intact? Or is that another piece of your intactness that your big, bad brother has stolen from you? It hurts a bit the first time, but I promise it gets better and better . . .’

It was the first of successive evenings when he practised with the flute. However, Lizzie made no move to touch the cello, which remained in its case, in its corner, beside the chemical toilet. He wondered how he might encourage her to play again.