Chapter Sixteen

As the toad had been the talisman of Harry’s infatuation with Sarah, so the brittlestar was a talisman for him and Lizzie.

Lizzie had found one on her first morning on the estuary; Harry had found another a few weeks later, by which time brother and sister had become lovers. For a while the brittlestars had meshed in their shallow tray of water, linking their limbs and moving together as Harry and Lizzie did. Once dead, the creatures had dried on the ceiling, pinned to the beams. The brittlestar was a symbol of Lizzie’s transition into womanhood: her separation from her parents, her first home away from the family home, her first love, her first man.

She’d never found another one, although she looked. There were common starfishes among the huge, translucent jellyfish and the dismembered remains of crabs which the sea had left behind. But never another brittlestar. The spring tides didn’t oblige by bringing one. While the brittlestars still dangled in the cabin, Lizzie’s search for another was desultory, casual, something to give a focus to her occasional walks on the beach. Then, one morning in April, as the Ozymandias lifted from the mud with the rising water, the brittlestars broke from the ceiling, fell to the floorboards and shattered into thousands of dry, salt splinters.

Lizzie was dashed. All of a sudden, it seemed overwhelmingly important to her to find another brittlestar, which would hang above her as she and Harry lay on their bed, and guide them through the coming months. Its absence assumed the focus of her growing despondency. In spite of the arrival of spring, which Harry had hoped would have lifted her spirits, Lizzie became increas­ingly depressed.

There was the business of the bicycle. Instead of being glad that Harry was more mobile, Lizzie felt sour. The contrast between her confinement and his mobility was something that rankled. Nearly six months into her pregnancy, she was weary, although regular checks had always shown her to be surprisingly strong for one so little and pale and apparently fragile; the enforced lethargy of winter was replaced by a disinclination to move. It seemed unfair that, having bridled at the narrowness of the cabin during the gales and squalls of the new year, she was still a prisoner now that the weather had improved. Of course, she joined Harry in and out of Caernarfon for her showers at the sports centre; but the walking gave her pains in her back, and she was self-conscious about her ballooning belly in front of strangers. Sometimes she accompanied him simply for the exercise, for the loveliness of the seas and the skies was still a wonder to her; she was thrilled by the movement of the birds and the tides. However, as far as the fetching of supplies was necessary, it made sense to say, ‘No, I’ll stay here, Harry. It’ll only take you ten minutes on the bike. At the rate I go these days, it’s more than an hour if I come with you. Go on, I’ll stay here . . .’

He’d bought the bicycle to get Lizzie out of the Ozymandias, not for his own convenience; but the result was to compound her immobility. He sped along the seashore with a basket full of clothes for the laundrette. It was a short enough journey to justify the bringing of fish and chips or a curry from the takeaway restaurants. The bicycle made a considerable difference to the convenience of living on the boat. But it irked Lizzie.

Often, when Harry returned from town, he would find that Lizzie wasn’t there. She spent hours along the beach, leaving soon after the nudge of the hull on the mud told her that the tide was out, and she searched for the brittlestar. So he would sit with his back to the cabin and scan the estuary with his binoculars until he spotted her distant figure, very tiny on the wide, wet sands, bulked in jeans and baggy sweater, moving slowly in black Wellington boots. A flock of gulls blew around her, the duck rose with a roaring of wings. Lizzie was a speck . . . even in the circle of his binoculars, she was an ant, creeping and stopping and creeping again. She looked downwards, always. For her, there were no gulls, there was no sky. Her only interest was in finding another brittlestar.

That evening, as the light faded, Harry rode steadily back to the Ozymandias with his basket of clean clothes swinging on the handle­bars. A plume of smoke rose from the boat’s chimney. Inside the cabin, Lizzie was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. She hardly flickered her eyes as he came down the steps.

‘No luck?’ he asked.

She didn’t answer.

He started to take out the clothes and hang them over the stove. In spite of the fire, the cabin seemed dull, suffocatingly domestic with the clothes hung up to air. There were no flowers; there’d been no flowers for weeks. ‘No luck with the brittlestar?’ he asked.

She rolled over listlessly and looked at him. ‘The other way round,’ she said.

He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

She sighed, as though she were struggling to communicate with an imbecile or a foreigner, rolling back to stare at the ceiling again. ‘I mean, dear Harry, the other way round. You said, no luck with the brittlestar. On the contrary: no luck without the brittlestar.’ She patted the bed, so that he sat down beside her. ‘Had a busy time in the big city?’ she asked.

He kissed her. To his surprise, she recoiled from him and buried her face in the quilt.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Oh, come on, Lizzie, don’t be such a grump! Stop moping! Our luck’s been great so far. We’ve got each other. We’re both in good shape. The spring’s come and – ’

She interrupted him. ‘Did you think the ride home would blow that smell away?’ she said, her voice muffled by the blankets.

Puzzled, he sat up. ‘What smell? The beer? Yes, I had a beer while the things were in the wash. I always do. Better than just sitting there watching the clothes go round and round. What’s the matter with you, Lizzie?’ He took her by the shoulders and turned her face towards him. She wrinkled her nostrils.

‘It’s not the beer,’ she said, grimacing. ‘I don’t mind the beer. But I don’t like who you go drinking with. Can’t you wash it off? It’s horrible!’

It made no difference, thereafter, to explain to Lizzie that he’d bumped into Helen Ince and they’d gone for a quick drink together. ‘I always go for a drink while the clothes are doing,’ he said. ‘This time I just happened to see Helen in the square and we dropped into the Black Boy for half an hour. Nothing very sinister about that, is there? Everybody who’s been in the Black Boy tonight will be reeking of her perfume, not just me! All over Caernarfon at this very moment, men are having to explain it away to their wives and girlfriends. She’ll probably get banned from the pub if she causes this much trouble.’

So he laughed it off, winning a rueful smile from Lizzie. ‘I promise you, my love, all my trysts with Helen are conducted right here, under your beady eye, and under the – ’

Too late to stop himself, he gestured vaguely in the direction of the ceiling, where a couple of drawing pins stuck into the wood were the only reminders of the strange, rare creatures that Lizzie had fixed there. Again, she buried her face from him.

So the bicycle remained a source of irritation in her mind, that he was so free while she was torpid. Furthermore, from that time on, no amount of banter could quite remove its link with Helen Ince. In the same way that the woman’s perfume lingered, so her name inevitably arose, as a joke that was more than just a joke, whenever he cycled to town. Indeed, there were times over the following months when Harry and Helen met in Caernarfon, not always by coincidence.