Chapter Seventeen

From then on, Zoë flew nearly every night.

It followed the same pattern. Harry would be woken by the girl’s soft, barefooted movements in the cabin; he would watch her effortless, ecstatic star flights; and, an hour or two hours later, she would brush smilingly past him, to occupy the warmest part of his bed.

And he remembered, with a laugh so bitter that he could taste the bile in his throat, how he’d worried, long ago, about the effect that the presence of the telescope might have had on the blind child . . . that Zoë might have felt excluded, that Zoë might have felt disabled, disadvantaged in the shadow of the telescope. He’d thought of constructing a false map, to deny her access to the stars . . . and of course his maps were false, all of them. When he stared into the barrel of the sophisticated, handmade machine, he saw no more than a wall. It was all flat. There was no distance. So much for mystery. So much for wonder. Where was the wonder in a wall studded with seashells?

Harry knew the answer to that question. The wonder and the mystery were in Zoë’s head.

Nevertheless, she persisted with the charade of conventional star-gazing, as they’d done for weeks and months before her pro­gression to space flight. During the long evenings which had once been so comfortable, father and daughter in a cosy conspiracy, he endured her mockery. Because, in wakefulness, she reverted to the old scheme of things, as though to humour him. Sweetly childlike, the smiling child whose hair was gleaming and silver, who padded from chart to chart as softly as a kitten, who smelled of soap and shampoo and of white, clean skin, Zoë would urge him to the use of the telescope, reversing the roles so that it was she who led him from one constellation to another, naming them and their com­ponent stars: the old names, without a flicker of dissent.

Harry acquiesced, too limp to resist her brisk authority. Around him, in the cabin that had once seemed so quaintly glamorous, he saw the stars glued on the walls. In the tube of the telescope, he saw the stars glued on the walls. For him, the mystery was gone. And yet he and Zoë continued with the list of labels, the dusty legends, the dry and crumbling bones . . . a menagerie of skeletons.

Only at night, for Zoë to slip effortlessly through the flatness of those walls, to rocket into a space he was powerless to imagine. From this he was excluded. Wretchedly, he sat on the corner of his bed, night after lonely night, and he watched her. His effacement was almost complete.

His bed had been requisitioned. The boat was a spaceship from which he could see nothing. The telescope was blinkered, spat­tered with bird shit. Lizzie’s bones were in Zoë’s custody. He’d thought the stars were his, like coins in his collection, but now they were tarnished beyond polishing. He’d thought the estuary was his, but he no longer dared identify the birds or the berries or the wild flowers, lest the child correct him; every cry from the dunes was a challenge he now shirked. He attempted the flute, exhuming it from its case, but it was a chill, unforgiving thing, and the child grimaced at the noise it made.

Sometimes he went onto the sands, while the girl was at school. Head down, hunched under the hugeness of the sky, deaf to the distant sea, he stalked the mudflats. The dead horse was still there, broken into many pieces. He pushed aside the ribcage with his boots. Kneeling in the oil-black pool, he tugged at the vertebrae, twisting the gristle. But there was no brittlestar, although the child could find it in a dream, in her sleep, in the thundering spaces of heaven. For Harry, there were no shards left, no fragments of that meteorite. Unable to compromise, he rejected the starfishes that he found, hurling them away with a backhanded flick of the wrist or tossing them skywards for a gull to catch.

The birds ignored him. They continued to feed, unruffled by his slow-moving, dull-brown presence, as he trod with his boots on the mud and kicked the clumps of weed. It was a vast place of sea and sand and sky. Harry Clewe was a speck on it.