The Cormorant

by Stephen Gregory

  Stephen Gregory

  The Cormorant

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  UNCLE IAN DIED …

  When he collapsed onto the floor of the boat, he gripped at his seizing chest and struck his head on the petrol tank. As he lay convulsing for just a few seconds, the cormorant sat and watched. Only the slow blinking of its eyes showed that any muscle stirred in its green-black frame.

  Ian was dead. And his cheeks were pitted from the blows of the cormorant’s beak. His lips were torn. The tender tissues of his gums were split. One eye remained intact. This was the bird that we inherited … .

  “SINISTER … A feeling of impending disaster gradually permeates the narrative … reminiscent of the tales of Poe.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The Cormorant has a relentless focus that would make Edgar Allan Poe proud … This is a first-class terror story that does for cormorants what Cujo did for Saint Bernards.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

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  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS / NEW YORK

  St. Martin’s Press titles are available at quantity discounts for sales promotions, premiums or fund raising. Special books or book excerpts can also be created to fit specific needs. For information write to special sales manager, St. Martin’s Press. 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.

  The Cormorant was first published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd.

  THE CORMORANT

  Copyright © 1986 by Stephen Gregory.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-36720

  ISBN: 0-312-91314-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition published 1986

  First St. Martin’s Press mass market edition / December 1988

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  FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

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  I

  The crate was delivered to the cottage at five o’clock in the afternoon. Two men carried it into our little living-room, put it down in front of the fire, and then they drove away in their van. For the next four hours, I left it there and continued working at my desk. I built up the fire with coal and a few freshly-split logs of spruce from the forest, cooked some supper, leaving some to stay warm for my wife until she came in from working in the village. Outside, it grew dark and there was the pattering of fine rain on the windows of the cottage. The wind blew up and made the trees of the plantation rattle. It was October. I could hear the tumbling of the stream at the foot of the garden, a reassuring sound, a background to the explosive crackle of the logs, the whining of wet wood in the growing heat of the fire. A curtain of drizzle concealed the mountains, they were dissolved into the sky, removed from around the village as though they had never been there. I worked for a while and I ate. The crate stood silent on the rug, in front of the hearth.

  It was a box of white wood, about three feet square, with a panel of perforations on the top to ventilate the contents. Once or twice, in the course of the evening, I got up from the desk, knelt by the crate and sniffed at the tiny holes. I blew into them. I smelt the new wood, its clean, useful smell, and from the perforations there came the pungent whiff of the beach, the rotten air of an estuary which dries a little and sweats before the return of the cleansing tide. Inside the box, there was something warm and breathing, asleep perhaps, sleeping in a bed of stale straw. No sound, no movement. I returned to my work, but I was restless so I abandoned it for another look at the newspaper. Sometimes, as I read, my hand strayed and rested on the corner of the white wooden crate. When my wife came in at nine o’clock we would open it together.

  Ann went immediately upstairs to take off her wet clothes and to inspect the baby. I could hear her shaking her coat, and imagined the shower of raindrops against the mirror in the bedroom as she dried her thick, brown hair with a towel.

  She went to the tiny back room and found the baby sound asleep; I had been up to check that he was all right each time I left my desk, my paper and the crate. She came down again, her cheeks pink with her efforts on the bicycle through the enveloping darkness and with the business of drying her hair. She was carrying the cat by the scruff of its neck.

  ‘Don’t let the cat go upstairs when Harry’s in bed,’ she said, dropping the animal unceremoniously onto the sofa. ‘It was curled up on his pillow. Otherwise, my love,’ and she presented her cheek for me to kiss, ‘everything seems to be in order. Good boy.’

  The cat leapt across the room and sniffed at the box. It arched its back, rubbed itself luxuriously on the corners of the crate.

  ‘So,’ said Ann. ‘It’s arrived. Let’s open it and see what we’ve got.’

  The fire was burning quickly in the grate. A gust of wind in the chimney sent out the plumes of sweet, blue smoke into the warm room. There was the intimate glow of a table lamp which focused its circle of light on my typewriter and picked up the white brightness of my pads of paper. On the walls, the strong primary colours of our prints glowed in the flickering firelight, the spines of the paperback books were a brilliant abstract impression in themselves. The thick rugs seemed to ripple with warmth in the cosy room. The cat rumbled contentedly. Upstairs, the baby was asleep.

  I went to the kitchen and came back with a screwdriver. It would be easy to open the crate. The top panel with its rows of holes came away with three gentle probings of the screwdriver. I put the lid and its twisted staples on an armchair. Together, we looked down into the box, grimacing at the smell which sprang powerfully up from inside and eclipsed the sweetness of the fire, the scent of my wife’s hair. There was a thick layer of straw; it moved a little with the sudden intrusion of light. I drew aside the bedding, moving gingerly and snatching away my hand. Ann chuckled and nudged my arm, but she would not reach down into the damp straw. The cat had withdrawn to a vantage point on top of the writing-desk, where it basked like a goddess in the circle of light. Its eyes were fixed on the crate, it sneezed quietly at the rising reek. Something was coming awake, shifting among the straw.

  The crate creaked. A log spilled from its bed of coal and fell onto the hearth with a splintering of sparks. From out of its nest of straw, as though summoned by the signal from the fire, the bird put up its head. It yawned, showing a worm-like tongue and issuing a stink of seaweed.

  Ann and I recoiled. The cat leapt onto the typewriter with an electric bristling of fur. Shedding its covering of straw, shaking itself free of its bedding, the bird rose out of the pit of its crate. The cormorant emerged in front of the fire. It lifted its wings clear of the box, hooked with its long beak onto the top of its wooden prison. Aroused from its slumbers by the direct heat of the flames, it heaved itself out of the box and collapsed on its breast on the carpet of the living-room. I felt Ann’s hand at my arm, tugging me backwards. Together, we shrank to the foot of the stairs which led up from the room. The cat was quivering with surprise. And the cormorant picked itself up, straightened its ruffled feathers with a few deft movements of its beak, stretching out its tattered, black wings and shaking them like an elderly clergyman flapping the dust from his gown. It sprang onto the sofa, where it raised its tail and shot out a jet of white-brown shit which struck the wooden crate with a slap before trickling towards the carpet.

  Ann squealed and took three steps up.

  ‘Get it
out! For God’s sake, get the thing outside!’

  I stepped forward, instinctively reaching for a heavy cushion from an armchair, and advanced on the big, goose-like bird, wafting at its face with my weapon. The bird retreated. Its neck writhed and the horny beak made sporadic thrusts at the cushion. I forced it backwards into the corner of the writing-desk, as the cat fled with a loud hissing and its question-mark of a tail held up. The cormorant went under the table, lodged itself among the legs and peered out, like an eel in its underwater lair. It shot a yellow jet into the skirting board, pattered its webbed feet wetly into the carpet.

  ‘Get it into the crate! Get it out from under the table!’

  Ann’s voice was shrill with panic.

  I reached for the box and turned it onto its side in the middle of the room, with the intention of driving the bird back into the prison. Straw fell out and steamed in the heat of the fire. By tapping bluntly on the table with the poker, I forced the cormorant out. By now, it had found its voice, an ugly, rasping yell which drew from the cat a series of spitting coughs. The bird leapt clumsily from its den, beat its wings just twice as it somersaulted through the air, knocking the lamp from its table and sending up a whirlwind of paper from around the typewriter. The lamp went out with a report like a pistol shot. The flames alone illuminated the little room, for Ann was too numb with horror to shift from her position of relative safety to reach the light switch.

  In the trembling glow of the fire, the bird awakened to a new frenzy. It threw itself about the room like a gigantic bat, croaking, squirting its shit, one moment hanging in the heavy curtains as though trapped with the moths and the craneflies, then achieving a series of laboured beats across the floor which ended in a panic-stricken collision with the pictures on one wall and the light shade which dangled from the centre of the ceiling. Books toppled from shelves as the cormorant thrust its beak into the crevices between them. I joined Ann on the stairs. Together we watched the hysteria of the cormorant, the bird which had been neatly delivered to us in its clean, white box. Even when it became calmer, the collapse of another log from the fire and its accompanying shower of sparks would set it mad again. It found the cat under the sofa and struck at it twice with its beak of black horn. For a second, it held tight on the cat’s foreleg, catching it with breathtaking speed as the cat made its instinctive, raking defence, but the animal tugged free and was up the stairs, between our legs, as quick and as hot as one of the sparks from the fire. The bird worked out its anger and puzzlement in the living-room of our cottage while we could only watch, while the cat was hiding, wild-eyed, in the darkness of an upstairs cupboard, while the baby awoke and whined in confusion at the cries and the clattering impact of the struggle below, while another night of drizzling cloud descended on the mountains. The flames of the fire had their cosy, orange light shredded and shattered into a thousand splinters of red and green by the heavy, black wings of the cormorant. It spat out its gutteral shouts. It splashed the walls and the books with its gouts of shit. It made threatening forays to the stairs, where I cursed and lashed out with my slippered foot. It wondered at the glowing logs, retreated from a power it did not understand and could not intimidate.

  Until, exhausted as much by its unmitigated bafflement as by its assault on the incomprehensible surroundings, it staggered suddenly and toppled into the upturned crate. The bird buried its head in the familiarly scented straw, heaving with tension and fatigue.

  I stepped quickly from the shadows, righted the box and replaced the lid. The cormorant shuffled into the drying straw. Then it was quiet. Its panting breath sent up fumes of fish through the perforations. I sat carefully on the sofa, avoiding the stains. Ann was weeping softly on the stairs, the tears which collapsed into the corners of her mouth catching the golden lights of a dying fire.

  *

  The cormorant had been left to me and Ann in the will of my uncle. Uncle Ian was a bachelor, who had spent all his working life as a schoolteacher in Sussex. For him, the narrow confines of the country prep school and all the trivial politics of the staffroom were a prison from which he could joyously escape in the holidays on his wooden river-boat. He kept the boat on the tidal mudflats of the Ouse at Newhaven. It was afloat for only four hours at a time, but he could safely reach the county town of Lewes up the river, have a meal and a pint of the local bitter before swooping back towards the coast on the retreating tide. He made this voyage innumerable times, never tiring of the flat fields which stretched away on either side of the river, never wearying of the gulls and swans and herons which maintained their posts at the slow bends and reed beds. In the summer, the swallows and martins spun their dizzy aerial threads around the little boat. A sandpiper fled upstream and waited on the next flat of drying mud before whistling plaintively and fleeing once more from the intrusion of the rippling wash. At Piddinghoe, the sun caught the golden fish which is the weather vane of the village church and threw its reflection into the brown water. There were coot and moorhen among the reeds from which the heron raised its dignified head. In the autumn, Ian went upstream in the shrinking evenings and saw a tired sun extinguish itself behind the gentle barrier of the downs.

  But it was on one of his rare winter journeys that he came across the cormorant. At first, in the failing light, he thought there was a clump of weed floating in midstream, and he had steered away to avoid catching it in his propeller. But, as he passed and saw that the dark mass in the water was a stricken bird, he turned and came in close. The cormorant, a first-year bird, was drowning. It had spread its wings in an attempt to remain afloat a little longer, but soon it was waterlogged, and the swirling tide simply turned it and stirred it, and the creeping cold was deep in the bones of the young bird. There was oil on its throat and in its face. When Ian lifted it carefully into the boat, he saw that the oil was in its wings, locking together the feathers. The cormorant was trying, with its failing strength, to preen the filthy oil from its breast: in doing so, it had swallowed it and gathered it in globules around its beak. The bird lay in the cabin of the boat and rested its black eyes on the boots of the man who had plucked it from the Ouse. It was a tough, young creature. It responded to Ian’s ministrations, his cleaning and feeding. Where it had at first been passive, it grew demanding and rude, aiming its murder-beak at the hands of the old man who proffered fish and meat. By the spring, it was as arrogant and vicious and unpredictable, as preoccupied with the business of eating and shouting and shitting as any first-year cormorant. Ian doted on the bird. It seemed to him to have many of the characteristics of his colleagues in the staffroom and the pupils that he taught, yet without the hypocrisy which threw up a veneer of good manners. The cormorant was a lout, a glutton, an ignorant tyrant. It affected nothing else.

  Ian was told by his doctor that he would shortly die. This did not distress the elderly bachelor. His had been a lonely and a bitter life. He had found little in common with his company in school. Only the oily and rotten-smelling river and its everchanging skies had eased the disappointment of so many unfulfilling years. Something of the mischief of the cormorant had touched him as he went through the dreary business of making a will. He had a little cash to leave, the boat, a run-down cottage in the mountains of north Wales which he had ceased to visit and use once the long hours of travelling from Sussex began to be too much. And he had the cormorant. Strong as it was, it had become dependent on him for food. In a short time, through the spring and into the summer, he had seen that the bird would never learn to support itself. It had grown into an impressively ugly bird, a gangster of a creature, with its mantling black wings, the cocksure stance, the menacing angles of that horn-brown bill and its rubbery, webbed feet. It oozed the stink of fish, the smell of the river, it breathed the tang of the tides. But it had learned to feed from the hand of the man. The bubble-beaded pursuit of dabs in the waters of the Ouse was forgotten. He would leave it in his will to one of his relatives, distant as they were, and the bird would be supported and nourished like a ch
ild, like the children which Ian had never had.

  And I was Ian’s choice of beneficiary.

  I hardly knew him. We had met over the years at weddings and funerals and the occasional family Christmas. Maybe he had been able to see something of himself in me, the germs of disillusionment in my boy’s face. But, unlike Ian, I had married while Ann and I were students at a teacher-training college, and we had gone together into our jobs in a Midland school. We persevered in the face of uncooperative students, using unsuitable and often irrelevant textbooks, and we returned in the evenings to our suburban, semi-detached house. We met Ian at another funeral. Perhaps he could see, from the set of our eyes and the way of our voices, that Ann and I were not teachers, just as he had never really been a teacher. He liked me. And he told me that Ann would make a good and loving wife. I remember my hands were shaking from the cutting cold of the graveside. The drizzle settled on my glasses and dripped like tears onto my cheeks, into the sparse whiskers of my jaw. No, I was not a teacher. And Ian must have thought that the gift of the cormorant could rescue us from our routine Midland existence.

  So he thought of me when he went to the office of his solicitor. His will was quite simple. He left the few hundred pounds to Harry, our baby son, and he left the cottage in Wales to me. He knew that the building was sound, although it had been neglected and had stood empty for several hard winters. It was only a tiny, terraced cottage, with a couple of bedrooms, but it had a fair-sized sitting-room with an open grate, a bathroom and a kitchen. There was a garden which led down to a stream at the bottom. Being snug in the middle of the terrace, it should have stayed dry throughout the years of neglect. Perhaps the roof would need some attention. He left the cottage to us, knowing from our expressions at the bitter graveside the last time that we met, that we would want to take it and make it a home with the money from the sale of our property. And Ian made one binding condition: the cottage should be ours for as long as we supported and sustained the cormorant. The solicitor shrugged, but admitted that the beneficiaries could be bound in such a way. The executor of the will would monitor the progress and the welfare of the bird and see that the conditions of the will were observed. It was mischievous. But something of the cormorant’s hooligan instinct must have infected Ian in his final months and coloured his philanthropy.