Stephen Gregory

by The Cormorant (epub)

  Behind us, Archie stood in the sunshine and held out its wings to dry.

  But a chill settled soon over the late afternoon. The moment the sun was shrouded, we realised how cold it was. While we were in Caernarfon, Ann wanted to have a quick look at the shops in their Christmas splendour. I put the cormorant into the back of the van; the bird was tired now and hopped eagerly onto its bed of straw. I carried Harry, who was snugly wrapped in his little anorak and peering gnomishly from inside the fur-lined hood, and Ann walked with her left hand nestling in my jacket pocket. She grimaced at the dampness of the dabs there and said I was only a silly old teacher with fish scales in my pockets. But I knew she was happy. Together we went into the town square. The lights had come on in the shop windows, there was a splendid Christmas tree strung with coloured bulbs. People were bustling from shop to shop, their shoulders hunched, their hands in their pockets, laden with parcels or children, or staring emptily into the warmth of the super­markets. The gulls were silent under the darkening steel of the sky. Harry’s nose was going red.

  ‘Let’s have a look inside, get warmed up a bit,’ said Ann.

  We went from shop to shop and bought nothing. The spirit of Christmas was everywhere, cheap and trivial in some places, glamorous in a few shops, appalling in others. The coming of Christmas affected everyone. Nobody was unchanged, no-one escaped. It strengthened the bonds between the happy, the lovers, the members of united families; it emphasised to the unloved and the wounded the bitterness of their plight. Ann squeezed my fingers deep in my fishy pockets, Harry planted a wet kiss on my forehead before slapping me repeatedly on both cheeks. It was so warm in all the shops. And outside it grew colder.

  It began to snow. The world was changing. The square was blurred with the steady fall of large, moth-like snow­flakes. They floated through the blue twilight, into the white and yellow lights of the town. People stopped walking, turning their faces away from the glare of the window displays and looked up at the sky. They put out their hands and caught the flakes, to examine them for a second on the warmth of their skin. Children were seen with their heads thrown backwards, their eyes closed, their tongues stuck out, squealing at the tingle-taste of the snow. It settled like confetti on the shoulders of the policeman and the traffic warden, caught them in conspiratorial conver­sation. An old man swore loudly and jammed down the brim of his cap. A single gull swam among the thistledown flakes, bigger and whiter but somehow less substantial, a ghost from the grey walls of the castle. Suddenly, someone with an eye for spectacle switched on the floodlights, bathed the ancient stones in a golden glow, coal-black shadows alive with falling snow. And the people cheered, they cheered and clapped when their castle leapt from the darkness. The magic was complete. There was snow in Ann’s hair and on her eyelashes. Harry looked angry, all this was so confusing. He went cross-eyed at the im­pertinence of a flake which settled on the tip of his nose. I roared an incoherent roar with my beard and glasses smudged.

  It was the sort of snow that settles, sticking fast to the trees and the lamp posts and the cars and to the roofs of the buildings. Sir Hugh Owen and Lloyd George were whitened with a mantle of snow, fresh and clean after their customary spattering of droppings from the gulls and the pigeons. It continued to fall heavily. Soon the square was muffled. Footsteps seemed silent, the passing taxis whis­pered. The voices of excited people rang eerily around the walls of the castle. There were no gulls. The jackdaws sulked among the battlements. We went carefully down the street to the harbour car park. The tide had gone out; the wet mudbanks and the remains of the river were the only places which refused the snow. Huddled together under the hull of a big yacht, the swans slept, their heads tucked under their wings. Even now, in the uncomfort­able conditions, the single outcast was on its own, wide awake, shaking the snow from its feathers on an exposed sand flat.

  ‘Poor old Pilbury . . .’ muttered Ann, and she turned away to the van.

  The cormorant was asleep. All the windows of the van were coated with snow, and the bird was snug among the straw and the darkness. It hardly raised its head when I unlocked the doors. Harry was weary too. He sat on Ann’s knee, and his eyes began to close even while I went round and scraped the snow from the windscreen. Once we set off, the van soon became warm inside. Harry slept. Ann put her right hand on my thigh. There was no sound from the cormorant. I drove carefully, for the road was whitened with a carpet of snow and only a little traffic had passed along and left its wheelprints. Sometimes I felt that sicken­ing second when I knew the van was beginning to slide, that feeling through my hands on the steering wheel and my backside on the seat that told me to wait and relax for an instant until the tyres bit again. Ann was unperturbed. As we climbed away from Caernarfon the snow stopped falling. The roads were clearer but the fields were uniformly white, the trees and the dry stone walls were daubed with snow. It would be colder now. The sky was clear, aching with stars. We were nearly home.

  ‘Alright, love? Is he asleep?’

  ‘Mmm . . . he’s well away,’ she answered. ‘A lovely day out, my darling. How did you manage to arrange for the snow as well? Is it something to do with your pagan rites with Archie in the firelight?’

  ‘That’s a secret,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d like it. Anyway, that’s nothing. My next miracle is the fish soup. You’ll love it, all caught by our very own tame fisherman.’

  She nodded. ‘I was impressed, I must admit. Although I still don’t think “tame” is quite the appropriate word. You’ve got to hand it to the beast though: it can fish.’

  We pulled up in front of the cottage. The village was deserted, just a few cars parked outside the pub, hardy drinkers determined to brave the weather. I went in first with Archie, while Ann stayed behind with the sleeping boy. The cormorant allowed itself to be carried from the bed of straw, although I held its neck with one hand and kept the beak turned away from my face. When I returned to the van, Ann had emerged and was standing on the pavement. Harry woke up.

  ‘Hello, my little Harry,’ she whispered, kissing his hot forehead. He was tousled and sticky from sleep. ‘You’re all hot and cuddly, aren’t you? You’ve had a nice day out at the seaside, haven’t you, with all your treasure hunting and those funny fishes . . .’

  The child blinked at her, rubbed his eyes. He stared about him, at me, at the snow-covered roofs, at his own frosty breath. He blew a plume into his mother’s face. She kissed him again.

  ‘Look, Harry . . .’

  And above our heads there stretched the oceans of stars. There were white stars, blue stars, red stars, stars of silver and gold. We strained our ears in the silence of the hills until we could hear the crackling and the splintering, the rumbling extinction of an ancient star and the tinkle of the first awakening of the brand new stars, like a breeze through the glass of a delicate chandelier. It was an ant-hill of stars. One moment they were suddenly close, pressing down against our eyeballs, so I felt I could reach up, take a handful and let them trickle through my fingers. Then they sprang away and kept on going, speeding into the purple distance.

  ‘Look, little Harry . . .’

  He looked. His eyes followed the line of Ann’s pointing finger. He craned his neck. Both his hands stretched up. Here was more treasure. His day was full of treasures, it was a mystery. Some he had been allowed to take, others he had been forced to discard, the squirming ones he could not touch, and these, the prettiest of them all, were infuriatingly just beyond the reach of his fingers. So he groped for them and blew a cloud of smoke. Now his hands were cold. He put them on his mother’s cheeks and leaned forward to press his face into her neck, where it was warm and soft.

  We went inside. I knelt at the hearth, busy with the firelighters and coal. Ann sat the child on the sofa and began to undo his buttons, before going to the tree and turning on the Christmas lights.

  ‘More stars, Harry,’ she said.

  He scrambled over to t
he tree, fell to the carpet and filled his fists with the fir needles which had dropped there. Soon the flames were dancing in the grate, taking the chill from the air in the living-room. While Ann was upstairs, I put on some music and poured out two glasses of sherry, setting them on the mantelpiece for when she came down again. She would be brushing out her hair in front of the bedroom mirror. I pictured her turning this way and that to catch the different angles, stroking hard with the brush until her hair was shining and alive with static. I waited for her, with the backs of my legs warming over the flames, and I hummed along with the music. Harry was engrossed with the needles, silent, preoccupied with their scent and their tingling sharpness.

  Then the boy stood up. He turned away from the tree and waited, motionless, alert. The child was listening for something, something beyond the music and the crackle of the fire. And sniffing the air, his nostrils dilated. He went to the sofa and sat down.

  ‘What’s up, Harry?’

  But the child was deaf to my question. His eyes did not so much as flicker in my direction. Alert, concentrating, every muscle in his face frozen, he tested the air like a hunted animal, gazed into the flickering fire.

  Ann’s voice came from the top of the stairs. ‘You’re a bit extravagant, aren’t you? It’s not Christmas yet, you know . . .’

  She came down. I pointed to the sherry and spoke quietly, although I was beginning to understand what she had meant. ‘Only a little drop, to celebrate the expedition.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that.’ Frowning, she looked around the room, at the table, the mantelpiece, the window sill. ‘I’d love a glass of sherry, but . . .’ Still puzzled, she added, ‘But I could have sworn I got the whiff of one of your horrible cigars . . .’

  And Harry began to laugh, an ugly croaking laugh, as he stared into an empty space.

  V

  Christmas Day itself was raw and blustery after the earlier promise of the snow, which only remained in patches in the lee of the dry stone walls and the shelter of boulders. By the roadside, the snow had turned to a muddy brown slush: it flew up from the wheels of traffic and soiled the doorsteps of the cottages in the village. On higher ground, the scree was flecked with white, as though the hills were suddenly crowded with sheep, a big bright flock of clean sheep. There were hardly any fields of snow. It lay so thinly that the movement of the livestock and even the passage of jackdaws and pigeons had scuffed it aside. The streams had turned to torrents, silver scratches on the mountainside, like flashes of forked lightning. The water roared at the bottom of the garden. It was a white Christmas, just, but a disappointment after the heavy fall a few days before. Grey skies unravelled, like the greasy wool of the hill sheep, snagged on the tops of the Snowdon ridge, pressing on and leaving a tangle of cloud in the same way that the sheep would decorate the barbed wire with knots of fleece. Sometimes a flurry of rain rattled on the windows of the cottage. It was cold.

  I got up early before Ann was awake. Very quietly, I drew the blankets aside and left her sound asleep in bed. I went downstairs, shivering in my pyjamas and slippers. Through the kitchen window, I saw the cormorant was still inside the white wooden crate, and I grimaced at the greyness of the morning. I had said nothing the previous evening to Ann’s remark about the cigar. She had just looked around again, shrugged and gone to Harry. He lunged away from her, as though he would dash himself in the flames of the fire, before instantly stopping in puzzled contemplation of the blaze. It might have been the first time he had seen it, for he frowned in bewilderment and stretched out his fingers. Then he awoke from his brief trance, to smile beatifically on his mother and continue playing under the tree. I shivered again, thinking of the dim moth-like presence which had been felt by all of us, by me and Ann and Harry. A strange atmosphere for the child to grow up in, in the company of a cormorant and some shadowy philanthropist.

  There I was in the kitchen at seven o’clock on Christmas morning, the only member of the household awake. I went into the living-room and set to work. Under the tree, I piled up the brightly coloured presents, most of them for Harry, but others too which had arrived by post for me and Ann. There were small gifts for Mr and Mrs Knapp, the couple who ran the village post office and shop, for they were coming to have lunch with us. I brought in a basket of logs, thoroughly dry and kept aside for the special day. When the fire was lit, I left the logs close to the hearth so they would be toasted and ready for their turn among the flames. And I began to prepare a celebratory breakfast for Ann. As I did so, busying myself by the kitchen window, I saw Archie make its first appearance of the day from its box. First of all, the crate swayed from side to side; a series of handfuls of straw flew out onto the floor of the cage; the bird’s head emerged, looking infinitely surprised to be in a makeshift chicken run rather than on a jetty overlooking some exposed estuary; the neck thrust upwards, two wings hooked themselves over the edges of the woodwork; the cormorant heaved itself indecorously out of its bed, to land, sprawling on its breast, on the slates of the backyard. Archie stood up. It stretched its neck and wiggled the stiff tail-feathers. Each black foot was held out at right angles to its belly, the ankles loosened. And the tour de force, the slow and painful extension of the wings after a night’s confinement, before they were shaken from sleep into a whirlwind of whistling plumage. Two further details of the morning ritual remained to be seen to: with the beak, so much dishevelled green and black mane had to be reorganised, and then the longest and most arrogantly arched jet of shit was squirted across the yard. The cormorant was awake.

  I went out hurriedly with the bacon rind and some gristle which I had cut from the kidneys. Archie took them gently from my fingers.

  ‘Good boy, Archie. And a merry Christmas to you.’

  I skipped back indoors. Bearing the breakfast tri­umphantly on a big tray, I went up the stairs and into the bedroom. I put the tray down on Ann’s dressing-table, sat on the end of the bed, took both her feet in my hands as they stuck up under the blankets and began to caress them. She groaned, her feet retreated as she curled up her legs. So I shifted to the top of the bed where I could lean over and kiss her on the neck. She remained still, with my lips on her throat. Her breathing stopped. There was only a flutter of a pulse under the skin, like the movement of a moth behind a curtain. Then she breathed out slowly, her whole body relaxed, her lips parted in a luxurious smile. In a moment I was trapped within her sleepy embrace.

  Breaking free, I went to the dressing-table and turned round with the tray.

  ‘To satisfy another of your outrageously healthy appetites . . . Happy Christmas, darling.’

  We kissed long and deeply, until she peeped from one eye. ‘Look, it’s Harry,’ she managed to say into my hair, and the little boy came drowsily into our room. We scooped him up and sat him between us in the warmth of the double bed.

  ‘Look what Daddy’s got for us,’ said Ann. Harry was thoroughly kissed and tickled by both of us until he writhed away into the dark caverns of the bedclothes. Together we ate the breakfast, crumbs and marmalade and spots of coffee on the sheets, Harry sucking a slice of bread which Ann had dipped into the yolk of an egg, while I, the dutiful husband, picked up the pieces of bacon and kidney which were considered too black for my wife. I climbed back into bed. Harry scrambled over us, up and over our bodies as though he were tackling an assault course. We winced at the punishment of his little hands and feet, he chuckled as he thumped us. Then we were all weary. Among the wreckage of a Christmas breakfast in bed, we slept.

  And when we went downstairs, the room was warmed by the fire that I had lit at seven o’clock. It was time for Harry to open his presents. Ann and I were in our dressing-gowns, barefoot; she looked wonderfully tousled, her features blurred with sleep, her hair a tangle of browns and golds in the fireglow, naked under her gown. She helped the boy with the wrapping paper. Soon, the rug in front of the hearth was strewn with the crumpled paper, itself a c
arpet of treasure, blues and silvers and purples and reds, while the furniture held Harry’s new toys, things of wood and plastic, cheap, bright, noisy things which he put to his mouth to lick and taste. Eventually he sat among the discarded wrappings and began to play with them, tearing off the strips of sticky tape and binding them into a ball. He ignored the toys in the fascination of the coloured papers.

  ‘So much for the presents,’ I said. ‘We could just have given him a roll of Sellotape to play with, and a few old newspapers.’

  ‘But that’s what I’ve got for you,’ laughed Ann. ‘Here you are . . .’ And she knelt down to reach for a weighty parcel from under the tree. On her knees at my feet, the front of her dressing-gown falling open, she held out the gift to me with both hands, bowed her head so that her hair tumbled over her face. ‘For you,’ she said.

  I opened it slowly, taking care not to tear the golden paper. It was a book, an expensive art book, alive with pages of glowing Japanese painting. Every plate burned with colour. I turned through it quickly: it was a forest fire of colours: figures at work and at rest, the scenery of mountains and oceans, changing seasons, fabulous creatures in their outlandish environments.

  ‘Why, it’s gorgeous, darling,’ I whispered. ‘What a splendid present . . .’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘There’s a picture of you in there somewhere. Page seventy-three, I think. Go on, have a look!’ Her hands were on my kneecaps, she leant forward and her eyes tingled.

  And there I was.

  I was a man on a beach, a long empty beach which stretched away and disappeared into a green haze in the distance. Apart from the man, the shore was deserted. There was a turquoise sky, boiling with clouds. The man was wearing a long red gown which was tugged by the wind so that the shape of his lean body was clearly defined. His face was not visible, for he was looking out to sea. But the line he was holding went over the waves, and there was the cormorant, half-submerged, quite black among the green and white water: the thin neck with its little collar, the head tilted slightly upward, the beak just open and manhandling a silver fish.