‘Archie,’ I said. ‘Well done, Archie, you’ve got one . . . now just let me haul you in. And there’s me in my kimono, bloody freezing on the beach at Caernarfon. Marvellous, marvellous, thank you so much, Ann, my love. What a lovely, special present!’
I closed the book. But I was still that faceless figure on a windswept shore. My mind refused to give up the image, the scene remained so clearly that I felt a spasm of cold from the bitter wind go through my shoulders and chest. Ann put up her face. With my tongue I touched the opaque blue tips of her teeth. I heard my voice saying, ‘I love you so much and I shall love you for ever,’ but it was distant and muffled through the cotton wool of those boiling clouds.
Reaching into the pocket of my dressing-gown, I brought out my tiny parcel. I held it out to her. ‘For you,’ I said.
It was a treat to watch her. She was electric with pleasure, like a child. There was the fragile necklace and the butterfly nestling in the cotton wool of the box. She drew it out and it danced on the end of the chain like a living thing. Set against her throat, with her hair loose on the whiteness of her neck, it gleamed. Kneeling on the rug, her throat and shoulders and her breast bare, the reds of her hair, the marble flesh, the silken blue dressing-gown and the golden butterfly, she was a figure from the book of Japanese paintings, burning with colours and warmth, a smouldering woman. She kissed my knees and she kissed the palms of my hands. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I shall love you forever.’
The three of us had a bath. In the steam and enveloping heat of the bathroom, we manoeuvred into the tub, Ann and I at opposite ends with her legs draped over mine, and Harry squatting in the pool which was formed by our interlacing limbs. We poured cupfuls of water over his head, he splashed us with his sturdy fingers. He was agog at the closeness, the slipperiness of so much white flesh, falling against Ann and burying his face between her breasts, only to emerge and spit out the taste of soap. Then he explored the muscular worm which sprouted from the water between my legs, and he examined himself by way of comparison. The worm uncurled and held its head aloft, out of the soap-grey water. Ann decorated it with a thick lather. Harry was soaped from head to toe, a shining cherub. Ann knelt up and let the suds run down her body, so she glistened in a suit of white bubbles, while I slid my hands from her throat and over her breasts, whose nipples stood out abruptly, as big and as hard as acorns, down the smoothness of her belly and into the nest of soap-rich fur which sent its stream of lather onto her thighs. My hands stayed in the nest for a minute and moved about in there. She closed her eyes tightly and gripped the sides of the bath. Enmeshed between us, Harry wriggled in the grey water. He forced his hands into mine, into the stream of soap from Ann’s thighs. And when I withdrew my fingers, it was little Harry, with a glassy grin frozen on his face, who continued to work the rich lather. Ann was oblivious. Her body tensed, her knuckles whitened as she gripped the bath, there was nothing she could do to stop the sudden rhythmic thrusts of her hips. She opened her eyes and mouth as wide as they would go. Harry looked up at his mother. She frowned at him as though he were a stranger whose name she ought to remember, said ‘Bloody hell, bloody hell, oh bloody hell . . .’ in a crescendo of whispers, before shuddering and subsiding into the water, her eyes once again tightly closed. A bubble of saliva formed at the corner of her mouth, as bright and as smooth as a pearl. Harry chuckled hoarsely and sprang to her breasts. She held him to her for a long moment, but when she opened her eyes she looked away from the little boy’s sparkling face. He was a stranger to her, who had taken liberties she could not condone.
The water grew cooler. In front of the living-room fire, we dried each other and dressed.
*
The Knapps came in at midday. He looked fierce and flushed, a short man of forty made wiry by his daily running. His cheeks were unusually hollow, the gauntness emphasised by a closely cropped beard. Even that morning, he had completed his customary twelve miles, fighting against the clock over the tracks of the plantation, up and down the road to Beddgelert. While he ran each day and relaxed under the shower, his wife kept the post office and shop. She looked pretty in a flowery dress, her blond hair bobbed, her plumpness dressed with powder and perfumed for Christmas. I soon pressed a big glass of sherry into her hand. Mr Knapp wondered if there was any fruit juice, so I made up a drink with some of Harry’s cordial. Ann hurried in from the kitchen, looking rather warm from her work with the Christmas dinner, to give a kiss to both the visitors and accept some sherry from me. She was wearing her special scarlet dress, quite revealing at the front and at the back, the golden butterfly quivering at her throat. We all relaxed in the armchairs before the fire, while dinner was cooking. Ann was in and out to check its progress. It was the first time that Mr Knapp had been inside our cottage, and I saw him puzzling over the crowded shelves of books and the modern prints. He did not speak much until I enquired about his running. He was a dour character, and I felt the unvoiced disapproval of my own lifestyle which was centred on the books, the typewriter, the living-room fire. It occurred to me to show him the cormorant and describe our successes on the shoreline, to enlarge on a side of my routine which took me well away from the hearth. I hesitated. Perhaps it was best to keep Archie in the background and enjoy a cosy Christmas Day.
Mrs Knapp disappeared into the kitchen with Ann, amid much giggling and refilling of glasses. Harry was quietly playing at the foot of the stairs, behind the sofa, there was just the occasional chuckle and sigh, the clatter of his new toys. He was well occupied. In the absence of any other conversation, I changed my mind and decided to introduce the other member of the family to our guest.
‘You never met Archie, did you?’
The man frowned and looked around the room. ‘Who?’
‘Archie, our bird. I wondered if Ann had mentioned it to your wife in one of their afternoon chats. No?’
Mr Knapp’s grizzled face remained blank.
‘Well, come and have a look at this then.’ I got up and put my glass on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s in the backyard. We’ll have to go through the kitchen, if we can escape the clutches of the ladies.’
He followed me into the steam of the kitchen.
‘Ann, can you keep an eye on Harry for a few minutes? He’s playing quite happily by the stairs. I just want to show off our charming pet . . . Mr Knapp hasn’t seen it yet.’
Ann’s face was smudged with a frown, but then she shrugged and flicked me with her dishcloth. ‘Go on, you silly men. Just leave us to do all the hard work . . .’ And as we went out, she added, ‘I hope you’ve left us some sherry. We don’t slave away for nothing, you know.’
Mrs Knapp tinkled with laughter. She was already rather flushed, enjoying herself more than she thought she was going to. The sherry must have muted her memories of the cormorant, which Ann had described to her some weeks ago. If the bird was securely confined to its cage in the yard, she had no interest in it. And through the kitchen window, there had been no sight or sound of Archie since much earlier in the day.
We went into the garden, shivered at first at the touch of the cold after the warmth of the cottage. I had done nothing to keep it tidy since the onset of the wet weather in the autumn. Ferns and heathers trailed over the slates of the path, everything was bedraggled with the drenching of a grey morning. At the foot of the garden, the winter trees shone black. The stream boomed. The edges of the mist were tangled in the firs of the plantation on the hillside, the mountains themselves were lost in the cloud.
‘Here we are. Come on, Archie, don’t be shy. You’ve got a visitor.’
Inside the wire-mesh cage, the crate stood among the threads of straw. There was no movement or sound from the box. The cage and the silent crate were like an odd work of sculpture in some modern gallery, the box standing centre stage, the whiteness of the wood smeared with yellows and greens and browns. Mr Knapp had never been inside an art gallery, but his daily newspaper sometim
es ridiculed the idiocies of abstract sculpture. He glanced at me, thinking perhaps that this was my idea of a joke, the sort of Christmas game which schoolteachers played. If so, it was as daft as those prints hanging on the living-room wall.
‘Hey, Archie, it’s Christmas Day. Don’t be an unsociable bugger . . . come on, Scrooge!’
There was a rope which led from the box, through the wire, coiled up and then attached to the drainpipe by the kitchen window. The ladies moved like ghosts behind the steamed-up glass. I took the rope and pulled it tight, began to tug it gently, rocking the crate.
‘Merry Christmas, Archie!’ I called, and started to sing Good King Wenceslas, my voice oiled with sherry. The crate rocked more and more, there was no response. It swayed and toppled over. The cormorant fell out. It stood up and stretched, beating its wings and sending up the blades of straw, then stopped in mid-beat to adopt its more picturesque heraldic pose for the benefit of its new admirer. And Archie hissed.
‘Hell’s teeth . . .’ whispered Mr Knapp, taking a step backwards.
Hiding a smile behind my hand, I nodded my head in appreciation. ‘A cormorant,’ I said. ‘Phalacrocorax carbo, a second-year male, I think. We call it Archie. Quite a beast, eh? I’ve been fishing with it a few times from the beach at Caernarfon, caught bags of dabs and eels. I put a collar round its throat and a line to its ankle, wait until it’s got something and then tug it in. Then you confiscate the fish and push the bird back out to sea. Make a lovely soup with the dabs and Archie eats all the eels. You should come with us next time we go: you’d be impressed.’
Mr Knapp was impressed. He was staring, open-mouthed, at the cormorant. Archie remained still, wings outspread, head erect, beak agape.
‘Can be a bit temperamental,’ I continued, ‘a bit moody, you know what I mean? Not a goose, not a crow, not a gull . . . a cormorant, something of a sea-crow. In fact, the name’s derived from the Latin, corvus marinus, which means exactly that. Great fisherman, with a disgraceful appetite: it’ll eat almost anything.’ I went to the wire. ‘Come on, Archie. Don’t be snooty, come and say hello.’
The bird folded its wings and waddled forward. It put its beak through the mesh. Moving my hands slowly, I touched the beak and stroked the glossy head. ‘There’s a good lad. I’ll get you some tasty scraps when we’ve had our dinner. Haven’t forgotten you, so there’s no need for you to sulk in your box all day.’
The other man came to the cage.
‘Always move really slowly,’ I warned him, ‘or it gets a bit jumpy. Seems pretty relaxed today though. Must be the Christmas spirit . . .’
Mr Knapp ran a finger along the cormorant’s bill. I raised an eyebrow at the bird’s patience with this stranger. The finger caressed the short feathers of Archie’s throat. It closed its eyes.
‘Well, well, you’ve made a conquest there,’ I admitted. ‘You’re the first person, apart from me and its previous owner, who’s had the honour of coming so close and actually touching the thing. Hope you’re not getting soft, Archie.’
Just then, with the rattle of an opening window, there came Ann’s voice: ‘Come on, you two men, dinner’s ready. We need some carving done . . .’
As though to prove it understood the words, the cormorant reacted. Archie withdrew the beak into the cage, away from the soporific movement of the finger, withdrew it with the same deliberate accumulation of tension of a man who pulls back the string of a longbow, and shot it forward again at the loosely dangling hand. The tip of the dagger-beak stabbed and raked, there was a sharp crack, like splintering wood. Mr Knapp leapt from the wire, bellowed a single obscenity and jammed the wounded hand under his armpit. Archie retreated into the furthest corner, shaking its head from the gloom. The man shouted a string of particularly unseasonal blasphemies at the cormorant. He exhaled a series of hisses from between whitened lips, looking as fierce as he often did at the end of a cross-country run, squeezing the hand under his arm and mouthing his favourite oath. I had watched the cormorant strike. Something told me that the beak was destined for the finger, just as Archie closed its eyelids and swooned in the luxury of the man’s caresses. There was something so inevitable about it at that moment that I had been unable to speak a word of warning. So I simply watched.
We hurried into the kitchen.
‘Your language, gentlemen . . .’ began Ann, but I cut her off.
‘Take a look at this hand, Ann, will you? That bugger Archie got him.’
She added her own choice of expletives to those of the injured man, glaring first at me and then out of the window, at the cage. Mrs Knapp went very pale, but she managed to extricate the hand from her husband’s armpit. Harry came to the kitchen, on hearing the commotion. He stood at the door, smiling like an angel. Among the numerous pots and pans which were empty and awaiting washing, with steam rising from three dishes of vegetables, different sauces and gravy, with the golden carcase of the turkey crackling gently to itself in a bath of its own juices, somehow a space was cleared so that the wound could be attended to. The man hopped from foot to foot at the touch of cold water, hissing like a kettle. His wife washed and dried the hand, dabbed some disinfectant on the broken skin. At this, Mr Knapp yelped, and Harry chuckled so loudly that I felt it was tactful to shoo him back into the living-room. In fact, the extent of the cut was not severe: it seemed that the beak had struck a hammer blow rather than a stab: there was the first flowering of a big bruise and the suspicion that the little finger was fractured. His hand was bandaged. He accepted a glass of sherry to replace his customary orange juice. The colour returned to his thin cheeks. Ann and I could not apologise enough; she gave her guests another kiss each and sat them down at the dining-table we had set up in front of the fire. Returning to the kitchen to collect the vegetables and the meat I was carving, she wheeled on me, her eyes ablaze.
‘For heaven’s sake, what do you think you were doing out there? You let him touch that crazy bird? The thing’s a killer!’
‘It seemed to be alright today. He stroked it, so it closed its eyes and let him carry on. You startled it by calling out of the window . . .’
‘Oh, charming!’ she exclaimed. ‘Was it my fault then? Did I frighten your darling bird? The poor sensitive little thing . . .’
‘Of course it wasn’t your fault, love. I didn’t mean to sound like that. It all just happened in a flash. It needn’t spoil our day, he’ll be OK, he’s got a broken finger, that’s all. He’s a tough guy, he’ll tell everyone who goes into the shop and love every minute of it.’ I kissed her cheek. ‘I’ll carve, you take everything through to the patient and his wife.’
She shrugged, forced a wry smile. ‘This is madness. You know, not one of my friends in the suburbs of Derby has got a bloody cormorant in the backyard. The poor deprived souls, they don’t know what delights they’re missing . . .’ Still muttering to herself, she went into the living-room with two dishes of vegetables.
It was a delicious meal. Ann had excelled herself. She pointed out that it was her wonderful husband who had done all the shopping, making the arduous journey into Caernarfon several times, with no thought for his own entertainment. I responded by reaching under the cloth in the pretence of retrieving my fallen napkin, to run my hand along the inside of her thigh.
She was a little red-faced when I emerged again with the napkin. There was plenty of wine. Mr Knapp declared a lifting of his personal ban on the drinking of alcohol, brandishing the wounded hand. The blood was seeping through the bandage and had stained the table-cloth as well. He wore it like a badge. ‘Don’t fuss, dear,’ he said, waving away the attentions of his wife. ‘Bit of blood and a broken finger, that’s all. I’ll be pounding those roads again tomorrow morning, you’ll see . . .’
Harry was subdued. He ate what Ann gave him, but kept his eyes on the man and his growing blossom of blood.
The courses came and went with the opening and emptying of more bo
ttles of wine. I got up to fuel the fire, Ann was back and forth to the kitchen, Harry watched us all from within his private world of silence. He flinched at the pop of the corks, and he smiled to see me throw each cork among the flames, signalling our intention of finishing a bottle once it was started. The child seemed to be studying us all, from a great distance, almost as though he were a towering adult intent on the stirring of an ant-hill. Once or twice, his eyes flickered from the bloodstained bandage to meet my eyes, and he would smile a lazy smile, as if we were sharing a private joke. Just as Ann had said before: he was like an adult, withdrawn and somewhat vacant, content to watch us and smile knowingly to himself.
It was the longest and most leisurely meal that we had had in the cottage. More wine, a drop more brandy, then the coffee pot lingered on the table and was replenished in the kitchen. Harry was encouraged to leave the table. He continued his exploration of the breaking points of his new toys; only a few gurgling cries were heard from behind the sofa, and his little blond head appeared now and then to remind us that he was still there and aware of every gesture we made. The Queen’s speech began on the radio. We four adults sat in silence and listened, the Knapps with sombre faces, while I walked my errant hand along Ann’s thigh. She pushed me away with one of her fierce teacher’s glares, but locked her fingers into mine. ‘Amen,’ I said, as soon as the speech was finished, and quickly turned off the radio before the anthem started, to avoid the possibility of the Knapps’ jumping to their feet.
Outside, the light was already fading on a grey afternoon. There was no traffic. The village was as silent as the mountains. As soon as the debris was cleared into the kitchen and Ann had firmly refused all offers of help with the washing-up, we sank back into our armchairs. I put two logs on the fire. For a minute, the flames were muted. Then the golden tongues licked round the dry wood and the room was splashed with their glow. The lights of the Christmas tree shone. On the carpet were the scarlet and purple ribbons of discarded wrapping paper, the litter of pine needles, the wine bottles which twinkled in the growing blaze, the confusion of Harry’s toys. The room was warm and full of colour. Ann looked as though she would begin to purr loudly at any moment, curled up in her armchair, the red dress and its glimpses of her breasts. Mr Knapp put his head back; he seemed to have forgotten the throb in his hand in the fullness of food and wine. His wife was already asleep. Silence, save for the occasional spitting of the logs. My eyelids were heavy, becoming heavier, my head swam a little when I closed my eyes. Silence, and the inviting oblivion of sleep . . .
Stephen Gregory Page 10