The Cormorant Read online

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ she said in her teaching voice. ‘Keep an eye on Harry, will you, he’s in the living-room.’

  The boy came tottering into the kitchen at that moment, holding two trophies of his early morning exploration: a pair of underpants and a bra.

  We all laughed.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Harry, what splendid presents!’

  Ann was not expected in the pub that day, indeed until after the New Year. I proudly displayed the shopping I had already done for Christmas and earned myself a kiss for my efforts. The cottage was tidy and clean once more, the family was reunited. My suggestion that we should all go out was greeted with instant approval.

  ‘All of us,’ I said. ‘All four of us.’

  A momentary pursing of the lips, then, ‘Yes, alright,’ she said. ‘I’ll make some sandwiches and things for a picnic, you get Harry organised. And the bird, of course . .

  I washed and dressed and did the same for Harry while Ann was busy in the kitchen. Then the child was occupied in the living-room with some of his noisy toys, Ann was in the bath, and I went out to the van. I sponged down the seats and the matting and made sure that the barrier which separated the back compartment from the passengers was quite secure. Fragments of fish, seaweed and feathers were all swept out into a plastic bag. I wiped the windows and sprayed a cloud of disinfectant into the van before slamming the doors closed. I went to fetch Archie. Ann came out of the bathroom with just a towel around her. At my warning shout, she scooped up the boy and took him upstairs, as a precaution, while I came though the front room with the cormorant. It was a good start to the expedition: the bird stalked up to the van, with a gentle coaxing from the leash (especially tightened around its ankle), and flapped into the back when I opened the doors. It sneezed like a cat at the smell of the spray, but settled down in the fresh straw which I provided. I had the collar in my pocket, I had checked and re-checked the new knot in the leash. Archie was ready. I was determined nothing should go wrong to spoil the beginnings of a new understanding of the cormorant.

  It was the closest that Ann and Harry had been to Archie. They sat in the front seat, every muscle tense for the first few miles, with only the wire mesh between them and the bird. When it came close and poked its beak through the holes, Ann whispered, ‘Bloody hell,’ and turned to look out of the window. Harry chuckled, blew a bubble, and went to bat at the beak with his hand. Ann restrained him.

  ‘Be a good lad there, Archie,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘Nearly there now.’ And to Ann, I added, ‘The bugger’s in a good mood today. Just relax, it can tell if you’re frightened. It can’t hurt you here, and I’ll keep it right away from you and Harry when we get to the beach.’

  She made a brave smile, touched my hand.

  We arrived at the castle in the bright sunlight of midday. The car park was practically empty. The air was perfectly still, the tide quite high but going out. I found myself looking round and inspecting the few pedestrians, and I threw a surreptitious glance along the grey blocks of the battlements. People would be at work or queueing in the supermarkets for the rest of their Christmas shopping. Ann and Harry got out of the van. While they were admiring the swans, twenty of them which were sailing grandly among the yachts and cruisers, I opened up the back and brought out the cormorant. Tying it to the rear bumper, I organised coats and extra pullovers for my wife and son, then locked the doors. Harry was not impressed with the swans: they were too clean and respectable, perhaps. He wriggled in Ann’s arms to turn and stare at Archie. Together we watched as the bird loosened its muscles, stiffened by a night in its crate and its confinement in the van. Feathers flew. The glittering air sang with the whistle of black wings. Archie stretched to the tips of its feet and lashed out its aching sinews. The gulls came from the castle walls, fell close by and wheeled away, screaming at the menace of the cormorant. Here was something, in the castle car park, attached to the bumper of a small van, which was more than the everyday sea-crows on the brown waters of the estuary. It came and went in the company of a man, not his slave, for they had seen him retreat from the wild beak, but in the company of people. It was more than the cormorants along the shore, much more than the swans which preened themselves in their muddy reflections, immeasurably more than the biggest of the black-backs or the oldest raven. The gulls swooped down to see. They recoiled from something they could not understand.

  Ann and Harry, the latter insisting on walking unaided, followed at a safe distance as I went over the bridge with the bird.

  While I dropped onto the beach and was busy fixing the collar to the cormorant’s throat, they continued further along the sea wall to the steps which the boy could negotiate. The shingle shore was a treasure trove for Harry. Time and time again, he fell on his knees with a gurgle of delight on spotting some object which was irresistible to his teeming imagination. There were cuttlefish, the leathery eggs of the rays; stones with stripes and hoops and spots, stones which were riddled with holes or studded with barnacles; necklaces and headbands of seaweed; numerous old shoes, the skeleton of a black umbrella; green bottles, blue bottles, clear bottles and those whose glass had been scoured to swirls of milky clouds by the friction of the sands; the waterlogged corpses of gulls and pigeons, the bright orange beak of an oyster-catcher, the foot of a swan; a pair of hornrimmed spectacles, a briefcase of good leather, locked up and containing all manner of scandalous secrets; more bejewelled boulders and emerald weed … the worn-out spars of shipwrecks, the flotsam and jetsam of innumerable complicated lives. Ann stayed with the boy, relieving him firmly of the least acceptable trophies but letting him comb the beach for more treasures. She sat on a dry rock and felt the December sun fall on her hands and on her face. She tasted the salt on her lips. Quite nearby, I was standing up to my ankles in the water, the line streamed out to sea and there was the black shadow of the cormorant, motionless for a second on the sparkling tide before it dived below the surface. Ann gasped. It was beautiful. Archie was suddenly different, moving across the gentle swell and diving like a knife into the green depths. The cormorant dropped its hooliganism and went hunting; its filthy manners were nothing but an affectation. We had known boys and girls in school who had been the same, who adopted the armour of the gross and the crass, who spat and puked and blew their noses on the curtains to disguise a sensitivity which had once been highly prized. Archie performed. In the water, the cormorant was healthy, vigorous, clean.

  ‘Go on, Archie!’ Ann was calling out.

  And when it surfaced, with a silver fish wriggling in its beak, she jumped up from her rock with a little cry. She called to me as I was drawing in the rope, and waved wildly.

  ‘Wonderful!’ she yelled, and I could see the welling of tears in her eyes. It had been just the same at school.

  I pulled in the bird, snatched the fish from its beak and put it in the pocket of my jacket. In a moment, the puzzled cormorant was once more breasting the waves and heading out into deeper water. There was a burst of applause from behind me. I spun round, as though I had been stung by a wasp, and there was Ann, delighted at the success of our hunting expedition. Harry winced at the sound of clapping, dropping his armful of treasure onto the beach. I returned to the fishing, while Ann soothed her sobbing son.

  In an hour, father and son had accumulated more prizes than we could carry. My plastic bag was full to bursting with eels and dabs, all struggling to prolong their lives by gaping their sticky mouths into the sunlight. Their bodies, writhing together in the bag, had made a mucous lather in which the fish would drown. We persuaded Harry to leave all but the most precious of his collection: he decided to keep a string of seaweed pearls and a pink shampoo bottle. From a discreet distance, Ann and Harry watched Archie enjoying the fruits of its work. I tipped the entire contents of the bag onto the sea wall, where the fish blew bubbles and convulsed on the dry concrete. Harry’s mouth fell open in astonishment. He mimicked the cormorant’s rasping croak, lunging forward with eager hands. Here were
far better toys than anything he could find on the seashore, jumping, skittering toys. Ann restrained him. Having removed the collar from the cormorant’s throat, I fed the eels to the bird one by one, stunning some of them first for the benefit of the weary hunter, but offering the others live for Archie to overpower and swallow, for the benefit of Ann and Harry. For Ann, Archie had reverted to its loutish manners; away from the water, it was ungainly and crude. But she was thrilled by such gluttony. The eels slid down Archie’s throat, the pulsating bulge descended as the cormorant released a belch of steam into the cold. Harry stared, with the solemnity of expression which only the very young and the ancient can achieve.

  Archie was replete. We all went back to the van. I put the bag of dabs on the floor by the driver’s seat and tied the bird to the bumper. Still the car park, under the walls of the castle, was quite empty. It was perfect for us to sit on the harbour side and eat our picnic. We watched the efforts of one dishevelled swan to rejoin the big group of swans in the face of nearly twenty hostile beaks. Ann called to the birds, her teaching voice again, as though she were sorting out some playground bullies. We both laughed at our old school charades, the feigning of outrage or surprise when laughter would have been appropriate. The bullying swans ignored her. I shouted to their victim: ‘What’s the matter now, Pilbury? Stop blubbing, for heaven’s sake! Get stuck in there, let’s see a bit of backbone!’ The swan drifted off, pecking at a few displaced feathers. There was a Pilbury in every playground.

  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 ocean
s 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.