The Cormorant Read online

  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 the 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 block 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 carpet 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 flowing 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.

  ‘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 side 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 lifetsyle 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?’<
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  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.