Stephen Gregory

by The Cormorant (epub)

  *

  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 child, 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 instincts must have infected Ian in his final months and coloured his philanthropy.

  Uncle Ian died. He was on the boat one evening in June, moving briskly with a rising tide from the wide waters of Piddinghoe towards the rip under Southease bridge. He must have had pains in his chest since leaving the moorings at Denton island, possibly after a struggle to start the outboard motor. When he collapsed onto the floor of the boat, he gripped at his seizing chest and struck his head on the petrol tank. And, 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. The bird stared into the face of the dying man. When the man lay still, his chest clenched in the rigour of death, when a dribble of saliva glistened on his chin, the cormorant dropped from its perch on the boat’s cabin and landed with its wide, wet feet on his belly. The boat caught in the iron limbs of the bridge, held there by the tide and the busy thrusts of the propeller. A heron briefly raised its head from fishing and turned an eye of frost on the butting vessel. The cattle snorted and returned to the lush grass of the water meadows. That evening, another boat stopped alongside the little cruiser. They found the man, dead, on the floor. The cormorant flapped heavily away to avoid the threatening boots of the boarding party, but it followed the boats downriver to the rank and frothy waters of the moorings.

  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.

 
When they had taken the body away, the bird heaved itself onto the deck of its master’s boat. It was seen through the rest of the evening and that warm summer’s night, hunched on the top of the cabin. It only blinked and cleaned a few morsels of soft flesh from its beak.

  This was the bird that we inherited.

  *

  We had been in the cottage for a week when the cormorant was delivered, that October evening. We had leapt at the opportunity of leaving our work in the Midlands. The sale of our house there gave us the financial freedom to have the cottage quickly surveyed and a few repairs carried out. Basically it was sound. A builder replaced a number of slates on the roof and some of the wiring was seen to. Soon, with our books and prints and brightly coloured rugs, the little place was cosy and warm. The village nestled under the cloud-covered summit of Snowdon, on the road between Caernarfon and Beddgelert. There was a shop, a post office and a pub. I stocked up with logs and coal; the fire gilded our living-room with its scented flames and sent up a tall feather of smoke into the autumn air. I was content to stay at home throughout the day and devote my time to the writing of my history textbook, exasperated as I had been in my experience as a teacher by the unsuitability of the material. Furthermore, I could manage Harry, our boy of eleven months, in the intervals of my work. Ann straight away found work in the pub, helping with the preparation of bar snacks at lunchtime and in the evenings until about nine o’clock. People in the village were friendly, but wary at first. We knew it would take time to make real friends there, by the nature of the mountains and the wet plantations. Being English was not a disadvantage, contrary to our expectations. The pub, the shop and the post office were all in the hands of English couples who had fled the northern cities of England to find a cleaner and less frantic way of life in the Welsh hills. There was no novelty in our being English; we were simply another young family who had come to settle in the village.

  The news of the death of Uncle Ian was a surprise to us. But our inheritance of the cottage seemed to be a miracle, such a thunderbolt of good fortune that the matter of the cormorant was practically ignored as an eccentric novelty perpetrated by my uncle, as a joke. We set our minds on quitting school and beginning a new life in Wales. I had a notion of what the bird would be like: it would be gawky and angular, a sort of black sea-goose, I gathered from a handbook, with an extraordinarily healthy appetite for fish. Well, it could stay in the backyard, on the end of a leash perhaps, or potter around and scavenge like a farmyard goose. We bought fish for the cat anyway, so it would be no trouble to double the ration and feed the cormorant at the same time. It was a sure sign of our complacency in receipt of the cormorant that we had opened the white wooden crate in our living-room and expected some kind of placid, domestic fowl to emerge and be driven quietly out through the back door. The image of the sea-raven, hunched and black and indelibly marked with the stink of mud and fish, the slow-blinking cormorant which had set its beak to the cheeks and gums of its saviour . . . this had been forgotten in the euphoria of moving into our rural retreat. The turmoil of the bird’s first appearance by the flaming lights of the fire had upset our picture of domestic bliss. It came from its box as ugly and as poisonous as a vampire bat.

  During a night of tears and recriminations, a long, sleepless night when the name of Uncle Ian came in for repeated vilification, we began to face up to that seemingly innocuous clause in the will which stipulated that the cormorant would be a part of our life in the cottage, or else the cottage would be forfeited. The next morning, before the baby could be brought downstairs, I manhandled the crate out of the living-room and put it down carefully in the yard. For all the sound and movement which was evident from within, the bird could have been dead. But that was wishful thinking on my part. In any case, there was some ludicrous clause which forbade us from disposing of our charge by releasing it or killing it; its death on the first day of our responsibility would have looked somewhat suspicious if we were to attempt to construe it as an accident. Undoubtedly, the bird was alive in the fetid straw of the box. Its smells simmered through the panel of perforations.

  Ann came down the stairs, still smudging the tears of disbelief from her face. She set about the living-room with water and disinfectant. While she washed the paintwork and sponged vigorously at the curtains, the furniture, the pictures, the books and our precious rugs, I was busy in the yard with my hammer and nails. I hastily erected a sort of cage in one corner, a ramshackle structure of chicken-wire and woodwork, with a section of corrugated iron on the top to afford some weather protection. Into this, I tipped the cormorant. I pushed in the crate, having loosened the lid again, knocked it over with a wary foot and shook out the contents into the new cage. There was a bundle of damp straw, that was all. Nothing stirred. I had seen the same sort of thing in zoos: rows of big cages, each with its informative little sign, and nothing but a bank of straw at the back, in which, if the signs were to be believed, some exotic and possibly savage beast was snoozing. But not a flicker of life. So, after I had closed down the walls of chicken-wire with a series of nails, I took a cane from the shed and tentatively pushed it into the cage and into the mess of straw. One moment the straw lay silent and still. Then it exploded in a chaos of black wings and spitting cries. The cormorant erupted from sleep, flung itself at the wire. Its jabbing bill came through, it hung for a second, scrabbling with its fleshy feet, its wings outstretched on the wire, like some gas-crazed soldier on a French battlefield. I yelped and jumped back. I watched in horror as the bird fell to the ground and began to strut backwards and forwards across the floor of its confines, until it became calmer. It pecked a little at the ground, threw some of the straw in the air and found some nameless morsel hidden among it. I watched the workings of the bird’s throat. Something slid down into the mucous darkness. At least the cormorant was behind bars.

  Ann came into the yard and looked at the bird from the back door. She was holding Harry in her arms. He was agog at the spectacle of the cormorant, throwing out his arms and wriggling like a trout. The bird froze for a moment, slowly opened up its wings into a black shroud and croaked. It came to the wire. Snaking its neck, it hissed a long, malodorous hiss and brought up a pellet of half-digested matter which lay steaming in the weak sunshine. Harry gaped at the offering and tried to get free from Ann. Something told her that this was not suitable viewing for her baby boy. Without speaking, she turned back into the kitchen, with Harry swivelling his little blond head for a last glimpse of the cormorant.

  I opened a tin of cat food and managed to shove it under the wire, on a tin plate. The bird devoured the meat before standing on the plate and releasing one long jet of yellow shit where the food had been a minute before. I found myself fascinated by the cormorant’s manners. I knew of football supporters and pop stars whose behaviour in railway carriages and expensive hotels was lovingly reported in the lightweight press and who were alleged to be like this, wonderfully oblivious to accepted standards of decency and cleanliness. But this bird made an art of being vile. It was somehow endearing, such candour. I turned away from the kitchen window, in case Ann should see my expression and disapprove of my smiles. Uncle Ian must have felt the same about the bird. I fed it again and supplied it with fresh water, forgot about my writing for the rest of the day as I strengthened the cage and effected a sort of hatch which would make feeding easier. I stayed close to the cormorant in the backyard, going into the cottage to look after the baby while Ann was out, but returning to watch the bird. It waddled around the cage, panting. When it had drunk deeply from the bowl, it put its face down into the water and snorted through its fur-covered nostrils. The bird held up its wings and flapped them until a few black feathers dropped onto the slate floor. By the afternoon, the cage was spattered with droppings, to which the sprinklings of down and dust and straw had stuck and through which the bird went slapping with its wide feet. I saw that frequent hosing would have to constitute part of the new routine initiated by the ar
rival of the cormorant. But if I could establish some kind of relationship, simply by being the regular supplier of food and water, perhaps the new member of the family would not cause too severe a disruption of our lives. I watched the bird for the first afternoon and allowed it to watch me. Maybe it could become a manageable entity. Harry must be kept away from it, and then its unpredictable temper and lack of hygiene would not be a hazard.

  The bird: it would be about eighteen months old, if Uncle Ian had rescued it from the river in its first winter. By now, it was three feet long from the tip of its tail feathers to the end of its beak. It was by no means utterly black when looked at in the sunlight and when it was behaving calmly, although I had thought of it as uniformly coal-black in the midst of its lunatic fits in the living-room, on the previous evening. In fact, it was shot through with browns and greens and blues as the sun caught it on its back and wings, the iridescence of oil and the stale river. There was a lighter patch on its breast, which the handbook said was the mark of an immature bird: this would disappear and the cormorant would become completely sooty. Its beak was an impressive weapon of heavy horn, three inches in length, brown and smooth, hooked at the tip. The bird stalked around on its webbed feet, putting them down with a slap in the water and in its own many-coloured squirts of shit. It held itself upright, like a goose, hissed with its bill open and made a nasal croaking. The cormorant was a Heathcliff, a Rasputin, a Dracula. Or maybe it was just a sea-crow, corvus marinus, as the name suggested, just a scavenging, unprincipled crow. The name came to me in a flash: Archie. I would call the cormorant Archie. It was harsh, like the sound the bird repeatedly croaked. There was something cocky and irreverent about it.