The Cormorant Read Free

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 instinct 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