The Cormorant Read Free Page A

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 text-book, 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