The Cormorant (18 page)

Ann sank to the ground. Unconscious, asleep, she fled the horror of the funeral pyre, safer, perhaps, in a world of dreams.

For myself, uncertain of what I should have been doing, utterly dazed and dazzled by the fire, I trod stupidly among the embers. I kicked away a few relics. My feet shuffled through blackened wood and charred cloth. They turned over the blistered bones of bird and boy. I found the shovel in my hands once more. From the corners of the garden I brought snow and sprinkled it on the remains. They sizzled. Smoke rose where the flames had been. Working faster, I came again and again with shovelfuls of snow, my eyes blurred with tears and the bitterness of ashes. All the air was heavy with the reek of burning.

Until the blackness of the fire was hidden with a mantle of immaculate white.

W
ith the coming of the thaw, the garden was emptied of snow. The stream was black and vicious with the melting of ice. I sat in the cottage and shuddered at the shrieking of the gales. In January and February, the mountains had groaned under the weight of snow, each night had stalked up the valley and suffocated the hillside with its chaotic darkness, until the rains came and the days were grey with the soaking they received. The country drowned. The fields sucked at the legs of the livestock. Mud, more rain, a quagmire of mists and drizzle: forever the sound of water, from the sky, from the roaring gullies, from the roadsides, and flying from every blackened branch and blade of grass. A landscape of greyness and water. The winter spent itself in March by assaulting the windows of the cottage and throwing soot down the chimney. A few slates flew off the roof. Water crept under the doors. The building dug its claws into the land, gripped and waited. The relics of winter faded.

Nothing remained of the cormorant, not a speck of ash or the grain of a singed feather. Harry was gone. Ann was still unconscious when they came to take her from me; her destination, in a welter of flashing blue lights and powerful sirens, was never clearly explained. Alone in the cottage, I stared into the fire, gripped the arms of my chair and flinched at the tumult of storms. I waited.

But, with the end of March, once more the sun appeared, splashing a little watery colour onto the mountain-sides. Like a great big dog which has come running up the beach after its frolic in the surf, the mountains shook themselves and sent a final shower of rainbow spray into the valleys. Then they relaxed. A little steam rose from their backs under the touch of the sun. Still the stream bellowed. But there was a prickling of green on the hedgerows, sparks of yellow in the grass, the daffodils and primroses.

It was spring.

The sunshine beckoned me into the garden. I would stride over the slates and sniff the air, stand and watch the hectic water of the stream. Alone in the garden. Until the gulls came . . .

They descended on me like the snow which had choked the garden at Christmas. I sniffed the tingling air and braced myself with my feet apart, simply stared into the sky and waited. No sounds, no cries or whispers.

But the gulls came.

At first a solitary bird came skimming over the plantation and peered down at the garden. Its laughter rang hollow against the hillsides. Until another gull appeared, and another, and the hysterical mirth increased. I stood still, my face upturned. And my sky became a blizzard of the whirling white birds. They dived towards me, their throats gulping with the effort of screams. Their wings made the air quiver. A patter of droppings rained on the slated path and settled like tears on my cheeks. I never raised my hands to wipe the tears away: I let them trickle to the corners of my mouth.

Then, when the turmoil was too much and in my head there was nothing but the snowstorm of gulls, I could dismiss them. I simply dropped the butt of my cigar and ground it out with my heel on the slates of the garden. The birds wheeled upwards. They wept a little and were gone.

The snows had vanished, for the time being. In the garden it was spring again.

Spring again, for the time being.