Llŷr G. Lewis
Birds
It was the wind that I always forgot about, and the salt air that came in its wake. And a different type of silence too, a stillness that came as though from further away. Healthy air, I thought, before chiding myself.
I tired of this every time I came home, that vague sense of unease and the ‘why did I ever leave this place?’ No-one had forced me to leave, and no-one forced me to stay away now either. I drew my coat and reached for my gloves from the boot, and aimed westwards away from the town, following the shore to the foryd fach.
I had begun to grow accustomed to this habit of wintering, of coming home for Christmas and stubbornly remaining slightly longer, until the worst of the January storms were over. The marshy ground of the mid-twenties, where we did not want, or could not see, a nest.
It was a fine walk and the wind at my back. They promised rain but so far it had kept away, and a pale sun shone through the clouds. The wind blew strongly, but my scarf kept the worst away and I could hear the cry of an oystercatcher now and again between the crunch of the pebbles beneath my feet. There was no sand on the foryd, only seagulls, of course. Always, the seagulls.
***
More than once, I had arrived at the Cormorant to start my shift with the droppings from those seagulls streaked on my shoulder, or worse still in my hair. I tried to wash the fishy mess in the gents’ sink before getting to work behind the bar. Not that there was any urgency at the Bili, as the locals called it. Even on Saturday nights, or bank holidays, the Bilidowcar, so called after the Welsh word for cormorant, there on a quiet street far from the castle and standing in the middle of a row of Georgian houses high above the quay, was dark and silent and sleepy.
There one night came a woman, in the quiet days of the new year, and ordered a sherry in a Welsh which was too polished to be this town’s Welsh. She sat at a table by the window as though she had done so every day of her life. She smiled as she paused above her sherry to stare out across the river which flowed to the strait in the gloom below. As she turned to look through the window, she seemed peculiarly like a bird, a hawk perhaps, and the curving shape of her nose like a beak against the orange glow outside, as though she had chosen a high place to look out for her prey.
Her shawl, too, was wrapped around her shoulders like wings. I tried to imagine what had compelled her to venture here, to this quiet pub, but before I could notice or think further, she had emptied her glass and flown out into the night. After her, I tried to guess her age, still seeing in my mind’s eye the strands of wiry grey hair, tied back simply, flowing through the door in her wake like feathers.
She returned the following evenings, sitting each time at her table by the window, listening to the quiet bells of the boats bobbing below and hearing the oystercatchers and the gulls before they roosted.
One night someone was sitting at her table. A hawk-like stare flashed across her face, but then it disappeared and she sat by the bar instead.
Only as I looked at her so closely did I see the wrinkles on her face, and how fine the strands of grey hair were which had been pulled back so carefully. The wrinkles were at their most obvious around her eyes, where that smile had scribbled its mark. And yet it was a while before I mustered the confidence to speak to her.
She smiled; she was glad that I had broken the silence. She had been coming to Wales often over the years, and nowhere did she prefer to this town with its salt-ridden people and the Welsh language a swearword at each corner. She came originally from the Toulouse area: she had come here to form her postgraduate dissertation on a local poet,
had learned the language, and had become infatuated with the country as those who have not a thread of connection with a place can sometimes do. Wales, she said, had drawn her for decades, and every now and then she was pulled back to it, flying from the mainland of the continent, by a custom which she was tempted to call instinct.
We discussed the works of the poet that she had studied and known.
One night, I ventured over to her where she had re-established herself at the window, and as it was relatively quiet, Steven, the Cormorant’s proprietor, gave me leave to sit there, as long as I got up every now and then to serve the lads. I wondered at the accounts of her visits to the poet’s home not far from this town, and the welcome that she received there over the years.
A year or two after completing her studies, the poet had insisted that she return to stay with him and his wife: they both missed her dearly, he said in his letter, and she had to come to spend the summer. She had given the poet quite a shock when she asked whether she might bring her fiancé along with her. The poet agreed at once, but the welcome that she and Arnaud, her fiancée, received, was slightly cooler than before.
By the end of the summer, the two couldn’t face having to leave, and in a sudden flurry of recklessness, they decided that they would be back within the month. Her parents went berserk when they heard of this plan, but the lovers were able to borrow a small sum from Arnaud’s parents, and they opened a tiny restaurant on this very street, a few doors down from the Bilidowcar.
The smile was revealing itself wrinkle by wrinkle. I was itching to learn more, but stop tap stalked up on us from nowhere, and she would return to Paris in the morning. I asked for her name: Eloise Bertrand. At closing time I wished her a safe journey back to France, and she expressed her wish to buy another sherry from me some day, when she would return to Wales and to this town in a year or two’s time. Neither of us truly believed that we would see each other again.
***
That was almost a decade ago, when I worked at the Cormorant in the evenings and went to school each day. Might I still be working there if I hadn’t moved away? Running the place by now; poorer, busier, happier perhaps. The wind whipped the foam in my face, and I aimed up the beach to the shelter of the seawall. Out on the mud, I saw someone stooping, collecting cockles. I only saw the silhouette, and when he got up for a rest, he stood very still, and the thin reflection of his legs in the mud made him resemble a heron awaiting his chance.
The longer I was away, the more I would repeat certain rituals each time I returned to winter, as though I could somehow slip back into a youth cut short. I saw old friends, drank in the old haunts. One of these rituals was to go walking by myself along the foryd. I was determined to do this before going back south.
I aimed for a saltmarsh which meandered towards the strait. There were tiny islets between streams, and reeds and dwarf eelgrass. I would usually go to watch the foryd fach from the other side of the estuary, gingerly avoiding the spent condoms on the floor of the observation shelter, and opening the hatch in order to peer at the birds from afar.
But I had an urge to get nearer, to tread the very ground, and so I had come round the headland this way, possibly trespassing on some farmer’s land.
I might as well have wished that I were a bird, of course: I was not one of them and my clumsy footsteps in the mud betrayed this. I was afraid of slipping or of stepping in a muddy puddle, or still worse that I might tread on a nest full of eggs on the floor. I didn’t see any birds anywhere.
I saw a large rock by the hedge, and I sat on it not knowing whether I should venture onwards across the marshy ground or turn back to the car’s warmth. I could see beyond the estuary the weather coming in from Ireland and from Anglesey.
I saw a flash of black and white, and an orange spark. It was an oystercatcher, and it looked at me with its red eyes. I called to her, but she turned away and looked out towards the strait. I called again, but she arose and spread her wings and flew away. She described a slow circle in the air, and landed again a few yards nearer to me. She looked straight at me, holding her head askew. I had read, as a child, of birds that could speak and of people who could talk to birds. ‘Why does your cry have such longing? Who do you miss?’ The oystercatcher continued to stare. ‘Don’t you nest with the same mate each year, returning faithfully to your partner?’
‘Where do you miss, then?’ I ventured. ‘Is it a place that you long for?’,
and I could see in the oystercatcher’s red eyes that I was warmer.
But she did not answer, she only arose again and made a slow circle before disappearing to the other side of the estuary where I could not follow.
***
I didn’t see Eloise the following year as I had left for the city. By my second year at university, money was scarce and Steven agreed that I could come back there to serve drinks over Christmas and Easter, and that he would have to see about the summer. One cold January night, at my last week of work before going back to my exams, Eloise landed once more, that smile already on her face and her shawl like wings on her shoulders.
Following our talk two years previously, I had asked my father about the small French bistro that had been opened by Eloise and Arnaud. Though he had never been there himself, he had a faint recollection of the place. The town’s inhabitants were well used to immigrants from Italy, and they flocked on warm Saturday afternoons to the ice cream shop on the square, but to have a French couple, and unmarried at that, running a bistro in town was quite the thing.
‘Well, yes, not everyone was willing to cross our threshold, though the food was very nice’, was Eloise’s mischievous response when I mentioned this to her. ‘But we were happy, very happy. We would be up with the dawn to go to the market and then we would sweat all day, I served while Arn cooked, and we had a few others with us by the end, but for me the best time was when there was only me and him.
We would fall together into the bed above the bistro, all sweat and garlic and exhausted but happy, and I would watch the moon above the castle and the tiny red and green lights reflected on the water while he caressed my back, and then he would love me and we would both lie, waiting to hear the gulls and the oystercatchers and thanking, thankful that we didn’t long for anything anymore as they did. We had nowhere else to be.’
She told me of the long nights, which had almost become legend, when the poet and his friends would come to eat. They would book a long table down the centre of the small room, and then gradually the other customers would leave in ones and twos until they had the place to themselves, and then the fun would start, the stories and the poems and the singing, and always one sick in the corner before he could find the toilets.
‘Then on Mondays, we would close the place and we would go for a walk, sometimes up to the hill above the town or sometimes to the little tower across the river, along the foryd for the dirty seaweed smell, or, if we wanted to speak to the birds, to the foryd fach. Arnaud would pull my leg, saying that my birdish was better than my WelshÉ Of course he couldn’t speak Welsh and he didn’t see the need. I did the shopping, the conversing, the serving. He was always in the kitchen.’ More to herself, now, than to me: ‘the mute swan, the little egret, shelduck, oystercatcher and curlew. There were more of them in winter. Ringed-plover, turnstone and redshank, in summer. And every now and then a lapwing, if you were lucky. And in the distance at the estuary’s mouth, the rafts of widgeon coming home to winter.’
Arnaud, she said, had had to return to France around the end of their third year here, something to do with his health, and she, after settling with the landlord and bidding farewell to one or two others, had followed the next spring. Eloise looked out of the window once more, past the boats below on the river, across towards the trees on the hill opposite and beyond towards the mountains.
***
The wind came at a rush now around the corner of the headland, and in the distance the Eifl had already disappeared. Since the oystercatcher had headed for the estuary I had been sitting completely still, and now I had begun to shiver. Then, about two islets away from me, I saw a bunch of cord-grass flowing in an opposite direction to all the others. Looking more closely, I saw that it was the speckled pattern of the curlew; I recognised it instantly by its long beak. He was burrowing in the mud beneath his feet, looking for a worm or a tasty piece of crab.
I tried to ask him from where he had come to land here. Was it from Scandinavia or Scotland, or Siberia possibly. I wanted to ask him what made him return to these parts, year after year. Was there something special about this place specifically? Or did he derive comfort simply from the ritual itself of returning?
The wind must have snatched my voice, or I must have forgotten my birdish, because he didn’t so much as lift his beak from the mud.
Finally he tired of his rummaging, and he arose to fly. He sang as he went, and in his call and in that call’s echo against the shores, and in its weakening as the curlew receded, I could hear the expanse that was
by now like a salt tide between me and my childhood.
***
Over the years I had a few conversations with Eloise as she still heard the town calling, and as I, through Steven’s kindness, still came to work at the Cormorant for a little pocket money, though less and less frequently.
She had been widowed for some years and had been teaching at a university in Paris, in charge of the exchange students from abroad.
She would get them drunk on Verlaine and Rimbaud and Baudelaire.
She liked also to teach her French students about Wales through translations, much of which she undertook herself. She showed them that which she had learned here, that language is a mooring and a taking flight.
One time a student developed an obsession with Eloise, and she would follow her everywhere on the campus. She began to send her letters, before she got hold of Eloise’s home phone number and started ringing her at every hour of the night. Of course she immediately went to the authorities, but they had refused to believe her. The student made a complaint against her; the head of department was suspicious but cautious, gave her compassionate leave, and knowing her, recommended this town. She had come here directly.
‘When bad things happen to me, Wales always calls in some way’, Eloise said quietly; she was forgiving.
***
I didn’t see any lapwings, though I thought that I heard a cry from afar.
I don’t know. They say that they’re getting rarer, fewer reasons for returning each year as their habitat is destroyed. I intended to go on, but in the middle of the path I saw a bird’s half-corpse, a seagull most likely, contorted in such a way that I couldn’t tell which end was which. There was a bit of skeleton, and some feathers about the place, but I couldn’t see many sinews and there was no stench. It must have been there for days, but it was enough to make me turn back.
The wind was against me now, and finally the rain came, turned to hail: beaky weather. The stones pecked at my forehead and ears, and I tried to raise my collar and planted my hands deep in my pockets. The tide was coming in quickly; I had to walk briskly now between the sea-wall and the waves, and I tried to turn my face away from the hail.
The cockle-gatherer had disappeared.
***
I only saw Eloise once after that. It was the end of summer, and I was serving behind the bar for the last time. By the following year I would have a permanent job in the city. She ordered a sherry as usual, but the smile was fainter this time and the wrinkles on her face had deepened, more shades of white in the careful hair. She was glad to see me, she said,
and she asked me to go and sit with her at the table by the window.
We conversed aimlessly for a while. The poet had died recently, and she had contacted the wife but had not heard a word in reply. And I had never considered or connected Eloise with the man in terms of age Ð to me, she was so much younger than him though there was, in truth, not much more than some five years between them. She felt that Wales was emptier without him though she hadn’t spoken to him for over a decade.
We both sat in silence for a while, and the noise of the gulls outside.
‘When bad things happen to me, Wales always calls in some way’,
Eloise mumbled abruptly. ‘And here I am, back again. But it can’t call any longer, perhaps.’
For a while she had begun to notice the signs: looking for her glasses before finding that they were perched neatly on top of her hair; phoning her nephew, only to forget why she had called in the first place; worst of all perhaps, she had begun to forget the ends of sentences before uttering them. That was the biggest fear, the fear of being unable to speak.
It was through her warbling that she had revealed her life to me. For some reason, it was only the periods in Wales that were still crystal clear.
She almost found Welsh easier than French by now. She maintained that she could recite tonight, if I asked her, the names of each of the company during those famous evenings, decades ago.
‘Stay here, then’, I offered. ‘It obviously does you good: there must be some way, surely?’
‘Hm. I will have no welcome from the widow now. And no-one will come with me. Unless you plan to return to this town, to look after an old owl like me?’
I saw the accusation of those old hawk eyes in her playful question.
And yet I could not convince myself that this was the last time that I’d see her. Finding her here had become one of those rituals each time that I came home. She was part of the wintering.
We talked all night and I saw neither in her bearing nor in her manner,
nor heard in her voice, nor sensed either in her hawk eyes the slightest hint of the long fog that was to descend on her. Quietly I bade her farewell and quietly I watched her empty her glass and fly out to the night. I could still see in my mind’s eye the strands of her wiry white hair, simply tied back, flowing through the door in her wake like feathers.
***
Eventually I reached the car, but I was already soaking wet. I changed my trousers, and drove nearer to the footbridge. I considered going straight home, but I parked the car by the quay. It was no use.
I didn’t aim for the Bilidowcar, but rather towards the other pub by the water, the one with polished brass and smugglers’ lanterns hanging by the bar, and little ships in bottles on the window ledges, where I could watch the sunset over the strait rather than seeing the night arrive without warning over the mountains and over the trees. I wouldn’t hear the oystercatchers there, only the seagulls, and there, I knew, would be waiting for me some of my friends from schooldays, where I could get blind drunk in their company before turning the car’s nose back towards the city in the morning, towards spring, knowing that as the miles slid under the motor, I would be able to feel the guilt and the strangeness falling away from me as I arose and flew.