A Drake at the Door (19 page)

The photograph of Lama which Shelagh secretly took

The Muscovy drake had arrived in a sack brought in the back of a car by a young farmer who aimed to make himself popular with the Wyllie family. He could not have created a worse impression. Jane, Jeremy and their mother would have starved rather than eat it.

It was magnificent. It was a large white bird, the size of a goose, with dark green feathers on its back, a powerful pink beak with a red bobble on it bridged by two holes like nostrils, huge yellow webbed feet, an angry red skin beneath the white feathers of its neck and head, piercing, intelligent eyes, and the ability to raise the crest of feathers on its head when annoyed, like the fur of a furious cat. It could also hiss like a steam engine.

Jane brought it across the fields from her cottage in her arms, unperturbed by its apparent ferocity, and she arrived at our door as if she were holding a Ming vase. I looked at it apprehensively.

‘And what, Jane,’ I asked, ‘is the procedure for looking after a Muscovy drake?’

She was grinning at me. She knew I had felt a little irked by being forced to agree to accept it. I had not been in the mood to collect any further responsibilities. I had dallied when she offered it to us. I foresaw difficulties. What about foxes? What about it flying away and all the hours we would have to spend searching for it? I saw it becoming a tedious tie, not because I would dislike the bird; on the contrary, I knew I would grow too fond of it. And I felt at the time that I did not relish such a worry.

‘Oh, it’s quite simple,’ said Jane, talking to me as if I were a backward small boy, ‘it’ll be quite all right in the chicken run with Hetty.’ Hetty was our one remaining chicken. She lived in a large chicken house by herself, and occupied the day pecking in the extensive wired-in run in the wood.

‘Surely Hetty won’t like being chased by a drake?’

‘You’re quite wrong,’ said Jane with a sweet smile, ‘the drake won’t show any interest in Hetty at all.’

Here Jane, in due course, was herself proved to be wrong. The drake and Hetty developed a strong platonic attachment and when Hetty, due to old age, began to fade away, the attention of the drake was touching to watch. For the last two days of her life he never left her side. They remained together in the chicken house refusing to come out. Nor could he be tempted to eat anything.

Jeannie, naturally enough, did not share my hesitant views. The prospect of helping another creature delighted her. She is one of those people who would fill the fields with old horses, the house with stray cats, and leave a legacy to provide grain for the birds on the bird table.

‘We must have a pond for him,’ she said within twentyfour hours of his arrival at Minack, and I observed that ‘it’ had already become ‘him’. ‘The postman,’ she added, ‘told me this morning he was certain to fly away to look for a pond unless we do something about it.’

There happened to be a drought. Springs were so low that we had scarcely enough water for domestic use from one well, nor enough for our tomato or freesia seedlings from the other well. The idea of making a pond was an impossible one.

‘It’s up to you,’ said Jeannie in that tone of voice which I knew would mean she would get her way in the end, ‘if you want him to fly away . . .’

The idea of his flying away was a threat that hung over us for a long time. People seemed to have a malicious pleasure in telling us this would happen. Cut his wings, they said, or you’ll lose him for certain. But we did not want to cut his wings for fear of frightening him. We did not want to upset him. We wanted him to feel at home and to trust us. In the end he never did fly away, that is for any distance. He flew, a magnificent beating of his wings, but only round and about the cottage. The prospect of touring the district in search of him never materialised.

I suppose it was the pond which restrained him, although the pond in the end was only an old tin bath just large enough for him to splash in. And he owed it not to Jeannie or me or the girls, but to Julius. We were at our wits’ end how to make his pond when Julius found the tin bath thrown away in the undergrowth near the cottage.

***

Julius was one of those sixteen-year-olds who seem to mature before their time. He was on holiday from his school in Switzerland and staying not far away. We had known him off and on since he was a child, and one day this particular summer he had suddenly appeared at the cottage. He was good-looking, erudite even for an adult, and effortless as far as Jeannie and I were concerned. He had a restless wish to be alone on the cliff, and he would come to us, have a meal and then go off down to the rocks by himself; and later I would find him there staring out to sea.

‘What are you thinking about, Julius?’

And in reply I would have a penetrating commentary on world affairs, or a more personal outlook on life. One did not think of him as younger than oneself. One had with him a standard of conversation like playing tennis on the centre court at Wimbledon. The ideas bounced back at one another with speed.

As soon as he found the tin bath he dug a hole in the chicken run, the exact size, so the rim of the bath was on a level with the surrounding soil; and then he carried water to it until it was filled. We waited expectantly for the drake’s reaction and in due course he waddled towards it, dipped his beak into the water, and a minute later was sitting in it looking like a battleship in a small lagoon.

‘Well done, Boris,’ said Julius.

‘Why Boris?’ asked Jeannie.

‘Well he must have a name and as he is a Muscovy he ought to have a name which sounds like a Russian.’

The Muscovy breed does in fact come from America but Boris sounded good. We all agreed upon that. It had a solid quality about it, tinged by the mysterious, which suited his personality. We had already seen enough of him to realise he was a determined bird who would develop set ways with strong likes and dislikes. He also obviously had intelligence. He would stare at us, not with the vacant expression of a chicken, but as if he were summing us up. It amused us.

‘What are you wanting, Boris?’

‘He likes being talked to,’ Jane would answer for him.

After Hetty died we thought he might be lonely. We considered finding him a mate and some people said he would go off and find one himself unless we did something about it. But a mate would mean eggs and eggs would mean baby Muscovy ducklings and as there would never be any question of killing them we decided to risk him going on an amorous quest. He has never done so. He has remained a bachelor and never given a hint he would like it otherwise.

He lives alone in the big chicken house, a house that was built for fifty hens. Every evening as dusk falls he waddles off to bed, a flat-footed walk with his whole feathered body wagging from side to side, a measured walk of habit, the same route every day, the soil packed hard by his webbed feet; we have given up trying to grow anything on his route to the chicken house. And when he arrives he roosts on the perch like a chicken, and waits for one of us to lock the door.

‘Have you put Boris to bed?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Well I’ll do it.’

Most evenings there is this scrap of conversation at Minack; for we are on guard about Boris. He is a tempting target for a fox or a badger. We hurry home to put him to bed, plans revolve around him. We do not feel at peace wherever we are if we know the chicken-house door is still open.

And in the morning we act in reverse.

‘Get up. It’s time Boris was let out.’

I envy those who are able to treat pets casually as if they exist only to titillate man’s boredom. I envy them their harshness. They can pursue their relationship with birds and animals on a metallic basis, a scientist’s standard. Emotion in their eyes is a vulgar thing. The heart of a bird or an animal does not exist and so they can treat them like a new toy, gloriously loved on its arrival then simmering into being a nuisance, then back again at intervals to being loved again.

Love for an animal is no less than love for a human being. It is indeed more vulnerable. One can compose oneself by the assurance that a human being can evict disillusion by contact with his friends. But an animal yields trust with the abandon of a child and if it is betrayed, shoved here and there, treated as baggage or merchandise, bargained over like a slave of olden days, everyone except the cynic can understand the hurt in its eyes. But the cynic grouses that we who see this hurt are suffering from a surfeit of sentiment, the word which the cynic parades so often as if it were his fortress.

I prefer, therefore, to behave indulgently to those who depend on me and who, for that matter, respond to my attentions without deceit. Hence Boris seemed to us from the beginning worthy of our minor sacrifices. He gave us pleasure and so we were glad to repay him.

He was puzzled by Lama; she had shed her wild disposition with remarkable speed, and she was now a homely cat, a cat who liked to sit on my knee wasting my time as Monty had done. She showed no wish to go out at night and instead chose to lie curled at the bottom of our bed, not taking up much space for she was a little cat. She had become very trusting, perhaps foolishly so. She appeared to be bewildered by the love that had suddenly come her way. She worried us, for instance, by her careless attitude towards the danger of cars. She always hurried to hide under any which were parked outside, and when we returned home in the Land Rover she would plant herself in the middle of the lane and refuse to budge. She was also insensitive to the threat of Boris’s fierce beak.

I think it understandable that Boris should have been jealous. We may have fussed over Boris but Lama, in comparison, was pampered. Boris used to eye us picking her up and hugging her, and although Boris would come for walks with us he did not like to travel far from the cottage; then he would stop and crossly watch Lama continue at our heels, a cat which had more enterprise than a drake.

Thus, whenever the opportunity arose, he liked to show his displeasure. He used to make feint attacks on her if she came near him, outstretching his neck, waving his head like an angry snake, hissing, waddling menacingly towards her. And because Lama in her wonderment believed no one could dislike her she would remain still, watching him come nearer and nearer, and only sidle away at the moment when I was about to shout her a warning.

Boris was always particularly vexed when he was having a meal outside the door of the cottage and Lama was wanting to come in or go out. We fed him on scraps and more especially Jeannie’s home-made bread, though his favourite was the leftover dough with which she had made the bread; like the gulls he would have nothing to do with shop bread. He had, of course, the grass and undergrowth to sift for insects, the freedom, in fact, to go where he wanted, but anything he found on these searches was considered by him to be either an hors d’oeuvre or a savoury. He insisted on the square meal that we were able to provide for him and every so often during the day he would pad up the steep path to the cottage.

As we threw him the scraps he would wag his tail feathers in pleasure, and gasp a strange noise like an out-of-breath man. This display of contentment would continue unless he caught sight of Lama poking her black head round the door or coming up the path from behind him; and then he became alert and angry and instead of soft gasps there were hisses.

Lama, on these occasions, responded with caution; a sensible cat who appreciated the rage she had engendered. She was sorry about it and she looked at Boris as if she were telling him so. There was certainly never any sign that she wanted to meet anger with anger. She was meek and mild. She just stared at him, waiting for the moment to slip by when there was the minimum chance of a peck from his beak. Perhaps she considered herself a superior being, a being that could sleep on a bed, not perch in a henhouse. A different social level. A snob. Perhaps she thought it beneath her dignity to take any notice of such raw ill-manners. And yet I doubt that this was so. I am sure she was fond of Boris and enjoyed his companionship. Why otherwise, as I often saw, should she turn on her back, paws softly curled, inviting him to come to her in the way she invited us to play with her?

Jeannie and I felt towards Lama the same kind of affection we felt towards Shelagh. Both were waifs. Lama came into our lives from the unknown, a lost wild kitten of the Cornish cliffs, while Shelagh, yearning for love, came from the barren land of no true parents. They had this forgotten quality in common and it helped no doubt to create the affection they showed each other. And I was glad, therefore, that Shelagh was there on the one occasion when Lama was in trouble.

Charlie the chaffinch had been with us so long that we knew his appearance with the same detail as one knows the Union Jack. And we had observed during the previous few months that he had developed a bump on his head just above his eye; and then after a little while we noticed the eye begin to close until in due course Charlie was making his monotonous call as a one-eyed chaffinch. We were of course very upset but there was nothing we could do. He was impossible to catch. He also continued to be as gay and thrusting as usual. He was the dominant figure of the bird table. He was the echo which followed us around. And yet we realised he was nearing his time. A healthy chaffinch, a young one, would not have a blind eye. And after all, had not Charlie been with us for eight years?

He used to annoy Monty as the wrens used to annoy him, chirping around his head from a bush as he lay somnolent underneath. He did the same with Lama. I can understand this annoyance, because if you are suddenly awakened from a deep sleep by a noise that flushes you into momentary bewilderment, you are usually for an instant bad-tempered. You say something which you afterwards regret. I have never hit anyone, though I have cursed them.

Lama was sleeping under the stunted apple tree just opposite the cottage when Charlie chose to perch on a tiny branch just above her, and began yelling his monotonous call. I was fifty yards away at the time but Jeannie was lying on the grass nearby, reading a magazine when, for an instant, she put it down, and saw to her horror that Lama had leapt at the branch and swiped Charlie into the grass.