Night Waking - Softcover

The swans are by the shore, drifting bright as paper cutouts

against waves blurred by dusk. They spend the night

murmuring oboe harmonies to each other, a woodwind of

reassurance. Ordinary swans, the Queen’s swans on the river

where we feed the ducks at home, have faces apparently

afflicted by some medieval disease, and sleep standing on one

leg, heads under their wings like child-free passengers on

long-haul flights who can summon night with a nylon blindfold.

These sea swans seem to stay awake all night, sailing

through the fading light like ships bound for far countries, and

they have faces as smooth and neutral as the corps de ballet, faces

that can’t communicate any level of grief or pain. Perhaps this

is an asset in species that mate for life.

I glance back at the house. Its façade, dark as the cliff-face

at the other end of the island, turns away from the after-light

shining over the sea, from where America is coming up for a

new day as we turn away from the sun. One of the swans

stretches towards the sky and cries out, wings threshing the water

in sudden agitation like that of someone who has just remembered

that a friend is dead. I saw a goose dying, once, a Canada

goose that had flown all the way from the Arctic to end its life on

the hard shoulder of the M40, and although one wing was still

beating as if to music while the other lay across the rumble-strip,

its face was impassive. I stood on the footbridge, watching, joggling

the pram in which the baby would sleep only for as long

as we kept moving, until some lorry driver, merciful or inattentive,

left a flurry of feathers and red jam on the road. Our swans

are safe from that, here. For a season. Like us, they will go south

in the autumn, but for now there are no cars, no roads. No

bridges, either. The stars are coming out in the darkening sky

over the hill. I shiver; not cold, exactly, but time to go in.