Les Noyades

12: The Sparrow's Nest

By the time he awoke he was alone. This came over him in waves of relief over sadness. He could not have borne it had he come to in Yves' arms following what must have been a lapse of almost drunken feel. He held the lingering sensations in his mind, turning each over and inspecting them with the care and yet the insurmountable distance of an elderly sea captain surveying the wake left by his boat. What had happened, then, made great rifts of tide appear and tower over him until he was certain that he should never be rid of such a monument, and then the next it lapped over him like a peaceful tide, soft as sable and just as sweet to the touch. This water became inextricable from the soothing caresses of Yves bidding him to sleep with that curious lullaby in throaty, rocking words that he had not understood. He tossed now like a boat cast from its anchor, sails rapping against the mast, tiller flocking this way and that, chaos wrapped interminably into a cocoon of lovely susurrations of water sucking at the swaying wood.

He ought to go down; he wondered at the hour. In rising to see the window's landscape painting his heart whistled in admiration for the world in which Sédar resided. A silt of unhurried white fog had come down, as if the white leaves of a wintry orchard waved across the undulating surface of the hills, obscuring peaks and troughs and minute details so that it became all one blur of proud beauty. A press of his palm to the glass pane set out more white shapes, set apart from the rest by the shadows of his fingers. The phenomenon had stunned him into raptured silence.

So this was the world; so big and precise was Nature's hand, with every organism feeding from it in one cycle of symbiosis. This was what he wanted— the fluttered décisions of Nature to create, to eradicate, to leave all at will and allow growths of any type. Out there he might have some hope of freedom from shame and from fear. How in the heavens could he ever lift a scream at the sight of a baying wolf when he could not muster even a voice to his own father of his own howling torments? Would it scare him to watch the maggot carcass of a deer torn apart by plagues and foxes when he had faced already the luscious fires of lusting touches in necessary shadow? The crows bowed in no reverence to false gods, thus why should he?

A stiff knock roused him from his appreciations. The door. He watched it lurching open and could not decide whom to expect emerging from that darker space. He hoped for Yves, but equally was paralysed by terror that it might be him and not his father. In half-relief he smiled to Sédar as he stepped through.

"Good morning," Sédar said in his slow way. "It is cold in here. If you had told me I could have built a fire for you. Let me know tonight and I will."

"Tonight?"

"I have invited your father and Yves to stay until the thesis is written that I can help guide him. I hope that does not sit badly with you."

"No, I... It's very kind of you to let us stay." He did not know what else he might stay. It sat very badly indeed with him and yet he had no outlet for his troubles so far from the Culshawes, the only people to whom he had any pretence of familial intimacy, and there was hardly a way for him to return home without his father or Yves to take him. He would have to look on this as a further adventure— just as he had been excited to arrive, and he could certainly enjoy the idyllic scenery, if a little on the feral side. It suited him well in that. He might take hours of walks every day if he pleased.

"I came to say that your father and I are going into the nearest town to phone his department. Yves is downstairs taking breakfast in the garden, you might join him."

Was the entire world conspiring against him, or merely its occupants alone? Either way, as he dressed once Sédar had left him, he felt very much the man at the gallows. Marie Antoinette at the guillotine could not have felt more pitying of herself and her circumstances.