Free Lark's Eggs by Desmond Hogan

satisfy an impatient sister.
    Years later when Mona was dying of cancer in a Birmingham hospital Margaret visited her. There was still no forgiveness, but both of them had forgotten what it was exactly that had come between them; a burgeoning of possibilities in the form of a young ex-soldier, an eye to another world. I doubt if either of them ever for a moment reached that other world but they were left with an intuition of it long after their father’s money had run out.
    Mona died a few years ago.
    Margaret still runs the guesthouse. And me?—I put these elements together to indicate their existence, that of Margaret and Mona, their enchantment with a young man who came and unnervedus all and left a strange aftermath, way back there in childhood, a shadow on the water, the cry of a wild goose in pain, an image of tranquillity in far-off Asia where candles burned before perennial gods, gods untouched by war, by the search of a young man, by the iniquitous failure of two young women who reached and whose fingers failed to grasp.

The Hedgehog
    The valley was situated somewhere in the Cevennes. It was mid-August when Dony stayed there, red berries fired in the blue air, the ground covered with fir cones. To one side the valley was encompassed by blue conical mountains. On the other side the Alps sometimes reigned in the faraway sky, their crests rose-coloured , tenuous.
    Dony was brought to the valley by the Jouvets, the sallow-skinned , drably dressed Parisian family with whom he was staying on an educational holiday, during this, the seventeenth summer of his life, only a few days left before he was to return to Ireland.
    Paris where he’d spent his first three weeks had been vastly disappointing . There’d been a tiredness after the students’ revolution of the previous May and the weather had been autumnal—cold, rainy—a delirium of cloud over the tourist-infested city. He’d been mainly confined to the Jouvet apartment—a Van Eyck reproduction transfixing the marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini on the otherwise unadorned wall—his time occupied by reading back issues of glossy French magazines and by listening to Wagner and Beethoven on record, the music crashing his brain. Altogether his stay in Paris had been a very lonely experience.
    He hadn’t expected much of an improvement in the final stage of his vacation. But he had hoped for some change.
    Â They were staying in a holiday colony, forest darkness encroaching on the bungalows that were grouped on the side of the valley. There was a tennis court nearby, boys and girls running, jumping about, reaching out, white shirts and shorts contrasting with the dark of their bodies. Everywhere were signs of activity. Children being banded off on picnics by chaperones. Groups of young people wobbling off on bicycle tours. Tours in a countryside of clear air, antique farms, leisurely peasantry.
    Dony ventured to the community centre on his first evening in the colony. It was there he met Claire. She was sitting by the fire as though in contemplation when he was introduced to her, a radiance about her cheeks, a sense of poise about her. Her creamy blonde hair fell loosely, grooves of dark green shadow in it. Her pink blouse was pale where her breasts were defined.
    He sat beside her as they spoke, his head largish over an orange T-shirt , charcoal brows converging on his eyes, an acne faded on his face. In his fragmentary French he told her about himself, Ireland, his hometown —the business town anchored in the rainy Midlands—the reds, blues, yellows of the fire filling his mind. The conversation touched on many subjects and finally led to politics, which provided ground for common discussion. Dony gave his views on the patchwork wars in Vietnam, Biafra, the Middle East, and expressed a lively hatred for the regimes in South Africa and Greece, targets of youthful concern.
    Dony’s politics overlapped with the remonstrance of