Free Lark's Eggs by Desmond Hogan Page A

Joan Baez and Donovan, delicate downtending faces on the covers of his record collection.
    When he’d finished speaking Claire told him that he was an idealist.
    Just then a youth approached. Claire introduced him as Remy. He wore a scarlet shirt, his hair bronze—indented with curls— masculinity concentrated in the expression on his face. He sat down, stretching his legs, remaining silent as the conversation was resumed.
    Suddenly Claire pointed to the window. Sunset had accumulated outside. She went to see it, Dony following, looking over her shoulder. Between distant, extinct volcanoes the sky was glowering pink and purple. The pink was strange. It reminded Dony of the undersides of mushrooms.
    Â But he was conscious of Remy slouching behind them, a sort of resentment about him, an expression of boredom on his face. Feeling that he ought to go Dony said goodnight to Claire, shaking her hand which entered neatly into his grasp.
    As he made for the door he heard her say of him, ‘Il est gentil.’
    â€˜Trop,’ Remy replied caustically.
    Despite that final uncomplimentary remark, Dony harboured hope after that night. He’d felt an awakening of romantic emotion as he’d spoken with Claire, an awakening of romantic trust.
    At home he didn’t involve himself with girls, overburdened with shyness.
    He’d found an opportunity at last to make a relationship with a girl. However, something in him cringed at the prospect, he wanted to retreat into himself.
    Next morning he started on a lone walk along the road that led from the holiday colony. On either side fields of corn rose in celebration of blue sky, children scrambling upwards, tiny figures lost in the clean glisten.
    He passed a few people sitting in sun dapple on a tree-shaded bench as they imbibed the morning beauty together. The women wore straw hats, spotted dresses. An old man who looked like one of Cézanne’s peasants leaned forward on a walking stick. The group watched Dony with mask-like expressions.
    As he walked on he noticed many things and he fitted them into a nook in his mind as though he wanted to retain them.
    Suddenly his attention was caught by a dead hedgehog that lay on the open road, blood dried on its bristles, the tender little creature utterly mutilated. He stood over it for a few moments, considering it. But it was just an object of curiosity, a detail of the morning.
    Further on he encountered Claire and Remy who were returning from a nearby village together, a shopping bag in Claire’s hand, ripples of colour in it. Her midriff was bare under a white blouse, her body slim, tapering in slacks.
    â€˜Tu es tout seul,’ she exclaimed. It seemed to surprise her, shock her even that he should have been alone. But it was as if she extended affection to him by using the second person singular.
    He accompanied them back to the colony, feeling a little awkwardas he straggled to one side of Claire, something unreachable about her blondeness, her self-contained body. She told him about a woodland picnic that had been arranged for the following evening, the evening before he was to return home. She made him promise that he’d come.
    The remaining part of his holiday was mainly taken up with touring in the surrounding regions with the Jouvets, new impressions converging on him, colours interchanging, the hard exhilarating greens of the upper valleys with the gradations of blue in the plains.
    But he was back on time to join the picnic on his final evening. The young people gathered outside the colony, bags in their hands, an air of expedition about the picnic. They trekked in a group to the forest, Dony walking alongside Claire, exchanging views on films they’d both seen. Remy was somewhere ahead in the crowd, absorbed in conversation with two girls, their buttocks clenched tightly by blue jeans.
    They found a suitable spot by the stream. It was twilight as they piled wood on a fire, sunset