Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks Page A

the rug.
    "Just a little carving. I did it with this." He took out the knife from his pocket.
    "It's beautiful."
    "You can have it if you like," Stephen said without thinking. Lisette glowed with pleasure, and looked around to make sure the others had seen. Stephen searched for some wood with which to do a carving for Grégoire, who was busily eating his lunch.
    No one else seemed to have much appetite. Various cheeses and pies were produced from the hampers by Madame Azaire but were returned with only a slice or two missing. Bérard ate some jellied tongue as well as the chicken; Lisette managed a strawberry tart and some little cakes Madame Azaire had made herself. She and her brother drank orangeade while the others had wine from the Loire valley, wine that immersion in the placid water had not chilled.
    After lunch Bérard lay back against his tree and fell asleep; Azaire lit his pipe before retiring to a neighbouring part of the garden for the same purpose. Stephen carved a hard piece of wood, with difficulty, into a passably realistic man for Grégoire.
    With lunch over, the afternoon lay heavy and dull on them. They clambered back into the boat and, after Stephen had been allowed a brief spell with the pole, Bérard resumed his position. The temperature had increased and the women fanned themselves vigourously. Madame Bérard, in thick formal clothes, looked disconsolate at the front of the boat, like a brooding figurehead on an ill-fated ship headed for ice and equatorial winds.
    Stephen felt hot and thickheaded from the wine. He was repelled by the water gardens: their hectic abundance seemed to him close to the vegetable fertility of death. The brown waters were murky and shot through with the scurrying of rats from the banks where the earth had been dug out of trenches and held back by elaborate wooden boarding. Heavy flies hung over the water, beneath the trees, dipping into the rotting tops of cabbages, asparagus, and artichokes that had been left unpicked in their reckless prodigality. What was held to be a place of natural beauty was a stagnation of living tissue which could not be saved from decay. Madame Azaire, also uncomfortable in the heat and torpor of the afternoon, had lost a fraction of her poise. Her skin was red at the base of her throat, where she had loosened the top of her dress, A strand of strawberry hair was stuck to her neck with moisture. One foot lay unresisting against Stephen's leg, which was outstretched beneath her seat. As Bérard propelled the boat on its slow, straight course, a tiny roll in its motion caused a perceptible pressure to form between them. While Stephen left his leg where it was, Madame Azaire was too hot or too indifferent to shift her position. He caught her eye and she looked into his with no social smile or conversational suggestion, then turned her head slowly away as though to look at the view.
    A fish broke the surface of the water unremarked even by the previously excited Grégoire. The flow of the river had been slowed by the construction of a canal, Bérard told them, which was why the boats no longer had rudders; a twitch from the pole was all that was necessary to keep the thing straight. Stephen imagined the great pools and marshes that had occurred in nature before the further channelling of the water and planting of the ground. The river's function had not been significantly changed; still it watered a cycle of superfluous decay, the rotting of matter into the turned and dug earth with its humid, clinging soil.
    It had reached a stage in the afternoon when it should have started to grow cooler, but what small breeze there had been had disappeared, and the static air coagulated, thick and choking. Grégoire began to splash water at Lisette, who smacked him on the side of the face and made him cry.
    Azaire took over in the stern from Bérard, who sat perspiring next to his wife. For once he was silent.
    Stephen tried to drag his mind from the vision of decay