Les Noyades

17: Meeting At Night

For the next few days they did nothing at all beyond smiles over the table at meals and the occasional conversation on the stairs when they passed. Rumi ought to have found this sudden distance off-putting, but rather it gave him time to consider what he was in; things were in a way things had never been before, and he had acted childishly. He had been childish. But it did not change his heart. Nothing, he though, would change that.

And maybe it was that Culshawe had taught him always that worship came along in male form, and that poetry had made him blind to logic, and he was only beginning to see through this shroud for the first time, but slowly Yves became less of an idol and more of a man. He ate food, drank wine, walked the dog, dropped books, tripped on the stairs, did everything else mundane and embarrassing that anybody else would do.

Spending less time with Yves might typically have given Rumi more time to himself, and he would have enjoyed long lonesome walks amongst the cold hills with his thoughts and his books as his sole company, but instead he found himself almost shadowed. Nobody had ever been curious about him before, and yet after the incident with the cigarette, Sédar had taken a sudden interest in him, as if he had realised that Declan's son was more than a quiet child hiding away in his room.

Several times Rumi had been cached away in the room he had been given, swathed in blanket upon blanket in the growing cold, and had heard a knock at the door— at which in would come Sédar with his probing questions about life at Doha and his long, intentional silences. Supposedly he knew Culshawe very well, and Rumi wondered if it might be in the same way as Yves, but for the fact that Sédar didn't seem to particularly like Culshawe all that well. Each time he talked of books and poetry Rumi would pick out what he had read of Culshawe's library and Sédar would look at him with vague disdain— but disdain at what, he would not say, or rather not until five quiet nights after the cigarette incident.

Rumi was not in his room this time; he was in the kitchen, and Yves was sat across from him drinking wine, and his father was upstairs asleep. He and Yves had not spoken— were near each other merely. Eventually Yves left for bed and Rumi dawdled about the room wondering what he might do since he could not sleep as awake as he was. He picked up Yves' wine glass and looked at the rim, thinking how the same lips that had been cupped around it had ventured the length of his body almost. He brought it to his own lips and inhaled the sweet, acidic smell of Sauvignon Blanc. He had never liked alcohol, but Yves had looked quite elegant swilling it absentmindedly as he took down notes and occasionally sipped at the glass. Rumi tipped it so that the last drop meandered slowly down to his mouth. It was sharp and less sweet than he had imagined it might be.

His father never drank. Rumi might have easier forgiven him for his shortcomings had he at least been a drunk. That would have been something upon which he could hinge his disappointments; a drunk father was better than a disinterested one, easier to find immediate fault with, and much simpler to dislike. Did he want to dislike his father? Was that what he wanted, would it make his unbearably complex existence easier to understand?

He gently placed the glass back upon the table. He was putting too much thought into it. Better to put as little thought into his father's input as possible, just as he had always done, just as he had learned to do.

"You look tired," said a voice from behind him: Sédar. "Shouldn't you be in bed?"

Sédar walked leisurely into the room, a mug in his hand and Henry at his feet, to stand beside Rumi. When Rumi did not reply out of the uncertainty that was so agonisingly natural to him, Sédar nodded and went to put the kettle over the stove.

"I'll make you some tea," he said, taking down a small pot from a cupboard and dropping in what Rumi assumed would be leaves. "And we'll talk."

Rumi felt already that this was not one of Sédar's evening conversations about mundanities and childhood stories. He was immediately made nervous by the way Sédar sent Henry from the room and sat at the small table, gesturing for Rumi to do the same, and yet he stood there and stared.