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and
comme il faut,
indeed instructive and singular and not to be missed.
    When do stags bell, or roar, or whatever it is they do in the breeding season? Can it possibly be late autumn? I just can’t credit it somehow, late autumnis surely an off season for reproduction among all dignified mammals, I think the whole thing was a hoax.
Allons écouter bramer les cerfs.
One of the boys made it up as a ruse to get beyond the range of the light switch, I bet, and no one thought to question him. And the ruse worked, it was a right bacchanal: plenty of
braming
to be heard but none of it from the deer as far as I could tell.
    Perhaps, though, looking back on it, we afforded rather a pretty spectacle: the night, the forest, the pairs of young people sloping off into the undergrowth in search of a – what would be the word for it? – a bower, a glade, a clearing, and, once they had found it, spreading out their overcoats and tangling there together on the ground. Perhaps Aimée’s prurience had an aesthetic side to it, which was gratified each time her searching torch picked out a couple. Unfettered now by the moral pickiness that made me scoff at Matty and her soldier, I can visualise the scene as not unlike the set of a Shakespeare play.
    My Orsino was no great performer, nor his Viola for that matter, but in the dark (a favourite saying of Aimée’s, this, and she should know) all cats are grey. His name was Aymar and he had the cleanest breath I have ever tasted. He must have been very young, and very unenterprising too, as all he did, and all we did together, was kiss and groan and slaver for the best part of an hour. Beyond unbuttoning my coat and running his finger round theoutline of my bra through my jersey in a rueful way, he didn’t even engage with my clothing at all. Matty drew Michel – one of the older and more sophisticated boys, from a slightly
déclassé
family with no ‘de’ and a château full of rotting apples – and she and he moved much faster, earning themselves a right blasting from Aimée when her relentless beam swung over them and caught them out.
    Probably this was the sticking point as far as Marie-Louise was concerned. Or maybe it was some other racier sideshow that slipped my notice though not hers. Or maybe it was just the overwhelmingly sensual cocktail of the whole: the darkness of the forest, the earthy smells, the sighs, the rustlings, the musk, the putative rutting deer, the pheromones, animal and human, flying around in the air. Who can say? Aggravated no doubt by the fact that other French girls of her class were present too, witnesses of her degradation. I can’t believe the other cause for shock could ever have surfaced in her tidy conventional mind, surely not. But anyway, whatever her grounds, that same night, when we got back to the château, she handed in her notice to Aimée. Publicly, dramatically, in front of us all, with tears and shakings that nobody quite liked to acknowledge the justice of, although deep down we must have sympathised, and how. It was her second year as teacher there – if she hated it as much as she said, and disapproved as much as she said, then why hadn’t she left before? Why wait till now? And whychoose this particular moment, when Aimée was all kindness and seriousness, cosseting us with cups of hot chocolate and asking us rectifying questions about the night’s outing: Had we felt the cold too much? She did so hope not. Had we heard the roaring? At least in the distance? Did we realise how unusual that was, what a privilege it was to be in on such a happening? Might it not be a good idea to write something about it for our
devoirs?
And then send it to our parents, maybe, to illustrate for them one of the characteristics of the region?
    In the wake of Marie-Louise’s outburst we were somewhat stuck for answers. It had brought back to us in force our perplexity and guilt. I remember,