Le Reveillon

Le Reveillon

The sky is laced with fitful red,
The circling mists and shadows flee,
The dawn is rising from the sea,
Like a white lady from her bed.

And jagged brazen arrows fall
Athwart the feathers of the night,
And a long wave of yellow light
Breaks silently on tower and hall,

And spreading wide across the wold
Wakes into flight some fluttering bird,
And all the chestnut tops are stirred,
And all the branches streaked with gold.

– Oscar Wilde

Music floats out from the open french doors, the sombre, heavy notes of Vivaldi’s "Winter". It colours the quiet here in the country, where the snow flutters light as dandelion down and the sky is an unrelieved inky black. The trees look ghostly, reflected white-grey in the snow glow and even the fairy lights strung about their boughs and trunks cannot cheer their spindly-fingered grasping.

Christmas Eve, Reveillon of a different sort this year. Ususally Reveillon is spent with a houseful of friends, food, drink and a bunch of amateur musicians in the kitchen. This year I am at Lac Noir with my lover on the last weekend we will ever spend together. The chalet is borrowed from a professor friend, a place in which we can burrow into for a few days, a place for everything to die in silence and solitude.

The chalet is just as it should be; rustic and rambling, low ceilinged with imperfect walls and a corridor that leads nowhere, a fireplace in the full bedroom and an inglenook as tall as myself in the study. All is rough farmhouse antiques and encompassing leather furniture, shelves of well-read books and an endless expanse of sloping lawn leading to the lake jetty.

We arrived in the mid-afternoon, laden with weekend bags and boxes of food. Snow was already beginning to fall in the fading light and the lake was a mosaic of black and white, the temperature not low enough to freeze the whole of its surface. Inside we lit a fire in the study, made coffee in the pre-war cafetiere and went for a walk in the woods; sometimes holding hands, sometimes stopping to kiss, but not talking. Not talking at all.

Nightfall finds us naked on the study couch, fire crackling,  post shag and mid-bottle. Sex silent and intense; biting, clutching, tears and clinging. I grab and cashmere blanket and fashion it toga-style to go into the kitchen and start some food. I cannot lie there with him, the smell of his skin makes me want to sob.

I assemble cheeses, dust off another bottle of red and put our posh bakery-bought tortiere into the oven. Almost immediately the scent of nutmeg, butter and meat begins filling the galley kitchen’s small space. Padding back, I see he is napping like a child, knees drawn up to his chest and hands clutched between them. I grab my long suede boots, my glass and go out to the terrasse for a smoke. I am undone by this, I cannot fight anymore, and though it kills me, this is the last of this. He knows I have decided this, thought I don’t think he believes me. Or maybe he doesn’t want it to be true. I don’t.

I venture down the path to the lake. It is eerily lonely here, like the rest of the world has died and there is only us left, waiting for our own inevitable end to come. She is coming. Soon. His fiancee. She is coming to live with him and see how things go. He says this could be in three to four months, but I cannot go on with the knowledge hanging over my head and somehow, with her imminent appearance, she becomes more real, more of a person. I have begun to feel wretched for what I ‘ve been doing. Or maybe just to feel that I should feel badly. I don’t know anymore. So I am saying goodbye. I know it is right, that it is time. His love and regret, his selfish panic at my loss, his steadfast insistence on pursuing his promise. All this tells me that the tmie is right to say goodbye.

I trudge back to the chalet, the blanket covering my nakedness no true shelter from the cold; my fingers are cramped from chill, gooseflesh tingles on my thighs and the skin of my shoulders is wet where snowflakes have melted. He sees this and kisses it away as I cuddle into him on the sofa. The house is redolent with warmth and cooking, I  feel drunk and satiated and as the night closes in and envelopes us we speak little, listening to music and tracing each other’s skin for memory.

Christmas comes as we sit outside watching the moon on the water. The sky has cleared and the moon shines shockingly white over everthing. Snow sparkles rival those in the sky as the stars are the only witnesses as we sit silently, side by side, as if staring out to sea.

Nothing is okay right now, but after everything, I know I will be.