We All Ran into the Sunlight

by Natalie Young

  It felt like a steal, this happiness. It felt like something only people much younger or much more in love were entitled to have.

  Kate kicked her shoes off and pulled her jumper up over her head. In the bedroom of the village house they’d rented, Stephen was sitting up against the headboard, his eyes roving gladly as he watched his wife move with her hands on her hips. She was self-conscious; she looked down at herself and the shiny bob of her dark hair spilled forward revealing the back of her neck. She had found the string of beads at the market in town. Pink and purple, they were cheap and childish, and they released something in both of them.

  It was a damp Friday afternoon. The rain had stopped but the sky hadn’t cleared and now water spurted from the gutter and flicked against the window pane. Inside the house it was softly lit and cosy with the candles they’d dotted about. Kate was laughing, at Stephen trying to flatten himself on the small bed, and at herself now; she was trying to do a belly dance. She was a thousand miles from work and London; she was a thousand miles from her mother. Coming away had been her idea. It was Stephen who suggested the South-West of France. It had taken them two weeks to unwind. Kate had made a promise not to do anything, not to think, not to worry about anything. Let go, was her mantra, and simplify.

  Stephen’s neck was coloured from walking in the countryside, his jeans were stained with spitting wine. There was no mobile reception in the village; no television in the house, no radio. He did calculations in his head, stopped taking the fish oils and vitamin B. Kate kept saying how we need so little, and on his bedside table these days there was nothing at all.

  Life in Canas was simple. It was perfect. It was waking late in an old wooden bed, cups of coffee, driving the 4x4 on the hills, their faces peering; just rocks and blue sky. The air chill in the evening, Stephen wrapped his wife in a sheepskin rug, made love to her in front of the fire.

  They slept off London like dogs dreaming, reflexes shuddering, sounds being released.

  From time to time they drove to the coast and walked together on the sand, their hands buried deep in the pockets of their jeans.

  In the afternoons, they read yesterday’s papers and the wine was poured. They took photographs, made films of the room, panning the camera round till they found each other, smiling, arms on the back of the sofa, heads tilted, serene.

  On Saturday morning they went to market for the poussin and the vegetables. Kate said she could feel herself unravelling; her spirit coming loose. She gazed out of the window at the sunlight winking in the trees. Through a clearing there were glimpses of the canal running deep and indolent beside the road.

  ‘Everything’s so different here, Stephen.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is.’

  ‘Don’t you love it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and he pushed his finger to the compact disc he’d selected so that it slid into the player. Stephen loved his old French café music – just a man and his accordion rousing with the hope of postwar France.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  He inclined his head. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I just want the quiet for a moment or two.’

  ‘But the music’s perfect,’ he objected, and Kate looked to him but didn’t say anything.

  Then Stephen turned the music up a little with the remote control on his steering wheel. Kate couldn’t bear that because it felt like a slight against her and so she turned to the window and bit her nail and after that she turned it down.

  ‘I just love how quiet it is.’

  He switched the music off. Kate carried on talking.

  ‘After all the madness. All that rush. I feel like the city swallowed me,’ she said. ‘I barely remember being there.’

  ‘I remember you there, darling.’

  ‘Not all the time.’

  ‘Yes, Kate. All the time.’

  ‘But that’s what I’m saying. It feels like a blur. To me. It feels like a blur.’

  ‘I can hear what you’re saying.’

  She swivelled her eyes to his face. He was smiling and looking ahead at the road. He was a handsome man – tall and dignified, with a soft sweep of sandy hair.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she said.

  ‘It’s just different out here,’ he replied, after a while. ‘It’s slower. That’s all.’

  ‘I like it slow. I love the roses all over the village. And I love the cross up there on the plateau. So black and thin and elegant. The way the sky changes colour around it. The sky is amazing up on the plateau.’

  ‘Look, it’s a heron,’ he said, pointing.

  Kate followed his finger to the bird perched on a sliver of rock where the succulent flies were dive-bombing the water so that when the car with the white faces looking out went past, the heron didn’t see it but remained standing on its rock, perfectly fixed and still.

  ‘You can hear but you don’t listen,’ said Kate, after a while. ‘Nobody listens. Have you noticed that? We’re all so busy talking. Don’t you think?’

  Stephen didn’t respond. He smiled and put his foot down on the pedal so that the car roared through the silent countryside.

  Stephen dropped her back in the village and then drove off into the hills to buy a new selection of wines. While he was out, Kate lost herself in the preparation of the food. She hummed her love of this little French kitchen, patiently tying the strings of her apron, lifting her hair at the back.

  She unwrapped the cheese and washed the vegetables, running her fingers through the leaves. She peeled the potatoes and laid them out on the draining board. Then she stood for a while at the window, leaning out on her elbows, and she heard the bell in the clock tower and watched the tiny movement of air in the leaves on the fig tree.

  It was a modest patch of garden; a square of rough soil in which someone had tried to grow some grass, and which was now overcome with dandelion, surrounded by a ring of gravel into which large thistles had driven their roots. The garden was wrapped by a high stone wall built of the same mixture of chalky limestone and black volcanic rock as the chateau.

  It was what they had loved the most when they first saw the house and Kate thought of their reaction to it, which had been mutual and surprising and strange: to be standing in the window together when the Mayor’s wife had moved on, and to blush simultaneously, as if the walled garden were a secret the two of them shared, something private and inevitable they had each already known about and would come to in time.

  Kate and Stephen didn’t have children, and one of the things they could do now that Stephen was ploughing his own furrow and Kate’s business – an art gallery in Southwark – had really taken off, was rent out the London house and take a sabbatical, try something new. Kate was about to turn forty. They felt like they’d earned it – a sort of halfway break after twenty years of work.

  ‘My husband’s an economist,’ Kate had said to the Mayor’s wife. Stephen was fingering the oven towels with disdain. ‘He’s come here to work on a book.’

  The Mayor’s wife was standing very straight with her arms flat against her sides. Kate said she didn’t know what she would be doing with her time here and the Mayor’s wife shrugged because it didn’t matter to her what anyone did with their time. It was only after the tour of the house, shaking hands at the door, that Kate said something complimentary about the roses and then made her little announcement. ‘I’m just going to think rather than act!’ she said, but it came out more aggressively than it needed to and it brought about a bit of a silence on the quaint little step.

  Kate climbed up the stairs to the bedroom in the attic, which smelt still of the garlic she’d used on last night’s lamb. She stood in front of the mirror and shook her hair out. She replaced the bra she’d been wearing with a sexier one and put on a long black cashmere sweater that was loose around the shoulders. On her legs she wore thick tights and sheepskin boots. She tousled her hair in the mirror, and pinched her lips a bit to make them look red and kissed. She drank the wine and looked at herself from the
side. She didn’t mind the way she looked out here. For the first time in a long time there were things she didn’t really mind at all. Like her clothes spilling about the bedroom. And a cigarette smoked out of the bathroom window while staring out at the view of the chateau and the birds lifting off from the roof. And the fact that Stephen hadn’t returned from his drive into the hills yet and wouldn’t, in fact, be there, as they’d talked about, for sex at 4.30 (pick a time, any time, he’d said, laughing) on a Monday afternoon.

  They sat in the kitchen where the lights were warm in the eaves. Kate put some candles out. Stephen opened the wine. At the table, they tore the legs from a warm, buttery chicken, and Stephen carved into the breast, releasing the steam from its ivory flesh. Outside the wind was picking up, swinging trestles of ivy across the window. They sucked cloves from a head of sweet garlic, dipped bread in the roasting tin to soak up the oil. Kate sprinkled salt on her greens and ate them with her fingers, picking them up, one by one, curling them luxuriantly into her mouth. Beside them the fire crackled quietly in the grate. They ate and drank. They didn’t say much. There wasn’t any need. Stephen wiped a drip of oil from her chin. Kate sat back and cradled her wine. She thought of the days spread out before her like drifting balloons and took another glug of wine. They held their glasses up.

  ‘Another triumph,’ said Stephen, leaning over to kiss her. Neither of them saw the white face that was pressed up against the window.

  When the doorbell rang, it was Kate who got up to answer it. She opened the door and a burst of cool air came in.

  It was late in the evening now; the streetlights flickered on and off in the square. A woman was standing out there holding a tray. She was small and shapely but her jeans and jumper were old and torn and her wild unkempt hair fell to the waist like the hair of a little girl. It looked as if it had never been cut.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ said Kate, warmly.

  ‘My name is Sylvie Pépin.’

  She nudged forward a little and tried to smile with her head down towards the floor. She was childishly shy, and when she came into the light, Kate and Stephen could see that her freckly face was marked with thick cream scar tissue as if someone had gone at her cheeks with a compass, while behind the gold rims of her glasses the woman’s eyes were shrunk as small as beads in the folds and creases of her skin.

  ‘It’s late, Madame, Monsieur, I apologise and wish you a good evening!’

  On the tray Sylvie had a small glass of violets and a loaf of homemade bread. She put the flowers and the loaf on the table and said that she could clean for them, if they needed her. She could clean the house twice a week, or once, if that was better. Kate remembered now that the Mayor’s wife had mentioned there was a woman in the village who could come and help around the house.

  On the sofa, Stephen was staring. Sylvie blinked rapidly through her thick glasses and fixed her eyes on Kate’s warm, animated face.

  ‘You are chic, like a film star,’ she said, quietly.

  Kate spun away from the compliment and laughed loudly. Stephen smiled and moved himself slightly on the sofa. A silence fell on the room.

  ‘I live there, over the other side of the church,’ said Sylvie. ‘My family house is there. It’s only me though now. Me and my dog. Coco. He is my dog. My family moved away. My father is Lollo. He used to manage the village café. You may have heard of him. In those days it was busier than it is now. Especially in the tourist season.’

  ‘Does it get very busy in the summer?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Seventy per cent increase in total population,’ said Sylvie.

  Kate nodded. ‘What number are you?’

  ‘Number 6 with the grey door. You don’t need to worry about the dog. He’s not vicious.’

  Then she rounded her shoulders and cradled the tray against her jacket. She started to back away towards the door and made a couple of gestures towards her watch.

  ‘There’s a roof terrace,’ she said, firmly. ‘It’ll need a sweep. There are books in the cupboard up the stairs. English books. And extra sheets. I’ve cleaned here for almost all the people who’ve rented this house. Germans, Swedes… I don’t like Italians. They make no effort to speak French. I like English. Normally the accent is terrible though. So terrible. It can make us laugh. If I were you I would wash out the saucepans. There are scorpions here,’ she said and she pushed the glasses up on her nose with a stiff little finger. ‘Small brown ones. I expect you didn’t think it would be hot enough. But it gets very hot here in the summer. When it gets that hot people go mad. There’s a court case I heard about in Carcassonne where a man was cleared for killing his wife because of the wind. They lived on top of a hill. The wind whipped round all day, all night. It’s the mistral. The tail end of it. It sweeps down the middle of France and sweeps off.’

  Stephen sat with his legs bent, like an uncomfortable giraffe. These ceilings, this cramped dark little house, felt ridiculous. With the back of his hand he pushed a bit of fringe back and coughed impatiently.

  Sylvie turned her head with a swish of hair. ‘You come and see me if you need me.’

  ‘Wait!’ Kate called after her. ‘Please don’t go. Would you like some wine?’

  Sylvie shook her head. ‘I don’t drink wine, Madame. Only on special occasions.’

  ‘We’ve met no one since we arrived in the village, apart from the Mayor’s wife who showed us the house.’

  ‘She told me that you would come,’ said Sylvie.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘The Mayor’s wife told me someone had rented the house, number 17. We look out for each other. The Mayor’s wife is kind. Most of the people in the village are. You’ll find that everyone looks out for each other. It can become uncomfortable. Voyeuristic is not the right word – I don’t know what is.’

  ‘There’s a lovely sense of community,’ said Kate, smiling warmly at Sylvie, looking only through the glasses and into the eyes. It was an effort to avoid the scars.

  ‘But it is relaxing. To know that one can lean on others when one is in distress.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Kate, eagerly, ‘that’s true. And it’s so pretty here. It is very different from London.’

  Sylvie nodded and continued to back out of the door. ‘Goodbye,’ she said quite firmly and then she lifted her hand from the doorframe and walked, half ran, into the square.

  2

  There was a point at which the serenity seemed to lift Kate up. In the stillness here she was weightless and free. It didn’t seem to matter much, nothing mattered, and nothing was real.

  For lunch they ate salad in the kitchen, picking it straight from the bowl. The tomatoes were enormous in their soft red skins.

  ‘Where did you get this basil, Stephen?’

  ‘In town. At the greengrocer’s there. The man speaks English.’

  ‘It’s amazing.’

  ‘We could mix it with olive oil, and garlic. We could have it with some angel hair pasta tonight. And that lovely new white I bought. The Viognier.’

  ‘I love that wine, darling,’ said Kate, chirpily.

  ‘I’ll put some more in the fridge,’ he said, getting up at once to do it.

  ‘It’s so much nicer than I thought it would be. It’s like everything I ever wanted, Stephen. I could stay here for ever, buy a place and do it up.’

  ‘You’d get bored,’ he said, gently. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘I can feel it, though. I can really feel it.’

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, absent-mindedly.

  ‘This place, Stephen. This feeling.’

  ‘Ah, but you felt that about the gallery, Kate. That place is your life. You put everything into that.’

  ‘Meaning what?’ she asked, slowly, and she leant forward across the table and fixed him with her eyes. She wanted him to see what was in there.

  ‘Meaning nothing really, darling.’

  Kate threw the remains of her meal in the bin. Stephen took a deep breath and leant back in his chair, switching his cam
era on and panning it slowly upwards so that it picked up the old wooden beams and the spiders’ webs strung across the ceiling.

  The sun came out. The air was clear. In the afternoon they drove to the coast.

  Kate took a call from the gallery. She listened patiently, she laughed. Her assistant was panicking.

  ‘It’s tension,’ Kate said. ‘It’s always like this before an opening.’ She felt guilty not being there. It made her speak very softly, very brightly, as if to a child. She repeated the instructions. Then she rang off and she stared out at the vines. Stephen was trying to scratch his back. When she turned to look at him she saw that his hair was more dishevelled than usual. There was something not quite right about the set of his features; his cheeks were long-looking and grey. From time to time, she sensed him looking across at her. They were near the coast and the land was flat, there was nothing to see. Still, she was quite absorbed, losing herself in the swaying of rickety pines.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he said, then again, until she turned.

  They parked on a road that ran along the coast. There was no one around. The sea was rippling blue, but looked cold. They walked on the sand and sat for a while, watching a man curling a line on the shore.

  Kate closed her eyes as she drove her fingertips into the sand. ‘It’s so quiet,’ she said, dreamily. Then she felt the tightening feeling in her chest. ‘What shall we have for dinner tonight?’

  Beside her Stephen tried to put his hands in his pockets. He relaxed his knees and left his hands there, half tucked in. His hair was being swept flat across his head; his pale lashes tried their best to keep out the sand. He watched the man with the line. It was hopeless. The sand was blowing into his eyes, making him blink. He began to feel cold. He leant over and tried to kiss his wife but he did it badly and skimmed her ear. He looked at her slightly sallow complexion; she was tired again. He could feel a headache coming on.