We All Ran into the Sunlight

by Natalie Young

  They got back in the car and drove to the village in silence. Stephen kept the engine running in the car while his wife jumped out. Then he drove off into the hills to buy some more wine.

  Kate drank deep of the wine he’d bought and went to bed early. In the morning she had no memory of the night before and she was up before he was awake. She taped sheets of thick watercolour paper to the bathroom mirror. She wanted to paint the birds she had photographed on the old chateau wall. She put Stephen’s leather jacket on over her naked body. On the bed he was still asleep, one arm over his eyes.

  In the bathroom window, the light was orange on the chateau. It looked calm and peaceful this morning and she bit her lip as the paper began to grey in thin, delicate lines. There was only this wonderful stretch of time before her, the distance of unmapped days to enjoy.

  Stephen sat up on the bed, sweating. There was an empty wine bottle on the floor. He got up from the bed and walked towards the bathroom. She was standing there in his jacket, her hair loose around her shoulders. He stopped. Across his pale eyes, a film of the two of them holding each other, writhing… As long as it was like this. The endlessness. It was perfect. It had never been like this. They could, if they wanted, do anything.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the painting demon. I knew it was coming, Kate. Just a question of time.’

  Kate smiled.

  ‘I had an awful dream,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, poor you.’

  Stephen sat on the edge of the bath, a towel wrapped round his waist. He rubbed his face with his hands, looking around the space, the paint peeling off the window frames, thick white towels piled neatly in the corner. He had thought rustic was what he wanted. Rustic French retreat was how he had worded the search. But the oyster shell soap dish, the pale floral curtains, the cushions that were small and stiff and faded?

  ‘Don’t you wonder what happened there?’ she said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the chateau. The fire. Why it was left like that? And that woman, Sylvie. Wasn’t she weird?’

  He yawned. ‘She was burnt.’

  ‘In the same fire? Do you think she was there?’

  ‘Ask her,’ he said, and he scratched his head and wandered back into the bedroom.

  Kate’s mother rang from her house in Dulwich to say that she was dying. They had taken her three times to King’s. Made her sleep the night in a ward with two other women who were also dying. Emphysema. They moaned about the food. Fits of talk, it was all they had. ‘There is nothing left, Kate.’ The women had talked about what was near to them, the male nurse who was black as night, the food, which wasn’t what they ordered. One of them couldn’t breathe. In the night, neither of them could breathe. There were blacks everywhere. Too many blacks. The women who were dying clung to their masks, their voices, husky, frightened; they called out for the nurse. One of them soiled herself. No one came. She nearly died. They took her away. It was Kate’s fault. ‘You have left me here,’ she hissed down the phone. She was watching the racing on television. Can after can of coke. She was strong as a horse. Stephen moaned that Kate’s mother would never die. Kate said they would have to do something.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Stephen mouthed. ‘It’s a ploy to make you come home.’

  ‘We’ll be home before too long, Mum. You’ll be round for tea before you know it.’

  Stephen shuddered. He stepped out onto the street to make a call to the office. Then he stood and waited for Kate beside the roses. In the square, the café was opening, the first of the old men wandering inside. Kate came out and joined him. They both looked up to the sky, which was cloudless: a deep brilliant blue. He slipped his hand into hers.

  ‘Don’t let her spoil it for you, darling. We earned this break.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘She’s not fine, Stephen. Anyone who puts herself into hospital three or four times a year for no real reason is not fine.’

  ‘You know, sometimes I think it’s your punishment, Kate.’

  She looked up into his eyes that were pale and cold as fish.

  ‘For marrying me,’ he said, simply, and Kate couldn’t fathom how he could have said this, which was why she smiled at him with her lips only, but Stephen didn’t seem to see that and his eyes still looked into hers as if waiting for a reply.

  ‘It’s hard to believe your arrogance sometimes, Stephen. It’s hard to believe I actually married a man who still thinks, after all this time, that I did it only to get back at my mother.’

  ‘Well, a psychiatrist…’

  ‘I’m not talking to a psychiatrist, I’m me, Kate, and I’m trying to talk to you,’ she said, quietly, and then she turned with her shoulders hunched around her neck and walked off across the square.

  By five o’clock she hadn’t returned from her walk. Stephen shut the lid of his laptop and smeared pâté onto the end of a stale baguette. Then he threw the bread in the dustbin and went out, slamming the front door behind him. He hung around outside the café and looked in the shop. Then he crossed the square, slipping down behind the church and walking to the far end of the village and out towards the cemetery. He thought for a moment that she might have left the village by the main road and walked up onto the old airfield and the heath. But there was also one more place he hadn’t checked in the village, the chateau itself, and the old gates Kate looked at when they pulled out of the square in the car.

  He was certain now that this was where she might have gone, and so he walked quickly back into the village and forced a gap between the gates to find himself in a vast open courtyard, overrun with weeds.

  Kate was at the top of the steps, bending over something. She picked it up and walked about. Stephen stood and watched her moving up there like a priestess in search of her senses. In her thin cotton dress and shawl she looked vulnerable. She had nothing on her feet. She was dwarfed by the vast, dreary walls. There were few windows, barely a roof; at the entrance were two huge double doors made of black oak, and studded with iron.

  Kate stopped moving when she saw him and picked up her shoes. She walked down the steps and through the grass towards him; then she reached forward for his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, squeezing his hand. ‘I got here and I found I couldn’t leave.’

  They went into the café for a drink and stood under the television that was bolted to the ceiling. Stephen said that they might have made a mistake coming all the way out here. Six months was a long time.

  ‘There’s not much here, Kate.’

  ‘There’s us,’ she said, smiling.

  She was happy. Her face was flushed and more youthful with it. She said she thought that the chateau courtyard was lovely.

  ‘All those birds flying about in the courtyard. And midges, like when I was young, dancing about above the weeds.’

  Stephen went back to the bar and ordered a bottle of wine. He took it outside, to where the zinc tables were gathered around the fountain. He sat in the chair that was most in the square, making sure the dark lumps of the chateau wall were behind him. He watched the light flickering an acid green in the trees. The air was cool. After a while, Kate came out and sat down beside him. Stephen leant forward across the table.

  ‘Don’t you feel like we’ve come to the middle of fucking nowhere?’

  ‘We have,’ she said, quietly. ‘That was the point.’

  ‘Just look at these awful houses, Kate. Like a square full of old, rickety teeth. Don’t you think? And the dog there, like a nasty little rat trying to crap by the fountain. Can you see that? Don’t you think that’s disgusting?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, sadly.

  ‘Bat country!’

  ‘You’re just cross that I had such a lovely afternoon, and you had a boring one, Stephen.’

  ‘How can you have had such a lovely afternoon? You didn’t do anything.’

  ‘I remembered things,’ she said, ‘like how much fun I used to have before I started
working. Maybe it’s fine to just sit and think, and remember things. What’s the point in dashing about? I’m worried about all the stuff we miss. I’m worried about the things that have been going on at the edges, Stephen. Like that lovely old man in the bar. You completely ignored him. You didn’t even see him, let alone say hello. We hurry about. We miss so much. It scares me.’

  ‘That man has tits on his playing cards, darling. You ok with that?’

  She shrugged like a child. ‘Who cares? We’re so uptight.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake! I care!’

  ‘I even like the wine here. Refreshingly unpretentious, I think. Un-up-its-own-arse.’

  ‘It’s rustic, Kate.’

  ‘Yes, but why does it bother you?’

  ‘Because we don’t need to put each other through this. I need a shower, and a decent bed. I need to get back to the office.’

  ‘Because you don’t like the person you’ve become without it?’

  ‘I had a team there. We were a team.’

  ‘Instead of what?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Oh, Stephen, this is pointless. Go with it. We’re here!’

  ‘We could have taken a holiday, a normal one. Slept. Sat by the pool.’

  ‘And then what?’

  He was silent.

  She stared at him with her glassy eyes, the brown so dark it was almost black. They finished the wine and stepped under the plane trees, which rustled quietly in the night. They saw the flies spinning on the fetid fountain water. Then they stumbled quietly back into the house and tried to have sex in their bedroom in the loft.

  In the morning, she was up and gone before he was awake. There was a note on the kitchen table. Slept really well. Hope you’re all right.

  Stephen fixed himself some coffee and ate the eggs that were left on the sideboard. The piece of toast he ate in two large mouthfuls.

  This time he went straight for the chateau and he forced an entrance again through the gates.

  Kate was there on the steps. She was wearing shorts and an old jumper of his. Her hair was still tousled with sleep, her face pale but calm. She smiled when she saw him and waved. Stephen ran forward; he was waving at her in a way that made him feel strange.

  ‘Hello!’ they said simultaneously, and he climbed up the front steps and walked round behind her.

  He put his head to the chateau doors and tried to see in. There was a single keyhole, low down; no bigger than the one on an ordinary London door. He bent down over it and tried to see through the cracks in the planks.

  ‘It’s been abandoned years ago,’ she said. ‘Everything gone. You can feel that.’

  ‘Can’t see a bloody thing in there.’

  ‘There’s nothing to see, Stephen. It’s empty.’

  ‘What a disappointment.’

  ‘A disappointment?’

  ‘Look, are you done with sitting here?’

  ‘No,’ she said, very firmly, though she wouldn’t look him in the eye. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘You’re trespassing,’ he said, coldly, and he turned and walked away from her then, his bright white trainers crunching loudly on the stones.

  When Stephen got back from his run she was still there. She hadn’t moved. The sky was fiercely blue by then, the pale stone on that altar of hers reflecting the sun in its glistening slivers of quartz. She didn’t want to come back to the house for lunch. She was smiling, and thinking, she said. Quite happy. Stephen changed tactic. He wasn’t going to let it wind him up. Whatever it was, she’d get over it soon enough. He felt sure of that. He got to the shop before it closed for the afternoon and he bought water for her, and fruit. He dropped off the bag. Then he went back to the house, pulled the shutters against the sun, and slept through the afternoon.

  At dusk, he crossed the square and stopped in the bar for a drink. Emboldened and relaxed, he squeezed through the chateau gates and stood, pink-faced in the light, by the olive tree.

  She was sitting up on the steps with her chin in her hand.

  ‘Kate!’ he shouted across the courtyard. She didn’t wave. She didn’t even seem to hear him. ‘Kate!’ he shouted again and he heard the tremor in his voice.

  She held onto his arm as they walked through the square, and when they arrived inside the house, she turned to him and put a hand on his cheek. She said she was feeling tired, a bit confused. She was sorry, she said.

  Stephen watched her move about the kitchen in that sexy, effortless way she had with her limbs. He opened the wine and made a pasta sauce out of the tomatoes he’d bought at the market. The garlic was fresh and hard and sweet-smelling. Neatly, he chopped and chopped and piled it in, with the basil and a heap of fresh thyme. Kate was sitting at the table looking tired, and scratching her neck. The skin on her arms and legs was tanned now but she looked thinner, smaller around the neck and the chin. But she revived with the food and wine and they sat and talked for a while.

  ‘Sometimes I sound like I’m a hundred,’ she said. ‘That whole conversation made me sound like a total bore.’

  He told her that she was beautiful, more beautiful than anyone, with her dark hair and her neat little face with its white teeth and soulful eyes.

  ‘Soulful?’ she said, and the eyes that used to droop at the corners with all the disappointment for which she had found no one to blame were full of sadness now. There was a hole growing; she’d recognised that today. It was almost a relief. Letting go meant giving in.

  The village outside was silent and peaceful, the candles flickered on the table. There was nothing she could do but try to be nice to Stephen, to listen to him talk through the book he was attempting to write.

  They drank down the wine. Then the face appeared at the window again and Stephen got out of his chair. He lurched a little drunkenly across the room. He had taken his shoes off, placed them neatly beside the door, facing, as always, into the room; ready for action. He bent down beside them and scooped up the note.

  Chateau in a nice French village.

  South-West France.

  Very old. Very quiet.

  For Sale.

  Offers accepted in many currencies.

  Kate took the message and passed it to Stephen. They smiled at the writing and read it again. Kate opened the front door but there was no sign of Sylvie or anyone at all.

  Stephen turned his attention away from the note and towards coffee and they lay about for a while, reading books and magazines, and drinking the rest of the wine. The papers fell to the floor and one of the candles was knocked over and went out on the rug, singeing a small black hole in the fibres.

  When at last they got up to go bed, Stephen took the message from the table and scrunched it up in his hand. He dropped it in the bin with the pasta sauce, the garlic peel and the wine corks, and when his wife came down in the night for a glass of water, she took the piece of paper out of the bin, and then sat for a while in the kitchen, looking out at the leaves on the fig tree in the garden.

  3

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said the boy who was working that morning in the café. In his right ear he had a large black rubber stud and a silver chain looping his hips. At Stephen’s table beside the fountain he leant his weight against the back of the chair so that it made a small dragging noise, and inched closer to the table.

  ‘Just a big old place with nothing in it. Big rooms. It’s empty inside. See those windows? Last year the shutters came off in the storm. There’s nothing there.’

  Stephen followed the finger to the dark sheet of wall, fifty metres up, which was exposed to the square.

  ‘When it rains you might see some snails in the courtyard. One year there were many snails. We tried to start a business, my dad and me. We tried to sell the snails in town. Took a whole load in.’

  Stephen licked his finger and turned the page of his newspaper then folded it and laid his elbows over the fold. He was making some progress now on the book and the breakthrough had cheered him and levelled his tolerance towards the sleepy vil
lagers.

  ‘My wife loves it there,’ he said. ‘She seems terribly drawn to the place. It’s a mystery to me. I’m lucky if I can get her to come out in the evening to eat!’

  The boy’s mouth was hanging open as if he struggled to breathe through his nose.

  ‘And I’m assuming it’s a private property. I’m sure the owners wouldn’t really welcome having her there…’

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly private,’ said the boy. But who would know? It’s hardly the village fun park. Like every year, we hold our annual summer party in there. Disco balls. Elephants. You name it. Fireworks flying off the roof. Duh!’ The boy pulled the tea towel down from his shoulder and whacked himself on the hand.

  ‘No, I’m sure not,’ replied Stephen coldly, and returned to his newspaper.

  The boy didn’t move. He continued to stand with his mouth slightly open, gazing up at the window. ‘Honestly?’ he said, quietly. ‘To some, I think it’s more like a nightmare. And old Madame Borja keeps it on. She won’t sell. We can’t demolish it and so it sits there, looking down on the village like a monster, like King Kong. We can’t move on.’

  ‘Then my wife is in love with your nightmare,’ said Stephen, which the boy didn’t seem to hear.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Who cares? The family left years ago. After the fire. Twenty years or so. Some of them died. Others just disappeared. Lucie Borja ran away to live in Paris with her nephew. I heard she died, though. Before Christmas. That’s the rumour anyway. Even so, she’ll never sell. Dead or alive, man. The Borjas keep it on. You can ask the Mayor if you want to go in.’ He had pushed the chair as far as it would go. ‘But don’t get your hopes up. It’s not a fun park. I think you’ll find it completely empty. Sometimes, when we were kids, we went in with our bikes and stuff. It was open and we just rode on through and came out again. No one hangs around in there. I don’t know why. Once, when I was a kid, like ten or eleven years old, I went in and I felt so weird. I had to come straight out again. It’s cold. And draughty.’