We All Ran into the Sunlight

by Natalie Young

  ‘Where can I get the keys?’ asked Stephen, and the boy seemed to wake out of his trance then. He smiled and lifted his hand up, poking a finger towards the Mayor’s office, which was opposite the church on the other side of the square.

  Up above them, in an overcast sky, the birds echoed each other, making loud throaty caws as they flew over the roof.

  Kate, in a long baggy coat and flip-flops, had her camera slung around her neck. She climbed the steps slowly and stared down at the familiar dandelion grass that was growing quietly between the cracks. Where the top step met the wall there was a slick of grey concrete with a footprint left in it. Stephen was at the door already, bending over the key. She didn’t like that he’d got there first. It made her feel depressed. She stood behind him with her arms folded and pulled in a deep, silent breath.

  ‘Here we go,’ he said gamely, and he smiled round at her while still holding the key. She felt infantilised and urged him to push at the door and go on in without her.

  Stephen took her hand and left the door open behind them.

  Inside there was dust and the air smelt of it.

  The entrance hall was wide enough for fifteen men charging, the ceiling tall and arched. To the left, in the corner, tucked back behind the door, there was a small round table, incongruously small, and made of iron that had been painted a greeny grey.

  ‘They would have had this out in the garden,’ said Kate, keeping her voice very low. ‘They would have taken it out into the courtyard for Madame to use for her cup and book, her platter of letters.’

  Stephen rushed past her, the dimness and the silence making him uneasy. He tried to fight it like a man, his body language becoming erratic; he tipped his head forward and flicked the dust from his hair. Then he placed his hands on either side of the giant stone pillar supporting the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs. The plasterwork here was dirty white and old; it brushed off on his coat. Low down, the walls were damp and blackish, as if they had been sucking up some strange malevolence from the ground.

  From the open door, winter sunlight stole across the floor. Kate stood and watched her husband backing away, brushing the plaster off his chest, half laughing, half coughing the dust out of his lungs. His enthusiasm seemed forced and unnatural, and she wanted to be away from him so that she could feel the breath of the place, and she went alone into the kitchen, which was long and thin with an enormous fireplace on the wall to her left.

  On the outer wall, there were two sets of shutters and a large stone sink at the far end. There were gaps in the shutters and the light flickered on the floor. Kate’s heart thumped as she tried to take it all in and she bent down to the floor, to feel the stone; it was smooth and shiny as marble. She felt the scratches left by furniture and she pictured a long kitchen table laid out with food, a cook busy working at one end of the table, sitting on a stool, sifting and kneading flour in her hands. She tried to people the place with children and artefacts; things that were simple, natural fibres, belongings passed down through the generations. Since the flight of the family the place had been looted.

  Kate ran her fingers on the old floor, fingering grooves as smooth as bone. She thought about this man and his wife, tried to picture them, wondered who they had been and how they had loved each other right up to the end.

  When Stephen came into the room, Kate stood up like someone caught doing something she shouldn’t, and she smiled at him to disguise the emotion she was feeling.

  Stephen turned to the earthenware pot that had fallen at an angle into the fireplace. There were hanging hooks. To the left and above the fireplace was a wooden platform enclosed by a large rickety wooden cage.

  ‘They would have kept dogs in there,’ he said loudly.

  ‘Dogs?’

  ‘To turn the spit.’

  ‘Is that meant to put me off the place, Stephen?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ he replied, but she had gone out into the corridor now, and was using the blue light on her mobile phone to guide her to the end. She pushed at the door and found herself in an internal courtyard, which was dripping with damp.

  The walls were sparsely trellised with a dry, yellowish ivy. In the centre of the courtyard three spectacularly tall and spindly pine trees reached up towards the light.

  There was a wrought-iron balcony that ran round the entire square from the first floor.

  ‘It’s like something out of Macbeth,’ said Stephen, following her, and he kicked at the stones that were cracked and mottled at their feet.

  The air smelt damp and old. Up above, through strings of ivy that criss-crossed the air, birds were flying, cawing still. Kate perched on the bench and hugged her knees. She watched her husband standing there with his shoulders slumped forward. He was trying to understand what she felt about the place; he was having a shot at being here for her. She felt sorry for his seclusion.

  ‘If I was the lady of the manor, Stephen, and you were the butler, would you bring me a cup of tea?’ she asked, trying to be sweet and playful.

  ‘Much obliged, Marm,’ said Stephen, turning happily, and he bowed to her and presented the cup and saucer.

  Kate sat bolt upright and pretended to sip at her tea. ‘It’s perfect,’ she said, smiling, but she was making too much of it and she could feel the strain in her face. Stephen turned away and went on in then. He said he was going to look upstairs.

  Halfway up, Kate looked out of the slit window and down onto the burnt-out storeroom so shrouded in dense green from the rain, so overgrown with weeds. The garden was stuffed full of ferns and poplars and huge oleander bushes that towered over the wall and over the roof of the storehouse.

  She went on up, running her hand up the wide, dusty banister. At the top of the stairs, she ran along the corridor. She went past doors opening onto rooms ransacked and left, paint peeling, to a door at the very end, which was locked. Kate stopped and pushed at the door. It gave onto a dark passageway and a circular room where Stephen was leaning out of the window.

  Behind him the fields were a vivid green.

  ‘It’s the tower room,’ said Kate and she stared down at the floor tiles that were cracked in the centre of the room, as if someone had been at them there with a sledgehammer. A mould clung to the damp on the grey outer wall like a white rash around the window.

  ‘Christ, look at all the bird shit,’ he said.

  ‘But look at it!’ she whispered. ‘Look at these beautiful tiny little shutters opening onto the view, Stephen. Look at the vineyards, the light.’

  ‘The light is lovely,’ he conceded.

  ‘People would think we had gone off our heads.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  It didn’t matter, she told him. She’d been thinking aloud, trying to figure out what it would be like. Stephen bent to the only piece of furniture in the room, a narrow wooden bed bolted to the wall. He ran his fingers over something inscribed in the stone. Watching him, Kate felt something change. Some small adjustment in the air. She pulled in her stomach. It felt as if she ought to be sick.

  Outside, in the courtyard, he sat down beside her on the highest of the steps. The sky was heavier now. Stephen felt his headache coming on.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked grimly.

  ‘Not sure. Too much wine, I guess.’

  ‘I don’t mean in there, Kate. I mean you. What’s going on with you?’

  She looked away and felt embarrassed. She put a hand on his knee but couldn’t bring herself to tell him about the restlessness she was feeling.

  He put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed hard. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said firmly, and Kate agreed with that and she looked out across the courtyard and up to where the birds were flying about.

  The nearest town was a twenty-minute drive from the village, and Stephen liked to go there on his own for a coffee in the morning, and a chance to get the paper. The greengrocer at the shop in town had a bald head and a broad, impish smile. His shop smelt of coffee and dried meat.
He gave Stephen a paper bag for the oranges.

  ‘Of course the chateau is haunted,’ he said. He took his glasses off to polish them. ‘Then again, it’s all to do with perception. And imagination. I see a ghost, I think to myself, is this a ghost or is it something my eyes want me to see?’ He shrugged. ‘Who can know? The chateau is haunted? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But no more than you or I.’

  He licked his thumb to pull a second paper bag from the string above his head. His thumbs were small, like a child’s. Stephen could see through the curtain behind him to where a boy was lying down on the floor with his arms behind his head. The greengrocer laughed. He reached down into the trays of food in the counter, took a thick salami and began to slice it slowly, silently, each slice exactly the same, the width of a coin. He hooked a slice with the point of his knife and lifted it over the counter for Stephen to try.

  ‘Yes, it was quite grand,’ he said. ‘Once upon a time. Old beauty, elegance. A beautiful courtyard. Plants such as you have never seen. You could drive into the courtyard and park beneath the trees. A mosaic of perfect white stones to the door.’

  Stephen counted out the money he owed for the oranges. Above his head, the blades of a fan began slowly to rotate, though there was no heat in the room.

  ‘My wife has been sitting on the steps outside the chateau for days, Monsieur. She seems to want to do little else.’

  Stephen coughed; he could feel the colour banking on his cheeks.

  Behind his glasses, the greengrocer’s little eyelashes were blinking rapidly. He folded his hands on his apron. Beads of orange grease had appeared at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Is she waiting for the rain?’ he said as a joke, though his face was without humour. ‘It won’t rain, you know. Not once the summer comes.’

  ‘She’s not waiting for rain.’

  ‘Well for St Christopher then.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘St Christopher,’ said the greengrocer, and he collected up the coin from the counter then and slid it into his till.

  Stephen turned to the window where the streamers were fluttering. He took the bag of oranges and made a knot of its neck in his fingers.

  ‘She wants to know what happened there. Maybe if I can find out what happened there then the place will loosen its hold on her.’

  ‘Well yes, Monsieur, but you are wasting your time trying to make friends with the villagers if all you want from them is the past. No one will tell you anything because they are French and proud and what happened is too sick to speak about.’

  ‘Too?’

  ‘Terrible.’

  ‘Was the woman Sylvie Pépin in the fire? Was it she who was burnt?’

  ‘And her brother died. He was found hanging in the bathroom.’ The man shook his head. There was something green, a smudge of something; it looked like a pea above his ear. ‘One of the villagers came down from Canas and came into the shop and said what had happened.’

  ‘What did happen?’

  ‘The Borja boy – freak boy – he killed the kid from the village, Frederic. Made it look like suicide. That’s what people say. Then he set the fire.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Who knows? All it takes is one match. The doctor from here was called. He was a good friend of Madame Borja and he helped her remove the body. She was totally crazy. Everyone knew that. But Monsieur Borja was a good customer of ours. I believe he stayed on for some years after everyone else left. I think he tried to keep the place going. His wife returned to Paris on her own. She never came back. Some years later Monsieur Borja was found dead in the vineyard.’

  Stephen nodded.

  ‘The chateau simply went to ruin. He had cleared everything out by then. Sold it off, piece by piece.’

  ‘Yes, we went in to have a look around on Saturday. There was nothing in there. Nothing at all.’

  The greengrocer shrugged his shoulders once more and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his apron. ‘Most people down here, in these villages, they keep to themselves. Outsiders are not always taken in kindly. That was one of the Borjas’ problems, of course, when they first came here. This is not like a metropolis; it is a peaceful part of the world. But that summer of the chateau fire there was something very strange in the air. It was so hot that summer. Things got out of hand.’

  ‘Do you get many like it?’

  ‘My God, no,’ said the greengrocer and he shook his head and frowned. He disappeared through the beaded curtain into the darkness at the back of his shop.

  Stephen drove back to the village in a mood and told Kate he was taking her out for dinner. They found a restaurant on the edge of town that was downmarket but warm enough inside. There were plastic flowers in baskets on the walls. Kate was wearing a black silk shirt that pulled tight across her breasts. Stephen ordered vodka cocktails to start. It was quiet as a tomb.

  But they felt better after a glass of wine and Stephen said his moules were the best he had ever had. Kate leant over and dipped her bread into the garlic wine in his bowl. She sucked the pulp up, and couldn’t seem to stop.

  ‘I checked out that word on the internet, Kate. That word we saw engraved in the chateau?’

  ‘In the wall?’

  ‘It’s Arabic. “Baseema”. It’s a name. It means “smiling”.’

  ‘Smiling?’

  ‘Yes. Weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘Gorgeous,’ she said and her eyes, when she looked at him, were bright and defiant. This was how she often looked at the moment and it made him feel afraid. She had messed up her hair so that it looked unkempt. Her lips were painted scarlet. More than anything, he wanted her to soften, to calm. He refilled her glass with wine.

  The convivial owner with the black eyes was passionate about the wines. Stephen asked him questions. Everywhere, Kate thought, he did this; he made himself known. It was part of his charm, his warmth. To develop a relationship that would hold them all in the arms of the evening, and squeeze.

  ‘We’re keen to sample as much of the local stuff as we can.’

  ‘The soil is very rough in the hills. For water, the roots of the vine have to work very hard; they have to go very deep. A beautiful wine.’

  The owner swooned a little beside their table. He was Jewish, he told them, while making a joke. Stephen and Kate were nothing. Christians once, for a few months. Meetings with the vicar. Readings from the Bible and bridesmaid dresses. But the nativity scene got lost in a box, in the roof. They didn’t have children to revive their religions and their lives were taken up: work, dinners, the gym, theatre, friends. And now, out here, she thought, they were busy trying to unlace themselves, trying to be free.

  Kate lifted her glass to her lips. London was a blur. It was the mystery of her early life that she wanted to try to remember. Who she was before she started working and met Stephen and moved into his flat. She wanted to know why it was she had begun to feel excitement again, ripples of it, that travelled through her for no apparent reason. It felt inherently childish, something pure, to do with the joy of life and it made her want to kick free; she needed to figure that out now, what was doing it, why now.

  She reached under the table for her handbag and the phone that had signalled a text from a friend. ‘How’s paradise?’

  Kate showed the phone to Stephen and he lifted his glass high in the air. The light was shining on his forehead and when he laughed his nostrils flared, which made him look smug, and strange.

  The waiter brought cognac. He spoke to them in English. Behind the bar, he had postcards of bullfighters, a woman with her hands folded on her pubis, her lips in an ‘o’. Kate smiled patiently and tucked her hair behind her ears. She drank the cognac. At the gallery now, they would be running around hanging twenty-foot paper cages from the ceiling on thick iron chains. The cages would swing in the air and crash into each other, their hanging disturbed by the air from a turbine. But the cages would do well. The show would run and run. Even Kate’s mother would make a point of coming up to se
e it. It would take the long-suffering Portuguese neighbour all morning to get them ready. Then the neighbour would be made to drive up to London, to push Kate’s mother in and round. There would be a smear of bright pink lipstick and a grey chignon. She would sit in the corner and say nothing. She would sit in the corner and say nothing and stare at the cages though her large dark glasses.

  Outside the restaurant the wind was picking up, fluttering the awning. Soon they would be back in their village, the bedroom in its loft, with the windows on the chateau. Kate decided that she would not return to the courtyard in the morning. She would stay with Stephen and sleep late. Let her body rest beside him. With a little more effort, she thought, she could make things lovely again between them. They would go into town, buy warm, fresh pains au chocolat from the baker and eat them out of paper bags as they strolled through the market. Stephen would choose the salami spiked with garlic. He would say the cheese was marvellous and she would enjoy his pleasure. She would buy some duck and cook up a meal so that they could eat together – husband and wife – in their walled garden, licking their greasy fingers and laughing together under the stars.

  ‘Have you been to this part of France before, Madame, Monsieur?’

  ‘We came here on our honeymoon. But by mistake, as a matter of fact,’ said Stephen. ‘We flew into Marseille. We were going east; the Côte d’Or, to Portefino. Kate was driving. She started west. We came here.’

  ‘We were meant to,’ she added, dreamily. ‘We were pulled here.’

  ‘Bollocks, darling,’ scoffed Stephen. ‘You were lost.’

  The owner was laughing, holding his chin. His eyes were tired.

  ‘More cognac, Madame, Monsieur?’

  He filled their glasses. ‘Santé!’

  ‘To the chateau,’ said Kate, lifting her glass.