We All Ran into the Sunlight

by Natalie Young

  ‘The chateau, Madame?’

  ‘My wife’s fallen in love with an old wreck in the village we’re staying in.’

  ‘I think it’s up for sale,’ Kate told him, lifting her eyes up now, expectantly, almost coquettishly, as if this restaurant owner might be the one to help her buy the place.

  ‘Ah but this is perfect!’ he said. ‘And now we can drink to you, and to your love of the real France. Where time really does stand still.’

  Stephen laughed aggressively; he was getting bored of these people. They were stiff and dour and far too still. He snapped his credit card down on the table. They drank. Silence fell. The wind dropped a stone onto the roof of the restaurant.

  On Tuesday, Stephen went on his own to the oyster bays to get a dozen oysters. Kate had been happier and more attentive the past few days and he had done some good work on his book. He wanted to reward them both with a picnic up at the lake.

  As soon as he had gone, Kate rang the airline. They agreed that it would be a good thing if Kate went back to London on her own for a couple of days. Just to ensure that all was well at work. She would check on the house, and bring out their post. It would give her a chance to see her mother – and more than anything, they both felt, it would be good for her sense of perspective to be away from here. She booked a ticket for Friday morning. She would go for a long weekend. That gave her three more days, she thought, taking her camera and her sketchbook across the square to the chateau where Sylvie was standing dressed in a denim dress that flared on her hips and fell to mid-calf. Kate saw the long wild hair and the shapely figure and she waved as she got near.

  ‘You have such beautiful hair,’ she said.

  Sylvie smiled and laughed and sniffed. She said she had never cut it. Not once. It had been growing for more than twenty years now. Since most of it went up in the fire.

  ‘It was a paraffin lamp. It exploded beside me. Where I was sleeping.’

  Kate had her hands over her mouth.

  ‘My brother died here,’ said Sylvie, tilting her head back, and then she followed Kate in through the gate and the two women stood and looked up at the front wall in silence.

  ‘It’s not a good place,’ said Sylvie. ‘My dog comes in but he won’t stay.’

  ‘Dogs are sensitive.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sylvie’s lip bunched when she smiled. From the pocket of her jacket, she took rolling papers and tobacco and she rolled herself a cigarette. Kate waited for Sylvie to make the next move. The woman had a hold on her, though she wasn’t sure what it was.

  Sylvie crunched forward in her dainty shoes.

  ‘Did you get my note?’ she said.

  Kate smiled. ‘Yes, I did. Of course. But God knows what made you think I have anything like the money to buy a place like this.’

  ‘Someone does,’ Sylvie said, and she squinted through the smoke escaping from her mouth. ‘And when they do then Daniel will come back.’

  ‘Who’s Daniel?’

  ‘Daniel Borja. He lived here. In the chateau.’

  ‘The son?’

  ‘That’s right. Daniel Borja,’ she said quietly, looking out over the vineyard and off towards the hills.

  The next morning was hot, and the sky white, the car disappearing now and then in the avenues of trees.

  They climbed into the hills; black rock formations leered up out of the slopes. They came into the town, which was just as they remembered it from their time there thirteen years before.

  There were palm trees and a statue of a giant man in military dress pointing his finger down the boulevard towards the square as if the way was paved with gold to war.

  ‘Algeria,’ said Stephen.

  ‘You remember this?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘I remember this statue. It’s for Algeria. Remember?’

  Kate was holding her hair back; she was looking all around. Then she started off in the direction of the square. Stephen followed her. They both knew where they were going. They picked up speed and broke into a run and Kate said she felt afraid suddenly.

  ‘The past is smaller than we remember it,’ she whispered to herself as her feet carried her forward. ‘We’re blind, like dogs trying to break in, we cannot get back there.’

  ‘He’s there,’ Stephen was shouting. ‘He’s there. Look!’

  Kate saw the trestle table with the paper behind it. There was the basket man, his carrot-red hair, his huge paunch, his square block of a head, and his vest which was grey and stained on the front with a slop of something that looked as if it had been slopped over a decade ago and the vest not washed in all that time. Kate shook her head. There he was before them now and there he was back then, and the two red-haired fat men with the stained vests came together in that moment and waved their hands for the English couple who were standing in the square, staring, lonely, astonishing themselves with this gift here in the sunlight.

  ‘How long is it?’

  Stephen was laughing.

  ‘Thirteen years,’ said Kate.

  ‘Nothing has changed.’

  And then to have laughed as they did, with such amazement, such relief, as they ran forward, and flung themselves on the table and began to pick up the baskets, grabbing them from the heap one at a time. The baskets were green, and blue and yellow. And this is her, my wife, thought Stephen, grabbing a basket with a white daisy on the front and handing it to her. She’s back, my wife; this is how I remember her, he thought, and he laughed again. They could hardly carry them all; they were laughing so hard and with such relief they only partly heard the man’s voice which wasn’t French at all.

  ‘We can’t carry them,’ Stephen was saying to his wife. ‘We don’t need them all.’

  ‘It might not be him,’ she replied quietly, but she was looking in her bag for her purse by now and he could barely hear what she said. Her face was shining, laughing. The sun was breaking out from behind a cloud, blinding them; it was much too warm suddenly.

  ‘What are we doing, darling?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Really,’ said Stephen brightly, but kindly, ‘what are we really doing?’

  And the basket man coughed and came over, his hands in the back pockets of his shorts, his face wide open and amicable and blue.

  ‘Please. Madame, Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Can I help you at all?’

  They left the baskets and drove back to the village in silence. Stephen checked his emails and then climbed into the bedroom for a sleep.

  Kate went back to the chateau. She felt calm here, that was all she knew. She spent time round the back of it, pulling through weeds in the garden. She sat on the steps, and the silence was almost unbearable. The size of its walls, the lack of windows, the crumbling tower. She felt it groaning around her, the ground moving beneath. She wanted to take the weight off, and go back in time.

  ‘I’ve seen beetles,’ she called down to Stephen when he came over later in the afternoon. ‘Big black tremendous beetles scuttling on these stones.’

  Stephen pulled his lips back in a wide, forced smile. His hands were folded behind his back. They were sleeping so well, eating delicious fresh food. They were light, inside and out. Even so, psychologically, he was treading water out here, and he felt listless, mentally soft as a result.

  ‘Are you bored?’ she said. ‘Is that what it is?’

  ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘Is that why you come here each day to find me? Can’t you look after yourself, Stephen?’

  ‘Why are you here, Kate? What’s the point?’

  ‘I’m thinking!’

  He laughed, picked up a pebble from the ground and slung it high, as far as he could.

  ‘All day? For a whole fucking day? With your back up against a wall?’

  He asked her if she couldn’t smell the sewage, which came from a burst pipe in the village. She couldn’t smell the rot, or the empty feeling of nothingness stretching from the pine tree
across the vineyards into more nothingness.

  She said she was confused. She was sorry. She didn’t mean to exclude him. He sat beside her and said that he was feeling tired of it all. He thought that perhaps he should go back to London with her.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said gently. ‘Let’s take a few days apart.’

  Which was fine, he conceded. ‘Absolutely fine.’

  They sat on an old bench in the atrium under cover of spiders’ webs and leaves, picnicked on bread and olives and cheese. Kate was hungry now and glad to eat. A breeze rustled the leaves in the trees but otherwise the garden was still. In a few days, Stephen said they could go to the coast, buy some oysters down in the oyster bays. There were flamingos there. He had seen them on the way in from the airport. She said she would like to see the flamingos, how pink they would be against all the blue; and that she would like to take a walk on the beach; throw some pebbles in at the sea.

  ‘Good,’ he said, feeling better at once for the shade and the food.

  ‘Do you love me, Stephen?’ she asked quietly.

  He ripped a hunk of bread from the loaf and dragged it through the oil in the plastic container; tried to swallow it whole, like a snake with a small bird.

  ‘I want to get back to our routine, Kate.’

  ‘Then you should be going back. And I should be staying here.’

  ‘But your mother.’

  ‘Yes but you’re the one who wants to be going back.’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Can I stay?’

  ‘I don’t know, Kate. Can you?’

  They wiped oil off their chins. Stephen pulled giant, glistening anchovies out of the jar and laid them across the bread. He cut a slice of blue Roquefort from the triangle sweating and shining in its paper on the bench. There was the drill of a woodpecker. In the village, a dog was barking.

  He filled her glass for her and she leant forward to drink. She slopped more wine into her glass and tilted it up towards her mouth.

  ‘I love this wine,’ he said. ‘So clean.’

  ‘It’s a nice wine,’ she agreed. He turned and looked into her eyes, which were big and brown and suddenly full of love. How fickle it was; the way it came in and out, depending on the mood, on the sunlight and the quality of the wine. He watched the tears bead on her eyelashes and he put his finger there to flick them away.

  ‘We were always going to go to Fiji. Do you remember that?’ he asked, gently. ‘That was our place. In the first year we moved into that house and we had no money and were always working just to keep it all going. We said to each other one night that we were doing it for a holiday – a great big holiday, one day, in Fiji. I can’t stop thinking about that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we never went there, Kate. We sort of lost it.’

  ‘We got busy.’

  ‘Things have changed a bit.’

  ‘And I feel like I want a different life. I feel like I’ve paddled all the way out and dropped the oars and now the mist has come in and I can’t find my way back to the shore.’

  He was grinning as if he hadn’t heard her, red-cheeked, insane. She looked at him then and her eyes neither moved him nor had any life in them at all. She was suddenly pale, and old-looking. He looked at the crow’s feet around her eyes.

  Behind her head, a spider was moving, its web a tremor of frailty in the shade. She told him she could hardly breathe. She bent down for her glass, and drank up the wine.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, and he could hear his voice; it was menacing and strange. ‘Drink it up, darling,’ he coaxed, and he placed a hand on the back of her neck, ‘and then, when we have finished our food and finished our wine, we can drive up into the hills and buy ourselves some more. There’s so much room in the car. We can buy as much as we need, darling. We can buy ourselves as much as we fucking need. We don’t have to go back. We don’t have to let anything change. Not if we don’t want to. We had a plan. And there’s all this time,’ he said, standing up from the bench, holding his glass out at arm’s length. ‘All this time to drink and do what we came here for, here in the village with all the birds and the fucking insects and this rough awful heat-resistant grass…’

  ‘Stop it,’ she begged. ‘Please.’

  Stephen was silent. He had stopped eating. Kate was sitting on the bench, pale in her white dress and she felt small and exhausted. Her mind was still, but somewhere deep inside she felt a flutter of desperation for air, and she pulled in a deep and silent breath for herself, and she held it there.

  LUCIE

  1949

  Silence in the beginning. And the car moving on the lip of the valley like a fly on the rim of a bowl – pausing – engine rattling; Arnaud lifting his hands from the wheel and pointing down through the trees. They had come so far south. It didn’t even feel like France any more but some other place of rock and whiteness and dryness over the mountains. Lucie sank into the neck of her coat. She couldn’t conceive of Arnaud’s pale, slightly chubby fingers working the vines on these hillsides, twisting and wrenching, digging this dry, rocky earth.

  ‘Can you see it?’

  He was pointing to the dark place in the valley. It was like a castle she had had as a child. She saw the towers rising up out of the village roofs that seemed to huddle in on each other in a nasty, conspiratorial fashion. It looked tatty down there, shabby, and old.

  Arnaud wasn’t trying to make his hands look like guns, and yet it seemed this way to her. She felt the point, two fingers stretched, one hanging limp near the trigger. Bang! She flinched and closed her eyes.

  ‘Lucie?’

  She turned her head away from him, looked out across the valley to where the hills paled in the distance. There was food on her lap. A soft cloth parcel of food. If only she had thought to get the blankets and wrap them around her legs and shoes. The nylon stockings did nothing to keep out the cold and her shoes were worn and thin. But the blankets were on the back seat with her suitcase and it was too late now. They were nearly there.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Answer me. Can you see the chateau down there in the village?’

  ‘There are eggs here. Two cooked eggs. A tin of meat.’ She peeled back the cloth. ‘A decent loaf.’

  He turned the wheel a little, let the car crunch onto the grass beside the track. Lucie studied the food carefully, imagining the tastes of the egg and the bread in her mouth. It was an anxious kind of hunger. As if there were mice in her stomach, steadily gnawing away. The war put mice in everyone’s stomach. She knew she was no exception.

  Arnaud would most probably climb out now and take in the view. Either that or take her hand, whisper something about their future together and the fear. Whisper something about it all going to be all right. But that would be silly, foolish, of course. She wouldn’t have the egg just yet. It was better to save it for later. The more she prepared herself the less anxious she would feel. And, of course, it was possible that he’d had enough of her moods already. She was guilty of these. Up and down. Like de Gaulle’s million bouncing babies. He would tell her again that she needed to try to let go of the war. It was something they all had to live with. But it was in the past. He would tell her to think of the future. France had a future. There were babies to be born.

  ‘You are always thinking of the food, Lucie. Nothing but the food.’

  ‘It’s important.’

  ‘It’s not all there is, though.’

  Arnaud coughed with uncertainty rather than impatience. He was trying to make her happy and he had come here full of hope. She turned, lift up your hearts women of France! and shook her head quite prettily for him, her eyes going wide as she spoke.

  ‘If you’re not hungry, Arnaud?’

  He reached forward for the handle and clicked it down. The door slammed behind him. Lucie watched his stocky legs plough through the long grass on the roadside and disappear into the trees.

  In Paris, the girls said life would be good, much e
asier, down in the country. In the room above the hairdressers they had tried to imagine it. One of them stood up and staggered across the room with her arms out in front to mimic the weight of food. The others laughed. Lucie watched them all, smiling on the window ledge. Marie made gobbling movements in the air.

  ‘And if the land is fruitful, girls?’

  They were women thinking of bigger things. In their hearts they were fighting another war which was the war of women sent back to the hearth but still they knew how much she wanted to have a baby. Her sister was one of them. Marie wore black culottes with boots and thumped her heart when she went in and out of the printing room. She said there would be nothing else to do down in the south: baking and babies, baby baking, my God, you could bake the fucking babies…

  A hawk circling for food above. The sound of dogs barking in the valley. The Germans wouldn’t have come this far south. No one would. The land was rough and barren and there was nothing for it to do but slough off now and slide all the way to the sea. She would not be able to do it here, to make a go of things and make it work.

  There was bright green grass beside the road. Dandelion, wild fennel. There was rock on the other side of the road – a sheer wall of black basalt and a plateau that stretched all the way back to the town. They had driven through it in silence, he with his hands firm on the wheel, his brandy bottle in the leather pouch around his neck. They had driven almost all the way from Paris in silence, stopping only to rest a little in Lyon.

  Lucie watched her husband walk back towards the car. He cut under low hanging foliage, pulling back branches of eucalyptus and fern. In his hand he carried a leaf, and he held it up for her to see. You could do worse than use the acorns of oak trees for coffee, she thought. Others had used chicory. Both would be bitter. But people had done worse.

  In the village, the shutters were worn, colourless and closed. You got the feeling nobody came out, nobody dared. But the square was attractive; there were young cats in the roots of lime trees, a red winter rose bobbing on a balcony and a child folding itself over the fountain.