We All Ran into the Sunlight

by Natalie Young

  Arnaud turned the car into a passageway that looked too small for it and they twisted between houses made of crumbling stone. There were plant pots on narrow steps scrabbling up the sides of houses, a rustic wooden chair with a pair of polished shoes left out on its wicker seat. Lucie thought of the women standing behind these small bolted doors, whispering, holding pans of fish, boiling fish heads, wooden tables, bread.

  Arnaud got out of the car and walked towards the tilt of gates, leaning in on each other, two withered sheets of green iron. Behind it, the walls rose up. They were high walls, the stone black as iron in places, windows few and far between.

  In the courtyard, the car choked on the weeds. At the far end of it a pine tree soared high into the air. There was a low stone wall that marked the start of the vineyard. Lucie turned her head in the wide open space. The quiet was strangely calming and there was no one there but a huge solitary crow labouring down through the air and landing on the steps, wings rustling with the attitude of a businessman, or an old watchman paid to behave like one, its thick charcoal hook pointing at them, then back at the house, as if to say: Come on then, come see it if you must; I’ve been waiting all this time.

  In the kitchen they stood with their suitcases, like two people who had found themselves in a different country.

  Arnaud’s cousin had said it would be like this. Empty for years, he said. The family were wine people and went to ruin. The only remaining son killed in the Great War. Arnaud bought the land because he believed it would make a wine everyone would care about – See the shape of the valley, Lucie, just think of all the water, how it will collect in this basin.

  From her suitcase, Lucie took a photograph of her and Marie in Paris with their parents. She stood with the photograph in her hand, unsure where to put it, what to do first. Arnaud jiggled himself about to keep warm. He capered about, folding his hands into a funnel and shouting into the corners of the room, up at the ceiling.

  ‘We can’t see,’ he said, pushing on the shutters. She looked at his thin little fingers and wondered again how they would manage, just the two of them, and this great old house, like an empty liner out on the ocean.

  ‘You should go to the café if you need something to drink, Arnaud.’

  He was grinning and he backed out into the hallway and through the big front doors, stumbling backwards down the steps and out into the sunlight. She saw his shadow and looked beyond to where the same enormous crow was strutting among the weeds in the courtyard, making for the car whose doors had been left open, exposing the food in their basket.

  ‘Arnaud!’

  But he had already got to the car and was bending down inside it making strange whooping noises. In a moment he was back, bounding up the steps, the basket in one hand, their suitcase of things in the other. He stood in the doorway and beamed at her. He was full of confidence, full of hope. Lucie smiled back at him. He took his cap off and threw it in the air, which was when she felt the tension in his recklessness – how clown-like it was – something staged to release or undermine her.

  ‘There’s no time for cafés, Lucie,’ he said. ‘We need warmth. We need a fire. The courtyard is full of sticks. I’m going to make us a mountain of sticks.’

  ‘We don’t need a mountain though. Just a few. For kindling. Then logs.’

  Lucie pulled the air in and held it in her lungs until her eyes began to blur. It would have been easier to sit down now, to curl up and fold herself away. But the women of France had a duty to rebuild this country. There were babies to be born, families and homes to be repaired. The women had to rise up now – women of France, lift up your hearts – they had to make do, be strong. And the women of the village, what would they be like?

  ‘I could start by making a cake, Arnaud. Inviting some women round?’

  It was dusk of that first wintry day. They had pulled the shutters and they sat together staring into the fire. Lucie laid out the eggs, the bread and the cheese on the table.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I will look for a saw. There is a tree blown down in the garden. Have you seen it, Lucie?’

  But she hadn’t seen anything yet. It was Arnaud who went upstairs to look around. He laid the mattresses they brought on the roof of the car, in front of the fire, and covered them in the blankets. He said the rooms upstairs were not so big as these. They ate slowly and cradled cups of hot brandy and water. She felt the alcohol loosen her, set something free.

  ‘This is a new beginning, Lucie.’

  ‘But God knows where to begin.’

  ‘What?’

  In the night, she knew that the dreams would come; snow on the streets in Paris, people scavenging for food, the radio broadcasts, the terrible waste…

  ‘God?’

  ‘Yes. What can he do?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘God.’

  ‘God is everywhere, Lucie. You know that.’

  ‘Yes, but what can he do?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘To help us.’

  Arnaud said nothing. For a long time he sat chewing on a small piece of bread. Lucie didn’t repeat her question. Her eyes had begun to glaze. She watched the fire blaze and hiss through a twisted olive branch and reach for the next one above it. It licked with a soft green flame then finally took hold.

  We must help ourselves. These were the words she heard first in the morning, as if her question had been left hanging in the room, watching over her, waiting for her to rise, to the day, to the house, to this fact of married life. She stirred and felt the life come back into her limbs and she found she was not so cold beneath the blankets and the dust and dirt had not got into her lungs; she felt well slept, almost clean.

  She pushed open the shutters. Marie wouldn’t have cared about the blankets and the lungs. Marie would have slept in her boots, a cigarette tip dormant in her hand. A warm light stole into the room. Her eyes travelled slowly down the steps and out into the courtyard. Across the pale stripe of the sky there were small fingers of yellow cloud.

  Arnaud got up from the mattress and took his brandy bottle from the table. He took a swig or two from what was left and then pulled on his trousers and coat.

  ‘There is work to be done.’

  ‘Arnaud, chéri, I….’

  ‘I’m going out to the vineyard…’

  ‘But what about breakfast?’

  ‘What is there to eat?’

  ‘Some bread. The jam.’

  ‘We need more food. There is money in the wallet, not much. You will hopefully find an épicerie in the village.’

  But the village gave up none of its secrets, not today, nor any morning that she walked quickly out of the chateau gates and through the square, peering in through the window of the café with its broken pane of glass, past the church and along the small passageways in search of a baker, a grocery store, even a stall selling fruit. She took each possible pathway through the village, down alleys reeking of urine, over cobbles worn smooth, past groups of cats licking their fur and sitting in groups in the first light of the sun.

  The villagers themselves were suspicious. Doors were opened quietly; faces appeared and looked around in the air behind her, their sad eyes asking nothing nor giving anything away. Their doors were closed quietly, firmly; shutters on the upstairs balconies drawn in.

  ‘Because the people here are afraid, Madame,’ said the Mayor that afternoon, standing in the courtyard.

  Arnaud walked towards them both slowly. He shook the Mayor’s hand.

  ‘Monsieur Borja, allow me to present myself…’

  The Mayor pulled a bandaged hand from the pocket of his short brown trousers and held it out.

  ‘He has brought us wine, Arnaud. Two casks. I’ve put them in the kitchen…’

  Arnaud wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. In this light, after his day outside, he looked ruddy and calm.

  ‘Welcome.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  Luc
ie smiled and looked at the ground.

  ‘The Mayor was just explaining to me, Arnaud, why the villagers do not come out of their houses, and no one will help me with provisions.’

  ‘We have all been disturbed by the war,’ said the Mayor, addressing only Arnaud. ‘Now people just want to get on with their lives.’

  ‘But I was just asking if anyone might sell me something to eat, some clothes perhaps, some sheets for the mattresses, an old quilt.’

  ‘Madame, have you come here with no clothes?’

  ‘One suitcase. But I walked all the way to the town today, Monsieur, and I was able to buy some food.’

  ‘You let me know if you have a problem with rats in the chateau. They are pests… they come in from the fields and eat everything.’

  ‘I’m not scared of rats, Monsieur,’ said Lucie, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking. There were rats in Paris during the war. In the end we had to borrow our neighbour’s cat to eat the rats. When we all got terribly hungry one week there was a suggestion we should eat the cat.’

  The Mayor coloured. He had thought her prissy in her crepe and petticoat. Now she stood before him in slacks and a black round-neck jumper, small round-toed shoes; she was pluckier than he thought.

  ‘I’d like to show you something,’ said the Mayor, and he led them across the courtyard to the gates.

  ‘You won’t have seen this; it’s overgrown.’

  The sun sank. Across the courtyard the heads of the thistles were painted orange.

  ‘There is a plaque here, behind the post. It tells you when the house was built. There. Read!’

  He stepped back and pushed her forward to the wall. Lucie opened her mouth obediently. The Mayor stood behind her; she felt the men’s eyes on the curls at her neck.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It says it was built in 1533, on the site of a former edifice.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘On the site of a former edifice.’

  ‘Who built it?’

  ‘Two brothers. From Barcelona. They were extradited by the King and came here, and built this, and died here.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Who knows?’ said the Mayor and then he made his excuses and put his bandaged hand back in his pocket. He walked away quickly, coughing. It was as if someone had called to him to come in and eat suddenly. He pushed his way through the gate and left them alone.

  Arnaud was delighted with the wine on the table and he poured some for both of them, using the brandy glasses from the night before. He seemed relaxed now in the room, and warm. Lucie had kept a fire going for most of the afternoon and now she opened the lid of the pot hanging from a hook over the fire and stirred the stew thick with onions, tomatoes, peppers and potatoes. He watched her go about her womanly business and smiled comfortably. There was bread and a large slice of soft cheese, which Arnaud cut quickly and ate with his glass of wine.

  He stood up to help her lift the pot from the fire. Lucie sat at the table with her hands demure in her lap. Arnaud leant forward, dragging his boots; already, she thought, his eyes had something of the countryside in them, something bright and hard like berries.

  He ate hungrily, watching her. When he had finished his food, he pushed his bowl to one side and reached across the table for her hand.

  ‘They are all so strange here, Arnaud.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘The Mayor, with his cough and his bandaged hand, leaving like that, having pushed us over to see the plaque, which means what exactly? Built on the site of a former edifice?’

  ‘It means built on something that was here before.’

  ‘Before what? Before the fifteenth century?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But the villagers who say nothing, and do nothing? I feel as if something has happened here.’

  He drained his glass. Then he pulled his chair away from the table and took it over towards the fireplace. He stood on the chair and reached his hand back through the bars and into the teeth of the wooden cage that was above the fireplace and was where he had put his gun.

  ‘They would have kept the dogs up here, Lucie. Dogs to turn the spit.’

  ‘Yes, Arnaud. Yes. I know.’

  He slid the gun out of its cloth and turned it in his fingers. In the morning he would go out in the fields to check it was still in working order.

  ‘This house was once magnificent,’ he said to her, looking her straight in the eye. ‘I think that if we work at it with all our hearts and minds we can make it so again.’

  2

  Through the winter, the crows kept watch; their watery eyes turned to her labours in the courtyard as she cleared the weeds and made space for herbs, for olive trees, a bed of lavender to plant in the spring.

  When she had finished clearing the courtyard, it looked vast and ghostly; the ground was dirty white in places, rings of cracked earth around the giant fig tree in the centre.

  Arnaud decided to remove the vines from the top vineyard entirely and leave the field fallow for a year. It took him days to haggle for the machines, and the men who came were not from the village but from another, up in the hills.

  In the early-morning dark, he peeled back the blankets from his mattress in the kitchen and slipped out to warm his car for the drive. He was gone all day, coming back at the sinking of the sun in the afternoon, his face burnt in the wind, his hands torn, his breath bitter with alcohol.

  Lucie watched the birds from behind the safety of the glass. She saw the way they strutted back and forth inspecting her wasteland and they reminded her of a teacher she had at school. Madame Tulson with her hair scraped back in a bun. It seemed that even the birds were ill-tempered, consumed with irritation for her lack of progress, mocking her inability to move on from the kitchen and into the other rooms. You have made a prison cell for yourself, it’s true. ‘Time to move on,’ Arnaud said. ‘We can’t live for ever in the kitchen.’

  But Lucie enjoyed her work in the kitchen. Going over and over the same things. Endlessly wiping the same surfaces, rearranging, moving things around. There was satisfaction to be drawn from this work and she lifted herself to the task. She put crates on the window ledges to store her fruit and vegetables, with tightly sealed jars of salt, flour, pickles and jam. In the centre of the kitchen the table was spotless and welcoming; on a strip of old lace she kept jars of mustard, thimbles of salt and pepper. Even their mattresses, as neatly made with blankets and cushions as beds in a doll’s house, lay side by side on the floor, in front of the fire.

  ‘We can’t stay for ever in the kitchen, Lucie. Not for ever. We can’t sleep in this room for ever.’

  ‘No,’ she said, but she didn’t move.

  ‘There is this whole house to live in.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A white winter morning. Arnaud and the men who worked with him came into the kitchen, unlaced their boots and sat around the table.

  Lucie stood with her back to them; she thought again of Marie and the women in the room above the hairdresser’s; how they would all laugh at this bunch of men behind her, their animal wrinkled skins, their inability to speak. Often she wondered what she was doing here among these people who never spoke, among the village folk who had not come round to pay a visit, not one of the women from the shuttered houses. In the square, their faces twitched with interest on seeing her, otherwise they slunk back inside, kept themselves to themselves. She wanted to follow them, knock on their doors and shout through their letterboxes: I’m not a German, you know! I’ve got nothing contagious, no fear greater than your own.

  ‘Lucie,’ said Arnaud when the coffee came and the men rounded like bears over their tiny cups. ‘I’m going to go with one of these men to Toulouse to see about a new machine. I’ll be away one night. Our neighbour said you can stay with his family if you would rather not be here alone.’

  The men smiled knowingly and nodded their heads.

  Lucie smiled. ‘Of course I can sleep in my own hou
se alone.’

  ‘You’ll need a gun,’ said one of the men in an accent so thickly southern she struggled to hear what he said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  He grinned. His teeth were brown and spaced apart. ‘You’ll need a gun. There are looters. Big places like this. Get looted.’

  She laughed. ‘Monsieur, there is nothing in this place for anyone to steal.’

  ‘That’s what you think, Madame,’ he said and Arnaud’s response was drowned out in the sound of their laughing.

  They left in the early afternoon when the light was clean and calm in the kitchen and the crows had gone. Lucie busied herself in the silence after their departure, emboldened suddenly by her independence. In the overgrown garden behind the house, she worked until her fingers were numb and then she bathed in the stone sink, sitting with her hair wet by the fire. She didn’t let herself think about the rest of the house heaving and groaning around her like the great old ship she saw in her mind. In the kitchen she had found it easier to imagine that the rest of the building simply didn’t exist.

  She thought of the baby’s blanket Arnaud’s mother had given her before their departure from Paris and how she held it, spilling heavy and dusty white from its yellowed tissue. Conceiving a child, even figuratively, meant believing there was something to bring it to, something good and whole and not full of fragments; a world in which the act of remembering was sweet and nostalgic and not like walking into a room full of soft, open cuts, bits of vein everywhere, cuts and sinews of flesh on the floor, on the backs of the doors. What if she could not do it? She would let them all down. Mother, Father, Sister, Brother. Their expectations would fall like a pack of cards around her. And then they would claw at the absent baby like wolves gone mad for lack of food. Because her fear, even then, was that someone might see the doubts that sank to the silt in her mind, or that they might perceive from the look on her face the shadows of these hulks appearing, so sinister, at the edges of her thoughts. You had to believe you believed in belief, and Lucie had been given no reason, though she didn’t really know it then, to believe in anything. There wasn’t a role model of goodness and patience and faith and charity as far as the eye could see. And you had to see some goodness to believe in it, that was what she believed. Her mother-in-law was bent on glory and a screwy patriotism raged in her heart. There was wonder, the old woman shrieked, in the sloshing of buckets on hospital floors, in the plastering-up of old walls; there was hope in the cleansing rain of autumn, in the snow falling softly on northern graves. There was glory, she said, in the women returning to the hearth now, to fatten like hens and produce their eggs, to sit and fatten and squawk like hens, thought Lucie, in a great triumphant line of readiness to aim, fire and plug the country’s gaping lines.