‘Yes.’
‘And is it the happiest feeling of all, do you think? Does it wipe all else away?’
‘No,’ he replied, and he kissed her then, placing his hot lips very carefully, very neatly on hers.
‘I think of you so often,’ he said afterwards, and her eyes were filling up now, gazing up into his as if he might be seeing her soul at last, her sweet kindly gentle loving soul, as it should be seen here, like a nurse, in this room of birth and softness and life.
She kissed him briefly and pulled back and went over towards the sleeping mother and child. She put her fingers out to the mattress and knelt beside them with this feeling of strength and purpose inside, such as she had never before experienced in her short and disconnected life.
4
It was Lucie herself who bought the goat from the shepherd who walked his flock across the heath. She waited for him one bright morning and sprung out from behind the rocks. All she had was the ring she wore on her finger and the chain she wore around her neck. She gave the shepherd the chain and he used his rope to fashion for her a collar and lead so that she could walk the goat back to the village.
Lucie knew that the women of the village would be looking out, through the cracks in their shutters, as always, and so she approached the chateau through the vineyard, pulling the goat quite easily, while feeding it handfuls of grass from her hand. It was only her neat little round-toed shoes that suffered from the indignity of this journey, and these she was able to clean satisfactorily while the Algerians prepared for the ceremony.
Arnaud didn’t come. ‘Which suits me fine,’ whispered Lucie to her new friend, and she and Fatima worked all day to clear out the old junk from the storeroom in the garden so that they could eat in there if it rained.
But it didn’t rain that night of the naming ceremony and they made a wonderful fire and even the doctor came, parking his car outside the gates and walking discreetly across the courtyard and over to the garden room. He was a short man with a thick moustache but he was clever, gracious, and Lucie didn’t mind him holding her and kissing the back of her neck while they stood behind the storeroom after the goat had been eaten and the Algerians had taken the baby back indoors.
‘Just looking at you, standing there beside the fire, with the baby in your arms, Lucie.’
‘Am I beautiful?’ she asked him, and he kissed her hard then and it almost felt exciting to her, to know that her husband sat in his library deep inside the chateau and here she was outside with the doctor – kissing in the darkness – with the smell of a baby on her hands; new life and loveliness come to them all at last.
Within a week of the naming ceremony, Fatima was out to work in the vineyard with the men. There was a little money to be made on the land and Lucie agreed that Fatima should do it. On the Monday morning, Lucie stood in the doorway and waved her off and then she peeked into the blanket in her arms to see a little more of the honey-coloured cheek.
Dr Clareon said Lucie would never be able to have a child. But he so looked forward to her weekly consultations. He told her that she needn’t be frightened or haunted any more; this memory of cuts he could wipe with pills that would keep her feeling upbeat and alive. He also gave her something to sleep. She would need to be strong, he said, because the Algerian family needed her now to care for their child.
So Lucie focused on the child in the house, she relished the nesting; she fattened herself, and she took the pills. In the nursing chair she sung lullabies and when Baseema was sleeping she trotted up and down the stairs with washing, and clean towels, and cot sheets, and warm bottles of milk. She became an expert at making things last – using what was left of the meat to make soup and stew and thick casseroles and soon it would be harvest time and then they would be able to live more off the land. She was busy out in the courtyard too, planting fruit trees; pruning the fig.
‘The yield on the fig tree will be tremendous,’ she whispered to Fatima one evening. ‘You just wait and see how much wonderful fresh food we will have here to feed us.’
Fatima was reticent. But she was flattered by all the attention and her heart softened to Lucie’s advances. Soon it was easy for Lucie to spend almost all day walking around with Baseema in her arms.
‘It’s like I’ve got my own child,’ she said to the doctor, when she went to visit him for her weekly check-up. He checked her pulse and kissed her wrist. He checked her breathing and his fingers teased the lobes of her ears. Doctor Clareon kept the shutters closed for her Friday appointment, and Lucie sat in the chair beside his desk while he kissed her and she ran through her mind the list of all the things she would need from the shops. Once or twice he got a little carried away; his hands became hot and he asked her to stay. But then, very quickly, he righted himself. The best thing about the doctor was that he did have this self-control and that was what Lucie loved about him – he was precise with his fingers, and neat and always controlled. And so she allowed herself to be petted in his chair. She gave him fifteen, twenty minutes; sometimes he wanted thirty. And then he slipped behind the curtain and pulled it across the bed while he took his trousers down and re-emerged a better man, he said; lighter in spirit, and mind.
In the village, of course, they all knew about the Algerian child and how Lucie was fast adopting it. In the café, the men who drank with Arnaud said his wife appeared to be thriving on it. Arnaud was getting bigger. His hair was long and straggly beneath his cap. He worked all day and he drank at night. ‘When a woman is happy she cooks like a demon,’ he said to the men in the bar. And so it became known in the village that Lucie Borja had a sense of purpose and cooked like a demon, and she tended a fruitful garden.
One by one, at the gate, the women started to appear. They came with ices. One or two of them even came to the chateau for lunch and they went to some trouble, she could see that, to choose an outfit and style their hair.
But something wasn’t quite right. It was as if Lucie was trying too hard and the pressure she exerted made the women feel hot and thirsty. Always, she would be waiting for them, in a pristine pastel-coloured dress and cardigan, waiting for her guests on the top step, her eyes like beads. Down she would rush and come to meet them, chattering nineteen to the dozen, offering her cold little hands and compliments. Everything they said she agreed with emphatically, which was unsettling for these country women, and strange. Like children themselves they would be ushered through the hallway and out through the echoing kitchen to where the garden table was laid with a white cloth and covered in shiny fruit tartlets and sticky buns she had slaved over – and then the baby there, on display, but tucked up in a pram in the shade.
‘Non-stop, she talks,’ said the women when they got back, at last, to their houses at dusk and gathered for a quick discussion.
‘She won’t draw breath.’
‘She dashes about, in and out of the kitchen, and she does all the work herself, slaving and slaving over the food. It’s a wonder she doesn’t run herself in.’
‘Lord knows why she doesn’t use the Algerian woman, Fatima.’
‘It seems the charwoman has risen ranks in the chateau.’
They laughed. ‘She bathes, don’t you know; she was in the bath while we were having tea. It seems Lucie and she are friends!’
For the women, of course, in their grubby little kitchens, the talk lingered. Seditious and secretive as a second helping of chocolate sauce, it brought them together in an animated huddle, then drove them apart; each time the temptation strengthening their bond. And so it went on, month after month that first year and the next, shutters flipping open in the wall overlooking the chateau garden. Eyes that were trained to stay low in any case, looked once, twice, took it all in. Scarves were adjusted, shutters closed. They kept shoulder to shoulder on their way back from the post office, their baskets rubbing, their skirts swishing into each other as they whispered and veered off towards the fish van parked in the square.
For these women of the village, it was
a way of speaking about themselves without saying ‘I’. It was a way of laughing together, warming themselves on the inside while looking appalled on the out. It was affirmation, unification in spite.
The truth was that life in the chateau was simple and routine those first few years of Baseema’s life. Fatima was a fine, hardworking woman with a sweet smile who was glad of Lucie’s kindness and companionship – the more so when her husband and his brother returned to Algeria to fight for the liberation of the people. The two men went to speak to Arnaud about it in his library. They told him they had no choice but to return to their village.
Financially, Arnaud was in a slightly better position by then. He was making some money at last in the vineyard, and he had joined forces with other winemakers in the hills and was proving himself among them as a robust and astute businessman. He cared little for the domestic arrangements in the house – these days the women were all on one floor and Arnaud slept alone in his study at night.
Lucie knew that her husband was quite content that she was absorbed in something that didn’t involve him. The day-to-day demands of a four-year-old kept her cocooned from the wider concerns of their world and for the moment at least, that suited him fine. Lucie knew too that he was relieved to have seen her finding a friend in Fatima. Four winters, four summers and the two women working together in the cold and the heat, taking care of the baby girl, telling stories to soothe her at night, whispering, singing, their hands moving together in the moonlight. One wouldn’t have known that one was the server, the other being served.
Fatima liked to sing the songs she learnt as a child. Desert songs she called them. Crooning at the sink. They rolled up their sleeves together. Lucie showed Fatima how to curl her hair. Baseema skipped in between them. Lucie loved this little girl and her soft fat cheeks more than she had loved anyone and the thought that Fatima might take her daughter back to Algeria because of the deteriorating political situation was too much for her to bear. Time and again she mentioned the benefits of a French education, and extolled the virtues of the small local school. Fatima listened and nodded a lot but it was clear that things in Algeria were not improving and at some point, she said, she and Baseema would be returning to their home.
But then, soon after Baseema’s fifth birthday, Fatima became unwell. Dr Clareon diagnosed tuberculosis, and suggested they move her out of the house and into the garden room.
It was Lucie herself who put the table and chair in there, a low bed, a vase of fresh flowers on the sill. Fatima was laid on the bed while Lucie sat at the table, arranging the flowers in the vase, her bottom pert on the chair.
From the fire the smell of sweet vine smoke filled the room. Lucie insisted on having the fire. Even in the heat of summer.
‘Surely?’ said Fatima, turning to the fire, looking aghast.
But Lucie said the doctor had told her to keep the fire burning for as long as the fever burnt. She didn’t say why. The doctor had put medications on the bedside table. And a bottle of linctus she could take in a hot tea.
Lucie sat with the patient and she thought about how grasshoppers were larger than ever that summer. Huge and monstrous; they clung to the window ledges and reached into the rooms with their antennae. Fatima barely noticed. Poor Fatima. So ill she got, so fast.
As it turned out, the medication wasn’t quite strong enough to destroy the bacteria that had formed in the woman’s weak lungs.
The doctor consoled Lucie. When he came up to the chateau, he held her in the garden room and told her she mustn’t blame herself. Fatima lay in the bed like a wraith now; all the fat from her limbs was gone and only her bones seemed to be there. The weight dropped off with such alarming speed; it was as if she were being rubbed out of the picture.
‘Which she was,’ said the women of the village, as they bustled into Mass on the day after the funeral. ‘She absolutely was!’
Lucie feared the bad luck that spilled out of the chateau walls.
She took the child round and round the garden. They collected flowers; they ran together in the vineyard.
Lucie cried, quite quickly, in the doctor’s chair and she told him that she would always be haunted by Fatima’s sweet face in the garden room, the look in the poor woman’s eyes, that brown hand trying to stifle a cough. It was so hot in the room, and the sweat had burst from them both. Lucie had herself closed Fatima’s eyelids and held her hand to the open gasping mouth, she told the doctor, who kissed her and held her and wrote her another prescription so that she could sleep easier at night.
‘You have a job to do now,’ he said. She had to be strong and eat and get on. ‘You’re a mother,’ he told her.
‘Yes,’ she whispered, with courage in her heart.
‘That’s the only thing that matters now.’
And Lucie agreed and was consoled by this and so she allowed him to lay her down on his bed behind the curtain and she found that the pills he gave her to keep her strong took the edge off the shock and the pain of penetration and the doctor was ever so grateful for her – the little neck, the sweet Parisian face – and the first time he lay on the bed above her and thrust and thrust with his trousers round his knees and he cried out in bliss.
Soon after, Baseema was moved into the master bedroom and she slept now on a little bed in the window with the porcelain doll Lucie ordered from Paris.
Out they bundled on a Friday morning and when the doctor called Lucie in for her consultation, Baseema remained in the waiting room for close to an hour playing with her doll under the sympathetic watch of the receptionist.
And if anyone had asked her, Lucie would say that the doctor had only ever been a trusted and loyal friend in a place where people were mostly cold and hostile to her. Mercifully, the doctor was able to advise her on so many things. He agreed, when she voiced her fears about it, that Baseema should probably wait another year before attending school and that, in the meantime, Lucie should continue just to enjoy all the time that they spent together in the chateau and out in the garden. Arnaud was never around.
If there was one thing that he asked, it was that Lucie found someone in the village to take her, just on a Friday morning, so that they wouldn’t have to rush behind the curtain, leaving the child sitting quite conspicuously with the receptionist in the waiting room outside.
5
Lucie wasn’t able to find anyone in the village to look after her. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them. It was more to do with the fact that the village women had other children – their homes were small and dirty and full of noise – and she worried that Baseema might prefer it there, might become used to the noise and the activity of other children and that this would bring about the first in a series of psychological separations that Lucie would be unable to bear. She was a woman in her own right now. She felt pretty in her Mrs America kitchen, reaching up on points in her full swinging skirts. In the evenings she made her clothes; by day she cleaned her house and played with her child. She made food that pleased her husband; she even had the women in the village to tea. So what need had she of the doctor and his Friday morning fumblings behind the white curtain? What need had she of all those mind-numbing pills?
So Lucie took the last of her pills and then Friday came and she would get through it alone.
The doctor didn’t call. He was a gentleman through and through and he didn’t come at the weekend.
On Saturday night she was bright as a button and she cooked a splendid feast for Arnaud. She sat with him in the library and chatted to him while she sewed. He sat and stared at the fire, listening to the radio and ploughing on through his bottle of wine, barely noticing a thing. No question his wife was more attentive, was chattier to him, and sweet. No question he was being fed like a king and waited on by a woman who seemed to enjoy making herself a slave.
They listened to the wind in the trees that night. They sipped the brandy by the fire. Then Arnaud said his intention was to bring her sister Marie down to the village for the summer.
A fortnight later, Arnaud carried Lucie into the surgery because by then she had got so weak and frail she could barely walk alone.
The doctor was appalled. He stood up very quickly from behind his desk and his face was white as the wall.
‘She’s done this to herself,’ Arnaud whispered in the doctor’s ear. ‘She got some news she didn’t like and this was how she responded. Her sister in Paris has a son. She didn’t know.’
‘When did she last eat?’ asked the doctor, bending down beside his patient at once to check the pulse.
Lucie’s mouth was dry and cracked at the corners. When she opened her mouth, the cuts opened and bled.
‘My husband has a son,’ she said. ‘He’s coming here in the summer to stay with us.’
‘Of course it’s not my son,’ he hissed at his wife while the doctor stood as if to intervene. ‘You’re talking nonsense, Lucie. If you had something in your stomach…’
Arnaud picked up the pills from the chemist and he sat with Lucie in the car while she swilled them back. Then he drove his family back to the chateau and for a few days things were back to normal. Every Friday the doctor came to the chateau to see Lucie and he would adjust the medication as was required.
Lucie took her pills and she got a lot of rest. She kept Baseema close to her, day and night. Soon things began to feel better. It was June. It was possible that it might even be fun to have a little boy about the chateau. Someone else for Lucie to mother as perfectly as she did Baseema, another reason to get the chateau shipshape as soon as she possibly could.
Lucie had Baseema. Marie had Paul. Fair’s fair, said Lucie to herself as she hung up the bed sheets on the line in the garden. Fair’s fair, she sang to herself as she went back into the cool of her house and busied herself, humming, and made the lunch.
We All Ran into the Sunlight Page 8