We All Ran into the Sunlight

by Natalie Young

  In terms of a husband, Lollo was the first and easiest choice of the boys in the village. He loved her instantly. His mouth fell open when she spoke to him. Her thick hair spilled around her shoulders and she told him about her money. They bought a house in the village. It was right on the square. Right in the centre of everything.

  ‘Arnaud Borja is very, very rich,’ she told everyone at the wedding reception. She was drinking, getting carried away. ‘He’s so rich he can have whatever he wants in the whole world.’

  She told them how impressive the Borjas were, how kind they had been to her. She drank back the wine. She was free now. She could make up everything.

  To all intents and purposes, Baseema had merely been the carrier, never the mother, and no one knew even that. Everyone believed what they’d been told. Even she almost believed it. The alternative was so unreal.

  The story went that at the age of fourteen, Baseema had gone to Paris to live with the brother of Arnaud Borja and she had studied there and gone to a local school in return for helping at the weekends with his children. During this time, Lucie Borja had finally given birth to a child which was a surprise to everyone, because no one at all had seen her in the village and assumed that she had also gone to Paris. When the child was one, Baseema had ‘come back’ to help them. Of course, by then the Borjas were rich and successful; the chateau was gorgeous; they could have had anyone to care for their child. It was Baseema they wanted, though. She was kind and willing and had lost none of her lovely charm. And so the girl was brought down from the tower room where she’d really been all year, with Lucie in the room next door, and she became the nanny who also happened to be nursing the child. Then things got complicated. Of course they did. Lucie wanted Daniel all to herself. It was time for Baseema to pack her bags and leave.

  She was tall and graceful on her wedding day, narrow-waisted, her hair in a thick glossy plait down her back. She was paler than she had been as a child. Still a deep olive colour but paler somehow, almost white from the neck up.

  ‘Such a beautiful child, wasn’t she?’

  ‘But no, she still is.’

  ‘She was more beautiful as a child.’

  ‘She was wrapped in cotton wool.’

  The women were talking across her. Everywhere they talked. It was the big village subject. One was rubbing the top of her breast, her glistening breasts nearly out of her dress. It was a hot, black night. The children were running around the fountain. The fire leaping beneath a vat of food. Monsieur and Madame Borja were helping Daniel lift the bolt to shut the gates behind them. They had been for a drink and now they were leaving.

  Baseema closed her eyes when they shut the gates. She was out. Daniel was in. He was theirs. She had got her freedom. She turned to look at the house the money had bought her. It was a fine and handsome house. She had a fine handsome man. She was still a child herself. What good would she have been to Daniel then? They had told her that: all over France people do this. There are some people who are lucky enough to have a child. There are others who can’t. We share the seeds. This was what they had told her. We share the seeds.

  But Lucie Borja had become very pale, very thin by then. She scuttled about in the village, her black eyes wide and haunted, her shoulders hunched and her hair oddly sprung on top of her head, as if even the curls on her head had tightened in the static tension of her atmosphere.

  In the épicerie the women said that Lucie Borja was paranoid, a fantasist; she believed some people were coming to try to take her little boy away. That was why she never let him out, nor let anyone in. She talked to the birds in the courtyard. She thought the birds were women. Dressed in black. Chattering about her. She dressed Daniel up like a prince. He had black beautiful curls and pale blue eyes. He took people’s breath away. But Lucie wouldn’t let them linger. She was furtive and always suspicious. Scuttling away from everything before anyone had a chance to talk to her, to ask her what on earth was wrong.

  Only once she was married and out of the chateau did Baseema begin to understand just how much the Borjas were disliked in the village. She drank this knowledge in and she settled into the village house and within a month of the wedding she was pregnant. This time it was easier. She knew what was happening and she threw herself into life as a housewife, keeping everything neat and organised, and she threw herself into life as a wife and she tried not to think about Daniel.

  Within a year, Frederic was born and Sylvie followed soon after. Lollo’s parents had moved into the village house with them and the life of cooking and washing and cleaning and managing a household of six was easy enough.

  There was warmth and comfort to be found in her family. Lollo’s parents were old and frail but they were kind people, and she found that she enjoyed looking after them. They delighted in the children growing rapidly at their feet. And Lollo was kind too: hardworking and quiet and kind. Uncomplicated was the word she used to describe him to herself. Unfussy. Mostly, she was grateful. He worked well in the café and was regularly seen out in the square with his children, playing with them when he had the time, letting them sit up at the bar and drink ice-cold drinks on summer afternoons. Frederic grew rapidly one summer and this became a source of pride to them all. He could help his father with the crates in the café, and Sylvie entertained them all with her sweet little songs and her skipping about at sundown in the square. Baseema tried not to think about Lucie and Arnaud and Daniel behind the chateau wall. She found you could make yourself good at being practical and then push yourself to work until you were tired. It was all a question of discipline; learning how to control the mind. Sometimes it slipped, on the long-hot afternoons. And sometimes, when Lollo had closed the café and driven his wife and children out to the vineyard to sit and eat with the boot open and the radio playing, he would see his wife wander off and crouch down in the dirt and beat her fists on the ground there, which was her way of stifling the urge she had to cry.

  It was a simple life but it was a good life. It was fine.

  People said what a good father Lollo was. And what a brilliant housewife Baseema was. Her hair pinned up on her long neck, a crisp white apron on over her pretty summer dresses. They all admired her in the village; the way she would carry two children on her hips and never even sweat. She would carry a basket of logs, drive the truck to market in her pretty dresses. She was strong, people said, as a horse.

  When she was fourteen she had learnt from the Borjas that women had to be strong. Strong and fit as horses. And that is precisely what she became.

  3

  13th March 2006

  From: sylviepépin@aol.fr

  To: Baseemapépin@aol.fr

  Subject: For Sale?

  Thanks for your message. Yes, I did get the cream. Coco is better now and I’ve started her on those biscuits you can get at the supermarket which are meant to be a bit better than the tins. She quite likes tuna now which is a relief because a massive delivery of stuff came into the shop which was almost out of date and so they put them all on special and me and Coco brought a stack load. It’s all we’ve eaten for a month now, tins of tuna and salmon mashed up with mayonnaise!

  But… I was cleaning in the Mayor’s office this morning and no one was in and so I answered the phone, which they like me to do from time to time when I can. It’s nice to sit at the desk and think for a moment that I might be working in an office. I picked up the phone and said, Mayor’s office, hello, and a man was on the end of the phone. He sounded a bit foreign but he asked in French if it was true that Lucie Borja had died and that the chateau was going up for sale. I asked him who was calling but he didn’t want to leave a name. He just made a coughing noise like people do when they don’t know what else to say and then he put the phone down. Of course I knew who it was. You don’t need a face to remember a voice. And I checked out the number – Paris, for sure. I know it was Daniel, Ma. But I will try to do some investigations when I get a minute. Kate is lovely, so chic and funny. She is free in spiri
t and mind, Ma. She even lies down by the road sometimes. When she laughs I feel myself come alive.

  As for your question about Lucie Borja. Well, yes, she died in Paris. She lived with her nephew, Paul, in an attic room above his flat. I don’t know where it was but I’m sure I can find an address. Apparently she fled there on the night of the fire and stayed there all these years. We don’t know how she died. Old age probably. Grief?

  I’ll keep you posted.

  xSylvie

  p.s I was cleaning out my wardrobe the other day because of a funny smell in there and I came across that bin liner of material that Lucie left out in the entrance to the church all those years ago. It made me stop for a moment or two. I sank down on my knees and pushed my hands into the bag, pulling all this old cloth out that was all full of holes. Poor Madame Borja. Do you remember that summer of the village sewing competition that we ran through the shop? Everyone knew that despite her initial enthusiasm, she couldn’t face it after all and everyone knew how she’d crept out in the middle of the night leaving all that cloth in the plastic bags outside the church. How people sniggered, I remember. Do you remember how everyone came to the café and talked about it? How they all laughed. And we divided the cloth among us. Some got on with the business of making things. Others just stuffed the bags to the backs of their wardrobes and forgot all about it.

  It’s like that in every village I suppose. Sniggerers, makers, stufferers to the back of things – faithfuls, atheists, hypocrites maybe. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Maybe we’re all a combination of all of these things. But the makers are the best, Ma. The makers who get on with the business of doing things. Maybe if I’d bothered to make myself a beautiful dress that day then Daniel might have loved me back; he might have loved me when I was lovable and then I might have been saved. Which makes me sound like an idiot. I know! Maybe I’ll take the cloth round to Kate and ask if she can sew. I think she’s quite good with her hands. She looks like she can turn her hand to anything at all. She’s a maker, Ma. I think she might have been a stufferer to the back of things. But down here I think she’s becoming a maker. She has one of those faces that tells you everything that’s going on inside. It’s fascinating to me.

  At lunchtime, the guests came in from the mountains and tramped into the steaming dining room for bowls of hot soup, for cassoulet, and wine. Baseema moved about the dining room, answering questions, chatting about the walking conditions outside. At one of the tables, a woman leant over and said how last time she had been here it was December and the light had been disappointing and their guide had taken them off the trail and into the middle of nowhere. How frightening it was, she said, being lost like that, and the light fading, their bright suits disappearing in the snow.

  ‘Here’s to being safe and warm,’ said Baseema and the woman with the small diamonds in her ears took Baseema’s hands and held them in her own. It was remarkable really, to think how far she had come.

  At half one, the new cleaner rang to say she had gone down with the flu and so Baseema rolled up her sleeves, working through the bedrooms and the bathrooms at speed.

  Room number 6 was the one she lingered in. It was the room belonging to the journalist and his girlfriend from Paris. Everywhere their lives were strewn and Baseema worked quickly, carefully folding the cashmere sweaters and putting things away with her mind, as she always did when she was working, completely in neutral, and without the destructive need some parents had to make comparisons between other people’s offsprings’ lives and their own.

  In the bathroom, she replaced the lid on a shiny pink lipstick. She rinsed the paste off two electric brushes, and stood them up in the rack. She rinsed the water glasses and stripped the sheets right back, letting the satin bedspread slide down to the floor. Baseema wiped the surface of the plasma screen television, used the remote to direct it back into the wall. She moved about silently, picked up a novel on one side of the bed, a small white clock, a tin of sea-kelp lip balm, a pair of pink silk knickers twisted up in a corner of the room. There were bottles of water everywhere, on the bedside table, on the desk with the writing paper and the pen laid out. A hairdryer discarded. Bottles of perfume, massage oil from Provence. Two passports in the drawer.

  But how careless people were with their precious things, Baseema thought, opening the passports, running her fingers over the pictures of the blonde thing grinning and the doe-eyed man frowning at the camera as if he had seen too much of the truth and now carried on his shoulders all the weight in the world.

  Lollo said he was going to leave her. He had a friend, he said, who ran a bingo club in northern Spain. Tossa del Mar. This was on Tuesday. He was lying with his arms up above his head on the sofa. He heaved himself upwards and switched the volume down suddenly. On the television there were elephants walking around an enclosure.

  ‘I’m going.’

  He said it louder.

  ‘I’m going, Baseema…’

  Then she laughed. Which was almost fatal. She was rearranging the flowers on the table behind him. He stood up from the sofa and let the blanket slide to the floor. He walked slowly around behind the sofa; the elephants were being hosed behind him. She thought he was going to lunge at her and she backed away. But he didn’t do anything. He simply stood where he was and let the tears soak his face.

  ‘I shall make you some coffee,’ she said, and she was in a panic – she might have slipped; she was wearing stockings without shoes and the carpet on the stairs was worn thin and smooth. Instead she went into the kitchen rolling the cream wool of her sweater up over her mouth.

  Behind her she could hear him kicking something, the wall perhaps, and she felt suddenly ashamed. It was the Borjas he hated, her he was merely frustrated with. But Baseema felt responsible. There had to be another way.

  She would say something about it, acknowledge the pain at least. She waited until the morning. He was hungover then, more slunk in the sofa. She took him some breakfast on a tray; fresh croissants she had been over to the kitchen for, and a bowl of steaming chocolate.

  Lollo sat up but he wouldn’t eat. His face was grimy and white, his eyes like pieces of grit.

  ‘We had a life there, Baseema!’

  Suddenly she felt too heavy to continue. She put the tray down and went off to work.

  19th March 2006

  From: sylviepépin@aol.fr

  To: Baseemapépin@aol.fr

  Subject: For Sale?

  So the Mayor went in with a tall man to have a look around. I think he might have been American. It was so strange to walk past the open gate on the way back from the épicerie and to see the front of the house like that with the olive trees still standing in the courtyard, still growing fruit and leaves. I said to Kate, who came in with me this afternoon, that she should be the one to buy it. Heaven knows if she has that kind of capital, Ma, but she is so creative. She would do something with it.

  I brought her back to my house then and we had coffee together and chatted casually about all sorts of things. She likes to smoke my roll-ups. She liked the way I do them for her. I’ll pay you back, she says. She wants to talk about the chateau too but I don’t say much.

  All day I’ve had this feeling, Maman, that something will come of this and the sale will bring them all back – Lucie, Arnaud, Daniel and Frederic – I mean, I know, it won’t bring Frederic back but maybe, at least, some dignity for us, for his memory.

  Baseema didn’t believe in ghosts. She knew that the sale, when it happened, would bring no one back to the village nor anything new to light. Frederic had died in the bathroom that night. The Borjas had asked her and Lollo to leave because they hadn’t wanted a fuss; they hadn’t wanted an inquiry. Lollo was right. It had been weak, more than weak, of them to have left when asked to. They should have been ashamed of themselves for having been the kind of people who just rolled over and did what people asked them. But in her heart, Baseema understood the indifference of the well-to-do and that this was why Lollo’s beggin
g for a portion of the money to heal an ancient wound was futile. Her meek little question about the will and Daniel’s whereabouts delivered on a doorstep in Paris would be something Madame Borja’s nephew, Paul, living quietly in scented drapery in some genteel apartment, would hear faintly, like a sound heard from the street outside through the window – a call to prayer from the mosque perhaps – that he would barely understand.

  In the cabin that night, she fried a handful of lardons and sprinkled them over the chicory and the spinach leaves, which were dressed already in olive oil. She took his plate downstairs on a tray and sat with him. On the news, they saw a boy being carried between two policemen away from a burning car. Lollo’s face was lifeless beside her. He watched the newsreels and said nothing.

  ‘If working-class people are the onions,’ said Baseema, after a while, ‘then who are these people?’

  He shrugged. He held the sides of his plate in his weak little hands.

  ‘I was thinking you might have a vegetable for them…?’