We All Ran into the Sunlight

by Natalie Young

  He took the book from her and placed it carefully back in its tissue paper and box.

  ‘Do you know that Daniel Borja was my biological son?’ she said finally.

  Paul nodded.

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Yes. I knew.’

  She inhaled slowly through her nose. She wanted to ask him how he knew but it didn’t seem to matter much. Nothing did, in the end. Except money.

  ‘I did see him. When he was a child. I did try to see my son. But Lucie was paranoid that I would try to take him away.’

  Paul nodded. ‘It must have been hard. To be living in the village. And Daniel there, but divided from you by a wall.’

  ‘I was tough, though. A survivor. I have that. I don’t know where it comes from. The desert, perhaps.’

  ‘She said that to me once.’

  ‘About the desert?’

  ‘No. That you had strength.’

  ‘“You’ve a quiet strength, Baseema,” she used to say. With the emphasis on quiet. Believe me, I would have shouted my head off in those walls if I could.’

  ‘She envied it,’ Paul said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The strength. The energy.’

  ‘Perhaps…’

  ‘And that was why she kicked you out?’

  ‘She had got what she wanted. She wanted a child of her own.’

  ‘And you?’

  Baseema was quiet. She looked up towards the windows.

  ‘I had a house in the village. I got married. I had my children. Frederic and Sylvie.’

  Paul said nothing.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what others think of us,’ she whispered. ‘Most people are too busy. But your curiosity for others is unusual and, I think, benign.’

  He shrugged modestly.

  ‘The truth is I did try to see him. When he was small. Daniel was five. I saw him playing, climbing the wall. It was summer and I managed to persuade him to climb over. I gave him my hand. I was so desperate. I would have done anything. From then on, it was ice creams. One every day. And for almost a week we got away with it. We walked together. In the avenue. There were these trees.’ She smiled stiffly.

  Paul nodded.

  ‘It was cool under there. In the height of summer. It was cool in the shade of the trees. Holding his hand as we walked along. I can feel it now. The warm clutch of his hand as we walked along. That hot, solid stickiness. How intelligent he was. His eyes were so blue they startled me. You know? As if he’d been swimming underwater. As if he knew, when he looked at me. As if he knew, and also understood somehow that he couldn’t ever tell.’

  ‘Did he find out who you were?’

  ‘Of course not. In a few days he stopped coming to the wall.’

  ‘Lucie must have seen you.’

  ‘It was Arnaud. He was driving back from town one afternoon. He simply stopped and opened the passenger door. Daniel knocked his ice cream as he climbed into the car. For three weeks I didn’t see him.’

  ‘Almost a summer.’

  ‘For a child, certainly.’

  ‘No one in there but him, Lucie, Arnaud. No one to play with.’

  Paul kept the box in his hand as he switched the light out above their heads. The back of the basement was in darkness now. She followed him back up the stairs. She wanted to tell him then that the reason she had come was nothing to do with the sale of the chateau and the money but about Daniel, to think for once about what had happened that night in the fire, to begin the process of finding a way back to her son. She wanted to tell him she had learnt, her whole life, about getting on; she had managed fine. It was just that…

  He opened what she had thought was a cupboard door at the back of the kitchen. He reached his arm around inside and pulled the step down with his hand.

  ‘Usually we kept the door open, the stairs unfolded. It became quite dangerous for her. Please. It’s ok for you to go up.’

  He followed her up the steps into a narrow room that had been walled off from the flat upstairs and into which the light poured through a tiny skylight above. There was a narrow bed and a chair against the outer wall, a wooden crucifix above the pillow. On the opposite wall was a low shelf with a microwave, a small television, a pile of magazines. There was a pair of black shoes tucked under the shelf. A brown cardigan was folded on the armchair in the centre. A pair of gloves, woollen socks. Baseema stepped over to the armchair and sat down.

  ‘This annexe was used to hide people in the war,’ said Paul.

  Baseema thought for the first time, with a stab of unhappiness, about what Lucie’s life would have been like in the war – the two sisters, working as nurses, using whatever they had to patch and stem and perpetuate life. Now Baseema could perceive how the journey south and her life in Canas with Arnaud had failed her.

  ‘Lucie arrived at the station very broken. My mother was waiting for her. She’d got it into her head that her sister had been abused all those years, living with a man who spent his time outdoors, she always in. Marie and Arnaud had fallen out long before. There was no correspondence for years and years. Then suddenly we had this call. There had been a fire. Daniel had gone. Lucie was leaving the village and taking the train to Paris. She was leaving for good, she said. The journey took her three whole days. She was in such a terrible state. She had this bald patch at the back of her head as if she’d plucked her own hair out. We thought she would simply disintegrate. We brought her back here and Lucie quite fell into my mother’s arms, I remember.’

  Baseema was listening to the silence in the room. She could hear water gurgling in the pipes; outside the muffled roar of cars. In winter it would be cold up here.

  She put a hand on her heart and rubbed at the skin, but the look of pain on her face was hard to disguise.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You have gone quite pale.’

  ‘It’s just strange,’ said Baseema, ‘for me to be here.’ She stood for a moment looking into his eyes with her fingers pressed to her mouth. In her mind she saw the lizard up here – white and small – drying out.

  In the kitchen, she picked up her coat. Paul stood to one side, smiling shamefully at the floor. Something had been said between them that should have remained buried.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, blinking at the back of her. ‘I wonder what you would have said to her had she been here.’

  ‘Quite simple,’ said Baseema, knotting the silk scarf at her neck again. But she didn’t continue. The sun had gone in now and the kitchen was grim and brown. She felt cold suddenly.

  ‘I’ve seen Daniel. He’s here, Baseema. In Paris.’

  Baseema cleared her throat. ‘I would like very much to see him.’

  Baseema rang Lollo to let him know where she was and that she was safe. The phone was in a vandal-resistant aluminium booth.

  ‘Where are you?’

  There was silence on the end of the phone.

  ‘Lollo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you find the soup?’

  ‘Yes, I found the soup.’

  She put the phone back on its hook then, quietly, without saying a word. She stood for a moment with her hands on her handbag, her chin tilted up to the ceiling.

  Arab cunts. Fuck the cunts. She dialled the number again. He picked up. His voice was weak and slow.

  ‘Lollo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lucie died here in Paris. She fell down the stairs. She left the chateau to Daniel. Nobody else was mentioned in the will. Not even Paul Prevost, her nephew.’

  ‘Does he know where Daniel is?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Baseema. She felt her heart beat a little faster. ‘Daniel is here. He lives and works in Paris.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In a restaurant on Boulevard St Michel.’

  Lollo’s voice wasn’t menacing, only flat, without life.

  ‘You will see him.’

  ‘Yes. Tomorrow. I want to.’<
br />
  ‘He’ll manipulate you.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘No one is innocent. You romanticise him.’

  ‘Everyone does.’

  ‘It stinks.’

  ‘He knows that Lucie died. He knows the chateau has passed to him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He has not been in touch since.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Paul says he is a kind person. Calm. He suggests I try to write to him.’

  ‘Write to him?’

  ‘To get my thoughts down. In order. It’s easier to say what one feels.’ But she felt no need to go on. ‘Bye,’ she said. ‘Night.’ And then she put the phone down. p

  Right up until the time they had moved away from Canas, life with Lollo had been fine. He was a quiet, hardworking man – soft as skin; sallow, harmless, with little black eyes and features that were small and close together. He had occasional but very occasional bouts of nastiness that had him rearing up to snap and writhe – like a small snake – before falling back and sinking, deep into the listless quiet of himself. The emotional bruises she got from these outbursts weren’t bad, and they were few and far between. After these episodes he barely said a word. Simply went to work at dawn and came home again for lunch with her and Frederic and Sylvie, then went back out again to work. Life was quite normal. The children were mostly happy; they did what all children did, which was play and wander and try to explore. They chattered a lot and watched TV when it got too hot to go out and they hung out in the square with the other children who played around the fountain. Frederic liked to go out to the vineyard and ride the machines. He was a tall and silent boy who loved his family and his collection of bugs in the yard. Weeks went by. Autumn gave into winter. Winter folded away. The village was quiet; time there moved in its own gentle rhythm; it held her in.

  Sometimes, she wondered if Lollo’s outbursts had something to do with the weather. High winds on the hillside got to him, and he’d stop at the bar with the wind still howling in his ears.

  So there was the work, and then the bar. Then there was coming home. That was what Baseema thought the problem was: the stimulation, the testosterone of men pent up their whole lives inside themselves with nothing and no way out and then them coming into the kitchen with it all hanging out and electric, looking for a fight. She could tell what was coming from the way he tried to cover up what he was feeling by whistling. He looked smaller than ever on these nights. When he was trying to look big. She’d never realised how small his features were, how feminine his nose. Right away she would make him coffee and then lock the door to the bedroom and turn the television up. Once or twice, he kicked at the door.

  But life was difficult at times for everyone. The point was to look at it positively. And, generally speaking, life in the village was comfortable, and familiar and fine. Then Frederic’s behaviour and his way of walking became the topic of conversation in every little kitchen, whispering and sniping behind the yellow mosquito screens, windows open to let the cooler air in; no one knew how their voices carried – no one in the village had any idea of the damage they were doing – silly women always doing their whispering…

  And because Baseema was a perkier, more sensitive person than people gave her credit for, she started hearing a few too many stories about her son, about his friend at the chateau, about her husband the café owner and the looks of disdain he gave his own boy, and it was round about then – Frederic in puberty – that she discovered the needles of shame underneath his bed and how bad it could be when they dug right in and needled away, needling a person back through all kinds of other shameful moments.

  Everyone knew that if you told someone they were this or that often enough, they would become this or that. And when she heard the villagers saying how she was either crazy or ought to be ashamed, turning her eye from the two teenage boys who were spending so much time together, she found the shame guiding her into town to spend half of the money her husband brought home on food for the family, on nicer clothes and shoes, on skincare, and six francs in the salon de coiffure having the shame styled out of her or herself styled out of the shame, so she could drive home and walk into that house and see her husband sitting there – he was a stupid man, even stupider than her.

  For a long time that night, Baseema sat with her ankles crossed on the crisp cotton sheets on the bed. In her hand she held the address that Paul had given her for the restaurant on the Left Bank where Daniel worked. Boulevard St. Michel. ‘He’s a nice guy,’ Paul had said. She had already asked the concierge how long it would take her to get there, how much time she would have before her train back to the south. Paul said he was a nice-looking man – ‘easy-going’. He had tried to describe the face but it could been have been anyone. Baseema felt that perhaps it would have been best to write to him first. Not turn up unannounced. Not squeeze him in between taxi and train. He’s very calm, Paul had said. ‘I imagine that he would take it in his stride.’

  But would she? That was the thing that worried her. Baseema stared through the ring of soft light from the lamp on the ceiling. From time to time, cars roared past outside with music pumping from their stereos. In the closet her suit was hanging, soft and old, and her green shoes would never do. She tried to think of what she would write to Daniel. For hours she ran it through her mind.

  If she didn’t go in the morning then she would have to face Lollo with her failure as soon as she returned. She hated him. But hate was easy. It was love that was hard. She should write that to Daniel, she thought. But how could she write that? What a thing to say. No, her green shoes would never do. And besides, she knew from her own experience how busy things got in a restaurant. Daniel was busy, and she needed some time.

  5

  From the Pyrenees it took Baseema only three hours. She had got back without seeing Lollo and taken the car. She would ring him from Canas. Then she was purring along the avenue of trees, headlights on, seeking out, between the trunks of plane trees, glimpses of the old chateau wall. There were holes and lichen growing; all was dark.

  She parked in the square. There was no one around. The café was closed, a single streetlight shining on the zinc tables piled high beside the doorway. The air was warm. Baseema switched the lights off and sat for a moment, listening to the tick and whirr of the engine as it cooled.

  The car door shut behind her and she locked it up. She was wearing the trouser suit with the green shoes but she had managed to bring some clean shirts, another pair of trousers. She stood still and heard the water trickle in the fountain.

  A new streetlight had been put up outside the church of Saint Perpetua and just a few of the houses had been repainted, some with lights in the eaves above the doors. Things had been patched up. There was a new awning over the café, a new bench outside the Mayor’s office, other benches dotted about. There was less memory, less of her life here.

  At the Pépin house she knocked, once and then again.

  Sylvie was there in a black tracksuit with the hood up around her head. She sniffed and dragged a finger under her nose. It was red and puffy. It looked as if she had been crying. She burst, with her sleeves over her hands, onto Baseema’s shoulders. Baseema inhaled the warmth of Sylvie’s small body and buried her head.

  ‘They’re gone, Ma,’ said Sylvie feebly.

  Baseema pulled back and focused her eyes on Sylvie’s.

  ‘The English couple, Ma. Kate and Stephen. Her mother died and they went back to London. She hasn’t come back. I liked her being here.’

  In the kitchen, Baseema stood at the sideboard and sipped the thimble of wine Sylvie had poured. She looked at the bin in the corner, the soda cans spilling onto the floor. Sylvie kept the hood up around her head and she pushed the glasses up on her nose as she bent down to the oven. In the sweatshirt she was wearing there were rings of sweat under her arms. She put some rock music on quietly and clomped about the kitchen in her boots. From the fridge she peeled back the clingfilm from a tin of an
chovies and stuck her nose in.

  ‘What makes you think they won’t come back?’ said Baseema, after a while.

  ‘Mr Glover hated it here. He’s the husband. He was jealous.’

  ‘Of what, Sylvie?’

  ‘Us, Ma. The quiet peaceful life she found here!’

  ‘And the chateau?’

  ‘An agent came. They locked it back up with a new chain around the gates.’

  Sylvie shook salt onto her chips and put one in her mouth. She didn’t look at her mother when she ate and the chips were hot so she chewed them fast with her mouth open. There was a jar of mayonnaise on the table, which Baseema tried and failed to open. She put the jar back on the table and told Sylvie about Paul.

  ‘Under French law if the owner dies then the property is passed to the children.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sylvie, blinking rapidly as her father did as she looked up into her room. ‘I know all about French law, Ma, you don’t need to tell me. And so Daniel will come back because he will have to, won’t he? Whoever buys the chateau, Daniel will have to come back to sign a paper or something. I did want the Glovers to like it.’

  ‘Someone will buy it,’ said Baseema soothingly. ‘Someone will buy it but, in the meantime, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’

  Sylvie was staring, her mouth hanging open. After a while, she got up from the table and went and sat down with the dog.

  ‘You want ice cream?’

  ‘No, love, I’m fine.’

  ‘If you’re here to tell me you left him, Ma, then spare me the details, ok?’

  ‘That’s not why I’m here.’

  Sylvie sighed. ‘In which case we can talk tomorrow. I’m tired. And Coco needs to pee.’

  Baseema gathered up the dishes. She put them in the sink, running water from the tap until she got something that felt hot. She rinsed and filled the cloth with hot water and then rubbed at the plates and the pile of chipped ceramic bowls until they were clean. Then she stacked them on the draining board and wiped behind the sink, over the rusty tap; she cleaned the shelf behind the sink, removed a spoon from where it had stuck to the shelf, and wiped it clean.