We All Ran into the Sunlight

by Natalie Young

  She took the Spanish plates off the wall and refilled the sink, plunging the plates into water that was hot and soapy, and which covered her hands and wrists; she held the plates down there for a minute or two (they had been a wedding present to her and Lollo) and she tried to remember who had given them but the name was gone; there was only the object left – old and sticky, meaning nothing to Sylvie and nothing to her mother. She turned back to the table, having dried everything on the sideboard, and saw Sylvie had come back in and slumped there, the mass of her hair spread over her arms to sleep.

  It was quite late already but Baseema wasn’t tired. She wiped the crusted legs of the kitchen table, the backs of the chairs. Quietly she stacked the chairs in the corner of the room and moved the dog to its bed by the door. She lit a candle in the window, swept up the dust and the dog hair and then she mopped the floor.

  She cleaned the oven and made a tea; then she sat at the kitchen table to drink it, listening to the rise and fall of Sylvie’s breathing, to the quiet tick of the oven clock. The room was clean. It made her feel better but it was still unsettling to be here.

  She thought of Lollo, she wondered whether he had eaten the food she had left on the stove. She thought of Paul, alone in his cluttered kitchen, some small part of him still listening out perhaps for the cries that no longer came from upstairs. Guilt was something we should all try to live without, she thought, staring hard at the candle that was guttering in the window. She looked at her shoes then, and got up to polish them.

  It was almost midnight but she wasn’t tired and her steps were soundless as she hurried across the square. Sylvie’s dog lumbered behind her, his long nails clicking quietly on the asphalt.

  The air smelt of dust. Baseema turned down the passageway off the square. There was no one around. She drew up silently and she pushed at the iron gates.

  The dog turned itself round and round in a circle. Baseema pushed harder; tried to jump up. She knocked at the chain with her hand. In all her thoughts of returning here there was never this thought of trying to get in, being locked out, unable to break back in. It was simply, in her waking and night dreams, a question of being there, back in the room at the very top or running in the halls. Never had she thought it would take any effort to get in there, nor that she might need a key.

  The gate creaked and the chain rattled but she couldn’t push it open. Baseema straightened her collar and stared down at her shoes. She pictured a little girl running, her velvet hair. Running along the corridors. It was almost as if it wasn’t her, and the memory not something she owned any more.

  She dialled Lollo as soon as she got back to Sylvie’s house.

  ‘Baseema?

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Canas. What’s the matter?’

  There was silence on the end of the phone.

  ‘Lollo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you find the casserole in the freezer?’

  ‘Did you find Daniel in Paris?’

  ‘No.’

  There was silence.

  ‘Sylvie needs to know first, Lollo. I need to spend some time with her. Talk to her a little about it all.’

  ‘Why does she need to know first?’

  ‘Because of what happened that night. And because she’s one of us. She has a right to know first.’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘So I don’t know when I’ll be back. They all know at the hotel.’

  ‘At?’

  ‘At the hotel.’

  ‘They all know what?’

  ‘That I’m here. That I’ve come to Canas.’

  ‘That’s fine then,’ he said and put the phone down.

  6

  Three days later, Baseema was on her knees polishing the wooden stairs outside the door to Sylvie’s room.

  ‘It’s too much, Maman. What you’re doing here. It’s breaking your back!’

  Sylvie was standing, halfway down the stairs. Her hair was wet and combed down her face in a thin black curtain.

  ‘I haven’t seen you all day. Where have you been?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re doing it. Every room in this house is being changed… I don’t understand. This was meant to be a holiday for you.’

  Sylvie pushed her glasses up with a finger and went into her room.

  ‘I thought it could do with a freshening-up. Thought I’d do it all in one hit to surprise you. You’re not pleased?

  ‘Well, I’ve never seen it look quite like this, I guess.’

  Baseema looked around at her efforts, tried to see how clean the windows were, how shiny the tiled floor of the bedroom and the look of the white tablecloth on the round table in the window, the crystal vase of fresh-cut roses, the light clear in the water, pale green stems.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Sylvie, laughing. She pointed to the turquoise and blue silk cushions piled up where there used to be a falling down armchair with a broken seat in the corner. Baseema had chosen a mix of round and square cushions and she had heaped them in a pile for when the sofa came back.

  ‘I’m getting the seat fixed, getting it re-covered in cream.’

  Sylvie looked down at her feet. She spoke quietly: ‘Thank you, Maman. It’s like being on “fix your space up”.’

  ‘Tssh!’ said Baseema. ‘I wanted to help.’

  ‘But I didn’t ask for it, did I?’ said Sylvie, suddenly sounding nasty.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Sylvie? Where have you been?’

  ‘To the Mayor’s office. Where else would I have been on a Tuesday morning, Ma?’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so depressed. Is it because the English couple have gone? Is that all this is?’

  Sylvie turned her head defiantly towards the window, the soft puffy jaw striving for an edge. The scars on her face were glistening, almost weeping.

  ‘You don’t live here any more.’

  Baseema played with the gold bangle on her wrist.

  ‘I thought that you were depressed. I wanted to help.’

  ‘But why? What with?’

  ‘With your happiness, Sylvie.’

  ‘I’m fine!’

  ‘You’re not fine.’

  Sylvie was scowling, there was spittle at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. As usual. I’m not fine.’

  ‘You’re on your own.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Are you any less alone, Ma?’

  ‘Sylvie, I…’ Baseema took a step closer to her daughter. But Sylvie backed away.

  ‘Do you remember the cherries dipped in chocolate?’

  ‘The cherries?’

  ‘Sure you do,’ Sylvie said. ‘We were eating them on the night of the fire. Madame Borja’s birthday meal. You brought out a whole big mountain of them. They were Daniel’s favourite food.’

  ‘I didn’t do that, Sylvie. It wasn’t me who was preparing the food here that night. She hired a cook from town, remember?’

  And Sylvie looked confused then and she moved to go downstairs.

  ‘Wait,’ said Baseema. ‘If you had some money, Sylvie. If you suddenly had a lot of money. What would you do?’

  ‘I don’t like to torment myself with thoughts of the lottery, Maman, because what is the point in that?’

  ‘I don’t mean the lottery. I mean, just if you suddenly had some money. A little bit of disposable money.’

  ‘Have a kennel,’ she said. ‘Lots of dogs. Why?’

  ‘Well, because your father wants me to contest Lucie Borja’s will. Come. Downstairs. Let’s have something to eat and then we can talk.’

  Sylvie opened her mouth to speak. ‘I…’

  Baseema ignored her daughter and carried on towards the kitchen. It was when Sylvie had caught up with her and was standing in the doorway that she came out with it. ‘You don’t need to tell me by the way, Ma. It’s just that I… I do know about me and Daniel
and Frederic. I’ve always known that you’re Daniel’s real mother. I was eleven years old when I figured that out.’

  Baseema said nothing.

  ‘Ma?’

  ‘Let’s eat,’ she said quietly.

  Baseema had her food at the kitchen table and tried not to watch her daughter eat. Each mouthful of food she put in her own mouth had a small battle to fight with her simultaneous urge to cry.

  ‘I worked it out. You don’t know this. I was a kid. I came home one day from school in the summer. Papa was shouting at you for spending all your weekend preparing a dish for the Borjas when you should have been thinking instead about us, your own… And then you said about how if it wasn’t for the Borjas you wouldn’t have this house.’

  ‘So, if you knew…?’

  ‘No, I didn’t actually know. Not – swearing on it – know. I didn’t know what that bit meant – and then he said only a woman who loved the Borjas more than her own family would do all the work you did for them…’

  And so Sylvie had thought about it and she’d let it work on her until she understood. That was all there was to it. It didn’t matter much, she said. What mattered now, she said, was that the boys never knew.

  Baseema listened to the oven clock. She took deep, sad breaths. Sylvie had fallen asleep on the sofa worn out by all the crying and the emotion. It was like watching a girl. It was true what she said about herself. That fire had frozen her in time.

  When she had finished her tea Baseema rinsed it in the sink and poured Sylvie a glass of water, which she left beside her on the table. Halfway up the stairs she turned and came back into the kitchen, thinking to move the glass in case Sylvie woke and knocked it over. She found her daughter sitting upright, her left eye wide open and staring, her right eye almost completely closed with salt and sleep.

  ‘I’m going to bed, Sylvie.’

  ‘Thank you, Maman. For coming here. It’s good to have you here with me.’

  Upstairs, Baseema put the torch on the chest of drawers in Frederic’s old room and sat herself on the end of his bed where the dog seemed to have been sleeping in among the piles of clothes Sylvie collected and sorted through for the children at the orphanage in the city. There was a single bed and a chair with the weave fraying in the seat.

  Baseema placed her palms on top of Frederic’s chest of drawers. She remembered the day they had picked it up cheap at the car boot sale outside town – how pleased they had all been to find it with its shiny brass handles – and the mirror Lollo hung above it.

  The light in the room was dim and yellow, the bulb and wicker shade thick with dust. Baseema pushed the shutters open, sitting back on the single bed to take in the view of the chateau and the tower, lit by a streetlamp now, standing tall and proud, like the tower on a toy castle that the boys would have played soldiers in.

  When the breeze came the window closed a little, and Baseema’s eyes swam forward to the glass where her face was momentarily reflected.

  Wearily, she pulled her clothes off and folded them neatly on top of her suitcase. She wondered if Lollo had eaten anything tonight. There was that casserole of pork, tomato and lentils. But she sensed he hadn’t even the energy to lift the lid and sniff the contents, let alone strike a match to the stove. Perhaps he would ignore all of it; simply wander in for another beer and leave the food exactly as she left it. We have to eat, she told him, the first night they arrived there. To move forward at all, you have to forget the past, or at least not think back to that same thing all the time. ‘What’s the point?’ she said. ‘To think of the roses bobbing, the children growing, the quiet square?’ You let things come for a moment and then you let them go.

  When Baseema had brushed her teeth and dragged a comb through her hair, she climbed into bed and wrote her list for the morning. She wrote:

  eye test for Sylvie

  dress for Sylvie

  can of apricot paint for the front door

  floor cleaner, cloths

  comb for the dog

  some face cream for Sylvie

  shampoo

  Again she wondered if Lollo had tasted her casserole. She thought of the cabin with its cosy kitchen, its neat little curtain in the window frame, its reassuring pot on the stove, and its clean slants of morning sunlight carving up the floor. These objects and routines were, she knew, all they had to survive on. And then one day it would all be over; they could fold their lives up, be gone. In the meantime, what they had was days to be filled. And if she’d felt there was anything out there rolling round in the darkness, she would have sent a prayer out for Lollo and Sylvie too, for Daniel and the truth he didn’t know, for the souls of Frederic and her parents who had come here from Algeria and left her here, not knowing any of this.

  7

  For Baseema’s last night in the village, Sylvie wore a cotton dress. Before dinner they decided to go for a drink in the square and take the flowers over to the cemetery.

  It was early evening as they arrived up at the cemetery and the streetlights had come on, flickering white in the empty streets.

  At the gate, Baseema picked up pace and walked through quickly, breaking away from Sylvie so that she could be the one to get there first, to stand with her hands down by her sides as she read the wording on her Frederic’s gravestone.

  Sylvie came to stand beside her mother. Baseema felt the pain. There was no thought, nothing to say.

  ‘Daniel didn’t kill Frederic, Sylvie.’

  ‘No, Ma. I know.’

  ‘Frederic did it to himself. He didn’t want to love Daniel the way that he did.’

  Sylvie was quiet. The two women sat together, on their knees, side by side. Baseema felt the hard ground seem to give way beneath her, as if it were trying to take her in. In her mind, she saw them clear as day – the big shutters slamming open that afternoon she had come to the chateau when Lucie was sick and Daniel had asked Frederic over to play and the two boys, in from the garden, had appeared on the sun-splashed balcony overlooking the internal courtyard. The boys were larking around; they performed for Baseema looking up cautiously from the ground below. They bowed and hollered and whooped with their hands over their mouths. Then they flopped over the railings. Daniel’s hair was thick and black and glossy. In the village they joked that he looked like a girl with his jet-black curls, his long blue eyes. He was so like Baseema. But small too, like a bird. Quick, and imaginative. By comparison, Frederic at that age of five or six was slow and shy and loitered in Daniel’s shadow. But Daniel didn’t notice these things about his little friend. So delighted was he to have someone to play for the day. The boys ran inside into the cool of the rooms and the balcony was suddenly deserted, the shutters and doors left swinging open and Baseema remained, looking up, her body leaning forward but out of sight on the bench, her hands fingering the pockets of her dress for a tissue to wipe her nose…

  ‘You did do the cherries that night, Ma. You did the dessert. As a favour. I remember because you came to get us from the garden room when you brought them round. You saw us dancing and you went away. Then, later, I went to find my guitar back at the house and you were there, with all the cherries in a bowl in front of you. You were arguing with Dad. I had to take the cherries myself back to the table.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter though, Sylvie. You must try to forget…’ she said but stopped herself short.

  ‘People get crushed, Ma. In the wheels of living, people get crushed.

  ‘Sylvie?’

  ‘Sometimes you can love people too much. It crushes the life out of someone when you love them too much. It fucking strangles the life out of them. Don’t you think that’s right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Baseema, and then she smiled and she turned to her daughter sitting there on the dark earth with her awful unhappy shoulders slumped forward and the irritated skin underneath her chin. But it wasn’t Sylvie who felt the need to pick and scratch at her own skin. Baseema knew who it was who was really blemished. She placed her fingers flat on the
ground to the sides of her knees and breathed. Still, the tears didn’t come.

  ‘You were born cat-like,’ she whispered.

  ‘Ma?’

  ‘It’s what I want to say to him. You were born cat-like. I have tried to write my thoughts to both of the boys, Sylvie. I don’t know what to say. To Frederic, I speak sometimes. At night. Just to tell him what’s going on. Nothing special. Just this and that. He didn’t want much more. But talking to Daniel, even in my head, is harder. And when I try to write to him I find it’s like writing into a void.’

  In the kitchen Baseema laid spaghetti on Sylvie’s plate. She sprinkled herbs, cracked pepper, forked through a sliver of butter.

  ‘If you have a child, Sylvie,’ she said quietly, then pulled herself up. She brought the plates to the table and stood there holding them for a moment, watching the steam curling. ‘You see, the thing is. I handed him over. Quite happily!’

  Sylvie had both of her knees tucked up in front of her.

  ‘Maman?’ she said. ‘We could all have done something different… We were smoking. I was drunk already. I thought I was going to be sick. I left them to come here and have some water. I made some coffee, really strong, and then I lay down for a while, till I started to feel better.’

  Baseema sat down at the table, and laid a napkin across her lap. She sat with her head held so high it made Sylvie seem like a dwarf beside her. They didn’t look at each other when they spoke. Sylvie put her knees down. They twizzled spaghetti on their forks.

  Baseema could only manage a mouthful of pasta. She laid her knife and fork together, then collected them up again in her hands, tried to eat a little more. Finally, she wiped the corner of her mouth and laid the napkin on the table.