‘So what did you do?’
‘I waited till he’d gone downstairs. I heard him put his bread in the toaster. I put some clothes in a bag. Then I walked downstairs, took my coat off the peg where it hangs in the hall, opened the front door and went.’
Daniel leant forward and put his chin in his hands. This was what he always did. He sat and he listened to women talking about their lives. It was all anyone needed. To feel that they were being heard and understood. And Daniel was good at doing it. And he knew the effect it had on them. After the trust, then he could tease. After he’d won them over with kindness, then he could use his brawn. But there was something about Kate that unnerved him. He felt her sophistication was something he needed to reach, and so sitting here just listening to her wasn’t enough. He wanted to say something that would hold her attention but he felt that it wouldn’t work in the seclusion of this little house where she was in control and they were both taking refuge. If he could get her back outside, then the balance might begin to shift again and the unease he felt would dissipate.
‘Did he follow you?’
‘He must have come after me, as soon as he heard the door close. He caught up with me at the train station and scared the life out of me by tapping me on the shoulder while I was waiting to get my ticket. He asked me to go into a café with him and have some tea. I just sat there, at this table, crying in my coat. He asked me if I needed to see a doctor. He looked so forlorn and unhappy then. I asked him – could we perhaps just take a little break from each other? I blamed it all on my mother and how I sensed it had made me depressed and I needed to figure some stuff out. Stephen said I should be with him, living with him, while I did that. Then I asked, had he never felt the need to have somewhere else to be? He looked confused. But worse than that. He looked completely and utterly disengaged. Like he had neither heard me nor even begun to try to understand anything that was going on in my head. He just can’t do it, I said to myself. He just can’t make the leap. After a few minutes of total silence, his stomach rumbled so loudly it almost made me laugh. He was looking vaguely over towards the sandwiches and then he got up to get an egg and bacon one which he brought back to the table and couldn’t eat. So he left it with the wrapper flapping open and the smell making him feel queasy. “It stinks,” he said. “The egg really stinks.” I said to throw it away. I started to feel desperate then. I told him I had to go and find the bathroom. He looked at me sheepishly. “I’ll hold onto your bag,” he said, and he reached down and clasped the handles and pulled it onto his lap. It was like he was holding onto our child. I said, ok. And then I left him with it and ran away.’
‘How did you get out?’
‘I just walked across the station concourse, then stopped at the machine and bought an underground ticket. I wasn’t even shaking. I was completely and totally calm. It felt like survival. I had my wallet and passport in my coat-pocket and there was nothing else I needed. I left him in that café holding my bag of clothes. I got straight on the Tube and sat down and watched this woman with a cello putting her make-up on. I think I was barely breathing. And by the time I got to the airport, it was almost midday. I bought a plane ticket, withdrew some money from the bank, ate some bananas and some biscuits for lunch, read the paper from cover to cover in the departure lounge, and then I flew.’
‘Good feeling,’ said Daniel, biting his lip. His left leg was jiggling ever so slightly on the sofa.
‘Yes. The plane landed at Montpellier. It was early in the evening…’ Kate smiled, showing her teeth.
He had destabilised something in her now. She swam back up to the surface of her experience and tried to reflect.
‘In the end, I found I just couldn’t do it. That thing people say about finding freedom within constraint. I found couldn’t breathe.’
‘Many people find that.’
‘I felt sick at the thought that the compromise was all it was going to be. The love died.’
Daniel straightened his leg out to reach his cigarettes. On his knee there was a tuft of hair, from Sylvie’s dog, which he brushed away with the palm of his hand.
‘I couldn’t work out how to live with the fact that my love for my husband had died. I sat on the steps outside the chateau and tried to figure out if I could or couldn’t live with it. The dead love. It’s so subtle.’
Daniel looked at the shine on Kate’s perfectly tanned little cheek. There was barely a spot of imperfection on her, and it bored him slightly, the vanity that came with. He looked down into her cleavage. Her breasts were quite small, tucked neatly into a simple cream bra.
Kate got up. She shook the dress out around her legs. ‘And now he’s getting on with life as usual. He’s getting up and going to work by bicycle. He’ll be eating, at 7.30am, a bowl of natural yogurt with walnuts, two pieces of granary toast with butter.’
‘Don’t feel guilty,’ said Daniel, getting up to get the ashtray from the table.
‘I don’t feel guilty.’
‘You will.’
‘Not now.’
‘No. But you will. When you realise you left him to prove you’re not getting old.’
‘What?’
Daniel was teasing her. ‘I’m kidding,’ he said.
‘How dare you?’
‘You’re not old, Kate.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
She looked at him, and he looked kindly into her eyes and saw how the colour rose to her cheeks. Usually, it made him feel powerful to see this. But with this one he was starting to feel vaguely hopeless. He finished his wine.
‘I have to go.’
‘Where?’
‘I’m overstaying my welcome.’
‘Please don’t go.’ She sat back down on the sofa, right on the edge of it, and folded her hands very neatly on her knees. ‘I would like it if you stayed and had at least one more glass of wine with me.’
‘Ok,’ he said quietly, and he grinned.
‘I heard this thing,’ she told him, staring out ahead of her into the garden now. ‘I heard this thing about children, and how if you lose a child on the beach, you must always walk towards the sun to find it because children naturally walk towards the light. Always.’
‘Yes. It makes sense. Because they’re frightened of the dark. It’s human instinct to go for the light. But there will be some kids, very few, who will go towards the dark. Not many, I think.’ Daniel took a deep breath through his nose. ‘But then the kids grow up, and they start to become interested in things that are daunting. They test themselves against the forbidden, the subversive, and try to embrace it.’
‘It’s weird, though, isn’t it?’ she went on, ‘when you find you have stopped doing all of that. You become good at working, having a home, maybe family. You haven’t run towards the light for a long time, and you don’t bother to meddle with the dark either. You know what you know. You get on. Because what else is there? And so then you begin to feel that the difference between the dark and the light is fading. First in the imagination, and then in reality. And you know there’s war and madness out there. But by then you’re cocooned. You’ve done it to yourself. And what you’re left with is this sticky sort of grey matter all around you, like some nasty chrysalis of middle age. And so you take up smoking again. Or you find somebody to fall in love with. Or you walk out on your marriage. But it doesn’t really matter, because nothing really changes. You’ll never feel that intensity of life – that fear as you ran towards the sun on the beach – that what was behind you was big and black and terrifying, or that thrill as you turned and went towards it that what you were doing was choosing the unknown. You’ve lived long enough to know you know enough to get by. And the challenges start to lessen. And nothing really moves you all that much. I mean it moves you by surprise, but the brain adjusts and you know what you’re doing again. Over and again, you just keep figuring out what it is you’re doing. The ability you have to adapt surpasses your longing to be surprised. And so there isn’t any rea
l fear or wonder any more. Like that thing at the end of Gatsby. And how in the greyness of everything nothing measures up.’
Daniel nodded.
‘And we need to be in awe,’ said Kate. ‘But we’ve lost our capacity. And so we beat on. Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
They talked through the afternoon and into the night. When they got hungry from all their talking, Daniel got up to make them both a sandwich. He put the sandwiches down on the table and she said how drunk she was.
‘I’m happy, though,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for being here.’
Daniel said he was drunk too. He thought it might be a good idea to have some coffee and, because he was tired of talking, and in need of somewhere quiet to be, he went upstairs and sat for a while in the bathroom and stared out of the window at the east wall of the chateau, lit by the streetlamp.
When he came down, she was curled up asleep on the sofa. Daniel stood for a moment or two and looked at the face that had softened and the lips that had opened slightly. Still her little hand was curled up with tension beneath her chin. He left her like that, and he went upstairs and opened up the shutters which gave him a view onto Sylvie’s house. Then he stretched himself out on the faintly scented bed and fell asleep.
In the morning Kate was gone. There was a note on the kitchen table.
‘Something’s changed,’ it read. ‘Meet me at the bar tonight at 7 o’clock and we can talk some more.’
Daniel sat in the garden. He picked some blades of grass. He went to see Sylvie in the afternoon but he found that she wasn’t there.
‘It’s a challenge,’ said Kate, that night at the bar. She bought a bottle of wine for them to share. And then she bought another.
He agreed with her. He said that yes, it was a challenge. ‘But one that I think someone like you will thrive on.’
They were drunk by the time they left the bar that night and Daniel took her hand and they carried on walking past the village house and down the road behind the church.
‘Let’s walk,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s such a beautiful night.’ He linked his arm with hers and they walked slowly under the orange streetlamps, taking the road that curled up onto the heath.
‘My mother thought birds foretold the future,’ said Daniel. ‘She was always out feeding them, watching them from the upstairs window, waiting for one of them to fly right in. She saw the women from the village in the birds that gathered in the courtyard. In their scratching and cawing, she said there was gossiping and picking. She thought the gossips had come to pick out her jewels, and to pick out her eyes. Fear made her blind, more blind than anyone. But she wasn’t my real mother, of course. My real mother was Frederic’s mother, Sylvie’s mother. Her name was Baseema. She was my real mother. She was a prisoner in the castle you want me to sell you.’
‘The castle that you will sell to me,’ said Kate coquettishly, leaning in on his arm.
‘Ha, ha,’ he said, lifting a hand out to the side. ‘Sell to you. And then I’m free!’
Kate stumbled against him. ‘Tell me about your mother.’
‘I think of her hands.’ He stopped on the road. ‘I love to watch women’s hands.’
Kate turned to him.
‘Could you kiss me, do you think?’
Daniel looked at her then. He saw how pretty she was, how elegant her fingers and wrists. Daniel felt as if, in that moment, he saw the whole woman in her. He saw who she had been, and who she would go on to be. He saw the lover, the friend, the wife; and he saw the mother in her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and kissed her very gently on the lips. Kate shivered slightly, and smiled. He looked into her face, and around her shoulders; he looked at her arms. Something was emerging in her; something light and fluttery trying to push its way out. Daniel was drawn to that and also afraid. He stood back a little on the quiet road. Nothing moved in the air tonight. In him there was nothing emerging, he felt. He wanted to make it. He just didn’t know how.
‘No one told me that losing someone would feel like this,’ she said, almost to herself.
‘Like what?’
‘Empty. And tired. I feel so tired. I feel like I can’t do anything. I can’t imagine having the energy to go back and do my job and be in my life. I can’t imagine doing it all over again.’
‘And yet you have the energy for all this,’ he said, looking back, as they began to walk again.
‘Is this what happens?’
‘What?’
‘This tired all time. Is this what it’s going to be like?’
In silence they walked together to the end of the runway. The land was still swollen from the heat of the day.
Kate was quiet now. He left her with her thoughts for a while and walked towards the trees. He cleared the gorse around the spot in swift clean strikes. He leapt up into the lower branches of a pine and swung till the branch gave up. Then another, and another branch. They were spindly as an old woman’s arms. He held these arms against his thigh and broke them above and below the elbow.
Kate watched him crouch in front of the fire and she saw the way he worked: clean, and precise. She sat silently beside him. Daniel pressed his lighter into the mound of gorse and watched the dry twigs take flame.
She took her clothes off over her head. He looked up, stood a little to receive them.
Then she sat down, her knees clicking quietly. Daniel looked at her and he thought about how he could love her.
He left the fire then and he moved slowly towards her. They held each other for a long time and then he lay her down on the ground. Beneath him she turned her head to the side and watched the flames burn through the branches. Behind the fire the last of the light was leaving the sky. The silence was filled with the sounds of the fire. It crackled and spat. He could feel her lift up beneath him. He put his fingers to the softness of her hair and he closed his eyes.
They dozed and then woke feeling cold and stiff, and so they dressed and walked back to the village without saying a word.
It was four o’clock in the morning. When they got to her place Daniel asked Kate if she was all right about what had happened up on the heath. It made her laugh, a bit; but she was too tired to deal with it now. She started to make some coffee for them both and then turned the gas off and went upstairs to sleep. Daniel came up and got in beside her. Just before he nodded off, he rolled towards her and whispered into her ear.
‘We did it, Kate.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We did.’
Daniel closed his eyes then. Whatever was to come, and he sensed the darkness already, he knew that in that moment at least, up there with this woman in his arms up on the heath, he had been blessed.
When he woke it was almost midday. Kate was sitting outside the house in nothing but a long white shirt. Her face was unwashed, her hair unbrushed. She was straddling a chair and spooning yogurt out of a pot.
‘Hi,’ he called shyly, and she looked up to see him standing in the doorway in his jeans. She gazed at his torso and grinned. ‘I can’t quite believe this,’ she said happily, and she pushed him back indoors so that she could put the coffee on to brew. She chucked him the pack of cigarettes so that he could come sit outside and join her on the steps in the sunshine.
‘I don’t want to sit outside, though,’ he told her, frowning slightly. Then he took a cigarette and lit it and stood for a moment or two rubbing his hand through the back of his hair.
‘Ok,’ she said, and she leant up and kissed his neck in a light and silly way.
‘Any minute now, you’ll be asking to borrow my T-shirt.’
But Kate hadn’t heard him properly. She was busy humming to herself as she ripped a bag of coffee open with her teeth.
‘My T-shirt, it’s… upstairs,’ he muttered, drawing heavily on the cigarette and watching the ash fall to the tiles on the floor.
‘What’s that?’ asked Kate happily.
He didn’t look at her. He walked towards the window an
d stared out onto the garden. He could feel Kate watching him. She was beginning to notice his mood. After a while, she came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his stomach. She breathed into the warm skin on his back and placed a very gentle kiss between the shoulder bones. He felt the tension ease a little in his shoulders. He felt the sunlight on his face and he watched the garden for signs of life.
‘It was lovely, wasn’t it?’ she murmured into the skin on his back.
He nodded, and then he disentangled himself from her in order to find somewhere to put out his cigarette.
‘I could do with a washing machine, to be honest. I’ve been here several days – since Monday – and I haven’t yet had a chance to wash my clothes.’
‘You’ve been here since Monday?’
‘Yes. My stuff’s at Sylvie’s.’
‘I guess it just goes to show,’ she said politely.
‘What’s that then?’ His eyes were a little narrow now. Something had changed in him. There was this tension in his shoulders, a stiffness in his neck. It was the thought of Frederic that he had woken with; a split second of something deeply uncomfortable that he had pushed out of his mind as he got out of this pretty woman’s bed. Her bedroom, her sheets were full of the scent of her. He was tired, perhaps. Now Kate was moving about her kitchen, throwing her hair around in a smug way that made him feel embarrassed. It exposed her conservative side; this slightly pathetic bid for freedom she was making. It was just a fuck. That was all it was. Just a quick fuck up on the heath.
She started to fiddle about in her bag for something. She found a pot of balm and began to apply it to her lips so that they looked a bit greasy. ‘Want some?’ she asked, for want of something else to say, at which point Daniel began to think it was time to go.
‘No, I don’t want some. And I have to go now.’
‘To get the key to the chateau?’
‘Yes. To get the key.’
‘I’m feeling really good about it all today,’ she said. ‘I think I might have the strength for it, after all.’
We All Ran into the Sunlight Page 18