Daniel didn’t go back to sleep. For several hours, he lay there with his head spinning in a thousand directions before getting up, rubbing his hands over his face and running across the courtyard, clearing the low wall in a single leap. The morning sky was red.
There up ahead was his father’s vineyard and the red rose bush planted to protect the vineyard from disease. There was a rose bush in every vineyard because if something got into the soil it would kill the rose before it killed the vine and then the disease would be known about and something could be done. When they were children, they had talked about this. And they had gone for a walk to see the rose that died to protect Arnaud’s vineyard and there beneath the rose bush was where they had found the small white bones.
What happened then was a game they made up, called ‘guessing where the bones came from’.
In Daniel’s mind, there was a child here before him and this child, born to Arnaud and Lucie when they were young, had died, and that’s why Lucie was sad and lay down all the time. ‘It’s haunted,’ he’d told his friends. ‘Those bones are the child’s bones. They buried it here when it died.’
‘Little pile of bones,’ he used to sing, skipping up and down.
‘The chateau is haunted,’ he’d insisted, at seven, eight years old. It was his favourite word. ‘There was a child here. It’s still here. It talks to me. There’s a child in there. Just like me. The same age as me. They brought it here with them. From Paris. She has blotted it out of her mind. But there are clues. Everywhere. A room with a crib in it. Clues. I know. And they came out here, in the middle of the night, buried it by the rose. It died one night in a storm and no one knew. I’ve seen the actual bones!’
And years later, at the party, on the night that Frederic died, the bones had come up again. No one knew what Daniel and Frederic were doing out in the garden room, a little drunk by then, a little stoned. They were arguing over the bones. Arguing over whose story it was in the first place. Years had passed. Suddenly it seemed imperative to remember things. Frederic was leaving. They were raking over the old times. A way of pretending the body wasn’t feeling the tingling. A way of doing away for a moment with the desire. Imperative that they remembered everything. Now. Before they parted. Clutching hold of each other. The others were out in the courtyard, eating, everyone quietly pressing food into their mouths; it was hot that night, so deadly hot and no one knew. Who could know? What could they do? And the little bones, whose story was it? Their lives had been so entwined.
Then yesterday, lying on her bed, Sylvie had said she’d gone to find the bones one day. She’d taken them back to the house and got them analysed. ‘They’re goat bones,’ she said.
Now Daniel flattened his body, pulled himself forward, and felt around on the ground. The small wooden cross that Frederic made was still there, it had fallen on its side. He felt it, ran his finger on the old, soft wood. The tears sprang forward and he pulled himself back, horrified; he stood, used the front of his shirt to wipe the tears away. The mound of earth was still there. The bones would be there beneath it. If there were no bones then there was no reason for the sadness that lived in his childhood home. If there were no bones there was no haunting – Lucie, Arnaud, him. If there was no reason for anything… He messed the earth around with his hands and cut his fingers and grabbed handfuls of dry, dusty soil, but his hands would not clasp the bones.
Up on the heath, he cut under low-hanging foliage, pulling back branches of eucalyptus and fern. There were dead leaves, white stones underfoot. The ground was hard and dry. Daniel was hungry and dehydrated but his head was clear. In the trees around the heath, he fell and scraped his leg on a tree. The leaves were black and spun around his head. He laughed because this was all there was, it seemed, left to do. He had done it to Sylvie because that was what she wanted. Not just that afternoon because she was standing in her old bedroom in a small white towel, but because it was what she had always wanted. There was nothing else. Just her on her single bed, sitting herself gingerly down. All she needed was for him to put it in and hold it there. Over and over. That was all she wanted. Then she pulled away, leaving him sore, holding himself. In her little bedroom, which was the same bedroom she had as a child, she had lit a cigarette and asked him to leave. Now he lay on the ground and the leaves spun in dazzling colours and a hawk circled far above the trees and he laughed as if she had knocked the wind and the sense from him.
For lying down with Sylvie was the music of his life. He had felt the smooth white softness of skin around her hips. He had held onto her small dancer’s body and cried. They had rocked each other, backwards and forwards, and nothing would have stopped them for all the dark and light in the world.
When he woke, the sun was winking in the trees, warming his face in the clearing. In the village, dogs were barking. The sun picked up flecks of black quartz in the rock. He heard the drill of a woodpecker, his eyes shut. What did he feel? He felt nothing. What Kate wanted from him he had absolutely no idea. He couldn’t see the point of her; she could only see what was right in front of her face: him, his face, his pebble-blue eyes, the steps white in the morning, a packet of cigarettes, the silky green of her dress. There was nothing there. Not like the weight of water, memory and fire.
The woodpecker stopped. There was silence in the clearing. Daniel watched the sun move, slide along a spider line of silk
‘Keep going. Keep away.’
He had promised. To live the life. He had promised, pressing the feet hanging, swinging, towards his mouth, that Frederic’s death would not be in vain, that when he got out there, into the world, he would take in everything, and not look back. He stood. ‘I didn’t kill him.’ Sylvie had been laughing; he was hard in her, she was asking him to say something that would help her. A surprise, she wanted. Her hand was pressing into his back as she gasped and cried and the dim, distant untrod pathways of her life came to fruition, and burst.
He had looked down at her face which was wet with tears, and her breasts were loose, a towel removed, the blankets of her childhood old and soft beneath them. Sylvie had asked him to move. After a while, she begged him to move; her face was small, and creased with all the years of pain. When he came, she did nothing. Her life felt complete. She closed her eyes.
Kate was wearing a black dress. She had put red lipstick on because, she told him, ‘one had to make the effort sometimes’. She was sitting at one of the tables, beside the fountain. She smiled politely at him. Her hair was a little wet still; it curled softly around her face. She looked young and happy and full of life.
‘Hello, stranger. Where on earth have you been?’
‘I had to get away for a while,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said glibly. ‘Well, Stephen got held up so he’s not coming till tomorrow now. And I’m celebrating by drinking vodka all on my own here – it being a Saturday night, of course.’
‘Can I join you?’ asked Daniel, tucking his T-shirt into the belt of his jeans.
‘Bien sûr,’ she replied, and she inclined her head to encourage him to sit down.
‘You look a little rough. Are you all right?’
Daniel smiled and tried to wipe the dust from his face. He looked around the square and took in the tables where a few tourists were sitting with glasses of beer, chatting quietly and leaning back in their chairs after long days in the sun.
‘I guess I need a shower. I camped out. I’m starving. How’ve you been?’
‘Pretty well. I spent most of the morning in the garden, actually. Then I had a siesta, and then did some drawing. And now I’m here…’
‘Looking lovely,’ he said, and he smiled at her. He was starting to feel a little more like himself. Sip by sip, outside a bar with a beautiful woman, he would become more like himself. The night was warm and starry and full of the smell of summer in the country, but this was the kind of urban chat he knew. It was who he was now. There was no time to change.
‘So I wonder if anyone lost their kid on the beach today,’ he
said calmly, indicating for the bartender to come over.
Kate leant down for her handbag and opened it. She took her purse out and uncurled a cheque which she handed across the table.
‘Half,’ she said. ‘Half on signature of contract.’
Daniel studied the cheque. He sat back and put his hands up above his head. He took a long and very deep breath.
‘What contract?’
‘The one we’re going to draw up,’ said Kate. ‘I don’t think we need to bother with agents and lawyers and so on. Do you?’
‘Er…’
‘I mean it’s not as if I feel you’re in any way inclined to come back here, Daniel Borja,’ she said, in English.
Daniel looked at the cheque sitting on the table. When the bartender came he placed his palm over it. Then he drank the vodka.
‘How do you feel?’ he asked quietly.
‘Fantastic!’ said Kate. ‘I’ve gone and damn well done it.’
‘Half of it. You’ve gone and done half of it.’
‘Which is a start.’ And she grinned then, showing him her startling white teeth. ‘I thought it through. And then I thought it through again. And then last night I tried to find you to talk about it a bit more but I couldn’t find you anywhere. So I had to just sit and figure it out on my own. And that’s what I did. And it needed to be done. Before Stephen gets here. But he’s bought me a little more time. He got held up.’
‘Yes, so you said.’
‘What?’
‘About the new start,’ he said, frowning slightly, because he sensed the tension that the cheque, and the sale, had now created between them.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, because you’re talking in riddles. I didn’t say anything to you about a new start.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Ignore me. I’m thinking about someone else.’
‘Who?’ said Kate. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Sylvie,’ said Daniel, and he leant back in his chair and breathed and he looked over the square to Sylvie’s house.
‘Sylvie?’
‘I’m worried about her,’ he said. ‘I’m worried about what will happen to her if I leave.’
‘Oh, Sylvie will be fine. I’ve already spoken to her about it all. When I went to find you last night and couldn’t, she said she didn’t know where you were and so she invited me in for a drink and I told her I’d made my decision and that I was going to buy and would she consider helping me when I moved in, finally, to get the place going again.’
Daniel nodded. He said nothing. Kate was drinking fast. There was a high, manic energy about her that unnerved him.
‘Her father was there. Lollo? Strange man. But he seemed pleased that the chateau was being sold. In fact, he was delighted. Kept saying it.’
‘Kept saying what?’
‘How delighted he was.’
‘Oh,’ said Daniel. ‘I try to avoid him.’ He looked around the square again.
‘You ok, Daniel?’
He shrugged, and turned his attention to the chateau wall.
‘Look,’ she said impatiently. ‘I know you think I’m crazy. I’m obsessing about it to make up for the lack in my life. But it’s not my fantasy, you know. There are far more glamorous locations in this world. Like an island, for example. A beach house somewhere. I love it. But my love is far more practical than you think. I am going to do things with it, Daniel.’
‘But it is your fantasy.’
‘I’m forty,’ she murmured.
Daniel looked at the pulse of light in her eyes. Then he tried to reach across the table for her hand and he took her wrist by mistake. He shook the wrist a little.
‘We are lucky, though,’ he said, looking at her hands. ‘To have this, don’t you think? This human skin, and lovely eyes. To have loved, to be able to love again.’ He let her hand go then. ‘I will be going back to Paris in a few days.’
Kate was quiet. ‘I was joking. About your not coming here again.’
‘I can’t stay here. There’s too much of my past to contend with. Being here again is a little like standing in a great big hole. It terrifies me. And I need to get away.’
‘It’s so still.’
‘What?’
‘The night. The air here.’ She lifted her drink. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘Now?’ he asked, lifting his drink. She lifted hers. ‘Now, we drink.’
‘And then…?’
‘Then?’
Kate smiled. After a while, she stopped. She reached across the table and took his hand. She held onto it, cradled it in her own.
‘It was nice though, wasn’t it? It was more than nice. I mean, it wasn’t absolutely amazing, but it was a start. We could love each other, couldn’t we, Daniel? We could learn to do it, I think. And try and make something of this. I mean, here we are, two people, similar, free, looking for something to do.’
Ha laughed and his eyes were bright and radiantly blue. ‘Speak for yourself,’ he said. ‘Me? I have a life back in Paris. I have a job and a home and a life…’
‘And yet, to me, you make it all sound so temporary. As if you’ve built your whole life on not being attached to anything, not being stuck anywhere.’
‘I’m standing in a hole, Kate.’
‘Me too,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Which is why we should do something to help each other get out.’
‘You don’t need my help. Not you. I suspect you don’t need anyone’s help.’
‘Women need reassurance.’
‘So do men.’
‘We all do. All the time. Isn’t that sad?’
Up above them the leaves began to rustle quietly in the dark. Daniel thought of the feet hanging from the ceiling. Of the grubby children whose faces had first peered over the wall. Those faces were all he had.
‘It’s not worth the money,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s less than what you imagine it to be. When it happens, when you have the key in your hand, then you will feel the disappointment. And the disappointment will be the thing that destroys you.’
‘You think I’m just one of those women that run from one thing to the next as and when the feeling takes me. But I’m not like that at all. I stay, I fight. I try to endure. But society doesn’t trust women who strike out on their own. It upsets everything they hold dear in their innermost hearts. So they all try to stop it.’
Around her neck she had tied a necklace of tiny colourful beads. It was a small attempt at lightness, at some kind of happiness, and the necklace against her skin and her black dress and collarbones looked forced and hopelessly out of place.
‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ he said.
‘Don’t be sorry…. It was so hot today. Wasn’t it? Stephen says he can’t manage without me. Which is why he wants to come and get me. To take me back to the city. And while I was thinking about how really awful that was, it occurred to me that I might as well get on with things. That life – the one I had with him – is over. I need to start again. And so we should just be terribly adult about it, I think. Make each other a proposition. Discuss what we want.’
‘I need my solitude, Kate.’
‘Come on, Daniel. You’ve got the cheque,’ she said, and she took her hands away from his then, which encouraged him to take it and put it in his pocket.
‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘You can stay with me tonight. We’ll have some breakfast together. Then we can go in and take a look.’
‘A look?’
‘And think about how we’re going to do it.’
Daniel was starting to feel a bit panicky. Kate was talking fast.
‘You’re not listening to me,’ she persisted, a little aggressively. ‘We could just give all the rooms upstairs a lick of white paint and stick a double bed, a couple of chairs, an old wardrobe in each. In town, there are these bric-a-brac places where you can pick up tatty old furniture, but proper wooden furniture, for next to nothing, aren’t there? And the point is, we
would then be able to keep it feeling rustic, a bit shabby, which is what people love, it’s what they need when they want to stretch out a bit.’
‘Kate, listen to me…’
‘No. Look. I’ve been making plans. I’ve done all these drawings. You should come and see. I want to create a space that is beautiful and tranquil, and simple. More than anything else, it’s about simplicity. I want to provide people with an empty canvas, somewhere they can come and be, and drift around the overgrown garden and create things, paint if they feel like it, or not, if they don’t, and do nothing maybe for a few days. It’s going to be whatever they want it to be. So long as they can have the space and the time. And the peace and quiet. To find out what it is they want to make of it… I think a bed and breakfast basically, with a café downstairs that has pictures on the walls from the summer art school.’
‘A school?’
‘Or a music school. We could make things work, you know. You and me. I think it’s fine. We could take it on and fill it with life. With new life. We could have a baby, Daniel. Couldn’t we? Isn’t that what you want? For us to be together and have a nice time?’
‘It’s not so simple as that.’
‘Oh God, I know. But maybe it could be. What’s the point in having things all complicated?’
‘I’m not ready,’ he said, but she didn’t seem to have heard him.
She continued: ‘Because what’s the point? After all the thinking. It’s just you and me, feeling a bit lost. I think we join forces on that. Take two lost people and put them together to make two not-so-lost people. And I could have a baby and we could work on the chateau – work so hard together – all through the winter, making it brilliant. There would be enough money left from the money Mum left me. We could do it, Daniel. Don’t you see?’
‘No,’ he said, and he stood up from the table, and knocked into it then. ‘I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ And then he walked briskly across the square. Daniel walked on past the chateau and he kept going down the avenue of trees. He walked faster and he took the wallet out of his back pocket, pulling the cheque out to see it again and remind himself that it was real, and then he started to run.
We All Ran into the Sunlight Page 20