We All Ran into the Sunlight (19 page)

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.

Sylvie was crying while eating now, shaking her head.

On the oven, the clock read 22.47.

‘It should have been me who was burnt, not you, my Sylvie.’

Sylvie looked up, brushed the tears from the swollen lids of her eyes. She sniffed and coughed and pushed the table away from her and slid out, her napkin tucked into the high waist of her skirt.

‘One postcard I’ve had from him,’ she said, walking over to the dresser Baseema had polished. She opened the door with trembling fingers, brought the postcard back to the table.’

‘It’s postmarked from Mexico, and this address is the one I replied to.’

‘This is a Mayan ruin,’ said Baseema, peering closer at the print on the postcard.

Sylvie took the card and straightened herself to read the words that were written in black ink on it.

‘You don’t need to be ashamed, Ma. After all, this…’

‘I gave him up.’

‘You had no choice.’

‘Pah! I had choice. We all have some choice, Sylvie.’

‘You weren’t to know any of this would happen.’

Baseema lifted herself a little higher in the chair and then her body slumped forward. She was beginning to feel so tired.

‘Fire was Daniel’s means of requesting help. He didn’t kill Frederic. Frederic killed himself. You know that, don’t you, Sylvie? He loved Daniel with all his heart. He didn’t want to be gay. He didn’t want to be gay… And Daniel loved Frederic. Daniel needed help himself. Perhaps he still needs help.’

‘He’s a grown man now, Ma. All this will be so far
behind
him.’

‘He won’t want to see me.’

‘I think he will come back here, though. I do think he will come back here. Of his own choice.’

‘We have to get on, Sylvie. We have to get up, get dressed, build ourselves a day, each day.’

‘And the others?’

‘Who?’

‘The people who get crushed?’

‘Who gets crushed?’

‘People get crushed, Ma. Like I said. People like me. People like Papa. Daniel’s free. He’s not crushed.
Everyone
loves Daniel. And you too, Ma. You’re free. Like Kate Glover. But not me. I am one of the people life fucks over. Like Frederic. Like Papa. Like me.’

In the Pyrenees, the early-morning air was wet and warm. Baseema drove fast on the road, which wound in a series of tight hairpin bends through the mist. She leant forward over the steering wheel as the wipers slushed back and forth. Her mind was empty, her body felt big and stiff with tiredness. She breathed slowly, then hardly at all.

In the driveway, she pushed the car beneath the
dripping
pines and drove round behind the guest rooms to the wooden cabin with its lights on in the windows.

She reversed the car into the double space beneath the low hanging boughs that no one had thought to trim. There was another car parked here. A small white van that she hadn’t seen before. She looked up the wooden steps to the cabin with its gingham curtain in the window.

She barely noticed the way things had been rearranged: the slight, but only slight sense of disorder: a couple of cups, a stain, smeary fingerprints on the windows, a book on the floor, as if, while she had been away, the cabin had tilted quickly on its side, displacing ornaments, here and there.

It was quiet inside. And calm. He was standing by the stove, a cup of coffee in his hand. But it wasn’t her
standing
there before him. As least, it didn’t feel like her. It felt as if she had found herself in another world where
houses 
flipped over like cards in a breeze, and minds warped without warning, emptying out in an instant while the animal Arnaud had said to her was in us all, was all we were, had finally found its opening and burst forward, eyes rolling, teeth bared, like a horse breaking into the house of its abuser and rearing up, using the last of its strength to take revenge.

Lollo did nothing. He went down like a leaf and lay there to be pummelled. His face was white, his lips slack.

And afterwards they sat across from one another at the small kitchen table and Lollo called his wife a Maghreb cunt. There was a bottle of Russian vodka between them and they took it in turns to drink from the bottle.
Baseema’s
head was empty, eerily so. Lollo sat with a towel wrapped around his hand. He wept. After a while he stopped.

Above their heads a naked bulb burnt low over the table.

‘What did you do with the light shade?’

‘I binned it.’

‘Oh.’

‘I moved things.’

‘Is the car yours?’

‘What car?’

‘The car parked outside. A van.’

‘There’s no car outside.’

Baseema drank vodka from the bottle and swilled it round her mouth. She would have liked to get up and show him the van, but for this strange feeling of
exhaustion
, this slowly creeping desire to crawl into bed upstairs and give it all up. But still there would be peace here, in this cabin in the mountains. There would still be the
lemony
light to recover, the quiet rhythm of her days.

She looked at her husband now and the way his lips were moving to try and form some words and she
wondered
how on earth she had stuck it out so long. How on earth she could have gone on pretending he almost didn’t exist.

Still, she didn’t know what to do.

After a while she got up and she carried her bag up to the bedroom, noticing the changes now, the few things left off kilter, the dust on the stairs, on the table.

She brought a sponge and a clean towel from upstairs, a T-shirt for him to put on.

‘You’re a bitch,’ he said, as she wiped the blood from his face and under his neck. ‘You should leave the blood, but you can’t bear to see it, Baseema. Your own violence. You will clean it up as you have always cleaned everything. Trying to make yourself shine. Always thinking you were somehow better than the folk in the village. With your clothes and your privilege. Fancy thinking you would get the chateau; that the nephew would actually give it to you – just like that. But you don’t have strength and you don’t have courage. You can’t even face your own son.’

‘Daniel came to see us,’ she said, standing with her back to him at the sink, her eyes on the view. ‘I think he was seven. He came one Sunday to sit in our kitchen. It was you who answered the door. Don’t you remember? It was raining and Daniel was standing there, holding a bag with his toothbrush and a plastic bag with some toys inside. He said he’d come to stay with us for a while. I can stay here? Would it be all right?’

Lollo said nothing. He was winding the towel around his hand.

‘We fed him a cream cake and then we turned him away. He was scared. Do you remember?’

‘What fucking choice did we have?’

‘Right!’ shouted Baseema, spinning round now and baring her teeth at him. ‘That house we had. That café. Well, God above, we were like royalty. Except it was better than that. We weren’t like the Borjas. Were we? We weren’t from the city. We were like everyone else, accepted by everyone else. Except for the fact that we had more than them. We had the best of both worlds. Friendship and privilege. Accepted and better off. And well we knew it. Well we knew.’

‘So you turned him away.’

‘No, Lollo!
We
turned him away. We did it, you and me. We fed him a cream cake and shut the door.’

‘He would have burnt us into the ground.’

‘He was seven years old.’

‘He was damaged.’

‘Seven years old!’

Outside, the rain had begun to fall and she walked slowly on the path that was wet beneath her feet. When the first of the snows came, the air would be sharper, all would be white; things would be clear. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten. And there was an ache at the back of her head where her neck had buckled on her shoulders. She would take long walks in the snow this winter, hire some cross-country skis, even; take refuge in the hills.

In the lobby, she switched the lights on and looked around. There was a tall vase of exotic flowers on the desk, and black and white photographs of mountains on the walls. She was proud of this job of hers in this quiet hotel. How she loved this vase of flowers and the
computer
that waited for her behind the desk. After her swim she would come in here with her hair washed and dried and ready herself for what was left to salvage of this day. She would make a cup of coffee and sit quietly, sifting through her emails. Things would start to seem better then. After all, what damage had been done? It wasn’t a question of pride. She was holding onto what she knew in order to protect him from the pain of their reunion. It was the only thing she could do for him, after all this time.

In the pool room, the lights came on automatically.
Beneath
the water, there were cones of yellow light from the spots on the sides.

Baseema put her towel on one of the loungers and held onto the bars as she eased her body down into the water. When she sank beneath the surface, the water held her hair up above her head so that it waved like velvety weeds clinging to a rock.

Yes, she was ready for winter. She was ready for the winter that would come and lock the secrets of the
summer
in. She loved how quickly it came and stripped the trees and flushed the dirt from the roads, how it went over everything with its cold hard brush and then laid the snow down so that everything could be covered over and quietly contained while the earth turned beneath.

Rape wasn’t right. Because rape wasn’t what it was. She’d been fourteen. Only just on her period. Fresh little eggs popping into the bright clean blood of her for the very first time. Lucie had explained everything. She took her through it all. There were diagrams that Lucie sat down at the kitchen table and drew. It wouldn’t hurt. Nine months was all it would be. She remembers the hot fondling in that tower room; remembers how quickly Arnaud got to sucking at her breasts. She was still a child. And now, after all this time.

It was a joke, Lucie had said, when she’d gone that
evening
to get the gun from the cage above the fireplace. She’d wanted to have a baby. She was barren, and too old.

It was a joke and not a joke.

She had clicked the gun and pointed it at Arnaud, who laughed and shook his finger in the air. But Lucie wanted them to do this.

Baseema didn’t care for the wine they had given her. But they had made such a fuss of her. Even she was
giggling
at the strangeness of it all. And when at last it
happened
, it happened. And after it, life went on, and she was carried forward, living as she always had, under the gaze and direction of the Borjas. It was early evening.
Lucie
was standing just inside the doorway, with her arms folded and her neck lifted right up like that of a startled bird. No, it wasn’t that unpleasant. The shutters were open in the bedroom. It was a beautiful evening. The sky was pink. And she didn’t like the wine but she soon got used to it.

Now she held her head up high above the water. When she moved she stretched her arms right out in front of her and propelled herself forward using her strong muscular legs. She made it all the way to the end of the pool and she felt the water rinse and purify her, seeping into her pores.