We All Ran into the Sunlight (2 page)

She slipped out of the kitchen door, along the front of the house, down the steps and through the keyhole archway, and down towards the garden room. The air was bitter. She stopped to breathe and she looked up at the stars and the white moon and there was nothing else – no wisps of cloud, no planes in the air – and it felt for a moment as if it was she alone standing on the earth right now, just Lucie Borja and all her stories, standing still under this big awful sky. She heard them singing as they had done earlier in the evening.
Bon an-ni-ver-saire
… like children singing from a colourful bank on the far side of her memory.

‘
Fucking
!’ her husband had said – just to take the wind right out of her mouth, just to take her fingertips off that napkin for a moment. Arnaud had been in high spirits at the dinner, better when the cheese and the pile of cherries dipped in chocolate arrived and everyone cooed and
gathered
around. The sugar went to their brains. The summer was killing them, it was true. Lucie stood up to make
coffee
.

There were four of them left at the table by then – the chef from the pizzeria had come and perched on the edge with his wine and cheese and Daniel, Sylvie and Frederic had gone to the garden room. Arnaud reckoned he’d have a fight on his hands to ask one of them to part with a cigarette but still he had gone off to find them, and the rest of the party had gone a bit quiet at the table.

He came back pale and lurching. ‘I couldn’t find
anything
to smoke,’ he said. ‘All the rooms in the chateau. Nothing, anywhere, to smoke.’

He was sweating.

‘I thought they were
fighting
, Lucie. It was dark in there. They seemed to be fighting. Rolling over. Daniel was growling.’

‘
Bon an-ni-ver-saire
…’

‘Lucie!’

Her sixtieth birthday. The lanterns were pale pink and very still in the trees.

‘They’ve always fought, those two – since childhood, Arnaud.’

‘Sylvie was passed out on the floor by the sofa… It was just the boys. Lucie, listen to me!’ But Arnaud stopped because he couldn’t say what he’d seen. She wouldn’t have let him, either.

‘There is coffee. Could you bring the coffee cups, Arnaud?’ she said and she went indoors then and straight up the staircase and up to the air on her balcony. The
doctor
, who had come for the supper, had lined her medicine cabinet with enough sedative to shush all the gossips in the village. She took one of these sedatives now and stood for a few moments breathing and then she sat on the edge of her bed and reflected on how the evening had gone, how well the food had been done; how subtle the cheese.

She took the air and she felt the softness in her head, and there was nothing to be thought about then, except sleep, which came and then went – like a coverlet being stripped away – to leave her with this fear that fluttered around her heart as she walked through the garden with the grass rasping around her ankles.

She kept walking, her face on the door to the garden room, her shoulders hunched forward. She opened the door and felt the thickness of air behind it; in her throat and eyes the smoke was bitter and she heard Daniel coughing, saw the flames licking yellow in the seat of the old horsehair sofa and leaping in the curtains above it. There was Sylvie on the floor by the sofa, drugged and sleeping, and Daniel was crawling towards her, shouting for her to wake up, fanning his arms over the sofa. Lucie’s eyes glazed. She took in the chaos through the smoke in the room. She saw a chair broken and tipped over.

Daniel bent down to Sylvie with a towel over his head, his intention to move her outside to safety, but Lucie screamed and ran for her son, and the old paraffin lamp on the floor burst and flamed into Sylvie’s hair.

Daniel’s shoulders rounded over Sylvie’s face; he
batted
the flames with his hands and screamed at his mother to get out as he stumbled with Sylvie down to the pool. Lucie tripped after him, out of the doorway, into the dark hiss of the garden.

‘Do something!’ he yelled, running back up the grass towards her. ‘Get Frederic. He’s in the fucking
bathroom
!’

His eyes were wide open, and red. Lucie knew that he was gone now; he was a million miles from where she was; Daniel, beloved, her little boy.

‘I can’t,’ she whimpered. ‘I…’

‘You can’t?’

The sweat was pouring from his face.

‘Why can’t you?’ The muscle in his jaw was protruding like a knuckle. ‘What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with
us
?’ he rasped.

‘I’ve done everything to protect you, Daniel,’ she said. ‘I’ve nothing left.’

Lucie felt her heart break then as her son ran back into the darkness. Arnaud was coming up behind her,
running
, his belly leaping from side to side. He was shouting, cursing God. He was waving something that looked like a piece of cloth.

‘Frederic’s in there, Lucie. Quick!’

He pointed to the bathroom, adjacent to the garden room. They had made it for Daniel. En suite. There was a door from the bathroom onto the courtyard and Arnaud had tried to get in that way to get some water to put out the fire. Now she turned after her husband and followed him in, running her hands on the wall in search of the light switch. But the light was already on in the bathroom. Light like at the circus. And the legs were hanging behind her head. She turned. She could hear Arnaud moaning, bending over, his head in his hands. The feet were there, like long brown rats dangling from the ceiling. He wasn’t wearing shoes. And he wasn’t wearing any socks. It was only his jeans torn around the ankles, and they were stained with oil and engine fuel.

The old couple backed out of the bathroom
together
and separated. Lucie’s legs were moving beneath her nightdress to the outside tap to turn on the hose. She bent to collect up a handful of gravel, her thought to throw something at the fire; if she could find the strength,
Saint Perpetua
, to throw a handful of these little stones.

Then silence. A deep and total silence. And an odd numbing sensation, a fizz, like lemonade, up to the brain. Lucie hit the ground, which smelt of dry limestone rock. She lay on the ground and the base stones of the chateau rose up like boulders on the overgrown grass.

It felt like a steal, this happiness. It felt like something only people much younger or much more in love were
entitled
to have.

Kate kicked her shoes off and pulled her jumper up over her head. In the bedroom of the village house they’d
rented
, Stephen was sitting up against the headboard, his eyes roving gladly as he watched his wife move with her hands on her hips. She was self-conscious; she looked down at herself and the shiny bob of her dark hair spilled forward revealing the back of her neck. She had found the string of beads at the market in town. Pink and purple, they were cheap and childish, and they released something in both of them.

It was a damp Friday afternoon. The rain had stopped but the sky hadn’t cleared and now water spurted from the gutter and flicked against the window pane. Inside the house it was softly lit and cosy with the candles they’d dotted about. Kate was laughing, at Stephen trying to flatten himself on the small bed, and at herself now; she was trying to do a belly dance. She was a thousand miles from work and London; she was a thousand miles from her mother. Coming away had been her idea. It was Stephen who suggested the South-West of France. It had taken them two weeks to unwind. Kate had made a
promise
not to do anything, not to think, not to worry about anything. Let go, was her mantra, and simplify.

Stephen’s neck was coloured from walking in the
countryside
, his jeans were stained with spitting wine. There was no mobile reception in the village; no television in the house, no radio. He did calculations in his head, stopped taking the fish oils and vitamin B. Kate kept saying how we need so little, and on his bedside table these days there was nothing at all.

Life in Canas was simple. It was perfect. It was waking late in an old wooden bed, cups of coffee, driving the 4x4 on the hills, their faces peering; just rocks and blue sky. The air chill in the evening, Stephen wrapped his wife in a sheepskin rug, made love to her in front of the fire.

They slept off London like dogs dreaming, reflexes shuddering, sounds being released.

From time to time they drove to the coast and walked together on the sand, their hands buried deep in the
pockets
of their jeans.

In the afternoons, they read yesterday’s papers and the wine was poured. They took photographs, made films of the room, panning the camera round till they found each other, smiling, arms on the back of the sofa, heads tilted, serene.

On Saturday morning they went to market for the poussin and the vegetables. Kate said she could feel
herself
unravelling; her spirit coming loose. She gazed out of the window at the sunlight winking in the trees. Through a clearing there were glimpses of the canal running deep and indolent beside the road.

‘Everything’s so different here, Stephen.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is.’

‘Don’t you love it?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and he pushed his finger to the
compact
disc he’d selected so that it slid into the player. Stephen loved his old French café music – just a man and his accordion rousing with the hope of postwar France.

‘Please,’ she said.

He inclined his head. ‘Hmm?’

‘I just want the quiet for a moment or two.’

‘But the music’s perfect,’ he objected, and Kate looked to him but didn’t say anything.

Then Stephen turned the music up a little with the
remote
control on his steering wheel. Kate couldn’t bear that because it felt like a slight against her and so she turned to the window and bit her nail and after that she turned it down.

‘I just love how quiet it is.’

He switched the music off. Kate carried on talking.

‘After all the madness. All that rush. I feel like the city swallowed me,’ she said. ‘I barely remember being there.’

‘I remember you there, darling.’

‘Not all the time.’

‘Yes, Kate. All the time.’

‘But that’s what I’m saying. It feels like a blur. To me. It feels like a blur.’

‘I can hear what you’re saying.’

She swivelled her eyes to his face. He was smiling and looking ahead at the road. He was a handsome man – tall and dignified, with a soft sweep of sandy hair.

‘I’m tired,’ she said.

‘It’s just different out here,’ he replied, after a while. ‘It’s slower. That’s all.’

‘I like it slow. I love the roses all over the village. And I love the cross up there on the plateau. So black and thin and elegant. The way the sky changes colour around it. The sky is amazing up on the plateau.’

‘Look, it’s a heron,’ he said, pointing.

Kate followed his finger to the bird perched on a sliver of rock where the succulent flies were dive-bombing the water so that when the car with the white faces looking out went past, the heron didn’t see it but remained
standing
on its rock, perfectly fixed and still.

‘You can hear but you don’t listen,’ said Kate, after a while. ‘Nobody listens. Have you noticed that? We’re all so busy talking. Don’t you think?’

Stephen didn’t respond. He smiled and put his foot down on the pedal so that the car roared through the
silent
countryside.

Stephen dropped her back in the village and then drove off into the hills to buy a new selection of wines. While he was out, Kate lost herself in the preparation of the food. She hummed her love of this little French kitchen, patiently tying the strings of her apron, lifting her hair at the back.

She unwrapped the cheese and washed the vegetables, running her fingers through the leaves. She peeled the potatoes and laid them out on the draining board. Then she stood for a while at the window, leaning out on her elbows, and she heard the bell in the clock tower and watched the tiny movement of air in the leaves on the fig tree.

It was a modest patch of garden; a square of rough soil in which someone had tried to grow some grass, and which was now overcome with dandelion, surrounded by a ring of gravel into which large thistles had driven their roots. The garden was wrapped by a high stone wall built of the same mixture of chalky limestone and black
volcanic
rock as the chateau.

It was what they had loved the most when they first saw the house and Kate thought of their reaction to it, which had been mutual and surprising and strange: to be
standing
in the window together when the Mayor’s wife had moved on, and to blush simultaneously, as if the walled garden were a secret the two of them shared, something private and inevitable they had each already known about and would come to in time.

Kate and Stephen didn’t have children, and one of the things they could do now that Stephen was ploughing his own furrow and Kate’s business – an art gallery in
Southwark
– had really taken off, was rent out the London house and take a sabbatical, try something new. Kate was about to turn forty. They felt like they’d earned it – a sort of halfway break after twenty years of work.

‘My husband’s an economist,’ Kate had said to the Mayor’s wife. Stephen was fingering the oven towels with disdain. ‘He’s come here to work on a book.’

The Mayor’s wife was standing very straight with her arms flat against her sides. Kate said she didn’t know what she would be doing with her time here and the
Mayor’s
wife shrugged because it didn’t matter to her what anyone did with their time. It was only after the tour of the house, shaking hands at the door, that Kate said something complimentary about the roses and then made her little announcement. ‘I’m just going to think rather than act!’ she said, but it came out more aggressively than it needed to and it brought about a bit of a silence on the quaint little step.

Kate climbed up the stairs to the bedroom in the attic, which smelt still of the garlic she’d used on last night’s lamb. She stood in front of the mirror and shook her hair out. She replaced the bra she’d been wearing with a sexier one and put on a long black cashmere sweater that was loose around the shoulders. On her legs she wore thick tights and sheepskin boots. She tousled her hair in the mirror, and pinched her lips a bit to make them look red and kissed. She drank the wine and looked at herself from the side. She didn’t mind the way she looked out here. For the first time in a long time there were things she didn’t really mind at all. Like her clothes spilling about the bedroom. And a cigarette smoked out of the
bathroom
window while staring out at the view of the chateau and the birds lifting off from the roof. And the fact that Stephen hadn’t returned from his drive into the hills yet and wouldn’t, in fact, be there, as they’d talked about, for sex at 4.30 (pick a time, any time, he’d said, laughing) on a Monday afternoon.

They sat in the kitchen where the lights were warm in the eaves. Kate put some candles out. Stephen opened the wine. At the table, they tore the legs from a warm, buttery chicken, and Stephen carved into the breast,
releasing
the steam from its ivory flesh. Outside the wind was picking up, swinging trestles of ivy across the
window
. They sucked cloves from a head of sweet garlic, dipped bread in the roasting tin to soak up the oil. Kate sprinkled salt on her greens and ate them with her
fingers
, picking them up, one by one, curling them
luxuriantly
into her mouth. Beside them the fire crackled
quietly
in the grate. They ate and drank. They didn’t say much. There wasn’t any need. Stephen wiped a drip of oil from her chin. Kate sat back and cradled her wine. She thought of the days spread out before her like drifting balloons and took another glug of wine. They held their glasses up.

‘Another triumph,’ said Stephen, leaning over to kiss her. Neither of them saw the white face that was pressed up against the window.

When the doorbell rang, it was Kate who got up to answer it. She opened the door and a burst of cool air came in.

It was late in the evening now; the streetlights flickered on and off in the square. A woman was standing out there holding a tray. She was small and shapely but her jeans and jumper were old and torn and her wild unkempt hair fell to the waist like the hair of a little girl. It looked as if it had never been cut.