We All Ran into the Sunlight (22 page)

He watched as the slim woman in the green dress came back out of her house carrying a bottle of water and a plastic bag. She wasn’t wearing shoes. She wasn’t from here, after all.

The bartender swung his head and smiled like
someone
smiling in his sleep.

‘Les anglais,’ he said. ‘Rumour is she’s trying to buy the chateau. She came here in winter with her husband. Now she’s here on her own. She’s crazy, I think.’

‘Crazy?’

‘In the way that they are. These people.’

They watched her walk on beyond the chateau and turn down the avenue of trees.

The bartender was bored. Daniel was looking over at Sylvie’s house.

‘You have family here? Friends?’

‘No.’

‘So how come you know Sylvie Pépin?’

‘I knew her from school.’

‘You went to school here?’

‘Not here. Toulouse.’

‘Sylvie didn’t go to school in Toulouse, man. Sylvie never went anywhere. I’m not from this village; I come from the next village that way, but my mum said
something
weird going on with that one. She’s nice, though. You know? Gentle.’ The bartender shrugged and changed the subject. ‘This used to be called the Café Union,’ he said. ‘Then I took over.’

Daniel nodded to show he understood. The chair was driving him mad. He leant right back in it and looked over to the chateau. The bartender looked over too.

‘You like these big old places? So many of these in this region, you know? The tourists like to come and gawp at them like they never seen an old stone.’

Daniel felt the heat of the sun and he curled his
shoulders
right forward over himself and smoked like a man smoking his last ever cigarette. He felt sick, and he fell silent.

The beer was brought out in a tall glass. Painted circles of lemon and lime tumbled down the sides. Daniel drank it quickly and watched a bird peck around the fountain.

After a while, he wandered inside the café to ask how much he owed. Very quickly he drank another beer and then he bought a packet of cigarettes and the bartender fiddled with the radio. Daniel stood still, in the middle of the room, and thought about what he should do.

At number 6 he knocked and picked a flake of paint off the door. He knocked again. He heard a shuffling noise inside. The smell of the house was coming through the door. It was musty and familiar. He heard a dog whine and scratch a little inside.

Daniel tried the handle and opened the door.
Inside
, it was murky. There was a single light in an old red shade above the table. Sylvie was there. She was sitting at the table and staring right at him through her
glasses
, which were steaming up. Her cheeks were bright and puffy and white with scars and glistening with bright starry tears.

Daniel stood in the doorway with his rucksack in his hand and he did nothing. He saw that Sylvie was wearing a grey hooded top, and that her breasts sagged a bit inside it. Under the table he saw a pair of jeans, and pink socks.

She took her glasses off and wiped them, then brushed her hands over her eyes.

‘You’re here,’ she said.

‘Shall I go?’ he whispered. He put his rucksack down on the floor.

‘Look at you!’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s a shock. Why are you here?’

‘To sell the chateau.’

‘Oh!’

‘Lollo came to find me. In Paris.’

‘It’s business, as usual,’ she said. ‘You’re here on
business
. Yes, the chateau is up for sale. People got in a fuss about it to start with. Then everyone forgot. Except Dad. He doesn’t forget anything. Soon he will come here. To live with me. You seen my dog?’

Daniel smiled. He looked at her chin, holding itself up with all the will in the world. He saw the pale, freckly skin and what the fire had done to her lovely eyes. He saw her hair, how big and thick and familiar it was. Like a dancer. Like a lovely Spanish dancer with all this old love, and feeling, and contempt for him.

‘I think I should go,’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Sylvie, and she pointed to the
refrigerator
. ‘You can leave your bag. Just stick it over there beside the fridge. I won’t ferret through your things. And no one will come to take it. We don’t have burglars here. Not like in the city. We’re innocent folk mostly. Nothing changes much.’

‘Sylvie?’ said Daniel quietly.

‘What is it?’ she said, flicking her hair back over her shoulder again.

‘Look at me.’

‘Not on your life.’ She sniffed and wiped away another stream of huge sliding tears.

Daniel left his bag there and slipped out into the heat of the square. At the bar, he had another beer or two. There was a hole which slowly started to fill with liquid. After a while, he joined some men for a jug of wine and a round of cards. The afternoon passed into evening, and the shifting purple light got the men
moving
; things were said but he didn’t remember much and they all fell out of the bar and scattered in the square like marbles thrown out. They bantered with him to go find some woman who might take him into her bed for the night. Daniel felt the heat of the night coming down. He laughed, but there wasn’t a cash machine for miles around and he had no money to pay for the drinks he’d had. He watched the men stagger home and he placed his hands on either side of the fruit machine, letting his head hang down. He felt his forehead touch the glass and he stared in at all the lights blazing away in there. Then a painted lemon glass, and the glass was full with water. The bartender grabbed Daniel’s neck and told him to go sleep and to come back tomorrow and settle up the bill. Then he laughed, and Daniel took the man’s hand, and everything seemed all right then. The day was done.

‘You can’t play the crucified man on me, Daniel Borja,’ said Sylvie, opening the front door in her dressing gown a few moments later. Her hair was hanging in a side plait over her shoulder. ‘You’re no Prodigal Son.’ He swayed a little on her doorstep, tried to place his hand on the frame. You’re drunk.’

But it made her kind, and she opened the door to take him in. It was a shock seeing him tonight, as it had been this afternoon, but this time she was active with it and it made her tend to him with a bed and coffee, which brewed while she doubled over in the kitchen and made a strange guffawing noise to herself.

He didn’t think it would be like this. That the memory would be so hazy. That he would feel nothing, like stone. Daniel hadn’t meant to go into the chateau yet but he found, two days later, walking along the avenue of trees with his hands in his pockets, that it was easy to scale the boundary wall. He felt a little restored since arriving here; he’d been fed, and he’d slept surprisingly well in the cool, redolent disorder of Sylvie’s house.

They hadn’t talked much. She’d cooked plate after plate of pasta with butter and cheese. Someone brought tomatoes round in a plastic bag; they had eaten them on the sofa while watching TV. The dog had lolled around with them in the gloom. She had fleas, Sylvie had said. It was too hot to go out. Daniel put bottles of lemonade in the freezer and they had those mixed in tall glasses with beer. She’d been planning to grow some flowers, she said, but she hadn’t got around to it yet. One night they’d heard a nightingale and they’d sat in the silence of the kitchen and smoked and listened to it.

It was Sylvie who’d remarked on how much he slept. As if he’d come home from a war, she said, smiling at him after a shower. He looked at her shoulders, which were shiny from the moisture in her hair. She was pale, and her
shoulders
were soft and round and giving. But her neck was thin, and shrivelled, like chicken skin, with scars. That was the irony. The thing she said about war. Frederic had been the one going off to National Service. Daniel went off to be free.

‘I bummed around,’ he’d told her. ‘And now all I really have is this sense of not going very far.’

‘I’m happy you’re here, Daniel,’ she said, over and over again.

‘Don’t get used to it,’ he’d joked one evening; he hadn’t expected it to make her cry. She’d told him how beautiful he was and how much she hated him. She told him about some stuff that had happened to her. And how, one day, she’d gone into Arnaud’s vineyard and dug up the little bones they had found as children. ‘I had them analysed,’ she’d said. ‘I found out they were goat bones.’

Then Lollo arrived. It was late in the afternoon. Sylvie brought her father’s bag in and said he’d been away, down to the sea. He had a friend in Tossa del Mar.

‘He will sniff you here, Daniel. First thing he asked was, had you been here?’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told him that yes, you were still here. And that you’re trying to sell the chateau.’

‘I’ll go out the back,’ suggested Daniel, kicking his bag under the table.

‘Yes,’ she said, and a portion of her hair had fallen down in front of her face as she looked at her shoes. Then she bent beneath the table and picked up his bag and went upstairs to put it in her room.

Daniel couldn’t see what lay on the other side but he climbed easily, his limbs remembering the thickness, the strange alliance of hard volcanic rock and the soft limestone, then the flick of his legs over the top, and the lift of his heart as he jumped down the other side. His heart thumped. His body moved slowly, awkwardly, unsure of itself in the nakedness of open space. He walked around the
courtyard
, keeping close to the wall. At his feet there were tall grasses and weeds, patches of dry scrub that he caught with his shoes. He reached forward through the
overhanging
boughs. There were steps at his feet; he felt for them through the ivy. Then an opening in the wall, a keyhole shape that gave onto the pool. It was smaller than he
remembered
, entirely overgrown. It was all here.

Daniel stood for a moment, inhaling the smell of stone. His eyes adjusted quickly, and he saw the garden room and how the garden had grown over, blocking out the light. At the window he tried to pull at the weeds. He heard the blast of fire that had blown out the glass. He leant his body through the opening and pressed his head into the leaves growing in.

They had left it, exactly as it was. Black and
charcoaled
. The three of them spinning around him now. He had loved and laughed at this simple village boy with the bad reputation. A boy who pulled his pants down at the ladies coming out of church. A boy who sprayed graffiti and smoked all manner of leaves rolled up. A boy who danced on the chateau wall with alcohol in his veins. And a village girl who loved her brother and loved him too. Sylvie and her braces who laughed and laughed. The three of them loved each other, friends from the very beginning. He saw them all sitting out at the table in the courtyard, dragging it out under the olive trees, stopping for breath in the heat. He remembered the Chinese lanterns
swinging
in the olive trees. Sylvie wearing a dress with flowers on it. She kept leaning in and kissing everybody.
Delirious
with happiness. She was getting high. What a party… what a lovely party… Sylvie’s eyes had once been lively. They were smaller now, and lifeless, like beads in the face of the doll.

Daniel the boy. And Lucie always shutting the window in case the birds came in. Arnaud away as usual. Daniel had rolled up a dry cloth and placed it in the sink. He was seven or eight. He lit the match from the fire and walked very carefully and pressed it into the cloth in the sink. He held it there. Then he lit another. And held it there. The silence was deathly, and quick. No one had come. Lucie was sick, dying, it looked like, in her sleep. Arnaud was always outside. Always working outside. And Lucie was sick. That was the thing. It was dark and quiet and cold in the chateau in winter. And the village children had crept up over the wall with their grubby faces and their big pink grins. He loved those grubby faces. Dark as little buttons they were. And the fire had nothing to hold onto; it raged in the stone sink, and then burnt itself right out.

In the courtyard, Daniel lay down beneath the olive trees and closed his eyes. If there was no soul inside him, and he had no reason to believe in anything, what did it matter if he simply turned himself into the ground and
expired
? He had come full circle, twenty years; he had been around the world and brought back nothing. He wanted someone to put his arms around. What had he learnt?

He closed his eyes for the sleep coming up from this old ground, snickering upwards, wrapping its hands around his brain. Beneath his eyelids now the kilometres he had travelled to get here, the damp northern weather, rain lashing the train windows. Prodigal Son – he was, wasn’t he? – over the mountains, seven towns.

When he woke, he looked through the dust in the
courtyard
and saw the English woman walking about on the steps outside the chateau. He saw the green dress and the way she had her fingers interlocked behind her neck. She was thinking about something, unaware of him.

Daniel sat up. The English woman was walking
towards
him now. She crouched down outside the circle of olive trees. Her face was shiny with sweat. She had her chin in her hand. ‘Hello,’ she said, in English, and her voice was direct, and bright, and sweet. ‘I just wondered. You’ve been here a long time. Are you all right?’

He smiled lazily. ‘It’s hot,’ he replied, in English.

‘Daniel?’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘Just a guess,’ she smiled, and then she frowned and backed away. ‘Aren’t you feeling the sun?’ she asked him, in French.

‘What here? In the shade?’

Kate laughed. But she looked a bit serious for games. She stood with her hands on the hips of her silky dress, and turned her head away and sighed, as if she wanted to be somewhere else but couldn’t figure out how to get there.

‘Are you the one who wants to buy this place?’

Kate shook her head. ‘No. Not anymore.’

‘No?’

‘I mean, I was.’

‘You were?’

‘I left my husband for it,’ she said, a bit glibly, even though it was clear she very much wanted him to know that.

Daniel coughed politely, and took a step back. ‘Oh! Right.’ He smiled then and curled his shoulders forward as he stood up. ‘But not any more?’

‘No. Not any more. I’ve sort of lost the heart for it, I think.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Is it?’

‘Well, yes,’ he said, and he laughed.

‘I’m Kate,’ she said sweetly, and she looked at the ground. It was clear she wanted him to feel something about the fact that she was here, on her own, trying to take the old place on.

‘I’m sorry you’re not going to be the buyer then,’ he whispered, and Kate’s dark eyes flashed greedily at him. She was gentle, and fierce. She was in another world. It roused him in a way that surprised him. ‘And it’s a problem for the guy who runs the bar,’ he added, with a shrug of his shoulders, ‘because until I have money, I can’t pay.’

‘You want to sell this house in order to settle your tab?’

‘Precisely,’ he said, and he laughed while she giggled and he shook out a cigarette and offered her one.

She was eyeing him strangely.

Daniel tried to carry on the joke. Then he stopped very suddenly. ‘I’m a fool. I haven’t been back here in a long time. I’m walking with ghosts.’

Kate took a deep breath. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ she said. ‘I’m staying over there, I can cook you some lunch.’

‘Like a date?’ he said. It was easy to talk like this. Much easier, he’d found, to be like this with women than it was to be anything else. Particularly with the ones he fancied. But this one was different. She was, and she wasn’t,
playing
his game.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m kidding, and a drink would be a good idea
because
it would give me the chance to talk to you about the price.’

‘Honestly. I’ve really lost the heart for it. It’s a fantasy I had. Nothing more.’

‘Is it?’

‘I’ve lost my courage,’ she said, and they walked
together
across the courtyard listening to the quiet crunch of their feet.

They opened the door to the village house and Daniel stood with his hands in his back pockets. She gave him a glass of red wine and he watched the straps of the green dress stir on the muscles and bones in her back as she stood at the stove waiting for the eggs to boil.

‘It’s only going to be a salad,’ she told him. And Daniel said that was fine. ‘It’s so hot,’ she went on. ‘Is it always like this? Suddenly, just absolutely baking?’

‘It all goes very hot, and white, all of a sudden.
Sometimes
it gets so hot that nobody can breathe.’

‘It’s not unbearable though, is it?’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Depends on what you can handle, I guess. Dry heat I can bear.’

Daniel drank the wine. He felt hungry. But when they got to it, they found it was too hot to eat even the salad. They drank the wine and they drank glasses of water. They moved from the table and sat, side by side, on the tired sofa that sagged against the wall. Daniel said
nothing
. He sat with his legs splayed out a bit and he listened to her talk about the death of her mother in March and how losing her had somehow burst the bubble she had been living in down here. Her husband had been so
relieved
to go back. And Kate had suddenly determined to make her marriage work.