We All Ran into the Sunlight (23 page)

‘It was all I cared about. I was so bloody serious about it all of a sudden. Love, I kept saying to myself. It’s a
question
of committing to it. Just love, with all your heart.’

Daniel watched her hands, which fluttered about in front of her face as she talked. Her teeth were very white and very clean. He found that they distracted him, and prevented him from looking into her eyes.

‘It was as if I had suddenly absorbed my mother’s way of doing things – being the perfect wife, without fuss or self-pity – and surviving by being good at it. The
commitment
created its own amazing momentum. All that
rebellion
fell away.’

Kate said that her husband had been so happy to get back to work. He had missed the structure and the
routine
, and he took up cycling again, which made him feel better. But he was the one who kept talking about the
village
, and the chateau. He had kept asking her if she didn’t miss it.

‘I think he worried I was in denial,’ she said. ‘And then one morning I woke up and thought, Oh God, what have I done? I thought, this isn’t right at all. I heard the water running. Stephen was in the shower. I lay there thinking about how much I wanted out. Stephen came back into the bedroom and started drying himself. I couldn’t look. I couldn’t bear to look at him any more. He sat beside me on the bed and he took my hand and asked me if I was all right. I said, “No. I don’t want to be here any more”.’

‘Not with him or not in London?’

‘Well, both – not with him, and not in the world at all. Isn’t that what it feels like when you’re stuck? You can’t distinguish what it is exactly that is making you feel so stuck because in my case it seemed like such an awful upheaval having to try to untangle everything. So I tried instead to be better at being married. But that only made me want to burst. So being married and being alive had become the same thing.’

‘Did you tell him that?’

‘We’re always saying, I’ve had enough. I can’t take any more. He’d stopped listening to that.’

‘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 real 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.