We All Ran into the Sunlight (24 page)

‘Let’s walk,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s such a beautiful night.’ He linked his arm with hers and they walked slowly
under
the orange streetlamps, taking the road that curled up onto the heath.

‘My mother thought birds foretold the future,’ said Daniel. ‘She was always out feeding them, watching them from the upstairs window, waiting for one of them to fly right in. She saw the women from the village in the birds that gathered in the courtyard. In their scratching and cawing, she said there was gossiping and picking. She thought the gossips had come to pick out her jewels, and to pick out her eyes. Fear made her blind, more blind than anyone. But she wasn’t my real mother, of course. My real mother was Frederic’s mother, Sylvie’s mother. Her name was Baseema. She was my real mother. She was a prisoner in the castle you want me to sell you.’

‘The castle that you will sell to me,’ said Kate
coquettishly
, leaning in on his arm.

‘Ha, ha,’ he said, lifting a hand out to the side. ‘Sell to you. And then I’m free!’

Kate stumbled against him. ‘Tell me about your
mother
.’

‘I think of her hands.’ He stopped on the road. ‘I love to watch women’s hands.’

Kate turned to him.

‘Could you kiss me, do you think?’

Daniel looked at her then. He saw how pretty she was, how elegant her fingers and wrists. Daniel felt as if, in that moment, he saw the whole woman in her. He saw who she had been, and who she would go on to be. He saw the lover, the friend, the wife; and he saw the mother in her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and kissed her very gently on the lips. Kate shivered slightly, and smiled. He looked into her face, and around her shoulders; he looked at her arms. Something was emerging in her; something light and fluttery trying to push its way out. Daniel was drawn to that and also afraid. He stood back a little on the quiet road. Nothing moved in the air tonight. In him there was nothing emerging, he felt. He wanted to make it. He just didn’t know how.

‘No one told me that losing someone would feel like this,’ she said, almost to herself.

‘Like what?’

‘Empty. And tired. I feel so tired. I feel like I can’t do anything. I can’t imagine having the energy to go back and do my job and be in my life. I can’t imagine doing it all over again.’

‘And yet you have the energy for all this,’ he said,
looking
back, as they began to walk again.

‘Is this what happens?’

‘What?’

‘This tired all time. Is this what it’s going to be like?’

In silence they walked together to the end of the runway. The land was still swollen from the heat of the day.

Kate was quiet now. He left her with her thoughts for a while and walked towards the trees. He cleared the gorse around the spot in swift clean strikes. He leapt up into the lower branches of a pine and swung till the branch gave up. Then another, and another branch. They were spindly as an old woman’s arms. He held these arms against his thigh and broke them above and below the elbow.

Kate watched him crouch in front of the fire and she saw the way he worked: clean, and precise. She sat silently beside him. Daniel pressed his lighter into the mound of gorse and watched the dry twigs take flame.

She took her clothes off over her head. He looked up, stood a little to receive them.

Then she sat down, her knees clicking quietly. Daniel looked at her and he thought about how he could love her.

He left the fire then and he moved slowly towards her. They held each other for a long time and then he lay her down on the ground. Beneath him she turned her head to the side and watched the flames burn through the
branches
. Behind the fire the last of the light was leaving the sky. The silence was filled with the sounds of the fire. It
crackled
and spat. He could feel her lift up beneath him. He put his fingers to the softness of her hair and he closed his eyes.

They dozed and then woke feeling cold and stiff, and so they dressed and walked back to the village without
saying
a word.

It was four o’clock in the morning. When they got to her place Daniel asked Kate if she was all right about what had happened up on the heath. It made her laugh, a bit; but she was too tired to deal with it now. She started to make some coffee for them both and then turned the gas off and went upstairs to sleep. Daniel came up and got in beside her. Just before he nodded off, he rolled towards her and whispered into her ear.

‘We did it, Kate.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We did.’

Daniel closed his eyes then. Whatever was to come, and he sensed the darkness already, he knew that in that moment at least, up there with this woman in his arms up on the heath, he had been blessed.

When he woke it was almost midday. Kate was sitting
outside
the house in nothing but a long white shirt. Her face was unwashed, her hair unbrushed. She was straddling a chair and spooning yogurt out of a pot.

‘Hi,’ he called shyly, and she looked up to see him
standing
in the doorway in his jeans. She gazed at his torso and grinned. ‘I can’t quite believe this,’ she said happily, and she pushed him back indoors so that she could put the coffee on to brew. She chucked him the pack of cigarettes so that he could come sit outside and join her on the steps in the sunshine.

‘I don’t want to sit outside, though,’ he told her,
frowning
slightly. Then he took a cigarette and lit it and stood for a moment or two rubbing his hand through the back of his hair.

‘Ok,’ she said, and she leant up and kissed his neck in a light and silly way.

‘Any minute now, you’ll be asking to borrow my
T-shirt
.’

But Kate hadn’t heard him properly. She was busy humming to herself as she ripped a bag of coffee open with her teeth.

‘My T-shirt, it’s… upstairs,’ he muttered, drawing heavily on the cigarette and watching the ash fall to the tiles on the floor.

‘What’s that?’ asked Kate happily.

He didn’t look at her. He walked towards the window and stared out onto the garden. He could feel Kate
watching
him. She was beginning to notice his mood. After a while, she came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his stomach. She breathed into the warm skin on his back and placed a very gentle kiss between the
shoulder
bones. He felt the tension ease a little in his shoulders. He felt the sunlight on his face and he watched the garden for signs of life.

‘It was lovely, wasn’t it?’ she murmured into the skin on his back.

He nodded, and then he disentangled himself from her in order to find somewhere to put out his cigarette.

‘I could do with a washing machine, to be honest. I’ve been here several days – since Monday – and I haven’t yet had a chance to wash my clothes.’

‘You’ve been here since Monday?’

‘Yes. My stuff’s at Sylvie’s.’

‘I guess it just goes to show,’ she said politely.

‘What’s that then?’ His eyes were a little narrow now. Something had changed in him. There was this tension in his shoulders, a stiffness in his neck. It was the thought of Frederic that he had woken with; a split second of
something 
deeply uncomfortable that he had pushed out of his mind as he got out of this pretty woman’s bed. Her bedroom, her sheets were full of the scent of her. He was tired, perhaps. Now Kate was moving about her kitchen, throwing her hair around in a smug way that made him feel embarrassed. It exposed her conservative side; this slightly pathetic bid for freedom she was making. It was just a fuck. That was all it was. Just a quick fuck up on the heath.

She started to fiddle about in her bag for something. She found a pot of balm and began to apply it to her lips so that they looked a bit greasy. ‘Want some?’ she asked, for want of something else to say, at which point Daniel began to think it was time to go.

‘No, I don’t want some. And I have to go now.’

‘To get the key to the chateau?’

‘Yes. To get the key.’

‘I’m feeling really good about it all today,’ she said. ‘I think I might have the strength for it, after all.’

‘Oh!’

‘You don’t seem pleased.’

‘It’s so strange, though, isn’t it? The world we live in. That you can just make this decision all on your own, Kate. And the only thing it depends on is whether you have the strength for it, or not.’

‘That’s life, though.’

‘Modern life,’ he said. ‘It depends on nothing but how depressed we are or aren’t. And if we aren’t then we can get on. And if we are then we can’t.’

Kate raised her eyes a little. ‘Sorry. Was it something I did?’

‘No.’

‘Oh,’ she said, a little awkwardly.

‘Shall I…. shall I come back later?’

‘Stay now,’ she pleaded, suddenly feeling panicky. ‘I don’t want you to leave.’

‘I think I have to.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of what happened. Last night. I think that perhaps we did the wrong thing.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I feel uneasy. I feel like it was exactly what I shouldn’t have done, in fact.’

‘Oh come on,’ she smiled. ‘It’s not as if I wasn’t a
consenting
adult.’

‘No.’

‘And it’s because of last night that I want you to stay. You see, if you go, then I might start thinking about my husband and I would feel guilty then and that would be terrible.’

Daniel smiled. ‘So you want me to stay so we can use each other to not think about everything else.’

Kate laughed. ‘It’s human.’

‘It stinks,’ said Daniel.

‘But please stay?’

He drew in a breath as she came closer and stood in front of him looking up into his pale eyes.

‘Come upstairs,’ she whispered sweetly, and her eyes were full of longing. He looked deep into the gold flecks in her brown eyes and he saw all her age and her hope and her desperate need to be someone else, quickly, again, today, before her old life came, and he loved her for that, and he put his arms around her lovely shoulders. He drew her to him and buried his face in the softness of her hair before taking her hand and walking upstairs with her into the roof.