We All Ran into the Sunlight (3 page)

‘
Bonsoir
,’ said Kate, warmly.

‘My name is Sylvie Pépin.’

She nudged forward a little and tried to smile with her head down towards the floor. She was childishly shy, and when she came into the light, Kate and Stephen could see that her freckly face was marked with thick cream scar tissue as if someone had gone at her cheeks with a
compass
, while behind the gold rims of her glasses the
woman’s
eyes were shrunk as small as beads in the folds and creases of her skin.

‘It’s late, Madame, Monsieur, I apologise and wish you a good evening!’

On the tray Sylvie had a small glass of violets and a loaf of homemade bread. She put the flowers and the loaf on the table and said that she could clean for them, if they needed her. She could clean the house twice a week, or once, if that was better. Kate remembered now that the Mayor’s wife had mentioned there was a woman in the village who could come and help around the house.

On the sofa, Stephen was staring. Sylvie blinked
rapidly
through her thick glasses and fixed her eyes on Kate’s warm, animated face.

‘You are chic, like a film star,’ she said, quietly.

Kate spun away from the compliment and laughed loudly. Stephen smiled and moved himself slightly on the sofa. A silence fell on the room.

‘I live there, over the other side of the church,’ said
Sylvie
. ‘My family house is there. It’s only me though now. Me and my dog. Coco. He is my dog. My family moved away. My father is Lollo. He used to manage the village café. You may have heard of him. In those days it was busier than it is now. Especially in the tourist season.’

‘Does it get very busy in the summer?’ asked Kate.

‘Seventy per cent increase in total population,’ said Sylvie.

Kate nodded. ‘What number are you?’

‘Number 6 with the grey door. You don’t need to worry about the dog. He’s not vicious.’

Then she rounded her shoulders and cradled the tray against her jacket. She started to back away towards the door and made a couple of gestures towards her watch.

‘There’s a roof terrace,’ she said, firmly. ‘It’ll need a sweep. There are books in the cupboard up the stairs. English books. And extra sheets. I’ve cleaned here for almost all the people who’ve rented this house.
Germans
, Swedes… I don’t like Italians. They make no
effort
to speak French. I like English. Normally the accent is terrible though. So terrible. It can make us laugh. If I were you I would wash out the saucepans. There are scorpions here,’ she said and she pushed the glasses up on her nose with a stiff little finger. ‘Small brown ones. I expect you didn’t think it would be hot enough. But it gets very hot here in the summer. When it gets that hot people go mad. There’s a court case I heard about in Carcassonne where a man was cleared for killing his wife because of the wind. They lived on top of a hill. The wind whipped round all day, all night. It’s the mistral. The tail end of it. It sweeps down the middle of France and sweeps off.’

Stephen sat with his legs bent, like an uncomfortable giraffe. These ceilings, this cramped dark little house, felt ridiculous. With the back of his hand he pushed a bit of fringe back and coughed impatiently.

Sylvie turned her head with a swish of hair. ‘You come and see me if you need me.’

‘Wait!’ Kate called after her. ‘Please don’t go. Would you like some wine?’

Sylvie shook her head. ‘I don’t drink wine, Madame. Only on special occasions.’

‘We’ve met no one since we arrived in the village, apart from the Mayor’s wife who showed us the house.’

‘She told me that you would come,’ said Sylvie.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘The Mayor’s wife told me someone had rented the house, number 17. We look out for each other. The
Mayor’s
wife is kind. Most of the people in the village are. You’ll find that everyone looks out for each other. It can become uncomfortable. Voyeuristic is not the right word – I don’t know what is.’

‘There’s a lovely sense of community,’ said Kate,
smiling
warmly at Sylvie, looking only through the glasses and into the eyes. It was an effort to avoid the scars.

‘But it is relaxing. To know that one can lean on others when one is in distress.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Kate, eagerly, ‘that’s true. And it’s so pretty here. It is very different from London.’

Sylvie nodded and continued to back out of the door. ‘Goodbye,’ she said quite firmly and then she lifted her hand from the doorframe and walked, half ran, into the square.

There was a point at which the serenity seemed to lift Kate up. In the stillness here she was weightless and free. It didn’t seem to matter much, nothing mattered, and nothing was real.

For lunch they ate salad in the kitchen, picking it straight from the bowl. The tomatoes were enormous in their soft red skins.

‘Where did you get this basil, Stephen?’

‘In town. At the greengrocer’s there. The man speaks English.’

‘It’s amazing.’

‘We could mix it with olive oil, and garlic. We could have it with some angel hair pasta tonight. And that
lovely
new white I bought. The Viognier.’

‘I love that wine, darling,’ said Kate, chirpily.

‘I’ll put some more in the fridge,’ he said, getting up at once to do it.

‘It’s so much nicer than I thought it would be. It’s like everything I ever wanted, Stephen. I could stay here for ever, buy a place and do it up.’

‘You’d get bored,’ he said, gently. ‘Trust me.’

‘I can feel it, though. I can really feel it.’

‘What’s that?’ he asked, absent-mindedly.

‘This place, Stephen. This feeling.’

‘Ah, but you felt that about the gallery, Kate. That place is your life. You put everything into that.’

‘Meaning what?’ she asked, slowly, and she leant
forward
across the table and fixed him with her eyes. She wanted him to see what was in there.

‘Meaning nothing really, darling.’

Kate threw the remains of her meal in the bin. Stephen took a deep breath and leant back in his chair, switching his camera on and panning it slowly upwards so that it picked up the old wooden beams and the spiders’ webs strung across the ceiling.

The sun came out. The air was clear. In the afternoon they drove to the coast.

Kate took a call from the gallery. She listened patiently, she laughed. Her assistant was panicking.

‘It’s tension,’ Kate said. ‘It’s always like this before an opening.’ She felt guilty not being there. It made her speak very softly, very brightly, as if to a child. She
repeated
the instructions. Then she rang off and she stared out at the vines. Stephen was trying to scratch his back. When she turned to look at him she saw that his hair was more dishevelled than usual. There was something not quite right about the set of his features; his cheeks were long-looking and grey. From time to time, she sensed him looking across at her. They were near the coast and the land was flat, there was nothing to see. Still, she was quite absorbed, losing herself in the swaying of rickety pines.

‘Nearly there,’ he said, then again, until she turned.

They parked on a road that ran along the coast. There was no one around. The sea was rippling blue, but looked cold. They walked on the sand and sat for a while,
watching
a man curling a line on the shore.

Kate closed her eyes as she drove her fingertips into the sand. ‘It’s so quiet,’ she said, dreamily. Then she felt the tightening feeling in her chest. ‘What shall we have for dinner tonight?’

Beside her Stephen tried to put his hands in his
pockets
. He relaxed his knees and left his hands there, half tucked in. His hair was being swept flat across his head; his pale lashes tried their best to keep out the sand. He watched the man with the line. It was hopeless. The sand was blowing into his eyes, making him blink. He began to feel cold. He leant over and tried to kiss his wife but he did it badly and skimmed her ear. He looked at her slightly sallow complexion; she was tired again. He could feel a headache coming on.

They got back in the car and drove to the village in
silence
. Stephen kept the engine running in the car while his wife jumped out. Then he drove off into the hills to buy some more wine.

Kate drank deep of the wine he’d bought and went to bed early. In the morning she had no memory of the night
before
and she was up before he was awake. She taped sheets of thick watercolour paper to the bathroom mirror. She wanted to paint the birds she had photographed on the old chateau wall. She put Stephen’s leather jacket on over her naked body. On the bed he was still asleep, one arm over his eyes.

In the bathroom window, the light was orange on the chateau. It looked calm and peaceful this morning and she bit her lip as the paper began to grey in thin, delicate lines. There was only this wonderful stretch of time
before
her, the distance of unmapped days to enjoy.

Stephen sat up on the bed, sweating. There was an empty wine bottle on the floor. He got up from the bed and walked towards the bathroom. She was standing there in his jacket, her hair loose around her shoulders. He stopped. Across his pale eyes, a film of the two of them holding each other, writhing… As long as it was like this. The endlessness. It was perfect. It had never been like this. They could, if they wanted, do anything.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the painting demon. I knew it was
coming
, Kate. Just a question of time.’

Kate smiled.

‘I had an awful dream,’ he said.

‘Oh, poor you.’

Stephen sat on the edge of the bath, a towel wrapped round his waist. He rubbed his face with his hands,
looking
around the space, the paint peeling off the window frames, thick white towels piled neatly in the corner. He had thought rustic was what he wanted.
Rustic French
retreat
was how he had worded the search. But the oyster shell soap dish, the pale floral curtains, the cushions that were small and stiff and faded?

‘Don’t you wonder what happened there?’ she said.

‘Where?’

‘In the chateau. The fire. Why it was left like that? And that woman, Sylvie. Wasn’t she weird?’

He yawned. ‘She was burnt.’

‘In the same fire? Do you think she was there?’

‘Ask her,’ he said, and he scratched his head and
wandered
back into the bedroom.

Kate’s mother rang from her house in Dulwich to say that she was dying. They had taken her three times to King’s. Made her sleep the night in a ward with two other women who were also dying. Emphysema. They moaned about the food. Fits of talk, it was all they had. ‘There is nothing left, Kate.’ The women had talked about what was near to them, the male nurse who was black as night, the food, which wasn’t what they ordered. One of them couldn’t breathe. In the night, neither of them could breathe. There were blacks everywhere. Too many blacks. The women who were dying clung to their masks, their voices, husky, frightened; they called out for the nurse. One of them soiled herself. No one came. She nearly died. They took her away. It was Kate’s fault. ‘You have left me here,’ she hissed down the phone. She was watching the racing on television. Can after can of coke. She was strong as a horse. Stephen moaned that Kate’s mother would never die. Kate said they would have to do something.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Stephen mouthed. ‘It’s a ploy to make you come home.’

‘We’ll be home before too long, Mum. You’ll be round for tea before you know it.’

Stephen shuddered. He stepped out onto the street to make a call to the office. Then he stood and waited for Kate beside the roses. In the square, the café was opening, the first of the old men wandering inside. Kate came out and joined him. They both looked up to the sky, which was cloudless: a deep brilliant blue. He slipped his hand into hers.

‘Don’t let her spoil it for you, darling. We earned this break.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘She’s fine.’

‘She’s not fine, Stephen. Anyone who puts herself into hospital three or four times a year for no real reason is not fine.’

‘You know, sometimes I think it’s your punishment, Kate.’

She looked up into his eyes that were pale and cold as fish.

‘For marrying me,’ he said, simply, and Kate couldn’t fathom how he could have said this, which was why she smiled at him with her lips only, but Stephen didn’t seem to see that and his eyes still looked into hers as if waiting for a reply.

‘It’s hard to believe your arrogance sometimes, Stephen. It’s hard to believe I actually married a man who still thinks, after all this time, that I did it only to get back at my mother.’

‘Well, a psychiatrist…’

‘I’m not talking to a psychiatrist, I’m me, Kate, and I’m trying to talk to you,’ she said, quietly, and then she turned with her shoulders hunched around her neck and walked off across the square.

By five o’clock she hadn’t returned from her walk.
Stephen
shut the lid of his laptop and smeared pâté onto the end of a stale baguette. Then he threw the bread in the dustbin and went out, slamming the front door
behind
him. He hung around outside the café and looked in the shop. Then he crossed the square, slipping down
behind
the church and walking to the far end of the village and out towards the cemetery. He thought for a moment that she might have left the village by the main road and walked up onto the old airfield and the heath. But there was also one more place he hadn’t checked in the village, the chateau itself, and the old gates Kate looked at when they pulled out of the square in the car.

He was certain now that this was where she might have gone, and so he walked quickly back into the village and forced a gap between the gates to find himself in a vast open courtyard, overrun with weeds.

Kate was at the top of the steps, bending over
something
. She picked it up and walked about. Stephen stood and watched her moving up there like a priestess in search of her senses. In her thin cotton dress and shawl she looked vulnerable. She had nothing on her feet. She was dwarfed by the vast, dreary walls. There were few windows, barely a roof; at the entrance were two huge double doors made of black oak, and studded with iron.

Kate stopped moving when she saw him and picked up her shoes. She walked down the steps and through the grass towards him; then she reached forward for his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, squeezing his hand. ‘I got here and I found I couldn’t leave.’