We All Ran into the Sunlight (4 page)

They went into the café for a drink and stood under the television that was bolted to the ceiling. Stephen said that they might have made a mistake coming all the way out here. Six months was a long time.

‘There’s not much here, Kate.’

‘There’s us,’ she said, smiling.

She was happy. Her face was flushed and more
youthful
with it. She said she thought that the chateau
courtyard
was lovely.

‘All those birds flying about in the courtyard. And midges, like when I was young, dancing about above the weeds.’

Stephen went back to the bar and ordered a bottle of wine. He took it outside, to where the zinc tables were gathered around the fountain. He sat in the chair that was most in the square, making sure the dark lumps of the chateau wall were behind him. He watched the light
flickering
an acid green in the trees. The air was cool. After a while, Kate came out and sat down beside him. Stephen leant forward across the table.

‘Don’t you feel like we’ve come to the middle of
fucking
nowhere?’

‘We have,’ she said, quietly. ‘That was the point.’

‘Just look at these awful houses, Kate. Like a square full of old, rickety teeth. Don’t you think? And the dog there, like a nasty little rat trying to crap by the fountain. Can you see that? Don’t you think that’s disgusting?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, sadly.

‘Bat country!’

‘You’re just cross that I had such a lovely afternoon, and you had a boring one, Stephen.’

‘How can you have had such a lovely afternoon? You didn’t do anything.’

‘I remembered things,’ she said, ‘like how much fun I used to have before I started working. Maybe it’s fine to just sit and think, and remember things. What’s the point in dashing about? I’m worried about all the stuff we miss. I’m worried about the things that have been going on at the edges, Stephen. Like that lovely old man in the bar. You completely ignored him. You didn’t even see him, let alone say hello. We hurry about. We miss so much. It scares me.’

‘That man has tits on his playing cards, darling. You ok with that?’

She shrugged like a child. ‘Who cares? We’re so
uptight
.’

‘Fuck’s sake! I care!’

‘I even like the wine here. Refreshingly unpretentious, I think. Un-up-its-own-arse.’

‘It’s rustic, Kate.’

‘Yes, but why does it bother you?’

‘Because we don’t need to put each other through this. I need a shower, and a decent bed. I need to get back to the office.’

‘Because you don’t like the person you’ve become
without
it?’

‘I had a team there. We were a team.’

‘Instead of what?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Oh, Stephen, this is pointless. Go with it. We’re here!’

‘We could have taken a holiday, a normal one. Slept. Sat by the pool.’

‘And then what?’

He was silent.

She stared at him with her glassy eyes, the brown so dark it was almost black. They finished the wine and stepped under the plane trees, which rustled quietly in the night. They saw the flies spinning on the fetid fountain water. Then they stumbled quietly back into the house and tried to have sex in their bedroom in the loft.

In the morning, she was up and gone before he was awake. There was a note on the kitchen table.
Slept really well. Hope you’re all right.

Stephen fixed himself some coffee and ate the eggs that were left on the sideboard. The piece of toast he ate in two large mouthfuls.

This time he went straight for the chateau and he forced an entrance again through the gates.

Kate was there on the steps. She was wearing shorts and an old jumper of his. Her hair was still tousled with sleep, her face pale but calm. She smiled when she saw him and waved. Stephen ran forward; he was waving at her in a way that made him feel strange.

‘Hello!’ they said simultaneously, and he climbed up the front steps and walked round behind her.

He put his head to the chateau doors and tried to see in. There was a single keyhole, low down; no bigger than the one on an ordinary London door. He bent down over it and tried to see through the cracks in the planks.

‘It’s been abandoned years ago,’ she said. ‘Everything gone. You can feel that.’

‘Can’t see a bloody thing in there.’

‘There’s nothing to see, Stephen. It’s empty.’

‘What a disappointment.’

‘A disappointment?’

‘Look, are you done with sitting here?’

‘No,’ she said, very firmly, though she wouldn’t look him in the eye. ‘I’m not.’

‘You’re trespassing,’ he said, coldly, and he turned and walked away from her then, his bright white trainers crunching loudly on the stones.

When Stephen got back from his run she was still there. She hadn’t moved. The sky was fiercely blue by then, the pale stone on that altar of hers reflecting the sun in its glistening slivers of quartz. She didn’t want to come back to the house for lunch. She was smiling, and thinking, she said. Quite happy. Stephen changed tactic. He wasn’t
going
to let it wind him up. Whatever it was, she’d get over it soon enough. He felt sure of that. He got to the shop before it closed for the afternoon and he bought water for her, and fruit. He dropped off the bag. Then he went back to the house, pulled the shutters against the sun, and slept through the afternoon.

At dusk, he crossed the square and stopped in the bar for a drink. Emboldened and relaxed, he squeezed through the chateau gates and stood, pink-faced in the light, by the olive tree.

She was sitting up on the steps with her chin in her hand.

‘Kate!’ he shouted across the courtyard. She didn’t wave. She didn’t even seem to hear him. ‘Kate!’ he shouted again and he heard the tremor in his voice.

She held onto his arm as they walked through the square, and when they arrived inside the house, she turned to him and put a hand on his cheek. She said she was
feeling
tired, a bit confused. She was sorry, she said.

Stephen watched her move about the kitchen in that sexy, effortless way she had with her limbs. He opened the wine and made a pasta sauce out of the tomatoes he’d bought at the market. The garlic was fresh and hard and sweet-smelling. Neatly, he chopped and chopped and piled it in, with the basil and a heap of fresh thyme. Kate was sitting at the table looking tired, and scratching her neck. The skin on her arms and legs was tanned now but she looked thinner, smaller around the neck and the chin. But she revived with the food and wine and they sat and talked for a while.

‘Sometimes I sound like I’m a hundred,’ she said. ‘That whole conversation made me sound like a total bore.’

He told her that she was beautiful, more beautiful than anyone, with her dark hair and her neat little face with its white teeth and soulful eyes.

‘Soulful?’ she said, and the eyes that used to droop at the corners with all the disappointment for which she had found no one to blame were full of sadness now. There was a hole growing; she’d recognised that today. It was almost a relief. Letting go meant giving in.

The village outside was silent and peaceful, the candles flickered on the table. There was nothing she could do but try to be nice to Stephen, to listen to him talk through the book he was attempting to write.

They drank down the wine. Then the face appeared at the window again and Stephen got out of his chair. He lurched a little drunkenly across the room. He had taken his shoes off, placed them neatly beside the door, facing, as always, into the room; ready for action. He bent down beside them and scooped up the note.

Kate took the message and passed it to Stephen. They smiled at the writing and read it again. Kate opened the front door but there was no sign of Sylvie or anyone at all.

Stephen turned his attention away from the note and towards coffee and they lay about for a while, reading books and magazines, and drinking the rest of the wine. The papers fell to the floor and one of the candles was knocked over and went out on the rug, singeing a small black hole in the fibres.

When at last they got up to go bed, Stephen took the message from the table and scrunched it up in his hand. He dropped it in the bin with the pasta sauce, the garlic peel and the wine corks, and when his wife came down in the night for a glass of water, she took the piece of paper out of the bin, and then sat for a while in the kitchen, looking out at the leaves on the fig tree in the garden. 

‘It’s nothing,’ said the boy who was working that
morning
in the café. In his right ear he had a large black rubber stud and a silver chain looping his hips. At Stephen’s table beside the fountain he leant his weight against the back of the chair so that it made a small dragging noise, and inched closer to the table.

‘Just a big old place with nothing in it. Big rooms. It’s empty inside. See those windows? Last year the shutters came off in the storm. There’s nothing there.’

Stephen followed the finger to the dark sheet of wall, fifty metres up, which was exposed to the square.

‘When it rains you might see some snails in the
courtyard
. One year there were many snails. We tried to start a business, my dad and me. We tried to sell the snails in town. Took a whole load in.’

Stephen licked his finger and turned the page of his newspaper then folded it and laid his elbows over the fold. He was making some progress now on the book and the breakthrough had cheered him and levelled his tolerance towards the sleepy villagers.

‘My wife loves it there,’ he said. ‘She seems terribly drawn to the place. It’s a mystery to me. I’m lucky if I can get her to come out in the evening to eat!’

The boy’s mouth was hanging open as if he struggled to breathe through his nose.

‘And I’m assuming it’s a private property. I’m sure the owners wouldn’t really welcome having her there…’

‘Well, it’s not exactly private,’ said the boy. But who would know? It’s hardly the village fun park. Like every year, we hold our annual summer party in there. Disco balls. Elephants. You name it. Fireworks flying off the roof. Duh!’ The boy pulled the tea towel down from his shoulder and whacked himself on the hand.

‘No, I’m sure not,’ replied Stephen coldly, and returned to his newspaper.

The boy didn’t move. He continued to stand with his mouth slightly open, gazing up at the window. ‘Honestly?’ he said, quietly. ‘To some, I think it’s more like a
nightmare
. And old Madame Borja keeps it on. She won’t sell. We can’t demolish it and so it sits there, looking down on the village like a monster, like King Kong. We can’t move on.’

‘Then my wife is in love with your nightmare,’ said Stephen, which the boy didn’t seem to hear.

‘It doesn’t matter. Who cares? The family left years ago. After the fire. Twenty years or so. Some of them died. Others just disappeared. Lucie Borja ran away to live in Paris with her nephew. I heard she died, though. Before Christmas. That’s the rumour anyway. Even so, she’ll
never
sell. Dead or alive, man. The Borjas keep it on. You can ask the Mayor if you want to go in.’ He had pushed the chair as far as it would go. ‘But don’t get your hopes up. It’s not a fun park. I think you’ll find it completely empty. Sometimes, when we were kids, we went in with our bikes and stuff. It was open and we just rode on through and came out again. No one hangs around in there. I don’t know why. Once, when I was a kid, like ten or eleven years old, I went in and I felt so weird. I had to come straight out again. It’s cold. And draughty.’

‘Where can I get the keys?’ asked Stephen, and the boy seemed to wake out of his trance then. He smiled and lifted his hand up, poking a finger towards the Mayor’s office, which was opposite the church on the other side of the square.

Up above them, in an overcast sky, the birds echoed each other, making loud throaty caws as they flew over the roof.

Kate, in a long baggy coat and flip-flops, had her
camera
slung around her neck. She climbed the steps slowly and stared down at the familiar dandelion grass that was growing quietly between the cracks. Where the top step met the wall there was a slick of grey concrete with a
footprint
left in it. Stephen was at the door already,
bending
over the key. She didn’t like that he’d got there first. It made her feel depressed. She stood behind him with her arms folded and pulled in a deep, silent breath.

‘Here we go,’ he said gamely, and he smiled round at her while still holding the key. She felt infantilised and urged him to push at the door and go on in without her.

Stephen took her hand and left the door open behind them.

Inside there was dust and the air smelt of it.

The entrance hall was wide enough for fifteen men charging, the ceiling tall and arched. To the left, in the corner, tucked back behind the door, there was a small round table, incongruously small, and made of iron that had been painted a greeny grey.

‘They would have had this out in the garden,’ said Kate, keeping her voice very low. ‘They would have taken it out into the courtyard for Madame to use for her cup and book, her platter of letters.’

Stephen rushed past her, the dimness and the silence making him uneasy. He tried to fight it like a man, his body language becoming erratic; he tipped his head
forward
and flicked the dust from his hair. Then he placed his hands on either side of the giant stone pillar
supporting
the ceiling at the bottom of the stairs. The
plasterwork
here was dirty white and old; it brushed off on his coat. Low down, the walls were damp and blackish, as if they had been sucking up some strange malevolence from the ground.

From the open door, winter sunlight stole across the floor. Kate stood and watched her husband backing away, brushing the plaster off his chest, half laughing, half coughing the dust out of his lungs. His enthusiasm seemed forced and unnatural, and she wanted to be away from him so that she could feel the breath of the place, and she went alone into the kitchen, which was long and thin with an enormous fireplace on the wall to her left.

On the outer wall, there were two sets of shutters and a large stone sink at the far end. There were gaps in the shutters and the light flickered on the floor. Kate’s heart thumped as she tried to take it all in and she bent down to the floor, to feel the stone; it was smooth and shiny as marble. She felt the scratches left by furniture and she
pictured
a long kitchen table laid out with food, a cook busy working at one end of the table, sitting on a stool, sifting and kneading flour in her hands. She tried to people the place with children and artefacts; things that were simple, natural fibres, belongings passed down through the
generations
. Since the flight of the family the place had been looted.

Kate ran her fingers on the old floor, fingering grooves as smooth as bone. She thought about this man and his wife, tried to picture them, wondered who they had been and how they had loved each other right up to the end.

When Stephen came into the room, Kate stood up like someone caught doing something she shouldn’t, and she smiled at him to disguise the emotion she was feeling.

Stephen turned to the earthenware pot that had fallen at an angle into the fireplace. There were hanging hooks. To the left and above the fireplace was a wooden platform enclosed by a large rickety wooden cage.

‘They would have kept dogs in there,’ he said loudly.

‘Dogs?’

‘To turn the spit.’

‘Is that meant to put me off the place, Stephen?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ he replied, but she had gone out into the corridor now, and was using the blue light on her mobile phone to guide her to the end. She pushed at the door and found herself in an internal courtyard, which was dripping with damp.

The walls were sparsely trellised with a dry, yellowish ivy. In the centre of the courtyard three spectacularly tall and spindly pine trees reached up towards the light.

There was a wrought-iron balcony that ran round the entire square from the first floor.

‘It’s like something out of
Macbeth
,’ said Stephen,
following
her, and he kicked at the stones that were cracked and mottled at their feet.

The air smelt damp and old. Up above, through strings of ivy that criss-crossed the air, birds were flying, cawing still. Kate perched on the bench and hugged her knees. She watched her husband standing there with his
shoulders
slumped forward. He was trying to understand what she felt about the place; he was having a shot at being here for her. She felt sorry for his seclusion.

‘If I was the lady of the manor, Stephen, and you were the butler, would you bring me a cup of tea?’ she asked, trying to be sweet and playful.

‘Much obliged, Marm,’ said Stephen, turning happily, and he bowed to her and presented the cup and saucer.

Kate sat bolt upright and pretended to sip at her tea. ‘It’s perfect,’ she said, smiling, but she was making too much of it and she could feel the strain in her face. Stephen turned away and went on in then. He said he was going to look upstairs.

Halfway up, Kate looked out of the slit window and down onto the burnt-out storeroom so shrouded in dense green from the rain, so overgrown with weeds. The garden was stuffed full of ferns and poplars and huge oleander bushes that towered over the wall and over the roof of the
storehouse
.

She went on up, running her hand up the wide, dusty banister. At the top of the stairs, she ran along the
corridor
. She went past doors opening onto rooms ransacked and left, paint peeling, to a door at the very end, which was locked. Kate stopped and pushed at the door. It gave onto a dark passageway and a circular room where
Stephen
was leaning out of the window.

Behind him the fields were a vivid green.

‘It’s the tower room,’ said Kate and she stared down at the floor tiles that were cracked in the centre of the room, as if someone had been at them there with a
sledgehammer
. A mould clung to the damp on the grey outer wall like a white rash around the window.

‘Christ, look at all the bird shit,’ he said.

‘But look at it!’ she whispered. ‘Look at these beautiful tiny little shutters opening onto the view, Stephen. Look at the vineyards, the light.’

‘The light is lovely,’ he conceded.

‘People would think we had gone off our heads.’

‘What did you say?’

It didn’t matter, she told him. She’d been thinking aloud, trying to figure out what it would be like. Stephen bent to the only piece of furniture in the room, a narrow wooden bed bolted to the wall. He ran his fingers over something inscribed in the stone. Watching him, Kate felt something change. Some small adjustment in the air. She pulled in her stomach. It felt as if she ought to be sick.

Outside, in the courtyard, he sat down beside her on the highest of the steps. The sky was heavier now. Stephen felt his headache coming on.

‘What is it?’ he asked grimly.

‘Not sure. Too much wine, I guess.’

‘I don’t mean in there, Kate. I mean you. What’s going on with you?’

She looked away and felt embarrassed. She put a hand on his knee but couldn’t bring herself to tell him about the restlessness she was feeling.

He put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed hard. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said firmly, and Kate agreed with that and she looked out across the courtyard and up to where the birds were flying about.