We All Ran into the Sunlight (17 page)

‘Did he find out who you were?’

‘Of course not. In a few days he stopped coming to the wall.’

‘Lucie must have seen you.’

‘It was Arnaud. He was driving back from town one afternoon. He simply stopped and opened the passenger door. Daniel knocked his ice cream as he climbed into the car. For three weeks I didn’t see him.’

‘Almost a summer.’

‘For a child, certainly.’

‘No one in there but him, Lucie, Arnaud. No one to play with.’

Paul kept the box in his hand as he switched the light out above their heads. The back of the basement was in darkness now. She followed him back up the stairs. She wanted to tell him then that the reason she had come was nothing to do with the sale of the chateau and the money but about Daniel, to think for once about what had
happened
that night in the fire, to begin the process of finding a way back to her son. She wanted to tell him she had learnt, her whole life, about getting on; she had managed fine. It was just that…

He opened what she had thought was a cupboard door at the back of the kitchen. He reached his arm around inside and pulled the step down with his hand.

‘Usually we kept the door open, the stairs unfolded. It became quite dangerous for her. Please. It’s ok for you to go up.’

He followed her up the steps into a narrow room that had been walled off from the flat upstairs and into which the light poured through a tiny skylight above. There was a narrow bed and a chair against the outer wall, a wooden crucifix above the pillow. On the opposite wall was a low shelf with a microwave, a small television, a pile of
magazines
. There was a pair of black shoes tucked under the shelf. A brown cardigan was folded on the armchair in the centre. A pair of gloves, woollen socks. Baseema stepped over to the armchair and sat down.

‘This annexe was used to hide people in the war,’ said Paul.

Baseema thought for the first time, with a stab of unhappiness, about what Lucie’s life would have been like in the war – the two sisters, working as nurses, using
whatever
they had to patch and stem and perpetuate life. Now Baseema could perceive how the journey south and her life in Canas with Arnaud had failed her.

‘Lucie arrived at the station very broken. My mother was waiting for her. She’d got it into her head that her
sister
had been abused all those years, living with a man who spent his time outdoors, she always in. Marie and Arnaud had fallen out long before. There was no correspondence for years and years. Then suddenly we had this call. There had been a fire. Daniel had gone. Lucie was leaving the village and taking the train to Paris. She was leaving for good, she said. The journey took her three whole days. She was in such a terrible state. She had this bald patch at the back of her head as if she’d plucked her own hair out. We thought she would simply disintegrate. We brought her back here and Lucie quite fell into my mother’s arms, I remember.’

Baseema was listening to the silence in the room. She could hear water gurgling in the pipes; outside the muffled roar of cars. In winter it would be cold up here.

She put a hand on her heart and rubbed at the skin, but the look of pain on her face was hard to disguise.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You have gone quite pale.’

‘It’s just strange,’ said Baseema, ‘for me to be here.’ She stood for a moment looking into his eyes with her fingers pressed to her mouth. In her mind she saw the lizard up here – white and small – drying out.

In the kitchen, she picked up her coat. Paul stood to one side, smiling shamefully at the floor. Something had been said between them that should have remained
buried
.

‘I wonder,’ he said, blinking at the back of her. ‘I
wonder
what you would have said to her had she been here.’

‘Quite simple,’ said Baseema, knotting the silk scarf at her neck again. But she didn’t continue. The sun had gone in now and the kitchen was grim and brown. She felt cold suddenly.

‘I’ve seen Daniel. He’s here, Baseema. In Paris.’

Baseema cleared her throat. ‘I would like very much to see him.’

Baseema rang Lollo to let him know where she was and that she was safe. The phone was in a vandal-resistant aluminium booth.

‘Where are you?’

There was silence on the end of the phone.

‘Lollo?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you find the soup?’

‘Yes, I found the soup.’

She put the phone back on its hook then, quietly,
without
saying a word. She stood for a moment with her hands on her handbag, her chin tilted up to the ceiling.

Arab cunts. Fuck the cunts
. She dialled the number again. He picked up. His voice was weak and slow.

‘Lollo?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Lucie died here in Paris. She fell down the stairs. She left the chateau to Daniel. Nobody else was mentioned in the will. Not even Paul Prevost, her nephew.’

‘Does he know where Daniel is?’

‘Yes,’ said Baseema. She felt her heart beat a little
faster
. ‘Daniel is here. He lives and works in Paris.’

‘Where?’

‘In a restaurant on Boulevard St Michel.’

Lollo’s voice wasn’t menacing, only flat, without life.

‘You will see him.’

‘Yes. Tomorrow. I want to.’

‘He’ll manipulate you.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘No one is innocent. You romanticise him.’

‘Everyone does.’

‘It stinks.’

‘He knows that Lucie died. He knows the chateau has passed to him.’

‘And?’

‘He has not been in touch since.’

‘But?’

‘Paul says he is a kind person. Calm. He suggests I try to write to him.’

‘Write to him?’

‘To get my thoughts down. In order. It’s easier to say what one feels.’ But she felt no need to go on. ‘Bye,’ she said. ‘Night.’ And then she put the phone down. p

Right up until the time they had moved away from Canas, life with Lollo had been fine. He was a quiet, hardworking man – soft as skin; sallow, harmless, with little black eyes and features that were small and close together. He had occasional but very occasional bouts of nastiness that had him rearing up to snap and writhe – like a small snake – before falling back and sinking, deep into the listless quiet of himself. The emotional bruises she got from these
outbursts
weren’t bad, and they were few and far between. After these episodes he barely said a word. Simply went to work at dawn and came home again for lunch with her and Frederic and Sylvie, then went back out again to work. Life was quite normal. The children were mostly happy; they did what all children did, which was play and
wander
and try to explore. They chattered a lot and watched TV when it got too hot to go out and they hung out in the square with the other children who played around the fountain. Frederic liked to go out to the vineyard and ride the machines. He was a tall and silent boy who loved his family and his collection of bugs in the yard. Weeks went by. Autumn gave into winter. Winter folded away. The
village
was quiet; time there moved in its own gentle rhythm; it held her in.

Sometimes, she wondered if Lollo’s outbursts had something to do with the weather. High winds on the hillside got to him, and he’d stop at the bar with the wind still howling in his ears.

So there was the work, and then the bar. Then there was coming home. That was what Baseema thought the
problem
was: the stimulation, the testosterone of men pent up their whole lives inside themselves with nothing and no way out and then them coming into the kitchen with it all hanging out and electric, looking for a fight. She could tell what was coming from the way he tried to cover up what he was feeling by whistling. He looked smaller than ever on these nights. When he was trying to look big. She’d never realised how small his features were, how feminine his nose. Right away she would make him coffee and then lock the door to the bedroom and turn the television up. Once or twice, he kicked at the door.

But life was difficult at times for everyone. The point was to look at it positively. And, generally speaking, life in the village was comfortable, and familiar and fine. Then Frederic’s behaviour and his way of walking became the topic of conversation in every little kitchen, whispering and sniping behind the yellow mosquito screens, windows open to let the cooler air in; no one knew how their voices carried – no one in the village had any idea of the damage they were doing – silly women always doing their
whispering
…

And because Baseema was a perkier, more sensitive person than people gave her credit for, she started hearing a few too many stories about her son, about his friend at the chateau, about her husband the café owner and the looks of disdain he gave his own boy, and it was round about then – Frederic in puberty – that she discovered the needles of shame underneath his bed and how bad it could be when they dug right in and needled away,
needling
a person back through all kinds of other shameful moments.

Everyone knew that if you told someone they were this or that often enough, they would become this or that. And when she heard the villagers saying how she was either crazy or ought to be ashamed, turning her eye from the two teenage boys who were spending so much time together, she found the shame guiding her into town to spend half of the money her husband brought home on food for the family, on nicer clothes and shoes, on
skincare
, and six francs in the
salon de coiffure
having the shame styled out of her or herself styled out of the shame, so she could drive home and walk into that house and see her husband sitting there – he was a stupid man, even stupider than her.

For a long time that night, Baseema sat with her ankles crossed on the crisp cotton sheets on the bed. In her hand she held the address that Paul had given her for the
restaurant
on the Left Bank where Daniel worked.
Boulevard 
St. Michel. ‘He’s a nice guy,’ Paul had said. She had already asked the concierge how long it would take her to get there, how much time she would have before her train back to the south. Paul said he was a nice-looking man – ‘easy-going’. He had tried to describe the face but it could been have been anyone. Baseema felt that perhaps it would have been best to write to him first. Not turn up unannounced. Not squeeze him in between taxi and train. He’s very calm, Paul had said. ‘I imagine that he would take it in his stride.’