We All Ran into the Sunlight (30 page)
Read We All Ran into the Sunlight Online
Authors: Natalie Young
PILOGUE
3rd March 2011
From: sylviepé[email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Hi!
Dear Daniel
Thanks for your message. You’re too late, I’m afraid. Kate isn’t here.
She sold the chateau because she couldn’t afford to keep it on. We were ok for a couple of years and we ran some art courses. We had a bed and breakfast, of sorts, with six excellent rooms. People really loved it here. They came once and then they came again.
We painted the whole thing white. It was really beautiful – so clean and bright. And then we started working in the garden. Kate was like a demon about it all.
But there were problems always with the roof and the damp and the wiring in the chateau and our third winter was terrible. Kate got heavily into debt and there was nothing any of us could do. We tried our best to patch the place up but, quite honestly, it felt like we were putting the smallest of plasters over the largest of lesions and in the end, the cracks became too great; the roof caved in.
Kate left six months ago. She had a brief relationship with an art tutor but she couldn’t bear another winter here. So she decided to go back to her husband. As it turned out, she had really begun to miss him. I think she found that life was easier with the compromises of marriage, after all. I’m sorry to learn that you’ve been thinking of her in that way, which your letter makes absolutely plain.
The village is back to normal. And the new people who bought the chateau haven’t arrived yet. They might come next summer but probably not this one. At least, that’s what people in the village are saying. They’re not from America. They’re just European. No one really knows where they live.
So the chateau just sits there now, as before, quietly rotting away.
I have moved back into my old house with my daughter, Ruby. Her father is Swiss but we have no contact. Lollo lives with us too. But his health isn’t great. I’m not sure how much longer he will be around.
I wonder if you have found a way to make it all work for yourself, wherever you are. Perhaps you have found a way of keeping yourself aloof. The joy of work, as our mother would say. Perhaps that’s the only way. She’s content. Then again, in his own way, so is Dad – now that he lives here again, with the only life he ever knew. I don’t know about the rest of us. The next generation. What a muddle we seem to have got ourselves in. I have tried to visualise clearing the muddle in order to gain some control and sometimes I have felt rather close to it all.
As for Kate, well, I thought we were friends but I haven’t heard a peep from her. It’s mostly a shame for Ruby, who misses her too.
But, honestly, we are fine. Life just goes on. I don’t think that, if I were you, I would think of coming back here, though. You won’t find anything here for you, Daniel. It is as it was and always will be. Not your world, certainly. As you said to me when you came back here, there’s so little here. It made you feel empty. But where you are isn’t what it’s about, I don’t think. Before I had Ruby I was hollow too. Perhaps that’s the same for everyone. But the beauty of living in a place like this is that no one will let you feel lonely. We sit and we watch each other’s children run round the fountain. And that, I think, in the end, is all we really need.
xSylvie
P.S – A few years ago, Ma sent me Lucie’s journal. It seems that Lucie’s nephew Paul sent it to her from Paris. It was mostly unreadable – inane and deluded mutterings from a woman going mad. But inside one of the pages was a letter gone a bit
yellow
. It was written the night you left and Frederic died. She must have written it when she went up to bed and we three were in the garden room. It’s strange to think that she might have been up there writing it while you and I were passed out and Frederic was quickly dying.
I thought it was quite beautiful when I read it. I don’t think anyone knew she could feel or write like that. There’s something in it about the house and the bird that really stuck in my mind. And it just goes to show how there are, in all of us, these moments of real brilliance, Daniel. And the rest so murky, so misunderstood.
The heat of the day has gone now. It’s lovely and cool up here. And I am cool, my blood is quiet, so still; there is hardly a heartbeat. I am almost asleep. You’ve nothing to fear.
After everyone left, I came upstairs and went through all the rooms, opening doors and opening up the shutters; feeling the air at last. How the chateau seems to love having the air blow through it. You can almost hear it sigh. This summer has been so hot. It’s no wonder things have got so bad.
Sometimes, in my dreams, I see this old house and I see myself as a young woman, newly married, and arriving here, stepping round to look in at the windows, drawing closer to peer in. I go backwards and forwards. In my sleep I feel the rocking motion as I step closer and then back away from the walls, and I never get to seeing what’s actually inside before I find I am sitting upright and wide awake. It is always just the outside, and all the doors and the windows blowing open, leaves drifting in.
I’ve been watching you from the balcony, moving around in the courtyard, night after night, kicking up stones. I cannot imagine what hurts you, Daniel. Always, you seem to be fighting with someone. Fighting with Frederic and Sylvie, fighting with your father, fighting with me.
Come inside. Come sit with me for a while. We don’t
have to think about anything. Not necessarily. Not here, not now. We’ll sit in our chairs by the window, looking out on the garden, hearing the cicada beating themselves in the trees. Just as it used to be. Summer nights. When you were young. We’ll talk about things. Nothing heavy. Only things that are separate to us, like the lines of basalt etched on the moon, or the distance between us and the stars. We used to consider how long it would take a car to get us to the nearest star… if you could
picture
the road. Remember? And politics. You always liked to talk of politics. The things occurring in Paris, the problem of immigrants.
The hours will pass and we will be happy enough together, as we always were, content in the silence, feeling the comfort of having each other near… Then it will be time to sleep and maybe, after all the wine and the party, we’ll not bother to go to bed but drift off to sleep in our comfortable chairs. And I’ll thank you, before I go, for the table you carried out into the courtyard, and for the lanterns you hung in the olive trees, such lovely Chinese lanterns, gold and green, the colours I love, for my birthday.
You’ll ask me to tell you again the story of when we came here, your father and I, and there was nothing here but the birds and a big empty house. And how for months we lived only in the kitchen, eating whatever the garden would provide. We were all scavengers after the war, Daniel. We were all so hungry, even the birds.
You’ll ask me again about the day the crow came in and flew at me while I was making the lunch, and I’ll tell you again, as I did before, about the parable of the bird and the human soul, which is from St Augustine, about
how the soul is like a bird that flaps around in a big house for a while, then finds an exit and disappears.
But your concentration will have gone by now, Daniel, and you’ll be back to the things you know about, the things you know you believe: the earth, the
vineyards
, the soil, rubbing the smooth surface of a stone beneath your thumb, and you’ll ask me, as you did when you were five or six, what it would be like to be a stone, standing still in a wall like this for five hundred years. You looked down at your hands then, my darling boy, at your fingernails, your skin, and you turned very pale then as if you had seen a ghost, as if you had passed through some tunnel of knowledge about yourself that answered to a truth that was too painful to bear. You looked up at me then, Daniel, and you burst into my
arms.
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their love, support and encouragement, I would like to thank the following people:
Fae Brauer, Lara Brauer, Hamish Burton, Ollie Burton, Aurea Carpenter, Jessica Carsen, Karen Cooper,
Marie-Hélène
Dupré, Alex Elam, Danny Finkelstein, Justin Fleming, Frances Gayton, James Harding, Barbara Heide, Andy Hine, Mercy Hooper, Clemmie Jackson-Stops.
Oliver Kamm, thank you.
Lottie Moggach, Paul Myners, Rebecca Nicolson, Alex O’Connell, Lucy Parrish, Richard Pohle, Rozanne Rees.
Louis and George, I love you.
Peter Sandison, Eleanor Scharer, Sally Sole, Tara Stewart, Caroline Sullivan, Emma Tucker, Alice Van Wart, Erica Wagner, Vanessa Webb, Laura Westcott.
Rhian Williams, thank you.
Hattie Young, for the first book, James Young, and Nicola Young.
And thank you to my parents, Michael and Daphne Young..
Natalie Young has worked for
The Times
for several years.
She has two children and lives in London.
This is her first novel.
