We All Ran into the Sunlight (15 page)
Read We All Ran into the Sunlight Online
Authors: Natalie Young
13th March 2006
From: sylviepé[email protected]
To: Baseemapé[email protected]
Subject: For Sale?
Thanks for your message. Yes, I did get the cream. Coco is better now and I’ve started her on those biscuits you can get at the supermarket which are meant to be a bit better than the tins. She quite likes tuna now which is a relief because a massive delivery of stuff came into the shop which was almost out of date and so they put them all on special and me and Coco brought a stack load. It’s all we’ve eaten for a month now, tins of tuna and salmon mashed up with mayonnaise!
But… I was cleaning in the Mayor’s office this morning and no one was in and so I answered the phone, which they like me to do from time to time when I can. It’s nice to sit at the desk and think for a moment that I might be working in an office. I picked up the phone and said, Mayor’s office, hello, and a man was on the end of the phone. He sounded a bit foreign but he asked in French if it was true that Lucie Borja had died and that the chateau was going up for sale. I asked him who was calling but he didn’t want to leave a name. He just made a coughing noise like people do when they don’t know what else to say and then he put the phone down. Of course I knew who it was. You don’t need a face to
remember
a voice. And I checked out the number – Paris, for sure. I know it was Daniel, Ma. But I will try to do some investigations when I get a minute. Kate is lovely, so chic and funny. She is free in spirit and mind, Ma. She even lies down by the road sometimes. When she laughs I feel myself come alive.
As for your question about Lucie Borja. Well, yes, she died in Paris. She lived with her nephew, Paul, in an attic room above his flat. I don’t know where it was but I’m sure I can find an address. Apparently she fled there on the night of the fire and stayed there all these years. We don’t know how she died. Old age probably. Grief?
I’ll keep you posted.
xSylvie
p.s I was cleaning out my wardrobe the other day because of a funny smell in there and I came across that bin liner of material that Lucie left out in the entrance to the church all those years ago. It made me stop for a moment or two. I sank down on my knees and pushed my hands into the bag, pulling all this old cloth out that was all full of holes. Poor Madame Borja. Do you remember that summer of the village sewing competition that we ran through the shop? Everyone knew that despite her initial enthusiasm, she couldn’t face it after all and everyone knew how she’d crept out in the middle of the night leaving all that cloth in the plastic bags outside the church. How people sniggered, I remember. Do you remember how everyone came to the café and talked about it? How they all laughed. And we divided the cloth among us. Some got on with the business of making things. Others just stuffed the bags to the backs of their wardrobes and forgot all about it.
It’s like that in every village I suppose. Sniggerers, makers, stufferers to the back of things – faithfuls, atheists, hypocrites maybe. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Maybe we’re all a combination of all of these things. But the makers are the best, Ma. The makers who get on with the business of doing things. Maybe if I’d bothered to make myself a beautiful dress that day then Daniel might have loved me back; he might have loved me when I was lovable and then I might have been saved. Which makes me sound like an idiot. I know! Maybe I’ll take the cloth round to Kate and ask if she can sew. I think she’s quite good with her hands. She looks like she can turn her hand to anything at all. She’s a maker, Ma. I think she might have been a stufferer to the back of things. But down here I think she’s becoming a maker. She has one of those faces that tells you everything that’s going on inside. It’s fascinating to me.
At lunchtime, the guests came in from the mountains and tramped into the steaming dining room for bowls of hot soup, for cassoulet, and wine. Baseema moved about the dining room, answering questions, chatting about the walking conditions outside. At one of the tables, a woman leant over and said how last time she had been here it was December and the light had been disappointing and their guide had taken them off the trail and into the middle of nowhere. How frightening it was, she said, being lost like that, and the light fading, their bright suits disappearing in the snow.
‘Here’s to being safe and warm,’ said Baseema and the woman with the small diamonds in her ears took
Baseema’s
hands and held them in her own. It was
remarkable
really, to think how far she had come.
At half one, the new cleaner rang to say she had gone down with the flu and so Baseema rolled up her sleeves, working through the bedrooms and the bathrooms at speed.
Room number 6 was the one she lingered in. It was the room belonging to the journalist and his girlfriend from Paris. Everywhere their lives were strewn and Baseema worked quickly, carefully folding the cashmere sweaters and putting things away with her mind, as she always did when she was working, completely in neutral, and
without
the destructive need some parents had to make
comparisons
between other people’s offsprings’ lives and their own.
In the bathroom, she replaced the lid on a shiny pink lipstick. She rinsed the paste off two electric brushes, and stood them up in the rack. She rinsed the water glasses and stripped the sheets right back, letting the satin
bedspread
slide down to the floor. Baseema wiped the surface of the plasma screen television, used the remote to direct it back into the wall. She moved about silently, picked up a novel on one side of the bed, a small white clock, a tin of sea-kelp lip balm, a pair of pink silk knickers twisted up in a corner of the room. There were bottles of
water
everywhere, on the bedside table, on the desk with the writing paper and the pen laid out. A hairdryer discarded. Bottles of perfume, massage oil from Provence. Two
passports
in the drawer.
But how careless people were with their precious things, Baseema thought, opening the passports, running her fingers over the pictures of the blonde thing grinning and the doe-eyed man frowning at the camera as if he had seen too much of the truth and now carried on his
shoulders
all the weight in the world.
Lollo said he was going to leave her. He had a friend, he said, who ran a bingo club in northern Spain. Tossa del Mar. This was on Tuesday. He was lying with his arms up above his head on the sofa. He heaved himself upwards and switched the volume down suddenly. On the
television
there were elephants walking around an enclosure.
‘I’m going.’
He said it louder.
‘I’m going, Baseema…’
Then she laughed. Which was almost fatal. She was rearranging the flowers on the table behind him. He stood up from the sofa and let the blanket slide to the floor. He walked slowly around behind the sofa; the elephants were being hosed behind him. She thought he was
going
to lunge at her and she backed away. But he didn’t do anything. He simply stood where he was and let the tears soak his face.
‘I shall make you some coffee,’ she said, and she was in a panic – she might have slipped; she was wearing
stockings
without shoes and the carpet on the stairs was worn thin and smooth. Instead she went into the kitchen rolling the cream wool of her sweater up over her mouth.
Behind her she could hear him kicking something, the wall perhaps, and she felt suddenly ashamed. It was the Borjas he hated, her he was merely frustrated with. But Baseema felt responsible. There had to be another way.
She would say something about it, acknowledge the pain at least. She waited until the morning. He was hungover then, more slunk in the sofa. She took him some breakfast on a tray; fresh croissants she had been over to the kitchen for, and a bowl of steaming
chocolate
.
Lollo sat up but he wouldn’t eat. His face was grimy and white, his eyes like pieces of grit.
‘We had a life there, Baseema!’
Suddenly she felt too heavy to continue. She put the tray down and went off to work.
19th March 2006
From: sylviepé[email protected]
To: Baseemapé[email protected]
Subject: For Sale?
So the Mayor went in with a tall man to have a look around. I think he might have been American. It was so strange to walk past the open gate on the way back from the épicerie and to see the front of the house like that with the olive trees still standing in the courtyard, still growing fruit and leaves. I said to Kate, who came in with me this afternoon, that she should be the one to buy it. Heaven knows if she has that kind of capital, Ma, but she is so creative. She would do something with it.
I brought her back to my house then and we had coffee together and chatted casually about all sorts of things. She likes to smoke my roll-ups. She liked the way I do them for her. I’ll pay you back, she says. She wants to talk about the chateau too but I don’t say much.
All day I’ve had this feeling, Maman, that something will come of this and the sale will bring them all back – Lucie, Arnaud, Daniel and Frederic – I mean, I know, it won’t bring Frederic back but maybe, at least, some dignity for us, for his memory.
Baseema didn’t believe in ghosts. She knew that the sale, when it happened, would bring no one back to the village nor anything new to light. Frederic had died in the bathroom that night. The Borjas had asked her and Lollo to leave because they hadn’t wanted a fuss; they hadn’t wanted an inquiry. Lollo was right. It had been weak, more than weak, of them to have left when asked to. They should have been ashamed of themselves for having been the kind of people who just rolled over and did what people asked them. But in her heart, Baseema understood the indifference of the well-to-do and that this was why Lollo’s begging for a portion of the money to heal an ancient wound was futile. Her meek little
question
about the will and Daniel’s whereabouts delivered on a doorstep in Paris would be something Madame Borja’s nephew, Paul, living quietly in scented drapery in some genteel apartment, would hear faintly, like a sound heard from the street outside through the window – a call to prayer from the mosque perhaps – that he would barely understand.