We All Ran into the Sunlight (16 page)

In the cabin that night, she fried a handful of lardons and sprinkled them over the chicory and the spinach leaves, which were dressed already in olive oil. She took his plate downstairs on a tray and sat with him. On the news, they saw a boy being carried between two policemen away from a burning car. Lollo’s face was lifeless beside her. He watched the newsreels and said nothing.

‘If working-class people are the onions,’ said Baseema, after a while, ‘then who are these people?’

He shrugged. He held the sides of his plate in his weak little hands.

‘I was thinking you might have a vegetable for them…?’

‘Couscous,’ he said gently.

It made Baseema smile. She was patient with him; she watched through the reels. ‘And the well-to-do?’

‘I never met any well-to-do,’ he replied. ‘You think the Borjas were that but they weren’t. They came to the village after the war with nothing.’

‘I don’t think there’s a vegetable for them, Lollo. They’re more like fruit which goes rotten quicker. Figs, for example.’

‘Figs are too common.’

‘Ugli fruit then,’ said Baseema, turning her eyes to the side to see if he would smile at all. He didn’t.

‘My bosses here are well-to-do.’

‘New money.’

‘What difference does it make?’

‘It makes all the difference. No one is who you think they are, Baseema. Your bosses are Euro-trash. We never knew any well-to-do.’

‘If Daniel is innocent, Lollo? What if he didn’t do it?’

‘He did do it.’

‘But in my heart I don’t believe that he did.’

‘He was starting fires since the age of seven, Baseema. That boy was on a mission to destroy. He killed Frederic. He hung him up and then he started the fire to destroy the evidence and make it look like it was a suicide. He was fucked in the head because Frederic was leaving and off to be a man. Off to take responsibility. Stand on his own two feet in the world. It was more than Daniel Borja was capable of. And he knew it. Daniel was jealous. And Lucie knew that. It was her fault, of course. For raising him like a pet. Making him think he was too good for anything. Making him think his health was poor so he wouldn’t find the strength to leave her. She knew it, all right. Her poor little adopted child.’

‘I think that Frederic killed himself. I think that he was afraid of being gay.’

‘
Ridiculous
!’

‘There was no inquiry.’

‘Because we did what we were
told
to do. Like a pair of mugs. You should have seen yourself, Baseema. All tickled red with shame. What a sight we must have been. And who knows what happened to the café, to the people who went there next morning waiting to be served. Gone, poof. We were gone, just like that. And all because…? Ah yes. Because we were
asked
to!’

Lollo lit a cigarette. For a long time they said
nothing
to each other. Baseema turned the sound right down. Then she changed the channel to a comedy show and he took the remote control and sat there clutching it while he laughed, high-pitched, like a maniac. It was how he had behaved on the night after the fire. Like a man with a sudden case of dementia. Wandering round and around the car in nothing but a T-shirt and
sandals
, no underpants, and talking to himself about all the things they would need to remember to do on the way. He had crammed what he could into the back of their car and held it down with rope. He had driven in his vest and sandals, his manhood curled like a grey mouse in his groin. It was dark. September hot, but dark. And quiet. Even the cicada were silent.

Sylvie had been taken in an ambulance to the burns hospital in Toulouse. For months, she lay there with her face wrapped under bandages; a steel girder keeping her ear from sliding down to her neck. Maybe she cried under all those bandages. Cried for Daniel. Cried for her brother. Maybe she didn’t. Nobody could tell. Daniel had run away to a place even God didn’t know about, and Lucie Borja had gone into her chateau through the great big entrance and then she had packed a suitcase and
disappeared
.

Baseema had looked away from the chateau as Lollo drove them away. Smoking as he drove. One cigarette
after
another. All the way to Toulouse. She could barely see through the smoke. But she didn’t care. There was only the pain to manage, to be borne through the night. Then the sun came up and turned the land orange. And Baseema watched it with a tissue pressed to her mouth, which was parted slightly, in a stiff, silent scream.

After that, it was focus on something or die. Work to make things better. Try to get on. Small things to start with. A pair of shoes for Sylvie for when she came out of the hospital. Something shiny to make her smile. Small things. A book, a magazine, some flowers. Day by day. What else could she do?

She worked hard, taking on as many hours in the
restaurant
as she could. Lucie and Arnaud Borja; the
vineyards
, the village, the chateau itself: these were easy to force out of her mind. And when the children came back to her – afternoons in the square with Frederic and Sylvie, and the red sun rising over the vineyards in winter from where she had looked out with Daniel as a baby from the tower room, Sylvie growing up, Frederic – she let things come, for a moment, just to make themselves known, a vision, but a vision without feeling, without substance, just a memory, like a room full of air kisses.

Baseema climbed the stairs and washed the dishes and laced up her boots. It was cold and dim outside. There wasn’t any moon. She walked down the drive and stood for a moment watching the wind moving in the pines. Her mind was empty now; she was tired; her thoughts were still. There was nothing more she could do for her
husband
or anyone tonight, so she put her hands in her
pockets
and walked with her clear still mind.

She found that the fire door to the swimming pool was open, the hot air escaping. There was a tinkle of a piano coming from a shiny white box off to one side of the pool. Baseema didn’t know this kind of music. It was what the young people would be dancing to in the cities. Instinctively, she knew that the swimmers were the couple from room number 6 and she hid behind the pillar and listened.

After a while, there came a lull in the music. Something clicked off. She was summoned from the shadows.

‘Have you come to tell us off?’

The young man’s chest was smooth and bare as a boy’s. His face was perfectly round; his eyes were mischievous and alive. ‘I spied you creeping in, Madame! Sorry, we know it’s late.’

Baseema looked at her watch. It was late. But what could she say? She smiled to see them swimming like this. How reckless they were. How impulsive. But they were happy, these fish. Uncontaminated, free. The past no more clung to them than they to a rock. They were swimming forward, in good clear water, their channels flooded with light.

‘I just wanted to tell you about the newspapers. I
managed
to get hold of them for you. All the ones that you wanted. They will be delivered to your door in the
morning
.’

He held a thumb up out of the pool.

The water was streaming off his arm. Baseema watched the girl giggle and dive back beneath the water. They would get cold soon, these fish. They would wrap
themselves
. Go back and get cosy in their deluxe shiny room, slide a DVD into the machine. It would be nice for them. It was what young people should be doing. Baseema knew this. And the sheets would wrinkle beneath them, the
towels
dropped, like peasants, on the floor. But that wasn’t something to worry about. Not enough to worry about. Life was short. Baseema knew this. The sheets, the
towels
. Everything could be changed these days; everything replaced so that the lucky ones could move on. And
someone
would change the towels and the sheets in the
morning
. She, personally, would change them in the morning. Like the snow, she would fall in silently and cover over everything, wipe the past away so that the luckier ones could find a way to move on. 

In Paris, six weeks later, it was a quarter past three in the afternoon. Baseema was much too early. She walked quickly to the café on the corner and sat for a while
playing
with a teaspoon, running her fingers over and around the edge.

Lollo had got up early and emerged to see her off. On the step, he’d stood with a purple dressing gown pulled tight around his waist, his hands deep in the pockets. The early light made his skin look bluish; his eyes were mean.

‘Remember,’ he had whispered into her ear as she
carried
her suitcase down the steps to the taxi that was
waiting
. ‘We are the losers, the lost ones, Baseema.’

But were they?

The sun was appearing through the clouds now,
casting
one side of the street in a cool, white frame. She paid the bill and left, walking quickly towards a hairdresser’s across the street. In the gutter, there was rubbish,
chippings
of paint.

In the green cross outside the pharmacy with the
posters
advertising glasses for old people who had white teeth and skin like butterscotch, the halogen light was broken and flashed intermittently, in a weak rhythm of its own. Baseema stood and watched it flash. She counted to ten and then moved up to the door.

The door was grey, thick and scratched. There were doorbells for the apartments above. She pressed the
lowest
of the three bells and waited. There was no response. She rang the next one up, pressing her finger carefully on the button and holding it there long enough to hear a bell ringing somewhere inside.

There was the crackling sound of the intercom and then a voice, small and distant.

‘My name is Baseema Pépin.’

The crackle of the intercom faded on the street.

‘Please,’ said the voice from inside, ‘push at the door. I will come down.’

Paul was a middle-aged man in a faded blue sweatshirt and jeans. What hair he had was reddish brown and
drying
from a wash behind his ears.

He kept a hand on the banister as he came down the stairs, one foot placed carefully in front of the other.

‘Are you the nephew of Lucie Borja, Monsieur? Have I come to the right place?’

‘Oh,’ he said quietly. ‘He’s dead!’ and he pulled the
corners
of his mouth down.

Baseema looked into his face, confused.

‘No. I’m sorry. That was just a joke. A weak one. You will find I haven’t changed much in fifty-odd years,
Baseema
. Please, do come in.’

‘I’m sorry to disturb you. It must seem most strange.’

He gasped and put a hand to his mouth, the sarcasm widening his eyes. But the eyes were kind. And playful. She wasn’t expecting this.

He put a hand lightly on her shoulder. ‘Hello, Baseema. I’m being a fool. Do you not remember your sickly old friend Paul?’

‘Of course,’ she said slightly stiffly, and she fiddled with the silk knot at her neck and tried to loosen it a little; she shouldn’t have come.

‘Please come in.’

The hallway was thin and dark. When Paul put the light on, she saw the piles of white, hand-addressed
envelopes
lined up on the ledge. She read his name and address on the label.

‘Did you have a pleasant journey?’

‘It was fine,’ she said politely. ‘I took the high-speed train from Perpignan.’

‘Sometimes, it’s just perfect the train, isn’t it? Time to think and time to… rest.’ He shrugged, his eyes twinkling a little. ‘Who knows?’ he added, and then he laughed with forced abandon. ‘Did you get refreshments?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

She followed him up the stairs. ‘You seem as if you were expecting me.’

‘I was,’ he said, and laughed. ‘You called to say you were coming.’

At the top, he opened a door onto an old kitchen with dull terracotta tiles on the floor. The air was thick with dust and the windows smeary, the surfaces cluttered with books and newspaper. There was a line of clear plastic bottles on a shelf above the sink.

‘The hairdresser’s is downstairs; it closed down last year,’ he explained. ‘No one has been round, though, to take away the chairs, the mirrors. Some of the hairdryers are still there. Please, if you would like me to cut your hair I…,’ he was smiling, kindly, embarrassed at his own attempt to make a joke. He looked like the kind of person who didn’t see many people. Baseema liked him. He was gentle, soft as the woolly hair on the back of his neck.

‘Really… why were you expecting me?’

‘Please, take a seat. Can I take your coat?’

He cleared a newspaper from the chair, tried to find somewhere to move it to. There was none. He folded the crust of bread he had been eating away in a paper bag and stood holding it. He was a nice-looking man. On the table, there was an open pack of butter.

‘Can I offer you something, coffee?’

‘I’m fine, thank you. I had a coffee on the train.’

‘I have fruit juice. It’s freshly squeezed. I could pour you a glass.’

Baseema nodded and the smell of the inside of the old refrigerator filled the room. ‘Why were you expecting me?’

‘Because from time to time she talked about you.’

‘Oh.’

Paul smiled and put a breadcrumb in his mouth. He sat down opposite her at the table, and crossed his legs to the side, folding his shoulders forward.

‘She fell down the stairs and cracked her skull,’ he said. ‘Her heart stopped just like that. No surprise, of course. But she’d been with us so long. My mother’s friends used to joke that we kept a lizard upstairs. She made so little noise. When my mother died, Lucie came down for the funeral and for lunch at the restaurant on the corner. She bought a magazine in the newsagent’s and then went back on up the stairs. There was a kitchenette up there, which she didn’t use – I tended to take her meals up on a tray – and a shower which she did use. At least before the sealant went. And then she began to lose her sight. I think it was about nine months or so later, and six months before she died that we got the diagnosis. Forgive me, Baseema. I’m mumbling.’

‘It’s fine,’ she said.

‘She went blind as a bat overnight then.’

‘I’ve heard it can happen like that.’

‘Poof!’ he said and he lifted his hands together and clapped quite triumphantly. It made him feel awkward. He got up and placed a pan under the tap to rinse it.
Water
screeched through the pipes. Baseema’s eyes travelled around the room, taking in the disordered piles of things, the linoleum floor, the smears and stains, a bowl of cat food spilt in the corner.

‘How long did she live here, Paul?’

‘Twenty years.’

‘Here?’

‘You are surprised.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘We got by.’

‘Did anyone go to the funeral?’

‘I cremated her. No one came.’

‘No one?’

‘Who would have come? My aunt did nothing here. She sat in the room upstairs for twenty years. She went nowhere. She wrote the addresses on envelopes for a few years to make a little money to help us with the rent.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m a printer. I have a workshop down in the
basement
.’

Baseema stood, finally, and took her coat off, which she hung neatly on the back of the chair. She sat back down and lifted her head up then. She took a deep breath.

‘Do you know why I’m here, Paul?’

‘It’s not a courtesy call.’

Baseema smiled. ‘Lucie’s will,’ she said, feeling the
discomfort
as a pain she tried to rub out of her chest. ‘Is there…?’

He looked away from her, tried to redirect the focus. Baseema was used to this behaviour in men. Their
awkwardness
around money and women, the combination. It amused her when the female clients came to pay the bill and the men had to leave or stand off to one side. Their weirdness about it empowered her. She spoke clearly.

‘Is there anything in the will about me, Paul?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’ He sat back down at the table then and folded his hands in a business-like manner. ‘She left
everything
to Daniel. There was never any discussing it.’

‘Did she see him?’

‘Never.’

‘Never?’

‘We heard nothing from him. In all those years.
Nothing
at all. He made no effort to contact her.’

‘Why would he? Of course…’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘He hated her,’ she whispered, almost to herself.

‘Yes,’ he said, softly, and he coloured a little.

Baseema took a breath, tried to sit higher up. Finally, she pushed herself up out of the flimsy little chair.

After the juice, Paul led her down the narrow flight of stairs behind the hairdresser’s, then down again into the basement and switched on the light in the printing room. Here there was paper everywhere, delicate pencil
drawings
, thick sheets of paper hand-made and tied with
ribbons
, parchment in tubes. There were shelves on which books were lined up in alphabetical order, cards with drawings of lovers, poetry inside. Baseema was silent as she followed him around.

From the windows on the pavement the light came in and sifted the dust. Paul bent his head as he dipped
beneath
a poster hanging off a strip of wire.

‘What an urge I have to clean,’ she said.

‘Perhaps we are best not to bother, though. There will always be more…. sooner or later…’ But he didn’t finish. Instead, he bent to the floor and took a box, which he lay on a photocopier and opened. He peeled back a layer of tissue paper and took out a leather-bound book.

‘This man used to eat sometimes in the café on the corner. Meat and potatoes in sauce. That’s what he ate.’

‘He was a poet, then,’ she said, a bit flatly.

‘No. Not really. He wrote, in his lifetime, maybe nine or ten poems. Take a look.’

Baseema turned a page.

‘It’s beautiful, no?’

She ran her fingers over the deep gold lettering.

‘I guess it is. Yes.’

‘He came to see me some time before he died. He was holding these loose pages in his hand, all covered in his handwriting. He said he would like his wife, Marianne, to have a book with these poems of his printed in them. He gave me what money he had.’

‘And you believed that was all the money he had?’

‘I didn’t believe anything. He didn’t have a wife. That’s the funny thing. It was a complete stranger he was in love with. She used to walk by the café sometimes with a dog. At least, we think it was her. When I finished the book, I took it to the address he gave me, which turned out to be a poodle parlour. There was no one in there by the name of Marianne. They all turned to me and laughed. The man was dead by then, which is why I have his book down here gathering dust.’

‘Well, isn’t it funny the way life goes,’ said Baseema and she sniffed and flicked the angry little tear that had popped out of her eye.

He took the book from her and placed it carefully back in its tissue paper and box.

‘Do you know that Daniel Borja was my biological son?’ she said finally.

Paul nodded.

‘You knew?’

‘Yes. I knew.’

She inhaled slowly through her nose. She wanted to ask him how he knew but it didn’t seem to matter much. Nothing did, in the end. Except money.

‘I did see him. When he was a child. I did try to see my son. But Lucie was paranoid that I would try to take him away.’

Paul nodded. ‘It must have been hard. To be living in the village. And Daniel there, but divided from you by a wall.’

‘I was tough, though. A survivor. I have that. I don’t know where it comes from. The desert, perhaps.’

‘She said that to me once.’

‘About the desert?’

‘No. That you had strength.’

‘“You’ve a quiet strength, Baseema,” she used to say. With the emphasis on quiet. Believe me, I would have shouted my head off in those walls if I could.’

‘She envied it,’ Paul said.

‘What?’

‘The strength. The energy.’

‘Perhaps…’

‘And that was why she kicked you out?’

‘She had got what she wanted. She wanted a child of her own.’

‘And you?’

Baseema was quiet. She looked up towards the
windows
.

‘I had a house in the village. I got married. I had my children. Frederic and Sylvie.’

Paul said nothing.

‘It doesn’t matter what others think of us,’ she
whispered
. ‘Most people are too busy. But your curiosity for others is unusual and, I think, benign.’

He shrugged modestly.

‘The truth is I did try to see him. When he was small. Daniel was five. I saw him playing, climbing the wall. It was summer and I managed to persuade him to climb over. I gave him my hand. I was so desperate. I would have done anything. From then on, it was ice creams. One
every
day. And for almost a week we got away with it. We walked together. In the avenue. There were these trees.’ She smiled stiffly.

Paul nodded.

‘It was cool under there. In the height of summer. It was cool in the shade of the trees. Holding his hand as we walked along. I can feel it now. The warm clutch of his hand as we walked along. That hot, solid stickiness. How intelligent he was. His eyes were so blue they startled me. You know? As if he’d been swimming underwater. As if he knew, when he looked at me. As if he knew, and also understood somehow that he couldn’t ever tell.’