We All Ran into the Sunlight (18 page)

But would she? That was the thing that worried her.
Baseema
stared through the ring of soft light from the lamp on the ceiling. From time to time, cars roared past outside with music pumping from their stereos. In the closet her suit was hanging, soft and old, and her green shoes would never do. She tried to think of what she would write to Daniel. For hours she ran it through her mind.

If she didn’t go in the morning then she would have to face Lollo with her failure as soon as she returned. She hated him. But hate was easy. It was love that was hard. She should write that to Daniel, she thought. But how could she write that? What a thing to say. No, her green shoes would never do. And besides, she knew from her own experience how busy things got in a restaurant.
Daniel
was busy, and she needed some time.

From the Pyrenees it took Baseema only three hours. She had got back without seeing Lollo and taken the car. She would ring him from Canas. Then she was purring along the avenue of trees, headlights on, seeking out, between the trunks of plane trees, glimpses of the old chateau wall. There were holes and lichen growing; all was dark.

She parked in the square. There was no one around. The café was closed, a single streetlight shining on the zinc tables piled high beside the doorway. The air was warm. Baseema switched the lights off and sat for a moment, listening to the tick and whirr of the engine as it cooled.

The car door shut behind her and she locked it up. She was wearing the trouser suit with the green shoes but she had managed to bring some clean shirts, another pair of trousers. She stood still and heard the water trickle in the fountain.

A new streetlight had been put up outside the church of Saint Perpetua and just a few of the houses had been repainted, some with lights in the eaves above the doors. Things had been patched up. There was a new awning over the café, a new bench outside the Mayor’s office,
other
benches dotted about. There was less memory, less of her life here.

At the Pépin house she knocked, once and then again.

Sylvie was there in a black tracksuit with the hood up around her head. She sniffed and dragged a finger under her nose. It was red and puffy. It looked as if she had been crying. She burst, with her sleeves over her hands, onto Baseema’s shoulders. Baseema inhaled the warmth of Sylvie’s small body and buried her head.

‘They’re gone, Ma,’ said Sylvie feebly.

Baseema pulled back and focused her eyes on Sylvie’s.

‘The English couple, Ma. Kate and Stephen. Her
mother
died and they went back to London. She hasn’t come back. I liked her being here.’

In the kitchen, Baseema stood at the sideboard and sipped the thimble of wine Sylvie had poured. She looked at the bin in the corner, the soda cans spilling onto the floor. Sylvie kept the hood up around her head and she pushed the glasses up on her nose as she bent down to the oven. In the sweatshirt she was wearing there were rings of sweat under her arms. She put some rock music on
quietly
and clomped about the kitchen in her boots. From the fridge she peeled back the clingfilm from a tin of
anchovies
and stuck her nose in.

‘What makes you think they won’t come back?’ said Baseema, after a while.

‘Mr Glover hated it here. He’s the husband. He was jealous.’

‘Of what, Sylvie?’

‘Us, Ma. The quiet peaceful life she found here!’

‘And the chateau?’

‘An agent came. They locked it back up with a new chain around the gates.’

Sylvie shook salt onto her chips and put one in her mouth. She didn’t look at her mother when she ate and the chips were hot so she chewed them fast with her mouth open. There was a jar of mayonnaise on the table, which Baseema tried and failed to open. She put the jar back on the table and told Sylvie about Paul.

‘Under French law if the owner dies then the property is passed to the children.’

‘Yes,’ said Sylvie, blinking rapidly as her father did as she looked up into her room. ‘I know all about French law, Ma, you don’t need to tell me. And so Daniel will come back because he will have to, won’t he? Whoever buys the chateau, Daniel will have to come back to sign a paper or something. I did want the Glovers to like it.’

‘Someone will buy it,’ said Baseema soothingly. ‘
Someone
will buy it but, in the meantime, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’

Sylvie was staring, her mouth hanging open. After a while, she got up from the table and went and sat down with the dog.

‘You want ice cream?’

‘No, love, I’m fine.’

‘If you’re here to tell me you left him, Ma, then spare me the details, ok?’

‘That’s not why I’m here.’

Sylvie sighed. ‘In which case we can talk tomorrow. I’m tired. And Coco needs to pee.’

Baseema gathered up the dishes. She put them in the sink, running water from the tap until she got something that felt hot. She rinsed and filled the cloth with hot water and then rubbed at the plates and the pile of chipped ceramic bowls until they were clean. Then she stacked them on the draining board and wiped behind the sink, over the rusty tap; she cleaned the shelf behind the sink, removed a spoon from where it had stuck to the shelf, and wiped it clean.

She took the Spanish plates off the wall and refilled the sink, plunging the plates into water that was hot and soapy, and which covered her hands and wrists; she held the plates down there for a minute or two (they had been a wedding present to her and Lollo) and she tried to
remember
who had given them but the name was gone; there was only the object left – old and sticky, meaning nothing to Sylvie and nothing to her mother. She turned back to the table, having dried everything on the sideboard, and saw Sylvie had come back in and slumped there, the mass of her hair spread over her arms to sleep.

It was quite late already but Baseema wasn’t tired. She wiped the crusted legs of the kitchen table, the backs of the chairs. Quietly she stacked the chairs in the corner of the room and moved the dog to its bed by the door. She lit a candle in the window, swept up the dust and the dog hair and then she mopped the floor.

She cleaned the oven and made a tea; then she sat at the kitchen table to drink it, listening to the rise and fall of Sylvie’s breathing, to the quiet tick of the oven clock. The room was clean. It made her feel better but it was still
unsettling
to be here.

She thought of Lollo, she wondered whether he had eaten the food she had left on the stove. She thought of Paul, alone in his cluttered kitchen, some small part of him still listening out perhaps for the cries that no longer came from upstairs. Guilt was something we should all try to live without, she thought, staring hard at the candle that was guttering in the window. She looked at her shoes then, and got up to polish them.

It was almost midnight but she wasn’t tired and her steps were soundless as she hurried across the square. Sylvie’s dog lumbered behind her, his long nails clicking quietly on the asphalt.

The air smelt of dust. Baseema turned down the
passageway
off the square. There was no one around. She drew up silently and she pushed at the iron gates.

The dog turned itself round and round in a circle. Baseema pushed harder; tried to jump up. She knocked at the chain with her hand. In all her thoughts of returning here there was never this thought of trying to get in, being locked out, unable to break back in. It was simply, in her waking and night dreams, a question of being there, back in the room at the very top or running in the halls. Never had she thought it would take any effort to get in there, nor that she might need a key.

The gate creaked and the chain rattled but she couldn’t push it open. Baseema straightened her collar and stared down at her shoes. She pictured a little girl running, her velvet hair. Running along the corridors. It was almost as if it wasn’t her, and the memory not something she owned any more.

She dialled Lollo as soon as she got back to Sylvie’s house.

‘Baseema?

‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in Canas. What’s the matter?’

There was silence on the end of the phone.

‘Lollo?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you find the casserole in the freezer?’

‘Did you find Daniel in Paris?’

‘No.’

There was silence.

‘Sylvie needs to know first, Lollo. I need to spend some time with her. Talk to her a little about it all.’

‘Why does she need to know first?’

‘Because of what happened that night. And because she’s one of us. She has a right to know first.’

She took a deep breath.

‘So I don’t know when I’ll be back. They all know at the hotel.’

‘At?’

‘At the hotel.’

‘They all know what?’

‘That I’m here. That I’ve come to Canas.’

‘That’s fine then,’ he said and put the phone down.

Three days later, Baseema was on her knees polishing the wooden stairs outside the door to Sylvie’s room.

‘It’s too much, Maman. What you’re doing here. It’s breaking your back!’

Sylvie was standing, halfway down the stairs. Her hair was wet and combed down her face in a thin black
curtain
.

‘I haven’t seen you all day. Where have you been?’

‘I don’t know why you’re doing it. Every room in this house is being changed… I don’t understand. This was meant to be a holiday for you.’

Sylvie pushed her glasses up with a finger and went into her room.

‘I thought it could do with a freshening-up. Thought I’d do it all in one hit to surprise you. You’re not pleased?

‘Well, I’ve never seen it look quite like this, I guess.’

Baseema looked around at her efforts, tried to see how clean the windows were, how shiny the tiled floor of the bedroom and the look of the white tablecloth on the round table in the window, the crystal vase of fresh-cut roses, the light clear in the water, pale green stems.

‘Oh God,’ said Sylvie, laughing. She pointed to the
turquoise
and blue silk cushions piled up where there used to be a falling down armchair with a broken seat in the corner. Baseema had chosen a mix of round and square cushions and she had heaped them in a pile for when the sofa came back.

‘I’m getting the seat fixed, getting it re-covered in cream.’

Sylvie looked down at her feet. She spoke quietly: ‘Thank you, Maman. It’s like being on “fix your space up”.’

‘Tssh!’ said Baseema. ‘I wanted to help.’

‘But I didn’t ask for it, did I?’ said Sylvie, suddenly sounding nasty.

‘What’s the matter with you, Sylvie? Where have you been?’

‘To the Mayor’s office. Where else would I have been on a Tuesday morning, Ma?’

‘I don’t know why you’re so depressed. Is it because the English couple have gone? Is that all this is?’

Sylvie turned her head defiantly towards the window, the soft puffy jaw striving for an edge. The scars on her face were glistening, almost weeping.

‘You don’t live here any more.’

Baseema played with the gold bangle on her wrist.

‘I thought that you were depressed. I wanted to help.’

‘But why? What with?’

‘With your happiness, Sylvie.’

‘I’m fine!’

‘You’re not fine.’

Sylvie was scowling, there was spittle at the corners of her mouth.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re right. As usual. I’m not fine.’

‘You’re on your own.’

‘And you?’

‘I…’

‘Are you any less alone, Ma?’

‘Sylvie, I…’ Baseema took a step closer to her daughter. But Sylvie backed away.

‘Do you remember the cherries dipped in chocolate?’

‘The cherries?’

‘Sure you do,’ Sylvie said. ‘We were eating them on the night of the fire. Madame Borja’s birthday meal. You brought out a whole big mountain of them. They were Daniel’s favourite food.’

‘I didn’t do that, Sylvie. It wasn’t me who was
preparing
the food here that night. She hired a cook from town, remember?’

And Sylvie looked confused then and she moved to go downstairs.

‘Wait,’ said Baseema. ‘If you had some money, Sylvie. If you suddenly had a lot of money. What would you do?’

‘I don’t like to torment myself with thoughts of the lottery, Maman, because what is the point in that?’

‘I don’t mean the lottery. I mean, just if you suddenly had some money. A little bit of disposable money.’

‘Have a kennel,’ she said. ‘Lots of dogs. Why?’

‘Well, because your father wants me to contest Lucie Borja’s will. Come. Downstairs. Let’s have something to eat and then we can talk.’

Sylvie opened her mouth to speak. ‘I…’

Baseema ignored her daughter and carried on towards the kitchen. It was when Sylvie had caught up with her and was standing in the doorway that she came out with it. ‘You don’t need to tell me by the way, Ma. It’s just that I… I do know about me and Daniel and Frederic. I’ve
always
known that you’re Daniel’s real mother. I was eleven years old when I figured that out.’

Baseema said nothing.

‘Ma?’

‘Let’s eat,’ she said quietly.

Baseema had her food at the kitchen table and tried not to watch her daughter eat. Each mouthful of food she put in her own mouth had a small battle to fight with her simultaneous urge to cry.

‘I worked it out. You don’t know this. I was a kid. I came home one day from school in the summer. Papa was shouting at you for spending all your weekend preparing a dish for the Borjas when you should have been thinking
instead
about us, your own… And then you said about how if it wasn’t for the Borjas you wouldn’t have this house.’

‘So, if you knew…?’

‘No, I didn’t actually
know
. Not – swearing on it – know. I didn’t know what that bit meant – and then he said only a woman who loved the Borjas more than her own family would do all the work you did for them…’

And so Sylvie had thought about it and she’d let it work on her until she understood. That was all there was to it. It didn’t matter much, she said. What mattered now, she said, was that the boys never knew.

Baseema listened to the oven clock. She took deep, sad breaths. Sylvie had fallen asleep on the sofa worn out by all the crying and the emotion. It was like watching a girl. It was true what she said about herself. That fire had
frozen
her in time.

When she had finished her tea Baseema rinsed it in the sink and poured Sylvie a glass of water, which she left
beside
her on the table. Halfway up the stairs she turned and came back into the kitchen, thinking to move the glass in case Sylvie woke and knocked it over. She found her daughter sitting upright, her left eye wide open and
staring
, her right eye almost completely closed with salt and sleep.

‘I’m going to bed, Sylvie.’

‘Thank you, Maman. For coming here. It’s good to have you here with me.’

Upstairs, Baseema put the torch on the chest of
drawers
in Frederic’s old room and sat herself on the end of his bed where the dog seemed to have been sleeping in among the piles of clothes Sylvie collected and sorted through for the children at the orphanage in the city. There was a single bed and a chair with the weave fraying in the seat.

Baseema placed her palms on top of Frederic’s chest of drawers. She remembered the day they had picked it up cheap at the car boot sale outside town – how pleased they had all been to find it with its shiny brass handles – and the mirror Lollo hung above it.

The light in the room was dim and yellow, the bulb and wicker shade thick with dust. Baseema pushed the shutters open, sitting back on the single bed to take in the view of the chateau and the tower, lit by a streetlamp now, standing tall and proud, like the tower on a toy castle that the boys would have played soldiers in.

When the breeze came the window closed a little, and Baseema’s eyes swam forward to the glass where her face was momentarily reflected.

Wearily, she pulled her clothes off and folded them neatly on top of her suitcase. She wondered if Lollo had eaten anything tonight. There was that casserole of pork, tomato and lentils. But she sensed he hadn’t even the energy to lift the lid and sniff the contents, let alone strike a match to the stove. Perhaps he would ignore all of it; simply wander in for another beer and leave the food exactly as she left it. We have to eat, she told him, the first night they arrived there. To move
forward
at all, you have to forget the past, or at least not think back to that same thing all the time. ‘What’s the point?’ she said. ‘To think of the roses bobbing, the children growing, the quiet square?’ You let things come for a moment and then you let them go.

When Baseema had brushed her teeth and dragged a comb through her hair, she climbed into bed and wrote her list for the morning. She wrote:

Again she wondered if Lollo had tasted her casserole. She thought of the cabin with its cosy kitchen, its neat little curtain in the window frame, its reassuring pot on the stove, and its clean slants of morning sunlight carving up the floor. These objects and routines were, she knew, all they had to survive on. And then one day it would all be over; they could fold their lives up, be gone. In the meantime, what they had was days to be filled. And if she’d felt there was anything out there rolling round in the darkness, she would have sent a prayer out for Lollo and Sylvie too, for Daniel and the truth he didn’t know, for the souls of Frederic and her parents who had come here from Algeria and left her here, not knowing any of this.