We All Ran into the Sunlight (5 page)

The nearest town was a twenty-minute drive from the
village
, and Stephen liked to go there on his own for a coffee in the morning, and a chance to get the paper. The
greengrocer
at the shop in town had a bald head and a broad, impish smile. His shop smelt of coffee and dried meat. He gave Stephen a paper bag for the oranges.

‘Of course the chateau is haunted,’ he said. He took his glasses off to polish them. ‘Then again, it’s all to do with perception. And imagination. I see a ghost, I think to myself, is this a ghost or is it something my eyes want me to see?’ He shrugged. ‘Who can know? The chateau is haunted? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But no more than you or I.’

He licked his thumb to pull a second paper bag from the string above his head. His thumbs were small, like a child’s. Stephen could see through the curtain behind him to where a boy was lying down on the floor with his arms behind his head. The greengrocer laughed. He reached down into the trays of food in the counter, took a thick salami and began to slice it slowly, silently, each slice exactly the same, the width of a coin. He hooked a slice with the point of his knife and lifted it over the counter for Stephen to try.

‘Yes, it was quite grand,’ he said. ‘Once upon a time. Old beauty, elegance. A beautiful courtyard. Plants such as you have never seen. You could drive into the courtyard and park beneath the trees. A mosaic of perfect white stones to the door.’

Stephen counted out the money he owed for the oranges. Above his head, the blades of a fan began slowly to rotate, though there was no heat in the room.

‘My wife has been sitting on the steps outside the
chateau
for days, Monsieur. She seems to want to do little else.’

Stephen coughed; he could feel the colour banking on his cheeks.

Behind his glasses, the greengrocer’s little eyelashes were blinking rapidly. He folded his hands on his apron. Beads of orange grease had appeared at the corners of his mouth.

‘Is she waiting for the rain?’ he said as a joke, though his face was without humour. ‘It won’t rain, you know. Not once the summer comes.’

‘She’s not waiting for rain.’

‘Well for St Christopher then.’

‘Who?’

‘St Christopher,’ said the greengrocer, and he collected up the coin from the counter then and slid it into his till.

Stephen turned to the window where the streamers were fluttering. He took the bag of oranges and made a knot of its neck in his fingers.

‘She wants to know what happened there. Maybe if I can find out what happened there then the place will loosen its hold on her.’

‘Well yes, Monsieur, but you are wasting your time
trying
to make friends with the villagers if all you want from them is the past. No one will tell you anything because they are French and proud and what happened is too sick to speak about.’

‘Too?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Was the woman Sylvie Pépin in the fire? Was it she who was burnt?’

‘And her brother died. He was found hanging in the bathroom.’ The man shook his head. There was
something
green, a smudge of something; it looked like a pea above his ear. ‘One of the villagers came down from Canas and came into the shop and said what had happened.’

‘What did happen?’

‘The Borja boy – freak boy – he killed the kid from the village, Frederic. Made it look like suicide. That’s what people say. Then he set the fire.’

‘Why?’

‘Who knows? All it takes is one match. The doctor from here was called. He was a good friend of Madame Borja and he helped her remove the body. She was totally crazy. Everyone knew that. But Monsieur Borja was a good
customer
of ours. I believe he stayed on for some years after everyone else left. I think he tried to keep the place going. His wife returned to Paris on her own. She never came back. Some years later Monsieur Borja was found dead in the vineyard.’

Stephen nodded.

‘The chateau simply went to ruin. He had cleared everything out by then. Sold it off, piece by piece.’

‘Yes, we went in to have a look around on Saturday. There was nothing in there. Nothing at all.’

The greengrocer shrugged his shoulders once more and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his apron. ‘Most people down here, in these villages, they keep to themselves. Outsiders are not always taken in kindly. That was one of the Borjas’ problems, of course, when they first came here. This is not like a metropolis; it is a
peaceful
part of the world. But that summer of the chateau fire there was something very strange in the air. It was so hot that summer. Things got out of hand.’

‘Do you get many like it?’

‘
My God, no,
’ said the greengrocer and he shook his head and frowned. He disappeared through the beaded curtain into the darkness at the back of his shop.

Stephen drove back to the village in a mood and told Kate he was taking her out for dinner. They found a
restaurant
on the edge of town that was downmarket but warm enough inside. There were plastic flowers in baskets on the walls. Kate was wearing a black silk shirt that pulled tight across her breasts. Stephen ordered vodka cocktails to start. It was quiet as a tomb.

But they felt better after a glass of wine and Stephen said his
moules
were the best he had ever had. Kate leant over and dipped her bread into the garlic wine in his bowl. She sucked the pulp up, and couldn’t seem to stop.

‘I checked out that word on the internet, Kate. That word we saw engraved in the chateau?’

‘In the wall?’

‘It’s Arabic. “Baseema”. It’s a name. It means “smiling”.’

‘Smiling?’

‘Yes. Weird, isn’t it?’

‘Gorgeous,’ she said and her eyes, when she looked at him, were bright and defiant. This was how she often looked at the moment and it made him feel afraid. She had messed up her hair so that it looked unkempt. Her lips were painted scarlet. More than anything, he wanted her to soften, to calm. He refilled her glass with wine.

The convivial owner with the black eyes was
passionate
about the wines. Stephen asked him questions.
Everywhere
, Kate thought, he did this; he made himself known. It was part of his charm, his warmth. To develop a
relationship
that would hold them all in the arms of the
evening
, and squeeze.

‘We’re keen to sample as much of the local stuff as we can.’

‘The soil is very rough in the hills. For water, the roots of the vine have to work very hard; they have to go very deep. A beautiful wine.’

The owner swooned a little beside their table. He was Jewish, he told them, while making a joke. Stephen and Kate were nothing. Christians once, for a few months. Meetings with the vicar. Readings from the Bible and bridesmaid dresses. But the nativity scene got lost in a box, in the roof. They didn’t have children to revive their religions and their lives were taken up: work, dinners, the gym, theatre, friends. And now, out here, she thought, they were busy trying to unlace themselves, trying to be free.

Kate lifted her glass to her lips. London was a blur. It was the mystery of her early life that she wanted to try to remember. Who she was before she started working and met Stephen and moved into his flat. She wanted to know why it was she had begun to feel excitement again, ripples of it, that travelled through her for no apparent reason. It felt inherently childish, something pure, to do with the joy of life and it made her want to kick free; she needed to figure that out now, what was doing it, why now.

She reached under the table for her handbag and the phone that had signalled a text from a friend. ‘How’s
paradise
?’

Kate showed the phone to Stephen and he lifted his glass high in the air. The light was shining on his forehead and when he laughed his nostrils flared, which made him look smug, and strange.

The waiter brought cognac. He spoke to them in
English
. Behind the bar, he had postcards of bullfighters, a woman with her hands folded on her pubis, her lips in an ‘o’. Kate smiled patiently and tucked her hair behind her ears. She drank the cognac. At the gallery now, they would be running around hanging twenty-foot paper
cages
from the ceiling on thick iron chains. The cages would swing in the air and crash into each other, their hanging disturbed by the air from a turbine. But the cages would do well. The show would run and run. Even Kate’s
mother
would make a point of coming up to see it. It would take the long-suffering Portuguese neighbour all morning to get them ready. Then the neighbour would be made to drive up to London, to push Kate’s mother in and round. There would be a smear of bright pink lipstick and a grey chignon. She would sit in the corner and say nothing. She would sit in the corner and say nothing and stare at the cages though her large dark glasses.

Outside the restaurant the wind was picking up,
fluttering 
the awning. Soon they would be back in their village, the bedroom in its loft, with the windows on the chateau. Kate decided that she would not return to the courtyard in the morning. She would stay with Stephen and sleep late. Let her body rest beside him. With a little more effort, she thought, she could make things lovely again between them. They would go into town, buy warm, fresh
pains au chocolat
from the baker and eat them out of paper bags as they strolled through the market. Stephen would choose the salami spiked with garlic. He would say the cheese was marvellous and she would enjoy his pleasure. She would buy some duck and cook up a meal so that they could eat together – husband and wife – in their walled garden, licking their greasy fingers and laughing together under the stars.

‘Have you been to this part of France before, Madame, Monsieur?’

‘We came here on our honeymoon. But by mistake, as a matter of fact,’ said Stephen. ‘We flew into Marseille. We were going east; the Côte d’Or, to Portefino. Kate was driving. She started west. We came here.’

‘We were meant to,’ she added, dreamily. ‘We were pulled here.’

‘Bollocks, darling,’ scoffed Stephen. ‘You were lost.’

The owner was laughing, holding his chin. His eyes were tired.

‘More cognac, Madame, Monsieur?’

He filled their glasses. ‘
Santé
!’

‘To the chateau,’ said Kate, lifting her glass.

‘The chateau, Madame?’

‘My wife’s fallen in love with an old wreck in the
village
we’re staying in.’

‘I think it’s up for sale,’ Kate told him, lifting her eyes up now, expectantly, almost coquettishly, as if this
restaurant
owner might be the one to help her buy the place.

‘Ah but this is perfect!’ he said. ‘And now we can drink to you, and to your love of the real France. Where time really does stand still.’

Stephen laughed aggressively; he was getting bored of these people. They were stiff and dour and far too still. He snapped his credit card down on the table. They drank. Silence fell. The wind dropped a stone onto the roof of the restaurant.