We All Ran into the Sunlight (7 page)

‘Stop it,’ she begged. ‘Please.’

Stephen was silent. He had stopped eating. Kate was sitting on the bench, pale in her white dress and she felt small and exhausted. Her mind was still, but somewhere deep inside she felt a flutter of desperation for air, and she pulled in a deep and silent breath for herself, and she held it there.

Silence in the beginning. And the car moving on the lip of the valley like a fly on the rim of a bowl – pausing – engine rattling; Arnaud lifting his hands from the wheel and
pointing
down through the trees. They had come so far south. It didn’t even feel like France any more but some other place of rock and whiteness and dryness over the mountains. Lucie sank into the neck of her coat. She couldn’t
conceive
of Arnaud’s pale, slightly chubby fingers working the vines on these hillsides, twisting and wrenching,
digging
this dry, rocky earth.

‘Can you see it?’

He was pointing to the dark place in the valley. It was like a castle she had had as a child. She saw the towers rising up out of the village roofs that seemed to huddle in on each other in a nasty, conspiratorial fashion. It looked tatty down there, shabby, and old.

Arnaud wasn’t trying to make his hands look like guns, and yet it seemed this way to her. She felt the point, two fingers stretched, one hanging limp near the trigger.
Bang
! She flinched and closed her eyes.

‘Lucie?’

She turned her head away from him, looked out across the valley to where the hills paled in the distance. There was food on her lap. A soft cloth parcel of food. If only she had thought to get the blankets and wrap them around her legs and shoes. The nylon stockings did nothing to keep out the cold and her shoes were worn and thin. But the blankets were on the back seat with her suitcase and it was too late now. They were nearly there.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Answer me. Can you see the chateau down there in the village?’

‘There are eggs here. Two cooked eggs. A tin of meat.’ She peeled back the cloth. ‘A decent loaf.’

He turned the wheel a little, let the car crunch onto the grass beside the track. Lucie studied the food
carefully
, imagining the tastes of the egg and the bread in her mouth. It was an anxious kind of hunger. As if there were mice in her stomach, steadily gnawing away. The war put mice in everyone’s stomach. She knew she was no
exception
.

Arnaud would most probably climb out now and take in the view. Either that or take her hand, whisper something about their future together and the fear. Whisper something about it all going to be all right. But that would be silly, foolish, of course. She wouldn’t have the egg just yet. It was better to save it for later. The more she prepared herself the less anxious she would feel. And, of course, it was possible that he’d had enough of her moods already. She was guilty of these. Up and down. Like de Gaulle’s million bouncing babies. He would tell her again that she needed to try to let go of the war. It was something they all had to live with. But it was in the past. He would tell her to think of the future. France had a future. There were babies to be born.

‘You are always thinking of the food, Lucie. Nothing but the food.’

‘It’s important.’

‘It’s not all there is, though.’

Arnaud coughed with uncertainty rather than
impatience
. He was trying to make her happy and he had come here full of hope. She turned,
lift up your hearts women of France
! and shook her head quite prettily for him, her eyes going wide as she spoke.

‘If you’re not hungry, Arnaud?’

He reached forward for the handle and clicked it down. The door slammed behind him. Lucie watched his stocky legs plough through the long grass on the roadside and disappear into the trees.

In Paris, the girls said life would be good, much easier, down in the country. In the room above the hairdressers they had tried to imagine it. One of them stood up and staggered across the room with her arms out in front to mimic the weight of food. The others laughed. Lucie watched them all, smiling on the window ledge. Marie made gobbling movements in the air.

‘And if the
land
is fruitful, girls?’

They were women thinking of bigger things. In their hearts they were fighting another war which was the war of women sent back to the hearth but still they knew how much she wanted to have a baby. Her sister was one of them. Marie wore black culottes with boots and thumped her heart when she went in and out of the printing room. She said there would be nothing else to do down in the south: baking and babies, baby baking,
my God, you could bake the fucking babies
…

A hawk circling for food above. The sound of dogs barking in the valley. The Germans wouldn’t have come this far south. No one would. The land was rough and barren and there was nothing for it to do but slough off now and slide all the way to the sea. She would not be able to do it here, to make a go of things and make it work.

There was bright green grass beside the road. Dandelion, wild fennel. There was rock on the other side of the road – a sheer wall of black basalt and a plateau that stretched all the way back to the town. They had driven through it in silence, he with his hands firm on the wheel, his brandy bottle in the leather pouch around his neck. They had driven almost all the way from Paris in silence, stopping only to rest a little in Lyon.

Lucie watched her husband walk back towards the car. He cut under low hanging foliage, pulling back branches of eucalyptus and fern. In his hand he carried a leaf, and he held it up for her to see. You could do worse than use the acorns of oak trees for coffee, she thought. Others had used chicory. Both would be bitter. But people had done worse.

In the village, the shutters were worn, colourless and closed. You got the feeling nobody came out, nobody dared. But the square was attractive; there were young cats in the roots of lime trees, a red winter rose bobbing on a balcony and a child folding itself over the fountain.

Arnaud turned the car into a passageway that looked too small for it and they twisted between houses made of crumbling stone. There were plant pots on narrow steps scrabbling up the sides of houses, a rustic wooden chair with a pair of polished shoes left out on its wicker seat. Lucie thought of the women standing behind these small bolted doors, whispering, holding pans of fish, boiling fish heads, wooden tables, bread.

Arnaud got out of the car and walked towards the tilt of gates, leaning in on each other, two withered sheets of green iron. Behind it, the walls rose up. They were high walls, the stone black as iron in places, windows few and far between.

In the courtyard, the car choked on the weeds. At the far end of it a pine tree soared high into the air. There was a low stone wall that marked the start of the vineyard. Lucie turned her head in the wide open space. The quiet was strangely calming and there was no one there but a huge solitary crow labouring down through the air and landing on the steps, wings rustling with the attitude of a businessman, or an old watchman paid to behave like one, its thick charcoal hook pointing at them, then back at the house, as if to say:
Come on then, come see it if you must; I’ve been waiting all this time
.

In the kitchen they stood with their suitcases, like two people who had found themselves in a different country.

Arnaud’s cousin had said it would be like this. Empty for years, he said. The family were wine people and went to ruin. The only remaining son killed in the Great War. Arnaud bought the land because he believed it would make a wine everyone would care about –
See the shape of the valley, Lucie, just think of all the water, how it will collect in this basin.

From her suitcase, Lucie took a photograph of her and Marie in Paris with their parents. She stood with the
photograph
in her hand, unsure where to put it, what to do first. Arnaud jiggled himself about to keep warm. He
capered
about, folding his hands into a funnel and shouting into the corners of the room, up at the ceiling.

‘We can’t see,’ he said, pushing on the shutters. She looked at his thin little fingers and wondered again how they would manage, just the two of them, and this great old house, like an empty liner out on the ocean.

‘You should go to the café if you need something to drink, Arnaud.’

He was grinning and he backed out into the hallway and through the big front doors, stumbling backwards down the steps and out into the sunlight. She saw his shadow and looked beyond to where the same enormous crow was strutting among the weeds in the courtyard, making for the car whose doors had been left open, exposing the food in their basket.

‘Arnaud!’

But he had already got to the car and was bending down inside it making strange whooping noises. In a
moment
he was back, bounding up the steps, the basket in one hand, their suitcase of things in the other. He stood in the doorway and beamed at her. He was full of
confidence
, full of hope. Lucie smiled back at him. He took his cap off and threw it in the air, which was when she felt the tension in his recklessness – how clown-like it was –
something
staged to release or undermine her.

‘There’s no time for cafés, Lucie,’ he said. ‘We need warmth. We need a fire. The courtyard is full of sticks. I’m going to make us a mountain of sticks.’

‘We don’t need a mountain though. Just a few. For
kindling
. Then logs.’

Lucie pulled the air in and held it in her lungs until her eyes began to blur. It would have been easier to sit down now, to curl up and fold herself away. But the women of France had a duty to rebuild this country. There were babies to be born, families and homes to be repaired. The women had to rise up now –
women of France, lift up your hearts
– they had to make do, be strong. And the women of the village, what would they be like?

‘I could start by making a cake, Arnaud. Inviting some women round?’

It was dusk of that first wintry day. They had pulled the shutters and they sat together staring into the fire. Lucie laid out the eggs, the bread and the cheese on the table.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I will look for a saw. There is a tree blown down in the garden. Have you seen it, Lucie?’

But she hadn’t seen anything yet. It was Arnaud who went upstairs to look around. He laid the mattresses they brought on the roof of the car, in front of the fire, and covered them in the blankets. He said the rooms upstairs were not so big as these. They ate slowly and cradled cups of hot brandy and water. She felt the alcohol loosen her, set something free.

‘This is a new beginning, Lucie.’

‘But God knows where to begin.’

‘What?’

In the night, she knew that the dreams would come; snow on the streets in Paris, people scavenging for food, the radio broadcasts, the terrible waste…

‘God?’

‘Yes. What can he do?’

‘Who?’

‘God.’

‘God is everywhere, Lucie. You know that.’

‘Yes, but what can he do?’

‘Hm?’

‘To help us.’

Arnaud said nothing. For a long time he sat chewing on a small piece of bread. Lucie didn’t repeat her
question
. Her eyes had begun to glaze. She watched the fire blaze and hiss through a twisted olive branch and reach for the next one above it. It licked with a soft green flame then finally took hold.