We All Ran into the Sunlight by Natalie Young Read Free Book Online Page B

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.

     
    On Tuesday, Stephen went on his own to the oyster bays to get a dozen oysters. Kate had been happier and more attentive the past few days and he had done some good work on his book. He wanted to reward them both with a picnic up at the lake.
    As soon as he had gone, Kate rang the airline. They agreed that it would be a good thing if Kate went back to London on her own for a couple of days. Just to ensure that all was well at work. She would check on the house, and bring out their post. It would give her a chance to see her mother – and more than anything, they both felt, it would be good for her sense of perspective to be away from here. She booked a ticket for Friday morning. She would go for a long weekend. That gave her three more days, she thought, taking her camera and her sketchbook across the square to the chateau where Sylvie was standing dressed in a denim dress that flared on her hips and fell to mid-calf. Kate saw the long wild hair and the shapely figure and she waved as she got near.
    ‘You have such beautiful hair,’ she said.
    Sylvie smiled and laughed and sniffed. She said she had never cut it. Not once. It had been growing for more than twenty years now. Since most of it went up in the fire.
    ‘It was a paraffin lamp. It exploded beside me. Where I was sleeping.’
    Kate had her hands over her mouth.
    ‘My brother died here,’ said Sylvie, tilting her head back, and then she followed Kate in through the gate and the two women stood and looked up at the front wall in silence.
    ‘It’s not a good place,’ said Sylvie. ‘My dog comes in but he won’t stay.’
    ‘Dogs are sensitive.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Sylvie’s lip bunched when she smiled. From the pocket of her jacket, she took rolling papers and tobacco and she rolled herself a cigarette. Kate waited for Sylvie to make the next move. The woman had a hold on her, though she wasn’t sure what it was.
    Sylvie crunched forward in her dainty shoes.
    ‘Did you get my note?’ she said.
    Kate smiled. ‘Yes, I did. Of course. But God knows what made you think I have anything like the money to buy a place like this.’
    ‘Someone does,’ Sylvie said, and she squinted through the smoke escaping from her mouth. ‘And when they do then Daniel will come back.’
    ‘Who’s Daniel?’
    ‘Daniel Borja. He lived here. In the chateau.’
    ‘The son?’
    ‘That’s right. Daniel Borja,’ she said quietly, looking out over the vineyard and off towards the hills.

     
    The next morning was hot, and the sky white, the car disappearing now and then in the avenues of trees.
    They climbed into the hills; black rock formations leered up out of the slopes. They came into the town, which was just as they remembered it from their time there thirteen years before.
    There were palm trees and a statue of a giant man in military dress pointing