We All Ran into the Sunlight by Natalie Young

returned to Algeria to fight for the liberation of the people. The two men went to speak to Arnaud about it in his library. They told him they had no choice but to return to their village.
    Financially, Arnaud was in a slightly better position by then. He was making some money at last in the vineyard, and he had joined forces with other winemakers in the hills and was proving himself among them as a robust and astute businessman. He cared little for the domestic arrangements in the house – these days the women were all on one floor and Arnaud slept alone in his study at night.
    Lucie knew that her husband was quite content that she was absorbed in something that didn’t involve him. The day-to-day demands of a four-year-old kept her cocooned from the wider concerns of their world and for the moment at least, that suited him fine. Lucie knew too that he was relieved to have seen her finding a friend in Fatima. Four winters, four summers and the two women working together in the cold and the heat, taking care of the baby girl, telling stories to soothe her at night, whispering , singing, their hands moving together in the moonlight . One wouldn’t have known that one was the server, the other being served.
    Fatima liked to sing the songs she learnt as a child. Desert songs she called them. Crooning at the sink. They rolled up their sleeves together. Lucie showed Fatima how to curl her hair. Baseema skipped in between them. Lucie loved this little girl and her soft fat cheeks more than she had loved anyone and the thought that Fatima might take her daughter back to Algeria because of the deteriorating political situation was too much for her to bear. Time and again she mentioned the benefits of a French education, and extolled the virtues of the small local school. Fatima listened and nodded a lot but it was clear that things in Algeria were not improving and at some point, she said, she and Baseema would be returning to their home.
    But then, soon after Baseema’s fifth birthday, Fatima became unwell. Dr Clareon diagnosed tuberculosis, and suggested they move her out of the house and into the garden room.
    It was Lucie herself who put the table and chair in there, a low bed, a vase of fresh flowers on the sill. Fatima was laid on the bed while Lucie sat at the table, arranging the flowers in the vase, her bottom pert on the chair.
    From the fire the smell of sweet vine smoke filled the room. Lucie insisted on having the fire. Even in the heat of summer.
    ‘Surely?’ said Fatima, turning to the fire, looking aghast.
    But Lucie said the doctor had told her to keep the fire burning for as long as the fever burnt. She didn’t say why. The doctor had put medications on the bedside table. And a bottle of linctus she could take in a hot tea.
    Lucie sat with the patient and she thought about how grasshoppers were larger than ever that summer. Huge and monstrous; they clung to the window ledges and reached into the rooms with their antennae. Fatima barely noticed. Poor Fatima. So ill she got, so fast.
    As it turned out, the medication wasn’t quite strong enough to destroy the bacteria that had formed in the woman’s weak lungs.
    The doctor consoled Lucie. When he came up to the chateau, he held her in the garden room and told her she mustn’t blame herself. Fatima lay in the bed like a wraith now; all the fat from her limbs was gone and only her bones seemed to be there. The weight dropped off with such alarming speed; it was as if she were being rubbed out of the picture.
    ‘Which she was,’ said the women of the village, as they bustled into Mass on the day after the funeral. ‘She absolutely was!’
    Lucie feared the bad luck that spilled out of the chateau walls.
    She took the child round and round the garden. They collected flowers; they ran together in the vineyard.
    Lucie cried, quite quickly, in the doctor’s chair and she told him that she would always be haunted by Fatima’s sweet face in the garden room, the