We All Ran into the Sunlight by Natalie Young Page A

look in the poor woman’s eyes, that brown hand trying to stifle a cough. It was so hot in the room, and the sweat had burst from them both. Lucie had herself closed Fatima’s eyelids and held her hand to the open gasping mouth, she told the doctor, who kissed her and held her and wrote her another prescription so that she could sleep easier at night.
    ‘You have a job to do now,’ he said. She had to be strong and eat and get on. ‘You’re a mother,’ he told her.
    ‘Yes,’ she whispered, with courage in her heart.
    ‘That’s the only thing that matters now.’
    And Lucie agreed and was consoled by this and so she allowed him to lay her down on his bed behind the curtain and she found that the pills he gave her to keep her strong took the edge off the shock and the pain of penetration and the doctor was ever so grateful for her – the little neck, the sweet Parisian face – and the first time he lay on the bed above her and thrust and thrust with his trousers round his knees and he cried out in bliss.
    Soon after, Baseema was moved into the master bedroom and she slept now on a little bed in the window with the porcelain doll Lucie ordered from Paris.
    Out they bundled on a Friday morning and when the doctor called Lucie in for her consultation, Baseema remained in the waiting room for close to an hour playing with her doll under the sympathetic watch of the receptionist .
    And if anyone had asked her, Lucie would say that the doctor had only ever been a trusted and loyal friend in a place where people were mostly cold and hostile to her. Mercifully, the doctor was able to advise her on so many things. He agreed, when she voiced her fears about it, that Baseema should probably wait another year before attending school and that, in the meantime, Lucie should continue just to enjoy all the time that they spent together in the chateau and out in the garden. Arnaud was never around.
    If there was one thing that he asked, it was that Lucie found someone in the village to take her, just on a Friday morning, so that they wouldn’t have to rush behind the curtain, leaving the child sitting quite conspicuously with the receptionist in the waiting room outside.

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    Lucie wasn’t able to find anyone in the village to look after her. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them. It was more to do with the fact that the village women had other children – their homes were small and dirty and full of noise – and she worried that Baseema might prefer it there, might become used to the noise and the activity of other children and that this would bring about the first in a series of psychological separations that Lucie would be unable to bear. She was a woman in her own right now. She felt pretty in her Mrs America kitchen, reaching up on points in her full swinging skirts. In the evenings she made her clothes; by day she cleaned her house and played with her child. She made food that pleased her husband; she even had the women in the village to tea. So what need had she of the doctor and his Friday morning fumblings behind the white curtain? What need had she of all those mind-numbing pills?
    So Lucie took the last of her pills and then Friday came and she would get through it alone.
    The doctor didn’t call. He was a gentleman through and through and he didn’t come at the weekend.
    On Saturday night she was bright as a button and she cooked a splendid feast for Arnaud. She sat with him in the library and chatted to him while she sewed. He sat and stared at the fire, listening to the radio and ploughing on through his bottle of wine, barely noticing a thing. No question his wife was more attentive, was chattier to him, and sweet. No question he was being fed like a king and waited on by a woman who seemed to enjoy making herself a slave.
    They listened to the wind in the trees that night. They sipped the brandy by the fire. Then Arnaud said his intention was to bring her sister Marie down to the village for the