The Way I Found Her (10 page)

I was enjoying this conversation. I wanted it to go on all night. But then there was my page of
Meaulnes
to read, and when we'd done this Valentina said she was tired. She put a little kiss on my head, like the ones Alice gave me when she said good night, and she went away down the stairs. I watched her blonde head getting lower and lower until it disappeared.

When she'd gone, I examined the musical box. I sniffed it like the women in the market sniffed the melons, and ran my hands over its surface and polished it a bit with the sheet. Then I put it near the round window and played it over and over and thought about the maids opposite, turning in their beds and hearing it and saying, ‘Oh yes, that's “Cherrytime”.'

Day after day, it was hot. No rain fell on the combed grass of the Parc Monceau, so the sprinklers kept turning and turning there.

When I eventually read the last bit of Hugh's letter, it told me that it had been boiling in Devon too and that Dad had gone for a lone midnight bathe and stood on the beach in the dark and suddenly missed Alice and me. I sent him a card of the Eiffel Tower, setting out what I'd eaten for lunch at Les Rosiers and explaining about Michelangelo's teeth. I didn't like him missing us. I suggested he invite Grandma Gwyneth and Grandad Bertie to stay. At the end, I put:
PS: I have made a new friend, whose name is Babba
.

Babba came from Benin, in Africa. This was a country I'd never heard of until this moment. Babba's skin was so black and smooth, it was like she was made of velvet. She was Valentina's maid. Babba wasn't her real African name, but that's what we called her.

I got to know her by following her around. Sometimes I helped her change the bolster covers. I liked the sight of her velvet arms plumping up cushions and dusting mirrors. She had a slow, sad walk and she spoke French in a sad, slow way.

One day she showed me a photograph of an old woman sitting in the back of a truck. ‘My mother,' she said. ‘Unfortunately, the truck was stolen.'

‘With your mother
in
it?'

Babba laughed. Her laugh was big and silent, like a yawn. ‘No, no, Louis. No, no . . .'

We were in the kitchen and I was helping Babba put clean crockery into the cupboards. The apartment was very quiet, with Valentina and Alice working away in their separate rooms. We put the photograph of Babba's mother and the stolen truck on the kitchen table and looked at it. Babba said sadly: ‘Four years.'

‘Since you saw your mother?'

‘Yes. Since I left my village in Benin.'

So then we stood there, thinking about Babba's village, or, rather, she was thinking about it and I was trying to imagine it. I put a new Renault truck into it and loads of animals – goats and wandering chickens and others. The imaginary houses were small and round and the new truck was blue, like the one in the picture. ‘Do you miss it?' I asked.

‘Yes,' said Babba. ‘But now I have Pozzi.' She got out another photo. It was of a kid, aged about two, not as black as Babba, more lightish brown, wearing a little bobble hat and standing in the snow. He was grinning and by him on the snowy ground was one of his gloves that had fallen off. ‘Pozzi,' she said.

It was probably because I told her I thought Pozzi looked great that she began to talk to me about her life – the one she had now in Paris. We both sat down at the kitchen table and I got us some Orangina from the gigantic fridge and Babba described her apartment to me. She said it was out at Nanterre. I knew where this was, beyond the cemetery where Didier's father was buried. There were high-rise buildings there, coloured blue and purple, and that's where Babba and Pozzi lived, in one of those blocks. She said that when you got close to them you could see that the blue and purple was made up of millions of mosaic pieces, but now, bit by bit, the mosaics were falling off.

What Babba had was one room and a kitchen. There were shared bathrooms along the corridors. She said this mournfully and I realised then that in Babba's imaginary village in Benin I'd put no bathrooms at all and I felt really guilty about this, really white and spoilt and guilty.

The main problem with Babba's apartment, she said, was the motorbike. It was a ten-year-old 1000cc Harley Davidson and it had belonged to the previous tenant, and when he vacated the apartment he just left it standing there in the one room where Babba and Pozzi had to live and sleep.

I said: ‘Can't you get the council to come and take it away, Babba?'

She shrugged her big shoulders. ‘Pozzi,' she said, ‘he loves that thing. I have to keep it shiny for him. I say, “Where are you going, Pozzi?” I say, “Where's Pozzi going?” and he says, “Africa. Pozzi's going to Africa!” So that's it, Louis. We got that bike for ever now.'

It may have been because of the bike that Babba liked polishing things. Keeping the chrome good might have given her the habit of making surfaces shine. I liked watching her work on Valentina's parquet floors. She and the electric polisher would go round and round in a series of slow arcs, with Babba swaying as she moved and sometimes singing, with her head bent low, like she was singing to the floor:

Then, she'd go down on her velvety hands and knees and rub the parquet with a thick, soft cloth. While she rubbed, she would gaze so intently at the shiny wood, it seemed to me she thought it was a magic pool from which might rise, at any time, a message of hope. I imagined she was asking the floor to bring back the stolen truck to her village in Benin.

Valentina didn't pay Babba that much. She said she knew that Babba didn't have a work permit in France, so she was doing her a favour just by employing her. But she let Babba take stuff from the fridge for her lunch – bits of cold salmon and potato salad and drinks of Orangina. She said to me: ‘Don't worry about Babba, Lewis. Women like Babba, they come and they go. One day, she will just leave without telling me.'

Then something happened which I knew might turn out badly for Babba: Valentina slipped on the polished parquet and fell over. It was a Saturday morning and she was wearing silver sandals. I was the one who found her lying on the floor, swearing in several languages, like Mr Gavrilovich in the coal yard.

I ran over to her and knelt down beside her. Sergei was standing there, whining. She looked really white and even her red lips had gone pale. ‘Shit!' she said. ‘Merde! Porca miseria! Scheisse! Fuck! Help me up, Lewis.'

I tried to help her. I put my arm under hers and round her back and attempted to lever her up, but she couldn't seem to push the top half of her body off the floor. When I tried to move her, she began screaming with pain. I could smell her perfume and her sweat, and then she started talking to me in Russian, as if she were giving me instructions about what to do, but I knew she didn't really realise what she was saying. I wished I could remember a few tips from our First Aid lesson at school, but all I could think about was what you did to a person, mouth to mouth, if they'd stopped breathing, and this wasn't the appropriate moment for that.

Sergei started licking Valentina's feet in their silver shoes, which didn't help. Dogs never know what to do in a crisis. I had to push him away and tell him to fuck off and then I decided that I needed help and so I laid Valentina down as gently as I could and went running to Alice's room.

But Alice wasn't in her room. Her desk was all tidy, with her books and papers in orderly piles, so I knew she'd gone out without telling anyone, which was what she was doing more and more, despite the fuss Valentina had made about this the first time. I had no idea where she went and I'd never asked.

I knew I had to get someone and so I charged up my stairs and opened the bathroom window and began calling to Didier. The job on the roof was so enormous that Didier often worked some part of Saturdays and when I shouted out, ‘Didier, aidezmoi!' I prayed he'd still be there. He was there. He came climbing round to me straight away and swung himself in through the window. Didier's body was powdered with slate dust. The bird on his neck looked as though it had gone flying into a grey mist. I hoped all this dust wouldn't stain Valentina's silk dress or fall on to the furniture.

When we got back to the salon, Valentina was crying. Blue eyeshadow was running down her face. I think she thought I'd abandoned her and that she'd just lie there on the floor till nightfall.

I knelt by her again. ‘Don't cry, Valentina,' I said. ‘Didier's here.' And she gazed up at me with her huge blue eyes.

Didier knelt down, too. Already, I noticed, there was a bit of slate dust on the parquet. It was probably because of the bad old days with the coal that Valentina liked to have everything so totally clean. But right now, she was in too much pain to be aware that her rescuer was covered with grime. And he was very good with her, staying calm and asking her gently what had happened. When her sobs stopped, she said that she thought her arm was broken.

Didier instructed me to fetch cushions. There was no shortage of these in Valentina's apartment. There were embroidered cushions and tapestry cushions, cushions made of satin and cushions with tassels dangling from them, like sporrans. I chose a selection and Didier told me to lay them carefully alongside Valentina's body. He seemed very intent and focused now, like a nurse, and I suddenly thought, I wonder if he once did this before, when his father was hurt?

When we had the cushions all lined up, we slowly, carefully, rolled Valentina on to the cushion bed, so that her weight was off the broken arm. Seeing this, Sergei thought it must be time to go to sleep and so he lay down beside her. Valentina was still trembling with pain and shock and so I fetched a duvet from her room and covered her with this, while Didier went to telephone for an ambulance. I wanted to
be
the duvet, enfolding her.

She asked me to light her one of her Russian cigarettes. So with one hand I helped her to smoke the cigarette, holding it next to her lips and putting it in and out of her beautiful mouth, and with the other I tried to wipe the watercolour sea from her face with one of the Marks and Spencer's hankies Bertie had given me for Christmas.

I wanted to go with her in the ambulance. I thought Didier and I were the heroes of the hour and that we had to see our mission through, but in the end neither of us went, because Alice came home and took over. I told Alice I wanted to come, but she ignored me. She thanked Didier for coping with the emergency, but she didn't thank me.

When the ambulance had driven away with Valentina and Alice inside, Didier and I sat down on the stairs in the hallway. Moinel came in with his shopping and gave us a nervous smile. When Moinel was out of earshot, I said: ‘Did your father fall off a roof, Didier?'

He took off his glasses and polished them on his T-shirt – a thing he often did. Then he said: ‘Have you read Zola's
L'Assommoir
? Do you remember how Lantier falls?'

I said I'd never read anything by Zola.

Then Didier went on: ‘Well. Lantier is a roofer. His wife comes by with his children and he's so glad to see them, he waves at them, without thinking. He lets go his grip . . .'

‘And that's what happened to your father? He let go?'

‘Louis,' he said, ‘when you are on a roof, you have to pay attention all the time. Especially on certain difficult jobs – a dome, for instance. No matter how good the scaffolding is, you can't take your eyes from what you're doing. And this makes the work very tiring. You know the Salpêtrière Hospital?'

‘No.'

‘You should go there and see. It has one of the most colossal domes in Paris, on the hospital's Church of Saint Louis – your saint. And it's made of slate.'

‘Like this roof?'

‘Yes. And everything there is to know about slate, my father knew. It shouldn't have happened. Never, never. It was me who called out to him, showing him what I'd seen in the sky . . .'

‘You mean you distracted him? What had you seen?'

‘We were putting up the scaffolding. That dome is an octagon. We'd laid scaffolding round seven of the eight sections. It had been raining earlier and my father kept saying, “Be careful, Didier: the slates are still slippery.” And some of them were loose, like they're loose on this building, just barely held, because the pins were broken or rusty . . . But still, it never should have happened that way . . .'

I could tell it was beginning to hurt Didier to tell me this story. He kept fiddling with his shoes and his voice was getting choked-up and faint, and I thought if he got to the bit where his father fell he might collapse or cry or something and I didn't want this to happen, because I knew it was going to embarrass me.

Luckily, he stopped before he got to the bad bit. He just stopped talking and his eyes behind his glasses looked dreamy and far away. I knew he was thinking all about it: the thing he'd seen, and the rain on the grey slate, and the grave like a garage on the housing estate of the dead, but he couldn't go on with the story.

I tried to change the subject by asking him when we were going to start the roller-skating lessons on the esplanade. But he didn't seem to hear this question. He looked hard at me and said: ‘Do you have a father, Louis?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘His name's Hugh. He's a schoolteacher.'

They had to cut Valentina's silk dress to get her broken arm out of it. Apparently, she said to Alice: ‘If they knew what this dress cost!' and the doctor and the nurse both laughed, but Alice didn't. Alice had become very stern with Valentina and that was that.