The Way I Found Her (11 page)

When they got home, Valentina's right arm was in a sling, lying comfortably between her breasts and her stomach. She was still wearing the mutilated dress which had come from Yves St Laurent and cost 10,760 FF, but she wasn't crying about it; she looked cheerful even, because at the hospital they'd given her something to take away the pain. A nurse once told Alice that the drugs that really take away pain are all heroin-based, so Valentina was having a kind of trip.

Valentina went to bed. Mum helped her get out of the dress and put on a satin nightie. After that she propped her up on millions of pillows and it was only then that I was allowed in to see her. She looked like an empress, lying there on all her pillows and cushions, and when I went into the room she said: ‘Here's my brave Lewis. Come, darling, and sit by me.' So I sat on her bed and held her hand. From where I positioned myself, I could see right down the soft valley between her breasts and I had to do some chess moves in my mind to stop myself from laying my head there.

After a while, I started thinking about the way things might change now that Valentina would have to be helped with everything, and when Alice had gone out to the kitchen to get us some supper I said: ‘I've got a good idea. I could become your secretary, Valentina. You could dictate stuff to me and I could type it. I'm ace with computers and I've got a word-processor programme on mine at home. What have you got – IBM or Apple Mac or what?'

‘Apple, darling. I don't know if it's Mac or not.'

‘It's Mac, if it's Apple. What software?'

‘I don't know. I don't know these kind of things, Lewis.'

‘Well, it doesn't matter. It's all more or less the same in a WP programme. I can familiarise myself with it in two minutes. It's a good idea, isn't it?'

She smiled at me and said: ‘Maybe it's better if Alice helps me . . .'

‘But then she won't be able to get on with her translation, Valentina. That's stupid. I can't translate your book, but I could help you with typing.'

‘Not really, darling. It has to be Alice . . .'

I hated her going on about wanting Alice. I wanted her to want me. ‘Let me try,' I said. ‘Let's try tomorrow, and if I'm no good you can get someone else.'

‘Perhaps I can still type with just my left hand?'

‘No, you can't. This system will be much faster, and it's nearly August. We've only got about a month left.'

She sighed at that point. Her sighs were very heavy, like some of the grimy Russian air was still in her lungs. Then she said to me in a whisper: ‘You've forgotten one thing, Lewis.'

‘No, I haven't,' I said. ‘What have I forgotten?'

‘I'm writing in French.'

It was true. I had forgotten that. Once again, I'd ignored what was prime. An English boy struggling with
Le Grand Meaulnes
would be a pitiful assistant to a French novelist. I couldn't believe I'd suggested such an idiotic thing. My love for Valentina was turning me into a moron.

I got up and walked around the room, looking at Valentina's things – her hairbrushes and her lamps and her photograph frames and her pots of flowers – and noticing that they were all heavy and expensive. I wanted to hurl one of them at the wall.

After a bit, Valentina said: ‘Don't be upset, Lewis. You can help me in other ways.'

‘I wanted to be your secretary!' I shouted.

‘Never mind about that,' said Valentina, trying to soothe me. ‘Now I want to ask you something important. Come here, darling, please.'

I could tell it was going to be something about Alice and it was, so I didn't move, but just stayed looking at all the perfume bottles on Valentina's dressing table and at her mirror, which was draped with beads and chiffon scarves.

Valentina wanted to know why Alice was angry with her. I wasn't interested in this and I didn't want to talk about it, but eventually, with my back turned, I said: ‘You shouldn't take any notice of Alice's moods.'

‘But what have I done to her?'

‘Nothing. She's always a bit like that, wanting to do things on her own. It's just her stubborn Scottish character.'

‘But you know I'm very fond of Alice, darling. And if she's going to be so cross all the time, I'm going to be unhappy.'

‘Don't be,' I said impatiently. ‘She's just
like that
. There's no point in being upset.'

‘The thing is . . . I don't know what I've done.'

‘You haven't done anything. I told you. It's Alice's way . . .'

‘But it never was before. And when she goes out alone, like that, where does she go, Lewis?'

‘I don't know. She maybe goes to a café or to the park, or something. She's fond of just sitting and thinking, which is why Dad's building the hut for her.'

‘Building a hut?'

I hadn't intended to mention this. I suppose I brought it up to distract Valentina from her questions about Alice and return her to some subject that had more to do with me, but as soon as I said it I regretted it.

‘Don't mention it to Alice,' I said. ‘I shouldn't have told you. It's meant to be a secret.'

‘What kind of hut?'

I'd picked up a silver clothes brush and now I banged this down very hard on the dressing table and two of the perfume bottles fell over. ‘I shouldn't have told you!' I said again. ‘Forget it. Please forget it and don't ask me about it any more. And don't ask me about Alice!'

I sneaked a glance at Valentina. She looked shocked. She couldn't understand why I felt so strongly about all this. She had no way of knowing that what I dreamed about in my attic room was her.

‘Come here, darling,' she said softly.

I felt so moody. I thought, I expect this is what it's like to have a lovers' tiff. I didn't want to go to her just because she spoke to me sweetly now, so I stood angrily by the dressing table, refusing to move.

‘Lewis,' she said, ‘come here.'

So I righted the perfume bottles and went and sat by her then, and she put her good arm on my knee and said how sensibly I'd behaved in the emergency and what an excellent idea it had been to fetch Didier.

There was a long silence after that. We just sat there, waiting for something to come into our minds to talk about. I started to feel a bit sleepy because I'd had hardly any food that day and had played chess with my Travel Set all afternoon until Alice and Valentina came home. And because I was awake for so much of each night. What I longed to do now was to lie down on the satiny bed and fall asleep with Valentina's arm holding me in.

I closed my eyes. As soon as I'd closed them, Valentina began talking again. I drifted away on the sound of her voice, and when I came to I realised she was telling me about her past. I thought, this could be what real lovers actually do – tell each other about their childhoods.

She told me that her parents, Mr and Mrs Gavrilovich, had come to France with a group of Russian farmers in 1957, on an official visit to a French wine co-operative. The co-operative was in the Luberon region. The Gavrilovichs brought little Valentina with them. She was three. She thought they'd suspected (‘or realised in a kind of dream, Lewis') that when they saw the acres of vines growing in the sunshine on the Luberon hills, they wouldn't have the stomach to return to Russia.

So they got on a train for Paris. They just left the Russian group and got on a train. They had almost no money and nowhere to stay, but someone had told Mr Gavrilovich he might find work in the old slaughterhouse at La Villette, and so they went there and he was taken on, and for the first week they slept in a barn where straw was kept and washed themselves in the slaughterhouse yard, very early in the morning, before the trucks of animals started arriving.

It took Mr Gavrilovich four years to make enough money to start the
café, bois et charbon
and only once in his life did he go back to Provence and see the vines on the hills. ‘I would have been about your age when we went,' said Valentina. ‘We camped in a meadow, in some old tent Papa had stolen or borrowed. It was autumn. I remember cooking mushrooms on a little open fire and I remember the cold dew in the mornings. It hadn't changed, you know, that beautiful landscape. It had hardly changed at all from when we'd first seen it ten years before. And after this, until he died, Papa kept promising we would go to live there and buy land and a house made of stone and grow vines, but we never did.'

‘Now, you could. If you wanted to,' I said sleepily.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘now I could, but it was Papa who wanted that life, not me. You can't live someone else's dreams, Lewis. You have to live your own.'

The next day was Sunday and I wasn't allowed near Valentina's room. She was feeling sick, after all the heroin they'd given her, and her arm was hurting again and she couldn't get up.

Mrs Gavrilovich arrived, dressed in black, with a scarf over her bun and smelling of incense. She brought a bunch of white peonies and her embroidery in a bag. I heard her say to Alice: ‘Broken bones are a curse. They make me afraid.'

Alice said it was best for us to go out, to let Mrs Gavrilovich take charge of everything. I thought it was odd that at forty-one a person could still need her mother, and I somehow predicted that when I was forty-one, if I ever got that far, all I would need of Alice and Hugh was just to know that they were alive.

The bedroom door closed on Valentina and Mrs Gavrilovich and I could hear them talking softly in Russian. I said to Alice, ‘I expect they could be talking about Provence and the house they never bought, don't you?' but she only shrugged. Either she didn't know the story about Provence, or else she just wasn't interested in it.

She went to the window and looked at the beautiful day outside and said: ‘Come on. Let's go out. Get Sergei's lead.'

We walked all the way to the bird market at the Place Louis Lépine, going right down through the Tuileries and past the Louvre and over the Pont au Change to the Île de la Cité. On the way, under the chestnuts of the Tuileries, I said to Alice, ‘Do you think Babba will get blamed for what happened?'

Alice shrugged again. ‘I expect so,' she said. ‘Things that happen to Valentina are never seen as being her own fault.'

‘She won't make Babba leave, will she?'

‘I don't know.'

Alice didn't seem interested in Babba's fate, any more than she'd been interested in what Valentina and Mrs Gavrilovich had been talking about. I was going to tell her about Pozzi and the Harley Davidson and Babba's village in Benin, but then I thought there was no point, because I understood now that, since we'd come to Paris, Alice was slowly going into some private world, in which these things seemed to be of no importance to her whatsoever. It wasn't just that Valentina had begun to annoy her; something else was preoccupying her mind.

I glanced at her, walking along in the dappled sunlight. She was wearing a skimpy blue dress and some brown beads Hugh had bought her from a craft shop in Exeter. I thought, when a person goes into her own secret world, it isn't a reassuring sign. And then I realised another thing about her, a thing I never would have anticipated: she'd been neglecting me. So this is what I thought about as we walked. I made an imaginary diagram of our two minds, Alice's and mine, and they were like two planets or stars zooming further and further away from each other as time passed and the universe expanded.

When we got to the bird market, Sergei began to tremble, seeing all these hundreds of birds looking out at him and trilling. I don't know whether he was trembling out of curiosity or out of sadness or out of a desire to snaffle up a dozen yellow canaries for his lunch. I stroked his neck to calm him. Some of the birds looked desperate to get out of their cages, sticking their beaks and their eyes through the bars, but the baby parrots were all huddled together in a far corner of their hutch, their green heads in a cluster, like they couldn't bear to see the people going by and wanted to be in darkness. I pointed this out to Alice and we stood and looked at them and Alice said: ‘They think
we're
for sale to them and they've decided they don't want to buy.'

We passed mina birds who tried to speak to us in some language we couldn't understand and a flight of Indian sparrows in a wicker barrel and then we came to pairs of budgerigars in very small cages, who had been labelled as being
inséparables
. Some had come from Japan and some from South America. I didn't know who had decided that these ones couldn't be parted from each other or what would happen to them if you did part them.

‘Would they die?' I asked Alice.

Mostly they were blue, the colour of her dress, and she smiled at them tenderly, as if they amused her. ‘They're just couples,' she said: ‘Mr and Mrs.'

‘Shall we buy a pair?' I said suddenly.

‘Certainly not,' said Alice. ‘Whatever for?'

‘For Valentina,' I said. ‘To cheer her up.' They weren't very expensive. I thought I could use some of my ‘book money' that Hugh had given me, because the only book I'd bought was Paul Berger's copy of
Le Grand Meaulnes
and Hugh had seemed to imagine I'd be buying books non-stop all the time, like he did. He couldn't pass a second-hand bookshop without coming out with some bizarre thing like
Letters of an American Slave Trader
or
Sanitation in Roman Britain
, but I was more selective. ‘I'll pay,' I said.

‘No,' said Alice.

I felt a sliver of fury come into me. Alice sometimes boasted about her obstinacy, but right now it just really pissed me off. I knew Valentina would like the budgerigars. I could imagine her taking them out of their cage and stroking their blue feathers. Russian people weren't afraid to bring birds inside their houses and let them alight on their bodies.