The Way I Found Her (5 page)

‘I know,' said Didier, ‘I've seen Louis' room.'

‘Oh, you have?' said Valentina. Her smile had gone now and I could tell she was wondering whether I'd invited Didier into my room for a Kit-Kat or something, or made him listen to the phantom whistler.

Alice tried a kind of conversation rescue. ‘Lewis is worried,' she said, ‘about your glasses.'

‘About my glasses?' said Didier.

‘Yes. That you could lose them and then—'

‘Lose them?'

‘Yes, and then . . . not fall, or anything – because I'm sure you're very practised – just feel a bit confused up there.'

‘No,' said Didier. ‘I don't think so.'

I could feel that the whole encounter was going really badly. I wished I'd never suggested it. And I wished we could now pretend to be on our way to the Parc Monceau, pretend that we'd passed Didier eating his lunch in the street quite by chance. Then I had an idea. I asked Didier if he'd like to see our dog, knowing he'd say yes, so that Valentina and Alice would go away and leave him in peace. So we all trooped back inside the apartment building and I fetched Sergei and brought him down and I could tell Didier liked him and he liked Didier. Sometimes, meetings with animals go better than meetings with novelists.

Later that day, when I told Alice that Didier was known as ‘the Bird' and that he was sometimes capable of flight, she said condescendingly that I shouldn't always believe the things the world appeared to say. And when I mentioned to Valentina that he was also an existentialist, she said: ‘Darling, either you must have misunderstood or that roofer was teasing you. Nobody uses that term today. It's a completely outmoded philosophy.'

It was like they both wanted to deny that Didier could be anything more than the person who'd come to mend the roof. But I knew better.

Every Thursday afternoon, Valentina went to visit her mother, Mrs Gavrilovich.

She told me that it was on a Thursday in the winter of 1981 that Mr Gavrilovich had died. He had died, said Valentina, in the yard of the
café, bois et charbon
, carrying a sack of coal from the coal bunker to the van. Valentina had glanced out of the window at the back of the café and seen him staggering about, like someone trying to remember the steps of a folk dance. He was still holding the corners of the sack of coal in his hands. Then he tripped over his own feet and sat down on the wet cobbles, ‘looking all around him in amazement, Lewis, as if he were seeing the yard for the first time'.

Valentina and Mrs Gavrilovich went running out to him. He apparently leaned back on the sack of coal and swore in Russian, over and over. ‘Bad words,' said Valentina, ‘words my mother could not tolerate. And in the middle of the swearing, his heart stopped beating.'

I wanted to ask Valentina how Mr Gavrilovich could have been ‘in the middle' of swearing when he died. Did one more curse, already lurking in his throat, come out of him after his heart had given up?

I didn't ask. I was afraid Valentina would think me pedantic. And she'd sometimes said that the most extraordinary things could happen to the people of Russia. Anything the human mind could imagine, no matter how strange or grotesque, had at one time or other taken place in Russian history. Which was why she was never shocked or surprised. And this could be one of those strange things: the word or
words
, even, spoken by the dead Mr Gavrilovich on a Thursday afternoon in the winter of 1981.

When Valentina had started to make money from her Medieval Romances, the café was sold. The
charbon
bit of it had already stopped when Mr Gavrilovich died. The remaining coal was just gradually used up by the old range where Valentina and her mother cooked their meals.

Then, when the money began to flood in from America and Germany and Britain and everywhere, Valentina installed Mrs Gavrilovich in a ground-floor apartment in the rue Daru, a short walk from the Russian Orthodox church of Saint Alexandre Nevsky. ‘And, you know,' said Valentina, ‘Maman believes that God
lives
in that church! She said to me one day, “If you were God and could choose to live anywhere in the world, you'd probably choose Paris!”'

At the moment, though, Mrs Gavrilovich wasn't feeling well. She had an ulcer. She had the blues. The blues were a thing Russians were born with. They lay in their prams, weeping for the greyness of the sky. ‘And she is tired of everything, Lewis, and that's a real problem. She telephones her concierge two or three times a day to complain about something or other and it's getting unreasonable. One day, she complained about a thunderstorm and the concierge told her, “Listen, Madame Gavrilovich, if I could create thunder, I'd be something better in life than a concierge, so don't speak to me any more on the subject!”'

Valentina took Sergei and walked down the rue Rembrandt, heading for her mother's apartment. I watched them go. Valentina's shoes were green that day, to match a green silk dress. I decided her smart clothes made Mum look like a hippie by comparison, but I didn't mention this to either of them.

Mum and I took the métro to Jussieu. When you come up at Jussieu station, you arrive under some dark trees with big leaves that clatter in the wind. Mum said these were catalpa trees and that they grew in Africa and so this is what they have always been to me – catalpa trees.

She'd taken me to see the Jardin des Plantes. It was so boiling hot it was as if we were
in
Africa.

We walked along down an avenue of limes, in their big shade, where sparrows bathed in the dust. I could hear frogs calling from the miniature lily ponds. In the flower beds, there were giant artichokes and purple broccoli. Bits of the land had been sculpted and planted to resemble China and Corsica and the high Alps.

We sat down in the middle of China, next to a little waterfall. We didn't speak, but just looked around us.

I thought, I've stepped so far out of my normal life, I may never get back to it. I knew this could happen to people. A perfectly ordinary person – his name could be Paul Berger, say – can arrive somewhere new, like in the Appalachian Mountains, and watch his previous life vanish, as if into a tiny lamp or vial. Paul Berger might keep the lamp or vial in some drawer, but he'd forget about it absolutely. Perhaps, when he was old, he'd discover it there in the drawer and say to himself, ‘What's this?' And then he'd give the corroded old vial a shake and remember it contained his former life.

We left China and went into the menagerie section of the park. We stood by a little compound of American bison, their fur all tattered and falling off them. I began thinking about
their
former lives and I said to Alice: ‘If you're a bison and you're here, do you think that there's any bit of you that remembers the Great Plains?'

Alice thought about this for a while, then she said: ‘More interesting is the question whether a bison who had
never been
to the Great Plains can feel their existence inside him somewhere.'

I agreed that this was more interesting, but I didn't really know how to start to speculate about it. On certain days, in my version of my future, I became a philosopher, but this particular Thursday didn't seem to be one of them. I wondered what Didier would come up with if I put this question about the bison to him.

‘When we go back to Devon,' I said, ‘I may not be able to fit back into my old life. Too much may have happened to me . . .'

‘No,' said Alice, ‘it doesn't work like that. When we go back, it'll be as if all of this hardly existed.'

‘It won't,' I said.

One of the bison got tired of looking at us and began to lollop towards its shed. I noticed that parked outside the shed, in the muddy straw, was a cocktail trolley. I pointed this out to Mum and she said: ‘It's a cocktail trolley, so it is! Well, I suppose things get abandoned in the most unlikely places – things and people, for that matter.'

‘Why do you say people?'

‘Oh, because it happens . . .'

‘You'd never be abandoned.'

‘No, I don't think so. But how is one to know?'

‘And you wouldn't abandon Dad, would you?'

‘Oh, no.'

I glanced up at Alice. Her hair looked very red today, in the sunshine, like the beginnings of a bush fire. I felt glad she didn't yet know what Dad's project was. If you realised that all your loved one could make for you was a hut like a public toilet, you might seriously think of abandoning him there and then.

Now, the other bison meandered towards the shed. They reminded me of the vagrants you saw in England in winter, bundled up in heavy rags and swaying along on worn-out feet. I said to Mum: ‘I expect some amazing food is going to be given to them – elephant grass or something.' But no one came to feed them, so we walked on.

‘Who's Barthélémy?' I asked suddenly.

Mum looked surprised and was about to say she didn't know anyone called Barthélémy, when she remembered. ‘Oh,' she said, ‘he's a character in Valentina's book. He's plotting a murder.'

‘Who's he going to murder?'

‘The husband of his mistress. A duke.'

‘How's he going to do the murder?'

‘He's the son of an apothecary. He steals poisons from his father's shop and mixes them and experiments with them in secret during the night. He's trying to find a poison that acts fast and leaves no trace.'

I thought this sounded quite good. I asked Mum if I could read some of her translation and she looked at me intently, as though an idea were dawning on her.

‘Yes,' she said after a while. ‘Why not?' Then she said in a kind of whisper: ‘This new book of Valentina's is a thousand times better than any of her others. Much more exciting. A lot more cruel. It's as if it's been written by someone else.'

I liked the idea that there could be some mystery attached to the book. I thought, perhaps our apartment is going to become so full of secrets, it'll get hard to breathe. And one secret that I decided to keep from Mum was Valentina's visits to my room and the work I was going to do with her on
Le Grand Meaulnes
.

The following Sunday afternoon, I was playing Computer Chess in my room when Alice came up and said to me, ‘I can't work, Lewis. Let's go out. Let's go now.'

She seemed in a fluster, angry. Her hair was spiky.

I said: ‘You know, this computer's making stupid moves, Mum. It captured my knight with its bishop and forgot it needed the bishop to defend its king. It was just greedy for the knight. I moved my queen in and it brought a rook over to defend, but it's going to be too late because—'

‘Never mind that,' Alice said. ‘Leave it. Let's go.'

We went straight out of the apartment without a word to Valentina. I could hear her talking on the telephone in her study and I was about to suggest to Alice that we wait and tell her where we were going, but Alice had already grabbed her key and was flying down the stairs, so I closed the apartment door and followed her. I knew that when I got back, the stupid Travel Computer could be checkmated in five moves.

It was a peculiar day, still hot, but sunless, with a sky of grey wool. We caught a metro going west. A guy got on and started to play the guitar and sing to us. When he'd finished and was going round with the hat, he said: ‘If this experience has been disagreeable to you in any way, please inform me.' But nobody informed him.

We got out at La Défense, the last stop on the line. Someone had recently built an arch here. The Arche de Ia Défense was the tallest, heaviest arch ever to be built in the history of the world. In front of it was a huge cascade of white steps and a big esplanade, the colour of the grey sky.

We stood around on the steps, looking up at the arch. Mum was scowling. Her beauty vanished a bit when she scowled. The designers of this arch had forgotten to put in a lift to carry people to the top, or so it seemed to me, because they'd added on a little fragile-looking elevator underneath it, like a hoist a trapeze artist might take to get him to his high wire.

I said to Mum I quite liked the trapeze idea, but she wasn't paying me much attention. She was staring out at the esplanade now, which had office buildings and modern sculptures all round it, and when I followed her line of vision I saw that it rested on the word FIAT on the top of a skyscraper. I stayed still by her side and after a moment she said angrily: ‘Luckily, we've all outgrown the idea that signs are put up for our entertainment.'

I didn't understand what she meant. There are times when I just don't understand her at all. What I usually do then is let a bit of silence drift by.

After this particular bit of silence had passed, I said: ‘What are you cross about, Mum?'

‘Valentina,' she snapped.

Her saying this made me realise something: when we'd been in Brittany with Valentina, I'd found her sort of bossy and difficult, but now I didn't; in fact I thought there was something really beautiful about her, something as beautiful and soft as snow. I wanted to walk into this snow, like on a new, fantastic morning, and lie down.

‘Why are you angry with Valentina?' I asked.

‘Because she treats me unfairly,' said Alice, ‘and I simply don't know how long I can go on working like this. She interrupts me all the time. She queries half of what I write. She's always been a self-centred woman and she just doesn't see . . .'

‘See what?'

‘That I have to be left alone to get on. She thinks she owns me. She doesn't own me!'

‘No one owns you, Mum,' I said. But I said this sadly, because the idea that we might have to leave Paris and leave Valentina suddenly seemed really horrible.