The Way I Found Her (7 page)

I asked her what Maurice had said about Sergei and she said: ‘Oh, he says it's nothing, Lewis. Perhaps it may be the heat. It's nothing to worry about.'

I went to see Mum then, who was working in her room, and I asked her if we were going to leave. She sighed. She leaned back in her chair and grabbed all her fantastic hair and scrunched it up into a kind of ponytail and said: ‘I don't think we can. Do you? I'm sorry I got angry. I've told Valentina to leave me in peace a bit more and she says she will.'

I felt so glad we weren't leaving, I gave Mum a hug and she had to let go of the ponytail to hug me back. While she hugged me, I looked down at the work on her desk and I saw she was on page thirty-nine of Valentina's manuscript. The last sentence she'd written was:
The long night passed and, all through it, Isabelle waited for Barthélémy to come to her, but he didn't arrive
.

I went up to my room then and undressed and got into bed. I started struggling with
Le Grand Meaulnes
. I was on
Chapitre VII, Le Gilet de Soie
. But I couldn't get my mind to concentrate on it. What my mind was concentrating on was the kiss that Valentina had given to Maurice the vet. Just as Maurice arrived, Valentina had put on more of her scarlet lipstick, so the mouth that she'd placed near his mouth was very red and shiny, and I kept on wondering whether her lips had been just near enough to Maurice's lips so that, on the way down in the lift, he could taste the lipstick. And if he had been able to taste it, what had it tasted like . . .

I couldn't get my mind off it. I decided that the lipstick would have tasted a bit like the centre of a chocolate, delicious but unreal, as if the chocolate manufacturers had made a mistake and put some perfume into the mix. And I kept thinking that the thing I wanted to do most in the world was to lick all the creamy lipstick off Valentina's lips. I just longed to do this. I'd lick and lick and lick until Valentina's mouth was absolutely bare and then swallow all the sweet lipstick and imagine it inside me, coating everything red. Then I'd get her to put more lipstick on. I'd say to her, really politely, ‘Valentina, would you mind just putting on a bit more lipstick?' and she'd say, ‘Oh no, darling, not at all. Here we go.' Then her mouth would be scarlet again and she'd lean over me and I'd put my tongue out and start lapping and licking again and move the creamy lipstick round my own lips and over my teeth and then let it slide down my throat.

I touched myself. I felt more sexy than I'd ever felt in my life. I kept rerunning Valentina's kissing of Maurice and then transferred her mouth to mine, and the minute I imagined my first taste of the lipstick it was like the rest of me vanished and all I became was my cock and my hand. I didn't even have to rub myself hard, like I usually did if I wanted to come. I just touched myself lightly for less than a minute and then I had this amazing, colossal orgasm.

Afterwards, I didn't feel guilty or a bit disgusted with myself, but just completely drained and exhausted and happy, and I turned out the light and went straight to sleep.

When I woke up, I saw that light was slowly filling my round window and then the birds started their little chirruping noises. My head felt swoony and seemed to fill with the birdsong. I tried to let the birds sing me back to sleep, but my brain wouldn't lie still to be sung to. It had remembered something of importance: Valentina had promised to come up the previous evening and listen to some more of my translation of
Le Grand Meaulnes
, but she hadn't appeared.

My copy of
Meaulnes
had fallen on to the floor. I picked it up and decided I'd do some work on the text right now, so that I'd have some really good stuff to impress her with the following evening.

I went back to
Chapitre VII, Le Gilet de Soie
. I was getting quite fond of the narrator of the story, François, and I thought I would tell Valentina this and say, ‘I hope nothing terrible is going to happen to him.' Then I would read her the work I'd done:

Chapitre VII – Chapter Seven, The Silk Waistcoat
.

Our room was, as I've told you, a huge attic. Half attic, half room. The adjoining buildings had ordinary windows, but our room had only a skylight
.

It was impossible to close the door of our room completely; it scraped on the floorboards. When we went up there in the evenings, holding our hands round our candles against the draughts, we always tried to close it and then we always had to give up
.

I went to sleep again for a bit. When I woke, I could hear Didier moving around on the roof and I thought, good, now the real day is going to begin.

At breakfast, Valentina made an announcement: she said we were all going to have a day off. She said she and Alice had been working too hard, that was why she got upset about things so easily, and she said she had been neglecting her friends and everybody, but especially her mother.

‘So,' she continued, ‘a car is coming at eleven-thirty. Maman will be collected and then we'll all drive out to Les Rosiers, which is a beautiful country restaurant with a swimming pool. You can swim, Lewis. We can walk Sergei in the woods nearby. Maman can snooze on a garden chair. And the food is wonderful.'

The car was a Mercedes E 6000 upholstered in blue leather. The chauffeur wore a blue uniform to match. The air conditioning was so cold, it was like speeding along in a fridge.

Mum and I were introduced to Mrs Gavrilovich. Like Valentina, she was a plump woman with beautiful eyes, but she'd let her hair go grey and rolled the grey hair into a bun on the top of her head. She'd brought a black straw hat with her, to put over the bun the moment we got out of the fridge. She sat in front with the chauffeur and on the journey I counted nineteen hairpins in different parts of the bun.

‘Maman has been having trouble with her teeth,' Valentina announced, almost as soon as we left the rue Rembrandt. It was as if she thought this inconvenience had to be explained to us before we went any further. ‘But,' she went on, ‘we are having some expensive reconstructive work done by an American dentist in rue Chateaubriand. Russians have bad teeth, like the English. The best teeth in the world belong to the inhabitants of Carrara, where there is liquid marble in the water.'

I was sitting between Alice and Valentina in the back of the car, with Sergei draped over all our feet. I could feel Valentina's warm bum snuggled in next to mine.

I said: ‘Did Michelangelo have good teeth?'

‘Yes,' said Valentina. ‘That is well known, darling. Up in the Sistine roof, he sometimes manoeuvred himself around by biting a rope.'

Alice and I both laughed. I thought, if you're a writer, you have to invent things. You have to keep thinking new things up, but what's the difference between the invented thing and the lie? Are the best writers just the niftiest liars? Was Shakespeare simply the most fantastic, brilliant, ace liar of all time? And what about Alain-Fournier? In my intro to
Le Grand Meaulnes
, it said that Alain-Fournier ‘wrote his own life', but I didn't know yet exactly what that meant. Perhaps it meant that Alain-Fournier just wasn't very good at thinking things up?

I began to feel happy in the Mercedes with Valentina's arse pressing against mine. The age I felt myself to be that morning was about eighteen. I longed to reach out my hand and stroke one of Valentina's fat brown arms.

To me, it was as if Valentina had been there in my night, as if she'd actually let me do the things I'd imagined. I knew that any ‘normal' woman would probably have felt shocked or disgusted. Girls at school were always telling the older boys they were shocked and disgusted by what they tried to get them to do. But I didn't think of Valentina as a normal woman. She was a crazy, romantic, gigantic Russian who'd told me that nothing on earth surprised her. I'd read in a book I found in Hugh's study that her ancestors had taken their pigs to church; they'd fought German soldiers outside Moscow with toasting forks; they once had an Empress who slept with her grandson. Valentina wouldn't mind what I felt about her. If I told her, she would probably laugh and kiss my nose. She might even let me put my hand on her breasts.

I felt so certain about this that I tucked my arm inside Valentina's. She patted my hand and her bangles jingled. She started to talk to her mother in French, telling her that I was a ‘very clever boy' and that together she and I were translating a French text. I looked at Mum, to see if she'd taken this in, but she was looking out of the window and she seemed far away, like she might be thinking about Dad or moonlight or Edinburgh. Mrs Gavrilovich started talking in Russian. This Russian language sounded like the words of a song being spoken.

‘What did she say?' I asked Valentina.

Valentina laughed. ‘Maman said you are the first English boy she has met in her life. She is sixty-nine. She says this is a strange thought.'

I said: ‘Tell her I think she's the first Russian woman I've met, apart from you and Raisa Gorbachev. I saw Mrs Gorbachev on a school outing when I was eight.'

Valentina reeled all this off in Russian and Mrs Gavrilovich turned round and smiled at me, and it was only when she smiled that anyone could see the trouble she'd been having with her teeth. Where some of her teeth should have been, there were holes. Then she asked me in French whether I would like to visit her church.

‘Did you understand?' Valentina said quickly. ‘Maman offered to show you her church. Would you like this? She thinks of it as “hers” and she likes to show people around. N'est-ce pas, Maman? Tu aimes montrer aux gens ta propre église?'

‘Oui. Bien sûr.'

The French Mrs Gavrilovich spoke was slow, as if she was still learning it after all this time. I said I'd like to see her church and I asked if we could hear some Russian singing or chanting. The answer to this didn't seem to be simple, because Valentina and her mother had to have a long discussion about it – or else they were talking about something completely different, like the rudeness of Mrs Gavrilovich's concierge. This made me realise that secret language equals power. I thought, when I'm a man – and this was a thing that felt as if it were going to occur quite soon – I'm going to acquire as many secret languages as I can and these will be my prime weapons in life.

I lay under a yellow parasol with my eyes closed.

I counted all the sounds I could hear: one, a fountain cascading water into the swimming pool; two, birds twittering; three, the murmured words of a Russian song; four, a plane on its way to Alaska or Alabama; five, the footsteps of a pool waiter; six, the rattle of drinks on a metal tray; seven, the snoring of Sergei; eight, the clattering of Valentina's bangles; nine, sun cream being squeezed on to Alice's freckled arms; ten, my own breathing.

Lying there, I began to feel amazed at the way the human ear could tolerate and interpret so much simultaneously. I wondered what the maximum number of sounds was before the brain had to select out, to save its interpretive faculty, and render some of them inaudible. Whenever I asked myself scientific questions, I knew that I could be 99.9 per cent certain that they had been asked before by someone else. Dad once said that only one person in a million contributes anything new to the world. Sometimes, I got ideas about becoming that one.

I'd never been anywhere like Les Rosiers. In fact I hadn't believed in the existence of places like this. I thought they just belonged in the minds of photographers for Sunday colour magazines or car commercials on TV and that, once the pictures had been taken, everything was disassembled and taken back to where it had come from, even the waiters, who were actors really and usually dressed in frayed jeans and old T-shirts from New York.

I tried to work out who owned Les Rosiers, because everything in it was just excessively perfect. Take the swimming pool: in ordinary pools in England there was a whole world of matter that you weren't supposed to see – floating insects and bits of blossom and dust. But here, in this pool, there wasn't one solitary speck of anything in the sparkling crystal-blue water. It was as if someone had poured ten tons of supermarket water, bottle by bottle, on to the little mosaic tiles.

And then there was my sun lounger. The mattress of the lounger had been upholstered in yellow-and-white cotton and tied on to the white wooden struts with white bows. No imprint of any previous body was visible on my lounger; no single drop of sun lotion, no stain of sweat, no watermark of a spilt cocktail. My lounger could have been made that morning, especially for me.

And beside it was a little white table. At the exact centre of the table had been placed a glass bowl, sculpted in the shape of a flower. The bowls had been filled with more impeccable water and white waxy flowers Valentina said were called gardenias had been set floating on the water like tiny boats.

I wanted to ask Valentina who she thought had gone to all this trouble and who for. I knew it hadn't been done for me, Third Year Chess Champion of Beckett Bridges School, wearing dark-blue Adidas swimming trunks. So I guessed it had been done for the kind of person who expected, as of right, to find no trace of a leaf in the swimming pool and who saw so many beautiful things in a single day that his eyes had to be kept amused by floating gardenias. ‘Ah,' he would say, ‘a floating gardenia, thank goodness.'

I opened my eyes and sat up and looked around. And I saw immediately how faulty my sound-collecting had been: two men had arrived to sit by the pool and I hadn't heard them. They were very tanned and sort of polished-looking, as if they'd put shoe cream on their foreheads as well as on their shoes. I christened them the Gardenia Men. Their teeth glimmered in the sun.

They talked very quietly, with a pile of paperwork on one of the little tables between them. They could have come all the way from the Fiat building at La Défense that Alice had been so rude about. And it was like they knew about this rudeness, because in between reading their balance sheets or their export statistics, or whatever it was they were discussing, they kept glancing up at Alice.