The Way I Found Her (9 page)

I'd worked my way round to the whistler's room now. To get close to its window, I had to climb back up the bit of steep roof underneath it, but I felt braver by this time. I stared in. The window was closed and the room was dark. To see inside, I had to blank out the radiance of the Paris sky with my body. And then I realised I was just staring at a curtain. Whatever went on in this space which Valentina had said was full of junk, someone had put a curtain at the window and drawn it. I stood very still, with my breathing quieter now, and listened, to see if I could hear snoring or sighing or that whistling again. But there was no sound at all.

After listening for some time, I moved backwards very carefully, down to the cage, and then I followed the scaffolding round and up until I was on the flat pinnacle of the roof, where the water tanks and the bulky chimneys and the forest of TV masts made their own kind of landscape. It was brilliant there. I could move confidently around and I could see for miles and miles, right out across the tops of the trees in the park and over the roofs of other apartment blocks to some amazing dome lit with yellow light.

The next day I got a letter from Hugh. Alice got one, too, but she didn't show me hers and Hugh said not to show her mine because it was all about the building of the hut.

I hated reading this letter. I wished it had said: ‘Dear Lewis, You will be very relieved to hear that I have abandoned the idea of building the hut', but it didn't. It went on and on about what a brilliant start Dad had made on the hut and how he'd mastered the art of bricklaying in less than a week, thanks to his DIY manual with its clear instructions and step-by-step drawings. It told me he was using a design called ‘Flemish Bond' for the ends, corners and junctions and that he preferred this to ‘English Bond' because it was ‘both more elegant and more difficult to perfect'. Then Dad put:
Once understood, the system of profile boards made level, with strings attached to them to demarcate the lines along which the walls will run, appears so simple and satisfactory that I've come to believe my little construction need have no flaw. On the contrary, I'm determined that it will be a work of art
 . . .

I hadn't a clue what a profile board was and I was completely certain that even if the hut seemed like a ‘work of art' to Dad, it wouldn't seem like one to Alice. Hugh went on to say he was putting in two windows instead of one, so that Alice would have a view of the house and a view of the sea. But I knew it would be me who would have these views, no matter how hard Hugh worked at his junctions. I'd sit there with my maths homework and from time to time I'd look up and see the house, getting dark on some November afternoon, and then I'd turn and see the sea, cold and English and glittery, and at those moments I would remember Valentina and the smell of her night cream and the taste of her lipstick and all I would long for was to be back in the rue Rembrandt.

Hugh thanked me for my letter. He said he was glad I'd found the bouquinistes and bought
Le Grand Meaulnes
. Then he said:
The book has been criticised, of course, for its melodramatic and sentimental flavour, but I have always found it rather moving. I expect you know that Fournier was ‘missing presumed killed' in the First World War in 1914 in the Eparges region. I believe, if he had lived, he would have written other marvellous novels, but that they would all have had his beloved childhood and adolescence at the heart of them
.

One of the things I hated about my father was that, because he was a schoolteacher, he always gave you information about the world long before you asked for it. He introduced most of this information with phrases like ‘I expect you know' or ‘I'm sure I needn't remind you', to stop you feeling inadequate or too empty of knowledge, but to him historical facts were like breath; if you didn't keep getting your supply of them, you'd start to die. Occasionally, I felt grateful he was like this, but mostly it just totally pissed me off and, for reasons I can't explain, his info about Alain-Fournier irritated me so much I had to put his letter away before I reached the end of it.

Valentina sent me to the market after breakfast. I had to buy some fish called
dorades
from the rue Poncelet, and white onions and tomatoes and cheese in muslin and parsley and green olives. At the end, she said: ‘Take Sergei, but don't let him eat sprats out of the gutters.'

It was so hot in the rue Poncelet that after I'd done the shopping I sat down at a café table and ordered a
panaché
, which was a kind of shandy and had become my favourite drink. The tables of the café I chose had been put right in the middle of the market and all the traffic of the market – fat women with baskets that looked like beach bags, kids in pushchairs, wandering musicians, dogs and cats and pigeons – had to squeeze round them.

The café tables were really heavy, like they'd been bolted to the pavement. They reminded me of ships' furniture and so I thought, that's it, the café's a ship and the market is the sea, teeming all round it, carrying in flotsam and birds and the passengers of old ocean liners. And I liked sitting in the ship and drinking the
panaché
and watching it.

I asked for some water for Sergei, who kept trying to snaffle food up from the road – exactly what Valentina had forbidden him to do. When it comes to food, dogs just aren't obedient and that's that. He was even trying to eat the parsley I'd just bought.

The women in that market reminded me of people at a jumble sale. They treated vegetables like they were clothes you had to examine really carefully for stains or holes or the smell of stale deodorant. They sniffed the melons and opened the sheaths of the corn cobs and sorted the beans and rejected almost all the lettuces with a sniff or a snarl. You could tell they were connoisseurs – people with secret knowledge. I imagined that they knew ninety-seven ways of cooking potatoes, that they could take a breathing lobster and turn it into a mousse. Watching them, I couldn't picture myself ever learning to cook. Chess seemed easier. Chess is pure thought, whereas cooking is at the mercy of the natural world. Valentina had told me that mayonnaise could curdle for thirteen different reasons.

My chest ached quite a lot from its encounter in the night with the scaffolding pole. I wanted the
panaché
to take the ache away, but it didn't. I wanted the ache to go because I was plucking up courage to embark on a plan I'd made while I bought the
dorades
and the olives and everything and I thought, if my body hurts, my courage may fail me.

To soothe my mind, I wrote some notes in my Concorde book about the Paris street-cleaning system, which I'd been monitoring since we arrived. I put:
This whole system depends on under-street water points and pieces of fabric laid this way and that at the apex of each street to direct the flow of the water. At first, I didn't understand why so many bits of old carpet had been left lying in the gutters. Now, I see that they are PRIME. Take them away and Paris would become a dirty city, like London
. Then I added:
If you understand what is PRIME, especially when what is prime appears random or accidental, then you are getting somewhere in your understanding of the world. (NB: Last night, a rope was the prime necessity and I didn't see this until it was too late
.)

A gypsy woman came by and tried to persuade everyone at the café to buy some horrible stiff roses wrapped in cellophane, but no one bought one. If the woman with the kitten face had been at the café, I might have got a rose and given it to her out of pity for her and for the flower seller, but she wasn't and I didn't feel pitying that morning, I felt too nervous about my plan. But after a while, when I'd drunk a second
panaché
, I got up and thought, I'm going to do it anyway and I'm going to do it now.

The shop I was heading for was at the top of the rue Poncelet. It sold beauty products like night repair cream and it was the kind of shop I would never normally go into in my life. I'd rehearsed what I was going to say and now all that was left to do was to go into the shop and say it. My heart was beating so hard in my aching chest, I felt as if I'd been in a shipping accident.

I tied Sergei to a litter bin and went in. The shop was ice-cold and it smelled of eucalyptus, as if the air inside it was not only being conditioned but also made ready to cure the colds and sinus blockages of its customers. I breathed it in and the bones in my chest froze with pain.

I was wearing a grey linen sunhat, given to me by my Welsh Grandma Gwyneth, and I could suddenly see, in the mirrored walls of the shop, that with this on and carrying my pannier of parsley and onions I looked really eccentric and poor, like a peasant boy in some old black-and-white movie about Spanish horse thieves. I also looked about ten years old and I swore I'd never wear this hat again as long as I lived.

Two women assistants, dressed in white overalls, with their hair and make-up perfectly arranged, came towards me and asked if they could help me. So now I said the words I'd rehearsed in French. I told them my mother was ill and that she had sent me to the market to do the family shopping. I showed them the pannier and the half-eaten parsley. ‘Voici le shopping,' I said, and they smiled. Then I took a deep breath and told them that my mother had asked me, on my way home, to come into this shop and buy her a lipstick.

They smiled some more. I think they were trying not to laugh. Both of them had pearly teeth, like the residents of Carrara. They took me over to a display counter and began to ask me questions. What
make
of lipstick did my Maman use? Did Maman tell me the
name
of her favourite colour? I could tell they thought I was ten by their use of the word ‘Maman'.

I hadn't realised lipsticks had names. The names they had were wild and I really liked them. I wanted to buy them all:
Danse du Feu, Feux d'Artifice, Mardi Gras, Fiesta, Siesta
. They were arranged in a perfect arc, going from pale pink to dark reddish purple. The scarlets were in the middle and so it was here that I focused my attention. I felt so overexcited and nervous, I could have been an actual horse thief. I was looking for the exact colour of Valentina's mouth. As I found it and took it down, my pannier fell over and all the white onions rolled out on to the lino floor. ‘This one,' I said. Its name was
Cerise
.

That night, after we'd eaten the
dorades
and I'd gone to bed, I was working on the passage in
Le Grand Meaulnes
where Meaulnes sets out alone in the cart, going to meet François's grandparents at Vierzon, and gets lost and the horse gets lame and the night comes down, when I heard Valentina corning up my stairs.

She had her wallflower cream on and she was wearing flowered silk pyjamas and little jewelled slippers. ‘It's hot up here, Lewis,' she said. ‘Perhaps we should move you to another room.' I told her I didn't mind it being hot and that I wanted to stay in the attic.

She sat down on my bed and then leaned over and put a heavy box into my hands. It looked like a jewel box, made of pale wood, with its top inlaid with a darker pattern of squares and diamonds. I thought, God, perhaps she's been buying up Cartier instead of working on her book.

‘Open it, darling,' she said.

It opened easily from a brass hinge. When I raised the lid, I heard a click and a whirr. It was a musical box. I stared down at its braille-like drum and at the steel fingers, like a tooth comb, that lifted as the drum turned and I found this mechanism really satisfying and clever. I remembered that the music box and the pianola worked on the identical principle of the marked drum turned by wheel cogs. Each line of markings is a bar of notes . . .

‘You're not listening to the song, Lewis,' said Valentina.

It was true, I wasn't. I was too preoccupied by the machinery in the box. But now I did. It was a repetitive, sort of sad tune with the tempo of a slow waltz. As it played, Valentina moved her hand in time to the beat, like she was conducting a little orchestra. She smiled all the time. ‘You know this old song?' she asked.

‘No,' I said.

‘Well, I don't know who wrote it, but it's one of the most popular songs in France. Yves Montand used to sing it. So sweetly. We used to play his record of it in the café when I was a child. He sang it less often as he got older, of course, because it's a song about youth and love. It's called
Le Temps des cerises
. You know what that means, darling?'

My heart gave a lurch, as though it had forgotten for a split second that its function was to keep me alive. Underneath my pillow, still wrapped in the shop paper bag, was the lipstick called
Cerise
.

‘Cherry . . .' I whispered.

‘Yes. Good. Cherry what, though?'

I thought for a moment. My heart began to simmer down and behave normally. ‘Cherrytime,' I said.

‘Yes, that's it,' said Valentina. ‘“Cherrytime”. A time which is perfect, you see, full of sunshine and love, and then it's gone.'

I looked up at her. Perhaps my look was a sad one, because she reached out and stroked my face and I stayed very still, not wanting her stroking to stop. After a bit, she said: ‘Anyway, darling, I thought you'd like to keep this box. It can sing you to sleep. I bought it one afternoon at a little shop in the Palais Royal. There are two shops there which I love because I'm such a baby at heart: one sells nothing but toys and the other is the shop where I bought this and all it sells are musical boxes. Imagine trying to make a living out of only that!'

I said I couldn't imagine making a living out of anything, except that there were days when I thought I might be a philosopher – just one or two in a year.

‘Well,' she said, ‘living is hard.'