The Way I Found Her

by Rose Tremain

  ‘Now,’ said Valentina, ‘you see the evening begin to come down.’

  Mum and Valentina kept very still on their bench, watching the sky and the way the colour in the park was beginning to fade away. ‘Look,’ I heard Valentina say, ‘the evening is a bird covering us with its wings.’ Then she laughed and put her arm round Alice’s shoulder, and I remembered this from Brittany, that she was always touching people and holding them to her, as if she wanted to keep everybody safe and near her, within reach all the time.

  I was looking around now, to see if I could spot some chess players, but I couldn’t see any. I decided they had their favourite bit of the park and we didn’t happen to be in it.

  ‘Valentina,’ I said, ‘where are the chess players?’

  ‘Chess players?’ she said. ‘Oh, Lewis darling, it’s almost dusk and anyway I don’t think there are any chess games in this park. You must go to the Luxembourg.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  Then I heard Valentina whisper to Alice: ‘You know, Alice, I forgot about the bloody chess. But I will find him someone to play with.’

  ‘He can find someone himself,’ said Alice. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Then Valentina got up. She was wearing yellow sandals, which matched her cigarettes. ‘OK,’ she announced, ‘now we are going to walk through the park to the Place des Ternes and have supper in a restaurant there. Come on, Lewis. Are you as hungry as an anaconda?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m as hungry as an anaconda, Valentina.’

  Valentina laughed again. That laugh of hers was the kind of laugh you imagine women having long ago, before they realised they were an oppressed category of people.

  She said to Alice: ‘Lewis is a good sport, you know. I hope he’s going to be happy up in that room.’

  When we got to the restaurant, we sat outside at a table on the pavement. I remembered this from Brittany, hundreds of tables on pavements, except that there a cold wind blew off the sea, and here the air was really hot and full of car fumes and light. Opposite the tables on the pavement was a flower seller. He was packing up his stall and I watched him going backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, loading his buckets of flowers, one by one, into a dented old Renault van.

  I think this flower seller put me into a kind of exhausted trance. Him and the neon lights in the Place, blinking on and off, and the sound of Valentina’s voice. I was finding it hard to eat my meal and hard to concentrate on what anyone was saying. I kept wondering how long the unsold flowers would last and whether, in the morning, they’d all be set out again, or if some would be chucked on to the flower seller’s compost heap – if he had a compost heap; if he didn’t live in a maid’s room on a top floor . . .

  ‘So, you see,’ I suddenly heard Valentina say: ‘this is why I have vowed these things.’

  ‘What things, Valentina?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve just been telling you, darling. Never to be poor again. Never to be hungry. Never to live in a cold room smelling of coal.’

  ‘Why would you have to be poor and hungry and live in a cold room smelling of coal?’

  ‘Well, I hope I won’t, Lewis. I hope all that is in the past.’

  I couldn’t remember what Valentina was talking about.

  ‘Are you tired?’ asked Mum.

  I nodded. Valentina reached out and touched my forehead. Then she stroked one of my eyebrows with the back of her index finger. I thought, the eyebrow isn’t a part of me that anybody has ever stroked before. Stroking it must be a special Russian thing. It could have a secret significance that I’m not yet able to understand.

  What Valentina called her ‘job in life’ was writing.

  Mum told me that certain writers make millions of pounds and others don’t make enough to pay their gas bills, but Valentina was in the first category. The books she wrote were called Valentina Gavril’s Medieval Romances, and all round the world people clamoured to buy them. In a survey done in the States, it was revealed that eighty-nine per cent of Valentina’s readers were women, but Valentina said to Alice that she didn’t give a toss who her readers were, they could be orang-utans, turning the pages with their feet. She said that what mattered was that, through her books, she had become rich and so escaped from her old life and had been able to install her mother in a nice apartment near her favourite church.

  I asked what her old life was and Mum told me that the Gavrilovich family was poor and that they owned something called a café, bois et charbon in some dismal little bit of Paris with hardly any trees. Not many café-charbons existed any more. They were places that opened very early in the morning, where you could have breakfast or a drink or buy a sack of coal. I said I didn’t think drinks and sacks of coal went very logically together, but all Mum said was: ‘Ask Valentina to tell you about it.’ And then I realised she’d been trying to tell me about it the evening we went to the Place des Ternes, but I just hadn’t been able to take it in.

  Alice was Valentina’s English translator. Her French was really brilliant and she’d passed a minute bit of this brilliance on to me.

  Translators don’t make millions; they just make enough to buy their clothes from Indian boutiques and give their hair mud baths of henna. The reason we were in Paris was that Valentina’s English publishers were so keen to get their hands on her next Medieval Romance that the translation was being begun even before Valentina had finished writing the book. That’s what she’d meant when she said to me that she needed to have Mum with her in Paris. She was going to give the manuscript to her, chapter by chapter.

  I’d never read any of Valentina’s books. I thought the idea of a Medieval Romance sounded drippy. And Mum told me the novels were ‘all the same’. She said they all had something Valentina called her ‘long-shot opening’. ‘I become a cinematographer, you see,’ she’d told Alice. ‘I start with a wide shot of the beautiful medieval countryside of France, all unspoiled and full of forests. Then, gradually, I go in closer and we see a house or castle, its sleeping roofs, its moats and battlements. And by this time, the reader knows where she is: she is in long-ago time. She can forget the difficult present. She can relax and surrender herself to another world. And then I go in closer still and we see a window; then a face at that window. It is our heroine. We go inside the room and there she is, waiting for life and romance to start, and so last of all we see inside her heart.’

  I listened to all this and didn’t pass any comment. Apparently, Valentina had only one worry – that she would eventually run out of stories. What I was thinking was, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if she did.

  That first night in Paris, in my maid’s room, I couldn’t sleep, even though I was tired, so I went down, about one o’clock, and knocked on the door of Mum’s room. Her light was on and she was reading Valentina’s manuscript.

  ‘Is it good?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s odd,’ she said. ‘It’s different from the others.’

  ‘I thought you said they were all the same?’

  ‘They were. But this one is completely different.’

  Mum’s bedroom in the flat was huge. She looked small in the colossal bed. There were blue curtains at her window that reminded me of the curtains in old-fashioned theatres, with gold tassles hanging off them. The street beyond would be the stage. Mum said: ‘Listen to the air conditioning. It’s like the sound of the sea at home.’

  So then she put away the manuscript and we sat there, thinking about Devon. I was privately thinking about Dad and his tragic hut, but what Mum was thinking about precisely I don’t know.

  Valentina’s dog was a fantastic animal. He was an Irish Setter named Sergei. His coat, in certain lights, was the colour of Mum’s hair.

  After breakfast the next morning, Valentina called me to her and put her arm round my waist. ‘Now, Lewis,’ she said, ‘you are going to get to know Sergei. Sergei, come here. This is Lewis. You must show Lewis what a clever dog you are.’

  We’d never had a dog at home
. The only non-human creature I’d talked to in my childhood had been Elroy. I’d even taken Elroy on walks and showed him the larks’ nests and the standing stones. Now, for the first time, a dog’s lead was put into my hand.

  ‘OK, darling,’ said Valentina, ‘Sergei has to be walked every morning and this will become your job. He will show you Paris. He knows his way right round the city. Not round the banlieue, of course, where we never go, but right round the centre of Paris. And he is an angel. He will find his way home from wherever you are. So off you go, Lewis. Here’s the lead. Take some money.’

  Sergei’s lead was a string coiled inside a kind of hand-shaped box. Valentina had said: ‘With this, you can let Sergei walk a long way ahead of you and then rein him in again, like a kite.’ As soon as Sergei and I got down to the street, Sergei turned left towards the park. He extended his lead so far so quickly that he was at the park gates before I’d even got into my stride. I tried to rein him in, as instructed by Valentina, but Sergei was a strong dog and he didn’t want to be reined in. He wanted to arrive at the park and sniff the juniper bushes and piss against the marble statues.

  I made a mental note about the inaccuracy of Valentina’s kite analogy. It seemed to me that she didn’t know what flying a kite was really like and that it was probable she’d passed her whole life without ever flying one. I thought, perhaps, when she was a little girl in Russia, a kite was too expensive a thing for her family to buy? The most difficult thing of all with a kite is getting it to go up. Whereas the difficult thing with Sergei was getting him to come back to me. And only on certain kite-flying days, when the lift factor is very strong, is the task of winding in the kite remotely hard.

  Sergei tugged me round the park. My arm began to ache. My arms were still the puniest bits of me. I could only rest when Sergei found some smell on the dusty paths delicious enough to make him pause. He saw some pigeons and began chasing them. His long lead went whirring out like a fishing line with a shark on the end of it. Then I heard an unexpected noise. It was a long blast on a whistle, like the PE instructor at school ending a game of football. And a man in a uniform came striding over to me, shouting and wagging his finger. The pigeons flew away and Sergei sat down and looked at the man accusingly, so I just stood and waited.

  The man was really angry. Under his summer tan, his face was quite red. I hoped he wasn’t carrying a gun. All along the path, old people sitting on the benches began to stare at me. A jogger passed, wearing a luminous bandana, and gave me a glare. And then I understood: dogs weren’t allowed in the park. The uniformed man pointed at Sergei and made an X-shape with his arms. ‘Défendu,’ he kept saying. ‘Défendu, défendu!’

  I shrugged. It was meant to be the gesture of an innocent, of the person who’s landed from outer space, knowing nothing. If Valentina hadn’t told me about the blow-dried grass, I might have trespassed on that too. How was I supposed to know the etiquette of the park without her help?

  ‘Sortez, s’il vous plaît,’ said the man. I could tell he thought I was an idiot. It hadn’t occurred to him that I was a schoolboy from Devon. ‘OK, d’accord,’ I said. And I tugged at the lead until Sergei came grudgingly towards me and there we were back in the rue Rembrandt. I noticed then that on the green park gates was a little picture of a dog with a line through it, but in a strange place your eyes can skim right past important things.

  I stood in the street. ‘Now where?’ I asked Sergei. He was shitting in the gutter, between a Renault Clio and a Volvo Estate, and while I waited for him to finish I looked all around me anxiously, hoping he wasn’t breaking some invisible law.

  When I got back, Alice and Valentina hardly noticed me. ‘Later, darling, you will tell us where you’ve been,’ said Valentina.

  They were sitting in Valentina’s study, talking. The subject they were discussing was medieval time. This was one of the things I’d begun to like about Valentina: you never knew what weird subject she was going to start on next.

  Sergei lay down on the parquet in the salon and I got myself an Orangina from Valentina’s fridge (she remembered I used to drink Orangina on that holiday in Brittany) and sat down by him, listening to this peculiar conversation coming through the open study door.

  Valentina said: ‘You know how they measured time in the Middle Ages, Alice? In hours of differing length. Because they counted twelve hours from sunrise to sunset and twelve hours from sunset to sunrise, no matter what season they were in. And so you see what happens? The hours of the night in summer become thirty-minute hours and the hours of the night in midwinter ninety-minute hours! But you can imagine that people might forget what kind of hour they were in, can’t you? In the darkness, especially, they could measure the hour wrongly. And this is what happens to Barthélémy.’

  ‘I see,’ said Alice. I wanted her to ask who Barthélémy was, but she didn’t, because she already knew.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘when he’s doing his experiments at night, he forgets that the hours are getting shorter as the spring comes?’

  ‘Yes. He is calculating in ninety-minute hours, when really an hour at that time of the year lasts only eighty-five minutes and then eighty-four and then eighty and then seventy. And this forgetting is fatal. You see?’

  There was a silence at that moment. It seemed to be Mum’s turn to speak, but she didn’t say anything. Then Valentina went on: ‘I have no difficulty in understanding the concept of the ninety-minute hour. In my other life, I lived ninety-minute hours. Even in summer, I don’t think the hours were any shorter than seventy or eighty minutes.’

  Alice said: ‘Time alters as we get older.’

  ‘No,’ said Valentina, ‘it’s not to do with age. It’s to do with movement. When I worked for my parents in the café-charbon, the places I moved between were the wine cellar and the café. Down, up. Cellar, café. Café, cellar. Up, down. That was all. To a prisoner, time is different.’

  ‘Is that how you think of your old life – as being in prison?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Valentina. ‘Worse for my father. The places he went between were the coal bunker and the yard. All day. Coal bunker, yard. Yard, coal bunker. Fill up a sack, take it up to the yard. You know how much a sack of coal weighs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘As much as a child of seven. All day, my father puts this child on his back and carries it to the yard. Perhaps one day I will write something about that. But no one will publish it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because from me, from Valentina Gavril, the readers want Medieval Romances. That’s all they want, Alice. A little terror, a little chivalry, a lot of fucking, a happy ending. Why not? A book can shorten an hour. But you know my last translator used to change things around. She was an American feminist and so she tried secretly to change the women in my books and make them more like feminists. She forgot my English was almost as good as hers. I had to kill her in the end.’

  ‘What?’ said Alice.

  I put down my Orangina and leant nearer the study door. I heard Valentina laugh. ‘Yes, I killed her,’ she said.

  There was a pause here. Being a Scot, Mum isn’t afraid to dismiss totally bluntly everything that strikes her as untrue. She has this haughty, withering look she can give you, worse than any look the teachers give you at school.

  ‘I kill my characters all the time,’ Valentina went on. ‘I decapitate them, disembowel them, poison them, burn them. I know so many methods. And I killed that translator.’

  The trouble about eavesdropping is you’re just left alone with the things you’ve heard. You’re marooned with them, like on a really uncomfortable rock, and all around you is a silent sea. I was trying to imagine Valentina taking off her jewellery and her expensive shoes and tiptoeing along the corridor with a carving knife, when she and Alice came out of the study and sat down with me and asked me to tell them about my morning.

  We’d walked such a long way that Sergei was exhausted and he went to sleep with his head on Valenti
na’s foot. She wasn’t wearing yellow sandals today, but white ones. The colour of her toenails was dark shining red, like wine, or like blood.

  I told her and Alice that I’d seen the river and the Eiffel Tower. I said the hugeness of the Tower had made me feel strange. What I meant by strange was ‘happy’. The thing I used to envy in my games with Elroy were how large the world must have seemed to him.

  I told them I liked it when things were vast and made of iron. And I described a courtyard I went into where there was an iron girder strung between two houses. It seemed to be holding the two buildings apart, as if one was the Capulet house and the other was the house of the Montagues. I’d had Romeo and Juliet on my mind lately, because we’d been studying it at school and I really liked the absolute total sadness of it, I don’t know why.

  I said I realised after a moment that the girder wasn’t really holding the two houses apart, but making a bridge between them. Creeper had climbed up the wall of the Montague house and along the girder and hung down in tentacles, and so Romeo could have climbed out of his window and inched his way along the girder, holding on to the creeper, until he reached Juliet’s bedroom.

  Valentina laughed when I said all this. Mum and Dad hardly ever laughed at the things I said, but I seemed to amuse Valentina, or else she was a woman who, now that she didn’t have to work in a coal yard, was easily entertained.

  She asked me what else I’d done. I said Sergei had tugged me across one of the bridges over the river and that I was so thirsty by that time that I’d sat down in a café and ordered a Coke for me and a bowl of water for Sergei. Near his bowl Sergei had found a perfectly formed strawberry tart in the gutter.

  Then I told them about the woman I’d seen in the café while I was drinking the Coke and Sergei was snaffling up the tart. She was old, but she had this little face like a kitten. She kept dabbing her nose with powder. It was hot in the café, so she dabbed loads and loads of times. I said: ‘I felt really sorry for her.’