by Rose Tremain
He’d chosen a really bum place. We were right in front of the Hôtel George V, almost on its doormat, and when the hotel doorman saw what had happened he started to shriek at me. People arriving in Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs had to step round Sergei and his vomit and I could perfectly well understand that this didn’t give them a good first impression of the hotel.
I told the doorman that I was very sorry and I tugged Sergei to a plane tree, where he looked up at me piteously. I stroked his head, like Mum used to stroke mine when I was made of Play Doh and puked in the night.
I’d tried to make Sergei walk towards home, but he refused; he just kept lying down on the pavement. So I had to stagger along with him in my arms. I kept remembering what Valentina had said about Mr Gavrilovich heaving sacks of coal that weighed as much as a child of seven. Sergei must have weighed as much as a child of nine.
Everyone stared at me, a thin boy carrying a gigantic dog, but no one offered to help me and the rue Rembrandt was a long way. I had to keep stopping to rest and I could have done with a raspberry Yop to give me strength.
I was wrecked by the time I got back to the flat. Valentina was on her own in the salon, watering her flower arrangements. When I put Sergei down, he went straight to her and lay down with his head on her feet. She looked at me accusingly and laid aside her little brass watering can. ‘What’s happened?’ she said. ‘What have you done to Sergei?’
‘I haven’t done anything to him,’ I said. ‘He threw up in front of the Hôtel George V. Practically on the George V’s carpet.’
‘Oh God!’ said Valentina, ‘and I lunch there!’
She bent down and lifted up Sergei’s head, stroking it, examining the eyes and mouth. ‘I’d better get Maurice,’ she said, ‘if I can get him on a Sunday. Nobody wants to do anything on a Sunday in Paris. And you know I was so upset by what you and Alice did this afternoon. I think at least, when you go out, you might have the courtesy to tell me.’
She seemed very unhappy. I wondered if Mum had told her we were leaving. I wondered how many nights I had left in my room with Le Grand Meaulnes.
‘I’m sorry, Valentina,’ I said.
‘You see, aside from anything else, we have so much work to get through, and of course when something worries me like that, I can’t work at all . . . and now Sergei is ill . . .’
‘I’m really sorry,’ was all I could find to say. I stood there uselessly dripping sweat on to the parquet. And I think I must have looked so abject that the sight of me somehow melted away Valentina’s anger, because she suddenly came over to me and put both her arms round me and pressed my face into her yellow silk blouse and kissed the top of my head. ‘It’s not your fault, darling,’ she said. She held me like that for a long time, till I almost suffocated in her perfume and my face made a wet patch on her blouse, and I thought, nobody I’ve ever known is like Valentina; she’s come out of a different kind of earth.
Eventually she let me go and went off to telephone Maurice, the vet. He wasn’t in and I heard her leave an angry message on his answering machine. I wondered where a posh Parisian vet might go on Sunday evening and I decided he would go some place where animals were hardly ever seen, like the Hôtel George V.
When I got up to my room, I took off my shirt and poured water all over myself and then won the chess game against the computer in 1.7 minutes. I knew Alice was working downstairs and I wanted to go and ask her whether we were leaving or not, but then I thought it was better not to disturb her.
I began a letter to Hugh. I described my room to him and told him that I’d moved my bed right under the round window, so that I could lie in it and look up at the Paris sky. I put: If a window is round, you expect to see more interesting things out of it than out of a normal window. The things I can see from my bed are: the sky, which is a kind of orange colour at night, a pole of scaffolding, birds, aeroplanes, stars (sometimes), the moon (sometimes), Didier’s legs when he’s working on my bit of the roof. If the window had been square, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to move my bed underneath it.
I told him about the Jardin des Plantes and sitting in China and about the bison and the cocktail trolley. I added: The first thing you see when you come into the Jardin des Plantes from the rue Cuvier is a statue of a lion eating a human foot. The foot isn’t attached to anyone. The person to whom the foot was once attached could now be inside the lion.
I stopped here. Writing to Hugh made me remember the hut. I sat there wishing that Hugh were trying to install a solar heating system or build a motorbike from old spare parts – something that would add to somebody’s happiness. Because I knew exactly what was going to happen to the hut: it would remain empty for ever. A desk would be put in it for Alice and a gas heater, even. But Alice would never spend any time there, not even in summer, and so it would be me who would have to pretend to use it, just to make Dad feel better about building it. I’d have to take homework out there on cold spring afternoons and say I liked the peace and quiet of it and the way, when the wind was in the west, it creaked and moved.
My mind started to wander, because thinking about the stupid hut oppressed me. I wondered what we’d have for dinner and whether this would be our last meal. I wondered when Maurice the vet would come. I wondered whether Valentina would ever take me inside the Hôtel George V and what she would wear if she did . . .
I carried on with the letter, but added nothing about the hut. I just put: I hope you’re not lonely, Dad. Please give my love to Grandma Gwyneth and Grandad Bertie when you see them and tell them I really am trying with my French. This guy Didier on the roof is a lonely kind of person. I think he’s an only child, like me and like you. He probably lives alone in a room somewhere.
Must go now. Valentina’s called me down for supper.
With love from Lewis xx
Nothing was said at supper about our leaving. We ate salmon with a peculiar sauce that tasted like liquorice and reminded me of being a child. Valentina had put a lot of blue eyeshadow all round her eyes. She and Mum were polite to each other – almost nice, but not quite. Sergei lay under the table, snoring. We didn’t talk much and while we ate I could hear the residents of the rue Rembrandt arriving back from their country weekends in their Volvos and Mercedes.
As we were finishing supper, the bell rang and it was Maurice the vet. He was a man with soft, crinkly white hair, and a tanned face, very smartly dressed in a pale suit. We cleared away the supper things and Maurice spread a rug over the dining table and put Sergei on it.
Maurice had long thin fingers, like artists and pianists are supposed to have. With these, he stuck a thermometer into Sergei’s bum and I could tell Sergei didn’t like this; he kept turning round to try to see what was happening to him. Maurice then started examining Sergei’s tummy. I had to help him hold Sergei down on the table, while Valentina watched anxiously, stroking one of Sergei’s ears and asking Maurice questions all the time. Maurice talked the fastest French I’d ever heard. It just floated out of his throat like air waves.
I could tell Valentina liked Maurice and I knew it was for him that she’d put on the blue eyeshadow.
When he was leaving, Valentina followed him to the door, and he bent his face down towards her and she kissed him, not quite on his mouth, but just slightly to one side of it, and then again on the other side. She didn’t see me watching this kiss, but I was.
When she came back from kissing Maurice, she was blushing and smiling. ‘Maurice is so good,’ she said. ‘He has such a good heart, he even reads my books!’ While she said this, she patted her hair and kept on smiling and I thought how amazingly beautiful she looked with her face all pink like it was, as if she’d been out in the snow.
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.