by Rose Tremain
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.
I looked over to her. She was lying with her eyes shut, while all the freckles in the air came clustering towards her and began to fall in silence on her face and arms.
I imagined the Gardenia Men waiting for the moment when they’d inform her what a marvellous company they worked for. They might even go on to refer to their marvellous salaries. In their desperation to get her approval, they would stumble over words, or drop them or spit them out by mistake. As if words were peanuts.
I got up and went to the side of the pool and sat with my legs in the water. The Gardenia Men stared at how white I was and how thin my arms were. It was like those two men had put themselves there to remind me that even if I felt grown-up, I wasn’t.
I sat there considering trying to execute a flawless swallow dive, causing the merest ripple, to impress Valentina, but I wasn’t that brilliant a diver. I knew my dive would cause gallons of water to bucket out and drench the stones.
I looked up at Valentina and she was watching me. She was smoking one of her yellow Russian cigarettes and talking softly to Alice, whose eyes were still closed. I wanted Valentina to be talking about me.
Then I looked at the others. Mrs Gavrilovich had put on her black straw hat and was eating the fruit out of her drink. I wondered whether fruit was good for an ulcer or not. Sergei lay in the shade of some sculpted hedge and slept. He looked rather elegant stretched out on the grass and I suddenly thought, I expect this is the kind of moment that painters love, when everything is sleepy and still and the people in the picture are dreaming about lunch.
I lowered myself into the pool and swam a few lengths, trying not to splash too much. When I came back to the shallow end the fourth time, I saw Valentina’s legs dipping into the water. She’d taken off her cotton robe and was wearing a white-and-gold swimsuit. Now she had only this on, I could see the shape of her whole body and what I thought was that the most beautiful thing in the world would be to be born out of Valentina’s vagina and be lifted up on to her stomach and given one of her huge breasts to suck and kept there on her breast with my lips round her milky nipple, sucking and sucking until I passed into oblivion.
I swam up to Valentina’s legs and took hold of one of her feet. Her toenails were more convex than mine and painted scarlet. I asked her to come swimming with me.
She said she couldn’t swim. I said I didn’t believe a person of forty-one had never learned to swim and she said: ‘Well, there you are, darling. You see, you’re learning surprising things all the time.’
I said I’d teach her how to swim and I thought, now this is going to be fantastic, because she’s going to have to lie down on the water and I’m going to have to hold her up with my arms. She called out: ‘Alice! Lewis says he’s going to teach me to swim!’ But Mum wasn’t really paying us any attention. She was admiring the embroidery Mrs Gavrilovich had got out and all she did was smile and nod. The Gardenia Men looked from us to her. One of them lit a cigarette.
We began the swimming lesson then and there. Valentina held on to one of my hands and I put my other arm under her stomach and she tried to kick her legs. The weight of her on my puny arm was greater than I’d expected, but it was a beautiful weight, like someone fallen from Michelangelo’s famous ceiling.
Valentina wasn’t a bit nervous; almost straight away she just started giggling and then I began to giggle and soon we were laughing so much that Valentina began to swallow water and start coughing and so I had to set her down.
‘You see, darling?’ she said. ‘I’m completely hopeless!’
‘No, you’re not,’ I said. ‘You just have to trust me more and not hold yourself so rigid. I won’t let you go.’
‘I’m no good, Lewis,’ she said; ‘I will never learn.’
‘Yes, you will,’ I said. ‘You can’t live and die and not learn to swim.’
‘Why not?’
I couldn’t think of a reason, really. It wasn’t as if she lived in Devon or in a shack by the River Volga. So I said: ‘Because swimming is a defiance of gravity. Don’t you want to defy gravity, Valentina?’
‘Defy gravity?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Do I want to?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘definitely.’
‘All right, darling. If you say so. Here we go, then. We’ll try again.’
She concentrated harder then. I could tell she was really trying. She’d tied her blonde hair up into a scrunch on her head, but little wisps of it came loose and trailed in the water. I began to steer her around and around in a circle. I told her she was doing great.
‘You know my bum’s out of the water, darling,’ she said after a circuit or two. ‘You don’t see the bums of swimmers sticking up out of the water in the Olympics.’
We began giggling again then. Valentina’s beautiful laugh echoed all roun
d the pool and through my heart. I made her go on trying to swim because I didn’t want to let her go, and then when we stopped laughing I said to her: ‘You haven’t forgotten about Le Grand Meaulnes, have you, Valentina?’
Lunch was served to us on a terrace overlooking a rose garden. Lawn sprinklers fanned water on to the roses all the time. Two tables away sat the Gardenia Men. A yellow umbrella cast its shade over their polished heads.
I made mental notes about everything I ate to put down in my Concorde notebook or to write in a letter to Dad: First course: 6 prawns arranged around a still-life of titchy vegetables. Yellow-coloured sauce. V says the yellow is saffron, which is made from crocus stamens! Q: Who was the first person on earth to realise you could eat crocus stamens?
I was really hungry after the swimming. I could have eaten sixteen prawns. Or twenty-six.
The waiters served us some white wine with lunch. A fat white napkin was held round the neck of the bottle to prevent a single drop of wine being spilled on our tablecloth. Mrs Gavrilovich loved this wine; she drank it down as if she had a raging thirst inside her that only it could cure. Her face got red and her big eyes got bright and her conversation drifted into Russian. She seemed to forget that Alice and I couldn’t understand a single word. All I could pick up was the name of a person called Grigory. And I could tell, also, that Valentina didn’t want to discuss Grigory, whoever he was. She put out a hand and stroked Mrs Gavrilovich’s arm and the stroking was telling her gently to shut up.
After lunch, we went back to the pool, which now had three little thin leaves floating on the water, spoiling its complete perfection. The Gardenia Men watched us go and nodded to Alice as she went by, but she ignored them completely. I could have told them that businessmen like them weren’t her type.
Mrs Gavrilovich settled herself on a lounger in the shade and put her hat over her face and went to sleep. I stayed in the pool and swam, hoping Valentina would put on her white-and-gold swimsuit, which was drying on the stones, and come and have another swimming lesson, but she didn’t.
After a little rest on their loungers, she and Alice took Sergei and went off for a walk. There was this wood not far away which belonged to Les Rosiers and Valentina said that in spring this wood was full of bluebells, which were her favourite flower.
I wasn’t invited on the walk. I could tell it was a kind of business walk. So I swam up and down, up and down, feeling a bit pointless because nobody was watching me. I took out the three leaves and arranged them into a triangle on the pool edge. Then I lay on my lounger and started counting sounds again, but there were hardly any; just the pool water sloshing through the filters and its little fountain splattering. The sounds I wanted to hear were Valentina’s voice, whispering secret words into my ear, and her laughter, brimming out into the air.
That night, I waited for Valentina, but she didn’t come up to my attic. I wanted to go down to her bedroom and fetch her, but I didn’t dare.
I translated a page of Meaulnes, Chapitre VIII, L’Aventure. It was becoming more and more clear to me that François’s life was going to turn out to have been ruined by the things that happened to him when he was fifteen, because I came across a reference to ‘days of sorrow’ and then a horrible mention of nothing being left but dust. This made me feel so anxious, I almost felt like giving up the book, but I also realised that I wanted to know what happened, even if it was going to be bad. I was starting to identify with François. His father was a schoolteacher who was stingy about heating. I liked the way he called his mother Millie instead of Maman and I decided that from now on I was going to call my mother Alice – not Mum any more, which sounded childish.
Translating usually exhausted me, but on this night I didn’t feel tired at all, so I decided now was the moment to get out on to the roof and explore it. I wanted to find out what or who was in that maid’s room next to my bathroom. I thought I’d also try to case the whole roof and make a kind of map of it. I knew there might be skylights in it, above rooms I didn’t know about, in Valentina’s apartment and in the apartment next door, which belonged to a very thin gay man who often dressed in white and whose name was Moinel. Valentina told me there was someone called Tante Moinel in Le Grand Meaulnes and she was the one who helped unravel the mystery.
I knew that getting safely on to the roof wasn’t going to be easy, because outside the bathroom window it sloped down almost vertically. Getting on to the bathroom windowsill was simple and I crouched there like a bird, with my feet on the edge of it, smelling the warm night air. About four feet away from me was the first pole of Didier’s scaffolding cage. All I had to do was to cross this tiny distance and then I would be safe and could work my way right round the roof, holding on to the cage.
The trouble with this kind of gap is that the psychological distance to be crossed is greater than the actual distance and it’s the psychological distance that makes you afraid. I stayed in my bird position and tried to apply mathematics to this, viz: Actual distance is about four feet. Psychological distance is more like, say, two times my capacity to cross it. Thus (a d = 4) and (psy d = 2 x c). Ergo, I must discover the value of c and multiply it by a factor of n to bring it into equality with (a d = 4). Q: What is the value of c? Principal Q: What is the n factor?
Working this out took me ages. It was a thing I quite often did – convert interior anxiety to maths, because almost invariably the maths looked clever and then your anxiety looked stupid in comparison and so the maths became like an armour you could put on.
It was my bird stance that eventually gave me the answer. I decided that n = flight or swoop. I would have to let my weight fall or ‘fly’ towards the horizontal pole. The swoop factor would be less if I could set my feet down on the roof itself outside the window, so this would be the first thing to do, climb out and stand with my back to the bathroom dormer.
I went back into my room and put on my trainers. I quite liked the idea of creeping around barefoot on the roof, like a cat burglar, but I could also see that grip was a secondary factor in n. As I tied my laces in a double bow, I thought, François would have been afraid of this, like me, but Meaulnes would have climbed out straight away without hesitating for a single second.
Then I was back on the ledge. Across the rue Rembrandt, all the attic windows were dark, but I noticed that some of them were open and I imagined that quite a few maids were sleeping there, behind little curtains made of lace. I wondered if they could have seen me masturbating, if they happened to be awake after their long days of ironing and polishing, and whether now they might be watching me fly or fall and then they’d say to each other, ‘That English boy, you never know what terrible thing he’s going to do next!’
I climbed out and got a footing on the lead outside the window. The slope under my feet was extreme and I remembered now what Didier had said about the slates being old and loose. I stood there, wishing I were taller. Then the cage wouldn’t seem so far away. Meaulnes was tall, but François was small and neat, like Millie.
I felt time passing. Time is structured differently for cowards, as if it had ninety-minute hours. I remembered being stuck on the high diving board at a pool in Plymouth when I was ten, with Alice and Hugh staring up at me, waiting for me to dive. Everything felt altered up there, especially time. And the fall had been terrifying. It had been so completely terrifying that I’d never, ever, tried it again.
I let go of the sill behind me. I heard a dog barking. I was breathing so hard I was almost snorting and I thought, what a hopeless noisy burglar I’d make! If you’re a villain, you have to breathe quietly. I thought I could tell this to Valentina and she could use it for Barthélémy.
Then I swooped. In mid-swoop, I thought, it isn’t maths I need, it’s a rope.
My hands reached the pole and held it, but my body was moving so fast, my feet were swept out in front of me and my chest rammed against the pole. I felt a pain come there and I swore loudly, like Mr Gavrilovich swore when he felt himself dying in the coa
l yard. Partly, I swore at my own stupidity vis-à-vis the fucking rope.
But I was all right. And now, moving along the edge of the roof with the scaffolding to hold on to was easy. I began to feel the thrill of where I was and what I was doing and the pain in my chest lessened. I imagined Valentina down there underneath me. I was pretty sure she’d never been up here. Hardly anybody knows what the world looks like from their own rooftop. But I would map the roof and then I would show her around. I’d say, ‘Here we are now above the skylight to Moinel’s attic and you will notice how Moinel’s maid sleeps with her hands in the prayer position, like a stone person on a tomb.’
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.