by Rose Tremain
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.’
I was enjoying this conversation. I wanted it to go on all night. But then there was my page of Meaulnes to read, and when we’d done this Valentina said she was tired. She put a little kiss on my head, like the ones Alice gave me when she said good night, and she went away down the stairs. I watched her blonde head getting lower and lower until it disappeared.
When she’d gone, I examined the musical box. I sniffed it like the women in the market sniffed the melons, and ran my hands over its surface and polished it a bit with the sheet. Then I put it near the round window and played it over and over and thought about the maids opposite, turning in their beds and hearing it and saying, ‘Oh yes, that’s “Cherrytime”.’
Day after day, it was hot. No rain fell on the combed grass of the Parc Monceau, so the sprinklers kept turning and turning there.
When I eventually read the last bit of Hugh’s letter, it told me that it had been boiling in Devon too and that Dad had gone for a lone midnight bathe and stood on the beach in the dark and suddenly missed Alice and me. I sent him a card of the Eiffel Tower, setting out what I’d eaten for lunch at Les Rosiers and explaining about Michelangelo’s teeth. I didn’t like him missing us. I suggested he invite Grandma Gwyneth and Grandad Bertie to stay. At the end, I put: PS: I have made a new friend, whose name is Babba.
Babba came from Benin, in Africa. This was a country I’d never heard of until this moment. Babba’s skin was so black and smooth, it was like she was made of velvet. She was Valentina’s maid. Babba wasn’t her real African name, but that’s what we called her.
I got to know her by following her around. Sometimes I helped her change the bolster covers. I liked the sight of her velvet arms plumping up cushions and dusting mirrors. She had a slow, sad walk and she spoke French in a sad, slow way.
One day she showed me a photograph of an old woman sitting in the back of a truck. ‘My mother,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately, the truck was stolen.’
‘With your mother in it?’
Babba laughed. Her laugh was big and silent, like a yawn. ‘No, no, Louis. No, no . . .’
We were in the kitchen and I was helping Babba put clean crockery into the cupboards. The apartment was very quiet, with Valentina and Alice working away in their separate rooms. We put the photograph of Babba’s mother and the stolen truck on the kitchen table and looked at it. Babba said sadly: ‘Four years.’
‘Since you saw your mother?’
‘Yes. Since I left my village in Benin.’
So then we stood there, thinking about Babba’s village, or, rather, she was thinking about it and I was trying to imagine it. I put a new Renault truck into it and loads of animals – goats and wandering chickens and others. The imaginary houses were small and round and the new truck was blue, like the one in the picture. ‘Do you miss it?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Babba. ‘But now I have Pozzi.’ She got out another photo. It was of a kid, aged about two, not as black as Babba, more lightish brown, wearing a little bobble hat and standing in the snow. He was grinning and by him on the snowy ground was one of his gloves that had fallen off. ‘Pozzi,’ she said.
It was probably because I told her I thought Pozzi looked great that she began to talk to me about her life – the one she had now in Paris. We both sat down at the kitchen table and I got us some Orangina from the gigantic fridge and Babba described her apartment to me. She said it was out at Nanterre. I knew where this was, beyond the cemetery where Didier’s father was buried. There were high-rise buildings there, coloured blue and purple, and that’s where Babba and Pozzi lived, in one of those blocks. She said that when you got close to them you could see that the blue and purple was made up of millions of mosaic pieces, but now, bit by bit, the mosaics were falling off.
What Babba had was one room and a kitchen. There were shared bathrooms along the corridors. She said this mournfully and I realised then that in Babba’s imaginary village in Benin I’d put no bathrooms at all and I felt really guilty about this, really white and spoilt an
d guilty.
The main problem with Babba’s apartment, she said, was the motorbike. It was a ten-year-old 1000cc Harley Davidson and it had belonged to the previous tenant, and when he vacated the apartment he just left it standing there in the one room where Babba and Pozzi had to live and sleep.
I said: ‘Can’t you get the council to come and take it away, Babba?’
She shrugged her big shoulders. ‘Pozzi,’ she said, ‘he loves that thing. I have to keep it shiny for him. I say, “Where are you going, Pozzi?” I say, “Where’s Pozzi going?” and he says, “Africa. Pozzi’s going to Africa!” So that’s it, Louis. We got that bike for ever now.’
It may have been because of the bike that Babba liked polishing things. Keeping the chrome good might have given her the habit of making surfaces shine. I liked watching her work on Valentina’s parquet floors. She and the electric polisher would go round and round in a series of slow arcs, with Babba swaying as she moved and sometimes singing, with her head bent low, like she was singing to the floor:
Moi, je t’offrirai des perles de pluie,
Venues des pays où il ne pleut pas,
Ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas . . .
Then, she’d go down on her velvety hands and knees and rub the parquet with a thick, soft cloth. While she rubbed, she would gaze so intently at the shiny wood, it seemed to me she thought it was a magic pool from which might rise, at any time, a message of hope. I imagined she was asking the floor to bring back the stolen truck to her village in Benin.
Valentina didn’t pay Babba that much. She said she knew that Babba didn’t have a work permit in France, so she was doing her a favour just by employing her. But she let Babba take stuff from the fridge for her lunch – bits of cold salmon and potato salad and drinks of Orangina. She said to me: ‘Don’t worry about Babba, Lewis. Women like Babba, they come and they go. One day, she will just leave without telling me.’