by Rose Tremain
Then something happened which I knew might turn out badly for Babba: Valentina slipped on the polished parquet and fell over. It was a Saturday morning and she was wearing silver sandals. I was the one who found her lying on the floor, swearing in several languages, like Mr Gavrilovich in the coal yard.
I ran over to her and knelt down beside her. Sergei was standing there, whining. She looked really white and even her red lips had gone pale. ‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Merde! Porca miseria! Scheisse! Fuck! Help me up, Lewis.’
I tried to help her. I put my arm under hers and round her back and attempted to lever her up, but she couldn’t seem to push the top half of her body off the floor. When I tried to move her, she began screaming with pain. I could smell her perfume and her sweat, and then she started talking to me in Russian, as if she were giving me instructions about what to do, but I knew she didn’t really realise what she was saying. I wished I could remember a few tips from our First Aid lesson at school, but all I could think about was what you did to a person, mouth to mouth, if they’d stopped breathing, and this wasn’t the appropriate moment for that.
Sergei started licking Valentina’s feet in their silver shoes, which didn’t help. Dogs never know what to do in a crisis. I had to push him away and tell him to fuck off and then I decided that I needed help and so I laid Valentina down as gently as I could and went running to Alice’s room.
But Alice wasn’t in her room. Her desk was all tidy, with her books and papers in orderly piles, so I knew she’d gone out without telling anyone, which was what she was doing more and more, despite the fuss Valentina had made about this the first time. I had no idea where she went and I’d never asked.
I knew I had to get someone and so I charged up my stairs and opened the bathroom window and began calling to Didier. The job on the roof was so enormous that Didier often worked some part of Saturdays and when I shouted out, ‘Didier, aidezmoi!’ I prayed he’d still be there. He was there. He came climbing round to me straight away and swung himself in through the window. Didier’s body was powdered with slate dust. The bird on his neck looked as though it had gone flying into a grey mist. I hoped all this dust wouldn’t stain Valentina’s silk dress or fall on to the furniture.
When we got back to the salon, Valentina was crying. Blue eyeshadow was running down her face. I think she thought I’d abandoned her and that she’d just lie there on the floor till nightfall.
I knelt by her again. ‘Don’t cry, Valentina,’ I said. ‘Didier’s here.’ And she gazed up at me with her huge blue eyes.
Didier knelt down, too. Already, I noticed, there was a bit of slate dust on the parquet. It was probably because of the bad old days with the coal that Valentina liked to have everything so totally clean. But right now, she was in too much pain to be aware that her rescuer was covered with grime. And he was very good with her, staying calm and asking her gently what had happened. When her sobs stopped, she said that she thought her arm was broken.
Didier instructed me to fetch cushions. There was no shortage of these in Valentina’s apartment. There were embroidered cushions and tapestry cushions, cushions made of satin and cushions with tassels dangling from them, like sporrans. I chose a selection and Didier told me to lay them carefully alongside Valentina’s body. He seemed very intent and focused now, like a nurse, and I suddenly thought, I wonder if he once did this before, when his father was hurt?
When we had the cushions all lined up, we slowly, carefully, rolled Valentina on to the cushion bed, so that her weight was off the broken arm. Seeing this, Sergei thought it must be time to go to sleep and so he lay down beside her. Valentina was still trembling with pain and shock and so I fetched a duvet from her room and covered her with this, while Didier went to telephone for an ambulance. I wanted to be the duvet, enfolding her.
She asked me to light her one of her Russian cigarettes. So with one hand I helped her to smoke the cigarette, holding it next to her lips and putting it in and out of her beautiful mouth, and with the other I tried to wipe the watercolour sea from her face with one of the Marks and Spencer’s hankies Bertie had given me for Christmas.
I wanted to go with her in the ambulance. I thought Didier and I were the heroes of the hour and that we had to see our mission through, but in the end neither of us went, because Alice came home and took over. I told Alice I wanted to come, but she ignored me. She thanked Didier for coping with the emergency, but she didn’t thank me.
When the ambulance had driven away with Valentina and Alice inside, Didier and I sat down on the stairs in the hallway. Moinel came in with his shopping and gave us a nervous smile. When Moinel was out of earshot, I said: ‘Did your father fall off a roof, Didier?’
He took off his glasses and polished them on his T-shirt – a thing he often did. Then he said: ‘Have you read Zola’s L’Assommoir? Do you remember how Lantier falls?’
I said I’d never read anything by Zola.
Then Didier went on: ‘Well. Lantier is a roofer. His wife comes by with his children and he’s so glad to see them, he waves at them, without thinking. He lets go his grip . . .’
‘And that’s what happened to your father? He let go?’
‘Louis,’ he said, ‘when you are on a roof, you have to pay attention all the time. Especially on certain difficult jobs – a dome, for instance. No matter how good the scaffolding is, you can’t take your eyes from what you’re doing. And this makes the work very tiring. You know the Salpêtrière Hospital?’
‘No.’
‘You should go there and see. It has one of the most colossal domes in Paris, on the hospital’s Church of Saint Louis – your saint. And it’s made of slate.’
‘Like this roof?’
‘Yes. And everything there is to know about slate, my father knew. It shouldn’t have happened. Never, never. It was me who called out to him, showing him what I’d seen in the sky . . .’
‘You mean you distracted him? What had you seen?’
‘We were putting up the scaffolding. That dome is an octagon. We’d laid scaffolding round seven of the eight sections. It had been raining earlier and my father kept saying, “Be careful, Didier: the slates are still slippery.” And some of them were loose, like they’re loose on this building, just barely held, because the pins were broken or rusty . . . But still, it never should have happened that way . . .’
I could tell it was beginning to hurt Didier to tell me this story. He kept fiddling with his shoes and his voice was getting choked-up and faint, and I thought if he got to the bit where his father fell he might collapse or cry or something and I didn’t want this to happen, because I knew it was going to embarrass me.
Luckily, he stopped before he got to the bad bit. He just stopped talking and his eyes behind his glasses looked dreamy and far away. I knew he was thinking all about it: the thing he’d seen, and the rain on the grey slate, and the grave like a garage on the housing estate of the dead, but he couldn’t go on with the story.
I tried to change the subject by asking him when we were going to start the roller-skating lessons on the esplanade. But he didn’t seem to hear this question. He looked hard at me and said: ‘Do you have a father, Louis?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘His name’s Hugh. He’s a schoolteacher.’
They had to cut Valentina’s silk dress to get her broken arm out of it. Apparently, she said to Alice: ‘If they knew what this dress cost!’ and the doctor and the nurse both laughed, but Alice didn’t. Alice had become very stern with Valentina and that was that.
When they got home, Valentina’s right arm was in a sling, lying comfortably between her breasts and her stomach. She was still wearing the mutilated dress which had come from Yves St Laurent and cost 10,760 FF, but she wasn’t crying about it; she looked cheerful even, because at the hospital they’d given her something to take away the pain. A nurse once told Alice that the drugs that really take away pain are all heroin-based, so Valentina was having a kind of trip.
Valentina went
to bed. Mum helped her get out of the dress and put on a satin nightie. After that she propped her up on millions of pillows and it was only then that I was allowed in to see her. She looked like an empress, lying there on all her pillows and cushions, and when I went into the room she said: ‘Here’s my brave Lewis. Come, darling, and sit by me.’ So I sat on her bed and held her hand. From where I positioned myself, I could see right down the soft valley between her breasts and I had to do some chess moves in my mind to stop myself from laying my head there.
After a while, I started thinking about the way things might change now that Valentina would have to be helped with everything, and when Alice had gone out to the kitchen to get us some supper I said: ‘I’ve got a good idea. I could become your secretary, Valentina. You could dictate stuff to me and I could type it. I’m ace with computers and I’ve got a word-processor programme on mine at home. What have you got – IBM or Apple Mac or what?’
‘Apple, darling. I don’t know if it’s Mac or not.’
‘It’s Mac, if it’s Apple. What software?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know these kind of things, Lewis.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s all more or less the same in a WP programme. I can familiarise myself with it in two minutes. It’s a good idea, isn’t it?’
She smiled at me and said: ‘Maybe it’s better if Alice helps me . . .’
‘But then she won’t be able to get on with her translation, Valentina. That’s stupid. I can’t translate your book, but I could help you with typing.’
‘Not really, darling. It has to be Alice . . .’
I hated her going on about wanting Alice. I wanted her to want me. ‘Let me try,’ I said. ‘Let’s try tomorrow, and if I’m no good you can get someone else.’
‘Perhaps I can still type with just my left hand?’
‘No, you can’t. This system will be much faster, and it’s nearly August. We’ve only got about a month left.’
She sighed at that point. Her sighs were very heavy, like some of the grimy Russian air was still in her lungs. Then she said to me in a whisper: ‘You’ve forgotten one thing, Lewis.’
‘No, I haven’t,’ I said. ‘What have I forgotten?’
‘I’m writing in French.’
It was true. I had forgotten that. Once again, I’d ignored what was prime. An English boy struggling with Le Grand Meaulnes would be a pitiful assistant to a French novelist. I couldn’t believe I’d suggested such an idiotic thing. My love for Valentina was turning me into a moron.
I got up and walked around the room, looking at Valentina’s things – her hairbrushes and her lamps and her photograph frames and her pots of flowers – and noticing that they were all heavy and expensive. I wanted to hurl one of them at the wall.
After a bit, Valentina said: ‘Don’t be upset, Lewis. You can help me in other ways.’
‘I wanted to be your secretary!’ I shouted.
‘Never mind about that,’ said Valentina, trying to soothe me. ‘Now I want to ask you something important. Come here, darling, please.’
I could tell it was going to be something about Alice and it was, so I didn’t move, but just stayed looking at all the perfume bottles on Valentina’s dressing table and at her mirror, which was draped with beads and chiffon scarves.
Valentina wanted to know why Alice was angry with her. I wasn’t interested in this and I didn’t want to talk about it, but eventually, with my back turned, I said: ‘You shouldn’t take any notice of Alice’s moods.’
‘But what have I done to her?’
‘Nothing. She’s always a bit like that, wanting to do things on her own. It’s just her stubborn Scottish character.’
‘But you know I’m very fond of Alice, darling. And if she’s going to be so cross all the time, I’m going to be unhappy.’
‘Don’t be,’ I said impatiently. ‘She’s just like that. There’s no point in being upset.’
‘The thing is . . . I don’t know what I’ve done.’
‘You haven’t done anything. I told you. It’s Alice’s way . . .’
‘But it never was before. And when she goes out alone, like that, where does she go, Lewis?’
‘I don’t know. She maybe goes to a café or to the park, or something. She’s fond of just sitting and thinking, which is why Dad’s building the hut for her.’
‘Building a hut?’
I hadn’t intended to mention this. I suppose I brought it up to distract Valentina from her questions about Alice and return her to some subject that had more to do with me, but as soon as I said it I regretted it.
‘Don’t mention it to Alice,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. It’s meant to be a secret.’
‘What kind of hut?’
I’d picked up a silver clothes brush and now I banged this down very hard on the dressing table and two of the perfume bottles fell over. ‘I shouldn’t have told you!’ I said again. ‘Forget it. Please forget it and don’t ask me about it any more. And don’t ask me about Alice!’
I sneaked a glance at Valentina. She looked shocked. She couldn’t understand why I felt so strongly about all this. She had no way of knowing that what I dreamed about in my attic room was her.
‘Come here, darling,’ she said softly.
I felt so moody. I thought, I expect this is what it’s like to have a lovers’ tiff. I didn’t want to go to her just because she spoke to me sweetly now, so I stood angrily by the dressing table, refusing to move.
‘Lewis,’ she said, ‘come here.’
So I righted the perfume bottles and went and sat by her then, and she put her good arm on my knee and said how sensibly I’d behaved in the emergency and what an excellent idea it had been to fetch Didier.
There was a long silence after that. We just sat there, waiting for something to come into our minds to talk about. I started to feel a bit sleepy because I’d had hardly any food that day and had played chess with my Travel Set all afternoon until Alice and Valentina came home. And because I was awake for so much of each night. What I longed to do now was to lie down on the satiny bed and fall asleep with Valentina’s arm holding me in.
I closed my eyes. As soon as I’d closed them, Valentina began talking again. I drifted away on the sound of her voice, and when I came to I realised she was telling me about her past. I thought, this could be what real lovers actually do – tell each other about their childhoods.
She told me that her parents, Mr and Mrs Gavrilovich, had come to France with a group of Russian farmers in 1957, on an official visit to a French wine co-operative. The co-operative was in the Luberon region. The Gavrilovichs brought little Valentina with them. She was three. She thought they’d suspected (‘or realised in a kind of dream, Lewis’) that when they saw the acres of vines growing in the sunshine on the Luberon hills, they wouldn’t have the stomach to return to Russia.
So they got on a train for Paris. They just left the Russian group and got on a train. They had almost no money and nowhere to stay, but someone had told Mr Gavrilovich he might find work in the old slaughterhouse at La Villette, and so they went there and he was taken on, and for the first week they slept in a barn where straw was kept and washed themselves in the slaughterhouse yard, very early in the morning, before the trucks of animals started arriving.
It took Mr Gavrilovich four years to make enough money to start the café, bois et charbon and only once in his life did he go back to Provence and see the vines on the hills. ‘I would have been about your age when we went,’ said Valentina. ‘We camped in a meadow, in some old tent Papa had stolen or borrowed. It was autumn. I remember cooking mushrooms on a little open fire and I remember the cold dew in the mornings. It hadn’t changed, you know, that beautiful landscape. It had hardly changed at all from when we’d first seen it ten years before. And after this, until he died, Papa kept promising we would go to live there and buy land and a house made of stone and grow vines, but we never did.’
‘Now, you could. If
you wanted to,’ I said sleepily.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘now I could, but it was Papa who wanted that life, not me. You can’t live someone else’s dreams, Lewis. You have to live your own.’
The next day was Sunday and I wasn’t allowed near Valentina’s room. She was feeling sick, after all the heroin they’d given her, and her arm was hurting again and she couldn’t get up.
Mrs Gavrilovich arrived, dressed in black, with a scarf over her bun and smelling of incense. She brought a bunch of white peonies and her embroidery in a bag. I heard her say to Alice: ‘Broken bones are a curse. They make me afraid.’
Alice said it was best for us to go out, to let Mrs Gavrilovich take charge of everything. I thought it was odd that at forty-one a person could still need her mother, and I somehow predicted that when I was forty-one, if I ever got that far, all I would need of Alice and Hugh was just to know that they were alive.
The bedroom door closed on Valentina and Mrs Gavrilovich and I could hear them talking softly in Russian. I said to Alice, ‘I expect they could be talking about Provence and the house they never bought, don’t you?’ but she only shrugged. Either she didn’t know the story about Provence, or else she just wasn’t interested in it.
She went to the window and looked at the beautiful day outside and said: ‘Come on. Let’s go out. Get Sergei’s lead.’
We walked all the way to the bird market at the Place Louis Lépine, going right down through the Tuileries and past the Louvre and over the Pont au Change to the Île de la Cité. On the way, under the chestnuts of the Tuileries, I said to Alice, ‘Do you think Babba will get blamed for what happened?’
Alice shrugged again. ‘I expect so,’ she said. ‘Things that happen to Valentina are never seen as being her own fault.’
‘She won’t make Babba leave, will she?’
‘I don’t know.’
Alice didn’t seem interested in Babba’s fate, any more than she’d been interested in what Valentina and Mrs Gavrilovich had been talking about. I was going to tell her about Pozzi and the Harley Davidson and Babba’s village in Benin, but then I thought there was no point, because I understood now that, since we’d come to Paris, Alice was slowly going into some private world, in which these things seemed to be of no importance to her whatsoever. It wasn’t just that Valentina had begun to annoy her; something else was preoccupying her mind.