The Way I Found Her

by Rose Tremain

  Eventually, I jolted myself back into the here and now. Porphiry Petrovich doesn’t get slowed down thinking about his future and his past.

  I opened files at random. The most interesting one I opened was MASP. There were no clues in it, but I really liked it.

  MASP was the acronym for Un mas de Provence. The file was a kind of diary. It described a journey Valentina had made down to Provence in 1992. She wrote that her quest was to find the field where she and her parents had camped long ago when they still ran the café. I remembered her telling me about this camping trip when I lay by her on the bed the night she came back from hospital after she’d broken her arm. She told me they found mushrooms in the fields and cooked them over an open fire. She said it had been a cold September and that there was always dew on the tent in the early mornings.

  Now, on this journey, Valentina was driving a Mercedes and staying at a five-star hotel called the Château d’Arly. She found the field and stood in it and it was more or less as it had been when the Gavrilovichs had pitched their old tent in it, except that then it had been sown with grass and now it was planted with carrots. This field made her feel incredibly sad. She thought about her father’s life and how, in the war, in 1941, when he was a soldier in one of General Zhukov’s Far Eastern Divisions, the cold had been so terrible, the men had to hack into the earth with picks to dig up carrots and swede and saw ice from the rivers to stay alive. She wished her father could be alive now, installed here, in the place of his dreams.

  She went to an estate agent and asked to see some stone farmhouses, known as mas. She was shown one overlooking a stream, with its own water wheel. She thought that Anton Gavrilovich would have found this one perfect. So she asked the estate agent to leave her alone in it for half an hour.

  He drove off and Valentina wandered on her own through the fantastic house. She imagined old Anton in each of the rooms: sitting in a rocking chair by the living-room fire, sleeping in a high bed listening to the turning of the water wheel, reading comic strips on the mahogany toilet, eating his favourite meal of roast guinea fowl in the kitchen. When she found that the owners had installed a jacuzzi in one of the bathrooms, she remembered an accusation of his about the Americans, who in 1942 had single-handedly supplied the Red Army with weapons and food and clothing: 14.5 million pairs of boots alone were sent to the Russians and a quarter of a million tons of canned meat. But Mr Gavrilovich used to say the Yanks had bought victory with Russian blood and paid in spam. There’s no French word for spam, so she just put spam. She had tried to turn on the jacuzzi, but no water came.

  When she went out into the garden, she strung an imaginary hammock between two plum trees and laid old Anton in it. She stood by, rocking him gently. He told her that he’d never grumbled about the coal-heaving in the café-charbon, because it was a million times better than working and starving on the collective farm, where food could be confiscated or requisitioned without warning; where the firewood was rationed and there was no coal to burn. ‘At least,’ he used to say to her, ‘we are safe, Valya, and in the winters the café is warm.’

  When the estate agent returned, Valentina gave him back the keys to the beautiful house with the jacuzzi and the water wheel and got into her Mercedes and drove away. She could have afforded the house five times over, but the person who wanted it was no longer alive. She had to pull into a lay-by and cry. She had nothing to wipe her eyes with except the car duster.

  On the way to the commissariat, I asked Alice: ‘When you’re grown-up, is there always something to regret?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘Like something that hasn’t turned out the way you thought it would?’

  ‘Almost nothing turns out the way you think it will,’ she said.

  The commissariat had tall windows with grilles over them and a polished wooden floor, worn down by people’s feet. On the reception desk an electric fan turned, moving the warm air around. Only when you were right next to it did it make you feel cool.

  Quite a few people were there, waiting. One was a woman dressed completely in pink, with pink ankle socks and pink high-heeled shoes and a pink beret on her head. She was smoking and blowing the smoke towards the fan.

  Behind the desk, a young officer, with a gun on his hip, saw the waiting people one by one and wrote things down in a ledger. Alice said the officer’s rank was brigadier and the ledger was known as La main courante. A corner of Alice’s brain is full of knowledge you might never need in your entire lifetime.

  When our turn came to talk to the brigadier, he began a new page of La main courante and wrote everything down very slowly. He looked as if he was learning to write. From time to time, his eye couldn’t help glancing over at the pink woman. When Alice said we’d come to report a missing person, he said: ‘Missing how?’

  ‘Just missing, disappeared,’ said Alice, and I knew she thought ‘Missing how?’ was a stupid question.

  ‘Right,’ he said with a sigh; ‘but missing from where?’

  Alice ran her hands through her thorny hair. I could tell she was getting impatient already. She said slowly: ‘Mademoiselle Gavril was last seen going into a hotel, the Hôtel de Venise, by my son here, at lunch time last Tuesday.’

  I nodded. The brigadier stared hard at me, with the kind of cross, stupid stare a teacher gives you when he knows you’ve been smoking in the school toilets. He wrote down ‘Venise’. Then he asked us if we were related to Valentina. When we said we weren’t, he said: ‘Why didn’t a member of the family come?’

  Alice explained about Mrs Gavrilovich being old and afraid.

  ‘Afraid of what?’ he asked.

  ‘Of the police,’ said Alice.

  The brigadier’s pen paused before it let him write this down. Then he said: ‘Could Madame Gavrilovich, or anyone in the family, gain material advantage by the death of Mademoiselle Gavril?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alice.

  ‘Very well,’ he said; ‘then we will have to put in hand an RIF.’

  ‘What’s an RIF?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Une recherche dans l’intérêt des families.’

  Then he moved on to questions about Valentina, such as her approximate height and the colour of her hair. He asked us whether she was in the habit of going missing. ‘What do you mean?’ said Alice. He said, well, people disappeared all the time – young people mostly; they went missing for a week or two weeks, then turned up somewhere. This pattern was part of modern life. And it was pointless for the police to search for people like this; they did search, of course, because this was their duty, but they also knew that in ninety-nine per cent of cases it was a waste of time and resources.

  Behind us, the pink woman started coughing and so the brigadier’s attention went away from us and on to her. And I heard Alice start to get angry. She said she’d already given Valentina’s age: she was a forty-one-year-old writer, not a young unemployed drifter. She was not ‘in the habit of going missing’. On the contrary. She was in the middle of a book, which had a deadline, and her disappearance was therefore absolutely unexpected and out of character.

  The brigadier looked at Alice, unmoved. He seemed to be one of the few people on earth on whom Alice’s beauty had no effect. All he said was, ‘Well, it will be put in hand. We will make a report to the Neuvième Cabinet de Délégation Judiciare.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Alice.

  ‘It is where information on missing persons is centralised. If you wish to have a photograph given to them, you will have to provide us with one.’

  ‘What will the Neuvième Cabinet do?’

  ‘They will open a dossier on this Mademoiselle . . . Gavril. They will make enquiries in the place of last sighting. They will check with the register of motor-vehicle accidents and with the Paris hospital morgues . . .’

  When I heard the word ‘morgue’, it did an odd thing to me. I felt suddenly detached from the whole scene, as if I’d gone behind a wall of opaque glass and everything
else – the brigadier, the fan, the desk, Alice, the pink woman, the sound of the telephones – existed on the other side of it. I knew I could still talk, but my own voice would sound as if it was behind the glass wall too.

  I held on to Alice’s arm while she said something else, I don’t know what, to the brigadier, and then he said we could go now. I felt Alice take my hand and we walked out of the commissariat into the street. I gripped her hand so hard it must have hurt her and then, as we strolled on, hand in hand, the glass panel slowly faded and the world came back.

  To console us after our ordeal at the commissariat, we went to Fouquet’s and ordered ice creams and sirop à la menthe, and sat in the sun, watching the people and the traffic and the movement of the trees.

  After a while of just sitting, I said to Alice that I supposed they didn’t have anyone of the calibre of Porphiry Petrovich at that commissariat, or at the Neuvième Cabinet de Délégation Judiciare, and she laughed. I said: ‘You can laugh if you want to, but if they’re not going to send anyone I’m going to do the detective work myself.’

  I thought I’d begin by talking to Didier.

  I had two reasons for this: one was that you can see things from a roof that no one else notices and the other was that Didier’s face and Raskolnikov’s face had become almost identical in my mind. Part of me was thinking, if he’s planning to steal Alice away from her former life, he might want everybody round her to disappear. Including me.

  Instead of climbing out of my bathroom window, I went up to the roof using Didier’s ladders. There were nine ladders in all, roped to the scaffolding cage. At night, he removed the bottom two ladders, so that no one could use them to get up on to the building. He said that, to him, getting to the ground after he’d stowed the ladders was as easy as blowing his nose, but most people would find it hard.

  At first, I thought he wasn’t on the roof, but then I found him asleep in the shade by the water tanks. He was in the exact spot where I’d looked up at the smiling moon.

  I crept over to him, without waking him. He was in such a stupor of sleep that a dribble of saliva had run down his chin and made a tiny stain on the lead. I didn’t move, but just stared at him. I thought, the similarities between him and Raskolnikov are quite striking: he’s lying curled up, like Raskolnikov lies huddled in his truckle bed; he’s been ill; he looks as if he hasn’t shaved; he’s definitely getting thinner . . .

  He woke up while I stood there watching him. I wondered whether Alice had seen him like this, asleep beside her.

  When he saw me, he looked startled and scrabbled to his feet. He brushed the dust off his body. ‘How are things going, Louis?’ he said.

  ‘Why were you asleep?’ I asked.

  ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I’ve been ill. It’s left me a bit tired.’ Then he picked up his can of Coke from the roof and drank some down. He offered me the can, but I refused it. ‘Well,’ he said again, as if everything was perfectly OK and normal and fine, ‘what’s the news?’

  I walked a few paces away from him, then I looked straight at him and said: ‘Valentina’s disappeared. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your mother told me.’

  I let a bit of silence go by. Then I said: ‘We went to the police this morning.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Yes. We reported a missing person. I expect they’ll be sending an inspector round.’

  Didier nodded. He didn’t look afraid or anything. He asked me if I’d like to help him hang a few slates. His friendliness towards me hadn’t diminished one bit and I knew that trying to dislike him or even hate him was going to be really hard. It was going to be hard mainly because I’d seen the Salpêtrière dome. I’d felt the hugeness of it and the puniness of people compared with it. There was a part of me which refused to despise someone who had restored something as vast and fantastic as that.

  I wasn’t totally in the mood for slate hanging. It was burning hot up there on the roof. The thing I most wanted to be doing in all the world was swimming at the Les Rosiers pool with Valentina in her white-and-gold swimsuit. But once I started on the slates, I began to enjoy it and to take pride in getting each of my slates perfectly positioned and squared up before I drove in the pin. It was as though I imagined that if I kept working with Didier, I was practising for some kind of future.

  ‘So,’ said Didier after a while, ‘where has Valentina gone, do you think?’

  ‘She could have been murdered.’

  There was a moment’s pause before Didier said: ‘Why would anyone murder her?’

  Without looking up from my work, I said: ‘Because they wanted her out of the way.’

  He tapped in a slate pin. His straight, shiny hair was getting a bit long and flopping over his glasses. ‘For what reason?’ he asked.

  ‘Any number of reasons. Like she was getting in the way of what someone wanted to do. Don’t you think that’s possible?’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose so, yes,’ he said. ‘That is always a possibility in any disappearance. But I’m sure this isn’t a question of murder, Louis. I think that’s just in your mind, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it’s just in my mind. On Tuesday morning at about twelve, she went out. I walked with her to a hotel where she was meeting Grigory, this Russian writer she knew. And she hasn’t been seen since. So anything could have happened – including a murder.’

  ‘But perhaps not. Perhaps she will come back?’

  ‘That’s what Alice keeps saying. But I know she won’t. I know I have to track her down. And I will. I’m going to be the one to find her.’

  I felt choked as I said this. I heard my voice begin to go odd. I didn’t want Didier to notice, so I pretended to cough. I looked down at the hammer in my hands.

  ‘How are you going to set about it?’ said Didier.

  I didn’t reply for a moment, then I said: ‘I’m making a plan.’

  I saw Didier stop work and look tenderly at me. It was the sort of look I sometimes got from Hugh.

  ‘Better to let the police make a plan, isn’t it?’ he said.

  Alice said to me that evening: ‘I had a call from Bianquis, Valentina’s French publishers, today. They want to know when the book’s going to be finished.’

  ‘What did you say to them?’ I asked.

  Alice was sitting on the Louis XVI sofa, where Valentina normally sat. I didn’t like her sitting there and I’d been willing her to move, but she didn’t move. Alice’s own will is so strong, it can outmanoeuvre everybody else’s.

  ‘I stalled,’ she said. ‘I said Valentina’s mother was ill and she was concentrating on that at the moment.’

  Then she told me something interesting. She said that on our first day in the rue Rembrandt, Valentina had admitted to her what pressure she was under all the time from Bianquis, to produce the next book and then the next and the next, like she was a writing factory. And she’d said she knew this couldn’t go on. It was wearing her out and she wanted it to end.

  ‘That couldn’t be it, could it?’ I said. ‘She couldn’t just have decided to abandon the book and go to Australia or something . . . ?’

  ‘It’s possible. She’d been very tetchy about the book. It didn’t seem to me that she was enjoying writing it. She wanted it to be finished and done with.’

  ‘But what about us?’

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘She wouldn’t have left us without a word.’

  Alice sighed. ‘In Valentina’s equation,’ she said, ‘we’re nothing. I do my job. You amuse her and you look after Sergei. She tolerates us in this apartment. But we’re of no importance to her. She leads a smart, international life and she makes a lot of money. These are the only things that count: nothing else. We’re like her servants – like Babba.’

  ‘No, we’re not!’ I blurted out. And what I wanted to describe were the things that had happened in my attic – the translation sessions and the present of the musical box – to show
Alice that Valentina cared about me and my future and gave me things that were precious to her. But then I decided not to. These were secret matters and I didn’t want Alice’s cool mind dissecting them and reducing them to ruins.

  ‘That day when we went out without telling her, Valentina was upset,’ I said. ‘That means she cares about us.’

  ‘Not necessarily. It means she needed us and was irritated when she discovered we weren’t there. Again, it’s the reaction of the employer towards the servant.’

  ‘It’s more than that!’ I said. I was getting upset now and I felt almost like I might cry. I swallowed and tried to calm myself down. ‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘you’ve got Babba wrong. Her name isn’t Babba. That’s just a stupid name invented by people here. Her name’s Violette and from now on we should call her Violette, which is her proper African name!’

  Alice sat completely still on the Louis XVI sofa. She didn’t move a muscle. Then she said: ‘Violette isn’t African, Lewis. It’s French.’

  I got up and walked out then and went straight to my room and lay down. My heart was beating like a bongo drum. I thought, Alice is too much for me. I hope Didier takes her away, up into the sky.

  When I went to Valentina’s computer the next day, I found Mrs Gavrilovich in the study.

  ‘Louis, help me,’ she said. ‘Your eyes are better than mine. I have a feeling we could learn something from what is in this room. So we should go through all the documents we can find. I’m searching for Valentina’s passport, but I can’t see it.’

  I didn’t say I’d accessed the computer files and that I’d found a piece about Anton and the stone house in Provence. I just said I would help search. I began on the desk where the computer stood and Mrs Gavrilovich started going through the drawers of a bureau, where I’d seen Valentina writing cards and signing cheques. There were also three filing cabinets in the room and about a mile of shelves.