by Rose Tremain
I didn’t mention the word ‘spirits’. What I said was: ‘There are a lot of things Carmody doesn’t know. If we can give him useful information . . .’
‘’Bout what, Louis?’
‘About . . . I don’t know. About why someone would have done her harm . . .’
Violette began putting on her overall. She looked down at the kitchen floor, which hadn’t been swept for days. Then she mumbled: ‘Maybe it was that American girl?’
‘The translator? The one who stayed here?’
‘Yeh.’
‘Were you here then?’
‘No. My friend worked here. Lisette-Marie. She got me this job.’
Violette was going to begin her cleaning, but I stopped her. I saw suddenly that there could be a line to follow here. Valentina used to boast about the ‘killing’ of this person and no doubt it’s impossible to ‘kill’ someone without consequences, even if they aren’t actually dead.
‘Who was the American girl?’ I asked. ‘What was her name?’
‘I don’t remember. All I know is Lisette-Marie told me this girl was ill. Then she went away.’
I fetched the two snaps that had fallen out of the photo album. I laid them in front of Violette and she looked at them, with a sad and sullen expression on her face. The girl had straight mousy hair. You would have described her as ‘ordinary’.
‘I think this may have been her,’ I said. ‘Have you ever seen her here?’
‘No.’
‘Will you show these to Lisette-Marie? Ask her to tell you if this is her and about what happened?’
‘She doesn’t know what happened. Just some trouble, that’s all she know.’
‘She might know what kind of trouble. If she was working right here in the apartment . . .’
‘She said to me she didn’t know. Because I asked her, I said, “If Madame Gavril is causing trouble, I don’t want to work there.” And she said, no, it was just that American girl, always screaming. But once she went away, everything was nice and quiet.’
‘Screaming? Why?’
‘No one knows, Louis. Only Madame.’
‘Please try to find out more, Violette. Please take the pictures and talk to Lisette-Marie. Get her name and the exact date of when she was here. Will you? It might turn out to be important. Then we can tell Carmody—’
Violette was shaking her head again. She thought Alice and I had betrayed her, which we had. She left the photographs lying on the table. She wasn’t really interested in them. She went to a cupboard and got out a broom and began sweeping the kitchen floor. Quite often, she sang while she swept, ‘Ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas’, but today she was silent.
As Violette was finishing off cleaning the flat and preparing to leave, Alice came and found us and said she was going out.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘To the Bibliothèque Nationale,’ she said. ‘I need to check some references.’
She smiled at Violette, but Violette turned her face away. Alice was wearing her blue dress and her amber beads. Her dark glasses were stuck on her head, in amongst her hair. I knew she wasn’t going to the library.
I went as far as the apartment door with her. As she left, I touched the gold chain in my pocket, safely hidden from Alice’s sight. I watched her hurry away down the stairs. The idea of following her was lapping at my mind like an icy tide.
I came back into the kitchen and made Violette put the two photographs of the American girl into her bag. As her rubbery hands snapped the bag shut, I thought, I may never see Violette again. She may have to leave us and leave her flat in the purple building and disappear into the crowd. So I said pleadingly: ‘Carmody doesn’t know your name. Only Babba. That’s all he knows. No real name and no address. And if he asks, I’ll say we don’t know any of it.’
Violette nodded. ‘OK, Louis,’ she said.
I didn’t follow Alice. I climbed up on to the roof. Exactly as I expected, Didier wasn’t there. Some of his tools were lying around, so he’d been working that morning, but now, of course, he’d gone. He was hovering above Paris: a bird on a string, waiting for Alice Little to wind him in.
I sat down on the burning lead. I thought, where is it they go?
What I longed for was for Valentina to come and sit down in the sun beside me, so that I could talk about Didier and Alice with her. And she’d make it seem like something insignificant and ordinary. She’d put her arm round me and say: ‘Nobody goes through life without lovers, Lewis. You’ll see this for yourself very soon.’ She would laugh. She would stroke my eyebrow with her finger, and I would lay my head against her breast.
I took Sergei for a walk in the Tuileries, where it was cool under the chestnuts. I sat down at the Pomone café and drank two panachés and the shadows of the trees on the gravel began to seem fantastic. No one yelled at me to get my dog out of the park.
When we walked on, I came across a brilliant bronze statue of a woman sitting with her elbow on her knee. Her thighs were big, like Valentina’s, but her breasts were small and pointy, like lemons. I walked all round her, looking at different bits of her bronze body. One of her legs disappeared into the plinth underneath her. The name of the sculptor was Aristide Maillol.
We were on our way to the grooming parlour. Even in the fresh air, the smell of Sergei had begun to waft towards my nostrils and I told him: ‘We’re going there right now and that’s that.’
It was called ‘Chiens etcetera’ and it was up above an art gallery off the Avenue Matignon. It must have been the smartest animal-grooming parlour in the whole Western world. When you went in, there was a din of all the hairdryers blow-drying the four-legged clients and the clients barking and whining in the hot air.
I pretended Valentina had made an appointment. I thought she might have an account there and that everyone would know Sergei, and I was right about both things. As soon as they saw him, they produced an orange-flavoured chocolate drop for him and started stroking his head. ‘Sergei . . .’ they cooed, ‘le méchant . . . !’
We had to wait for about ten minutes, till a bath-booth became available. I sat on a pink couch and Sergei stood on the white tiled floor, looking at everything and wagging his tail. I hoped he wouldn’t do anything embarrassing. No white poodles came by. I don’t know whether he remembered what had happened the last time or not.
Then a girl in a pink overall and wearing pink surgical gloves arrived to take him away for his shampoo. She gave me a scowl. At ‘Chiens etcetera’, they knew what I was: I was Valentina’s slave.
Sergei looked like a star again. His tail billowed. He smelled of lemonade. In the street, the heads of the smartly coiffed people turned as he trotted along with his high step, like a prancing chestnut pony. I swear he knew he was beautiful.
On the way home, I began to think, if Alice is back, perhaps I’ll give her the gold chain after all and confront her and then the air we breathe will get sweet again, like the Devon air.
But I could see her yelling at me and I didn’t want this. She’d say I shouldn’t believe, at the age I was, that I had a right to know everything. She’d say the world was far more complicated than I was capable of imagining. She didn’t know how complicated my world already was.
I thought, what would François have done if Millie had taken the pony and trap and said she was going to Vierzon, say, and then he’d found out she’d been in the back room of the bakery in Sainte-Agathe? He would never have said: ‘Millie, you’re betraying us.’ He would have just lain in his attic, listening to the wind, trying to figure out why. And eventually, he would have discovered why.
But Millie is a really different character from Alice. François always seems to know more or less what Millie is going to do and feel, but with Alice no one ever knows. When I was at infant school and she’d come and collect me in the old green Citroën 2CV she had, I’d never know where she’d be. I got used to not knowing. Sometimes, she’d be there talking with the other parents at the school ga
tes, but on other days not.
Once, I found her sitting on the top of the slide. When she saw me, she slid down it towards me. In summer, she’d occasionally park the Citroën way down the lane and stand on the car seats, with her head and shoulders sticking out of the rolled-back roof, waving. Or else she’d be walking in the field behind the playground, or lying on a hay bale, smoking a cigarette. One day, she arrived in her bikini with just a towel round her and her hair soaking wet. She said she’d been swimming in the sea for three hours. I don’t know what had happened to her clothes.
Another time, she didn’t arrive at all; she just forgot about me and the head teacher had to ring her up and remind her. My best friend called Carl used to say to me: ‘Is your mother really your mother, or is she someone else?’
She was mine. She got tired of me sometimes. I’d see her lose concentration while I was speaking to her and I’d know she was wishing she was somewhere else – in an Edinburgh late-night bar, or diving for pearls in the Indian Ocean. But, even though I looked nothing like her, I knew I belonged to her. She had a smell about her that was like mine; we neither of us could stand Lloyd Webber show tunes; we were both good at languages. Oh and Hugh told me he’d seen me being born, the bit of Play Doh that I was. He said my head had been as pointy as an elf’s and Alice had laid my pointy head on her shoulder and cried with joy.
She wasn’t in the apartment. And as soon as we went in, I knew something had happened there. The furniture in the salon had been moved around. There was a ton of ash and soot in the fire grate and the room smelled of this soot and of something else strange that I couldn’t recognise.
I stood on the first bit of the parquet, listening and waiting. Then I called out: ‘Alice? Alice? Qui est là?’
Sergei could smell the soot. His body began quivering. I held tightly to his lead and walked to Alice’s room. Usually she left the french windows open, but now they were closed and when I looked over to her desk I got a real shock: her computer had gone. And it was clear that every bit of her room had been searched. One of her cupboard doors was open and all her clothes inside it were in jumbled heaps. I called her name again. Sergei began to whine, but no other sound came.
I went from room to room then, searching and calling. I knew what the goal of the burglars would have been: Valentina’s jewellery. She had a safe somewhere in the apartment, but she’d never shown me where it was and I’d never found it. Keeping Sergei close to me, I went first to her study and then into her bedroom. The idea that men had come in and gone through Valentina’s clothes and stolen her precious possessions was really bad.
Both rooms were a mess. Her dressing-table drawers had been taken out and emptied and put back in the wrong order, so that they wouldn’t shut properly. Some of her dresses lay on the bed and all her hundreds of pairs of different-coloured shoes had been heaped into a pile.
There was the smell of her perfume and I saw that one of her scent bottles had fallen over. The little TV she sometimes used to watch at night was still there on a chest of drawers, but in the study all the computer hardware had gone. And the desk and the bureau, where Mrs Gavrilovich and I knew every item, had been stripped of everything. Even the champagne corks had been taken and the street map of Beijing.
I sat down in her desk chair and unhooked the lead from Sergei’s collar. He sat close to me, waiting to see what I was going to do. Then suddenly, I remembered my own room and got up and ran hurtling up my stairs.
My bed had been moved. There was a space between it and the round window. They’d been through my books and my chess set and the things on my night table. My Kermit alarm clock was upside down. But I was glad to find that Elroy was still there. He was lying on the bed, gazing up at the attic ceiling. He looked dazed, as if a tiny drop of chloroform had been splashed on to his face. The burglars had known he was of no use or value.
Sergei had followed me upstairs. I sat down on my bed, holding Elroy, and Sergei sat on the floor, twitching his blow-dried tail and watching me to see what bright ideas I was going to get. His breath smelt of dogs’ toothpaste. After a few moments, I said to him: ‘We have to call Carmody.’
We went back downstairs. I knew it would be better if Alice spoke to Carmody, because she’d be able to explain what had happened more precisely, but I didn’t know when she was planning to come home; it could be hours before she did, and I didn’t want to sit here alone, breathing the vandalised air. And Carmody had said: ‘If anything occurs or if anything worries you, don’t hesitate to call.’ A burglary was definitely an occurrence.
I’d copied his number, from the card he’d given Alice, into my Concorde book. Carmody answered straight away, after half a ring, as though his hand had been poised above the receiver, waiting for my call.
‘Oui?’ he said.
I said it was Louis calling. I began to explain that there’d been a burglary in the apartment, but I’d hardly got started before I heard Carmody laugh.
‘We are the “burglars”, Louis,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We obtained the correct authorisation to search Mademoiselle Gavril’s apartment. Her mother, Madame Gavrilovich, oversaw the operation and we assumed she had remembered to warn you and your mother. We have simply taken away the computers and some related material for investigation. It will be returned in due time, but we think it might yield some clues.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Are you sure it was you?’
Carmody laughed again. ‘Yes. Quite sure. I think we left everything tidy.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ I said. ‘You moved the furniture around and you left Valentina’s shoes in a pile and you made soot come down the chimney . . .’
‘Oh, please accept my apologies.’
It pissed me off a bit that Carmody was mocking me. I said crossly: ‘How’s my mother going to work without her computer?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Carmody. ‘Her computer will be returned tomorrow.’
There was a silence then. I wanted to ask Carmody what the peculiar smell was in the apartment, but at that moment I thought, it might be some kind of chemical dust used in fingerprinting. If they’d dusted the vacuum cleaner and the polisher, they could have found perfect prints of Violette’s hands.
‘I’m sorry you were frightened,’ said Carmody after a while. ‘Are you alone? Is that it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m alone, except for Sergei.’
‘Who is Sergei?’
‘He’s a dog.’
‘Ah.’ Then Carmody cleared his throat and said: ‘Louis, where is your father?’
Alice came in at six forty-five. She’d been out for almost seven hours. She said she’d been reading in the Luxembourg Gardens. She told me she’d discovered they kept bees there, in little hives with pagoda-shaped roofs. She said she’d lost all count of time.
She found me in Valentina’s room, going through her shoes and putting them all back, in pairs, into her wardrobe. Some of the shoes had a faint smell to them, of Valentina’s scented feet. Some silver ones, in particular, and before Alice got in I’d lain on the rug in Valentina’s bedroom with one silver shoe held to my nose and had an orgasm without touching myself, just by pressing against the carpet. I imagined her naked foot, with its scarlet toenails pushed into my crotch, rubbing me slowly. ‘Come on, darling,’ she whispered, ‘come on.’
Alice helped me tidy the rest of the flat. She didn’t know what I’d been doing on the floor of Valentina’s room and I didn’t know what she and Didier had done, out in their private sky. We cleaned in silence, not even talking about Carmody’s untidiness.
When Alice knew her computer had been taken, she just said: ‘Well, they won’t find anything in it – only Valentina’s novel, as far as I’ve got with it.’
‘What else is on the hard disk?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Absolute blank zero. Whatever was on there has been wiped.’
I watched her. Her nose and cheeks looked red from s
itting in the sun. I thought, perhaps they made love in that park that’s built on a mound of slaughterhouse bones?
When we sat down in the salon, I said: ‘Everything’s getting frightening, isn’t it?’
She sat on the Louis XVI sofa again. It was like she was trying to make the apartment hers. She put her freckled arms up behind her head and looked at me. ‘Do you want to go home?’ she asked. ‘Do you think that would be best?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Perhaps I should talk to your father and see if he thinks you should go back to England?’
I knew that when Alice referred to Hugh as ‘your father’, she’d put him into some far-away compartment of her heart, like he was a stranger in the street. I said: ‘I’m not going back till they find Valentina.’
‘I think Hugh may want me to send you back.’
‘Then don’t tell him what’s happened.’
‘We have to tell him.’
‘No, we don’t. Not yet. Carmody told us to tell no one. We don’t have to tell him till it’s over.’
We neither of us knew what I meant by ‘over’. I stood by one of the windows, looking at Alice, watching her brain cells struggle with all the alternative meanings of this word.
‘In September, you’ll have to go back,’ she said.
‘So will you.’
‘Not necessarily. I may have to stay and finish the work. It depends on whether the book can be finished or not.’
This didn’t seem fair to me: Hugh and I starting our school terms and Alice staying on in Paris alone with her lover. I said: ‘You can’t do that. Think of Dad.’
‘I do think of him,’ she said. ‘But Dad’s very happy on his own. Can’t you sense it in his letters?’
I said I thought he was only happy now because he was working on his project and because he had Bertie and Gwyneth with him. I said he was having a kind of second childhood, but in the autumn he’d have to be grown-up again and then he’d want us to go home. I expected Alice to say this was a stupid notion, but she didn’t: she laughed loudly and brightly, like people laugh at old sitcom reruns on TV. Her laugh was like a bell, echoing all through the empty flat, trying to summon other laughter that wasn’t there.