by Rose Tremain
I told him about the grandfather with the hankie. He said: ‘The villain of the story is the boy, Henri, who never comes to visit.’
The woman doctor had a heart-shaped face. Ingrid had told Carl that this was what girls longed for – to have heart-shaped faces. Around the heart was a lot of straight, shiny black hair and you could imagine all the highly tuned brain circuitry underneath it.
She came back to us quite quickly. She shook my hand and she led us to a different waiting area further down the corridor. We sat down on some comfortable chairs and she said: ‘There may or may not have been some confusion. It looks, on the register, as if Mademoiselle Gavril’s name has first been ticked and then the tick has been crossed, like this.’ She got out a piece of paper and drew a cross and showed it to us. The lines of her cross were curled at the bottom; it looked almost like a little running man, but without a head.
‘But if there was a tick,’ she said, ‘which is what is put when a patient arrives, it was put there in error. The cross firmly indicates that Mademoiselle Gavril did not keep her appointment.’
‘OK . . .’ said Moinel.
‘I suggest you leave the photograph with the receptionist,’ said the doctor. ‘She may not recognise her, but can show it to her colleagues. There’s no law of confidentiality preventing them from remembering a face.’
We nodded. I got out the photo again. It looked as if it had been taken at a fancy-dress party. I looked at it while Moinel and the doctor talked. The doctor’s voice had a crack in it which, if I had been ill, I knew I would have found soothing. While I gazed at the ribbons in Valentina’s hair, the doctor held Moinel’s fingers in hers and asked him how he was and he said: ‘Perfectly all right, darling. Thank goodness. When I’m not, you’ll be the first to know.’
Then the doctor had to rush away. Doctors are always in transit, never staying. They drink tea standing up. Moinel smoothed his hair and we walked back to the Radiologie reception area.
A different receptionist was sitting at the desk. She looked up and stared at us as we came in. She had a pale face that looked as if it had never seen the sun.
I let Moinel be in charge. He took the photo of Valentina and leant across the desk and showed it to this new woman. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘for taking up your time, but I want to leave this photograph with you. I need to know if you, or any of your colleagues, have ever seen this person in the waiting area here. We believe she was here on Tuesday last, the seventh—’
‘No,’ said the receptionist. ‘I’ve never seen her.’
‘Fine. Please ask your colleagues if they saw anyone like this. Her arm was in a cast and we think she would have been wearing a black-and-white dress . . .’
I could tell the receptionist didn’t want to take the photo, but then she snatched it out of Moinel’s hand and put it face down on her desk. Reluctantly, she scribbled down Moinel’s telephone number, then she suddenly looked at him and said: ‘Etes-vous police?’
Moinel smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Do we look like flics?’
Something nagged me as we walked back down the long corridors to the exit, but I didn’t know what it was. I thought it might swim into my mind during our taxi ride back to the rue Rembrandt, but nothing came, only a mild sadness at the loss of the photograph. I kept wondering where Valentina had bought the red ribbon and who had taken the picture.
When I came in, Violette was there. She’d decided to wash down all the cupboards in the kitchen and she was standing on the worktops, so what you most noticed about her were her legs, which weren’t thin like her arms, but big and strong. Under her overall, she was wearing an orange skirt. She said: ‘I want all these cupboards looking good for when Madame comes home.’
I helped her with this task. The cupboards looked clean, but when you began to wash them you discovered they were dirty. While we worked, Violette told me that since getting the news about her work permit she was making an effort to resume Pozzi’s toilet-training. She said everything changed when you knew you had a future.
When the kitchen was done, I got Violette to help me search Valentina’s room for the back-up disks I thought might be in the apartment somewhere, if Carmody hadn’t taken them. I knew they could be in the safe, but it was still worth looking for them, because we had Alice’s computer back now and, if I found them, I could run the GOH file through that. I said to Violette: ‘If we find that file, we’ll know the whole story of Gail O’Hara,’ and Violette shook her head and replied: ‘The whole story might be too terrible for us to bear, Louis.’
We went through Valentina’s bedroom wardrobes, all six of them, shelf by shelf and drawer by drawer. We found thirteen musical boxes, some as small as a matchbox, and some quite large and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Each one was on a different shelf, among different pieces of clothing, and each one played a different song – La Mer, Les Feuilles mortes, La Vie en rose, Je ne regrette rien, Sur ma vie . . . The smallest one played La Marseillaise so quietly, it sounded like it was a little marching song for mice.
Violette loved the musical boxes. She stroked the mother-of-pearl with her velvety hands. We set them in a line along the carpet, and opened all their lids at once. Then we moved down the line on our elbows and knees with our bums in the air, listening. Violette’s bum stuck up much higher than mine. I said it was possible to imagine you were moving down a corridor where pianists were practising in tiny rooms, like Alice had told me she’d done at school. Her friend Jean had been a better pianist than Alice. Jean could play one and a half Mozart piano sonatas and Alice could only play one. She would hear this half-sonata stealing through the sound-proofed wall and weep with fury.
We didn’t find any disks. A sea of underwear frothed round us on the floor and spilled over the line of musical boxes. Some of the bras looked too small to contain Valentina’s tits and could have belonged to another part of her life, when she was thinner. I wondered if she’d bought all the stuff herself or whether her lovers, like Grisha, had gone round department stores picking out knickers and camisoles and suspender belts and carrying them back to her in miniature carrier bags. And then I thought, if she’s alive, if I ever see her again, I’m going to get her a present. It won’t be underwear. It will be something she’s never seen before. And she will turn to me and say: ‘Oh, darling, I thought there was nothing new in the world, but I was wrong!’
Alice found us sitting in this surf of knickers, playing the Marseillaise. She said: ‘Lewis, what on earth are you doing?’
‘Searching,’ I said. ‘Did Carmody call?’
Violette lowered her head and closed the musical box lid. I could tell she was in awe of Alice, as if Alice were a parakeet from a forest in Benin, who might suddenly fly at her and start pecking her face.
‘What are you searching for?’ said Alice.
‘Did he call?’ I said.
‘No. No one called. Only Hugh. You’re making a terrible mess of this room. Why?’
I felt like saying: ‘If you were my chosen ally, I’d tell you everything, but you’re no good as an ally because of your guilty secret.’ But I didn’t say this. There was a bit of me that was afraid to be pecked by the parakeet, too. All I said was: ‘I need to find Valentina’s back-up disks. To follow a hunch I have . . .’
‘I expect the police took them,’ said Alice.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘They weren’t in the desk or in the bureau; that’s the stuff they took.’
‘Well,’ said Alice, ‘I need to talk to you, Lewis. I think we should go out.’
We took the métro to Jussieu. I thought the catalpa trees might be turning yellow by now, but they were just the same, green and clattery in the shallow breeze.
Alice didn’t say much on the journey, but when we came into the Jardin des Plantes and passed under the statue of the lion eating the human foot she took my hand and said: ‘I had a long conversation with Hugh this morning. He’s worried about you. He thinks I should send you home.’
> ‘Why?’ I asked.
‘He said he’s been worried ever since you asked him to send Elroy.’
I pulled my hand away. There are times in a life when you imagine lowering your parents’ heads into a rock pool and holding them there until their bodies go still.
I ignored everything Alice had said and walked past some lettuces and tomatoes towards the largest of the hothouses. Alice called after me, but I didn’t turn round. I just went on into the hothouse and began looking at the rainforest plants, as if I were on my own. The heat in there was damp and smelled of earth and almost all the trees and cacti in it were vast and I felt my habitual admiration – of the kind that I felt for the Eiffel Tower – for enormous things. I should have been born a beetle.
By one of the ponds, there were some tiny turtles on a stone. They were so immobile, I thought they were made of plastic or something. Then they began slipping and sliding into the pool and swam down into the murk of it and out of sight. I thought, one of the thousand things human beings find difficult is staying absolutely still.
I saw Alice lurking on the other side of the pool. For once, she was looking at me anxiously, almost tenderly, but I didn’t want to speak to her, so we each went round the hothouse alone, until we met up behind the waterfall and Alice said: ‘Did you see the turtles?’
‘Of course I saw them,’ I answered.
We couldn’t stay in there all day, it was too hot. There was sweat on my T-shirt and I began to feel thirsty. I walked out, knowing Alice would follow, and went to a little stall selling junk food and bought a can of Coke. Alice came up and offered to pay for it, but I said I’d already paid. Then, when I’d drunk half of it down, gulping like a frog, I announced: ‘I’m staying till Valentina’s found. Dad can’t make me go home and nor can you.’
‘No one’s “making you” do anything,’ said Alice calmly. ‘Hugh just gets the impression you’re not happy here. Is that right?’
I told Alice this was an absolutely stupid idiotic question. Of course I wasn’t ‘happy’ when, at any time, we could get a call from Carmody telling us that Valentina’s body had been found in a forest or dumped in a lime quarry. How could anyone be ‘happy’ under circumstances like these?
Alice gave me one of her scrutinising looks. You could tell her brain was whirling with questions, and to forestall the one that was going to come out of her mouth next I said: ‘I want to know something. Did you show Grigory Panin Valentina’s manuscript?’
There was a silence, during which Alice blinked. She hadn’t expected me to come up with a question of my own.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Did he ask you to show it to him?’
‘No. He asked me to tell him what it was about, that’s all.’
‘And did you tell him?’
‘Yes.’
‘In detail?’
‘No. There wasn’t really time. Just the thrust of the story, as far as I’ve got . . .’
‘And how did he react?’
Alice shrugged. ‘He wanted to clarify a few things. He seemed interested in it, more so than I would have expected. Why do you want to know all this, Lewis? It was you we were talking about . . .’
We began to walk on. We were going in the direction of the menagerie, where we’d first seen the bison and the cocktail trolley. I said that I didn’t want to talk about me, that I had no remembrance of the me Alice was referring to, it had existed so far back in time. Then I added: ‘If you send me back to Devon before I find Valentina, she stands no chance of ever coming back.’
‘The police will find her,’ said Alice gently.
‘No, they won’t,’ I said. ‘They don’t have enough facts. They don’t know what’s important and what’s useless. But I know. And one thing I think is, she could only be in Russia with Grigory if Grigory has seen her new book, so I hope you’re not lying to me about that.’
Alice shook back her thorn-tree hair. She said she was surprised how I spoke to her these days, so rudely. We were in the allée of limes now and in this lovely shade I wanted to whisper that I was only rude because I knew she’d started lying to me. I felt cool and deadly, as if, without the least effort, I could dance along here, like a kick-boxer, laying waste everyone who got in my way.
I ran on a little way. My legs and feet felt light and I called back: ‘I don’t mean to be rude to you. I just want to get at the answers, that’s all.’
It was then that we came upon the bear. I don’t know why we’d never seen him before; he must have been lurking in his tunnel under the ground, ignoring the sunlight and the world. But he was there now, in his pit, twenty feet below us, a yellowy-brown bear with his long nose always pointing towards the people above him, trying to smell them and work out what creatures they were. The young kids called to him and held their arms over the wire. They thought he was something they could take home with them and put into their beds on winter nights to keep them warm.
Alice and I hung over the pit and stared. There was almost nothing in the pit except a pathetic tree-sculpture the bear was meant to feel happy about climbing, but you could tell he didn’t feel happy about anything; he wanted to be out of this awful place and back on a Canadian mountainside, munching bees. His world was empty of everything except the smell of people and this smell confused him and kept him wandering round and round the pit, with his nose lifted into the air.
The bear made me feel ridiculously sad. I actually felt like holding on to Alice and weeping. Some of my sadness was for the bear and all the rest was for me. After enduring this choking feeling of misery for several minutes, I said: ‘I don’t know why this had to happen!’
‘I know,’ said Alice.
She didn’t ‘know’, of course. She couldn’t have begun to imagine. If I’d told her one half of what I felt about Valentina, she would have just thought my brain was overheating, like it did when I was a child and imagined the German paratrooper alive in our cellar.
I didn’t want to stay in the Jardin des Plantes after seeing the bear. I wanted to be back in the flat, so that I could call Carmody and continue my search for the disks. Alice suggested we go to a café and have a meal, but for once I didn’t feel hungry. I said to Alice: ‘We can’t just act normally, you know, going to cafés and things, when Valentina could be dead.’
‘Lewis,’ said Alice firmly, ‘don’t be such a prig.’
Then we travelled all the way home in total absolute silence. As usual, men on the métro stared at Alice, but instead of keeping watch over her I turned my face to the window and let the sooty tunnels and the bright stations alternate in front of my eyes.
The flat was tidy when we got in, with all Valentina’s underwear and the musical boxes put away. Violette had also polished the parquet and the floors were gleaming and slippery again, like in the days before Valentina’s broken arm. I didn’t know whether Violette was getting paid any more or if she was working for nothing until the day when Madame walked back into the apartment and I ran towards her and put my arms round her.
There was a message on the answering machine. It was from Dominique Monod at the publishers, Bianquis, inviting Alice to supper that evening ‘to discuss the situation vis-à-vis Mademoiselle Gavril’. It said a car would call for her at seven-thirty. I said to Alice I thought it sounded more like a summons than a charming invitation to dinner, but all Alice said was: ‘At least she’s sending a car.’
I wasn’t invited, needless to say, so Alice gave me some money and told me to go to Prisunic and get some food. In the old days of our life in Devon I never had to get my own meals, but now everything was altering all the time.
I took Sergei with me and tied him up outside Prisunic, where he started barking at the bird whistler, and as I went into the store I heard the bird whistler bark back.
Alice hadn’t told me what food to get. Valentina would have devised some delicious concoction for me, using ingredients you never imagined putting together, like, say, petits pois and anchovies. But now I
just walked along the shelves, staring at tins of vegetables and packets of meat and cartons of yoghurt and felt my brain go numb. I wished I were Sergei and could make do with a tin of dog meat. The idea of cooking anything without Valentina’s step-by-step instructions felt much too difficult.
In the end, I just got two litre-bottles of Orangina, a packet of crisps, some bread and some ham. I knew this was pitiful and that, when the time for supper came, I’d wish I’d bought Mexican chicken wings and oyster mushrooms and sour cream or something, but I just didn’t understand the science of cooking, and that was that. I couldn’t see what the connection was between a raw leek, say, and leek soup. I couldn’t envisage what it was that the leek had to undergo.
On the way home, I approached the bird whistler. I said: ‘Show me what you do,’ and he took out of his mouth a tiny little plastic gizmo, the shape of a half-moon, and coloured pink to match his tongue. ‘Sifflet du chasseur,’ he said, ‘pour imiter la perdrix, la caille, le merle, la grive et le cri du lapin.’ I’d never noticed rabbits had a cry. But I didn’t mention this to the whistle-seller; I bought one of his whistles instead, with the rest of the supper money given to me by Alice, and all the way home, with the whistle pressed against my tongue and the roof of my mouth, pretended to be a bird. I don’t know what kind of bird I was pretending to be.
When I got back, I put my food away. Already, it looked hopeless and unappetising and even the bread was hard. I began wondering if Moinel was a good cook and whether, once Alice had left, I could invite myself to supper next door. Then, thinking about Moinel, I began to reconstruct our visit to the hospital and I knew, suddenly, what had been nagging at my mind on our way back from there: the second receptionist we’d approached had asked us a question without using a definite article – exactly the mistake that Grisha made all the time. She’d said: ‘Etes-vous police?’ And it was this phrase that had stayed in my mind, hidden just under the surface of consciousness. But my French simply wasn’t perfect enough to know, for certain, whether it constituted a linguistic error or not.