by Rose Tremain
I went to ask Alice, but the door of her room was locked. When I knocked on it, Alice called out to me that she was sleeping. She told me to go away. I got the suspicion that, just as I had moments of wanting to drown my parents, so Alice had moments of wanting to drown me. But I needed an answer to my question now, so I said, ‘Just tell me, if you wanted to ask someone, in French, if they were from the police, how would you phrase the question?’
There was a silence, into which I knew Alice was fitting a sigh. Then she said: ‘You’d either say: “Etes-vous de la police?” or “Etes-vous des policiers?”’
‘Could you never, ever, say: “Etes-vous police?”’
‘You could say it but it wouldn’t be correct.’
‘So no French person would ever make this mistake?’
‘I doubt it. Now please go and play chess or something, Lewis. I’m feeling really tired.’
I went up to my room and opened my Concorde notebook. Sometimes I can write something down that I didn’t know I knew and I hoped this would happen now – that I’d suddenly see the significance of there being a Russian receptionist at the very desk where Valentina had or had not checked in for her X-ray appointment. I knew it had to be important, but I couldn’t see why. All I wrote was: Second receptionist was (probably) Russian. Her behaviour was rude. She didn’t want to take the photo of V. Why?
I picked up Elroy absent-mindedly and we both stared vacantly out at the room. After about ten minutes had passed, something dawned on me. Perhaps this Russian receptionist hadn’t wanted to take the photograph of Valentina because she’d recognised her! She’d recognised her because Valentina had reported for her appointment on that Tuesday afternoon. The Russian receptionist had been the one to check her in. And then Valentina had disappeared. She had disappeared from the hospital. The Russian receptionist had been involved in the disappearance.
In this way, when the time came for her to be called in to Dr Bouchain’s consulting room, she was no longer there. At this point, a different receptionist was at the desk. In the crucial ten or fifteen minutes between Valentina arriving and being called to go in to see the doctor, the shift at the desk changed, and so the new (non-Russian) receptionist looked around and called and told Dr Bouchain that Valentina had never arrived.
I scribbled down this hypothesis. I thought, if I’m right, everything will hinge on the lack of a definite article. But the question remained: if Valentina had been abducted from the hospital, who had taken her and how? Had she been called to the phone? Had someone come in posing as a doctor? Who, apart from Dr Bouchain, knew she had an appointment with the X-ray department that afternoon? Was Dr Bouchain himself involved? Was the Russian receptionist definitely the one who had led her away? And what happened next? Assuming she left the hospital, where was she taken and how?
My brain felt a bit exhausted, as if I were in the middle of a difficult chess game. I hesitated between two actions – calling Carmody or going straight to the hospital, myself, now. I just sat where I was, hesitating, mainly because, for some reason I couldn’t actually express, I felt frightened by both things.
Didier had explained to me that when an existentialist is faced with two choices and can’t decide between them, and so does nothing, he is still making a choice: he is choosing not to choose. He said: ‘But we can’t take refuge in a non-decision, Louis. A non-decision is a decision of a kind. We have to take responsibility for whatever comes from it.’
I didn’t want to make a non-decision. In one of my reports, the head teacher Mr Quaid had written: Lewis is a person of resolution. So I decided to call Carmody. It was still only mid-afternoon and I was fairly sure he’d be in his office. Calling him frightened me less than going to the hospital. It was like I knew that if I went to the hospital I’d see something I’d rather not see.
Carmody wasn’t in his office. I was told he was ‘out of Paris’ for twenty-four hours. I wanted to say that he’d said we could call him any time, day or night, and he’d be there, but I didn’t. Perhaps he hadn’t said this at all, only somehow made me believe it because I wanted to believe that someone was watching over us?
Now, I had to go to the hospital. I tried to dream up a third option, but there wasn’t one and that was that.
I took Sergei with me. I was in the habit of talking to him quite a lot. He didn’t show much sign of listening to me. All he did was just trot along, ignoring me, flicking his tail in the sunshine, but I found talking to him consoling, nevertheless. In a survey done in California, it was revealed that ninety-one per cent of female dog owners talked to their pets ‘about intimate matters’. It didn’t say what the men talked about. The surveyors just probably assumed that men never talked to dogs, which isn’t true. Bertie used to have a West Highland Terrier called Sally and he often talked to her. Once, I heard him say: ‘Sally, that wife of mine sometimes drives me absolutely potty.’
We took the metro to a station called Convention. Some of the names of Paris stations are weird. My favourite is Mairie des Lilas. I imagined coming up there into the arms of a woman in a lilac tree.
Convention wasn’t far from the hospital and as I walked along the rue de Vaugirard, getting nearer to it, I felt myself long to turn round and go back to the apartment. If I hadn’t had Sergei with me I might have turned back, but I kept going and when I arrived at Main Reception I recognised the girls who had been so nice to Moinel and my courage improved.
But then they weren’t nice to me. They told me I couldn’t bring Sergei inside. They were furious that I’d thought of it, as if dogs were radioactive or something. I had to take him out and tie him to a railing and this made me uneasy. I could just imagine some deranged patient walking out and seeing Sergei and stealing him then and there. ‘Reste!’ I told him. ‘Ne bouge pas!’
When I got to Radiologie, the Russian receptionist was at the desk. I hid in the corridor, planning what to say. Then I moved towards her, and when she saw me she looked startled, like I was a radioactive dog. And seeing her get startled like this made me feel suddenly sure that she knew something about Valentina and that my hypothesis had been set out along the right lines.
I asked her if she’d shown Valentina’s photograph to her colleagues and she nodded and said: ‘Oh yes. Nobody in this department has seen that woman.’
‘What about Dr Bouchain? He knows her, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes, of course. I do not include Dr Bouchain.’
‘Is Dr Bouchain certain he didn’t see her on that day?’
‘I cannot tell you this.’
‘Can I talk to Dr Bouchain, please?’
‘You have appointment?’
I thought, there she goes again: no article. And this was a stupid question. She knew perfectly well I didn’t have an appointment.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have an appointment.’
This confused her just for a second, as I hoped it would. ‘Your name?’ she said.
‘Petit,’ I replied. ‘Louis Petit.’
My heart was jumping about inside my skinny T-shirt. One of several differences between Porphiry Petrovich and me was that Porphiry Petrovich was never afraid.
The Russian receptionist pretended to scan the appointments list. Just then, one of the doors opened and a doctor appeared, holding some X-rays clipped to a line. I dived towards him, as fast as I tried to dive towards the line in a rugby game. Lewis is a person of resolution.
‘Dr Bouchain?’ I asked.
Over my boring supper, I reconstructed my two and a half minutes with Bouchain. I was trying to see if there was something in it that was important, but which I hadn’t seen.
There didn’t seem to be anything.
He was a friendly man. He wore small glasses that looked as if their frames were made of gold. He asked me to come into his consulting room. He confirmed to me that he had X-rayed Valentina’s arm when she was brought into the hospital on the day she fell down and that she had fractured it in two places. Then he said: ‘I was booked to see
her about ten days ago, but she missed the appointment. I hope the arm is healing correctly. She isn’t in any pain, is she?’
‘I don’t know . . .’ I stammered. ‘We think she’s in Russia, possibly in Kiev, but we’re not sure . . .’
‘What has happened?’ he asked, looking at me kindly.
‘We don’t know. We only know she isn’t at home. Did Inspecteur Carmody call you?’
‘Yes. He asked me if I saw her on that day – last Tuesday – and I told him that I never saw her.’
Then I said: ‘Can you be absolutely certain that Valentina never arrived at the hospital?’
‘Well,’ said Bouchain, ‘she never arrived in my consulting room. I came out, into the reception area, and she was not there. We had her paged, but she never turned up.’
‘One of your receptionists told Valentina’s mother, Mrs Gavrilovich, that she’d seen her . . .’
‘I have a lot of patients. She thinks now that she must have muddled her with someone else.’
‘Could there ever have been a tick against her name on the appointments list?’
‘Your Inspecteur asked me that. No, I don’t think so. A tick indicates that the patient has arrived. When the patient is seen by me or one of the other radiologists, the name is barred with a highlighter pen, but if the patient doesn’t keep the appointment, a cross is put against the name. This procedure never alters and there should be no confusions at all.’
I left then. I was very polite and apologetic to Dr Bouchain and thanked him for giving me his precious time, et cetera, et cetera. Hearing this polite voice of mine, I thought, when I’m old, I’m going to sound exactly like Grandad Bertie.
Dr Bouchain shook my hand. On my way out, the Russian receptionist stared at me and when I looked back from the corridor she was still staring, like she was a marksperson keeping me in her sights. So I dodged down and began to run and I ran very fast through all the long corridors till I came to the main entrance and went out to Sergei, who was safe and sound, just as I’d left him, and we began the journey home.
Now, we were both eating bread and ham in the kitchen. Alice had put on her one smart dress for her dinner with Dominique. Her one smart dress was made of a thin creasy kind of velvet and it had a tiny slit in one of the seams that she hadn’t noticed was there. But she looked beautiful, I had to admit. The dress was dark green and her fiery hair fell on to the green like the colours of the fall in New England I’d once seen in a calendar picture.
Round her neck was a rope of false pearls that didn’t look false, and before she left I took these pearls in my hand for a moment. It was difficult to feel angry with Alice when she looked really beautiful, and I wanted to say I was sorry, but somehow no words of apology would come out of me. Alice patted my hair. ‘Enjoy your supper,’ she said. She didn’t know that all I had was ham and crisps.
After supper, Sergei and I watched TV. There was a programme about the Women of Europe. One of these women was a brilliant intelligent mayor of a German city and another was a Spanish garment worker. These two people were the same age, forty-four, but the Spanish garment worker earned one fifteenth of the salary of the mayor. There were no English women mentioned in the programme, as if England wasn’t really part of Europe.
The woman I liked best was a dairy farmer in the Auvergne. If I’d had to choose any of them for a mother, I would have chosen her.
She was about forty. She got up at four in the morning to milk her cows and lived in a white house by a row of poplars. Her name was Arlette. She ate lonely dinners of bread and soup with her dog, Michou. She had huge bright eyes, like Valentina’s, and her hair was as wild as hay. You could be sure that old Michou was a dog who knew a lot of ‘intimate matters’, and when Sergei saw him he went nearer the TV set and barked at him.
Alice told me she might be home late. I said: ‘Fine. It doesn’t matter. I’ll go to bed.’
When the programme about the Women of Europe ended, I took Sergei for a walk round the block, just as far as the Avenue Friedland, and we both looked for a second at the Arc de Triomphe on its mound of light, with all the traffic swirling round it. And I thought, this is where my existence is now: I’ve chosen Paris.
I went to sleep reading Crime et châtiment. I read the bit where Mrs Marmeladov, who’s dying of tuberculosis, goes crazy and starts making her children dance in the street for money and I thought it was just about the saddest passage I’d ever read in any book ever.
When I woke up, I knew before I opened my eyes that something was odd in my room. I’d heard a noise and it was this noise that had woken me. And then I noticed that it was much darker than normal in the room – almost pitch dark, which it never was because of the light from the street coming through my round window.
I thought something had happened to the sky. I was still half in a dream about the blood coming out of Mrs Marmeladov’s mouth, and I thought, there’s blood in the sky now, making everything go black. Then I sat up.
There was a face at my window.
I stayed absolutely still, with my breaths coming out as whimpers. My right hand slowly curved itself around the body of Elroy, who was lying near my thighs on the bed. I didn’t look back up at the window. All I knew was that the face had something wrapped around it and the only bit of it you could see were the eyes.
I got up and ran. I was out of my door and down the stairs and yelling for Alice in less than ten seconds. Then I was in her room switching on the light and screaming at her to wake up. But she wasn’t there. I stared at her bed, with its blue-and-gold bedcover. I just couldn’t believe she wasn’t in it. ‘Alice!’ I kept shrieking, ‘Alice! ALICE!’
But I knew I should keep moving. I knew the next thing that was going to happen was that whoever was at my window was going to come into the flat. He would come in through my bathroom window and he would follow me down here and kill me . . .
I heard Sergei begin to bark then. I tore out of Alice’s bedroom and skidded across the parquet of the salon and into Valentina’s room. As I went, I flicked on every light and all the time part of me was listening for footsteps coming down my stairs. I fell over on to Sergei, then scrambled to my feet and got a hold of his collar and together we went slithering over the parquet as fast as I could make him go. As we went, I yelled in French: ‘Don’t come down! I’ve got a dangerous dog here! I’ve got a very dangerous dog!’
Then we were out of the flat and on the landing. All I was wearing was my underpants. I knew that at any moment I might piss in them.
I found Moinel’s doorbell and, still holding on to Elroy and holding on to Sergei, I held my fist against it and heard it buzz. I began knocking with my head against the door and calling out to Moinel.
Nothing happened. I imagined Moinel far away in some other part of the city, drinking in a bar, listening to jazz, and my calling to him turned into a kind of prayer:
‘S’il vous plaît, Moinel, soyez là. Aidez-moi. Moinel, aide-moi . . .’
Then I heard him on the other side of the door. ‘Qui est là?’ he whispered.
‘Moinel! C’est Louis. Aidez-moi . . .’
His door had a security chain on it. Above the chain, I saw Moinel’s tangerine head appear and I let out a sob of relief. When he opened the door, I stumbled towards him and he held me up, just stopping me from falling. He thought I was wounded or ill, so he began to look me over and ask me questions, but all I said was: ‘Close the door, Moinel. Close the door!’
He closed it. I sat down on a hard couch in Moinel’s little hallway. I’d let go of Sergei now that we were safely inside, but I was still clutching Elroy. The breaths coming out of me weren’t just breaths, but half sobs, like the breaths Mrs Marmeladov has to breathe when she goes begging on the street.
Moinel crouched down by me and stroked my hand. He was wearing a navy-blue-and-white kimono. ‘OK . . .’ he said in his reassuring English. ‘It’s OK, Louis. Take your time. Breathe. That’s it. Are you hurt? Breathe. Take your time . . .’
‘A face . . .’ I said. And I raised my hand feebly, pointing up.
‘OK. Take your time. A face. Where?’
‘Someone . . .’
‘In the apartment?’
‘At my window.’
‘Has anyone hurt you?’
‘No.’
‘But you saw a face at your window?’
‘Looking in . . . Wrapped in a scarf or something. He was going to kill me, Moinel!’
Moinel stood up. He said: ‘OK, you’re safe now. You’re safe now. I’m going to get you something warm to put on. Wait there. Hold on to Sergei – he’s nice and warm.’
I did as he said. I put my arm round Sergei and made him come close to me and then I started sobbing like a kid into his furry neck. Then I felt something soft on my shoulders. Moinel was wrapping me gently in a duvet, then helping me up and we walked together into his salon, which was painted brilliant staring white with big white sofas in front of a marble fireplace.
He sat me down on one of the sofas. I was aware of an ache in my hand and I knew this came from gripping Elroy so hard. Then Moinel handed me a glass of something and told me to drink. I didn’t know what it was. It was like all my senses were muddled and would never again get sorted out. I let go of Elroy and laid him on my lap. Then I drank and felt the liquid go down into me and warm me and I kept drinking till I reached the bottom of the glass.
Moinel took the glass from me and pulled the duvet round me, till every part of my body was covered. I knew I was behaving like a boy of five, but I couldn’t help it and I didn’t care.
The night kept on being strange.
The police came. Not Carmody, but two others, in uniform. I supposed they were agents or brigadiers. They asked me to describe the face I’d seen, but all I could say was: ‘I didn’t see it. Only the eyes.’
‘How were the eyes?’ they asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
I’d locked myself out of the apartment – I had had no time to think about keys – so I couldn’t let the brigadiers in. They said they would go down and wake up the concierge.