by Rose Tremain
When they came back, they said they’d searched the apartment and cased the roof and there was no one there. One of them told me that the time was three o’clock.
They said they’d patrol the street and keep watch. And all I wanted to do then was he down and go to sleep, but I remembered Alice, so Moinel wrote her a note and pinned it to our apartment door. And while we waited for Alice to come in, I let myself lie down on the white sofa and close my eyes. Moinel stayed in the room. I could feel him there, just out of sight. He put some Mozart on his CD player and played it very quietly and then I heard him moving about and opened my eyes. I saw him put down a bowl of water for Sergei. I thought, he’s doing everything right, in the right order, and keeping so calm and contained, it’s as if he knew this was all going to happen and planned exactly what he had to do . . .
Then I slept for a little while. The next thing I remember was that Alice was there. She smelled of smoke. She and Moinel were trying between them to lift me up, but I knew what they were going to do, they were going to take me back to my room, and I didn’t want to go there. I just wanted to stay here, with the Mozart on the CD. So I fought them. And then I heard Moinel say: ‘Leave him. He can sleep there. He’ll be fine.’
Then it was morning. It was light and cool in Moinel’s airy white room and I could hear the pigeons in the street. I knew that somewhere quite near, both Moinel and Alice would still be sleeping.
When I remembered the face at my window, it was like a part of my brain got suddenly dark. I lay very still, looking at the ceiling. I felt grateful that the room was white.
Moinel made us a breakfast of pink grapefruit and hot brioches and coffee. The coffeepot was silver and the grapefruit halves were put into cut-glass dishes and the brioches were folded inside the blue-and-white napkin. It looked like a painting of a breakfast and I didn’t want to mess it up by eating it. I just sat at the table, watching Alice and watching Moinel, trying to keep this peculiar darkness from seeping across my mind.
‘Eat, Louis,’ said Moinel.
‘Yes, eat,’ said Alice. ‘Come on.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ I said.
When we left Moinel’s and the door closed on us in Valentina’s apartment, I couldn’t move. I sat in the salon, staring at the dust in the squares of sunlight on the floor. It was like I didn’t really see the whole room, but only the bits of it that the sun lit up.
Alice went off to have a bath. She was still wearing her velvet dress that smelled of smoke. She stayed in the bathroom for a long time and I knew she was lying there, dreaming about Didier. But now, since I’d seen the face at my window, I no longer wanted to be told about it. I wanted her to keep absolutely silent and closed like a clam.
Later, someone called Inspecteur Villeneuve arrived and began to ask me questions about the face. I was still sitting in the salon, not moving, and Violette had gone round and round me with the floor polisher, watching me with her sad brown eyes.
Inspecteur Villeneuve wasn’t a bit like Carmody, but tall and pale with a long nose that sniffed the air as he talked. I told him I’d prefer to talk to Carmody, but he didn’t hear this. He probably didn’t hear it because I didn’t even say it, only thought I said it.
Alice sat by me. She smelled of soap now and she’d changed into jeans and a white shirt. She took my hand and held it in hers and though I wanted to remove it I didn’t have the strength. ‘Try to remember . . .’ she kept saying.
All I said was that the face was wrapped up. I said it could have been wrapped in a bandage or in a dishcloth, like you might wrap a head that was severed. And Alice and Villeneuve stared at me, as if I’d said something wrong or embarrassing. After a moment, I said: ‘I can’t help it if this upsets you.’
Then Villeneuve disappeared. Alice said he was going to question everyone in the building, but I knew he was on the roof, looking for footprints in the slate dust and fingerprints on the glass. I said to Alice: ‘I’m going to throw up now.’
She ran and got a bowl. All that seemed to be inside me was a bit of pale-green slime. Then Violette came and knelt by me and gave me a little sip of Orangina to drink through a straw, and what I thought then was, I wish I were Pozzi, learning toilet etiquette, small and safe in Violette’s skinny arms.
Violette and Alice put me to bed in the room I once thought had been Grisha’s. It had apricot-coloured curtains and a bed head made of gold wood. They fetched everything out of my attic – all my clothes and my musical box and my Concorde notebook and my lipstick and my books – and stowed these away in drawers and cupboards without comment, without saying a single word. The only things they didn’t find were Alice’s gold chain and Valentina’s silk nightdress under my pillow.
I wanted Alice to go away and Violette to sing to me:
Moi, je t’offrirai des perles de pluie,
Venues des pays où il ne pleut pas,
Ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas . . .
But it was Alice who stayed and Violette who went, and all she did was sit there in silence.
Then I heard the telephone ring and she went away and I noticed that the apricot curtains had been drawn, like it was night time, so I thought, well, OK, if it’s a sort of night, then I’ll go to sleep. I tried to call Violette back, but she didn’t hear me.
I went straight into a dream about Hugh. I was helping him with his hut, buttering bricks with cement and handing them to him, but this hut had got so large, it filled up every inch of ground that had once been the garden. It was like Hampton Court, with bell towers and arches and vaulted ceilings and square windows that let in the sound of the sea. He worked like someone in a cartoon, in a sort of speeded-up way, slamming brick after brick in place, so that I couldn’t prepare them fast enough for him and he began to get angry. ‘It’s not my fault,’ I said. ‘I’m not really there.’
When I woke up, I was drenched in sweat and the bedclothes over me felt as heavy as mud.
The light in the room had altered and I thought it might be dusk and I remembered Valentina saying, on our first night in Paris: ‘Now you see the evening begin to come down. The evening is a bird covering us with its wings,’ and I thought, well, now this bird is going to land on me, on this bed of mud.
Then I felt something settle on my head. I knew it was a bird of some kind, but I’d forgotten the names of every single bird in the universe.
‘Louis?’ a voice said.
I stared up. The thing I saw wasn’t a bird, but Mrs Gavrilovich’s mouth, full of broken teeth. She was trying to talk to me, but I couldn’t hear her very well. She put something into my hand and I saw that it was a spoon. I was sitting up now, but I didn’t know how this change in my position had occurred. In front of me was a bowl of soup. It was a deep dark red, the colour of wine.
Mrs Gavrilovich took the spoon from me and began to feed me tiny sips of the red soup, but I knew if she went on with this I’d throw up again, so I asked her to take the soup away. I found my thoughts had wandered to an imaginary Kiev and to Grisha walking around in some park full of chess players, with his head tipped back, looking at the sky. ‘Has Grisha been found?’ I asked, but no one answered and then I saw that Mrs Gavrilovich and the bowl of soup and the spoon had gone and I was alone and the night had come.
With the night came something else. I saw a shape at the end of a long tunnel like a railway tunnel – very cold and dark, with water dripping from the curved walls – and the shape got gradually larger, as if I were a slow train in the tunnel, inching towards it.
The nearer I got to the shape, the more it filled up the mouth of the tunnel. I thought it would get out of the way and that I’d emerge into the sunlight in a landscape of rocks and grass and tall trees with grey roots clinging to a railway cutting, but all it did was move on the spot, like something dancing. I stopped and stood watching it and I began to feel that it had come there for me and that whatever I did – even if I retreated back down the icy tunnel – it would follow me and fol
d itself around me. So I went forward, step by step, holding on to the tunnel wall, and then an old familiar scent came wafting towards me: it was Valentina’s wallflower night repair cream.
I tried to speak, but by that time I was in the shape and it was in me, moulding itself round me like heavy air. It didn’t hurt me or push me, but just gradually enfolded me, and, despite the beautiful scent of the wallflower cream, being enfolded like this made me start to shiver; instead of being soft and warm, as Valentina’s body would have been, it was soft and cool, and then I began to understand that the shape was Valentina’s ghost.
When I woke again, I was crying and my top lip was covered with snot, just like it’d been when I was a kid and made of Play Doh. I heard someone say: ‘It’s OK, Lewis. It’s going to be OK.’ And what I said was: ‘No, it isn’t.’ Then more covers were put on top of me and I entered a soundless, dreamless state.
What I remember next is surfacing back into consciousness and hearing church bells and deciding the day of the week was Sunday. I didn’t know what had happened to Saturday. Where it should have been, there was only a black hole in my mind.
I sat up and looked round this new room of mine. On the bedside table lay Grisha’s book, La Vie secrète de Catherine la Grande, and my next thought was, I’ve got way behind with my investigation into Valentina’s plagiarism and I should focus on that now, so that we can either pursue or eliminate the Grisha Theory, but when I went to pick the book up my arm felt weak and I had to put it down again. So I just lay there, waiting. The thing I seemed to be waiting for was for someone to bring me a bowl of red soup.
Later, Alice gave me a bath. My body stank like cheese; I could smell it the minute I pushed back my bedcovers. She washed my cheesy hair and scrubbed my back and I just sat in the water, obeying her instructions. She said: ‘You’ve been quite ill. Moinel thinks it may have been shock.’
And it was then that I remembered the face at the window and said: ‘It’s only a matter of time before that person comes back.’
Alice poured water over my head. The feel of the hot water running down my spine made me shiver. She said: ‘I don’t think he will come back. The police are keeping watch now.’
‘Keeping watch where?’
‘In the street.’
‘It won’t be enough. He’ll get on to the roof by some other route.’
‘Well,’ said Alice, ‘you’re safe now. The door to the attic stairs has been locked. You needn’t go up to that attic ever again.’
I asked Alice to print me out a copy of Valentina’s novel and she brought it in to me almost straight away. People who are ill have to be obeyed. Then she made up my bed with clean sheets and I lay there, propped up with cushions, like Valentina when she broke her arm, reading Alice’s translation of Pour l’amour d’Isabelle. Outside, the church bells kept ringing and ringing.
I thought the book was quite exciting and good in a weird kind of way. It wasn’t exactly Crime et châtiment, but for something supposed to be a medieval romance it was almost brilliant. The portrait it painted of Isabelle’s husband, Pierre, the Duc de Belfort, was really frightening and strange. Valentina had made him a total retard. He had a set of toy soldiers made of lead and this was what he liked to do all day, play with his lead soldiers and imagine battles for them. The room where he kept them – set out on two huge tables – was furnished with muskets and kegs of gunpowder and military helmets. His moments of retardation were a good deal more frequent than mine with Elroy.
When Pierre wasn’t playing with his soldiers and setting up executions for the poor toy generals who had lost his wars, he was torturing live things, like pet rabbits and mice. He kept alive a snake, called Serpentine, uniquely for the pleasure of torturing it. Part of the torture included suffocating it by sticking it up his rectum. And this was the only way he could get any sexual pleasure – with his snake, Serpentine. I thought, God, did Valentina make this up or does it come out of Grisha’s text?
Whenever Pierre tried to make love to Isabelle, it was a hopeless failure and he just fell asleep before he’d hardly started. Not that Isabelle minded. She didn’t want him near her. She’d been forced into the marriage by her ambitious mother, but now she despised Pierre. She sat in her room under the bell tower, doing her calligraphy lessons and praying that Pierre would die. She became the mistress of the apothecary’s handsome son, Barthélémy, and told him how she wanted Pierre dead and he started to talk to her about finding a clever poison ‘that would leave no trace’.
I was still hoping that Valentina was going to include something about a woman, like Catherine la Grande, who had a lover forty years younger and that that lover would turn out to be thirteen years old, when I got to the passage about the smallpox plague coming to Belfort. Isabelle, who was immune to smallpox, having had it as a child, persuaded Pierre – who was mortally afraid of the plague – to join the throng of people who were praying to their favourite saint, Sainte Estelle, at the city gate. She didn’t tell him that, because so many people were gathered here, this place had become the most infected part of the city, and he was too stupid to realise this. It was here that I found the bit I’d already read, about Father H being sent to remove Sainte Estelle and being dismembered by the people, and now I saw how it fitted in. Pierre was the man who cut off Father H’s testicles. He took them back to the palace and fed them to Serpentine for supper.
I was so engrossed in this story that I didn’t want to stop, but Violette came in with a meal on a tray and said to me: ‘You better eat something, Louis. If you don’t eat now you won’t get well, and if you don’t get well we’re never going to find Madame.’ So I put the book aside and Violette stayed with me while I ate a sliver of chicken and a few grains of white rice.
Then, after a while, I realised Violette shouldn’t be here. It was Sunday and she never worked in the apartment on a Sunday, so I said: ‘Why are you here, Violette?’
She didn’t reply. She got up and closed the door of the room and then she came and sat down closer to the bed and whispered to me: ‘I made a vèvè last night, Louis. We asked Ogou Feray to come.’
‘What’s a vèvè, Violette?’ I said.
‘A pattern. You make it on the floor with rice or grains or flour and through the vèvè the spirits come . . .’
‘Is Ogou Feray a spirit?’
‘Yes. We say, at home, he lives in the calabash tree. His colour is red, so we made the vèvè with red beans. And one of his days is Saturday, so we had to get him to come last night.’
‘What did you ask him to do?’
‘Ogou Feray is the one who fights against all bad conditions – including bad illness. When he comes, he makes you swear, I tell you! You curse and yell when Ogou Feray comes into you.’ Violette laughed. ‘But I got used to him,’ she added. ‘I’ve been asking him to help with my bad conditions for a long time now. I think he got those Social Security people to give me a work permit, you see?’
‘What did you ask him to do this time?’
‘Make you well. And now you’re sitting up, eating a bit of chicken!’
‘Is this why you came today, to see if I was better?’
‘No. Since you were ill, I come here every day.’
I tried to finish the chicken, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know where my famous raging hunger had got to. If Valentina had been there and invited me to lunch at the Plaza, I would have had to refuse. I told Violette I was sorry about not eating the food and she said: ‘Tomorrow, you will,’ as if this was something that Ogou Feray had informed her.
Then she took my tray away and told me never to tell anyone about the spirits; this was a secret between me and her and could never be revealed. As she was going out of the door, I said: ‘Violette, could you ask Ogou Feray to do something about Valentina?’
She shook her head. ‘Ogou Feray might not be the one to ask. You have to choose which spirit you want – this one for a love charm, that one to protect your home, this one for a good harvest, tha
t one to bring you money – and how do I know what’s happening to Madame?’
‘Ask Ogou anyway. If she’s been taken, she may be held somewhere very cold or dirty or horrible . . .’
‘Or else there is some spell on her. Then I have to talk to Gédé, to get it removed. But Gédé is the spirit of death and he makes me afraid.’
Alice came to see me. All we talked about at first was the pathetic bit of chicken I’d eaten. Then she handed me something she’d been holding in her lap. It was Elroy. His beret was missing, but I didn’t mention this. I just took him and laid him on one of my cushions, face down. The cushion was gold and he looked a bit as if he were slithering up a hill of sand towards an enemy position below. When a real enemy had come, he’d been completely useless.
Alice sat there, looking at me. In the street, I could hear two people having a conversation about the price of flowers. And then Alice said: ‘Hugh called yesterday and I had to tell him that you were ill. I didn’t tell him what had happened, but he’s not stupid, he senses that something is odd here . . .’
‘I’m not going back to England.’
‘I think you may have to go, Lewis. Bertie and Gwyneth are leaving the house at the weekend and it’s only a fortnight or so before your term begins. Dad wants me to send you home no later than next Sunday.’
‘And you agreed?’
‘I said I would talk to you . . .’
‘Well, you’ve talked to me. I’m not going. We have to find Valentina.’
Alice took my hand and stroked it with hers. I didn’t look at her, but at Elroy scaling his dune. Sometimes I envied Elroy his indifference towards everything in the world.
‘You’re very fond of Valentina, aren’t you?’ said Alice.
I still didn’t look at her. What I said was: ‘Is Carmody back?’
‘Answer my question,’ said Alice.
‘Answer mine,’ I said.
So we just stayed silent, like people do when they’re trying to work out how to get their way, and the conversation in the street went on and on, clear as a bird: peonies so much, lilies x or y, geraniums bla bla bla, cheaper at Fleurs Monceau than in the rue Ponthieu, cheaper still at the marché aux fleurs . . . if one didn’t mind the walk, or if one included the price of the taxi . . .