The Way I Found Her

by Rose Tremain

  Alice caved in first. She said: ‘Carmody’s back. He came round and I took him up to your room. He’s now talked to everyone in the building.’

  I didn’t want us to go into silence again, so I kept asking questions. Did Carmody have any news of Grisha? Had Alice told him to examine the GOH file? What did Dominique want?

  When I mentioned Dominique, Alice turned her head away and looked out of the window. ‘She doesn’t know anything,’ she said. ‘She’s in the dark.’

  I stared at her. I thought, I’ve lost my feeling for when Alice is telling the truth and when she’s lying, but I knew it was pointless to pester her; she wouldn’t tell me anything more.

  I returned to the subject of the GOH file. Alice said it contained a list of expenses and that was all.

  ‘What kind of expenses?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Aren’t they identified?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘If they’re identified, they could prove to be important because they could tell us what happened to that translator, Gail, and this could be connected—’

  ‘Stop!’ said Alice. ‘Now look at me, Lewis. This has got to end. You’ve got to stop taking responsibility for everything and believing you can fix it. Nothing is your fault and nothing can be solved by you, however much you want to solve it.’

  ‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘I am solving it. I’m getting close. That’s why that face came to my window. They’re trying to frighten me.’

  ‘Carmody said there was no trace of anyone having been on the roof.’

  ‘You mean you don’t believe I saw a face?’

  ‘I believe you saw something and it frightened you.’

  ‘It wasn’t “something”. It was a man’s face!’

  ‘All right. Then the reasons for going home become greater, don’t they? If you’re actually in danger because of what you’ve found out, the only sensible thing is to go back to England. If we told Hugh what had really happened, I’m sure he’d insist on you being sent back.’

  ‘He might insist on you being sent back.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He’d realise I had to stay until something’s resolved. And there are other things, which you don’t know about . . .’

  Alice got up and walked to the window and stood with her back to me, looking out. And I knew that when she turned round towards me again, she was going to reveal everything that was happening in her secret life. The moment had come for her confession. She was going to talk to me man-to-man. But I had to stop her. I just couldn’t take her man-to-man stuff right now, because I knew it could turn out to be far more serious and shocking than I’d imagined and alter my life and Hugh’s and everyone’s for ever and this wasn’t the moment when I could endure it.

  So what I did was begin babbling about some of the things I’d discovered: Gail O’Hara’s possible connection to the drug world; the confusion about Valentina’s hospital visit; my realisation that the second receptionist had been Russian . . .

  Alice turned and gaped at me. She didn’t know until this moment how hard I’d been working on the case.

  ‘Don’t give in to Dad,’ I said. ‘Please. Be on my side, not his. All I need is a bit more time and I’ll find her.’

  I could see her hesitating, weighing everything up. In arguments at home between her and Hugh, it was Alice who usually won. Then, finally, she shrugged. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but you know you have to be home in time for the school term. Right? There’s no argument whatsoever about that. So all you’ve got is two weeks.’

  I’d done so much sleeping that, when the night came, I didn’t feel sleepy. I wanted to carry on reading Valentina’s novel, but instead I made myself go on with Grisha’s French text.

  The further I read the more frequently I wrote a huge P in the margin. I also translated and copied out the following passages from Grisha’s book:

  1. Archduke Peter was preoccupied by his collection of military toys. He owned 126 soldiers, made of lead, wax and wood. He set up mock military battles on two large tables in a special room in his apartments and moved the soldiers around by means of ingenious mechanical devices.

  2. Archduke Peter was extremely superstitious about water and in consequence refused to wash his body. He once said that he feared the bath more than the fortress.

  3. Peter received very severe treatment at the hands of his tutor, Governor Brummer. He was often beaten and deprived of meals. Tales were told of his being forced to kneel naked on a harsh surface of dry peas. And it was widely assumed that it was these punishments which led him, in his turn, to punish. His victims were his inferiors: his servants, his grooms and his pet animals, which included a snake . . .

  4. On his wedding night, the Archduke – unwashed, as he always was – came into Catherine’s chamber and demanded to watch while his bride was undressed and made ready for him. By the time she had lain down in the great fortress of a bed, her new husband was asleep. In nine years, Archduke Peter never once succeeded in achieving sexual intercourse with his wife and when he died at the hands of her lover, Orlov, some wondered why the murder had been necessary.

  Virtually everything, supposedly original, that Valentina had written so far about Pierre was based on the Archduke Peter in Grisha’s book. She hadn’t even bothered to change his name. I was leaning towards the Grigory kidnapping theory more and more when I found this and I numbered it 5:

  The story of the Varvarsky Virgin is indeed strange. In the autumn of that year, Moscow, never at this moment in its history a clean city, was visited by a terrible plague. It was a plague of smallpox, not uncommon at the time and deeply feared by the people, who chose on this occasion not to put their trust in the doctors of the city, but to flee to the city wall, where they congregated at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary at the Varvarsky gate. They spent their waking and sleeping lives there, praying and beseeching the Virgin to save them from the pox.

  The city fathers soon understood, however, that by gathering there all together, the people had turned the Varvarsky gate into a terrible centre of contagion. They went to the crowd and asked them to disperse, but no one was willing to move.

  In desperation, under cover of night, Father Ambrosius, Bishop of Moscow, had the Varvarsky Virgin removed. At dawn, when the people woke and found the Virgin gone and word went around that Father Ambrosius was responsible, they rose up in a great bloodthirsty mass. They pursued Father Ambrosius into the fortress of the Kremlin, where he’d taken refuge. He was discovered hiding in a crypt and he was savagely killed and dismembered and his limbs thrown into the river.

  The night was slowly passing as I read all this. The Volvos and Mercs of the weekenders were back in the rue Rembrandt, their fantastic engines gently cooling; the maids in their high rooms were sighing in their narrow beds, wishing Monday morning wasn’t going to come.

  And I was thinking, that’s it, it’s almost conclusive proof: if Grisha knows what is in Valentina’s book, then she’s in Russia and all the hospital stuff is a blind trail. She never went to the hospital, because she was on a plane.

  But as I put the book down I thought, perhaps, after all, Grisha wouldn’t kill Valentina. What he’d do is make her live his life, with him, in Moscow or Kiev or wherever he decided, in some old concrete block of flats with broken windows and dangerous electric wiring. He’d make her see how half the population of the world had to live; everything she saw and touched and ate would irritate her: the plastic chairs in the living room, the grey toilet paper, the slices of pink sausage served up for her dinner . . .

  And then there’d be his bed. It would be just a mattress on the green lino floor. The blankets would be thin and scorched-looking; the sheets would have patterns of marigolds on them. And every night or night and morning Grisha would fuck Valentina and the ugly marigolds would get tangled around their bodies and part of Grisha’s pleasure would come from knowing how much Valentina was hating every minute of her life. He’d stroke her hair, which wou
ld be going more grey by now. He’d say: ‘Valya, I am never going to let you go.’

  On Monday, I got up and walked with Alice to the Parc Monceau. My legs felt like sticks of cooked asparagus.

  On the way, we heard Didier at work on the roof, but neither of us looked up.

  In the park, we sat on a bench and watched a wedding party having their photos taken. It was a double wedding and both the brides were fat and smiling and both the bridegrooms were serious and small. One of the mothers-in-law parked herself on our bench and pulled her straw hat over her eyes and went to sleep. Alice said: ‘Well, you’re looking a bit better, Lewis.’

  I didn’t feel like talking. I just watched the wedding people and the stupid photographer with his huge camera on a tripod, diving in and out of his black head-cover, like photographers of long ago. He reminded me of my dream of the tunnel and this made me shiver. Alice was carrying a soft little blue cardigan and she put this round my shoulders. With this on and my wimpy-feeling legs and my eyes that kept watering in the sun, I felt like a girl.

  My hands were cold and I put them into my pockets, and in my right-hand pocket I found my sifflet du chasseur. Without letting Alice see, I put it into my mouth and began my lark-practice. I saw Alice turn and stare at me in amazement. This is probably why people can make a living out of selling bird whistles – because everyone on earth has a secret longing to amaze.

  ‘How are you doing that?’ said Alice.

  I just shrugged, pretending I was able to sound like a lark unassisted.

  The mother-in-law woke up and looked at me. The thing about the cry of the lark is that it sounds like two little stones being crushed together in your hand. This could be the unlikely reason why it has a world-wide effect on the human heart.

  ‘Mon Dieu,’ said the mother-in-law. But I don’t know if she was admiring my skill or if her heart was breaking.

  I didn’t want to talk to anyone, in any language, so I got up, leaving the cardigan behind on the bench, and walked to the children’s carousel and watched the smart little babies being whirled around in miniature cars and miniature fire engines and miniature spaceships. One kid was whirling and trying to eat a toffee apple at the same time, and when I arrived the toffee apple flew off its stick and landed on the gravel at my feet. From then on, although her body kept moving forwards, her eyes remained fixed on the lost apple. She didn’t cry or anything, but just kept staring round and back at the apple, like she wanted her head to fall off and be with the apple in the dust.

  Moinel called in to see me. He’d bought me a little bunch of anemones, wrapped in yellow paper. He told me he’d been photographing an English Carolinian mortuary chair for an international periodical.

  When Alice left the room, I told him about Valentina’s plagiarism and showed him the passages I’d noted down in my Concorde book. I said: ‘I’ve begun to believe she’s in Kiev.’

  Moinel took out some tiny little glasses and put them on. I knew he was one of those people who was older than he wanted to be. After a while, he looked up and said: ‘I suppose she thought Grigory’s book would never be published outside Russia?’

  ‘Yes, I guess so.’

  ‘And her books never appear in Russia. She thought no one would ever make a connection – provided Grisha never saw her text. Except she knew his book was out in France.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why did she go on with the plagiarism, once she knew that?’

  I picked up the anemones. They didn’t really have any scent, but I liked them. They looked like a little clutch of people all having a bad-hair day. I said: ‘I think she went on with it because she was running out of ideas. Alice said this was her worst fear – to run out of stories.’

  Moinel nodded, as if he knew exactly what this might feel like. Then he took off his glasses and said gravely: ‘Despite all this, I don’t think Valentina is in Russia, Louis. I think we may have got close to something at the hospital. You know, I believe that last receptionist was Russian . . .’

  I then told Moinel about my return visit, based on the same conclusion, and my meeting with Dr Bouchain and Moinel said: ‘To have taken Valentina from the hospital would have been easy – provided the register was safely amended to make everyone believe she never arrived. If you have a hospital appointment and someone calls your name, you follow that person, whoever it may be. You believe, automatically, that the person is going to take you to an X-ray room or a consulting room or whatever. You don’t question anything. I believe she went to the hospital that afternoon and checked in at Radiologie, and someone was waiting for her there and called her away before Dr Bouchain was ready to see her. And now, because you and I made our enquiry and you went back there again on your own, whoever took her believes they’re in danger of being discovered. This is why they tried to frighten you.’

  I nodded. In their separate lonely spaces, Moinel’s brain and mine had arrived at identical theories. If it hadn’t been for Grisha’s book, I would have been certain we were close to uncovering the truth.

  Then Moinel sighed. He looked at me sternly. ‘You must listen to me now, Louis,’ he said. ‘I believe that you must stop all your enquiries. You must cease them absolutely. OK? Are you listening to me? You must tell everything you know to Inspecteur Carmody and leave the rest to him. Will you promise me you will do this?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why should I stop when we could be getting close? Don’t you care about Valentina?’

  He sighed again. He put his glasses away. ‘We all care. But anything we can do can be done better by the police . . .’

  ‘That’s not true. The police are too visible.’

  ‘You are visible now. They know who you are and that puts you in danger. Who knows what that man on the roof was trying to do.’

  ‘You’re as bad as Alice,’ I said. ‘She wants to send me home.’

  ‘Well, perhaps that isn’t such a terrible idea? Perhaps you should try to forget about Valentina and—’

  ‘Forget about Valentina?’

  ‘I don’t mean “forget”. I know this can’t be forgotten. I only mean I think you should leave it to someone else now.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t do that.’

  Then I laid the anemones aside. I felt tired suddenly and I had nothing more to say to Moinel. I closed my eyes, pretending to sleep, and after a moment I heard him tiptoe out. Then I summoned Valentina’s face to my mind and laid my cheek against hers, which was smooth and cool. Something touched my neck and it was one of her long dangling earrings, made of silver.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said to her, ‘I am Porphiry Petrovich: I am François Seurel: I never give up.’

  Part Three

  Things happen in ways you never expect. When I was a child, my imaginary German in the cellar suddenly left a turd down there. The turd was small but it was real and had a human smell.

  And the next thing happened like this: a note came, addressed to me. It had been posted in Paris, in the 9th Arrondissement, and it was written in English on squared paper, like we used for maths at school, torn out of a spiral notebook. It said: Lewis, Meaulnes can tell you where to meet Valentine. You work it out by Thursday. You are safe if you do not go to the police.

  We were in the kitchen at the time, Alice and Violette and I, and Alice said to me: ‘Who’s your letter from?’

  I said it was private. I wanted to add: ‘You’re not the only one with a secret life, Alice.’ But I didn’t. I went straight up to my room. I still couldn’t think of this guest room, where I’d once imagined Grisha making love to Valentina, as mine, but Alice referred to it this way. ‘My room’ would always be the attic with the round window. That room would contain part of me in it for ever.

  I sat down at the little bureau and spread the note out in front of me. It was written in biro and the writing was large and loopy, a bit childish. There was no date or other word on it. I wished I was Sherlock Holmes and had a magnifying glass in my pocket with which to examine
it.

  Then I picked up my copy of Le Grand Meaulnes. It was a long time since I’d read it. I’d been too preoccupied by Grisha’s text and Valentina’s novel. And I couldn’t remember what was happening, except that Meaulnes had left Sainte-Agathe for ever. He was in Paris, searching for Yvonne de Galais.

  I held the book in my hands. It had only 177 pages and somewhere in them lay the answer to where Valentina was. I thought, whoever sent me this note already knows something about me: he’s set me a puzzle and he knows I’ll solve it, because that’s what I’m good at, solving puzzles. And this proves that he (or she) is the person holding Valentina. He’s given me proof of his credentials by revealing what he knows about me.

  I thought this was neat. I almost admired him, whoever he was – just as long as Valentina was safe. ‘OK,’ I said to him in my mind, ‘I’ll play your game.’

  I knew I should start reading straight away, but I was almost afraid to begin. Because it depended on my accurate translation from French, this puzzle just might prove too difficult for me. Suppose I just couldn’t work anything out from the Meaulnes text? The kidnapper didn’t seem to have thought about this. Suppose the clue was so obscure that I missed it and Thursday came and I just didn’t know what to do or where to go?

  The chapter I was on was called Je trahis . . . and I remembered now that, as soon as Meaulnes has left, François takes up with his old friends again and tells them everything he was meant to be keeping secret. Then he knows he’s betrayed Meaulnes and feels bad.

  I finished this chapter and began the next, in which François gets a letter from Meaulnes in Paris. The letter says: Dear François, Today, as soon as I arrived in Paris, I went to the house. But there was nothing to be seen. No one was there. No one will ever be there . . .