by Rose Tremain
‘What have you been telling that person from Bianquis? Where does she think Valentina is?’
Alice still didn’t look at me as she spoke. ‘Oh, in Kiev,’ she said. ‘Just as you suggested to her.’
I sat down on Alice’s gigantic blue-and-gold bed. I imagined Hugh and Bertie at work inside the hut, sloshing on green paint with furry paint-rollers. I thought, that kind of childish happiness is always doomed.
‘Can we go this afternoon?’ I asked.
‘Go where?’
‘To Notre-Dame. Say, at about half past two?’
She looked at me then. It was like she was really surprised that I wanted to go on an outing with her when it had seemed to both of us that the time of our Paris outings was long past.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why not? We could have lunch in a café near by. Would you like that?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘That’d be good.’
We agreed to leave in an hour’s time.
I went to my room and made my final preparations. I was very near to confiding in Violette and asking her to ask the spirits to protect me, but I knew this would be too dangerous. I had to think and act, from now on, with a cool, clear head.
I changed into the trousers that had the kitchen knife in their side pocket. Into the hip pocket, I put all the money I had – about four hundred francs – and my bird whistler. Then I put on a denim jacket I hadn’t worn for days in the stifling hot weather, and in the pockets of this I hid my Concorde notebook and my copy of Le Grand Meaulnes. At the last moment, as I heard Alice coming towards my room, I untied Elroy from the bed head and stuffed him, string and all, into the waistband of my trousers, hidden by the jacket.
We left Sergei behind. Alice said they didn’t allow dogs into cathedrals. As we went out of the apartment I saw him standing in the salon, in a square of sunlight, staring expectantly at us, and I thought, if I never see him again, at least I’ll be able to say later on: I once knew a really fantastic, ace, brilliant dog.
I thought Alice was going to nag me to take my jacket off in the boiling heat, but she didn’t, and while she was buying a new métro carnet I was able to transfer Elroy to one of the eight pockets that jacket had. All Alice was wearing was a black sleeveless T-shirt with Save the Rainforests written on it and a flimsy skirt the colour of rice. Her sunglasses nested in her hair and she carried an old canvas bag slung over her freckled shoulder. As we walked along, the faces of the men turned towards her like sunflowers turn towards the sun.
At Châtelet station, where we got off, I saw a guy standing and waving at the train. I’d seen him before. His face and clothes were both a kind of grey-brown, like he’d had his clothes made from different bits of his own hair and skin, and what he did all day was breathe the fug of the métro station and wave at the trains. Sometimes people waved back. Not often, though. I thought, maybe, long ago, he arranged to meet someone here and that person never arrived, and so now this is where he lives his life, just in case they turn up before the end of the century.
When we came out into the air, we walked right past the Théâtre de la Ville and over the Pont au Change. I looked at the theatre as we went by, to see which door I’d have to use when I went in. The play that was on was Le Misanthrope by Molière and quite a few people were going in and out to book tickets and I began to wish I was one of those ticket-bookers and not me. That’s what cowardly people do all the time, when they’re approaching some frightening thing: they wish they were sparrows or news vendors or dead.
The street where we had lunch was called the rue de la Colombe. Alice smiled and said: ‘We’re in Dove Street.’
I wasn’t a bit hungry, so I ordered a Badoit and a salad and just pushed everything in the salad round and round on my plate. Alice ate an omelette and drank three glasses of white wine and started talking about the winter. She said she just couldn’t imagine it ever coming, and I said: ‘It won’t. This is the last season of our lives.’
We went into the cathedral of Notre-Dame at 3.05. I kept checking the time without Alice noticing.
It seemed cooler in the cathedral than in any place I’d been for months and months, and I really liked the coolness of it and its darkness and the way human voices – even all the squeaky voices of the tourists – sounded tiny because of the massive weight of air between them and the vaulted roof.
Now I had to lose Alice.
I told her we might as well separate, so that we could each look at the things we wanted to see, and without waiting for an answer or a comment I wandered away from her and she didn’t call me back. I thought, suppose this is the last time I ever lay eyes on her?
I walked very slowly on and on, creeping past the huge stone columns, into the transept, where a bunch of Italian kids were milling around, all wearing little coloured rucksacks. They looked kind of spaced out, as if their eyes just couldn’t get accustomed to the saintly darkness, as if, in this empty place, they were getting weak from lack of ice cream.
Then I found myself in one of the side chapels, and it was called – just completely by chance – the Chapelle Saint Louis, so I stood in it for a long time, looking at a tomb, which had Cardinal de Noailles written on it, and listening to time passing. A cold little bit of daylight fell on to the tomb. I didn’t know who Cardinal de Noailles was, but I spoke to him in my mind and to Saint Louis. I said: ‘OK, guys, it’s a quarter to four and I’m going to go now.’
I moved. It took me a while to be able to make myself move. Then I kept on moving slowly past four or five other chapels, round to the north door, keeping a watch out for Alice. Once I was back in the sunlight in the rue du Cloître, I knew I was exactly five minutes from my rendezvous.
I suppose I should have felt guilty about what was going to happen soon to Alice. She was going to start walking round and round and round the cathedral, in and out of chapels, behind the choir screen, between the lines of chairs, searching for me, knowing I was there somewhere and not finding me. And then she’d get worried and maybe ask people to help her look.
But it would be all right. Later, she’d find the note I’d written on a paper table napkin in the restaurant. I’d stuffed it into her canvas bag, next to her purse, while she was in the toilet. It said: Following important lead to V. Tell no one where we were today. Will telephone. Love, Lewis.
The theatre had four separate glass entrance doors, of which two were open.
I stood just inside one of them, looking in and looking out by turns. Under my arm, with the title visible, I carried Paul Berger’s copy of Le Grand Meaulnes. I thought, this is the riskiest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
I felt a bit faint. The floor of the theatre foyer was made of marble or some slippery kind of stone slabs, and every time I took a step I seemed to slide around on it, like I was on ice. What I longed to do was to sit down.
When my watch said 4.20, I decided no one was coming and I felt relieved at first, thinking, well, I can just go home now and take Sergei for a walk, and then frantic, knowing that my last hope of seeing Valentina again was disappearing as every minute passed.
I slithered over to the stairs, which had open treads made of wood, and sat down on one of them. I put the book next to me on the step and stared at the sunlit afternoon outside. In a mechanical kind of way, I began to count the number of vacant taxis that went by.
Then I heard someone coming down the wooden steps behind me and, just as I was about to turn round, a man’s foot appeared right next to me. It trod on my book. I tried to move my head, but the man was crouching above me on the next step and he had his hand on the back of my neck, forcing my head forward.
I could still just see his foot, in a scuffed brown shoe, resting on Meaulnes, then the foot moved to one side and a voice said in French: ‘Pick up your book.’
I reached out with my left hand. I saw that the shoe had left a mark on the white cover of the book. ‘Don’t turn round,’ whispered the voice.
When I’d gathered up the book, I felt the
man’s arm go round my neck and his hand tap my shoulder, as if he was pretending to be my old friend.
‘So,’ he said, ‘I’m very glad to meet you, Lewis. Will you stand up now, please? Don’t turn to look at me. That’s it. We are buddies, OK? And I have a car outside, so let’s just walk towards the door . . .’
I didn’t say anything. The next moment, we were outside, with the hot sun and the people and the traffic. I was wondering what kind of car these kidnappers had, when a Citroën drew up in front of me and the man’s hand pressed down on my head, and I was shoved into the back seat.
The man got in beside me and I felt the car pull out and away, very fast. I was looking to see who was driving the car, when I felt something pressed against my nose and mouth and all I had time to think was: I don’t know what this is, but whatever it is it smells bad, like the end of the world . . .
When I woke up, I knew I was in England.
I could hear someone moving about and I was certain that someone was Hugh, going downstairs to put on the kettle to make a cup of tea.
I lay and listened. My head was aching. I had no recollection of any plane journey or any arrival or any words spoken by anyone.
My body was itching. I began to scratch my arms and it was then that I realised I was lying under a blanket and not under my duvet, as I’d thought. And so I knew I wasn’t at home in England at all, but somewhere else that I couldn’t recognise.
I lay as still as I could, because it hurt my head to move it. Then, very slowly and carefully, in case thinking was going to damage my brain inside my hurting head, I put together everything I could remember: making my way out of the cool of the cathedral towards the rendezvous, waiting for someone to arrive in the foyer of the theatre, seeing a foot coming down on my copy of Meaulnes, being led out to the car. But after I got into the car, there was nothing. My brain circuitry kept searching and finding a blank, a black hole.
I felt my arms and legs, to see what I was wearing. All I had on was a T-shirt and some underpants. I knew the loss of my trousers and my jacket was important, but I couldn’t remember why.
I floated into another dream. In it, I was on a ship in a rough sea and I was feeling terribly sick. Valentina had laid my head in her lap and was stroking my eyebrow with her finger.
I woke up, puking. I couldn’t see what or where I was puking into, but it wasn’t a toilet, and when I’d stopped, the puke just stayed near me, stinking. So I started to call out. ‘Help me!’ I called. ‘Someone come! I’ve been sick!’
It was so dark where I was, I couldn’t make out where the walls were or the door, or anything. I thought, it must be night.
Being sick seemed to have exhausted me and I wanted to lie down again under the blanket, but I made myself keep calling. Then my elbow touched something and I realised that just to the left of me was a wall. It felt cold, as if it had been built hundreds of years ago and no light had ever fallen on to it. I knelt up, with my face turned away from the puke, and began banging on the wall with both my fists. And I changed my calling into French: ‘Aidez-moi! Quelqu’un! Je suis malade! J’ai vomi! Aidez-moi!’
No one came. My head was hurting so much, I had to lean it against the wall. And I think that’s how I must have stayed for quite a bit of time, kneeling there, with my head pressed to the cold wall. Then, just as I was about to float back to sleep, kneeling up like that, I heard a sound coming from the other side of the wall, right where my ear was. I waited and it came again – a knocking, like a human hand knocking on a door.
It went on. When it paused, I knocked back, then I called softly: ‘Qui est là?’
The next thing I heard were footsteps and they were coming towards me. Then a door was opened and a bright light, like a searchlight, shone on to me. It was so blinding, it gave my whole body a shock, like it’d been thrown into freezing water. I closed my eyes and tried to blot out the light with my right hand.
I felt someone come into the place where I was. I realised quite quickly that it was two people. Then a voice said in French: ‘O merde! Il a dégueulé partout . . .’
One of the people came behind me and took my arms away from the wall and my hand away from my eyes, and I fell backwards on to someone’s chest. It was a man’s chest and the man smelt strongly of cigarettes. He pushed me up and wrenched my hands together and snapped something metal on my wrists.
A piece of cloth was put over my face and tied round my head. At least it helped to blot out the blinding light. Then I was pushed over and fell back on to the mattress where I’d been lying. The blanket was snatched away.
I kept still, just lying how I’d fallen. I thought, I’ve often wondered how handcuffs feel and now I know: they hurt your wrist bones.
I knew there were at least two men in the place. It could have been three. One of them went away and then came back in again. All the time, I could see the light shining on to me through the blindfold.
The men started to move round me. They were swearing as they moved, but I didn’t know at first what they were doing. I thought, they could be about to kill me.
Then I smelled disinfectant and I knew they were trying to clean up the puke on the floor. Some cold water splashed on to my legs and I realised that, for the first time in ages and ages, I was shivering. I thought, wherever I am must be underground for the temperature in here to be so low. ‘J’ai froid,’ I said, but the men didn’t hear me. They were moving a mop or a brush or something over the ground. It sounded as if the ground was made of brick or stone – some hard surface, which the mop scraped on. Gradually, the smell of puke began to go and was just replaced with the horrible disinfectant smell.
I heard one of them go out again, probably with the mop and pail, and so I said to whoever remained, ‘Where am I?’
‘Tais-toi,’ someone said, then in broken English: ‘You quiet. You shut. Or we hurt you. Compris?’
‘J’ai froid,’ I said again, and then I felt the man smelling of smoke come near me.
‘You shut!’ he yelled. ‘Nothing! You say nothing, English boy!’
Then the men and the light went away. The men went first, then the light, and a door was closed and locked. Before the men left they removed the handcuffs, and slowly I reached up and pulled down the blindfold. I blinked. My eyes kept seeing round circles of light, floating on the darkness, paler and paler ghosts of the one that had been there.
The feeling of wanting to sleep had gone. I was preoccupied by the cold and, now, by a new thing, a sudden thirst that was so acute, it was as if I had no moisture left in my body.
I lay down, with my knees curled up to my stomach. I was on a mattress, but the mattress had no cover or sheet or anything and I could feel underneath me the little tufts of twine or whatever it is they put in the pockets of mattresses. I thought, I wonder if this mattress was made in another country, by women working for hardly any wages, like that garment worker in Spain on the TV programme about the Women of Europe? And asking myself this question reminded me that what I needed to acquire now was information about where I was.
I didn’t stand up. I just got on to my knees and like this – like I’d gone up and down the line of Valentina’s musical boxes, with Violette, that time when we were searching her room – I started to move around, off the mattress and on to the floor, which was hard and gritty, using one hand to keep guiding me along the wall and then stopping and feeling in front of me for objects in the room.
I hadn’t gone far when my head nudged against another wall. Just before it did, my right hand located an iron pipe, coming out of the wall about six inches above the ground and turning and running almost to the corner, but not quite. I went back, to where the pipe began, and then moved forward again, keeping my hand on the pipe, which felt wider than normal heating or water pipes usually were, till it reached the place where it ended or broke off. I felt all around the broken end. It hadn’t been capped off; it was just a hollow length of pipe, old and heavy, made of lead or iron, not copper, sticking
out into the room. And I knew that one of two things might be attached to the other end of it – water or gas. I hoped it was water.
I knelt crouched by the pipe for a long time. Outside the room, some distance away, the men were talking. I thought I could hear at least three voices, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I wanted to call out to them, to bring back the blanket, to bring water, but they’d warned me not to speak and I didn’t have any idea what they might do if I disobeyed them. I thought, cold and thirst could turn out to be nothing; cold and thirst could be a state of luxury compared with what they might do . . .
I decided to go on with my investigation of the room. As I crawled around, I made a mental note of the probable distance I was covering. I calculated that my mattress was placed against the wall about a metre from where the pipe began. The length of the pipe was less than a metre, so the distance between my mattress and the back wall was less than two metres. I expected the back wall to run for only a few feet, as if the room was going to be a small rectangle, like a cell. But it wasn’t. The back wall carried on for at least three metres, or possibly more.
There was nothing near it or on it at ground level, but my knees touched something soft as I came to the corner and it felt to me like hay. I began to pick it up in handfuls. Even holding it close to my eyes, I couldn’t see what it was, but it smelled like hay and I thought that if there was enough of it I could burrow down in it and get warm. But there wasn’t much – no more than an armful – so I let it go and carried on round the corner, along the third wall.
I was getting tired. I was less cold now, because I’d been moving around, but my thirst was really bad. An image of Violette’s black arms holding the fat Orangina bottle and pouring it out into two glasses came into my mind, drenching it with longing. I let myself fall to the floor and rest.
I lay there for a long time. It was like I dreamed that I was asleep. When I sat up, I hit my head on something hard. I reached up to feel what it was and I realised it was a table. It was made of wood, like a table you might put in a kitchen. Slowly, I got to my feet, holding on to the table, and I felt all over the surface of it, just in case the kidnappers had kindly left me a glass of water. They hadn’t, and my thirst went on, but then my hand touched something solid and I knew straight away what it was: it was my copy of Le Grand Meaulnes. I picked it up and pressed it to my face. I thought, if only they would give me some light in here, I could read to the end of it and find out whether Meaulnes is ever reunited with Yvonne de Galais or not.