by Rose Tremain
What I wanted to do was stay there, just exactly as we were for a while, and then slowly, slowly, let myself fall on to the mattress and, as I fell, take Valentina down with me, and without speaking, without saying a single thing, and almost without her noticing what was happening, lift up the skirt of her torn dress and fit myself inside her and rock her gently, like a parent rocks a child, to calm her and soothe her and love her into darkness and into sleep.
And so this, in my ghostly cell, where the light was seeping out as the moon moved away down the sky, was what I did. And when Valentina understood what I was doing and what I felt, instead of turning away from me or pretending to be shocked or insulted or that any of this was strange she just let me come into her, and she held me and let me kiss her ear and her neck, where the blonde wisps of hair lay curled.
And when it was over, she lay on her back and put my head on her breasts and still held me to her and I knew she was smiling, I mean laughing almost, amused, like she was remembering something funny or crazy from long ago. The thing she could have been remembering was the boy-lover of Catherine the Great. She stroked my hair and after a little while she whispered to me: ‘Darling, now I know all your secrets and you know mine, and all that matters is that we keep them safe.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s all that matters.’
I went to sleep and when I woke up it was almost morning.
When I saw that I was lying with Valentina, with my head on her shoulder, I longed to just stay there and not move, but I also knew that if we didn’t try to make our escape now, we’d never make it at all. Part of me didn’t want to make it at all. If I could have lived in this room with Valentina for the rest of time, that would have been OK with me. But I knew this wouldn’t happen. I knew that when the ransom money arrived, Shukov or Todorsky would be sent into our cells to kill us and our bodies would be buried under the trees.
I woke Valentina and said to her: ‘The time’s come. We’ve got to go now.’
She opened her eyes and stared at me. I was leaning on my elbow looking down at her and she stared up at me gravely and then reached up and stroked my eyebrow with her finger. ‘Lewis,’ she said, ‘do you know what today is?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s the day when we put my plan into operation.’
She smiled. ‘I’ve been keeping track,’ she said; ‘ever since I was brought here, I’ve been counting days. It’s the sixteenth of September.’
‘That’s my birthday,’ I said.
‘Yes. I know. That’s what day it is.’
I lay still for a moment. Then I gently touched one of Valentina’s breasts and felt it there, large and soft and warm under my hand, and she didn’t move or push my hand away. What she said was: ‘Happy birthday, darling.’
I thought, if I leave my hand on her breast one second more, I won’t be able to move away from her. So I got up and began carrying the table and chair to the centre of the room. When they were in place, I climbed up and removed the baton and took off the slates. When I stuck my head out, the sky above me was grey and flat, but I could see, far off, way beyond the horizon of the meadow, a line of yellow light brimming up above the earth.
I listened. A long way away, a dog was barking, but apart from this, everything was silent. It was odd, in that silence, to think that I’d been alive for fourteen years and that now, today, I was no longer a virgin.
I looked all around. And suddenly I could see, beyond the trees, something faintly glimmering, and I knew it was the river or canal where the boats sometimes passed. And I thought, instead of burying us, they might just tie stones to our feet and drown us there, and we’d lie in the mud and waterweed through all the autumn and winter and the fish and the snakes would come and nibble us away and by spring we’d be gone.
I climbed down again and back into the room. Valentina was retying her ‘Ypres’ scarf round her hair, and today she tied it like Russian peasant women do, winding the ends right round her head and knotting them at the back. This task was difficult because she couldn’t lift the arm in the cast very high.
I stood by the table and said: ‘Valentina, the time’s come now. We’ve got to make our escape.’
She finished knotting her scarf and held out her hand to me. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘come here. Listen to me. I know you’ve made this wonderful, daring plan and that you’ve worked so hard on those batons. But it’s no use asking me to climb around on the roof. I just can’t do it, Lewis.’
‘You’ve got to do it,’ I said. ‘Look, it’s almost light. We can’t stay here discussing it. All we have to do is lower ourselves down towards the guttering and then jump on to the barn roof. It isn’t difficult . . .’
‘I’m too afraid of roofs, Lewis. I always was. And you know, I believe this whole thing will be resolved, probably quite soon, and then Alexis will release me.’
I went and knelt down by Valentina. Above us, I could sense the patch of sky getting lighter all the time. I took hold of one of her wrists and gripped it. ‘He won’t release you, Valentina!’ I almost shouted. ‘I don’t know why you’ve never been able to admit this! Even if he can’t bear to kill you himself, one of the others will have to do it.’
‘No, darling. They will get their money and disappear; that’s what will happen. I’m sure they have it all planned. Russia has changed so much now. They will go back there and no one in France will hear from them again. But they haven’t even hurt me, Lewis. Don’t tell me they would risk killing me.’
‘They have to kill you! And me, as well. Because I know who they are and I’ve seen Vasya’s face. So don’t keep sticking to your stupid argument, Valentina. You’re wasting time and every minute you waste could be crucial.’
She let me pull her to her feet. Then she drew me to her and held me against her for a moment. ‘Lewis,’ she said, ‘why are you so passionate about everything?’
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m just passionate about you. And I’m not going without you. Either we both leave or neither of us goes. If we stay, all my work on the roof will have been in vain. And in a few days’ time, we’ll die.’
We stood there. I thought, either we’ll stand like this, holding each other for the bit of time remaining to us, or Valentina will decide to agree to my plan.
She agreed to get out on to the roof and then see if she could let herself try to inch down it. She said: ‘I just don’t know, until I’m out there, what I will be capable of.’ Then she added: ‘Of course, if we do get back to Paris today, like you’ve planned, darling, I’ll take you to lunch at the Plaza.’
I could feel the seconds and minutes passing. I let go of Valentina and climbed out. The light on the horizon was welling up, brighter and brighter. And the air was still, like the storm had never occurred.
I had to help Valentina out. Her arm in its plaster hampered her. In this glimmer of early morning, I saw that her skin, which had always been a kind of golden colour, had paled in all the weeks of darkness.
She held on to me tightly and I put my arm round her waist, and it was as if I was lifting her out and back into the world. She blinked up at the light, and when she felt the fresh air on her face she said: ‘Oh God, I’d forgotten that, Lewis: that lovely smell of the earth.’
We sat on the roof, holding on to the ridge, and looked around us. Valentina seemed stunned to see the things that were there: sky and poplar trees and the meadow lying under a white mist. It was like she’d arrived in China or some place she never knew existed.
I knew we shouldn’t talk, because voices out in the air can travel so far, so after I’d let her stare at the landscape for a bit I just whispered to her that we had to climb down the roof now and get ready for our leap. She looked over at where the corrugated top of the barn was and I knew she was thinking that it seemed too far away, because her eyes suddenly focused on it, like a camera lens trying to swivel into close-up, and I felt her body go rigid and tense.
‘I can’t do it, Lewis,’ she whispered.
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br /> ‘Yes, you can,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to. There’s nothing else. It’s this or death.’
But she still didn’t believe me. And I felt choked now. I thought, what if I’m wrong? What if I’m putting her through all this, when in a week’s time she’ll be released just as she believes? My heart was thumping. I stared around helplessly, as if I thought a ladder or a rope might suddenly materialise in front of my eyes, but the only thing that materialised was the sun coming up, warning me that minutes were passing, and then I felt a kind of calm, like I’d felt in the chess game, anchor me to my plan. I’d made a choice, taken a decision, and now I had to follow it through. I heard Didier say: ‘Not to choose is also to make a choice, Louis,’ and I knew that while we stayed there, hesitating, not choosing, Alexis and Vasily could be waking up and climbing the stairs and unlocking the door to my cell. And then everything would be lost.
I touched Valentina’s hand, indicating she should watch what I did and follow me. Then I let go of the ridge and lay on the slates, half turned towards them, moving myself sideways, not straight down, but tacking across the roof, digging in with my fingers and with my heels. I didn’t look down; I focused on the slates, counting each one as I climbed lower . . . seven, eight, nine . . . eleven . . .
I looked up. Valentina hadn’t moved. I held out my hand, beckoning her towards me, and I watched her slowly, awkwardly, lower herself from the ridge. I shifted my position, improving my grip, and waited for her. The sun was up now and across the roof I saw our two shadows fall, so instead of watching Valentina’s body with its broken arm trying to cling on to the roof and move down it, I shifted my gaze and watched the shadows and just waited patiently until her shadow came level with mine and then merged with it as she reached the point where I was and I put out my arm to steady her.
She was breathing hard. There was sweat on her face. The black-and-white dress was rucked up almost round her waist and I could see her knickers, made of creamy silk, torn round one edge. ‘God,’ she said, ‘I’m so frightened, Lewis. We weren’t made to cling to the tops of buildings.’
‘You’re doing fine,’ I said. ‘We’re almost there.’
We stayed where we were for about a minute, holding on, getting our breath. We were only a few feet from the gutter line and when I looked down I could see the barn roof much nearer now. But this was going to be the hardest bit. Instead of clinging to the slates, we had to turn, force ourselves to turn and face outwards, standing upright over the void. And then we had to fly.
I delayed a little longer. I laid my head on the slates and looked at Valentina. What I wanted to say was: ‘My whole future is you. There’s nothing anywhere in any shape or form in my future life except you. I don’t know why this has happened to me, but that’s the way it’s always going to be.’ But I thought I would say this later, when we were in a more comfortable position, when we were sitting down at a table in the restaurant of the Plaza Hotel. So all I did was smile and stroke Valentina’s arm, and then I gathered all my strength and all my courage and I turned away from her and round towards the sunrise and leapt outwards and felt the air underneath me buoy me up away from the pull of gravity and land me, still upright, on the corrugated iron roof of the barn.
I let myself topple forwards. The iron was rusty and harsh on my bare feet, but it didn’t buckle or split. A feeling of elation began stabbing at me, stronger than anything I seemed to have known. I wanted to yell, ‘I did it! I did it!’ I wanted to dance about on the iron like a voodoo spirit. So I turned and got to my feet and began to wave wildly at Valentina. I waved and waved, with both my arms. I saw her above me, smiling . . .
Epilogue
Today is the first of November.
The clocks have gone back by one hour, which means that it’s going to get dark by about five in the afternoon, and that suits me fine. I prefer it when there’s no light in the sky.
At school, I spend a lot of time looking out of the window, watching the line of sycamore trees at the end of the playing fields. These trees are having a really horrendous time: the wind just whips them and torments them hour after hour and whole branches have broken off and lie around underneath them in the grass.
I find it pretty hard to give my attention to what the teachers are saying. I’d honestly rather look at these trees. ‘Lewis,’ the teachers sometimes say, ‘are you with us?’
Quite often, I get brought in to see the headmaster, Mr Quaid. This is because I’ve stopped doing any homework except Maths. The harder the Maths gets, the more I like it. But the other subjects seem pointless. My ability to interest myself in the structure of biological photocells, or in standards of living in Latin America, or in the priggish character of Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, diminishes with each day.
Mr Quaid tells me he understands this, but feels disappointed by it. He’s quite nice to me. He doesn’t bollock me or threaten me with expulsion. He just looks at me sadly and reminds me that I’m on my GCSE track this year. He says I used to be one of the ‘high-flyers’ of Beckett Bridges School.
Sometimes he gives me Nescafé, made by his secretary, in a white china mug. I can’t stand Nescafé. He waits for me to make some comment about being a high-flyer, but I find it really difficult to think of anything to say. From his office window, you can see the very tops of the sycamore trees, so I look out at them and try to drink the coffee, which makes my stomach burn. And after a while, Mr Quaid says something like: ‘Well, Lewis, what is the answer to all of this?’
One of the things I don’t know the answer to is where Valentina is buried.
I keep asking Alice and she keeps saying she doesn’t know. ‘I’ve told you,’ she says, ‘I don’t know, Lewis.’ As if knowledge were finite and couldn’t be acquired. As if what’s in her mind now is all that’s ever going to be there.
I figure that if Anton was buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre, Valentina would have wanted to be buried there, somewhere near him. But the Cimetière de Montmartre might be full up by now. They might have left some room in Anton’s grave to put Mrs Gavrilovich in, but not Valentina as well. So where is she? Once or twice, I’ve come near to calling up Mrs Gavrilovich and asking her, but then when I get the phone in my hand, I hesitate.
I imagine the apartment in the rue Daru and Mrs Gavrilovich sitting in it. She’s eating her little cakes and giving crumbs to Sergei, who lies across her feet. She’s staring at her icon. She’s gone into her own sorrowful world and she doesn’t want to be disturbed. And I respect that.
People won’t leave me alone, though. They think my being silent is sinister, sort of weird, so they try to get me to talk to them. I’ve been found a counsellor, whose name is Daniel. He lives in Sidmouth, so I think the people he mainly counsels are retired. He probably sits in their bungalow gardens, on their patio loungers, counselling them while they stir their tea and check their bingo numbers.
But actually, I quite like him. What I primarily like is the fact that he knows virtually nothing about me. He wears crazy ties with fish or sunflowers or leopards on them and he has wild hair, a bit like Grisha’s. He’s about forty-three and he lives alone, without even a pet.
He makes me talk about it, though, and this I don’t like. He says I have to get the facts completely straight in my mind. And only then, in time, will I learn to stop taking responsibility for it. I tell him: ‘It was my idea to try to escape by climbing on to the roof, so I want to take responsibility for it. That is my existential choice.’
Talking about it brings such a mass of pain into me, it’s like I’m the one who’s fallen and hit the ground. So I say it all very fast, as if I’m sending in a report from a war zone, with the enemy getting nearer and nearer. I say: ‘I’m standing on the roof of the barn. I look up at Valentina and she smiles at me and then we see the helicopter. It comes out of nowhere, like out of the sunrise. It’s a police helicopter. It just comes roaring in, right above Valentina. And that’s it.’
‘That’s what?’ says D
aniel.
‘That’s the moment. She’s distracted by the helicopter and the revolving blades are creating this down-draught like a wind. She can’t hang on to the slates any more. And I see her body begin to slide. She reaches out with her good arm, but she can’t get a grip on anything. Her arm just flails around in the air, like she was waving at something. And then she falls.’
And when I’ve said all this, I can’t speak for the next ten minutes or so. I’m just completely exhausted.
One time, I say to Daniel: ‘Hugh needs counselling, you know. He probably needs it more than I do.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Daniel asks.
‘Because he’s taking responsibility for everything too.’
‘In what way?’
‘He thinks he never should have let Alice and me go to Paris on our own. He thinks if he’d been there everything would have been different.’
Then I describe how Hugh is since we got back, like how he talks in whispers a lot of the time and how he’s become completely and totally obedient to Alice and tries to do all the shopping and everything, to save her the trouble of moving from her desk. And like how he sleeps in the spare room, not in Alice’s bed, and plays Mahler symphonies late at night, drinking red wine.
Daniel asks me if I think everything would have been different if Hugh had been there and I say: ‘No. Not for me. It wouldn’t have made any difference at all.’
There’s a long silence, while Daniel’s thin fingers fiddle with his leopard tie. And as always when there’s a sudden silence, I feel myself moving away from whatever place it is I’m in and returning to Valentina. Quite often, I’m in her bedroom at the rue Rembrandt, lying among the cushions while she strokes my hair, but not always. Because I can find her anywhere. I could be walking along by the bouquinistes, or sitting in the rue Poncelet, watching the bustle of the market. I could be down in the métro or under the catalpa trees at Jussieu or looking at the green parrots in the bird market. I could be in the kitchen feeding Sergei, or in the dining-room eating lunch or up in my attic playing my musical box. But she is always with me. I can smell her. She is so close to me, I could reach out and touch her.