The Way I Found Her

by Rose Tremain

  ‘What about Alice?’ asks Daniel, when this silence ends. ‘What do you think she feels about what happened?’

  I sigh. I don’t like being made to leave Valentina to focus on Alice; it hurts my head. I say to Daniel: ‘Look, I don’t know Alice any more. And she doesn’t know me. And that’s just how it is, and it’s always going to be like that.’

  ‘Why?’ says Daniel. ‘Why’s it “always going to be like that”?’

  ‘Because,’ I say, ‘it just is.’

  Even with Daniel, I get tired of talking. I get tired pretty fast. I can’t be bothered to explain to him that Alice and I have totally different interpretations of the same period of time. Or that sometimes when I look at her here at home I know she’s miles away in her mind, in the same place as I am: she’s back in Paris with her lover.

  I’d rather just be quiet and look at the things in Daniel’s room – his photographs of the sea, his collection of cactus plants, his black venetian blind – or be on the bus going home.

  The bus is good. No one says anything to me. I just ride along, watching the day being overtaken by the night. And sometimes I find myself smiling. The thing I’m smiling at is the knowledge that there’s one thing about Valentina and me that Daniel will never know. Never, ever. No one on earth will know it. It’s her secret and mine and it’s safe with me.

  One night, about one o’clock or something, I go downstairs to make a glass of malted milk. Malted milk is meant to still your brain and make you sleep like a child, but it doesn’t. It just lets you lie there wondering when this lovely sleep is going to come. But I like it anyway.

  I’m about to go into the kitchen, but then I stop outside the door because I can hear Alice and Hugh in there, talking. I thought they were in bed in their separate rooms, but they’re not; they’re sitting at the kitchen table, talking about their marriage, and I can tell that Hugh is crying. I listen for a bit, then I can’t stand to stay there a moment longer. In fact, I can’t bear to be in the house with them any more. So I take one of the old waterproof coats from near the back door and let myself out into the garden.

  The wind is tearing at the trees. I wouldn’t mind lying on the lawn and staying awake all night, listening to everything moving in the wind, except that it feels cold out here, so I walk right down the length of the lawn and go into the hut.

  The smell in there is really nice. Hugh thinks the best things about the hut are the dinky wooden porch he erected round the door and the way the windows fit so brilliantly and the cockerel weather vane on the roof. But he’s wrong: the best thing about it is the smell. He and Bertie put in a wide shelf, made of pine, which is meant to be Alice’s desk, and it’s like the pine they used is really still a pine tree and this foresty smell in the hut comes from the sap which still bleeds out of the wood in several places.

  Not one single time has Alice taken work out here or sat at this desk, but now I lie down under it and cover myself with the gardening coat and stay there till morning.

  Bertie and Gwyneth come back to stay for a while.

  When Gwyneth sees me, she starts crying and says: ‘Oh Lewis, thank God it’s over.’

  Not just her, but everyone, including Daniel, thinks it’s all sliding nicely away out of sight, into the past, and becoming history. But I will never let it be over. I will never let it become history. I’m like the bison who, in the core of his being, can remember the Great Plains and knows that he was once right there, in what – to him – was the most beautiful place on earth.

  Bertie offers to play chess with me, but I tell him I’ve lost interest in chess. My chess set is packed away in its box, in a cupboard. I never want to see it again.

  ‘What do you want to do, then?’ Bertie says. ‘We can do anything you like.’ So I ask him if he can drive me to Exeter and lend me some money and he says, ‘Absolutely. Why not?’ So we go on our own and walk around Exeter until we find a big toy-shop. And I spend thirty-nine pounds on a fantastic battery-operated car with flashing lights and a remote-control horn, and Bertie and I go and try it out on a piece of derelict ground and we both agree that it’s seriously excellent. Then I wrap it up and take it to a post office and send it to Pozzi. I enjoy writing his little name on the label: Pozzi Babbala.

  On the way back home, we stop at a Happy Eater and order eggs and sausages and I explain to Bertie who Pozzi is and where he lives, in that building made of mosaics, and about the village in Benin. This is the greatest amount of talking I’ve done for a long time and Bertie listens very attentively.

  But then he admits he can’t remember where Benin is, so I draw a map of Africa on one of the Happy Eater napkins and sketch in Benin, very small, next to Nigeria. The shape of Benin is like a bunch of flowers and Violette’s village is somewhere low down among the stalks.

  Bertie suddenly looks up from this drawing and wipes his mouth and says: ‘You know, Lewis, if they hadn’t rescued you, I just don’t know how any of us would have survived.’

  The police only found us because of Moinel. Alice says I should write and thank him for saving my life, but I can’t see it like that. If Moinel had known nothing, that helicopter would never have come out of the sunrise.

  But he knew the link to the kidnappers had to be the Russian receptionist at the hospital and he made Carmody focus on her. I know her name now. It’s Sonya, like Sonya Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment. It was Sonya I heard shouting the night they drove off in the Citroën 2CV and it was Alexis she was shouting at.

  She was Alexis’s girlfriend, but she betrayed him in the end. Carmody broke her down with his interrogations. He just went on and on and on at her until she cracked. She held out for seventeen days and then, after that row with Alexis, she made a plea bargain with Carmody and told him everything. If Sonya and Alexis had had the row two days earlier, if Moinel had kept silent, Valentina would still be alive.

  I’ve begun a letter to Grisha. I’m writing it in French: Cher Grigory . . .

  I start by telling him how good I think his book is. Alice once said writers are like children: what they long for is unadulterated praise.

  Then I say that I understand why he prefers looking at the sky to looking at people and explain that I feel the same way now. I describe the sycamores beyond the playing fields. I add: There’s also a walk I make, over the cliffs and down to the sea. My father, Hugh, always wants to come on this walk with me, but I hardly ever let him. The reason I like looking at the sea is that I know what lies beyond it: France.

  I keep the letter in a drawer and add things to it from time to time. One of the things I add is that I often dream there’s a bird on my own neck, trying to fly me into some kind of future. I tell Grisha it’s a mathematical bird and the future that it’s flying me towards is logical and clear and cold and bright. The language I’m going to speak there is one that only a few people can understand.

  On a Sunday night, I decide to end the letter and post it. And after a week or so, I start looking forward to getting a reply. The post to and from Russia takes a long time, but I know that one day a reply will come. And this will become a part of my life now: writing to Grisha and receiving news about the Moscow sky.

  And so November just goes on and becomes December and Alice and Hugh start buying Christmas presents, and I buy nothing for anybody. I just can’t see how people could be interested in this Christmas shit any more. I say to Daniel: ‘When I hear them playing carols in the shops, I want to gun down everybody in sight.’

  And as Christmas comes nearer, being in my room makes me edgy. It’s full of things which remind me of Christmases gone by, when I was a boy and knew nothing and thought the only function a metronome could ever have, as long as the world lasted, was to keep time. I lie in bed and stare at the room and at my old self in it and I say aloud: ‘The day has come when you and I have to part company.’

  So I tell Hugh, I don’t want to sleep in there any more; I want to sleep in the hut. At first, he says it’s too cold, too uncomfortable, a
stupid idea. But I make Daniel talk to him about it, and after that he changes his mind. He puts a mattress in there, under the desk, and a greenhouse heater and a paraffin lamp. He asks me what else I’d like.

  I tell him I don’t want anything, just a blanket. I say I imagined all along that he was building the hut for me. And this pleases him somehow and he touches my shoulder and smiles.

  So that’s more or less where I live now, separate from the house, separate from Alice and Hugh. It’s getting pretty cold as the winter goes on, but I don’t want to move. I’m going to try and stick it out because I’m far more content in there, on my own. By the flickering paraffin light, which reminds me of the light in the attic room of François Seurel, I do my mathematical calculations and the numbers go forwards and onwards, taking me with them through time.

  And on certain nights, when it’s very dark and still, something amazing happens to me. If I close my eyes, I can dream myself back into my attic cell and reach out and find, very near me in the wall, the hole through which I can feel the warm touch of Valentina’s breath.

  And then, after only a moment or two, I hear her laughter and a feeling like happiness comes into me and is mine.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following people, without whose knowledge and assistance this novel could not have been written:

  Frank Willis for his knowledge of the Russian language;

  Jean Bourdier for his information about French police procedures and his patient correcting of my French syntax;

  David Norwood for his invaluable help with Lewis’s chess problems;

  Commissaire Yves Jobic for his guidance on police intervention;

  Claude Jonis for his generously undertaken additional Paris research;

  David Gentleman for his marvellous Paris watercolours, which inspired many of the trails I followed on the ground; and Penelope Hoare, editor and friend, who, as always, helped to make this a better book than it once was.

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