The Way I Found Her (2 page)

Before we left for Paris, my father, Hugh, had told me in confidence what his ‘project' was. We were sitting on a cliff at the time, watching gulls circling in the air. Hugh said: ‘Lewis, I'm going to build a hut in the garden.'

He said this as if he were old Brunel about to start on the Clifton Bridge. He seemed to want me to marvel.

I don't remember what I did say. Perhaps I just looked up at the birds, trying to think of something, and then Hugh went on: ‘It's a secret between you and me, OK? I'm building it for Mum. We'll put a desk and a chair in it. It'll be a place where she can sit and read or work in the summer.'

I didn't look at him. If I had looked at him, I would have seen a short, neat man with gentle brown eyes and thick hair just smartly flecked with grey. His mother, Gwyneth, was Welsh and his father, Bertie, English. With my mother being Scottish, I have the DNA of almost the whole of the British Isles sloshing round in my body, but I've wound up with the Welsh name Dad insisted on.

Dad loved the Devon cliffs. He kept pointing things out to me – tamarisk trees and standing stones and larks' nests in the gorse and wild snapdragons. He'd pointed these things out about ninety-nine times. After a while, he said: ‘The thing is, I've never built anything in my life. I've got a DIY manual that makes it all look easy, but it almost certainly isn't. So listen. If, when you come back from Paris, there's absolutely no sign of a hut in the garden, don't mention it in front of Mum, OK? I'll invent another project – something to do with school. OK, Lewis? It might be because the hut has fallen down, or it might be that it's simply proved too difficult.'

I said I thought a hut ought not to be too terribly hard, but Dad said you never really knew, in life, what was going to prove hard or prove easy. People's assumptions about their own capabilities were often amazingly wrong.

I remember picturing the finished hut at the bottom of the garden, sort of red and oblong with one tiny window and a little squat roof. I thought it risked looking like a public toilet, or even a private outside toilet for us, like houses had in the old days, and I didn't think Mum would want to go and work in an outside toilet, so I said: ‘Dad, wouldn't a summerhouse be better than a hut?' And he said yes, of course it would, and that maybe, in the autumn, that's what we'd find there: a beautiful summerhouse with a wooden floor and an ironwork balcony and a weather vane on the top. But it was better not to imagine it.

My Paris room was a maid's room in the roof of the apartment building. I don't know why I'd been given it, because Valentina's apartment was huge, with loads of rooms in it, but I had, and I didn't mind; I enjoyed feeling that I was up there alone.

You reached my room by a little narrow staircase. The thing I really liked about it was that it had a round window, looking out on to the street, which was called the rue Rembrandt. I didn't know whether, long ago, Rembrandt himself had come there and said in Dutch: ‘What a nice street! Please name it after me', or whether he never set foot in it.

When I looked out of the round window, my head filled it up completely, as if the window had been measured for me by a person who made astronaut helmets. It was also positioned at exactly the right height for me, about five foot above the floor, so I could stick my face into it and examine the roofs opposite for as long as I wanted, and be perfectly comfortable.

As soon as I first saw these roofs on the other side of the rue Rembrandt, I realised they were different from English roofs. Nothing much ever seems to grow out of an English roof, but here there were dormers and balustrades and TV masts and chimney stacks and bits of ironwork and flowerpots and an ornamental gold cross, all sprouting out of the slate and jostling each other for space. So I got out my Concorde notebook and, leaving some blank pages in which to develop my Exploding Peanut Theory of Beauty, wrote down an instruction to myself to investigate the life of a Paris roof, inside and out. I put:
NB: I am well placed to do this
.

Next to my bedroom was a peculiar bathroom with a huge iron bath standing on claw feet in the middle of the floor. Valentina had said: ‘I had to put this bathroom in, darling, because of course nobody used to consider that maids needed to bathe. The smell of them must have been extremely disconcerting, mustn't it?'

This bathroom was the chosen place for the overspill from Valentina's wardrobe. I counted thirty-one dresses and evening gowns and nine coats, wrapped in polythene, hanging on a movable chrome rail. I wondered whether they were cast-offs or whether Valentina would sometimes come up to my bathroom in just a satin slip or something and choose a dress for the evening.

While I was counting the ball gowns, I found a door. It had been hidden by the clothes rail and it was locked and there was no key. I put my ear to the keyhole. I supposed that what the door led to was another maid's room like mine, so I listened for the kind of sound I thought a maid might make; a sigh, for instance. But I couldn't hear anything at all, and at this moment Valentina called up my stairs and said we were going out to supper.

I combed my hair and went down and stood at the door of the salon. The salon had a parquet floor with a gleam on it like on the surface of still water. And it was as if, suddenly, I didn't dare to cross this water or thought I'd disturb it or muddy it or something and so I just stayed by the door, watching.

Valentina was alone in the room, sitting on a spindly sofa, smoking one of her Russian cigarettes. The cigarette was yellow. When she saw me hesitating, she held out her arm, which was plump and golden-skinned, and said: ‘Come on, darling. Come and tell me all the secrets of your life!'

I didn't have any secrets. I felt like I was waiting and waiting for the day when my first secret was going to appear. And then, as I walked across the watery floor and the mingled smell of the yellow cigarette and Valentina's expensive perfume wafted into my brain, I thought, this feels like the kind of place where this famous day might happen.

We didn't go straight to a restaurant but walked into a park near Valentina's flat called the Parc Monceau.

You can't sit on the grass in Paris parks, so Mum and Valentina sat on a bench and I stood staring at the grass, admiring how green and shiny it was, as if it had been washed and combed by a hairdresser.

‘Now,' said Valentina, ‘you see the evening begin to come down.'

Mum and Valentina kept very still on their bench, watching the sky and the way the colour in the park was beginning to fade away. ‘Look,' I heard Valentina say, ‘the evening is a bird covering us with its wings.' Then she laughed and put her arm round Alice's shoulder, and I remembered this from Brittany, that she was always touching people and holding them to her, as if she wanted to keep everybody safe and near her, within reach all the time.

I was looking around now, to see if I could spot some chess players, but I couldn't see any. I decided they had their favourite bit of the park and we didn't happen to be in it.

‘Valentina,' I said, ‘where are the chess players?'

‘Chess players?' she said. ‘Oh, Lewis darling, it's almost dusk and anyway I don't think there are any chess games in this park. You must go to the Luxembourg.'

‘OK,' I said.

Then I heard Valentina whisper to Alice: ‘You know, Alice, I forgot about the bloody chess. But I will find him someone to play with.'

‘He can find someone himself,' said Alice. ‘Don't worry about it.'

Then Valentina got up. She was wearing yellow sandals, which matched her cigarettes. ‘OK,' she announced, ‘now we are going to walk through the park to the Place des Ternes and have supper in a restaurant there. Come on, Lewis. Are you as hungry as an anaconda?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I'm as hungry as an anaconda, Valentina.'

Valentina laughed again. That laugh of hers was the kind of laugh you imagine women having long ago, before they realised they were an oppressed category of people.

She said to Alice: ‘Lewis is a good sport, you know. I hope he's going to be happy up in that room.'

When we got to the restaurant, we sat outside at a table on the pavement. I remembered this from Brittany, hundreds of tables on pavements, except that there a cold wind blew off the sea, and here the air was really hot and full of car fumes and light. Opposite the tables on the pavement was a flower seller. He was packing up his stall and I watched him going backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, loading his buckets of flowers, one by one, into a dented old Renault van.

I think this flower seller put me into a kind of exhausted trance. Him and the neon lights in the Place, blinking on and off, and the sound of Valentina's voice. I was finding it hard to eat my meal and hard to concentrate on what anyone was saying. I kept wondering how long the unsold flowers would last and whether, in the morning, they'd all be set out again, or if some would be chucked on to the flower seller's compost heap – if he
had
a compost heap; if he didn't live in a maid's room on a top floor . . .

‘So, you see,' I suddenly heard Valentina say: ‘this is why I have vowed these things.'

‘What things, Valentina?' I asked.

‘I've just been telling you, darling. Never to be poor again. Never to be hungry. Never to live in a cold room smelling of coal.'

‘Why would you have to be poor and hungry and live in a cold room smelling of coal?'

‘Well, I hope I won't, Lewis. I hope all that is in the past.'

I couldn't remember what Valentina was talking about.

‘Are you tired?' asked Mum.

I nodded. Valentina reached out and touched my forehead. Then she stroked one of my eyebrows with the back of her index finger. I thought, the eyebrow isn't a part of me that anybody has ever stroked before. Stroking it must be a special Russian thing. It could have a secret significance that I'm not yet able to understand.

What Valentina called her ‘job in life' was writing.

Mum told me that certain writers make millions of pounds and others don't make enough to pay their gas bills, but Valentina was in the first category. The books she wrote were called
Valentina Gavril's Medieval Romances
, and all round the world people clamoured to buy them. In a survey done in the States, it was revealed that eighty-nine per cent of Valentina's readers were women, but Valentina said to Alice that she didn't give a toss who her readers were, they could be orang-utans, turning the pages with their feet. She said that what mattered was that, through her books, she had become rich and so escaped from her old life and had been able to install her mother in a nice apartment near her favourite church.

I asked what her old life was and Mum told me that the Gavrilovich family was poor and that they owned something called a
café, bois et charbon
in some dismal little bit of Paris with hardly any trees. Not many
café-charbons
existed any more. They were places that opened very early in the morning, where you could have breakfast or a drink or buy a sack of coal. I said I didn't think drinks and sacks of coal went very logically together, but all Mum said was: ‘Ask Valentina to tell you about it.' And then I realised she'd been
trying
to tell me about it the evening we went to the Place des Ternes, but I just hadn't been able to take it in.

Alice was Valentina's English translator. Her French was really brilliant and she'd passed a minute bit of this brilliance on to me.

Translators don't make millions; they just make enough to buy their clothes from Indian boutiques and give their hair mud baths of henna. The reason we were in Paris was that Valentina's English publishers were so keen to get their hands on her next Medieval Romance that the translation was being begun even before Valentina had finished writing the book. That's what she'd meant when she said to me that she
needed
to have Mum with her in Paris. She was going to give the manuscript to her, chapter by chapter.

I'd never read any of Valentina's books. I thought the idea of a Medieval Romance sounded drippy. And Mum told me the novels were ‘all the same'. She said they all had something Valentina called her ‘long-shot opening'. ‘I become a cinematographer, you see,' she'd told Alice. ‘I start with a wide shot of the beautiful medieval countryside of France, all unspoiled and full of forests. Then, gradually, I go in closer and we see a house or castle, its sleeping roofs, its moats and battlements. And by this time, the reader knows where she is: she is in long-ago time. She can forget the difficult present. She can relax and surrender herself to another world. And then I go in closer still and we see a window; then a face at that window. It is our heroine. We go inside the room and there she is, waiting for life and romance to start, and so last of all we see inside her heart.'

I listened to all this and didn't pass any comment. Apparently, Valentina had only one worry – that she would eventually run out of stories. What I was thinking was, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if she did.

That first night in Paris, in my maid's room, I couldn't sleep, even though I was tired, so I went down, about one o'clock, and knocked on the door of Mum's room. Her light was on and she was reading Valentina's manuscript.

‘Is it good?' I asked.

‘It's odd,' she said. ‘It's different from the others.'

‘I thought you said they were all the same?'

‘They were. But this one is completely different.'

Mum's bedroom in the flat was huge. She looked small in the colossal bed. There were blue curtains at her window that reminded me of the curtains in old-fashioned theatres, with gold tassles hanging off them. The street beyond would be the stage. Mum said: ‘Listen to the air conditioning. It's like the sound of the sea at home.'