The Way I Found Her (3 page)

So then she put away the manuscript and we sat there, thinking about Devon. I was privately thinking about Dad and his tragic hut, but what Mum was thinking about precisely I don't know.

Valentina's dog was a fantastic animal. He was an Irish Setter named Sergei. His coat, in certain lights, was the colour of Mum's hair.

After breakfast the next morning, Valentina called me to her and put her arm round my waist. ‘Now, Lewis,' she said, ‘you are going to get to know Sergei. Sergei, come here. This is Lewis. You must show Lewis what a clever dog you are.'

We'd never had a dog at home. The only non-human creature I'd talked to in my childhood had been Elroy. I'd even taken Elroy on walks and showed him the larks' nests and the standing stones. Now, for the first time, a dog's lead was put into my hand.

‘OK, darling,' said Valentina, ‘Sergei has to be walked every morning and this will become your job. He will show you Paris. He knows his way right round the city. Not round the
banlieue
, of course, where we never go, but right round the centre of Paris. And he is an angel. He will find his way home from wherever you are. So off you go, Lewis. Here's the lead. Take some money.'

Sergei's lead was a string coiled inside a kind of hand-shaped box. Valentina had said: ‘With this, you can let Sergei walk a long way ahead of you and then rein him in again, like a kite.' As soon as Sergei and I got down to the street, Sergei turned left towards the park. He extended his lead so far so quickly that he was at the park gates before I'd even got into my stride. I tried to rein him in, as instructed by Valentina, but Sergei was a strong dog and he didn't want to be reined in. He wanted to arrive at the park and sniff the juniper bushes and piss against the marble statues.

I made a mental note about the inaccuracy of Valentina's kite analogy. It seemed to me that she didn't know what flying a kite was really like and that it was probable she'd passed her whole life without ever flying one. I thought, perhaps, when she was a little girl in Russia, a kite was too expensive a thing for her family to buy? The most difficult thing of all with a kite is getting it to go up. Whereas the difficult thing with Sergei was getting him to come back to me. And only on certain kite-flying days, when the lift factor is very strong, is the task of winding in the kite remotely hard.

Sergei tugged me round the park. My arm began to ache. My arms were still the puniest bits of me. I could only rest when Sergei found some smell on the dusty paths delicious enough to make him pause. He saw some pigeons and began chasing them. His long lead went whirring out like a fishing line with a shark on the end of it. Then I heard an unexpected noise. It was a long blast on a whistle, like the PE instructor at school ending a game of football. And a man in a uniform came striding over to me, shouting and wagging his finger. The pigeons flew away and Sergei sat down and looked at the man accusingly, so I just stood and waited.

The man was really angry. Under his summer tan, his face was quite red. I hoped he wasn't carrying a gun. All along the path, old people sitting on the benches began to stare at me. A jogger passed, wearing a luminous bandana, and gave me a glare. And then I understood: dogs weren't allowed in the park. The uniformed man pointed at Sergei and made an X-shape with his arms. ‘Défendu,' he kept saying. ‘Défendu, défendu!'

I shrugged. It was meant to be the gesture of an innocent, of the person who's landed from outer space, knowing nothing. If Valentina hadn't told me about the blow-dried grass, I might have trespassed on that too. How was I supposed to know the etiquette of the park without her help?

‘Sortez, s'il vous plaît,' said the man. I could tell he thought I was an idiot. It hadn't occurred to him that I was a schoolboy from Devon. ‘OK, d'accord,' I said. And I tugged at the lead until Sergei came grudgingly towards me and there we were back in the rue Rembrandt. I noticed then that on the green park gates was a little picture of a dog with a line through it, but in a strange place your eyes can skim right past important things.

I stood in the street. ‘Now where?' I asked Sergei. He was shitting in the gutter, between a Renault Clio and a Volvo Estate, and while I waited for him to finish I looked all around me anxiously, hoping he wasn't breaking some invisible law.

When I got back, Alice and Valentina hardly noticed me. ‘Later, darling, you will tell us where you've been,' said Valentina.

They were sitting in Valentina's study, talking. The subject they were discussing was medieval time. This was one of the things I'd begun to like about Valentina: you never knew what weird subject she was going to start on next.

Sergei lay down on the parquet in the salon and I got myself an Orangina from Valentina's fridge (she remembered I used to drink Orangina on that holiday in Brittany) and sat down by him, listening to this peculiar conversation coming through the open study door.

Valentina said: ‘You know how they measured time in the Middle Ages, Alice? In hours of differing length. Because they counted twelve hours from sunrise to sunset and twelve hours from sunset to sunrise, no matter what season they were in. And so you see what happens? The hours of the night in summer become thirty-minute hours and the hours of the night in midwinter ninety-minute hours! But you can imagine that people might forget what kind of hour they were in, can't you? In the darkness, especially, they could measure the hour wrongly. And this is what happens to Barthélémy.'

‘I see,' said Alice. I wanted her to ask who Barthélémy was, but she didn't, because she already knew.

‘So,' she said, ‘when he's doing his experiments at night, he forgets that the hours are getting shorter as the spring comes?'

‘Yes. He is calculating in ninety-minute hours, when really an hour at that time of the year lasts only eighty-five minutes and then eighty-four and then eighty and then seventy. And this forgetting is fatal. You see?'

There was a silence at that moment. It seemed to be Mum's turn to speak, but she didn't say anything. Then Valentina went on: ‘I have no difficulty in understanding the concept of the ninety-minute hour. In my other life, I
lived
ninety-minute hours. Even in summer, I don't think the hours were any shorter than seventy or eighty minutes.'

Alice said: ‘Time alters as we get older.'

‘No,' said Valentina, ‘it's not to do with age. It's to do with
movement
. When I worked for my parents in the
café-charbon
, the places I moved between were the wine cellar and the café. Down, up. Cellar, café. Café, cellar. Up, down. That was all. To a prisoner, time is different.'

‘Is that how you think of your old life – as being in prison?' asked Alice.

‘Yes, of course,' said Valentina. ‘Worse for my father. The places he went between were the coal bunker and the yard. All day. Coal bunker, yard. Yard, coal bunker. Fill up a sack, take it up to the yard. You know how much a sack of coal weighs?'

‘No.'

‘As much as a child of seven. All day, my father puts this child on his back and carries it to the yard. Perhaps one day I will write something about that. But no one will publish it.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because from me, from Valentina Gavril, the readers want Medieval Romances. That's all they want, Alice. A little terror, a little chivalry, a lot of fucking, a happy ending. Why not? A book can shorten an hour. But you know my last translator used to change things around. She was an American feminist and so she tried secretly to change the women in my books and make them more like feminists. She forgot my English was almost as good as hers. I had to kill her in the end.'

‘What?' said Alice.

I put down my Orangina and leant nearer the study door. I heard Valentina laugh. ‘Yes, I killed her,' she said.

There was a pause here. Being a Scot, Mum isn't afraid to dismiss totally bluntly everything that strikes her as untrue. She has this haughty, withering look she can give you, worse than any look the teachers give you at school.

‘I kill my characters all the time,' Valentina went on. ‘I decapitate them, disembowel them, poison them, burn them. I know so many methods. And I killed that translator.'

The trouble about eavesdropping is you're just left alone with the things you've heard. You're marooned with them, like on a really uncomfortable rock, and all around you is a silent sea. I was trying to imagine Valentina taking off her jewellery and her expensive shoes and tiptoeing along the corridor with a carving knife, when she and Alice came out of the study and sat down with me and asked me to tell them about my morning.

We'd walked such a long way that Sergei was exhausted and he went to sleep with his head on Valentina's foot. She wasn't wearing yellow sandals today, but white ones. The colour of her toenails was dark shining red, like wine, or like blood.

I told her and Alice that I'd seen the river and the Eiffel Tower. I said the hugeness of the Tower had made me feel strange. What I meant by strange was ‘happy'. The thing I used to envy in my games with Elroy were how large the world must have seemed to him.

I told them I liked it when things were vast and made of iron. And I described a courtyard I went into where there was an iron girder strung between two houses. It seemed to be holding the two buildings apart, as if one was the Capulet house and the other was the house of the Montagues. I'd had
Romeo and Juliet
on my mind lately, because we'd been studying it at school and I really liked the absolute total sadness of it, I don't know why.

I said I realised after a moment that the girder wasn't really holding the two houses apart, but making a bridge between them. Creeper had climbed up the wall of the Montague house and along the girder and hung down in tentacles, and so Romeo could have climbed out of his window and inched his way along the girder, holding on to the creeper, until he reached Juliet's bedroom.

Valentina laughed when I said all this. Mum and Dad hardly ever laughed at the things I said, but I seemed to amuse Valentina, or else she was a woman who, now that she didn't have to work in a coal yard, was easily entertained.

She asked me what else I'd done. I said Sergei had tugged me across one of the bridges over the river and that I was so thirsty by that time that I'd sat down in a café and ordered a Coke for me and a bowl of water for Sergei. Near his bowl Sergei had found a perfectly formed strawberry tart in the gutter.

Then I told them about the woman I'd seen in the café while I was drinking the Coke and Sergei was snaffling up the tart. She was old, but she had this little face like a kitten. She kept dabbing her nose with powder. It was hot in the café, so she dabbed loads and loads of times. I said: ‘I felt really sorry for her.'

‘I expect she was waiting for someone, darling,' said Valentina.

‘Well, maybe she was,' I said, ‘but no one came.'

‘Then what do you think was happening, Lewis?'

I could tell Mum wasn't in the least interested in this conversation. She was looking away from both of us, staring into her own separate thoughts. Valentina put her arm through mine. She smelled of some special delicious perfume I'd never breathed before. I took some deep sniffs of it before I said: ‘I think she thought people passing would mistake her for some old movie star and come in and order up champagne, or something. She kept scanning out for the one person who was going to see her former beauty, but that person never came by.'

Valentina laughed again. Then she said: ‘That's really very sad, Lewis. I don't know why I'm laughing.'

‘I thought about pretending to
be
that one person,' I went on, ‘but I couldn't remember the names of any old movie stars.'

Valentina began to reel off a list of names of former beauties. They were mostly French and I'd never heard of any of them. I remembered one name: Simone Signoret. Valentina said hers was the saddest story of all.

When it was almost lunchtime, I went up to my room. I got out my Concorde notebook and added a Second Hypothesis to my
Exploding Peanut Theory of Beauty
. It didn't have the simplicity of the first, but all the same I quite liked it. It went like this:
Female beauty, if or when lost by the former owner of it, can cause insanity. The brain, which might have roughly the same mass as a Family Size pack of dry-roasted peanuts, ‘explodes' into irrational behaviour, searching for signs – such as the passing glance of a stranger in the street – that the irretrievably lost beauty has suddenly been found again
.

It was stifling in my room. Maids weren't meant to be in their rooms during the day; they were meant to be dusting parquet or polishing the silver downstairs. I went into my bathroom and ran some cold water in the washbasin and laid my face in it, till it began to cool. It was while I had my head in the water that I remembered something my father had said to me about happiness. We were shrimping at the time. Hugh said: ‘See this deep pool, Lewis, and see the little grey shrimp? Think of the pool as your life and your quota of happiness as the shrimp and then you won't expect too much of anything, and when disappointment comes you won't drown.' At the time, I'd thought this a kind of wise and fathomless thing to say, but now it seemed to me, standing there with my head in the basin, that to equate happiness with a shrimp was completely stupid.

When I emerged from the water, I heard a new sound. I dried my face and listened. Someone was whistling on the other side of the locked door.

I tiptoed across the bathroom and bent down by the keyhole of the door. I tried to see into the room beyond, but I couldn't. Perhaps the key was in the lock on the other side, or perhaps some piece of furniture had been put in front of it? But there was definitely whistling going on. It sounded like the sad song of a maid, except it was a man whistling, as if he might be reading some boring newspaper. One of my teachers at school did this, whistled while he marked dull assignments, and only stopped when he found something to interest him. He'd whistled all through my essay on
Romeo and Juliet
, right to the last full stop.