The Way I Found Her (6 page)

I was about to suggest that Mum talk to Valentina and ask her politely not to keep interrupting her, when I heard a voice calling ‘Louis! Louis!' and I turned round and saw Didier.

He was zooming towards us on roller blades. He was smiling, as if we were his old friends. He came to a perfectly controlled stop right beside us and shook our hands. And I thought, he didn't have to come up to us at all. There are a lot of people here and he could have pretended that he hadn't seen us, but he didn't.

I think he understood that Alice was feeling miserable, because he turned his attention to her straight away. He didn't seem embarrassed in front of her, like he'd been that day in the street. He pointed out to us the roller-skating slalom run on the right of the esplanade and told us that he and a few friends came here most Sundays ‘to show off'. I wanted to see him skate. I reckoned that someone called Didier-the-Bird would have to be a brilliant roller-blader. So I said: ‘Will you skate for us, Didier?'

He said sure, in a minute he would, but he wanted to know first what we thought about the arch. Alice began going on about how she knew the architect had conceived it as the western gateway to the city and that it had become part of the ‘Great Axis' made by the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde, the Place du Carrousel and the Louvre. Then she added that, close to, she didn't really like it. Didier looked pleased. I don't know if it was the bit of history she'd learned or her not liking the arch that pleased him. He asked Alice if we had time to see what was on the other side of it, on the piece of ground ‘which had not been in the architect's calculations'.

I knew we had all the time in the world, that Alice wouldn't want to go back to the apartment yet, but she turned and asked me if I thought we had enough time. I nodded and so we walked with Didier through the arch, under the trapeze thing, until we got to a rail on the western edge of the development. ‘There,' said Didier.

We found that we were looking down at a cemetery. Didier said nothing. We all three of us stared at the cemetery, which looked as though it had been filled up long ago, because it was chock-a-block with graves. I think this was the first French graveyard I'd seen and I noticed that, instead of having flat slabs put over them, the dead here were put inside proper stone buildings with roofs on and railings round some of them and tiny gardens planted with plastic flowers. It was like looking at the Afterlife Housing Estate. All it lacked were TV facilities.

Then Didier suddenly said: ‘My father is buried here.'

Alice said she was sorry, and I immediately thought that Didier seemed too young to have a dead father. I'd worked out that he was no older than about twenty-seven, so his father might only have been fifty or fifty-five. Not many people seemed to die at this age. I made a note to ask Didier whether his father had been a roofer and if the mortality rate among roofers was high.

Didier went on: ‘As you can see, it's difficult to get into that graveyard now. There's building work all round it, new roads out to the
périphérique
.'

Alice nodded. It was a bit windy out here above the cemetery and her hair started blowing about wildly. Didier took off his glasses and began polishing them on the hem of his T-shirt. Without them, he looked more like a tennis star or a cyclist than a philosopher. ‘So how do you get there?' asked Alice.

‘Oh,' said Didier, putting his glasses back on, ‘I fly. Didn't Louis tell you I could fly?'

‘Yes, he did,' said Alice, ‘but I don't necessarily believe everything he says.'

‘Would you like a Yop?' asked Didier.

‘What?' said Alice.

I told Mum Yop was a yoghurt drink. Students and joggers in the Parc Monceau drank Yop and the litter bins were full of old Yop containers. She said OK, she'd like one. Then she said to Didier, ‘Which tomb is your father's?'

He pointed to the far side of the graveyard, where I'd noticed one of the dead people's houses had an angel on the roof. It was the only angel in the whole place. ‘There,' he said, ‘next to the angel. The small one on the right of it.'

We all looked at Didier's father's tomb. In scale, and in situation, it looked like the garage to the house with the angel. It didn't look as though there was any room for Didier's mother in the garage, and I wondered whether, every time he came here, Didier thought, that fucking angel, overshadowing Papa, and making him seem small, I'm going to knock its wings off one day!

But he didn't seem downhearted. He bought us the Yops and we drank them while we watched the roller-skaters and I could see that Mum's fury was lessening and that she was enjoying herself. I didn't know which thing it was that had cheered her up.

When Didier went off to skate, as soon as he did his first run we could see that he was the best, the niftiest. His slalom technique was perfect and he went faster than all the other skaters.

I said to Mum: ‘That could be it, you know.'

‘What?' she said.

‘Why he's called Didier-the-Bird.'

But her eyes were fixed on Didier and she didn't bother to reply.

When we got back to the flat, it was about six o'clock. Sergei was there alone. There was a furious note on the hall table from Valentina, which said:
Why do you sneak out like thieves? This is not a hotel! Lewis, walk Sergei when you return. V
.

I got Sergei's kite lead. I thought I'd head for the Eiffel Tower and beg it to let me stay in Paris. I'd never begged in French before, to something made of iron, but I didn't see why I shouldn't try.

We set off down the leafy boulevard, which I now knew was the Avenue George V, but we hadn't got very far when Sergei suddenly stopped and wouldn't walk on. I tugged at him, but he just sat down in the street and then he vomited.

He'd chosen a really bum place. We were right in front of the Hôtel George V, almost on its doormat, and when the hotel doorman saw what had happened he started to shriek at me. People arriving in Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs had to step round Sergei and his vomit and I could perfectly well understand that this didn't give them a good first impression of the hotel.

I told the doorman that I was very sorry and I tugged Sergei to a plane tree, where he looked up at me piteously. I stroked his head, like Mum used to stroke mine when I was made of Play Doh and puked in the night.

I'd tried to make Sergei walk towards home, but he refused; he just kept lying down on the pavement. So I had to stagger along with him in my arms. I kept remembering what Valentina had said about Mr Gavrilovich heaving sacks of coal that weighed as much as a child of seven. Sergei must have weighed as much as a child of nine.

Everyone stared at me, a thin boy carrying a gigantic dog, but no one offered to help me and the rue Rembrandt was a long way. I had to keep stopping to rest and I could have done with a raspberry Yop to give me strength.

I was wrecked by the time I got back to the flat. Valentina was on her own in the salon, watering her flower arrangements. When I put Sergei down, he went straight to her and lay down with his head on her feet. She looked at me accusingly and laid aside her little brass watering can. ‘What's happened?' she said. ‘What have you done to Sergei?'

‘I haven't done anything to him,' I said. ‘He threw up in front of the Hôtel George V. Practically on the George V's carpet.'

‘Oh God!' said Valentina, ‘and I lunch there!'

She bent down and lifted up Sergei's head, stroking it, examining the eyes and mouth. ‘I'd better get Maurice,' she said, ‘if I can get him on a Sunday. Nobody wants to do anything on a Sunday in Paris. And you know I was so upset by what you and Alice did this afternoon. I think at least, when you go out, you might have the courtesy to tell me.'

She seemed very unhappy. I wondered if Mum had told her we were leaving. I wondered how many nights I had left in my room with
Le Grand Meaulnes
.

‘I'm sorry, Valentina,' I said.

‘You see, aside from anything else, we have so much work to get through, and of course when something worries me like that, I can't work at all . . . and now Sergei is ill . . .'

‘I'm really sorry,' was all I could find to say. I stood there uselessly dripping sweat on to the parquet. And I think I must have looked so abject that the sight of me somehow melted away Valentina's anger, because she suddenly came over to me and put both her arms round me and pressed my face into her yellow silk blouse and kissed the top of my head. ‘It's not your fault, darling,' she said. She held me like that for a long time, till I almost suffocated in her perfume and my face made a wet patch on her blouse, and I thought, nobody I've ever known is like Valentina; she's come out of a different kind of earth.

Eventually she let me go and went off to telephone Maurice, the vet. He wasn't in and I heard her leave an angry message on his answering machine. I wondered where a posh Parisian vet might go on Sunday evening and I decided he would go some place where animals were hardly ever seen, like the Hôtel George V.

When I got up to my room, I took off my shirt and poured water all over myself and then won the chess game against the computer in 1.7 minutes. I knew Alice was working downstairs and I wanted to go and ask her whether we were leaving or not, but then I thought it was better not to disturb her.

I began a letter to Hugh. I described my room to him and told him that I'd moved my bed right under the round window, so that I could lie in it and look up at the Paris sky. I put:
If a window is round, you expect to see more interesting things out of it than out of a normal window. The things I can see from my bed are: the sky, which is a kind of orange colour at night, a pole of scaffolding, birds, aeroplanes, stars (sometimes), the moon (sometimes), Didier's legs when he's working on my bit of the roof. If the window had been square, I probably wouldn't have bothered to move my bed underneath it
.

I told him about the Jardin des Plantes and sitting in China and about the bison and the cocktail trolley. I added:
The first thing you see when you come into the Jardin des Plantes from the rue Cuvier is a statue of a lion eating a human foot. The foot isn't attached to anyone. The person to whom the foot was once attached could now be inside the lion
.

I stopped here. Writing to Hugh made me remember the hut. I sat there wishing that Hugh were trying to install a solar heating system or build a motorbike from old spare parts – something that would add to somebody's happiness. Because I knew exactly what was going to happen to the hut: it would remain empty for ever. A desk would be put in it for Alice and a gas heater, even. But Alice would never spend any time there, not even in summer, and so it would be me who would have to pretend to use it, just to make Dad feel better about building it. I'd have to take homework out there on cold spring afternoons and say I liked the peace and quiet of it and the way, when the wind was in the west, it creaked and moved.

My mind started to wander, because thinking about the stupid hut oppressed me. I wondered what we'd have for dinner and whether this would be our last meal. I wondered when Maurice the vet would come. I wondered whether Valentina would ever take me inside the Hôtel George V and what she would wear if she did . . .

I carried on with the letter, but added nothing about the hut. I just put:
I hope you're not lonely, Dad. Please give my love to Grandma Gwyneth and Grandad Bertie when you see them and tell them I really am trying with my French. This guy Didier on the roof is a lonely kind of person. I think he's an only child, like me and like you. He probably lives alone in a room somewhere
.

Must go now. Valentina's called me down for supper
.

Nothing was said at supper about our leaving. We ate salmon with a peculiar sauce that tasted like liquorice and reminded me of being a child. Valentina had put a lot of blue eyeshadow all round her eyes. She and Mum were polite to each other – almost nice, but not quite. Sergei lay under the table, snoring. We didn't talk much and while we ate I could hear the residents of the rue Rembrandt arriving back from their country weekends in their Volvos and Mercedes.

As we were finishing supper, the bell rang and it was Maurice the vet. He was a man with soft, crinkly white hair, and a tanned face, very smartly dressed in a pale suit. We cleared away the supper things and Maurice spread a rug over the dining table and put Sergei on it.

Maurice had long thin fingers, like artists and pianists are supposed to have. With these, he stuck a thermometer into Sergei's bum and I could tell Sergei didn't like this; he kept turning round to try to see what was happening to him. Maurice then started examining Sergei's tummy. I had to help him hold Sergei down on the table, while Valentina watched anxiously, stroking one of Sergei's ears and asking Maurice questions all the time. Maurice talked the fastest French I'd ever heard. It just floated out of his throat like air waves.

I could tell Valentina liked Maurice and I knew it was for him that she'd put on the blue eyeshadow.

When he was leaving, Valentina followed him to the door, and he bent his face down towards her and she kissed him, not quite on his mouth, but just slightly to one side of it, and then again on the other side. She didn't see me watching this kiss, but I was.

When she came back from kissing Maurice, she was blushing and smiling. ‘Maurice is so good,' she said. ‘He has such a good heart, he even reads my books!' While she said this, she patted her hair and kept on smiling and I thought how amazingly beautiful she looked with her face all pink like it was, as if she'd been out in the snow.