by Rose Tremain
‘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.
There was no sound of the whistler moving about – no footstep or anything. I imagined someone sitting on a stool, in front of a round window identical to mine, reading about all the thousands of things going on in France and in the wider world and whistling right through them.
I thought about knocking softly on the door. I then considered asking the whistler if he played chess, but I thought, it might be a maid after all and a maid could misinterpret the question. So I stayed still, just listening, until I realised how starving I was. I started to hope that Valentina had made or bought a huge strawberry tart even better than the one Sergei had found in the gutter.
Before I left England, Dad had told me about the bouquinistes, who sell old books and prints and cards from little stalls alongside the river, and the next day Sergei led me right to them. I reined him in tight and browsed slowly past them. The stall holders didn’t seem very interested in selling anything. It was like they just enjoyed chatting there, where a breeze was coming off the water. I prefer people like that to the kind who try to stick their crappy wares up your nostrils.
I hadn’t really intended to buy anything, but then I saw a copy of Le Grand Meaulnes bound in chalky leather and I picked it up. I tied Sergei to a plane tree and opened the book. The previous owner had written his name and a date inside it in faded blue ink: Paul Berger, 1961. I worked out that if Paul Berger had been, say, thirteen or fourteen in 1961, he was now in his late forties, about the same age as Dad. He might now be a banker or a futures trader and not even remember the name of Alain-Fournier. On the other hand, he could be a writer himself by now, the kind of writer no one has heard of but who makes a puny living writing the books he once liked to read. The favourite authors of this kind of writer are all dead, but he still tries to become like them. He doesn’t notice that the world he’s writing about no longer exists. Paul Berger might now be on his tenth attempt to rewrite Le Grand Meaulnes.
I bought the book. The stall holder looked quite miserable to part with it. He put it in a used brown paper bag and handed it to me carefully, with a kind of solemnity. Sergei, when I unwound him from the tree, thought it was a waffle or something and tried to bite it.
That night, in bed, I began reading it. Reading in French is always harder than speaking it. It’s almost as if each word has three dimensions.
J’avais quinze ans. C’était un froid dimanche de Novembre, le premier jour d’automne qui fit songer à l’hiver . . . I moved round and round this sentence, trying translations. ‘I was fifteen’, or ‘I was fifteen years old’. ‘It was a cold Sunday in November’, or ‘It was a cold November Sunday’; ‘the first day of autumn’, no, ‘the first autumn day’, no, ‘the first day of this autumn . . . which made you [or ‘he’? or ‘one’? or ‘everyone’?] dream of [or ‘have thoughts about’? or ‘remember’?] winter [or ‘the winter’]’. I wanted to go and ask Mum how she would decide whether ‘winter’ or ‘the winter’ sounded best. Did Mum, as a translator, have to be a kind of writer herself, a kind of poet, in order to make a choice instinctively, as if the words came from her and not the original author?
I was comfortable in my bed, with my round window full of city light. I thought everyone but me was asleep and so I said aloud: ‘I will now attempt a perfect but fluid translation of this sentence by Alain-Fournier, the Lewis Little Version! “I was fifteen. It was a Sunday in November, very cold. It was the first day of that autumn which made you remember that winter was just around the corner . . .”’
Then a voice said: ‘Lewis, are you talking to yourself?’
I looked over the top of the book and realised that Valentina was standing in my room. She must have crept up the stairs, wearing her little jewelled slippers, without my hearing her. She had on a Japanese kimono, black and green and yellow, and her face was oily.
‘I’m translating Le Grand Meaulnes,’ I said. ‘I’ve been working for an hour and I’m still only on page two.’
I knew this would make her laugh, and it did. She came and sat on my bed and folded her arms. ‘Read to me,’ she said.
‘Where from?’ I asked.
‘Anywhere you like.’
‘From the beginning?’
‘Yes.’
‘In English or in French?’
‘In your translation.’
‘I’ll never be a translator,’ I said. ‘Is that some kind of special oil on your face, Valentina?’
‘Yes. It’s called Night Repair Cream. It mends me while I sleep.’
I didn’t think Valentina looked as if she needed much repairing. Her eyes were really large and gentle and the lines at the corners of them were small, like she might have lain on a feather by mistake. ‘How old are you, Valentina?’ I asked.
> ‘Forty-one, darling, alas,’ she said. ‘How old are you?’
‘Thirteen. Fourteen on September the sixteenth.’
‘Is that the age of François in Le Grand Meaulnes? I can’t remember.’
‘No, he’s fifteen. “J’avais quinze ans.”’
‘Off you go, then, from the beginning.’
I lifted myself up in the bed. I noticed that Valentina’s night repair cream smelled of wallflowers. In Devon, we grew wallflowers by the back door and, in early summer, the scent of them wafted by you every time you came in or went out.
I turned back to page one of the book. I read: ‘“He arrived at our house one Sunday in November 1890. I continue to say ‘our house’ even though the house isn’t ours any more. We left that country since soon fifteen years . . .”’
‘Not “soon fifteen years”, Lewis.’
‘No, right. “We left that country almost fifteen years ago, and we will certainly never go back . . .”’
‘Oh yes; said Valentina with a little sigh, ‘I remember that. When you begin a book and you already know in the first line that everything is in the past, this makes you worry so for the character.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the thing he is writing about will turn out to be the most important thing in his life, you see? Or else why would he write about it? So you know all the rest of his life has been dull compared with that.’
I thought about this for a second, then I said: ‘It could be the worst thing in his life. He could be saying, “This terrible thing happened to me when I was fifteen and this is what I’m going to tell you about” – like old Oliver Twist in the workhouse.’
‘Yes. But not usually. Go on, anyway, darling. You’re reading very nicely, Lewis.’
I struggled on, round and in and out of blocks of words, till my mind felt too tired to carry on. While I was reading, Valentina sat very still, listening, as if I were reciting some magical Russian fairy tale. She didn’t try to help me or correct my translation again, but just stayed quiet, sometimes nodding and smiling. When I put the book down, she said: ‘Would you like to read to me a little each night, Lewis? This way, you will learn very fast.’
I liked the idea of her creeping up my stairs, wearing her wallflower cream, and the story of Meaulnes gradually unfolding in my attic room.
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Good. You prepare a couple of pages for tomorrow and I will come and listen. And now you’d better go to sleep. What I came up to tell you is you may hear some noises on the roof tomorrow. People are coming to do some work up there. So the noise will be the roof repairers and not a murderer, or anything like that. I didn’t want you to be afraid.’
‘I heard someone today,’ I said.
‘You heard someone on the roof?’
‘No. In the room on the other side of my bathroom, where the door is behind your clothes. Someone whistling.’
Valentina looked through to the bathroom, as though she expected to find the person still there. ‘Whistling?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I don’t know who that can be. That is a junk room. There’s no space in it for anyone to whistle.’
The next day, Didier appeared.
A huge hissing truck parked in the street at eight o’clock, just after I’d woken up. I had my head in my astronaut window when it arrived. It was the kind of hydraulic-lift truck firemen use and Didier was put into the cradle of it and transported to the roof. He went inching up about six feet from my window and I waved to him as he passed and he waved back.
I monitored him for most of the morning. He went up and down seventeen times, hauling scaffolding. Then he began to construct a scaffolding cage over the whole roof, with the base of it resting on a ledge below my room. One pole of his cage now cut my view of Paris in half. While he was fixing this pole, I stuck my head out of the window and asked him: ‘Comment vous appelez-vous, Monsieur?’
He was very thin and tanned and wore glasses. He said his name was Didier, so I told him mine was Louis. I told him I was the only person living in this attic.
At lunch, Valentina said: ‘I hope they’ve sent sensible people to work on the roof and I hope they don’t dawdle, you know.’ Valentina’s English was so good, she even knew words like ‘dawdle’.
‘There’s only one guy,’ I told her.
‘One guy? To do the whole roof?’
‘Yes. His name’s Didier. He’s very thin and he wears glasses, which is peculiar.’
‘Why’s it peculiar?’ asked Alice.
I said: ‘A roofer should have perfect sight, shouldn’t he? If his glasses fell off while he was on the roof, he might not be able to get down, or he could slip and fall. I think I’ll go and check on him from time to time, shall I, to make sure everything’s all right?’
‘Well, that’s a noble thought, darling,’ said Valentina, ‘but how are you going to get on to the roof?’
‘From the bathroom window.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Lewis,’ said Mum.
‘Darling,’ said Valentina, helping herself to another piece of veal, ‘more people will come to help him. You’ll see. They wouldn’t send one poor man to do this whole difficult roof.’
But no one else came. Didier constructed a second scaffolding cage at one corner of the apartment building, which enclosed a complicated staircase made of ladders, and he went up and down this ladder, carrying heavy hods of slates. I knew that he was just the very person Dad needed to help him with his hut.
I liked Didier. I swapped life stories with him. I told him I was Third Year Chess Champion of Beckett Bridges School and he told me he was an existentialist. I couldn’t remember exactly what an existentialist was, but Didier looked more like a student of philosophy than a roofer. Sometimes I like people just because I think the way they look is really neat. But I also thought, if you did a scan of Didier’s brain, you might see an area of brilliance in it that nobody expected to find.
On his neck was a tattoo of a bird. I didn’t know precisely where the jugular vein was, but it looked to me as if Didier’s tattoo was near it. So I asked him why he’d got that on his neck and he said it was a tattoo of his name, ‘Didier-l’oiseau’, or ‘Didier-the-Bird’.
‘Why “the Bird”?’ I asked him.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘there are times in life when you need to fly.’
At lunchtime, he sat on the dusty street, in the shade, eating bread and ham and drinking Coke. When the residents of the building passed him, they might nod or smile, but they never said a word to him.
‘No one speaks to Didier,’ I told Mum, after a few days.
‘I expect they do,’ Mum said. ‘The French are polite on the whole.’
‘They don’t. I’ve watched them. No one says anything to him.’
‘Except you.’
‘Well, I do, but I expect he’d prefer to have conversations with the grown-ups. Will you talk to him, Mum?’
Mum laughed, as if I’d said something outrageous. ‘What do you want me to say to him?’ she asked.
‘You could ask him about his eyesight. You could see if he’s got a spare pair of glasses in his shorts.’
She laughed and laughed. I could see her tonsils jiggling up and down. But eventually – humouring me like I was a kid of four – she said that if this was important to me she would talk to him. So, the following day, when I saw him eating his lunch in the street, I persuaded her and Valentina to come down and introduce themselves to him.
As soon as we got outside the door, they both looked embarrassed. I could see them thinking that a famous novelist and her translator shouldn’t go down and talk to roofers in the street. And when Didier saw them coming with me towards him, he looked uncomfortable too and blushed and tried to hide his half-eaten sandwich behind his dusty body.
I introduced them nevertheless and they both shook hands with him. I saw him notice Alice’s beauty. He probably wished his sandwich would turn into a red rose he coul
d give her. I thought, I must try to keep close track of what everyone’s going to say.
Valentina asked him if other men would be coming to help him with the roof, but he kept his eyes on Alice and said he didn’t know. Then Mum said in her brilliant, flawless French: ‘We ask because this is Valentina Gavril, the well-known writer of Medieval Romances. She has a lot of work to do and it’s important she isn’t disturbed for too long.’
I could tell this pissed Didier off. It was like that clever bit of his brain thought the whole idea of a Medieval Romance was complete and utter shit. He gave Valentina a mean stare from behind his glasses and said: ‘I’m sorry if the roof work disturbs you, Madame. But it must be done. The slates are very old and uneven.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Valentina, with one of her sweet smiles, ‘I know that.’ And then she put her hand on my shoulder and said: ‘Lewis is the one who’ll be disturbed the most. His room is right under the roof.’
‘I know,’ said Didier, ‘I’ve seen Louis’ room.’
‘Oh, you have?’ said Valentina. Her smile had gone now and I could tell she was wondering whether I’d invited Didier into my room for a Kit-Kat or something, or made him listen to the phantom whistler.
Alice tried a kind of conversation rescue. ‘Lewis is worried,’ she said, ‘about your glasses.’
‘About my glasses?’ said Didier.
‘Yes. That you could lose them and then—’
‘Lose them?’
‘Yes, and then . . . not fall, or anything – because I’m sure you’re very practised – just feel a bit confused up there.’
‘No,’ said Didier. ‘I don’t think so.’
I could feel that the whole encounter was going really badly. I wished I’d never suggested it. And I wished we could now pretend to be on our way to the Parc Monceau, pretend that we’d passed Didier eating his lunch in the street quite by chance. Then I had an idea. I asked Didier if he’d like to see our dog, knowing he’d say yes, so that Valentina and Alice would go away and leave him in peace. So we all trooped back inside the apartment building and I fetched Sergei and brought him down and I could tell Didier liked him and he liked Didier. Sometimes, meetings with animals go better than meetings with novelists.
