by Rose Tremain
I glanced at her, walking along in the dappled sunlight. She was wearing a skimpy blue dress and some brown beads Hugh had bought her from a craft shop in Exeter. I thought, when a person goes into her own secret world, it isn’t a reassuring sign. And then I realised another thing about her, a thing I never would have anticipated: she’d been neglecting me. So this is what I thought about as we walked. I made an imaginary diagram of our two minds, Alice’s and mine, and they were like two planets or stars zooming further and further away from each other as time passed and the universe expanded.
When we got to the bird market, Sergei began to tremble, seeing all these hundreds of birds looking out at him and trilling. I don’t know whether he was trembling out of curiosity or out of sadness or out of a desire to snaffle up a dozen yellow canaries for his lunch. I stroked his neck to calm him. Some of the birds looked desperate to get out of their cages, sticking their beaks and their eyes through the bars, but the baby parrots were all huddled together in a far corner of their hutch, their green heads in a cluster, like they couldn’t bear to see the people going by and wanted to be in darkness. I pointed this out to Alice and we stood and looked at them and Alice said: ‘They think we’re for sale to them and they’ve decided they don’t want to buy.’
We passed mina birds who tried to speak to us in some language we couldn’t understand and a flight of Indian sparrows in a wicker barrel and then we came to pairs of budgerigars in very small cages, who had been labelled as being inséparables. Some had come from Japan and some from South America. I didn’t know who had decided that these ones couldn’t be parted from each other or what would happen to them if you did part them.
‘Would they die?’ I asked Alice.
Mostly they were blue, the colour of her dress, and she smiled at them tenderly, as if they amused her. ‘They’re just couples,’ she said: ‘Mr and Mrs.’
‘Shall we buy a pair?’ I said suddenly.
‘Certainly not,’ said Alice. ‘Whatever for?’
‘For Valentina,’ I said. ‘To cheer her up.’ They weren’t very expensive. I thought I could use some of my ‘book money’ that Hugh had given me, because the only book I’d bought was Paul Berger’s copy of Le Grand Meaulnes and Hugh had seemed to imagine I’d be buying books non-stop all the time, like he did. He couldn’t pass a second-hand bookshop without coming out with some bizarre thing like Letters of an American Slave Trader or Sanitation in Roman Britain, but I was more selective. ‘I’ll pay,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Alice.
I felt a sliver of fury come into me. Alice sometimes boasted about her obstinacy, but right now it just really pissed me off. I knew Valentina would like the budgerigars. I could imagine her taking them out of their cage and stroking their blue feathers. Russian people weren’t afraid to bring birds inside their houses and let them alight on their bodies.
‘Please, Mum,’ I said, forgetting my promise to imitate François, who never called his mother by anything but her first name.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Absolutely not, Lewis. And now I think we’ve seen enough caged birds. Let’s go to a café for some lunch and then up to La Défense. OK?’
I felt furious, but then our lunch took all my crossness away. It was in one of those big, noisy café-brasseries where pinball machines and cappuccino coffee-makers ping and hiss in the background all the time and the conversation is as loud as the sea, and what the atmosphere of this brasserie made me feel was that I was at the centre of the Western world. My reflection in the brasserie glass was aged a cool sixteen.
I drank two panachés and then I wanted to sleep. I felt like the green baby parrots, who were tired of all the sale goods that passed their way, so I asked Alice if she’d mind if I didn’t come with her to La Défense. I expected her to say she did mind, but all she did was shrug again and say, ‘No, it’s up to you. Take Sergei home, if you want, but be quiet in the apartment in case Valentina’s sleeping.’
When I got back, I left Sergei outside Valentina’s room, where he lay down and sniffed her perfume in the tiny gap of air under the door. I stood and listened, but there was nothing to be heard, only the whisper of a few cars on the rue de Lisbonne. I imagined Valentina and Mrs Gavrilovich lying side by side and snoring quietly. I told Sergei not to start whining or whimpering for their love.
Then I went and looked round Alice’s room. My sleepiness had gone. I was looking for the manuscript of Valentina’s book, and I expected to find a fat pile of pages sitting neatly on her desk but there was no such pile. I began searching in drawers and cupboards, like a burglar. A real burglar could have told from the quality of Alice’s underwear that she wasn’t rich. Her knickers were all different colours and small and scrunched up, as if they were never ironed, and her bras were made of cotton check. And she didn’t have any jewellery, only a few beads and bits of amber. The burglar would have gone away thinking, that’s really pitiful: nothing worth nicking.
I couldn’t find the manuscript, only a few sheets – pages 39 to 42 – lying under a paperweight by Alice’s bed. I could have moused my way into her computer file and printed the whole thing out from page I, but I wasn’t feeling that assertive and, anyway, I didn’t want to be here delving around in Alice’s things; I wanted to be alone.
I went up to my room. I drew the little curtain across my round window to blank out the light and closed and locked my bedroom door. Then I got into bed with the lipstick Cerise. I took all my clothes off and lay in the semidark with my eyes closed and the lipstick caressing my mouth and my tongue.
It tasted of strawberries. Not cherries. It had a texture so fine it was like something chefs might dream of. So then I imagined a line of chefs arriving and presenting Valentina with sugared grapes and lattice baskets of chocolate and redcurrants dipped in cream and she smiled and giggled as she ate them, as some of the sugar dusted her breasts and the cream dripped on to her thighs, and then she sent them all away and said, ‘Now I shall have my real feast.’ And her ‘real feast’ was me. She lay on me, with her huge soft weight, and she kissed me again and again and then she put me inside her.
I’d never dared to think about being inside Valentina before. It was like I’d said to myself, if I don’t think about that, then all my other fantasies will never harm her and never be known by anyone on earth. But it was the lipstick that drove my thoughts there. And then that was what I wanted. I wanted to fuck her. I’d never, ever, imagined fucking anyone before that afternoon, but now I did imagine it and I felt as absolutely crazy with longing as it is possible to feel. Afterwards, when I’d come, I put my hands over my face, which was red and sticky with the lipstick, and cried.
Then I slept for a long time. No one came to disturb me and I supposed that Alice was still out. When I woke up, the sun had moved from our side of the street and I could tell it was getting towards supper time.
I got up and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. I looked as if I’d stepped out of some really violent movie, bleeding from the face and genitals, punched in the eye, left to die. I wished I was my father, aged forty-six, happy with a hut. This is undoubtedly what love does to people, I thought: it kills them.
It was difficult to know how to make myself look normal again, but I thought having a bath might help, so I ran a big deep tub of water and soaped and scrubbed the lipstick away and lay submerged in the pink scummy foam like a diver. I wanted to emerge from the water reborn, with no vestige of my longing for Valentina remaining, but I knew this wasn’t going to happen and it didn’t.
I put on clean clothes. There was lipstick all over my pillowcase, so I yanked it off and threw it into my wardrobe, hoping Babba wouldn’t go sniffing around and find it.
When I got downstairs, I found Mrs Gavrilovich in the kitchen, making onion soup. She said in her heavy French: ‘Onions. Those I grew in Moscow, Louis. Long ago. In a tin bath, under the skylight.’
Alice hadn’t come in. It was half past seven and the country-weekenders of the rue Rembrand
t were returning as they always did, but Alice was staying away. I knew that when I saw Valentina – if I was allowed to see her that night – she’d ask me where Alice was, so I made up a convincing story about her meeting a friend from Scotland in the brasserie and going off with her for the rest of the day. I would call her Jean, which had been the name of Alice’s friend in Edinburgh. Alice and Jean used to go roller-skating together and one day Jean skated right into a milk float and broke her nose. I would tell Valentina this story, to divert her.
Then Valentina came into the kitchen. She had no make-up on, no lipstick, nothing, and her face looked white, like the faces of heroin users. She was wearing her silk kimono and her hair was a bit flat where she’d been lying on it. She looked terrible really, yet, the moment I saw her, all I wanted to do was to go to her and put my arms round her, or let my hand be a bird, landing on whatever part of her it chose. She peered for a moment at Mrs Gavrilovich’s soup, then she came to me and gently stroked my hair that was still wet from my diver’s bath.
‘Lewis,’ she said, ‘how are you, my English boy?’
I had my piece of rope now. Getting out on to the roof was a cinch. And I had my private roof kit, which consisted of a torch, a blanket and a Lion bar.
I installed myself on the plateau where the tanks were. The moon was up and smiling.
The blanket was my bed and one of the tanks was my bed head, against which I could lean. If I climbed on to the tank I could see right down to ground level, and this I did that night from time to time, to see if Alice was returning. Not many people walked in the rue Rembrandt at night, because our bit of it led nowhere except to the park. At about one, Moinel came down the street, carrying what looked like a bag of groceries, and I saw him hurry in, as if these groceries embarrassed him. He was dressed from head to toe in white.
I’d told the story about Jean to Valentina, so she wasn’t worried about Alice, but after I’d seen Moinel go in I felt a kind of worm of worry slither through me and I was tempted to go down and telephone my father and ask him what I should do if, in the morning, Alice was still missing. But I didn’t move from the roof. In Hugh’s last letter, he’d told me he went to bed early and slept ‘like a child’.
To combat my worm, I began to read pages 39 to 42 of Valentina’s book that I’d taken from Alice’s room. Neither Barthélémy nor Isabelle seemed to be in this bit of the text. I didn’t know what had happened to them.
What I read about was a winter night in the town of Belfort. Belfort was having the ninety-minute hours I’d heard Valentina describe and in these all the people were leaving their homes and moving in ones and twos and groups and families towards the city gate. They were going because a smallpox plague had come to Belfort, ‘spreading from house to house on a sneeze or a breath, being carried further and wider in the sewage that streamed along the gutters. A freak wind from the south blew a black dust into the air that swirled like a tornado into the sky and then fell back to settle on the streets . . .’
I paused here. I thought, this story is meant to be set in the year 1400 or something and probably the first time anyone in the Western world heard the word ‘tornado’ was when Dorothy’s house got blown into the sky in The Wizard of Oz, so Valentina’s feeling for history is a bit off key in this passage. I made an indentation with my nail in the margin opposite the word ‘tornado’ and then read on.
I found out why the people were all going to the city gate. They were going because there, on a plinth of stone, stood a statue they believed was blessed with curative powers. It was the statue of a saint called Sainte Estelle de Belfort and the people preferred to put their trust in Sainte Estelle than in the know-nothing doctors. But by going there, and massing together round the statue and refusing to leave, they were gradually turning this place near the city gate into the worst area of contagion in the whole city, ‘because, as the people prayed together, the disease was carried from mouth to mouth on the words of prayers, from palm to palm on the strings of rosary beads . . .’
I began to get a bit caught up in the story at this point, to become one of Valentina’s orang-utan readers, blindly following her, with my Lion bar peeled and ready to eat, like a jungle fruit. The Mayor of Belfort, furious at the people’s stupidity, had instructed one of the priests, Father H, to go to the city gate near dawn when the people had fallen asleep and remove the statue of Sainte Estelle. He was ordered to hide it in the crypt of his church. He was told, in fact, to barricade it into a niche in the wall with rods of iron and then to close the crypt and lock its gates so that no one could come within breathing distance of the statue. ‘“In this way, Father,” said the Mayor, “the citizens will be forced to disperse and to seek help from the appropriate sources, namely the good doctors of this town.” ’
Then Valentina began to describe the feelings of Father H on being given this order. He wasn’t afraid of the anger his action was going to provoke. What really got to him was the thought of imprisoning the statue. He was very fond of this little Sainte Estelle and the idea of barricading her into a wall with iron rods gave him a pain in his heart. He imagined her ‘waking from her statue-reverie in the icy crypt with its smell of coal and understood what sorrow she would feel at being rendered useless’. And so he planned to remove her from the gate as instructed, but then take her home with him to his lodgings, ‘where she would still be able to look on human faces and see me, poor penniless priest, go about my daily tasks. And, in order not to embarrass her, he would cover her face with a shawl while he performed his morning ablutions.’
I didn’t like the way Valentina had called her character ‘Father H’. When I find this in a book, I always think the writer’s been too lazy to think up a proper name. One of my teachers at school once said something about ‘universal identification with a letter’, but I’d told him I found identification with a letter an impossible task. I was glad Alain-Fournier hadn’t called poor old François ‘F’. That would have ruined the whole thing.
I got up at this point and climbed the tank and scanned the street and listened, but no one was coming down it. I thought, perhaps Alice had just walked out, leaving all her things, and Valentina and I will be alone together from now on. The thought of this was so amazing and odd that I shivered.
I ate my Lion bar and carried on reading. Father H walked towards the statue carrying the wicker pannier in which he normally fetched his bread. Covering his face, he went in among the people huddled asleep round the statue, unscrewed Sainte Estelle’s little foot from the plinth, reached up and took hold of her by her waist and put her gently into the pannier. No one woke up. (Luckily.) Father H clutched the bread pannier to his chest and scuttled away.
‘Father H hurried through the dark streets, with Sainte Estelle getting heavier and heavier in the pannier, almost as though she were growing as he carried her, becoming as heavy as a child of five, as heavy as a child of seven, so that by the time he reached his lodgings Father H could barely hold the pannier higher than his knees.
‘With one last effort, he hauled the saint up his wooden stairs. He was hurrying so fast he didn’t see an old woman lying under the stairs, who woke as he passed and smelled the smell of fear and lay awake listening, knowing without seeing it what Father H had done.
‘Father H let himself into his rooms. He looked all around them for a place to hide his terrible burden, but could fine none. The lodgings were meagre. He cursed the Church for allowing him to acquire so little in life. And then, in desperation and misery, he took the saint out of the basket and laid her down in his narrow bed.
‘Unhappy Father H! Why did he not leave his room at that moment and go to his church to pray? He did not leave because cold and fear and exhaustion overcame him and so he lay down in the bed beside Estelle. His thoughts were not immodest. He wanted only to sleep. But the old crone under the stairs crept to his door and looked in through the keyhole and saw Father H lying with his arms around the statue. And so she went out to the crowds now waking at t
he city gate and told them what she had seen.
‘The people followed the old woman. There were more than a hundred of them, all in their ragged clothes of despair. With knives they cut off the penis and testicles of Father H. They ignored his terrible screams of agony and the blood that gushed in their faces. With saws and axes, they dismembered him limb from limb and threw the bits and pieces of his body into the icy river.’
The pages ended there. I’d told myself that by the time I’d read this story Alice would have come back, but she hadn’t. The air above the roof was still warm, but I began to feel cold and strange at the thought that she might have left me, so I climbed back on to the water tank and sat there with my blanket round my shoulders, like a Mexican peasant in a Western, waiting and watching.
I went to sleep sitting up. Mexican peasants can do this: it’s their connectedness to the earth.
It was Didier who woke me. He was beginning his day on the roof as my far-away church clock struck eight. He said: ‘Louis, what are you doing up here?’
I’d fallen sideways in my sleep and lay with my cheek on the galvanised iron tank. I thought, I wonder which country and which century invented the pillow? As I sat up, I knew one half of my face was square and flat.
‘I was waiting for Alice,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Didier.
I rubbed my face to try to get it back to its normal shape and then I said: ‘Alice never came home. I waited for her . . .’
‘Are you sure?’
‘She never came in. Did she go up to La Défense yesterday afternoon? Did you see her?’
