The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online

during the night. He’s trying to find a poison that acts fast and leaves no trace.’
    I thought this sounded quite good. I asked Mum if I could read some of her translation and she looked at me intently, as though an idea were dawning on her.
    â€˜Yes,’ she said after a while. ‘Why not?’ Then she said in a kind of whisper: ‘This new book of Valentina’s is a thousand times better than any of her others. Much more exciting. A lot more cruel. It’s as if it’s been written by someone else.’
    I liked the idea that there could be some mystery attached to the book. I thought, perhaps our apartment is going to become so full of secrets, it’ll get hard to breathe. And one secret that I decided to keep from Mum was Valentina’s visits to my room and the work I was going to do with her on Le Grand Meaulnes .
    The following Sunday afternoon, I was playing Computer Chess in my room when Alice came up and said to me, ‘I can’t work, Lewis. Let’s go out. Let’s go now.’
    She seemed in a fluster, angry. Her hair was spiky.
    I said: ‘You know, this computer’s making stupid moves, Mum. It captured my knight with its bishop and forgot it needed the bishop to defend its king. It was just greedy for the knight. I moved my queen in and it brought a rook over to defend, but it’s going to be too late because—’
    â€˜Never mind that,’ Alice said. ‘Leave it. Let’s go.’
    We went straight out of the apartment without a word to Valentina. I could hear her talking on the telephone in her study and I was about to suggest to Alice that we wait and tell her where we were going, but Alice had already grabbed her key and was flying down the stairs, so I closed the apartment door and followed her. I knew that when I got back, the stupid Travel Computer could be checkmated in five moves.
    It was a peculiar day, still hot, but sunless, with a sky of grey wool. We caught a metro going west. A guy got on and started to play the guitar and sing to us. When he’d finished and was going round with the hat, he said: ‘If this experience has been disagreeable to you in any way, please inform me.’ But nobody informed him.
    We got out at La Défense, the last stop on the line. Someone had recently built an arch here. The Arche de Ia Défense was the tallest, heaviest arch ever to be built in the history of the world. In front of it was a huge cascade of white steps and a big esplanade, the colour of the grey sky.
    We stood around on the steps, looking up at the arch. Mum was scowling. Her beauty vanished a bit when she scowled. The designers of this arch had forgotten to put in a lift to carry people to the top, or so it seemed to me, because they’d added on a little fragile-looking elevator underneath it, like a hoist a trapeze artist might take to get him to his high wire.
    I said to Mum I quite liked the trapeze idea, but she wasn’t paying me much attention. She was staring out at the esplanade now, which had office buildings and modern sculptures all round it, and when I followed her line of vision I saw that it rested on the word FIAT on the top of a skyscraper. I stayed still by her side and after a moment she said angrily: ‘Luckily, we’ve all outgrown the idea that signs are put up for our entertainment.’
    I didn’t understand what she meant. There are times when I just don’t understand her at all. What I usually do then is let a bit of silence drift by.
    After this particular bit of silence had passed, I said: ‘What are you cross about, Mum?’
    â€˜Valentina,’ she snapped.
    Her saying this made me realise something: when we’d been in Brittany with Valentina, I’d found her sort of bossy and difficult, but now I didn’t; in fact I thought there was something really beautiful about her, something as beautiful and soft as snow. I wanted to walk into this snow,