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

like on a new, fantastic morning, and lie down.
    â€˜Why are you angry with Valentina?’ I asked.
    â€˜Because she treats me unfairly,’ said Alice, ‘and I simply don’t know how long I can go on working like this. She interrupts me all the time. She queries half of what I write. She’s always been a self-centred woman and she just doesn’t see . . .’
    â€˜See what?’
    â€˜That I have to be left alone to get on. She thinks she owns me. She doesn’t own me!’
    â€˜No one owns you, Mum,’ I said. But I said this sadly, because the idea that we might have to leave Paris and leave Valentina suddenly seemed really horrible.
    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