The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain

swooped. In mid-swoop, I thought, it isn’t maths I need, it’s a rope.
    My hands reached the pole and held it, but my body was moving so fast, my feet were swept out in front of me and my chest rammed against the pole. I felt a pain come there and I swore loudly, like Mr Gavrilovich swore when he felt himself dying in the coal yard. Partly, I swore at my own stupidity vis-à-vis the fucking rope.
    But I was all right. And now, moving along the edge of the roof with the scaffolding to hold on to was easy. I began to feel the thrill of where I was and what I was doing and the pain in my chest lessened. I imagined Valentina down there underneath me. I was pretty sure she’d never been up here. Hardly anybody knows what the world looks like from their own rooftop. But I would map the roof and then I would show her around. I’d say, ‘Here we are now above the skylight to Moinel’s attic and you will notice how Moinel’s maid sleeps with her hands in the prayer position, like a stone person on a tomb.’
    I’d worked my way round to the whistler’s room now. To get close to its window, I had to climb back up the bit of steep roof underneath it, but I felt braver by this time. I stared in. The window was closed and the room was dark. To see inside, I had to blank out the radiance of the Paris sky with my body. And then I realised I was just staring at a curtain. Whatever went on in this space which Valentina had said was full of junk, someone had put a curtain at the window and drawn it. I stood very still, with my breathing quieter now, and listened, to see if I could hear snoring or sighing or that whistling again. But there was no sound at all.
    After listening for some time, I moved backwards very carefully, down to the cage, and then I followed the scaffolding round and up until I was on the flat pinnacle of the roof, where the water tanks and the bulky chimneys and the forest of TV masts made their own kind of landscape. It was brilliant there. I could move confidently around and I could see for miles and miles, right out across the tops of the trees in the park and over the roofs of other apartment blocks to some amazing dome lit with yellow light.
    The next day I got a letter from Hugh. Alice got one, too, but she didn’t show me hers and Hugh said not to show her mine because it was all about the building of the hut.
    I hated reading this letter. I wished it had said: ‘Dear Lewis, You will be very relieved to hear that I have abandoned the idea of building the hut’, but it didn’t. It went on and on about what a brilliant start Dad had made on the hut and how he’d mastered the art of bricklaying in less than a week, thanks to his DIY manual with its clear instructions and step-by-step drawings. It told me he was using a design called ‘Flemish Bond’ for the ends, corners and junctions and that he preferred this to ‘English Bond’ because it was ‘both more elegant and more difficult to perfect’. Then Dad put: Once understood, the system of profile boards made level, with strings attached to them to demarcate the lines along which the walls will run, appears so simple and satisfactory that I’ve come to believe my little construction need have no flaw. On the contrary, I’m determined that it will be a work of art  . . .
    I hadn’t a clue what a profile board was and I was completely certain that even if the hut seemed like a ‘work of art’ to Dad, it wouldn’t seem like one to Alice. Hugh went on to say he was putting in two windows instead of one, so that Alice would have a view of the house and a view of the sea. But I knew it would be me who would have these views, no matter how hard Hugh worked at his junctions. I’d sit there with my maths homework and from time to time I’d look up and see the house, getting dark on some November afternoon, and then I’d turn and see the sea, cold