The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain Page A

and English and glittery, and at those moments I would remember Valentina and the smell of her night cream and the taste of her lipstick and all I would long for was to be back in the rue Rembrandt.
    Hugh thanked me for my letter. He said he was glad I’d found the bouquinistes and bought Le Grand Meaulnes . Then he said: The book has been criticised, of course, for its melodramatic and sentimental flavour, but I have always found it rather moving. I expect you know that Fournier was ‘missing presumed killed’ in the First World War in 1914 in the Eparges region. I believe, if he had lived, he would have written other marvellous novels, but that they would all have had his beloved childhood and adolescence at the heart of them .
    One of the things I hated about my father was that, because he was a schoolteacher, he always gave you information about the world long before you asked for it. He introduced most of this information with phrases like ‘I expect you know’ or ‘I’m sure I needn’t remind you’, to stop you feeling inadequate or too empty of knowledge, but to him historical facts were like breath; if you didn’t keep getting your supply of them, you’d start to die. Occasionally, I felt grateful he was like this, but mostly it just totally pissed me off and, for reasons I can’t explain, his info about Alain-Fournier irritated me so much I had to put his letter away before I reached the end of it.
    Valentina sent me to the market after breakfast. I had to buy some fish called dorades from the rue Poncelet, and white onions and tomatoes and cheese in muslin and parsley and green olives. At the end, she said: ‘Take Sergei, but don’t let him eat sprats out of the gutters.’
    It was so hot in the rue Poncelet that after I’d done the shopping I sat down at a café table and ordered a panaché , which was a kind of shandy and had become my favourite drink. The tables of the café I chose had been put right in the middle of the market and all the traffic of the market – fat women with baskets that looked like beach bags, kids in pushchairs, wandering musicians, dogs and cats and pigeons – had to squeeze round them.
    The café tables were really heavy, like they’d been bolted to the pavement. They reminded me of ships’ furniture and so I thought, that’s it, the café’s a ship and the market is the sea, teeming all round it, carrying in flotsam and birds and the passengers of old ocean liners. And I liked sitting in the ship and drinking the panaché and watching it.
    I asked for some water for Sergei, who kept trying to snaffle food up from the road – exactly what Valentina had forbidden him to do. When it comes to food, dogs just aren’t obedient and that’s that. He was even trying to eat the parsley I’d just bought.
    The women in that market reminded me of people at a jumble sale. They treated vegetables like they were clothes you had to examine really carefully for stains or holes or the smell of stale deodorant. They sniffed the melons and opened the sheaths of the corn cobs and sorted the beans and rejected almost all the lettuces with a sniff or a snarl. You could tell they were connoisseurs – people with secret knowledge. I imagined that they knew ninety-seven ways of cooking potatoes, that they could take a breathing lobster and turn it into a mousse. Watching them, I couldn’t picture myself ever learning to cook. Chess seemed easier. Chess is pure thought, whereas cooking is at the mercy of the natural world. Valentina had told me that mayonnaise could curdle for thirteen different reasons.
    My chest ached quite a lot from its encounter in the night with the scaffolding pole. I wanted the panaché to take the ache away, but it didn’t. I wanted the ache to go because I was plucking up courage to embark on a plan I’d made while I bought the dorades and the olives and