The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain Page B

everything and I thought, if my body hurts, my courage may fail me.
    To soothe my mind, I wrote some notes in my Concorde book about the Paris street-cleaning system, which I’d been monitoring since we arrived. I put: This whole system depends on under-street water points and pieces of fabric laid this way and that at the apex of each street to direct the flow of the water. At first, I didn’t understand why so many bits of old carpet had been left lying in the gutters. Now, I see that they are PRIME. Take them away and Paris would become a dirty city, like London . Then I added: If you understand what is PRIME, especially when what is prime appears random or accidental, then you are getting somewhere in your understanding of the world. (NB: Last night, a rope was the prime necessity and I didn’t see this until it was too late .)
    A gypsy woman came by and tried to persuade everyone at the café to buy some horrible stiff roses wrapped in cellophane, but no one bought one. If the woman with the kitten face had been at the café, I might have got a rose and given it to her out of pity for her and for the flower seller, but she wasn’t and I didn’t feel pitying that morning, I felt too nervous about my plan. But after a while, when I’d drunk a second panaché , I got up and thought, I’m going to do it anyway and I’m going to do it now.
    The shop I was heading for was at the top of the rue Poncelet. It sold beauty products like night repair cream and it was the kind of shop I would never normally go into in my life. I’d rehearsed what I was going to say and now all that was left to do was to go into the shop and say it. My heart was beating so hard in my aching chest, I felt as if I’d been in a shipping accident.
    I tied Sergei to a litter bin and went in. The shop was ice-cold and it smelled of eucalyptus, as if the air inside it was not only being conditioned but also made ready to cure the colds and sinus blockages of its customers. I breathed it in and the bones in my chest froze with pain.
    I was wearing a grey linen sunhat, given to me by my Welsh Grandma Gwyneth, and I could suddenly see, in the mirrored walls of the shop, that with this on and carrying my pannier of parsley and onions I looked really eccentric and poor, like a peasant boy in some old black-and-white movie about Spanish horse thieves. I also looked about ten years old and I swore I’d never wear this hat again as long as I lived.
    Two women assistants, dressed in white overalls, with their hair and make-up perfectly arranged, came towards me and asked if they could help me. So now I said the words I’d rehearsed in French. I told them my mother was ill and that she had sent me to the market to do the family shopping. I showed them the pannier and the half-eaten parsley. ‘Voici le shopping,’ I said, and they smiled. Then I took a deep breath and told them that my mother had asked me, on my way home, to come into this shop and buy her a lipstick.
    They smiled some more. I think they were trying not to laugh. Both of them had pearly teeth, like the residents of Carrara. They took me over to a display counter and began to ask me questions. What make of lipstick did my Maman use? Did Maman tell me the name of her favourite colour? I could tell they thought I was ten by their use of the word ‘Maman’.
    I hadn’t realised lipsticks had names. The names they had were wild and I really liked them. I wanted to buy them all: Danse du Feu, Feux d’Artifice, Mardi Gras, Fiesta, Siesta . They were arranged in a perfect arc, going from pale pink to dark reddish purple. The scarlets were in the middle and so it was here that I focused my attention. I felt so overexcited and nervous, I could have been an actual horse thief. I was looking for the exact colour of Valentina’s mouth. As I found it and took it down, my pannier fell over and all the white onions rolled out on to the