The Way I Found Her Read Online Free

hadn’t occurred to him that I was a schoolboy from Devon. ‘OK, d’accord,’ I said. And I tugged at the lead until Sergei came grudgingly towards me and there we were back in the rue Rembrandt. I noticed then that on the green park gates was a little picture of a dog with a line through it, but in a strange place your eyes can skim right past important things.
    I stood in the street. ‘Now where?’ I asked Sergei. He was shitting in the gutter, between a Renault Clio and a Volvo Estate, and while I waited for him to finish I looked all around me anxiously, hoping he wasn’t breaking some invisible law.
    When I got back, Alice and Valentina hardly noticed me. ‘Later, darling, you will tell us where you’ve been,’ said Valentina.
    They were sitting in Valentina’s study, talking. The subject they were discussing was medieval time. This was one of the things I’d begun to like about Valentina: you never knew what weird subject she was going to start on next.
    Sergei lay down on the parquet in the salon and I got myself an Orangina from Valentina’s fridge (she remembered I used to drink Orangina on that holiday in Brittany) and sat down by him, listening to this peculiar conversation coming through the open study door.
    Valentina said: ‘You know how they measured time in the Middle Ages, Alice? In hours of differing length. Because they counted twelve hours from sunrise to sunset and twelve hours from sunset to sunrise, no matter what season they were in. And so you see what happens? The hours of the night in summer become thirty-minute hours and the hours of the night in midwinter ninety-minute hours! But you can imagine that people might forget what kind of hour they were in, can’t you? In the darkness, especially, they could measure the hour wrongly. And this is what happens to Barthélémy.’
    â€˜I see,’ said Alice. I wanted her to ask who Barthélémy was, but she didn’t, because she already knew.
    â€˜So,’ she said, ‘when he’s doing his experiments at night, he forgets that the hours are getting shorter as the spring comes?’
    â€˜Yes. He is calculating in ninety-minute hours, when really an hour at that time of the year lasts only eighty-five minutes and then eighty-four and then eighty and then seventy. And this forgetting is fatal. You see?’
    There was a silence at that moment. It seemed to be Mum’s turn to speak, but she didn’t say anything. Then Valentina went on: ‘I have no difficulty in understanding the concept of the ninety-minute hour. In my other life, I lived ninety-minute hours. Even in summer, I don’t think the hours were any shorter than seventy or eighty minutes.’
    Alice said: ‘Time alters as we get older.’
    â€˜No,’ said Valentina, ‘it’s not to do with age. It’s to do with movement . When I worked for my parents in the café-charbon , the places I moved between were the wine cellar and the café. Down, up. Cellar, café. Café, cellar. Up, down. That was all. To a prisoner, time is different.’
    â€˜Is that how you think of your old life – as being in prison?’ asked Alice.
    â€˜Yes, of course,’ said Valentina. ‘Worse for my father. The places he went between were the coal bunker and the yard. All day. Coal bunker, yard. Yard, coal bunker. Fill up a sack, take it up to the yard. You know how much a sack of coal weighs?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜As much as a child of seven. All day, my father puts this child on his back and carries it to the yard. Perhaps one day I will write something about that. But no one will publish it.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Because from me, from Valentina Gavril, the readers want Medieval Romances. That’s all they want, Alice. A little terror, a little chivalry, a lot of fucking, a happy ending. Why not? A book can shorten an hour. But you know my last