The Way I Found Her Read Online Free Page A

translator used to change things around. She was an American feminist and so she tried secretly to change the women in my books and make them more like feminists. She forgot my English was almost as good as hers. I had to kill her in the end.’
    â€˜What?’ said Alice.
    I put down my Orangina and leant nearer the study door. I heard Valentina laugh. ‘Yes, I killed her,’ she said.
    There was a pause here. Being a Scot, Mum isn’t afraid to dismiss totally bluntly everything that strikes her as untrue. She has this haughty, withering look she can give you, worse than any look the teachers give you at school.
    â€˜I kill my characters all the time,’ Valentina went on. ‘I decapitate them, disembowel them, poison them, burn them. I know so many methods. And I killed that translator.’
    The trouble about eavesdropping is you’re just left alone with the things you’ve heard. You’re marooned with them, like on a really uncomfortable rock, and all around you is a silent sea. I was trying to imagine Valentina taking off her jewellery and her expensive shoes and tiptoeing along the corridor with a carving knife, when she and Alice came out of the study and sat down with me and asked me to tell them about my morning.
    We’d walked such a long way that Sergei was exhausted and he went to sleep with his head on Valentina’s foot. She wasn’t wearing yellow sandals today, but white ones. The colour of her toenails was dark shining red, like wine, or like blood.
    I told her and Alice that I’d seen the river and the Eiffel Tower. I said the hugeness of the Tower had made me feel strange. What I meant by strange was ‘happy’. The thing I used to envy in my games with Elroy were how large the world must have seemed to him.
    I told them I liked it when things were vast and made of iron. And I described a courtyard I went into where there was an iron girder strung between two houses. It seemed to be holding the two buildings apart, as if one was the Capulet house and the other was the house of the Montagues. I’d had Romeo and Juliet on my mind lately, because we’d been studying it at school and I really liked the absolute total sadness of it, I don’t know why.
    I said I realised after a moment that the girder wasn’t really holding the two houses apart, but making a bridge between them. Creeper had climbed up the wall of the Montague house and along the girder and hung down in tentacles, and so Romeo could have climbed out of his window and inched his way along the girder, holding on to the creeper, until he reached Juliet’s bedroom.
    Valentina laughed when I said all this. Mum and Dad hardly ever laughed at the things I said, but I seemed to amuse Valentina, or else she was a woman who, now that she didn’t have to work in a coal yard, was easily entertained.
    She asked me what else I’d done. I said Sergei had tugged me across one of the bridges over the river and that I was so thirsty by that time that I’d sat down in a café and ordered a Coke for me and a bowl of water for Sergei. Near his bowl Sergei had found a perfectly formed strawberry tart in the gutter.
    Then I told them about the woman I’d seen in the café while I was drinking the Coke and Sergei was snaffling up the tart. She was old, but she had this little face like a kitten. She kept dabbing her nose with powder. It was hot in the café, so she dabbed loads and loads of times. I said: ‘I felt really sorry for her.’
    â€˜I expect she was waiting for someone, darling,’ said Valentina.
    â€˜Well, maybe she was,’ I said, ‘but no one came.’
    â€˜Then what do you think was happening, Lewis?’
    I could tell Mum wasn’t in the least interested in this conversation. She was looking away from both of us, staring into her own separate thoughts. Valentina put her arm through mine. She smelled of some special delicious