The Way I Found Her Read Online Free Page B

perfume I’d never breathed before. I took some deep sniffs of it before I said: ‘I think she thought people passing would mistake her for some old movie star and come in and order up champagne, or something. She kept scanning out for the one person who was going to see her former beauty, but that person never came by.’
    Valentina laughed again. Then she said: ‘That’s really very sad, Lewis. I don’t know why I’m laughing.’
    â€˜I thought about pretending to be that one person,’ I went on, ‘but I couldn’t remember the names of any old movie stars.’
    Valentina began to reel off a list of names of former beauties. They were mostly French and I’d never heard of any of them. I remembered one name: Simone Signoret. Valentina said hers was the saddest story of all.
    When it was almost lunchtime, I went up to my room. I got out my Concorde notebook and added a Second Hypothesis to my Exploding Peanut Theory of Beauty . It didn’t have the simplicity of the first, but all the same I quite liked it. It went like this: Female beauty, if or when lost by the former owner of it, can cause insanity. The brain, which might have roughly the same mass as a Family Size pack of dry-roasted peanuts, ‘explodes’ into irrational behaviour, searching for signs – such as the passing glance of a stranger in the street – that the irretrievably lost beauty has suddenly been found again .
    It was stifling in my room. Maids weren’t meant to be in their rooms during the day; they were meant to be dusting parquet or polishing the silver downstairs. I went into my bathroom and ran some cold water in the washbasin and laid my face in it, till it began to cool. It was while I had my head in the water that I remembered something my father had said to me about happiness. We were shrimping at the time. Hugh said: ‘See this deep pool, Lewis, and see the little grey shrimp? Think of the pool as your life and your quota of happiness as the shrimp and then you won’t expect too much of anything, and when disappointment comes you won’t drown.’ At the time, I’d thought this a kind of wise and fathomless thing to say, but now it seemed to me, standing there with my head in the basin, that to equate happiness with a shrimp was completely stupid.
    When I emerged from the water, I heard a new sound. I dried my face and listened. Someone was whistling on the other side of the locked door.
    I tiptoed across the bathroom and bent down by the keyhole of the door. I tried to see into the room beyond, but I couldn’t. Perhaps the key was in the lock on the other side, or perhaps some piece of furniture had been put in front of it? But there was definitely whistling going on. It sounded like the sad song of a maid, except it was a man whistling, as if he might be reading some boring newspaper. One of my teachers at school did this, whistled while he marked dull assignments, and only stopped when he found something to interest him. He’d whistled all through my essay on Romeo and Juliet , right to the last full stop.
    There was no sound of the whistler moving about – no footstep or anything. I imagined someone sitting on a stool, in front of a round window identical to mine, reading about all the thousands of things going on in France and in the wider world and whistling right through them.
    I thought about knocking softly on the door. I then considered asking the whistler if he played chess, but I thought, it might be a maid after all and a maid could misinterpret the question. So I stayed still, just listening, until I realised how starving I was. I started to hope that Valentina had made or bought a huge strawberry tart even better than the one Sergei had found in the gutter.
    Before I left England, Dad had told me about the bouquinistes , who sell old books and prints and cards from little stalls alongside the river, and the next day Sergei led me