Zadie Smith - Swing Time

“I’m telling you right now I got no idea where this place is at,” he said, slapping his handlebar with his map. “You get halfway down some tiny little street — Christchurch Close, Hingleberry fucking Corner — and then this thing’s telling me: turn to page 53 . Motherfucker, I’m on a bike.”

“Chin up, Granger,” said Aimee, in a terrible British accent, and pulled his big head down on to her shoulder for a moment, squeezing it fondly. Granger freed himself and glared at the sun: “Since when is it this hot?”

“Well, it’s summer. England can sometimes get hot in summer. Should’ve worn shorts.”

“I don’t wear shorts.”

“I don’t think this is a very productive conversation. We’re on a traffic island.”

“I’m done. We heading back,” said Granger, he sounded very final about it, and I was surprised to hear anyone speak to Aimee this way.

“We are not going back.”

“Then you best take this,” said Granger, dropping the A‒Z in the basket at the front of Aimee’s bike, “’Cos I can’t use it.”

“I know the way from here,” I offered, mortified to be the cause of the problem. “It’s really not far.”

“We need a vehicle,” Granger insisted, without looking at me. We almost never looked at each other. Sometimes I thought of us as two sleeper agents, mistakenly assigned to the same mark and wary of eye contact, in case the one blew the other’s cover.

“I hear there’s some cute boys up in there,” said Aimee in a sing-song voice — this was meant to be an imitation of Granger—“They’re hid-ing in the tree-ees.” She put her foot to the pedal, pushed off, swerving into the traffic.

“I don’t mix play with work,” said Granger sniffily, getting back astride his dainty bike with dignity. “I am a professional person.”

We set off back up the hill, monstrously steep, huffing and puffing and following Aimee’s laughter.

I can always find the Heath — all my life I’ve taken paths that lead me back, whether I wanted it or not, to the Heath — but I’ve never consciously sought and found Kenwood. I only ever stumble upon it. It was the same this time: I was leading Granger and Aimee up the lanes, past the ponds, over a hill, trying to think where might be the prettiest, quietest and yet most interesting place to stop with a too-easily bored superstar, when I saw the little cast-iron gate and behind the trees, the white chimneys.

“No cycles,” said Aimee, reading a sign, and Granger, seeing what was coming, began again to protest, but was overruled.

“We’ll be, like, an hour,” she said, getting off her bike and passing it to him. “Maybe two. I’ll call you. Have you got that thing?”

Granger folded his arms across his massive chest.

“Yeah, but I ain’t giving it to you. Not without me being there. No way. Forget about it.”

As I got off my bike, though, I saw Aimee put out her adamant little hand to receive a small something wrapped in cling-film, closing her palm around it, which something turned out to be a joint — for me. Long and American in design, with no tobacco in it at all. We settled under the magnolia, right in front of Kenwood House, and I leaned against the trunk and smoked while Aimee lay flat in the grass with her black baseball cap low over eyes, her face turned up toward me.

“Feel better?”

“But… aren’t you going to have any?”

“I don’t smoke. Obviously.”

She was sweating like she did on stage, and now grabbed at her vest, lifting it up and down to create a tunnel of air, so that I received a glimpse of that pale strip of midriff that once so mesmerized the world.

“I’ve got a coldish Coke in my bag?”

“I don’t drink that shit and neither should you.”

She got up on her elbows to take me in more fully.

“You don’t look all that comfortable to me.”

She sighed and rolled over on to her stomach to face the milling summer crowds going down to the old stables for scones and tea or through the doors of the great house for art and history.

“I have a question,” I said, knowing I was stoned and that she wasn’t but finding it hard to keep in mind the second half of that proposition. “You do this with all your assistants?”

She considered: “No, not this exactly. People are different. I always do something. I can’t have somebody in my face twenty-four-seven who is going to act shy around me. No time. And I don’t have the luxury of getting to know you in some slow, delicate way or being politely English about it, saying please and thank you whenever I want you to do something — if you work for me, you just have to jump to it. I’ve been doing this a while, and I’ve figured out that a few intense hours at the beginning save a lot of time and misunderstandings and bullshit later on. You’re getting off easy, believe me. I had a bath with Melanie.”

I attempted a goofy extended joke, hoping to hear her laugh again, but instead she squinted at me.

“Another thing you should understand is that it’s not that I don’t get your British irony, I just don’t like it. I find it adolescent. Ninety-nine percent of the time when I meet British people my feeling is: grow up!” Her mind turned back to Melanie in that bath: “Wanted to know if her nipples were too long. Paranoid.”

“Were they?”

“Were who what?”

“Her nipples. Long.”

“They’re fucking like fingers.”

I spat some of my Coke on to the grass.

“You’re funny.”

“I come from a long line of funny people. God knows why the British think they’re the only people allowed to be funny in this world.”

“I’m not that British.”

“Oh, babe, you’re as British as they come.”

She reached into her pocket for her phone and began going through her texts. Long before it became a general condition Aimee lived in her phone. She was a pioneer in this as in so many things.

“Granger, Granger, Granger, Granger. Doesn’t know what to do with himself if he doesn’t have anything to do with himself. He’s like me. We’ve got the same mania. He reminds me of how tiring I can be. To others.” Her thumb wavered over her brand-new BlackBerry. “With you I’m hoping for: cool, calm, collected. Could do with some of that around here. Jesus Christ, he’s sent me like fifteen texts already. He just needs to hold the bikes. Says he’s near the — what in hell is the ‘men’s pond’?”

I told her, in detail. She made a skeptical face.

“If I know Granger there’s no way he’s swimming in fresh water, he won’t even swim in Miami. Big believer in chlorine. No, he can just hold the bikes.” She poked a finger in my belly. “Are we done here? Got another one of those if you need it. This is a one-time deal — take advantage. One time per assistant. Rest of the time you work when I work. Which is always.”

“I am so relaxed right now.”

“Good! But is there anything else to do around here besides this?”

Which is how we came to be wandering around inside Kenwood House, followed, for a while, by an eagle-eyed six-year-old girl whose distracted mother refused to listen to her excellent hunch. I trailed red-eyed behind my new employer, noticing for the first time her very particular way of looking at paintings, how for example she ignored all men, not as painters, but as subjects, walking past a Rembrandt self-portrait without pausing, ignoring all the earls and dukes, and dismissing, with a single line—“Get a haircut!”—a merchant seaman with my father’s laughing eyes. Landscapes, too, were nothing to her. She loved dogs, animals, fruit, fabrics, and flowers especially. Over the years I learned to expect that the bunch of anemones we had just seen in the Prado or the peonies from the National Gallery would reappear, a week or so later, in vases all over whichever house or hotel we happened to be in at the time. Many small, painted dogs, too, leaped from canvases into her life. Kenwood was the source of Colette, an incontinent Joshua Reynolds spaniel bought in Paris a few months later, whom I then had to walk twice a day for a year. But more than any of these she loved the pictures of the women: their faces, their fripperies, their hairstyles, their corsetry, their little, pointy shoes.