Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

Laura suggested they go together to look for Nina in the garden and steered her out of the room. Small birds swooped down to drink from the still, green water of the pool. A box of cherry chocolates from the day before lay melting on Mitchell’s big blue chair, covered in ants. Two damp towels were draped on the canvas recliners and in the middle of them, like an interrupted conversation, was the wooden chair Isabel had dragged out for Kitty Finch. Under it was Joe’s black ink pen.

This was the rearranged space of yesterday. They walked through the cypress trees and into the parched garden. It had not rained for months and Jurgen had forgotten to water the plants. The honeysuckle was dying, the soil beneath the brown grass cracked and hard. Under the tallest pine tree, Laura saw Nina’s wet bikini lying on the pine needles. When she bent down to pick it up, even she could not help thinking the cherry print on the material looked like splashes of blood. Her fingers started to fumble in her pocket for the little stainless-steel calculator she and Mitchell had brought with them to do their accounts.

‘Nina’s OK, Isabel.’ She ran her fingers over the calculator as if the numbers and symbols she knew were there, the m+ and m—, the x and the decimal point, would somehow end in Nina’s appearance. ‘She’s probably gone for a walk. I mean, she’s fourteen you know, she really has not been’ — she was about to say ‘slaughtered’ but changed her mind and said ‘spirited away’ instead.

She didn’t finish her sentence because Isabel was running through the cypress trees so fast and with such force the trees were shaking for minutes afterwards. Laura watched the momentary chaos of the trees. It was as if they had been pushed off balance and did not quite know how to find their former shape.

The spare room was dark and hot because the windows were closed and the curtains drawn. A pair of grubby flip-flops lay on top of the tangle of drying weeds lying on the floor. Kitty’s red hair streamed over a lumpy stained pillow, her freckled arms wrapped around Nina, who was clutching the nylon fur rabbit that was her last embarrassed link with childhood. Isabel knew Nina was awake and that she was pretending to be asleep under what seemed to be a starched white tablecloth. It looked like a shroud.

‘Nina, get up.’ Isabel’s voice was sharper than she meant it to be.

Kitty opened her grey eyes and whispered, ‘Nina started her period in the night so she got into bed with me.’

The girls were drowsy and content in each other’s arms. Isabel noticed the tattered books Kitty had put on the shelves, about six of them, were all her husband’s books. Two pink rosebuds stood in a glass of water next to them. Roses that could only have been picked from Madeleine Sheridan’s front garden, her attempt to create a memory of England in France.

She remembered Kitty’s strange comment yesterday morning, after their swim together: ‘Joe’s poetry is a more like a conversation with me than anything else.’ What sort of conversation was Kitty Finch having with her husband? Should she insist her daughter get out of bed and leave this room that was as hot as a greenhouse? Kitty was obviously trapping energy to heat her plants. She had made a small, hot, chaotic world, full of books and fruit and flowers, a sub-state in the country of the tourist villa with its Matisse and Picasso prints clumsily framed and hanging on the walls. Two plump bumblebees crawled down the yellow curtains, searching for an open window. The cupboard was open and Isabel glimpsed a short white feather cape hanging in the corner. Slim and pretty in her flip-flops and ragged summer dresses, it would seem Kitty Finch could make herself at home anywhere. Should she insist that Nina get up and return to her clean lonely room upstairs? Tearing her away from Kitty’s arms felt like a violent thing to do. She bent down and kissed her daughter’s dark eyebrow, which was twitching slightly.

‘Come and say hello when you’re awake.’

Nina’s eyes were shut extra tight. Isabel closed the door.

When she walked into the kitchen she told Jozef and Laura that Nina was sleeping with Kitty.

‘Ah. Thought as much.’ Her husband scratched the back of his neck and disappeared into the garden to get his pen, which, Laura informed him, was ‘under Kitty’s chair’. He had covered his bare shoulders with a white pillowcase and looked like a self-ordained holy man. He did this to stop his shoulders burning when he wrote in the sun, but it infuriated Laura all the same. When she looked at him again he was examining the gold nib as if it had been damaged in some way. She opened the fridge. Mitchell wanted a piece of stale cheese to trap the brown rat he had seen scuttling about in the kitchen at night. It had gnawed through the salami hung on a hook above the sink and he’d had to throw it away. Mitchell was not so much squeamish as outraged by the vermin who devoured the morsels he bought with his hard-earned money. He took it personally, as if slowly but surely the rats were gnawing through his wallet.

So his lost daughter was asleep in Kitty’s bed. Joe sat in the garden at his makeshift desk, waiting for the panic that had made his fingers tear the back of his neck to calm as he watched his wife talking to Laura inside the villa. His breathing was all over the place, he was fighting to breathe. Did he think Kitty Finch, who had stopped taking Seroxat and must be suffering, had lost her grip and murdered his daughter? His wife was now walking towards him through the gaps in the cypress trees. He shifted his legs as if part of him wanted to run away from her or perhaps run towards her. He truly did not know which way to go. He could try to tell Isabel something, but he wasn’t sure how to begin because he wasn’t sure how it would end. There were times he thought she could barely look at him without hiding her face in her hair. And he could not look at her either, because he had betrayed her so often. Perhaps now he should at least try and tell her that when she abandoned her young daughter to lie in a tent crawling with scorpions, he understood it made more sense of her life to be shot at in war zones than lied to by him in the safety of her own home. All the same, he knew his daughter had cried for her in the early years, and then later learned not to because it didn’t bring her back. In turn (this subject turned and turned and turned regularly in his mind), his daughter’s distress brought to him, her father, feelings he could not handle with dignity. He had told his readers how he was sent to boarding school by his guardians and how he used to watch the parents of his school friends leave on visiting day (Sundays), and if his own parents had visited him too, he would have stood for ever in the tyre marks their car had made in the dust. His mother and father were night visitors, not afternoon visitors. They appeared to him in dreams he instantly forgot, but he reckoned they were trying to find him. What had worried him most was he thought they might not have enough English words between them to make themselves understood. Is Jozef my son here? We have been looking for him all over the world. He had cried for them and then later learned not to because it didn’t bring them back. He looked at his clever tanned wife with her dark hair hiding her face. This was the conversation that might start something or end something, but it came out wrong, just too random and fucked. He heard himself ask her if she liked honey.

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Because I know so little about you, Isabel.’

He would poke his paw inside every hollow of every tree to scoop up the honeycomb and lay it at her feet if he thought she might stay a little longer with him and their cub. She looked hostile and lonely and he understood it. He obviously disgusted her. She even preferred Mitchell’s company to his.