Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

When Kitty came back, her dress dripping wet, she was saying something but the husky was barking at a seagull. Nina could just see Kitty’s lips moving and she knew, with an aching feeling inside her, that she was still angry or something was wrong. As they walked to the car Kitty said, ‘I’m meeting your father at Claude’s café tomorrow. He’s going to talk to me about my poem. Nina, I am so nervous. I should have got a summer job in a pub in London and not bothered. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

Nina wasn’t listening. She had just seen a boy in silver shorts roller-skating down the esplanade with a bag of lemons tucked under his tanned arm. He looked a bit like Claude but he wasn’t. When she heard a bird screeching in what she thought sounded like agony, she dared not look back at the beach. She thought the husky or snow wolf might have caught the seagull after all. Maybe it wasn’t happening and anyway she had just spotted the old lady who lived next door walking on the promenade. She was talking to Jurgen, who was wearing purple sunglasses in the shape of hearts. Nina called out and waved.

‘That’s Madeleine Sheridan, our neighbour.’

Kitty gazed up. ‘Yes, I know. The evil old witch.’

‘Is she?’

‘Yes. She calls me Katherine and she nearly killed me.’

After she said that, Kitty did something so spooky that Nina told herself she hadn’t seen it properly. She leaned backwards so that her copper hair rippled down the back of her knees and shook her head from side to side very fast while her hands jerked and flailed above her head. Nina could see the fillings in her teeth. And then she lifted her head up and gave Madeleine Sheridan the finger.

Kitty Finch was mental.

Madeleine Sheridan was trying to pay for a scoop of caramelised nuts she had bought from the Mexican vendor on the esplanade. The smell of burnt sugar made her greedy for the nuts that would at last, she hoped, choke her to death. Her nails were crumbling, her bones weakening, her hair thinning, her waist gone for ever. She had turned into a toad in old age and if anyone dared to kiss her she would not turn back into a princess because she had never been a princess in the first place.

‘These damn coins. What’s this one, Jurgen?’ Before Jurgen could answer she whispered, ‘Did you see Kitty Finch doing that thing to me?’

He shrugged. ‘Sure. Kitty Ket has something to say to you. But now she has some new friends to make her happy. I have to book the horse-riding for Nina. The Ket will take her.’

She let him take her arm and steer her (a little too fast) into one of the bars on the beach. He was the only person she talked to in any detail about her life in England and her escape from her marriage. She appreciated his stupor, it made him non-judgemental. Despite the difference in their age she enjoyed his company. Having nothing to do in life but live off other people and his wits, he always made her feel dignified rather than a sad case, probably because he wasn’t listening.

Today she was barely listening to him. The arrival of Kitty Finch was bad news. This is what she was thinking as she stared at a motorboat making white frothy scars on the chalky-blue sea. When he found a table in the shade and helped her into a chair that was much too small for a toad, he seemed not to realise she would have to twist her body into positions that made her ache. It was thoughtless of him, but she was too disorientated by the sight of Kitty Finch to care.

She tried to calm herself by insisting Jurgen take off his sunglasses.

‘It’s like looking into two black holes, Jurgen.’

It was her birthday in four days’ time and right now she was thirsty in the heat, almost crazed with thirst. She had been looking forward to their lunch appointment for weeks. That morning she had telephoned her favourite restaurant to find out what was on the menu, where their table was positioned and to request the maître d’ save her a parking space right outside the door in return for a healthy tip. She screamed at a waiter for a whisky and a Pepsi for Jurgen, who disliked alcohol for spiritual reasons. It was hard for an old woman to get a waiter’s attention when he was busy serving topless women sunbathing in thongs. She had read about yogic siddhas who mastered human invisibility through a combination of concentration and meditation. Somehow she had managed to make her body imperceptible to the waiter without any of the training. She lifted both her arms and waved at him as if she were flagging down an aeroplane on a desert island. Jurgen pointed to the accordion player from Marseilles perched on a wooden box by the flashing pinball machine. The musician was sweating in a black suit three sizes too large for him.

‘He’s playing at a wedding this afternoon. The beekeeper from Valbonne told me. If I got married I would ask him to play at my wedding too.’

Madeleine Sheridan, sipping her hard-won whisky, was surprised at how his voice was suddenly so high-pitched.

‘Marriage is not a good idea, Jurgen.’

Not at all. She began to tell him (again) how the two biggest departures in her life were leaving her family to study medicine and leaving her husband to live in France. She had come to the conclusion that she was not satiated with love for Peter Sheridan and exchanged a respectable life of unhappiness for the unrespectable unhappiness of being a woman who had cut her ties with love. Now it seemed, staring at her companion, whose voice was shaking all over the place, that in his damaged heart (too many cigarettes) he wanted to tie the knot, to close the circle of his life alone, which frankly was an affront.

It reminded her of the time they were walking on the beach in Villefranche and saw a wedding taking place in the harbour. The bridesmaids were dressed in yellow taffeta and the bride in cream and yellow satin. She had scoffed out loud, but what did the hippy Jurgen say?

‘Give them a chance.’

This was the same man who only a few months before had told his girlfriend that nothing had taught him marriage was a good idea. She didn’t believe him and took him to an Argentinian barbecue to propose to him. Great piles of scented wood. Hunks of beef from the pampas thrown on to the fire. His girlfriend ate her way through the red meat until she noticed Jurgen was not eating and remembered he was a militant vegetarian. Perhaps she had laughed too loudly when he told her that.

‘I think Kitty Finch wants to harm me.’

‘ Ach, nein .’ Jurgen frowned as if he was in pain. ‘The Ket she only harms herself. Claude asked me why Madame Jacobs insisted she stay. But I have no idea why.’

She gazed at her friend with her cloudy, short-sighted eyes. ‘I believe she wants the beautiful mad girl to distract her husband so she can finally leave him.’

Jurgen suddenly wanted to buy the accordion player a drink. He called the waiter and told him to offer the man in the big suit a beer. Madeleine watched the waiter whisper in the musician’s ear and tried to forget how she came across Kitty Finch in the tunnel by the flower market in Cours Saleya four months ago. Their encounter was one more thing she wanted to add to the long list of things she wanted to forget.

She had found the flame-haired English girl on a cool spring morning on her way to buy two slabs of Marseilles soap, one made from palm oil, the other from olive oil, both mixed with sea plants from the Mediterranean by the local soap master. Kitty was naked and talking to herself on a box of rotten plums the farmers had thrown out at the end of the day. The homeless men who slept in the tunnel were laughing at her, making lewd remarks about her naked body. When Madeleine Sheridan asked her what had happened to her clothes, she said they were on the beach. Madeleine offered to drive to the beach and get her clothes for her. Kitty could stay exactly where she was and wait for her. And then she’d drive her back to the tourist villa where she was staying to study mountain plants. She often stayed there when Rita Dwighter had not let it out to retired hedge-fund managers because Kitty’s mother used to clean for her. Mrs Finch was Rita Dwighter’s right-hand woman, her secretary and cook but mostly her cleaner, because her right hand always had a mop in it.