Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

Kitty grabbed Jurgen’s arm and hung on to him. ‘Don’t listen to Dr Sheridan. She’s obsessed with me. I don’t know why but she is. Ask Jurgen.’

Jurgen’s sleepy eyes blinked behind his round spectacles.

‘Come on, Kitty Ket, I’ll take you home.’ He said something to Madeleine Sheridan in French and then put his arm around Kitty’s waist. They could hear his voice soothing her. ‘Forget forget Kitty Ket. We are all of us sick from pollution. We must take a nature cure.’

Madeleine Sheridan’s eyes were burning like coal. Blue coal. She wanted to call the police. It was an attack. An assault. She looked like a matador that had been gored by the bull. The park keeper fiddled with a ring of keys strapped to his belt. The keys were almost as big as he was. He wanted to know where the young woman lived. What was her address? If Madame wanted him to call the police they would need this information. Isabel explained that Kitty had arrived five days ago with nowhere to stay and they had given her a room in their rented villa.

He frowned over this information, tapping his keys with his tiny thumb. ‘But you must have asked her questions?’

Isabel nodded. They had asked her questions. Jozef asked her what a leaf was. And a cotyledon.

‘I don’t think we need bother the police. It’s a private argument. Madame is shaken but not harmed.’

Her voice was gentle and a little bit Welsh.

The keeper was gesticulating now. ‘The young woman must have come from somewhere.’ He paused to nod to two men in muddy boots who seemed to need his permission to cut through a log with a circular saw.

‘Yes,’ Madeleine Sheridan snapped, ‘she came from a hospital in Kent, Great Britain.’ She tapped the assaulted pearls tied in a knot near her throat and turned to Isabel Jacobs. ‘I believe your husband is taking her out for a cocktail at the Negresco tomorrow.’

People stopped to look at her. To gaze and gaze again at the vision of a radiant young woman in a green silk dress who seemed to be walking on air. The left strap of her white tap-dancing shoes had come undone, as if to help lift her above the cigarette butts and chocolate wrappers on the paving stones. Kitty Finch with her wealth of hair piled on top of her head was almost as tall as Joe Jacobs. As they strolled down the Promenade des Anglais in the silver light of the late afternoon, it was snowing seagulls on every rooftop in Nice. She had casually slung the short white feather cape across her shoulders, its satin ribbons tied in a loose knot round her neck. The feathers fluttered in the wind blowing from the sea, the Mediterranean, which, Joe mused, was the same col-our as the glittery blue kohl on her eyes.

In the distance they could see the pink dome of the Hotel Negresco. He had respectfully changed into a pinstriped suit and even opened the new bottle of perfume sent to him from Zurich. His parfumier, the last alchemist living in the twentieth century, insisted the top notes were irrelevant and the deepest notes would present when he was perspiring. Kitty slipped her bare arm through his pinstriped arm, a vertical red stripe that was not unlike the centipede he had caught in the river. She did not tell him what had happened with Madeleine Sheridan (she and Jurgen had already discussed it for hours) and he did not tell her how he had found himself on his knees lighting one and then two candles at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral. The tension of waiting to meet each other again had made them do things they did not understand.

By the time they arrived at the marble entrance, the porter in his crimson jacket and white gloves respectfully swung open the door for them, NEGRESCO printed across the arch of glass in gold letters. Her feather cape flew behind her like the wings of the swan they were plucked off. She did not so much stroll as glide into the low-lit bar with its faded red velvet armchairs and tapestries on the walls.

‘See those oil paintings of noblemen in their palace?’

He looked up at the portraits of what appeared to be solemn pale aristocrats posing on chairs covered in tapestry in chilly marble rooms.

‘Yeah, well, my mother cleans their silver and washes their underpants.’

‘Is she a cleaner?’

‘Yeah. She used to clean the villa for Rita Dwighter. That’s how I get to stay free sometimes.’

This confession made her blush but he had something to say in reply.

‘My mother was a cleaner too. I used to steal hen’s eggs for her and bring them home in my pockets.’

They sat side by side on two antique chairs. The white feathers of her cape trembled when he whispered, ‘There’s a note to us on the table. I think it must be from Marie Antoinette.’

Kitty reached over and picked up thewhite card propped against a vase of flowers.

‘It says the cocktail of the month is champagne with something called Crème de Fraise des Bois.’

Joe nodded as if this information was of vital importance.

‘After the revolution everyone shall have the cocktail of the month. Shall we have one now anyway?’

Kitty nodded enthusiastically.

The waiter was already at his side, taking his order as if it were a great privilege to do so. A bored musician in a stained white dinner jacket sat at the piano playing ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the corner of the bar. She crossed her legs and waited for him to talk about her poem. Last night she saw something that scared her and she wanted to tell him about it. The boy was standing by her bed again. He was waving frantically like he was asking her to help him and he had two hen’s eggs in his pocket. He had broken into her mind. She had started to cover mirrors in case he appeared again. She slipped her hands under the bag on her lap so he wouldn’t see they were shaking.

‘Tell me more about your mother. Does she look like you?’

‘No, she’s obese. You could make the whole of me from one of her arms.’

‘You said she knows the owner of the villa?’

‘Yeah. Rita Dwighter.’

‘Say more about Rita and her portfolio of property and pain.’

She did not want to talk about her mother’s boss. It was shrapnel in her arm, his indifference to the envelope she had pushed through his bedroom door. He kept changing the subject. She took a deep breath and smelt the clover in his perfume.

‘Rita owns so much property she has become a tax exile in Spain, but that means she can only be in the UK for a certain number of days a year. My mother told her she’ll be like someone on the run and Rita took offence and said her own shrink told her she must accept her greed.’

He laughed and sank his fingers into the small bowl of nuts on the table. They clinked glasses and took their first sip of the cocktail of the month.

‘What is your favourite poem, Kitty?’

‘Do you mean a poem I’ve written or someone else’s?’ He must know by now that he was her favourite poet. That was why she was here. His words were inside her. She understood them before she read them. But he wouldn’t own up. He was always cheerful. So fucking cheerful, she thought he might be in terrible danger.

‘I mean do you like Walt Whitman or Byron or Keats or Sylvia Plath?’

‘Oh, right.’ She took another sip of her cocktail. ‘Well, there’s no competition. My favourite poem is by Apollinaire.’

‘What’s that?’

She tipped her chair forward and grabbed the fountain pen he always clipped on to his shirt like a microphone.

‘Give me your hand.’

When he placed his hand on her knee, his palm making a sweaty mark on her green silk dress, she jabbed the nib into his skin so hard he jumped. She was stronger than she looked, because she held his hand down and he couldn’t or didn’t want to tear it away. She was hurting him with his own pen as she inked a black tattoo of letters on his skin.