Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

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He stared at his smarting hand. ‘Why do you like it so much?’

She lifted the champagne flute up to her lips and stuck her tongue inside it, licking the last dregs of strawberry pulp.

‘Because it’s always raining.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah. You know it is.’

‘Do I?’

‘It’s always raining if you’re feeling sad.’

The image of Kitty Finch in perpetual rain, walking in rain, sleeping in rain, shopping and swimming and collecting plants in rain, intrigued him. His hand was still on her knee. She had not put the lid back on his pen. He wanted to demand she return it to him but instead found himself offering her another cocktail. She was lost in thought. Sitting up very straight on the velvet armchair with his pen in her hand. The gold nib pointing to the ceiling. Small diamonds of sweat dripped down her long neck. He walked to the bar and leaned his elbows against the counter. Perhaps he should beg the staff to drive him home? It was impossible. It was an impossible flirtation with catastrophe, but it had already happened, it was happening. It had happened and it was happening again, but he must fight it to the end. He stared at the black rain she had inked on his hand and told himself it was there to soften his resolve to fight. She was clever. She knew what rain does. It softens hard things. He could see her searching her bag for something. She had a book in her hand, one of his own books, and she was underlining something on the page with his pen. Perhaps she was an extraordinary writer? It hadn’t occurred to him. Perhaps that is what she was?

Joe ordered two more cocktails of the month. The barman told Monsieur he’d bring them over when they were ready but he did not want to walk back to his antique armchair yet. She was really quite knowledgeable about poetry. For a botanist. Why had he not told her he had read her poem? What was stopping him? Should he trust his instinct not to reveal he had read the threat she had slipped into the envelope? He carried the iced flutes over to her. This time Joe glugged back his strawberry champagne as if it was a pint of pale ale. He bent towards her lips, which were wet from the strawberry champagne, and kissed her. When she let him, he kissed her again, his black silver hair tangling with the curls of her red hair. Her pale eyelashes sooty with mascara fluttered against his cheek while he held her long neck in the palm of his hand and felt her painted green fingernails press into his knee.

‘We’re kissing in the rain.’ Her voice was hard and soft at the same time. Like the velvet armchairs. Like the black rain inked on his hand.

Her eyes were squeezed tight shut. He was walking her towards the heavy Austrian chandelier in the lobby. Her head was spinning and she needed some water. She could hear him asking the Italian receptionist if there were vacancies for rooms. She opened her eyes. The sleek Italian pressed his fingers on the keyboard of his computer. Yes, there was a room. But it was decorated in the style of Louis XVI rather than art deco and it did not have a sea view. Joe handed over his credit card. The bellhop led them into a lift lined with mirrors. He wore white gloves on his hands. He was pressing buttons. She stared at the multiple reflections of Joe’s sweating arm around her waist, the green silk of her dress trembling as they sailed silently in the lift that smelt of leather to the third floor.

Madeleine Sheridan formally invited Isabel to Maison Rose. She gave her a glass of sherry and told her to make herself comfortable on the uncomfortable chaise longue. She sat herself down in the armchair opposite the journalist wife and delicately removed a few strands of silver hair from her glass of whisky. Her eyes were cloudy like the pool Kitty Finch had complained about to Jurgen and she thought she might be losing her sight. This made her all the more determined to help Isabel Jacobs see things clearly. To help her understand that being threatened with a knife was a serious business and strangely enough she experienced a sharp pain across her throat even though Kitty Finch had not in reality touched her throat. She was very much Dr Sheridan and not Madeleine when she explained that she had telephoned Kitty’s mother, who would be arriving early on Sunday morning. Mrs Finch would drive from the airport to the villa to collect her daughter and take her home. Isabel stared at her sandals.

‘You seem convinced she is very ill, Madeleine.’

‘Yes. Of course she is.’

Every time Isabel spoke, Madeleine Sheridan reckoned it was as if she was reading the news. Her mission to help the exotic Jacobs family see things as they really are was on full alert.

‘Life is something she has to do but she doesn’t want to do it. Nina has told us as much.’

Isabel sipped her sherry.

‘But Madeleine … it’s only a poem.’

Dr Sheridan sighed. ‘The girl has always been a bit of a mess. But what a beauty, eh?’

‘She is very beautiful, yes.’ Isabel heard herself say this sentence awkwardly, as if she were scared of it.

‘If I may ask you, Isabel … why did you invite a stranger into your home?’

Isabel shrugged as if the answer was entirely obvious.

‘She had nowhere to stay and we have more rooms than we need. I mean, who needs five bathrooms, Madeleine?’

Madeleine Sheridan tried to look straight through Isabel Jacobs but what she saw, she had to admit, was a blur. Her own lips were moving. She was speaking to herself in French because the things she was saying were less suited to the English language. Her thoughts were making a hard noise against her lips, Kah, Kah, Kah, as if she was indeed obsessed with Kitty Finch, who, for some reason, was so adored by Jurgen and everyone else she managed to manipulate and intrigue. For the last three weeks she had observed the Jacobs family from the best seat in the theatre, the hidden chair on her balcony. Isabel Jacobs might have pushed Kitty Finch into her ridiculous husband’s arms, but it was a foolhardy thing to risk because she would lose her daughter. Yes. If her husband seduced the sick girl it would be impossible to return to life as it had been before. Isabel would have to ask her husband to leave the family house. Nina Jacobs, like an assassin, would have to choose which parent she could live without. Did Isabel not understand that her daughter had already adapted to life without her mother in it? Madeleine Sheridan tried to stop her lips from moving, because they said such unpleasant things. She could just about make out Isabel shifting on the chaise longue. Crossing her legs. Uncrossing her legs. The heat outside was so fierce she had switched on the ancient air-conditioning system. It groaned above her head. Madeleine could sense (although she could not see) that Isabel was a brave woman. When she was at medical school she had observed women train as heart specialists, gynaecologists, bone cancer consultants. Then they had children and something happened. They became tired. All the time. Madeleine Sheridan wanted this groomed, enigmatic woman sitting in her living room to fade, to be exhausted, to display some sort of vulnerability, to need her and above all to value this conversation.

Instead the betrayed wife rolled her long black hair in her fingers and asked for another sherry. She was almost flirtatious.

‘When did you retire, Madeleine? I have often interviewed doctors working in the most difficult situations. No stretchers, no lights, sometimes no medication.’

Madeleine Sheridan’s throat hurt. She leaned towards the woman she was trying to destroy, took a shallow breath and waited for the words to come, something about her work before she retired and the difficulty of persuading patients on low incomes to give up smoking.