Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

He was convinced he could hear an animal growling in the grass and told her it sounded like a dog.

‘Don’t worry about the dogs. The farmer owns 2,000 olive trees in the Grasse area. He’s too busy to set his dogs on us.’

‘Well, I suppose that many olive trees would keep him busy,’ Joe mumbled.

His black hair now fading into silver curls fell in a mess around his ears and the battered straw hat kept slipping off his head. Kitty had to run behind him to pick it up.

‘Oh, 2,000 … that’s not a lot of trees … not at all.’

She stooped down to peer at wild flowers growing between the long white grasses that came up to her knees.

‘These are Bellis perennis .’ She scooped up what looked like daisy petals and stuffed them in her mouth. ‘Plants are always from some sort of family.’

She buried her face in the flowers she was clutching and named them for him in Latin. He was impressed by the tender way she held the plants in her fingers and spoke about them with easy intimacy, as if indeed they were a family with various problems and unusual qualities. And then she told him what she wanted most in life was to see the poppy fields in Pakistan.

‘Actually,’ she confessed nervously, ‘I’ve written a poem about that.’

Joe stopped walking. So that was why she was here.

Young women who followed him about and wanted him to read their poetry, and he was now convinced she was one of them, always started by telling him they’d written a poem about something extraordinary. They walked side by side, flattening a path through the long grass. He waited for her to speak, to make her request, to say how influenced by his books she was, to explain how she’d managed to track him down, and then she would ask would he mind, did he have time, would he be so kind as to please, please read her small effort inspired by himself.

‘So you’ve read all my books and now you’ve followed me to France,’ he said sharply.

A new wave of blush crashed over her cheeks and long neck.

‘Yes. Rita Dwighter, who owns the villa, is a friend of my mother. Rita told me you had booked it for the whole summer. She lets me stay in her house for free off-season. I couldn’t stay because YOU hah hah hah hah hogged it.’

‘But it’s not off-season, Kitty. July is what they call the high season, isn’t it?’

She had a north London accent. Her front teeth were crooked. When she wasn’t stammering and blushing she looked like she’d been sculpted from wax in a dark workshop in Venice. If she was a botanist she obviously did not spend much time outside. Whoever had made her was clever. She could swim and cry and blush and say things like ‘hogged it’.

‘Let’s sit in the shade.’

He pointed to a large tree surrounded by small rocks. A plump brown pigeon perched comically on a thin branch that looked like it was about to snap under its weight.

‘All right. That’s a haaaah hazelnut tree by the way.’

He charged ahead before she finished her sentence and sat down, leaning his back against the tree trunk. When she seemed reluctant to join him he patted the space next to him, brushing away the twigs and leaves until she sat down by his side, smoothing her faded blue cotton dress over her knees. He could not so much hear her heart as feel it beating under her thin dress.

‘When I write poems I always think you can hear them.’

Abell tinkled in the distance. It sounded like a goat grazing somewhere in the orchard, moving around in the long grass.

‘Why are you shaking?’ He could smell chlorine in her hair.

‘Yeah. I’ve stopped taking my pills so my hands are a bit shaky.’

Kitty moved a little nearer him. He wasn’t too sure what to make of this until he saw she was avoiding a line of red ants crawling under her calves.

‘Why do you take pills?’

‘Oh, I’ve decided not to for a while. You know … it’s quite a relief to feel miserable again. I don’t feel anything when I take my pills.’

She slapped at the ants crawling over her ankles.

‘I wrote about that too … it’s called “Picking Roses on Seroxat”.’

Joe fumbled for a scrap of green silk in his pocket and blew his nose. ‘What’s Seroxat?’

‘You know what it is.’

His nose was buried in the silk handkerchief.

‘Tell me anyway,’ he snuffled.

‘Seroxat is a really strong antidepressant. I’ve been on it for years.’

Kitty stared at the sky smashing against the mountains. He found himself reaching for her cold shaking hand and held it tight in his lap. She was right to be indignant at his question. Clasping her hand was a silent acknowledgement that he knew she had read him because he had told his readers all about his teenage years on medication. When he was fifteen he had very lightly grazed his left wrist with a razor blade. Nothing serious. Just an experiment. The blade was cool and sharp. His wrist was warm and soft. They were not supposed to be paired together but it was a teenage game of Snap. He had snapped. The doctor, an old Hungarian man with hair in his ears, had not agreed this pairing was an everyday error. He had asked questions. Biography is what the Hungarian doctor wanted.

Names and places and dates. The names of his mother, his father, his sister. The languages they spoke and how old was he when he last saw them? Joe Jacobs had replied by fainting in the consulting room and so his teenage years had been tranquillised into a one-season pharmaceutical mist. Or as he had suggested in his most famous poem, now translated into twenty-three languages: a bad fairy made a deal with me, ‘give me your history and I will give you something to take it away’.

When he turned to look at her face, now drained of its blush, her cheeks were wet.

‘Why are you crying?’

‘I’m OK.’ Her voice was matter of fact.

‘I’m pleased to save money and not spend it on a hotel, but I didn’t expect your wife to offer me the spare room.’

Three black flies settled on his forehead, but he did not let go of her hand to flick them away. He passed her the scrap of silk he kept as a handkerchief.

‘Mop yourself up.’

‘I don’t want your handkerchief.’ She threw the scrap of silk back into his lap. ‘And I hate it when people say mop yourself up. Like I’m a dirty floor.’

He couldn’t be sure of it, but he thought that was a line from one of his poems too. Not quite as it was written but near enough. He noticed a scratch running across her left ankle and she told him it was where his wife had grabbed her foot in the pool.

The goat was getting nearer. Every time it moved the bell rang. When it was still the bell stopped. It made him feel uneasy. He brushed a small green cricket off his shoulder and placed it in her open palm.

‘I think you’ve written something you’d like me to read. Is that right?’

‘Yes. It’s just one poem.’ Again her voice was matter of fact. She set the cricket free, watching it jump into the grass and disappear. ‘It’s a conversation with you, really.’

Joe picked up a twig that had fallen from the tree. The brown pigeon above his head was chancing its luck. There were stronger branches it could move to but it refused to budge. He told her he would read her poem that evening and waited for her to thank him.

He waited. For her thank-yous. For his time. For his attention. For his generosity. For defending her against Mitchell. For his company and for his words, the poetry that had made her more or less stalk him on a family holiday. Her thank-yous did not arrive.

‘By the way’ — he stared at her pale shins covered in crushed ants — ‘the fact I know that you um take medication and all that … is confidential.’