Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

She shrugged. ‘Well, actually, Jurgen and Dr Sheridan and everyone in the village know already. And I’ve stopped taking it anyway.’

‘Is Madeleine Sheridan a doctor?’

‘Yeah.’ She clenched her toes. ‘She’s got friends at the hospital in Grasse, so you’d better pretend to be happy and have a grip.’

He laughed and then to make him laugh some more, so he would appear to be happy and to have a grip, she advised him that nothing, NOTHING AT ALL, was confidential when it was told to Jurgen. ‘Like all indiscreet people, he puts his hand on his heart and assures his confidant that his lips are sealed. Jurgen’s lips are never sealed, because they always have a giant spliff between them.’

Joe Jacobs knew he should ask her more questions. Like his journalist wife. The why the how the when the who and all the other words he was supposed to ask to make life more coherent. But she had given him a little information. On the way to the orchard she told him she had given up her job clearing leaves and cutting grass in Victoria Park in Hackney. A gang of boys had pulled a knife on her because when she was on medication it made her legs twitch so she was easy prey.

They heard the bell again.

‘What is it?’ Kitty stood up and peered into the long grass.

Joe could see the vertebrae of her spine under her dress. When he dropped his hat once again, she picked it up and dusted it with the tips of her green fingernails, holding it out to him.

‘Oh!’

Kitty shouted ‘Oh’ because at that moment the long grass moved and they saw flashes of pink and silver glinting through the blades. Something was making its way towards them. The grass seemed to open and Nina stood in front of them, barefoot in her cherry-print bikini. On her toes were Jurgen’s gift of the five silver rings from India with little bells attached to them.

‘I came to find you.’ She gazed at her father, who seemed to be holding Kitty’s Finch’s hand. ‘Mum’s gone to Nice. She said she had to take her shoes to get mended.’

Kitty looked at the watch on her thin wrist.

‘But the cobblers are shut in Nice now.’

Three growling dogs sprang out of the grass and circled them. When the farmer appeared and told the sweating English poet that he was trespassing on his land, the beautiful English girl ripped the scarf off the hat she was wearing and passed it to the frowning poet.

‘Mop yourself up,’ she said, and told the farmer in French to call the dogs off them.

When they got back to the villa, Joe walked through the cypress trees to the garden, where he had set up a table and chair to write in the shade. For the last two weeks he had referred to it as his study and it was understood he must not be disturbed, even when he fell asleep on the chair. Through the gaps in the branches of the cypress trees he saw Laura sitting on the faded wicker chair by the pool. Mitchell was carrying a bowl of strawberries towards her.

He glanced drowsily at Laura and Mitchell eating their strawberries in the sunshine and found himself about to fall asleep. It was an odd sensation, ‘to find himself’ about to fall into sleep. As if he could find himself anywhere at any time. Best to make the anywhere a good place to be, then, a place without anguish or impending threat; sitting at a table under the shade of an old tree with his family; taking photographs in a gondola moving across the canals of Venice; watching a film in an empty cinema with a can of lager between his knees. In a car on a mountain road at midnight after making love to Kitty Finch.

It was getting dark and she told him the brakes on the hire car were fucked, she couldn’t see a thing, she couldn’t even see her hands.

Her silk dress was falling off her shoulders as she bent over the steering wheel. A rabbit ran across the road and the car swerved. He told her to keep her eyes on the road, to just do that, and while he was speaking she was kissing him and driving at the same time. And then she asked him to open his window so she could hear the insects calling to each other in the forest. He wound down the window and told her, again, to keep her eyes on the road. He leaned his head out of the window and felt the cold mountain air sting his lips. Early humans had once lived in this mountain forest. They knew the past lived in rocks and trees and they knew desire made them awkward, mad, mysterious, messed up.

‘Yes,’ Kitty Finch said, her eyes now back on the road. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all. That is why I am here, Jozef. I have come to France to save you from your thoughts.’

Isabel Jacobs was not sure why she had lied about taking her shoes to be mended. It was just one more thing she was not sure of. After Kitty Finch’s arrival all she could do to get through the day was to imitate someone she used to be, but who that was, who she used to be, no longer seemed to be a person worth imitating. The world had become increasingly mysterious. And so had she. She was not sure what she felt about anything any more, or how she felt it, or why she had offered a stranger the spare room. By the time she had driven down the mountains, found change for the toll, got lost in Vence and tried to turn back in the traffic that choked the coast road to Nice, enraged drivers jerked their hands at her, pressed their horns, rolled down their windows and shouted at her. In the back seats of their cars, groomed little dogs stared at her mockingly, as if not knowing where you were going in a one-way system was something they despised too.

She parked opposite the beach called Opéra Plage and walked towards the pink dome of the Hotel Negresco, which she recognised from the map stapled on to the ‘fact sheet’ that came with the villa. The fact sheet was full of information about the Hotel Negresco, the oldest and grandest belle époque hotel on the Promenade des Anglais. Apparently it was built in 1912 by Henri Negresco, a Hungarian immigrant who designed it to attract to Nice ‘the very top of the upper crust’.

A breeze was blowing across the two lanes of traffic that separated her from the crowded beaches. This blast of dirty city life felt better, far better than the clean sharp mountain air that only seemed to make sorrow sharper too. Here in Nice, France’s fifth biggest city, she could disappear into the crowds of holidaymakers as if she had nothing on her mind except to complain about the cost of hiring a sun lounger on the Riviera.

A woman with a helmet of permed, hennaed hair stopped her to ask if she knew the way to Rue François Aune. The lenses of her big sunglasses were smeared with what looked like dried milk. She spoke in English with an accent that Isabel thought might be Russian. The woman pointed a finger laden with rings at a mechanic in oily navy overalls lying under a motorbike, as if to suggest Isabel ask him for directions on her behalf. For a moment she couldn’t work out why this was demanded of her, but then she realised the woman was blind and could hear the mechanic revving his bike nearby.

When Isabel knelt down on the pavement and showed him the scrap of paper the woman had pushed into her hand, he jerked his thumb at the apartment block across the road. The blind woman was standing in the street she was looking for. ‘You are here.’ Isabel took her arm and led her through the gate towards the affluent mansion block, every window framed with newly painted green shutters. Three sprinklers watered the palm trees planted in neat lines in the communal gardens.