Swimming Home

by Deborah Levy

  Interpreting a Smile

  ‘Madel-eeene!’

  It was the fat man who liked guns calling up to her. Madeleine Sheridan lifted up her arthritic arm and waved with two limp fingers from her straw chair. Her body had become a sum of flawed parts. At medical school she had learned she had twenty-seven bones in each hand, eight in the wrist alone, five in the palm. Her fingers were rich in nerve endings but now even moving two fingers was an effort.

  She wanted to remind Jurgen, whom she could see carrying Kitty Finch’s bags into the villa, that it was her birthday in six days’ time, but she was reluctant to appear so begging of his company in front of the English tourists. Perhaps she was dead already and had been watching the drama of the young woman’s arrival from the Other Side? Four months ago, in March, when Kitty Finch was staying alone at the tourist villa (apparently to study mountain plants), she had informed Madeleine Sheridan that a breeze would help her tomatoes grow stronger stems and offered to thin the leaves for her. This she proceeded to do, but she was whispering to herself all the while, pah pah pah, kah kah kah, consonants that made hard sounds on her lips. Madeleine Sheridan, who believed human beings had to suffer real hardships before they agreed to lose their minds, told her in a steely voice to stop making that noise. To stop it. To stop it right now. Today was Saturday and the noise had come back to France to haunt her. It had even been offered a room in the villa.

  •

  ‘Madel-eeene, I’m cooking beef tonight. Why don’t you join us for supper?’

  She could just make out the pink dome of Mitchell’s balding head as she squinted at him in the sun. Madeleine Sheridan, who was quite partial to beef and often lonely in the evenings, wondered if she had it in herself to decline Mitchell’s invitation. She thought she did. When couples offer shelter or a meal to strays and loners, they do not really take them in. They play with them. Perform for them. And when they are done they tell their stranded guest in all sorts of sly ways she is now required to leave. Couples were always keen to return to the task of trying to destroy their lifelong partners while pretending to have their best interests at heart. A single guest was a mere distraction from this task.

  ‘Madel-eeene.’

  Mitchell seemed more anxious than usual. Yesterday he told her he had spotted Keith Richards drinking Pepsi in Villefranche-sur-Mer and was desperate to ask for his autograph. In the end he didn’t because, in his own words, ‘The arsehole poet was with me and threatened to headbutt me for being normal.’

  Mitchell with his flabby, prawn-pink arms amused her when he gloomily observed that Joe Jacobs was not the sort of poet who gazed at the moon and had no muscle tone. He could probably lift a wardrobe with his teeth. Especially if it had a beautiful woman inside it. When the English tourists arrived two weeks ago, Joe Jacobs (JHJ on his books but she’d never heard of him) knocked on her door to borrow some salt. He was wearing a winter suit on the hottest day of the year and when she pointed this out, he told her it was his sister’s birthday and he always wore a suit to show his respect.

  This bemused her, because her own birthday was much on her mind. His suit seemed more appropriate for a funeral but he was so charming and attentive she asked him if he would like to try the Andalucían almond soup she had made earlier. When he muttered, ‘How kind, my dear,’ she poured a generous amount into one of her favourite ceramic bowls and invited him to drink it on her balcony. Something terrible happened. He took a sip and felt something tangle with his teeth, only to discover it was her hair. A small clump of silver hair had somehow found its way into the bowl. He was mortified beyond her comprehension, even though she apologised, unable to fathom how it had got there. His hands were actually shaking and he pushed the bowl away with such force the soup spilt all over his ridiculous pinstriped suit, its jacket lined with dandyish pink silk. She thought a poet might have done better than that. He could have said, ‘Your soup was like drinking a cloud.’

  ‘Madel-eeene.’

  Mitchell couldn’t even say her name properly. Possibly because he had such a ridiculous name himself. The prospect of having to live with Kitty Finch had obviously got him into a panic and she wasn’t surprised. She squeezed her eyes into slits, enjoying the view of her ugly bare feet. It was such a pleasure not to wear socks and shoes. Even after fifteen years living in France, wrenched as she was from her country of birth and her first language, it was the pleasure of naked feet she was most grateful for. She could live without a slice of Mitchell’s succulent beef. And she would be insanely brave to risk an evening in the company of Kitty Finch, who was pretending not to have seen her. Right now she was scooping pine cones out of the pool with Nina Jacobs as if her life depended on it. There was no way Madeleine Sheridan, six days away from turning eighty, would perform like a dignified old woman at the dinner table in the tourist villa. The same table Jurgen had bought at the flea market and polished with beeswax and paraffin. What’s more, he had polished it in his underpants because of the heatwave. She had had to avert her eyes at the sight of him sweating in what she delicately called his ‘undergarments’.

  An eagle was hovering in the sky. It had seen the mice that ran through the uncut grass in the orchard.

  She called down her excuses to Mitchell, but he seemed not to have heard her. He was watching Joe Jacobs disappear inside the villa to find a hat. Kitty Finch was apparently going to take the English poet for a walk and show him some flowers. Madeleine Sheridan couldn’t be sure of this, but she thought the mad girl with her halo of red hair shining in the sun might be smiling at her.

  To use the language of a war correspondent, which was, she knew, what Isabel Jacobs happened to be, she would have to say that Kitty Finch was smiling at her with hostile intent.

  The Botany Lesson

  There were signs everywhere saying the orchard was private property, but Kitty insisted she knew the farmer and no one was going to set the dogs on them. For the last twenty minutes she had been pointing out trees that, in her view, ‘were not doing too well’.

  ‘Do you only notice trees that suffer?’ Joe Jacobs shaded his eyes with his hands, which were covered in mosquito bites, and stared into her bright grey eyes.

  ‘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, wou
ld 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.’

  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 cobbl
ers 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.

  A Mountain Road. Midnight.

  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.