Swimming Home

by Deborah Levy

  ‘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.’

  Imitations of Life

  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.

  ‘But I want the port, Madame. I am looking for Dr Ortega.’

  The blind Russian woman sounded indignant, as if she had been taken to the wrong place against her will. Isabel gazed at the names of residents carved on to brass plaques by the door and read them out loud: ‘Perez, Orsi, Bergel, Dr Ortega.’ There was his name. This was where he lived, even though the woman disagreed.

  She pressed the bell for Dr Ortega and ignored the Russian woman, who was now fumbling urgently in her crocodile-skin handbag for what turned out to be a grubby portable dictionary.

  The voice that came out of the polished brass speaker of the door entry system was a soft Spanish voice asking her, in French, to say who she was.

  ‘My name is Isabel. Your visitor is waiting for you downstairs.’

  A police siren drowned her out and she had to start again.

  ‘Did you say your name is Isabel?’ It was a simple enough question but it made her anxious, as if she was indeed pretending to be someone she was not.

  The entry system made a whining sound and she pushed open the glass door framed in heavy dark wood that led into the marble foyer. The Russian woman in her stained dark glasses did not want to move and instead kept repeating her request to be taken to the port.

  ‘Are you still there, Isabel?’

  Why did the doctor not walk down the stairs and collect the blind woman himself?

  ‘Could you come down and get your patient?’ She heard him laugh.

  ‘Señora, soy doctor en filosofía. She is not my patient. She is my student.’

  He was laughing again. The dark rumbling laugh of a smoker. She heard his voice through the holes in the speaker and moved closer to it.

  ‘My student wants the port because she wishes to go back to St Petersburg. She does not want to arrive for her Spanish lesson and therefore does not believe she is here. Ella no quiere estar aquí.’

  He was playful and flirtatious, a man who had time to speak in riddles from the safety of the door entry system. She wished she could be more like him and fool around and play with whatever the day brought in. What had led her to where she was now? Where was she now? As usual she was running away from Jozef. This thought made her eyes sting with tears she resented. No, not again, not Jozef, not again. She turned away and left the Russian woman groping the banisters of the marble stairway, still insisting she was in the wrong place and the port was her final destination.

  The sky had darkened and she could smell the sea somewhere close. Seagulls screeched above her head. The sweet yeasty smell of the boulangerie across the road wafted over the parked cars. Families were returning from the beach carrying plastic balls and chairs and colourful towels. The boulangerie was suddenly full of teenage boys buying slices of pizza. Across the road the mechanic was revving his motorbike triumphantly. She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be. Instead she walked for what seemed like an hour along the Promenade des Anglais and stopped at one of the restaurants set up on the beach near the airport.

  The planes taking off flew low over the black sea. A party of students was drinking beer on the slopes of the pebbles. They were opinionated, flirtatious, shouting at each other, enjoying a summer night on the city beach. Things were starting in their lives. New jobs. New ideas. New friendships. New love affairs. She was in the middle of her life, she was nearly fifty years old and had witnessed countless massacres and conflicts in the work that pressed her up close to the suffering world. She had not been posted to cover the genocide in Rwanda, as two of her shattered colleagues had been. They had told her it was impossible to believe the scale of the human demolition, their own eyes dazed as they took in the dazed eyes of the orphans. Starved dogs had become accustomed to eating human flesh. They had seen dogs roam the fields with bits of people between their teeth. Yet even without witnessing first-hand the terrors of Rwanda, she had gone too far into the unhappiness of the world to start all over again. If she could choose to unlearn everything that was supposed to have made her wise, she would start all over again. Ignorant and hopeful, she would marry all over again and have a child all over again and drink beer with her handsome young husband on this city beach at night. They would be enchanted beginners all over again, kissing under the bright stars. That was the best thing to be in life.

  A large extended family of women and their children sat at three tables pushed together. They all had the same wiry brown hair and high cheekbones and they were eating elaborate swirls of ice cream piled into pint-sized glasses. The waiter lit the sparklers he had stuck into the chantilly and they oohed and aahed and clapped their hands. She was cold in her halter-neck dress, too naked for this time of night. The women feeding their children with long silver teaspoons glanced curiously at the silent brooding woman with bare shoulders. Like the waiter, they seemed offended by her solitude. She had to tell him twice she was not expecting anyone to join her. When he slammed
her espresso on the empty table set for two, most of it spilled into the saucer.

  She watched the waves crash on the pebbles. The ocean folding into itself the plastic bags left on the beach that day. While she tried to make what was left of her coffee last long enough to earn her place at a table set for two, the thoughts she tried to push away kept returning like the waves on the stones.

  She was a kind of ghost in her London home. When she returned to it from various war zones and found that in her absence the shoe polish or light bulbs had been put in a different place, somewhere similar but not quite where they were before, she learned that she too had a transient place in the family home. To do the things she had chosen to do in the world, she risked forfeiting her place as a wife and mother, a bewildering place haunted by all that had been imagined for her if she chose to sit in it. She had attempted to be someone she didn’t really understand. A powerful but fragile female character. If she knew that to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile, she did not know how to use this knowledge in her own life or what it added up to, or even how it made sitting alone at a table laid for two on a Saturday night feel better. When she arrived in London from Africa or Ireland or Kuwait it was Laura who sometimes offered her a bed in the storeroom above their shop in Euston. It was a kind of convalescence. She lay on it in the daytime and Laura brought her cups of tea when the shop was quiet. They had nothing in common except they had known each other for a long time. The time that had passed between them counted for something. They did not have to explain anything or be polite or fill in the gaps in conversation.

  She invited Laura to share the villa with them for the summer and was surprised at how quickly her friend accepted. Laura and Mitchell usually needed more notice to shut up the shop and get their affairs in order.

  The sparklers were spluttering to an end in the ice creams. One of the mothers suddenly shouted at her five-year-old son, who had dropped his glass on the floor. It was a cry of incandescent rage. Isabel could see she was exhausted. The woman had become fierce, neither unhappy nor happy. She was now on her hands and knees, wiping the ice cream on the floor with the napkins the clan were holding out to her. She felt the disapproval of the women staring at her as she sat alone, but she was grateful to them. She would bring Nina to this restaurant and buy her daughter an ice cream with a sparkler in it. The women had planned something lovely for their children, something she would imitate.

  Walls That Open and Close

  Nina watched Kitty Finch press the palms of her hands against the walls of the spare bedroom as if she was testing how solid they were. It was a small room looking over the back of the villa, the yellow curtains drawn tight across the only window. It made the room hot and dark, but Kitty said she liked it that way. Upstairs in the kitchen they could hear Mitchell singing an Abba song out of tune. Kitty told Nina she was checking the walls because the foundations of the villa were shaky. Three years ago a gang of cowboy builders from Menton had been paid to patch the whole house together. There were cracks everywhere but they had been hastily covered up with the wrong sort of plaster.

  Nina couldn’t get over how much Kitty knew about everything. What was the right sort of plaster, then? Did Kitty Finch work in the construction industry? How did she manage to tuck all her hair into a hard hat?

  It was as if Kitty had read her thoughts, because she said, ‘Yeah, well, the right sort of plaster has limestone in it,’ and then she knelt down on the floor and examined the plants she had collected in the churchyard earlier that morning.

  Her green fingernails stroked the triangular leaves and clusters of white flowers that, she insisted, wrinkling her nose, smelt of mice. She was collecting the seeds from the plants because she wanted to study them and Nina could help her if she wanted to.

  ‘What sort of plant is it?’

  ‘It’s called Conium maculatum. It comes from the same family as fennel, parsnips and carrot. I was really surprised to see it growing by the church. The leaves look like parsley, don’t they?’

  Nina didn’t really know.

  ‘This is hemlock. Your father knew that, of course. In the old days children used to make whistles from the stems and it sometimes poisoned them. But the Greeks thought it cured tumours.’

  Kitty seemed to have a lot to do. After she’d hung up her summer dresses in the wardrobe and lined up a few tattered well-thumbed books on the shelf, she ran upstairs to look at the pool again, even though it was now dark outside.

  When she came back she explained that the pool now had underwater lighting. ‘It didn’t last year.’

  She took a brown A4 envelope out of the blue canvas bag and studied it. ‘This,’ she said, waving it at Nina, ‘is the poem your father has promised to read tonight.’ She chewed at her top lip. ‘He said to put it on the table outside his bedroom. Will you come with me?’

  Nina led Kitty Finch to the room where her parents slept. Their bedroom was the largest in the villa, with an even larger bathroom attached to it. It had gold taps and a power shower and a button to turn the bath into a jacuzzi. She pointed to a small table pushed against the wall outside their bedroom. A bowl stood in the centre of the table, a muddle of swimming goggles, dried flowers, old felt-tips, postcards and keys.

  ‘Oh, those are the keys to the pump room.’ Kitty sounded excited. ‘The pump room stores all the machinery that makes the swimming pool work. I’ll put the envelope under the bowl.’

  She frowned at the brown envelope and kept taking deep breaths, shaking her curls as if something was caught in her hair.

  ‘Actually, I think I’ll slip it under the door. That way he’ll trip over it and have to read it immediately.’

  Nina was about to tell her that it wasn’t his bedroom, her mother slept there too, but she stopped herself because Kitty Finch was saying weird things.

  ‘You have to take a chance, don’t you? It’s like crossing a road with your eyes shut … you don’t know what’s going to happen next.’ And then she threw back her head and laughed. ‘Remind me to drive you to Nice tomorrow for the best ice cream you’ll ever taste in your life.’

  Standing next to Kitty Finch was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle. The first pop when gasses seem to escape and everything is sprinkled for one second with something intoxicating.

  Mitchell was calling them for supper.

  Manners

  ‘My wife is having her shoes mended in Nice,’ Joe Jacobs announced theatrically to everyone at the dinner table.

  His tone suggested he was merely giving information and required no reply from the audience assembled for dinner. They concurred. It was not mentioned.

  Mitchell, always the self-appointed chef, had spent the afternoon roasting the hunk of beef Joe had insisted on paying for in the market that morning. He sliced it gleefully, pink blood oozing from its centre.

  ‘None for me, thank you,’ Kitty said politely.

  ‘Oh, just a morsel.’ A thin slice of bloody meat dropped from his fork and landed on her plate.

  ‘Morsel is Mitchell’s favourite word.’ Joe picked up his napkin and tucked it into his shirt collar.

  Laura poured the wine. She was wearing an ornate African necklace, a thick band of plaited gold fastened with seven pearls around her neck.

  ‘You look like a bride,’ Kitty said admiringly.

  ‘Strangely enough,’ Laura replied, ‘this actually is a bridal necklace from our shop. It’s from Kenya.’

  Kitty’s eyes were watering from the horseradish, which she spooned into her mouth as if it was sugar. ‘So what do you and Mitchell sell at your “Cash and Carry”?’

  ‘“Emporium”,’ Laura corrected her. ‘We sell primitive Persian, Turkish and Hindu weapons. And expensive African jewellery.’

  ‘We are small-time arms dealers,’ Mitchell said effusively. ‘And in between we sell furniture made from ostriches.’

  Joe rolled a slice of meat with his
fingers and dipped it into the bowl of horseradish. ‘Furniture is made from ostriches and horseradish is made from horses,’ he chanted.

  Nina flung down her knife. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  Mitchell grimaced. ‘Girls of your age shouldn’t use such ugly words.’

  Her father nodded as if he entirely agreed. Nina stared at him furiously as he polished his spoon with the end of the tablecloth. She knew her father had a lot of time for what Mitchell called ‘ugly’ words. When she told him, as she regularly did, that she was sick of wearing totally sad shoes to school with the wrong colour tights, her father the poet corrected her choice of words: ‘Next time say totally sad fucking crap shoes. It will give your case more emphasis.’

  ‘Ugly words are for ugly thoughts.’ Mitchell briskly tapped the side of his bald head and then licked a smear of horseradish off his thumb. ‘I never would have sworn in front of my father when I was your age.’

  Joe shot his daughter a look. ‘Yes, my child. Please don’t swear like that and offend the fuckers at this table. Especially Mitchell. He’s dangerous. He’s got weapons. Swords and ivory revolvers.’

  ‘Ac-tu-ally’ – Mitchell wagged his finger – ‘what I really need is a mousetrap, because there are rodents in this kitchen.’

  He glanced at Kitty Finch when he said ‘rodents’.