by Deborah Levy
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.
‘It’s my birthday today.’
She heard the small begging voice that came out of her mouth but it was too late to try and catch another tone. If she could have said it again it would have been light, airy, amused at being alive at all. Isabel looked genuinely taken aback.
‘Happy birthday! If you’d told me I would have bought a bottle of champagne.’
‘Yes. Thank you for the thought.’ Madeleine Sheridan heard herself speaking in entitled middle-class English again.
‘Someone has burgled my garden. My roses have been stolen and of course I know that Kitty Finch is very angry with me.’
The exotic wife of the poet was saying something about how stealing a rose was not exactly proof of insanity and anyway it was getting late and she wanted to say goodnight to her daughter. From the window opposite she saw a full moon float across the sky. What was the poet’s wife doing? She was walking towards her. She was getting closer. She could smell honey.
Isabel Jacobs was wishing her happy birthday again and her lips were warm on her cheek. The kiss hurt as much as the pains in her throat.
Foreign Languages
Nina was asleep but in her dream she was awake and she found herself walking towards the spare room where Kitty lay on the bed. Her face was swollen and her lip was split. She looked like Kitty but not a lot. She heard Kitty whisper her name.
Nina crept closer. Kitty’s eyelids were dusted with green eyeshadow. They looked like leaves. Nina sat on the end of the bed. Kitty was forbidden because she was dangerous. She did dangerous things. Nina swallowed hard and gave dead Kitty some information.
Your mother is coming to get you.
She placed a blue sugar mouse on the edge of Kitty’s foot. It had a tiny tail made from string. Nina had found it under Kitty’s bed.
And I’ve bought you some soap.
She had seen Kitty look for soap lots of times but there wasn’t any in her bathroom and she said she’d spent all her money on the hire car.
I read your poem. I think it’s brilliant. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read in my life.
She quoted Kitty’s lines to her. Not like how they were in the poem but how she remembered them.
Jumping forwards with both feet
Jumping backwards with both feet
Thinking of ways to live
Kitty’s eyelids trembled and Nina knew she had got the poem all wrong and hadn’t remembered it properly. And then she asked Kitty to stick out her tongue, but Kitty was speaking to her in Yiddish or it might have been German and she was saying, ‘Get up!’, which is what made Nina wake up.
Money is Hard
He slipped his hands around her neck and untied the white satin ribbon of her feather cape. The four-poster bed draped in heavy gold curtains resembled a cave. She heard a car alarm go off while seagulls screamed on the window ledge and her eyes were fixed on the wallpaper. The white feathers of her cape lay scattered on the sheet as if it had been attacked by a fox. She had bought it in a flea market in Athens but had never worn it until now. A swan was a symbol of the dying year in autumn, she had read that somewhere. It had stuck in her head and made her think of the way swans stick their heads in the water and turn themselves upside down. She had been saving the cape for something, perhaps for this; it was hard to know what she had had in mind when she exchanged money for the feathers that had insulated this water-bird from the cold and were also made from quills that were once used as pens. He was inside her now but he was inside her anyway, that was what she couldn’t tell him but she had told him in her poem which he had not read and now the car alarm had stopped and she could hear voices outside the window. A thief must have broken into a car, because someone was sweeping up broken glass.
After a while he ran her a bath.
They walked down to reception and she stood under the blinding Austrian crystals of the chandelier while Joe signed something with his pen. The Italian receptionist gave him back his credit card and the porter opened the glass doors for them. Everything was like it was before but a little bit different. The pianist was still playing ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the bar they had left two hours ago, except now he was singing the words. The palm trees planted along the two lanes of traffic were lit up with golden fairy lights. Kitty jangled the car keys in her hand and told Joe to wait while she bought herself a sugar mouse from the candy stall on the esplanade. The mice were lined up on a silver tray. Pink white yellow blue. She pushed in front of a Vietnamese woman buying strawberry marshmallows and examined the tiny tails made from string. She eventually chose a blue mouse, dropping the car keys as she searched her bag for coins. When they got to the car she told him she was hungry. Her stutter had returned to torment them both. Would he mind if she stopped somewhere for a pah pah pah? Of course, he said, I’d like a pizza too, and they found a restaurant with tables outside in the warm night next to a church. It was the first time he had seen her eat. She devoured the thin pizza with anchovies and he bought her another one with capers and they drank red wine as if they were indeed the lovers they were not supposed to be. She played with the night-lights burning on the table, making prints of her fingertips from the wax, and when he requested she give him one to keep for ever she told him her fingerprints were all over his body anyway. And then she told him about the hospital in Kent and how the nurses from Odessa compared their love bites in the lunch break. She had written about that too but she was not asking him to read it – she was just telling him it would be part of her first collection of poetry. He helped her to salad and spooned artichokes on to her plate and watched her long fingers mop up the oil with bread. They clinked glasses and she told him how after the shock treatment when she lay damaged on the white sheets she knew the English doctors had not erased the thoughts inside her head, etc, but he would know all about that and why go into it now because the night was soft here in the alleyways of old Nice in contrast to the day when it was hard and smelt of money. To all of this he nodded and though he asked her no questions he knew that in a way they were talking about her poem. Two hours later, when they were halfway up the mountain road, Kitty hunched over the steering wheel as she manoeuvred the car around perilous bends, he glanced at his watch. She was a skilled driver. He admired her firm hands with their waxy fingertips on the steering wheel as she pulled the car round the mountain bends. Kitty beeped the horn as a rabbit ran across the road and the car swerved.
She asked him to open his window so she could hear the animals calling to each other in the dark. He wound down the window and told her to keep her eyes on the road. ‘Yes,’ she said again, her eyes now back on the road. Her silk dress was falling off her shoulders as she bent over the steering wheel. He had something to ask her. A delicate request which he hoped she would understand.
‘It would be better for Isabel if she does not know what happened tonight.’
Kitty laughed and the blue mouse bounced in her lap.
‘Isabel already knows.’
‘Knows what?’ He told her he was feeling dizzy. Would she slow down?
‘That’s why she invited me to stay. She wants to leave you.’
He needed the car to move slowly. He had vertigo and could feel himself falling although he knew he was sitting in the passenger seat of a hire car. Was it true that Isabel had started the beginning of the end of their marriage and invited Kitty Finch to be the last betrayal? He dared not look down at the waterfalls roaring against the rocks or t
he uprooted shrubs that clung to the sides of the mountain.
He heard himself say, ‘Why don’t you pack a rucksack and see the poppy fields in Pakistan like you said you wanted to?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Will you come with me?’
He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain air stung his lips. She was driving too fast on this road that had once been a forest. Early humans had lived in it. They studied fire and the movement of the sun. They read the clouds and the moon and tried to understand the human mind. His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same.
•
‘Why haven’t you read my pah pah pah?’
‘My sweetheart’ is what she heard him say as she pressed her white shoe on the brakes. The car lurched towards the edge of the mountain. His voice was truly tender when he said ‘My sweetheart’. Something had changed in his voice. Her head was buzzing as if she had knocked back fifteen espressos one after the other. And then eaten twelve lumps of sugar. She turned the engine off, pulled the handbrake up and leaned back in her seat. At last. At last he was talking to her.
‘It is dishonest to give me a poem and pretend to want my opinion when what you really want are reasons to live. Or reasons not to die.’
‘You want reasons to live too.’
He leaned towards her and kissed her eyes. First the left and then the right, as if she was already a corpse.
‘I’m not the right reader for your poem. You know that.’
She thought about this while she sucked on her blue mouse.
‘The important thing is not the dying. It’s making the decision to die that matters.’
He took out his handkerchief to hide his own eyes. He had vowed never to show the dread and worthlessness and panic in his own eyes to his wife and daughter. He loved them, his dark-haired wife and child, he loved them and he could never tell them what it was that had been on his mind for a long time. The unwelcome tears continued to pour out of him just as they had poured out of Kitty Finch in the orchard full of suffering trees and invisible growling dogs. He must apologise for not stamping on his own desires, for not fighting it all the way.
‘I’m sorry about what happened in the Negresco.’
‘What happened in the Negresco that you’re sorry about?’
Her voice was soft, confident and reasonable.
‘I know you like silk so I wore a silk dress.’
He felt her fingers tap his wet cheek and he could smell his perfume in her hair. To have been so intimate with her had brought him to the edge of something truthful and dangerous. To the edge of all the bridges he had stood on in European cities. The Thames flowing east across southern England and emptying into the North Sea. The Danube that started in the Black Forest of Germany and ended in the Black Sea. The Rhine that ended in the North Sea. Sex with her had brought him to the edge of the yellow line on the platforms of tube and train stations where he had stood thinking about it. Paddington. South Kensington. Waterloo. Once in the Metro in Paris. Twice in Berlin. Death had been on his mind for a long time. The thought, the throwing of himself into rivers and into trains lasted two seconds, a tremor, a twitch, a blink and a step forwards but, so far, a step backwards again. A step back to five beers for the price of four, back to roasting a chicken for Nina, back to tea, Yorkshire or Tetley’s, never Earl Grey, back to Isabel, who was always somewhere else.
He was the wrong reader for her to ask if she should live or die because he was barely here himself. He wondered what kind of catastrophe lived inside Kitty Finch. She told him she had forgotten what she remembered. He wanted to close down like Mitchell and Laura’s shop in Euston. Everything that was open must close. His eyes. His mouth. His nostrils. His ears that could still hear things. He told Kitty Finch he had read her poem and that it been ringing inside him ever since. She was a writer of immeasurable power and more than anything he hoped she would do the things she wanted to do. She must travel to the Great Wall in China, to the vitality and dream that is India, and she must not forget the mysterious luminous lakes closer to home in Cumbria. These were all things to look forward to.
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.
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.
‘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.’
SATURDAY
Nina Ekaterina
When Nina woke up just after dawn on Saturday morning she knew immediately everything had changed. The doors of her balcony were wide open as if someone had been there in the night. When she saw a yellow square of paper rolled up like a scroll on her pillow she knew she would be wiser to go back to sleep and hide all day. The words on the yellow paper were written in shaky handwriting by someone who was in a hurry and who obviously liked writing things down. She finished reading the note and crept downstairs to the French doors that led to the pool. They were already open, as she thought they would be. She knew what she was going to see.
Something was floating in the pool and that did not surprise her. At a second glance she saw that Kitty’s body was not so much floating as submerged vertically in the water. She was wrapped in a tartan dressing gown but the gown had slipped. The yellow lilo bounced against the edges of the pool and floated towards the body. She heard herself call out.
‘Kitty?’
The head was low in the water, tilted back with its mouth open. And then she saw the eyes. The eyes were glassy and open and they were not Kitty’s eyes.
‘Dad?’
Her father did not reply. She thought he was playing a joke on her. Any second he would rise from the water and roar at her.
‘Dad?’
His body was so big and silent. All the noise that was her father, all the words and spluttering and utterances inside him, had disappeared into the water. All she knew was that she was screaming and then suddenly doors were banging and her mother had dived into the pool. Mitchell jumped in too. Together they steered the body around the lilo and with difficulty were trying to lift it out of the pool. Nina heard her mother shout something to Laura. She watched Mitchell lay the body down on the paving stones and press his hands up and down on it. She could hear the sound of water splashing as her mother heaved the dressing gown out of the water. She did not understand why it was so heavy but then she saw her mother pull something out of the pockets. It was a pebble the size of her hand and it had a hole in the middle of it. Nina could see her struggling with three more of the pebbles she had collected on the beach with Kitty and she thought it must have got later and the sun was rising over the pool because the water had changed colour. She shivered and searched for the sun in the sky but she could not see it.
Mitchell stuck his fingers in her father’s mouth. And then he pinched his nose. Mitchell was panting and actually kissing her father over and over again.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
Laura ran into the villa shouting something about the fact sheet. Where was Jurgen? Everyone was shouting for Jurgen. Nina felt someone touch her head. Kitty Finch was stroking her hair. And then Kitty pushed her through the French doors and told her to sit down on the sofa while she helped Laura look for the fact sheet. That’s all she heard for the next five minutes. Where was the fact sheet? Had anyone seen the fact sheet? Alth
ough Nina was still not sure whether it was her father or Kitty who was alive or dead she sat obediently on the sofa and stared at the Picasso prints on the wall. A fish bone. A blue vase. A lemon. It was only when she heard Laura shouting, ‘It’s yellow. The fact sheet is a yellow piece of paper,’ that she realised she was holding a yellow sheet of paper in her hand and waved it at Laura. Laura looked startled and then grabbed it from her and ran to the telephone. Nina watched her peer at the numbers.
‘I don’t know, Kitty. I don’t know which one to call.’
Kitty was saying something in a detached flat voice.
‘The hospital is in Grasse on the Chemin de Clavary.’
It began to rain. Nina heard herself sobbing. She was standing outside herself looking at herself as she stood by the glass doors.
The ambulance and the police were arriving. Madeleine Sheridan was there too. She was shouting at Mitchell.
‘Tilt his head upwards, hold his nose!’ and Nina could see her fingers press into her father’s neck as she felt for a pulse.
‘Do not put him in the recovery position, Mitchell. I think he has a spinal injury.’
And then she heard the old woman cry out, ‘There it is …’
Nina started to sob in the rain because she was still not sure what had happened. As she ran towards her mother she heard that she was a very loud crier. It sounded a bit like laughing but it wasn’t. Her teeth were showing and she could feel little jabs in her diaphragm. She was frowning and the more she cried the more she frowned. She could feel her mother holding her in her arms, stroking her neck. Her mother was wearing a nightdress and it was wet and cold and she smelt of expensive creams. As a child she had played a morbid game in which she dared herself to have to choose which one of her parents she would rather die. She had tormented herself with this game and now she buried her face in her mother’s stomach because she knew she had betrayed her.
