Swimming Home (2 page)

Kitty Finch lifted up the sole of her left foot and slowly pulled out a thorn. Her grey eyes searched for Nina, who was still hiding behind her father. And then she smiled.

‘I like your bikini.’ Her front teeth were crooked, snarled into each other, and her hair was drying into copper-coloured curls. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Nina.’

‘Do you think I look like a bear, Nina?’ She clenched her right hand as if it was a paw and jabbed it at the cloudless blue sky. Her fingernails were painted dark green.

Nina shook her head and then swallowed her spit the wrong way and started to cough. Everyone sat down. Mitchell on the ugly blue chair because he was the fattest and it was the biggest, Laura on the pink wicker chair, Isabel and Joe on the two white plastic recliners. Nina perched on the edge of her father’s chair and fiddled with the five silver toe-rings Jurgen had given her that morning. They all had a place in the shade except Kitty Finch, who was crouching awkwardly on the burning paving stones.

‘You haven’t anywhere to sit. I’ll find you a chair.’ Isabel wrung the ends of her wet black hair. Drops of water glistened on her shoulders and then ran down her arm like a snake.

Kitty shook her head and blushed. ‘Oh, don’t bother. Pah pah please. I’m just waiting for Jurgen to come back with the name of a hotel for me and I’ll be off.’

‘Of course you must sit down.’

Laura, puzzled and uneasy, watched Isabel lug a heavy wooden chair covered in dust and cobwebs towards the pool. There were things in the way. A red bucket. A broken plant pot. Two canvas umbrellas wedged into lumps of concrete. No one helped her because they weren’t quite sure what she was doing. Isabel, who had somehow managed to pin up her wet hair with a clip in the shape of a lily, was actually placing the wooden chair between her recliner and her husband’s.

Kitty Finch glanced nervously at Isabel and then at Joe, as if she couldn’t work out if she was being offered the chair or being forced to sit in it. She wiped away the cobwebs with the skirt of her dress for much too long and then finally sat down. Laura folded her hands in her lap as if preparing to interview an applicant for a job.

‘Have you been here before?’

‘Yes. I’ve been coming here for years.’

‘Do you work?’ Mitchell spat an olive pip into a bowl.

‘I sort of work. I’m a botanist.’

Joe stroked the small shaving cut on his chin and smiled at her. ‘There are some nice peculiar words in your profession.’

His voice was surprisingly gentle, as if he intuited Kitty Finch was offended by the way Laura and Mitchell were interrogating her.

‘Yeah. Joe likes pe-cu-li-ar words cos he’s a poet.’ Mitchell said ‘peculiar’ as if imitating an aristocrat in a stupor.

Joe leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. ‘Ignore him, Kitty.’ He sounded as if he had been wounded in some inexplicable way. ‘Everything is pe-cu-li-ar to Mitchell. Strangely enough, this makes him feel superior.’

Mitchell stuffed five olives into his mouth one after the other and then spat out the pips in Joe’s direction as if they were little bullets from one of his minor guns.

‘So in the meantime’ – Joe leaned forward now – ‘perhaps you could tell us what you know about cotyledons?’

‘Right.’ Kitty’s right eye winked at Nina when she said ‘right’. ‘Cotyledons are the first leaves on a seedling.’ Her stammer seemed to have disappeared.

‘Correct. And now for my favourite word … how would you describe a leaf?’

‘Kitty,’ Laura said sternly, ‘there are lots of hotels, so you’d better go and find one.’

When Jurgen finally made his way through the gate, his silver dreadlocks tied back in a ponytail, he told them every hotel in the village was full until Thursday.

‘Then you must stay until Thursday.’ Isabel said this vaguely, as if she didn’t quite believe it. ‘I think there’s a spare room at the back of the house.’

Kitty frowned and leaned back in her new chair.

‘Well, yeah. Thanks. Is that OK with everyone else? Please say if you mind.’

It seemed to Nina that she was asking them to mind. Kitty Finch was blushing and clenching her toes at the same time. Nina felt her own heart racing. It had gone hysterical, thumping in her chest. She glanced at Laura and saw she was actually wringing her hands. Laura was about to say she did mind. She and Mitchell had shut their shop in Euston for the entire summer, knowing the windows that had been smashed by thieves and drug addicts at least three times that year would be smashed again when their holiday was over. They had come to the Alpes-Maritimes to escape from the futility of mending broken glass. She found herself struggling for words. The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway. She couldn’t be sure of this, but it seemed to her that Joe Jacobs had already wedged his foot into the crack and his wife had helped him. She cleared her throat and was about to speak her mind, but what was on her mind was so unutterable the hippy caretaker got there first.

‘So, Kitty Ket, shall I carry your valises to your room?’

Everyone looked to where Jurgen was pointing with his nicotine-stained finger. Two blue canvas bags lay to the right of the French doors of the villa.

‘Thanks, Jurgen.’ Kitty dismissed him as if he was her personal valet.

He bent down and picked up the bags.

‘What are the weeds?’ He lifted up a tangle of flowering plants that had been stuffed into the second blue bag.

‘Oh, I found those in the churchyard next to Claude’s café.’

Jurgen looked impressed.

‘You’ll have to call them the Kitty Ket plant. It is a historical fact. Plant hunters often named the plants they found after themselves.’

‘Yeah.’ She stared past him in to Joe Jacobs’ dark eyes as if to say, ‘Jurgen’s special name for me is Kitty Ket.’

Isabel walked to the edge of the pool and dived in. As she swam low under the water, her arms stretched out in front of her head, she saw her watch lying on the bottom of the pool. She flipped over and scooped it up from the green tiles. When she surfaced she saw the old English woman who lived next door waving from her balcony. She waved back and then realised Madeleine Sheridan was waving to Mitchell, who was calling out her name.

‘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.

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.’