She flung down the rucksack full of pebbles and marched into the sea in the butter-coloured dress she said made her feel extra cheerful. Nina watched her dive into a wave. The house in London Kitty referred to wasn’t exactly cosy. Her father always in his study. Her mother away, her shoes and dresses lined up in the wardrobe like someone who had died. When she was seven and always had nits in her hair the house had smelt of the magic potions she used to make from her mother’s face creams and her father’s shaving foam. The big house in west London smelt of other things too. Of her father’s girlfriends and their various shampoos. And of her father’s perfume, made for him by a Swiss woman from Zurich who married a man who owned two show horses in Bulgaria. He said her perfumes ‘opened his mind’, especially his favourite, which was called Hungary Water. The posh house smelt of his special status and of the sheets he always put in the washing machine after his girlfriends left in the morning. And of the apricot jam he spooned into his mouth straight from the jar. He said the jam changed the weather inside him, but she didn’t know what the weather was in the first place.
She did sort of know. Sometimes when she walked into his study she thought he looked a sorry sight stooped in his dressing gown, silent and still as if he’d been pinned down by something. She’d got used to the days he was sunk in his chair and refused to look at her or even get up for nights on end. She’d close the door of his study and bring him mugs of tea he never touched, because they were still there when she talked to him from behind the door (a slimy beige skin grown over the tea) and asked him for lunch money or to sign a letter giving his permission for a school trip. In the end she signed them herself with his ink pen, which is why she always knew where it was, usually under her bed or upside down in the bathroom with the toothbrushes. She had designed a signature she could always replicate, J.H.J with a full stop between the letters and a flourish on the last J. After a while he usually cheered up and took her to the Angus Steak House, where they sat on the same faded red velvet banquette they always sat on. They never talked about his own childhood or his girlfriends. This was not so much an unspoken secret pact between them, more like having a tiny splinter of glass in the sole of her foot, always there, slightly painful, but she could live with it.
When Kitty came back, her dress dripping wet, she was saying something but the husky was barking at a seagull. Nina could just see Kitty’s lips moving and she knew, with an aching feeling inside her, that she was still angry or something was wrong. As they walked to the car Kitty said, ‘I’m meeting your father at Claude’s café tomorrow. He’s going to talk to me about my poem. Nina, I am so nervous. I should have got a summer job in a pub in London and not bothered. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’
Nina wasn’t listening. She had just seen a boy in silver shorts roller-skating down the esplanade with a bag of lemons tucked under his tanned arm. He looked a bit like Claude but he wasn’t. When she heard a bird screeching in what she thought sounded like agony, she dared not look back at the beach. She thought the husky or snow wolf might have caught the seagull after all. Maybe it wasn’t happening and anyway she had just spotted the old lady who lived next door walking on the promenade. She was talking to Jurgen, who was wearing purple sunglasses in the shape of hearts. Nina called out and waved.
‘That’s Madeleine Sheridan, our neighbour.’
Kitty gazed up. ‘Yes, I know. The evil old witch.’
‘Is she?’
‘Yes. She calls me Katherine and she nearly killed me.’
After she said that, Kitty did something so spooky that Nina told herself she hadn’t seen it properly. She leaned backwards so that her copper hair rippled down the back of her knees and shook her head from side to side very fast while her hands jerked and flailed above her head. Nina could see the fillings in her teeth. And then she lifted her head up and gave Madeleine Sheridan the finger.
Kitty Finch was mental.
Medical Help from Odessa
Madeleine Sheridan was trying to pay for a scoop of caramelised nuts she had bought from the Mexican vendor on the esplanade. The smell of burnt sugar made her greedy for the nuts that would at last, she hoped, choke her to death. Her nails were crumbling, her bones weakening, her hair thinning, her waist gone for ever. She had turned into a toad in old age and if anyone dared to kiss her she would not turn back into a princess because she had never been a princess in the first place.
‘These damn coins. What’s this one, Jurgen?’ Before Jurgen could answer she whispered, ‘Did you see Kitty Finch doing that thing to me?’
He shrugged. ‘Sure. Kitty Ket has something to say to you. But now she has some new friends to make her happy. I have to book the horse-riding for Nina. The Ket will take her.’
She let him take her arm and steer her (a little too fast) into one of the bars on the beach. He was the only person she talked to in any detail about her life in England and her escape from her marriage. She appreciated his stupor, it made him non-judgemental. Despite the difference in their age she enjoyed his company. Having nothing to do in life but live off other people and his wits, he always made her feel dignified rather than a sad case, probably because he wasn’t listening.
Today she was barely listening to him. The arrival of Kitty Finch was bad news. This is what she was thinking as she stared at a motorboat making white frothy scars on the chalky-blue sea. When he found a table in the shade and helped her into a chair that was much too small for a toad, he seemed not to realise she would have to twist her body into positions that made her ache. It was thoughtless of him, but she was too disorientated by the sight of Kitty Finch to care.
She tried to calm herself by insisting Jurgen take off his sunglasses.
‘It’s like looking into two black holes, Jurgen.’
It was her birthday in four days’ time and right now she was thirsty in the heat, almost crazed with thirst. She had been looking forward to their lunch appointment for weeks. That morning she had telephoned her favourite restaurant to find out what was on the menu, where their table was positioned and to request the maître d’ save her a parking space right outside the door in return for a healthy tip. She screamed at a waiter for a whisky and a Pepsi for Jurgen, who disliked alcohol for spiritual reasons. It was hard for an old woman to get a waiter’s attention when he was busy serving topless women sunbathing in thongs. She had read about yogic siddhas who mastered human invisibility through a combination of concentration and meditation. Somehow she had managed to make her body imperceptible to the waiter without any of the training. She lifted both her arms and waved at him as if she were flagging down an aeroplane on a desert island. Jurgen pointed to the accordion player from Marseilles perched on a wooden box by the flashing pinball machine. The musician was sweating in a black suit three sizes too large for him.
‘He’s playing at a wedding this afternoon. The beekeeper from Valbonne told me. If I got married I would ask him to play at my wedding too.’
Madeleine Sheridan, sipping her hard-won whisky, was surprised at how his voice was suddenly so high-pitched.
‘Marriage is not a good idea, Jurgen.’
Not at all. She began to tell him (again) how the two biggest departures in her life were leaving her family to study medicine and leaving her husband to live in France. She had come to the conclusion that she was not satiated with love for Peter Sheridan and exchanged a respectable life of unhappiness for the unrespectable unhappiness of being a woman who had cut her ties with love. Now it seemed, staring at her companion, whose voice was shaking all over the place, that in his damaged heart (too many cigarettes) he wanted to tie the knot, to close the circle of his life alone, which frankly was an affront.