Isabel moved closer to Laura and put her arms around her. Laura was so tall it was sometimes hard to believe she was not literally above the things that bothered everyone else. She was obviously not feeling herself, because her shoulders were pulled down too. Her friend had never adopted the stoop tall people sometimes develop to make themselves human scale, but now she looked crushed.
‘Let’s open the wine.’ Laura had forgotten to bring a corkscrew so they used the end of Isabel’s comb, plunging its long plastic spike into the cork, and found themselves drinking from the bottle, passing it to each other like teenagers on their first holiday away from family. Isabel told Laura how she had spent the morning searching shops for sanitary towels for Nina, but had no idea how to say it in French. At last the man in the pharmacy told her the words were ‘serviettes hygiéniques’. He had wrapped the pads in a brown paper bag and then in a plastic bag and then in another plastic bag as if in his mind they were already soaked in blood. And then she changed the subject. She wanted to know if Laura had a personal bank account. Laura shook her head. She and Mitchell had had a joint account ever since they set up business together. And then Laura changed the subject and asked Isabel if she thought Kitty Finch might be a little … she searched for the word … ‘touched’? The word stuck in her mouth and she wished she had another language to translate what she meant, because the only words stored inside her were from the school playground of her generation, a lexicon that in no particular order started with barmy, bonkers, barking and went on to loopy, nuts, off with the fairies and then danced up the alphabet again to end with cuckoo. Laura began to tell her how much Kitty’s arrival alarmed her. Just as she was leaving the villa to drive to the Matisse Museum she had seen Kitty arrange the tails of three rabbits Mitchell had shot in the orchard in a vase — as if they were flowers. The thing was, she must have actually cut the tails off the rabbits herself. With a knife. She must have sawed through the rabbits with a carving knife. Isabel did not reply because she was writing Laura a cheque. Peering over her shoulder, Laura saw it was for a considerable amount of money and was signed in Isabel’s maiden name.
Isabel Rhys Jones. When they were students introducing themselves to each other in the bar, Isabel always pronounced her home city in Welsh: Caerdydd. She had had a Welsh accent to start with and then it more or less disappeared. In the second year of their studies Isabel spoke with an English accent that wasn’t quite English but would become so by the time she was on television reporting from Africa. Laura, who had studied African languages, tried to not sound English when she spoke Swahili. It was a complicated business and she would have liked to think about it some more, but Isabel had put the lid back on her pen and was clearing her throat. She was saying something and she sounded quite Welsh. Laura missed the first bit of what her friend was saying but tuned in on time to hear how the North African cleaner who mopped the floors for a pittance in the villa was apparently on strike. The woman wore a headscarf and mended the European plugs for Jurgen, who had gleefully discovered she was more skilled with electrics than he was. Laura had seen her gazing at the wires and then out of the window at the silver light that apparently cured Matisse’s tuberculosis. This woman had been on her mind for some reason and just as she was wondering why she had been so preoccupied by her she remembered what Isabel had said when she was writing out the cheque. It was something to do with Laura opening a separate account from the one she shared with Mitchell. She started to laugh and reminded Isabel that her maiden name was Laura Cable.
The Thing
‘You shouldn’t cover yourself with so much sun lotion, Mitchell.’
Kitty Finch was obviously upset about something. She had taken off all her clothes and stood naked at the edge of the pool as if no one else was there. ‘It changes the chemical balance of the water.’
Mitchell put a protective hand on the dome of his stomach and groaned.
‘The water is actually CLOUDY.’ Kitty sounded furious. She ran around the sides of the pool staring into it from every angle. ‘Jurgen has got the chemical treatment all wrong.’ She stamped her bare foot on the hot paving stones. ‘It’s chemistry that does the fine-tuning. He’s added chlorine tablets to the skimmer box and now it’s too concentrated in the deep end.’
Once again Mitchell took it upon himself to tell her to fuck off. Why didn’t she make herself a cheese sandwich and go and get lost in the woods? In fact he would even drive her there if she could see her way to putting some petrol in his Mercedes.
‘You’re so easily frightened, Mitchell.’
She jumped towards him. Two long leaps as if she was playing at being a gazelle or a deer and was taunting him to come and hunt her down. Her ribs poked out of her skin like the wires of the trap Mitchell had bought for the rat.
‘It’s a good thing Laura’s so tall, isn’t it? She can peer over your head when you shoot animals and never have to look at the ground where they lie wounded.’
Kitty leapt into the cloudy water holding her nose. Mitchell sat up and immediately felt dizzy. The sun always made him ill. Next year he would suggest they hire a chalet on the edge of an icy fjord in Norway, as far away from the Jacobs family as possible. He would catch seals and thrash himself with birch twigs in saunas and then he’d run out into the snow and scream while Laura practised speaking Yoruba and longed for Africa.
‘THE WATER IS FUCKED.’
What had got into her? Adjusting the umbrella over his pink bald head, he could see Joe limping towards the small gate that led to the back of the garden. Nina followed him through the cypress trees carrying a red bucket and a net.
‘Hi, Joe.’
Kitty jumped out of the pool and started to shake water out of the copper coils of her hair. He nodded at her, relieved that despite their unpleasant meeting earlier she sounded genuinely pleased to see him. He pointed to the bucket Nina was carrying with some difficulty to the edge of the pool.
‘Come and see what we found in the river.’
They crowded around the bucket, which was half full of muddy water. A slimy grey creature with a red stripe down its spine clung to a clump of weed. It was as thick as Mitchell’s thumb and seemed to have some sort of pulse because the water trembled above it. Every now and again it curled into a ball and slowly straightened out again.
‘What is it?’ Mitchell couldn’t believe they had bothered to lug this vile creature across the fields all the way back to the villa.
‘It’s a thing.’ Joe smirked.
Mitchell groaned and moved away. ‘Nasty.’
‘Dad always finds gross things.’
Nina stared over Kitty’s shoulder, making sure not to look at her breasts, which were now hanging over the bucket as she peered in. She didn’t want to look at naked Kitty Finch and her father standing too near her. Nina could count the bones that ran like beads down her spine. Kitty was a starver. Her room was full of rotting food she had hidden under cushions. As far as Nina was concerned, she’d rather stare at the blotches of chewing gum on London pavement than at her father and Kitty Finch.