Nina found herself stranded on the pony as Kitty led her past the bemused waitress carrying a tray of Orangina to a family at a nearby table. The old woman seemed to have frozen on her chair at the moment she was about to put a cube of sugar into her cup of coffee. It was as if the sight of a slender young woman in a short blue dress, her red hair snaking down her back, leading a grey pony on to the terrace of a café was a vision that could only be glanced at sideways. No one felt able to intervene because they did not fully know what it was they were seeing. It reminded Nina of the day she watched an eclipse through a hole in coloured paper, careful not to be blinded by the sun.
‘How are you, Doctor?’
Kitty pulled at the rope and gave the pony a sugar cube. With one hand still holding the rope, she draped her arm around the old woman’s shoulder.
Madeleine Sheridan’s voice when she finally spoke was calm, authoritative. She was wearing a red shawl that looked like a matador’s cloak with pom-poms sewn across the edge.
‘Stick to the track, Kitty. You can’t bring ponies in here.’
‘The track has disappeared. There’s no track to stick to.’ She smiled. ‘I’m still waiting for you to bring me back my shoes like you said you would. The nurses told me I had dirty feet.’
Nina glanced at her mother, who was now standing on the left side of the pony. Kitty’s hands were shaking and she was speaking too loudly.
‘I’m surprised you haven’t told my new friends what you did to me.’ She turned to Isabel and imitated a horror-film whisper: ‘Dr Sheridan said I have a morbid predisposition.’
To Nina’s dismay, her mother actually laughed as if she and Kitty were sharing a joke.
The waitress brought out a plate of sausages and green beans and thumped it in front of Madeleine Sheridan, muttering to her in French about getting the pony out of the café.
Kitty winked at Nina. First with her left eye. And then with her right eye. ‘The waitress isn’t used to ponies coming in for breakfast.’
On cue the pony started to lick the sausages on the plate and all the children at the next table laughed.
Kitty took a small sip of the doctor woman’s untouched coffee. Her eyes had stopped winking. ‘Actually’ — her knuckle suddenly turned white as she gripped the rope that was supposed to keep the pony on the trail — ‘she had me locked up.’ She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘I EMBARRASSED HER SO SHE CALLED AN AMBULANCE.’
Kitty picked up the knife from the plate, a sharp knife, and waved it at Madeleine Sheridan’s throat. All the children in the café screamed, including Nina. She heard the old woman, her voice straining, telling her mother that Kitty was sick and unpredictable. Kitty was shaking her head and shouting at her.
‘You said you’d get my clothes. I waited for you. You’re a LIAR. I thought you were kind but they electrocuted me because of you. They did it THREE times. The nurse wanted to shave off some of my HAIR.’
The point of her knife hovered a centimetre away from Madeleine Sheridan’s milky pearl necklace.
‘I want to go!’ Nina shouted at her mother, trying to keep her balance as the pony, its pointed ears now alert, jerked forward to find the bowl of sugar cubes.
Isabel tried to undo the stirrups so Nina could get off the pony. The waitress was helping her with the buckles and Nina managed to swing her legs over the saddle but didn’t dare jump because the pony suddenly reared up.
Someone in the café was calling the park keeper on the telephone.
‘THEY BURNED MY THOUGHTS TO MAKE THEM GO AWAY.’
As she moved closer to Madeleine Sheridan, waving the knife at her stricken frozen face, two small white feathers caught in her hair drifted towards Nina, who was still struggling to get off the pony.
‘The doctors PEEPED at me through a spyhole. They forced MEAT down my throat. I tried to put on face cream but my jaws HURT from the shocks. I would rather DIE than have that done to me again.’
Nina heard herself speak.
‘Kitty is going to drown herself.’
It was as if she was the only person who could hear her own voice. She was saying important things but apparently not important enough.
‘Katherine is going to drown herself.’
Even to her own ears it sounded like a whisper, but she thought the old woman doctor might have heard her all the same. Her mother had somehow managed to grab the knife out of Kitty’s hand and Nina heard Madeleine Sheridan’s wobbling voice say, ‘I must telephone the police. I’m going to call her mother. I must call her straight away.’ She stopped because Jurgen had suddenly arrived.
It was as if Kitty had conjured him in her mind. He was talking to the park keeper, who was shaking his head and looked flustered.
‘I have witnesses.’ The pom-poms on Madeleine Sheridan’s red cape were jumping up and down as if they were the witnesses she referred to.
Kitty grabbed Jurgen’s arm and hung on to him. ‘Don’t listen to Dr Sheridan. She’s obsessed with me. I don’t know why but she is. Ask Jurgen.’
Jurgen’s sleepy eyes blinked behind his round spectacles.
‘Come on, Kitty Ket, I’ll take you home.’ He said something to Madeleine Sheridan in French and then put his arm around Kitty’s waist. They could hear his voice soothing her. ‘Forget forget Kitty Ket. We are all of us sick from pollution. We must take a nature cure.’
Madeleine Sheridan’s eyes were burning like coal. Blue coal. She wanted to call the police. It was an attack. An assault. She looked like a matador that had been gored by the bull. The park keeper fiddled with a ring of keys strapped to his belt. The keys were almost as big as he was. He wanted to know where the young woman lived. What was her address? If Madame wanted him to call the police they would need this information. Isabel explained that Kitty had arrived five days ago with nowhere to stay and they had given her a room in their rented villa.
He frowned over this information, tapping his keys with his tiny thumb. ‘But you must have asked her questions?’
Isabel nodded. They had asked her questions. Jozef asked her what a leaf was. And a cotyledon.
‘I don’t think we need bother the police. It’s a private argument. Madame is shaken but not harmed.’
Her voice was gentle and a little bit Welsh.
The keeper was gesticulating now. ‘The young woman must have come from somewhere.’ He paused to nod to two men in muddy boots who seemed to need his permission to cut through a log with a circular saw.
‘Yes,’ Madeleine Sheridan snapped, ‘she came from a hospital in Kent, Great Britain.’ She tapped the assaulted pearls tied in a knot near her throat and turned to Isabel Jacobs. ‘I believe your husband is taking her out for a cocktail at the Negresco tomorrow.’
FRIDAY
On the Way to Where?
People stopped to look at her. To gaze and gaze again at the vision of a radiant young woman in a green silk dress who seemed to be walking on air. The left strap of her white tap-dancing shoes had come undone, as if to help lift her above the cigarette butts and chocolate wrappers on the paving stones. Kitty Finch with her wealth of hair piled on top of her head was almost as tall as Joe Jacobs. As they strolled down the Promenade des Anglais in the silver light of the late afternoon, it was snowing seagulls on every rooftop in Nice. She had casually slung the short white feather cape across her shoulders, its satin ribbons tied in a loose knot round her neck. The feathers fluttered in the wind blowing from the sea, the Mediterranean, which, Joe mused, was the same col-our as the glittery blue kohl on her eyes.