‘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? Although 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.