Swimming Home Read Free Page B

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.’
    Joe stopped walking. So that was why she was here.
    Young women who followed him about and wanted him to read their poetry, and he was now convinced she was one of them, always started by telling him they’d written a poem about something extraordinary. They walked side by side, flattening a path through the long grass. He waited for her to speak, to make her request, to say how influenced by his books she was, to explain how she’d managed to track him down, and then she would ask would he mind, did he have time, would he be so kind as to please, please read her small effort inspired by himself.
    ‘So you’ve read all my books and now you’ve followed me to France,’ he said sharply.
    A new wave of blush crashed over her cheeks and long neck.
    ‘Yes. Rita Dwighter, who owns the villa, is a friend of my mother. Rita told me you had booked it for the whole summer. She lets me stay in her house for free off-season. I couldn’t stay because YOU hah hah hah hah hogged it.’
    ‘But it’s not off-season, Kitty. July is what they call the high season, isn’t it?’
    She had a north London accent. Her front teeth were crooked. When she wasn’t stammering and blushing she looked like she’d been sculpted from wax in a dark workshop in Venice. If she was a botanist she obviously did not spend much time outside. Whoever had made her was clever. She could swim and cry and blush and say things like ‘hogged it’.
     
     
    ‘Let’s sit in the shade.’
    He pointed to a large tree surrounded by small rocks. A plump brown pigeon perched comically on a thin branch that looked like it was about to snap under its weight.
    ‘All right. That’s a haaaah hazelnut tree by the way.’
    He charged ahead before she finished her sentence and sat down, leaning his back against the tree trunk. When she seemed reluctant to join him he patted the space next to him, brushing away the twigs and leaves until she sat down by his side, smoothing her faded blue cotton dress over her knees. He could not so much hear her heart as feel it beating under her thin dress.
    ‘When I write poems I always think you can hear them.’
    Abell tinkled in the distance. It sounded like a goat grazing somewhere in the orchard, moving around in the long grass.
    ‘Why are you shaking?’ He could smell chlorine in her hair.
    ‘Yeah. I’ve stopped taking my pills so my hands are a bit shaky.’
    Kitty moved a little nearer him. He