Swimming Home Read Online Free PDF

start all over again. If she could choose to unlearn everything that was supposed to have made her wise, she would start all over again. Ignorant and hopeful, she would marry all over again and have a child all over again and drink beer with her handsome young husband on this city beach at night. They would be enchanted beginners all over again, kissing under the bright stars. That was the best thing to be in life.
    A large extended family of women and their children sat at three tables pushed together. They all had the same wiry brown hair and high cheekbones and they were eating elaborate swirls of ice cream piled into pint-sized glasses. The waiter lit the sparklers he had stuck into the chantilly and they oohed and aahed and clapped their hands. She was cold in her halter-neck dress, too naked for this time of night. The women feeding their children with long silver teaspoons glanced curiously at the silent brooding woman with bare shoulders. Like the waiter, they seemed offended by her solitude. She had to tell him twice she was not expecting anyone to join her. When he slammed her espresso on the empty table set for two, most of it spilled into the saucer.
    She watched the waves crash on the pebbles. The ocean folding into itself the plastic bags left on the beach that day. While she tried to make what was left of her coffee last long enough to earn her place at a table set for two, the thoughts she tried to push away kept returning like the waves on the stones.
    She was a kind of ghost in her London home. When she returned to it from various war zones and found that in her absence the shoe polish or light bulbs had been put in a different place, somewhere similar but not quite where they were before, she learned that she too had a transient place in the family home. To do the things she had chosen to do in the world, she risked forfeiting her place as a wife and mother, a bewildering place haunted by all that had been imagined for her if she chose to sit in it. She had attempted to be someone she didn’t really understand. A powerful but fragile female character. If she knew that to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile, she did not know how to use this knowledge in her own life or what it added up to, or even how it made sitting alone at a table laid for two on a Saturday night feel better. When she arrived in London from Africa or Ireland or Kuwait it was Laura who sometimes offered her a bed in the storeroom above their shop in Euston. It was a kind of convalescence. She lay on it in the daytime and Laura brought her cups of tea when the shop was quiet. They had nothing in common except they had known each other for a long time. The time that had passed between them counted for something. They did not have to explain anything or be polite or fill in the gaps in conversation.
    She invited Laura to share the villa with them for the summer and was surprised at how quickly her friend accepted. Laura and Mitchell usually needed more notice to shut up the shop and get their affairs in order.
    The sparklers were spluttering to an end in the ice creams. One of the mothers suddenly shouted at her five-year-old son, who had dropped his glass on the floor. It was a cry of incandescent rage. Isabel could see she was exhausted. The woman had become fierce, neither unhappy nor happy. She was now on her hands and knees, wiping the ice cream on the floor with the napkins the clan were holding out to her. She felt the disapproval of the women staring at her as she sat alone, but she was grateful to them. She would bring Nina to this restaurant and buy her daughter an ice cream with a sparkler in it. The women had planned something lovely for their children, something she would imitate.
     

Walls That Open and Close
     
    Nina watched Kitty Finch press the palms of her hands against the walls of the spare bedroom as if she was testing how solid they were. It was a small room