Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

  “Feel better?”

  “But . . . aren’t you going to have any?”

  “I don’t smoke. Obviously.”

  She was sweating like she did on stage, and now grabbed at her vest, lifting it up and down to create a tunnel of air, so that I received a glimpse of that pale strip of midriff that once so mesmerized the world.

  “I’ve got a coldish Coke in my bag?”

  “I don’t drink that shit and neither should you.”

  She got up on her elbows to take me in more fully.

  “You don’t look all that comfortable to me.”

  She sighed and rolled over on to her stomach to face the milling summer crowds going down to the old stables for scones and tea or through the doors of the great house for art and history.

  “I have a question,” I said, knowing I was stoned and that she wasn’t but finding it hard to keep in mind the second half of that proposition. “You do this with all your assistants?”

  She considered: “No, not this exactly. People are different. I always do something. I can’t have somebody in my face twenty-four-seven who is going to act shy around me. No time. And I don’t have the luxury of getting to know you in some slow, delicate way or being politely English about it, saying please and thank you whenever I want you to do something—if you work for me, you just have to jump to it. I’ve been doing this a while, and I’ve figured out that a few intense hours at the beginning save a lot of time and misunderstandings and bullshit later on. You’re getting off easy, believe me. I had a bath with Melanie.”

  I attempted a goofy extended joke, hoping to hear her laugh again, but instead she squinted at me.

  “Another thing you should understand is that it’s not that I don’t get your British irony, I just don’t like it. I find it adolescent. Ninety-nine percent of the time when I meet British people my feeling is: grow up!” Her mind turned back to Melanie in that bath: “Wanted to know if her nipples were too long. Paranoid.”

  “Were they?”

  “Were who what?”

  “Her nipples. Long.”

  “They’re fucking like fingers.”

  I spat some of my Coke on to the grass.

  “You’re funny.”

  “I come from a long line of funny people. God knows why the British think they’re the only people allowed to be funny in this world.”

  “I’m not that British.”

  “Oh, babe, you’re as British as they come.”

  She reached into her pocket for her phone and began going through her texts. Long before it became a general condition Aimee lived in her phone. She was a pioneer in this as in so many things.

  “Granger, Granger, Granger, Granger. Doesn’t know what to do with himself if he doesn’t have anything to do with himself. He’s like me. We’ve got the same mania. He reminds me of how tiring I can be. To others.” Her thumb wavered over her brand-new BlackBerry. “With you I’m hoping for: cool, calm, collected. Could do with some of that around here. Jesus Christ, he’s sent me like fifteen texts already. He just needs to hold the bikes. Says he’s near the—what in hell is the ‘men’s pond’?”

  I told her, in detail. She made a skeptical face.

  “If I know Granger there’s no way he’s swimming in fresh water, he won’t even swim in Miami. Big believer in chlorine. No, he can just hold the bikes.” She poked a finger in my belly. “Are we done here? Got another one of those if you need it. This is a one-time deal—take advantage. One time per assistant. Rest of the time you work when I work. Which is always.”

  “I am so relaxed right now.”

  “Good! But is there anything else to do around here besides this?”

  Which is how we came to be wandering around inside Kenwood House, followed, for a while, by an eagle-eyed six-year-old girl whose distracted mother refused to listen to her excellent hunch. I trailed red-eyed behind my new employer, noticing for the first time her very particular way of looking at paintings, how for example she ignored all men, not as painters, but as subjects, walking past a Rembrandt self-portrait without pausing, ignoring all the earls and dukes, and dismissing, with a single line—“Get a haircut!”—a merchant seaman with my father’s laughing eyes. Landscapes, too, were nothing to her. She loved dogs, animals, fruit, fabrics, and flowers especially. Over the years I learned to expect that the bunch of anemones we had just seen in the Prado or the peonies from the National Gallery would reappear, a week or so later, in vases all over whichever house or hotel we happened to be in at the time. Many small, painted dogs, too, leaped from canvases into her life. Kenwood was the source of Colette, an incontinent Joshua Reynolds spaniel bought in Paris a few months later, whom I then had to walk twice a day for a year. But more than any of these she loved the pictures of the women: their faces, their fripperies, their hairstyles, their corsetry, their little, pointy shoes.

  “Oh my God, it’s Judy!”

  Aimee was across the red damask room, in front of a life-size portrait, laughing. I came up behind and peered at the Van Dyck in question. No doubt about it: there was Judy Ryan, in all her horrible glory, but four hundred years ago, wearing an unflattering black-and-white tent of lace and satin, and with her right hand—half maternal, half menacing—resting on the shoulder of a young, unnamed page. Her bloodhound eyes, terrible fringe, the long, chinless face—it was all there. We laughed so much it seemed to me that something changed between us, some formality or fear fell away, so that when, a few minutes later, Aimee claimed to be charmed by something called The Infant Academy I felt free enough at least to disagree.

  “It’s a bit sentimental, isn’t it? And weird . . .”

  “I like it! I like the weirdness. Naked babies painting naked pictures of each other. I’m a sucker for babies right now.” She looked wistfully at a boy child with a coy smirk on his cherubic face. “He reminds me of my baby. You really don’t like it?”

  I didn’t know at the time that Aimee was pregnant with Kara, her second child. She probably didn’t know it herself. To me it was obvious the whole picture was ridiculous, and the pink-cheeked infants especially repulsive, but when I looked at her face I saw she was serious. And what are babies, I can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize? The idea frightened me. I restricted myself to praising her son Jay’s beauty in comparison to these cherubim, not very convincingly or coherently, thanks to the weed, and Aimee turned to me, frowning.

  “You don’t want kids, that it? Or you think you don’t want them.”

  “Oh, I know I don’t want them.”

  She patted me on the top of my head, as if there were not twelve years between us but forty.

  “You’re, what? Twenty-three? Things change. I was exactly the same.”

  “No, I’ve always known. Since I was little. I’m not the mothering type. Never wanted them, never will. I saw what it did to my mother.”

  “What did it do to her?”

  To be asked so directly forced me to actually consider the answer.

  “She was a young mum, then a single mum. There were things she wanted to be but she couldn’t, not then—she was trapped. She had to fight for any time for herself.”

  Aimee put her hand on her hips and assumed a pedantic look.

  “Well, I’m a single mom. And I can assure you my baby doesn’t stop me doing a damn thing. He’s like my fucking inspiration right now if you really want to know. It’s a balance, for sure, but you’ve just got to want it enough.”

  I thought of the Jamaican nanny, Estelle, who let me into Aimee’s house each morning and then disappeared to the nursery. That there might be any practical divergence between my mother’s situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewi
ng the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality. I looked at the color in her cheeks and where my hands were—out in front of me, like a politician making a point—and realized that our discussion had become rapidly and strangely heated, without either of us really wanting it to, as if the very word “baby” was a kind of accelerant. I put my hands back by my sides and smiled.

  “It’s just not for me.”

  We headed back through the galleries, looking for the exit, falling in step with a tour guide, he was telling a tale I’d known since childhood, about a brown girl—the daughter of a Caribbean slave and her British master—brought to England and raised in this big white house by well-to-do relatives, one of whom happened to be the Lord Chief Justice. A favorite anecdote of my mother’s. Except my mother did not tell it like the tour guide, she did not believe that a great-uncle’s compassion for his brown great-niece had the power to end slavery in England. I picked up one of the leaflets stacked on a side-table and read that the girl’s father and mother had “met in the Caribbean,” as if they’d been strolling through a beach resort at cocktail hour. Amused, I turned to show it to Aimee but she was in the next room, listening intently to the guide, hovering at the edges of the tour group as if she were part of it. She was always moved by stories that proved “the power of love”—and what difference did it make to me if she was? But I couldn’t help myself, I began channeling my mother, commenting ironically on the commentary, until the guide became irritated and directed his group outside. When we, too, headed for the exit, I took over Aimee’s tour, leading her through a low tunnel of ivy bent into an arbor and describing the Zong as if that great ship were floating right there in the lake right before us. It was an easy image to conjure up, I knew it intimately, it had sailed so many times through my childhood nightmares. On its way to Jamaica, but far off course due to an error in navigation, low on drinking water, filled with thirsty slaves (“Oh?” said Aimee, pulling a briar rose from its bush) and captained by a man who, fearing the slaves would not survive the rest of the journey—but not wanting a financial loss on his first voyage—gathered a hundred and thirty-three men, women and children and threw them overboard, shackled to each other: spoiled cargo on which insurance could later be collected. The famously compassionate great-uncle oversaw that case, too—I told Aimee, as my mother had told me—and he ruled against the captain, but only on the principle that the captain had made a mistake. He, and not the insurers, must take the loss. Those thrashing bodies were still cargo, you could still jettison cargo to protect the rest of your cargo. You just wouldn’t be reimbursed for it. Aimee nodded, tucked the rose she had plucked between her left ear and her baseball cap and knelt suddenly to pat a passing pack of small dogs that were dragging behind them a single walker.

  “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” I heard her tell a dachshund, and then, straightening up and facing me again: “If my dad hadn’t died young? No way I’d be here. It’s the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That’s our secret fucking strength.” I thought of my mother—who had no patience for sentimental readings of history—and cringed. We left the dogs and walked on. The sky was cloudless, the Heath filled with flowers and foliage, the ponds were golden pools of light, but I couldn’t rid myself of this feeling of discomfort and imbalance, and when I tried to trace its source I found myself back before that unnamed page in the gallery, a little gold ring in his ear, who looked beseechingly up at Judy’s doppelgänger as we’d laughed at her. She did not look back at him, she never could, she’d been painted in such a way as to make that impossible. But hadn’t I also avoided his eye, as I avoided Granger’s eye and he avoided mine? I could see this little Moor now with absolute clarity. It was as if he were standing on the path before me.

  • • •

  Aimee insisted we end that peculiar afternoon by swimming in the ladies’ pond. Granger waited once more at the gates, three bikes at his feet, angrily turning the pages of his pocket Penguin Machiavelli. A haze of pollen hovered just above the water, it seemed to be caught in the thick, drowsy air, though the water was frigid. I went in cringingly, in my knickers and T-shirt, inching myself down the ladder while two broad-beamed English women in sturdy Speedos and swim caps bobbed nearby, offering unsolicited encouragement to all who were in the process of joining them. (“Really rather nice once you’re in.” “Just keep kicking your legs till you feel them.” “If Woolf swam here, so can you!”) Women to the right and left of me, some three times my age, slipped right off the deck into the water, but I couldn’t get any deeper than my waist and, stalling for time, turned round and pretended instead to be admiring the scene: white-haired ladies moving in a stately circle through the foul-smelling duckweed. A pretty dragonfly dressed in Aimee’s favorite shade of green flitted by. I watched it land on the deck, just by my hand, and close its iridescent wings. Where was Aimee? I had a moment of paralyzing, weed-inflected paranoia: had she got in before me, while I was fretting about my underwear? Already drowned? Tomorrow would I find myself at an inquest, explaining to the world why I let a heavily insured, universally beloved Australian swim unaccompanied in an ice-cold North London pond? A banshee wail pierced the civilized scene: I turned back and saw Aimee, naked, running from the changing room toward me, launching herself in a dive over my head and over the ladder, arms out, back perfectly arched, as if lifted from below by an invisible principal dancer, before hitting the water clean and true.

  Six

  I didn’t know that Tracey’s father had gone to prison. It was my mother who told me, a few months after the fact: “I see he’s gone in again.” She didn’t have to say more, or tell me to spend less time with Tracey, it was happening naturally anyway. A cooling-off: one of those things that can happen between girls. At first I was distraught, thinking it permanent, but in fact it was only a hiatus, one of many we would have, lasting a couple of months, sometimes longer, but always ending—not coincidentally—with her father getting out again, or else returning from Jamaica, where he often had to flee, when things got hot for him in the neighborhood. It was as if, when he was “in,” or away, Tracey went into standby mode, pausing herself like a video-tape. Although in class we no longer shared a desk (we had been separated after Lily’s party, my mother went up to the school and requested it) I had a clear view of her each day and when there was “trouble at home” I sensed it at once, it revealed itself in everything she did, or didn’t do. She made life as difficult as possible for our teacher, not with explicit bad behavior like the rest of us, not by swearing or fighting, but by an absolute withdrawal of her presence. Her body was there, nothing else. She wouldn’t answer questions or ask them, didn’t involve herself in any activities or copy anything down, or even open her exercise book, and I understood, at such times, that for Tracey time had stopped. If Mr. Sherman started shouting she sat impassive at her desk, her eyes angled to a point above his head, her noise upturned, and nothing he could say—no threat and no degree of volume—had any effect. As I’d predicted, she never did forget those Garbage Pail Kids cards. And being sent to the headmistress’s office held no fear for her: she stood up in the coat she had anyway never taken off and walked out of the room as if it made no difference where she went or what happened to her. When she was in this state of mind I took the opportunity to do those things that, when I was with Tracey, I felt inhibited from doing. I spent more time with Lily Bingham, for example, taking pleasure in her good humor and gentle way of being: she still played with dolls, knew nothing of sex, loved drawing and making things out of cardboard and glue. In other words she was still a child, as I sometimes wished I could be. In her games nobody died or was afraid or took revenge or feared being uncovered as a fraud, and there was absolutely no black and no white, for, as she solemnly explained to me one day as we played, she herself was “color blind” and saw only what was in a person’s heart. She had a little cardboard theater
of the Russian Ballet, bought in Covent Garden, and for her a perfect afternoon involved maneuvering the cardboard prince around the stage, letting him meet a cardboard princess and fall in love with her, while a scratchy copy of Swan Lake, her father’s, played in the background. She loved ballet, though she was a poor dancer herself, too bandy-legged to have any real hopes, and she knew all the French words for everything, and the tragic life stories of Diaghilev and Pavlova. Tap dancing didn’t interest her. When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn’t anticipated, she was offended by it—hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black people in a film, it wasn’t fair. Maybe in America you could do that, but not here, in England, where everybody was equal anyway and there was no need to “go on about it.” And we wouldn’t like it, she said, if someone said to us that only black people could come to Isabel’s dance class, that wouldn’t be nice or fair to us, would it? We’d be sad about that. Or that only black people could come into our school. We wouldn’t like that, would we? I said nothing. I put Stormy Weather back in my rucksack and went home, walking beneath a Willesden sunset of petroleum colors and quick-shunting clouds, going over and over this curious lecture in my mind, wondering what she could have meant by the word “we”?

  Seven

  When things were frosty between Tracey and me I found Saturdays hard, and relied on Mr. Booth for conversation and advice. I brought new information to him—which I got from the library—and he added to what I had or explained things I didn’t understand. Mr. Booth hadn’t known, for example, that it was not really “Fred Astaire” but “Frederick Austerlitz,” but he understood what “Austerlitz” meant, he explained it was a name that must have come not from America but from Europe, probably German or Austrian, possibly Jewish. To me Astaire was America—if he had been on the flag I would not have been surprised—but now I learned that he’d spent a lot of time in London, in fact, and that he had become famous here, dancing with his sister, and if I’d been born sixty years earlier I could have gone to the Shaftesbury Theater and seen him myself. And what’s more, said Mr. Booth, his sister was a far better dancer than him, everybody said so, she was the star and he was the also-ran, can’t sing, can’t act, balding, can dance, a little, ha ha ha, well he showed them, didn’t he? Listening to Mr. Booth, I wondered if it were possible for me, too, to become a person who revealed themselves later in life, much later, so that one day—a long time from now—it would be Tracey sitting in the front row of the Shaftesbury Theater, watching me dance, our positions reversed completely, my own superiority finally recognized by the world. And in later years, said Mr. Booth, taking my library book out of my hands and reading from it, in later years his daily routine was little changed from the life he had always led. He woke up at five a.m. and breakfasted on a single boiled egg that kept his weight at a constant hundred and thirty-four pounds. Addicted to television serials such as The Guiding Light and As the World Turns, he would telephone his housekeeper if he could not watch the soap operas, to find out what had happened. Mr. Booth closed the book, smiled and said: “What an odd fish!”