Beautiful Nights by Nina George

Author:Nina George [George, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2025-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

Who’s swimming beside you?

“You,” Claire had replied, “you, Jeanne!”

Jeanne had shaken her head. Keep practicing, she had insisted. “Don’t fight the waves, swim calmly, slowly, they’ll take your weight, they’re plenty strong enough. Start by diving through the breakers, don’t try and swim against them. Breathe in when the wave’s behind you. Breathe regularly, exhale fully to make room in your lungs. Always breathe on the same side when you’re doing the crawl. If you get scared, lie on your back with your head toward the beach. Fear makes you heavy: let the water carry you, let it take your fear. Leave it to the sea to move you. Fear is a wave: it comes and then it goes.

“But most importantly, child: know where you’re going! Don’t just put your head down and swim sixty strokes like a thing possessed. Look up every now and then. Take time to pause. Otherwise you’ll end up swimming in a direction you didn’t intend. Dictate your own course. And that means pausing to breathe and look around you.”

Every day of her first summer they had gone down to the Plage de la Baleine, and Jeanne had taught Claire to swim in the sea. She had spat first in the left, then in the right lens of her swimming goggles and encouraged her to do the same.

Jeanne swam alongside her, with a steady breaststroke; she was there to help Claire through the moments of panic, when the water caught her midbreath and filled her mouth, eyes, and stomach with salt water. She was there when Claire’s aching muscles gave in and cramped up. She was there when Claire started crying, all of a sudden, as they swam through a patch of water with dark, moving shadows in the depths, and tear salt mixed with sea salt. She was there when Claire swam the crawl against the current, and she smiled when she decided not to fight the undertow but to find another way back, turning onto her back and using the energy of the waves by way of resistance.

Whenever Claire returned to the shore, panting, proud, or simply empty and serene, Jeanne would go back into the water alone, slip on her flippers, and swim briskly and steadily to the harbor and back, and Claire would watch her through the binoculars, counting her strokes: one, two, three, inhale, one, two, three, exhale. Pausing on the crest of the wave after every twenty strokes, looking around, adjusting her course.

Afterward, they would linger on the beach for an hour or two. Claire would reach into the rock pools and dig around for snails and shellfish. She ran her hands over the fossils and watched the mussels grow bigger week by week. She listened to the sounds and breathed in the air. Once they found washed-up giant jellyfish the size of rucksacks.

They hiked along the GR34, the coast path once used by customs officers and smugglers alike, between lakes and grassland, cliffs and slopes covered in lichen, moss, and heather, the rocks glowing copper-red in the morning and evening light.

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