Low life

We have a gardener, Philippe, who comes once a week. He lives in a ruin a little way down the cliff, which he is carefully and sensitively restoring using traditional materials and techniques. Philippe is in his late twenties, single, tall, slender, beautiful, hard-working, ambitious, educated, courtly, gentle, speaks good English and has a ponytail and a plaid leather bracelet on his tawny wrist. Catriona thinks he’s an oracle, as well as beautiful, and goes to him for advice on practical matters of every sort, as if she thinks that if we were all dominos I’d be a double blank and Philippe an ivory-backed double six. He stepped in for a gin-and-tonic the other day. Catriona’s oldest girlfriend was staying. Also Catriona’s youngest daughter.

I’ve swapped my carer’s tray in Devon for a barrow and spade halfway up a cliff in the south of France. Right next door to the modernised, carpeted cave in which we live is a concealed cavern, home for hundreds of years to troglodytes (the ceiling is black with soot from their fires) and their domestic animals. The floor is feet-deep in accumulated manure and debris that has turned over the years to a fine black dust. I’ve dug down to rock and now I’m working forward towards the door with three electric fans at my back directing the rising dust out of the cavern entrance in a stream of smoke. It’s a filthy business. I spade the black dust into a wheelbarrow, then tip it over the cliff.

I said my goodbyes and went outside with my trolley bag to wait for the taxi. While waiting, I looked across the sheep field at the sea. The wind direction had changed from due east to south-west and the surface of the sea, formerly turbulent, was placid. For the past ten weeks I’d been my mother’s full-time cook and carer. I’d put in a decent stint; nevertheless I felt guilty about leaving. Mum isn’t a great talker and, given the opportunity, neither am I. For ten weeks we had coexisted in amicable and introspective quietness, while outside one Atlantic gale after another shook the house. When I came here back in January from France, where the boozy chatter is non-stop and there is little opportunity for introspection, I had lost touch with my subconscious mind.

Does the BBC suppose that it will convert the public to a belief in equality if it does not, in its heart, believe in it itself? Unlike the genial guidance of wartime propaganda, this current stuff feels like snobbish contempt. Of course no one forces me to watch state television, and apart from snooker, darts, football or horse racing, I don’t. But the other day, I took a tray into the room where my mother sits slumped at an angle and the telly was on, and it was showing the terrier judging at Crufts. Crufts! Terriers! Wondering how this culturally questionable event has escaped the gimlet-eyed ideologues’ red pencil, I settled down in a comfortable chair to watch.

Standing in a messy kitchen at the tendril tip of a county line at three o’clock in the morning, Trev was applying his concentration to the intricate business of washing the coke in a dessert spoon with acetone and a lighter flame. When the impurities had burnt away, Trev goggled with incredulity at what remained in the spoon. Then he swore in a low, disbelieving voice because the washed remainder was the most he’d ever seen. Three were a crowd in the small, narrow kitchen. Our hyperactive host, whose eyes were out on stalks and whose voice was hoarse from shouting, was carrying on two conversations at once. He would hoarsely shout at us for a minute or so, then run upstairs to shout at whoever was up there.

My fifth week confined to barracks as nurse, chief cook and bottle washer. I drive to the supermarket about twice a week, otherwise my horizon has shrunk to a vase of cut daffodils on the kitchen table, and through the window a fluorescent orange football in the garden with the grass growing up around it, and in the field beyond furry heifers enthusiastically nosing up hay from their circular feeder. Nevertheless I am far from unsocialised. The house is close to the centre of the village. The front door is always open — you enter via a conservatory — and there are plenty of visitors. Some of these stand at the door and diffidently call out for permission to enter, others stroll in.

To begin with it was mice. The house was overrun with them. She saw them out of the corner of her eye shooting across the room. Then they became bolder. Instead of running away they ran towards her, menacing her. So she set traps and laid poison. I’d come home and open a linen drawer and find a trap set in it or blue granules in a plastic tray. Then a mouse ran up her leg. Her brother, a farmer turned smallholder, has been waging war on rats and mice all his life. He keeps abreast of the literature and advances in rat-extermination technology. He advised deafening them with plug-in sonic devices. She bought three, whose continual blue flashing aids navigation around the house after dark, saving on light bulbs.

My sister’s boyfriend is a solitary man and easily overwhelmed by another’s presence. On his rare visits he flits in and flits out again. On this occasion he was making his usual dash for the door when he saw me, remembered something, and handed me two battered old pocket diaries in that offhand, embarrassed way of his. ‘You’re interested in the first world war. I thought you might want to have these,’ he said. ‘If you can make any sense of them, good luck.’ I opened one and saw his surname, Smith, inscribed between the words ‘Gunner’ and ‘248 Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery’. The diary was for 1917. The other one was for 1918. ‘Your grandfather?’ He nodded.

Just before I left France, Oscar’s mum sent over a photo of Oscar in his classroom at school showing the camera two school awards. One was for ‘pupil of the week’, the other for general sporting excellence. His expression was a comic parody of being proud rather than pride itself. I’d seen him hardly at all since last summer, and perhaps for this reason the change wrought in him between his eighth and ninth years astonished me more than if I had seen him constantly. Last weekend, I picked him up from his mother’s flat and took him to his first football match: Exeter City vs MK Dons. The change in him that I had noticed in the photo was confirmed when he opened the front door, ready with his coat on.

‘The whole of my life I’ve had difficulty.’ I heard Sylvia say this through the door, which was slightly ajar. ‘Sometimes it’s absolute torture.’ I knocked and entered my mother’s small sitting room unctuously, bearing a tray on which were two gold-rimmed Royal Worcester cups and saucers, the cups filled with steaming, freshly poured Yorkshire tea. On a reclining armchair, with her legs stuck out, and she herself thickly covered in a colourful variety of thin and thick blankets, my mother was listening to the monologue, or perhaps soliloquy, being delivered by the woman in the reclining chair opposite, also with her legs stuck out.

My first night back in Blighty, I sat all evening at the kitchen table drinking wine with a charming, courteous English gentleman stricken in years. (I’ll call him Bertie. He enjoys the column and wrote inviting me to visit him at his pile on Exmoor.) I’m partial to old-fashioned English gentlemen, relishing above all their many rare qualities their disinterestedness. Before dinner we had slowly and deliberately drunk a bottle of red wine, and another one after that. He did most of the talking. His body was a calamity, but his mind was completely lucid. The vocabulary with which he expressed his mind was about ten times as large as mine and he wielded it with precision and virtuosity.

We drove down from the hills to visit friends of friends with a house by the sea and on the journey I experienced all the usual mixed feelings of a trip to the coast. On departure: the not unsnobbish excitement at the prospect of a day out on the glamorous French Riviera. On arrival: the disenchantment with the traffic queuing in the cramped streets, the hideous, jerry-built apartment blocks, the boulder beaches, the dog shit, the prevailing chill of vulgar, insentient wealth. Always the disenchantment brings to mind that passage in Cyril Connolly’s only novel, The Rock Pool (1936), which is set on the Côte d’Azur. The central character is called Naylor. Naylor has a hangover. After several days and nights of partying, this one is his worst yet.

We were eight for dinner on New Year’s Eve: four men and four women with a combined age, I would guess, of around 500. A quarter of the company — two of the men — had been officially diagnosed as suffering from one form or another of dementia. We whose brains still neatly fitted the inside of our skulls were instead prey to all the usual anxieties, delusions, depressions and addictions typical of those wealthy, late middle-aged English people who exist in the strange limbo of expatriation. We sat there facing each other across the dinner table on the last day of the year, knackered, it’s true, each drifting aimlessly in a private universe of his or her own devising.

The Airbnb accommodation at Paddington, chez Mohammed, was a fourth-floor room measuring about nine feet by five. As well as having a single bed, this small space was extraordinarily well equipped, with a wardrobe, huge fridge, sink, draining board, ironing board, microwave oven, kettle, two electric hobs, a set of saucepans and enough cutlery and crockery for a select dinner party, and a television set. The room’s heat, which came from an unidentifiable source, was tropical. The mattress had a couple of broken springs and was horribly filthy, but the sheet covering it smelt freshly laundered and for just £22 a night I was well pleased.

At the turn of the century, I started a diary. I’ve mostly typed it on old typewriters, bashing out a sheet of A4 like a hyperactive muppet, without giving any forethought to what I am going to say. The pleasure I get from the daily typed entry is partly mechanical. When the page is done, I punch two holes in the side of the sheet with an antique lever punch, shove it in a box binder and forget all about it. In 18 years I have filled five box binders. The only people interested enough to read my diary have been female members of my family. They read it when I’m out and they don’t even bother to put it back where they found it. Now and again I recognise a cryptic comment alluding to something they’ve read there.

I entered the cave house carrying groceries and panting from the climb to find an old hippie woman displaying rugs to Catriona. Evidently Catriona had narrowed her final choice down to the two spread out on the red floor tiles. She and the hippie were silently contemplating them. One was about six feet by four, the other four by two. ‘What do you think?’ said Catriona. ‘Very ethnic,’ I said. ‘From where?’ The hippie woman asserted ‘Cappadocia’ rather too hastily for my liking. ‘They’re kilims,’ said Catriona, brightly and knowledgeably. Top of the class, she informed me that a kilim is a traditional prayer mat or wall decoration decorated with symbols and coloured with natural dyes.

Three of us on a cold metal bench waiting for the bus. It’s almost dark. Winter arrived yesterday and we are frozen. Next to me sits a small, moon-faced woman wearing a brown beret. Her spectacles are missing an arm. She is wearing unlaced plimsolls with no socks, a thin black skirt and an anorak with no padding. Her shopping bag appears to contain rubbish. She has been waiting since ten o’clock this morning. Next to her is an old man wearing pathetically flimsy, broken-down trainers. His bony knees are outlined by the worn-out cotton of his trousers. His face is ashen with cold. He’s been waiting since noon. I’ve been waiting two hours. We are waiting for the coach to Nice. I’m hoping to get to Nice airport to catch a flight to Bristol.

Evenings, I sit in a chair facing the cave interior and Catriona lies on the new sofa facing me (and, behind me, the window). Neither of us likes telly much so we read. She is currently consumed by a biography of Gerald Brenan; I’m enjoying The Unfree French, which is a history of the German occupation and the Vichy government. The cave wall is light brown and pitted and striated by a river that once cascaded over it. The rock is stable and perfectly dry and according to one’s imaginative mood resembles either a gigantic petrified bath sponge or Arizona viewed from a light aircraft.

The monument to this French village’s war dead is a plain white stone block with the head of a grizzled old French infantryman chiselled on top. His big capable hands are gripping the block’s edge, as though he is peering intently over the parapet of a trench. On Sunday we assembled around him to honour the 53 local men, from a population of 1,800, who lost their lives in the first world war. Schoolchildren queued at a microphone to sing out their names. A ladies choir sang a plangent song about Verdun. The state bell tolled for 11 minutes. The major made an interminable speech in the rain. Everybody sang the Marseillaise. Around 300 people turned out (beneath about 100 umbrellas) from a winter population the same size as it was 100 years ago.

Three years ago we were given a bag of skunk, Catriona and I, provenance Glasgow. It was one gigantic dried bud wrapped in polythene. Cannabis in any shape or form usually renders me paranoid, especially if I smoke it in company and there is conversation. I’ve come to hate it. The delusion is always the same: I become unconvinced by my persona, which seems to have been chosen at random from a number of equally eligible candidates, and now feels like a flimsy, hackneyed mask. If the paranoia intensifies, I fall under the further illusion that everyone in the room’s personas except mine are as ingrained as oak rings, and that the ludicrousness of my papier-mâché one is transparent to all. The last time I smoked cannabis was three years ago.