Low life

I apologised, was gladly granted an indulgence, and on Sunday I packed a small bag and reached into a drawer for the passport. I was going back to the cave house in the Provençal village. Back to France and the French and to speaking my trousers-on-fire French. Salut! Tu vas bien? Viens m’embrasser, mon petit chou. Back to a country where, as Barbara Cartland put it, you can make love in the afternoon without people hammering on the door. Back to village bells clanging off the hours of the day, back to early rising and trying to be witty, or at least sentient, in French with the insanely jolly woman in the village bakery at a quarter to seven in the morning. Back to the flaking morning croissant and strong coffee and eating outside — always eating eating eating.

My reactionary first world war reading jag continues. The literature is vast, but so is my capacity and fascination. I began reading systematically, then went in search of thrills. Typing ‘my top ten first world war books’ into a search engine has also been a wonderfully fruitful source of leads. Space, and probably your boredom threshold, won’t allow me to list mine. I want to stick my neck out, however, and give a cheer for two books by liaison officers: one a Anglophile Frenchman liaising with the British, the other a Francophile Englishman liaising with the French. As one might imagine, both books are tragicomic. Emile Herzog was the son of a textile tycoon. In the first world war he served as an interpreter, then as a liaison officer.

East of London the Thames broadens dramatically to a surreal waste of mud and sewage-coloured water lined with shipping-container dumps. Here, a row of expensive apartment blocks commands the view as if it were the Loire valley. At 11.30 on the morning of the Friday before last, anyone looking idly out of a window of one of these might have raised an astonished eyebrow. For in the water below, manoeuvring strenuously against an ebb tide and a Pentecostal wind to position her stern against a shipping buoy, was a beautiful, red-sailed, century-old Thames sailing barge. Crowding her deck, moreover, and enterprisingly clad in tweed and waxed cotton, some wearing ties, was a curious assembly of passengers.

I told Oscar to wait outside and I went in and said to the barman: ‘Would it be all right if my grandson came in to watch the football?’ ‘Of course,’ he said. My notion that children aren’t allowed in pubs must be a quaint one because his harassed, hardworking face creased into a bemused smile and a man seated at the bar laughed. We had four screens of various sizes to choose from: one behind the bar, one above the pool table, one above the fireplace and one fixed to the wall at the end of the bar. About a dozen customers were half paying attention to the screens above the fireplace and devoting the other half to obscenity-laden conversation. The swearing in this intensely local bar was unselfconscious, unemphatic and universal.

Once the house move was completed, Catriona’s oldest and best Scottish friends, two of them, came to stay for a week. Now that Catriona lives in France they see each other but infrequently. A seven-day female catch-up feast did not appeal to me. Neither would a shadowy male presence about the house appeal much to them, I imagined. An unenlightened point of view, perhaps. But gender is more sharply defined in Scotland than south of the border. The lassies are proud of their lads’ outrageous, even ludicrous, masculinity, but they sympathise with each other more. Scottish gender begs to differ. So I planned to bugger off back to England the day after they arrived and leave them to it.

I have a friend here in this French village to which we moved just over a week ago. He is a veteran foreign correspondent, still working but also spending time tending his beloved garden, olive grove and small vineyard, from which he bottles and labels about 450 bottles of red each year. He is a proud journalist of the old school, which is to say that he is sober and serious when in pursuit of his story, and neither when not. With his fund of unprintable stories, his undiminished zest for current affairs, and his 450 bottles cooling under the stone stairs of his 18th-century house, he is the best possible company.

Moving day. The contents of a hillside shack to be moved four miles to a cave house perched high on a cliff above the village. The cave house’s only access from the road below is a steep, narrow and stony footpath. Three removal men for the job: me plus two French day-labourers. The elder of the Frenchmen, Philippe, was 67. I called him Philippe Phillop because that’s what he wore. He is a patriotic Parisian and his character, I would say, is the Parisian equivalent of a chirpy cockney. The same ready wit, the same cynicism born of urban poverty. He did not, however, find my nickname for him as amusing as I did, not even after a laborious explanation. The first time I met Philippe, in a bar, he told me his life story.

The long table was set out under four beautifully pollarded plane trees festooned with coloured lanterns and red balloons. Twenty party guests. Above us the clear night sky was brightly peppered with stars. Three and a half years ago, Catriona fled to France with a broken heart and shattered confidence. She returned to the village where she had spent family holidays in happier years; an expat family friend had offered his empty villa as a refuge. In that lonely time she used to stand at the bedroom window and look out at those pollarded planes, bare and dripping in the rain, and wonder what was going to become of her. It was winter and as wet, cold and miserable as Provence can be. One day the housekeeper paid a visit. Ruth had done the same once — fled with nothing.

I’d missed the train, and the next was due in 45 minutes, so I popped into the nearby salon for a haircut, two months since the last one. Half Price Monday for Students, it said on a board outside. Inside, three women attended to three female heads in a spacious salon with the doors and windows flung open to the warm air and the view of the long-stay car park. I was directed to a chair, and presently a woman came bounding through a door, exuberantly, like a chat-show host bounding down the studio steps to wild applause. She was slim and tanned with strong-looking legs, aged about 50. ‘And how are you today?’ she yelled, as if I were deaf as well as old. Gawd help me, I thought. Here, clearly, was the loudest, chattiest and most socially confident woman on the firm.

I was present in the room when Oscar encountered his father for the first time since returning from his fortnight in the south of France. Oscar doesn’t see his father often. I hoped that his father would be pleased to see his son and would kindly ask him how his holiday went. And if, as I hoped, he did ask how the holiday went, I wondered which of his holiday memories Oscar would describe to his father, and in which order. There was plenty to choose from. For a start there had been the extraordinary weather. Would he tell his father about the terrible heat and the car always like a furnace when we first got in, and driving everywhere with the windows down, and the breeze coming in as hot as a hair dryer, but at least the air was moving.

The Villa Carnignac art gallery is located on a Mediterranean island off the French Riviera called Porquerolles. Purpose-built to show off billionaire hedge-fund executive Edouard Carnignac’s modern art collection, the gallery opened in June. Monsieur Carnignac hung out at the Factory with Andy Warhol in the 1960s, is a freedom-loving, polo-playing child of the counter-culture who famously paid for an advertisement displayed in the leading papers of Europe on the same day urging former president Hollande to lay off taxing the rich. The off-shore location of his art gallery is vitally important. You don’t visit Villa Carnignac because you can’t think of anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon. You journey there, imbued with a pilgrim spirit.

The entire Alpine village, contemptuously dismissed recently in an online tourist guide as a nondescript centre of old peasants and old dogs, was gathered under an awning in the single street for a festive lunch. Oscar and I squeezed along between long rows of perhaps 100 bent backs to the only pair of empty chairs remaining. The tables were covered with disposable paper covers; everyone had brought their own plate and knife. As we sat, our immediate neighbours greeted us with vinous geniality. They were a matriarchal middle-aged woman, a mournful girl aged about 13 with thick lenses in her spectacles, and two young men with comically drunk faces. Everyone was drinking dark pink wine decanted into old-fashioned glass-stoppered bottles.

Me in a black polo-neck jumper looking sour; Oscar wearing a floppy hat; her youngest daughter nude and stooping to dry her feet with a towel; a mountain profile at dusk; a labourer’s stone hut in a vineyard; a copy of Augustus John’s ‘Robin’. Strangely inspired by John’s ‘Robin’, Catriona first picked up a paintbrush 18 months ago, and these pictures, collected and hung on the wall of the local bar, comprised her first public exhibition. They will hang there for the month of August and she held a vernissage to celebrate the occasion. About 50 people turned up from six o’clock onwards and mingled with about an equal number of the bar’s usual clientele. Food and drink was a tray of nibbles and a couple of wine boxes on a trestle table.

The cave house next to ours is let out to weekly renters. A green-eyed German with a ponytail came out of his cave to stand on his terrace and look for the Blood Moon at the same time as I stood 30 yards farther along the ledge to look. There was no moon to be seen and we spread our arms and opened our palms to each other in that universal expression of frustration. I knew he had green eyes because earlier I had knocked on his door and presented him with two boxes of pastries, which I had been given, but Catriona cannot eat pastries because she is allergic to eggs, so we passed them on. I’d had a few drinks and was maybe a bit tousled and my eyes were probably glazed.

Towering above this medieval French village is dun-coloured cliff of volcanic rock, dramatically floodlit at night, topped by two ancient lookout towers. A wide waterfall once flowed over this cliff and at night the floodlights pick out the grooves and caverns worn away over thousands of years. For the last couple of millennia these caverns have been the dwelling places of all sorts of refugees and paupers and one of the larger ones was turned into a hospice for old soldiers of Napoleon’s citizen army. The rock is too hard and impervious to allow for much modification of the cavern walls, but a rough stone wall with window and doorway built across a cavern opening affords a perfectly dry and secure dwelling place.

Saturday morning. Quarter to 12. Sit-down fish and chips at the Silver Grill: me, Oscar and Oscar’s cousin Atticus. Atticus lives with Oscar because his life is arranged by social workers and the courts. He is a year younger than Oscar, which is to say seven, and they share a bedroom with another, older boy. This is Atticus’s first weekend with Oscar’s grandfather (me) acting as host and entertainments officer, and it could be termed an experiment. The relationship between Atticus’s little bottom and the seat of his chair suggests opposing magnetic fields. ‘And what to drink?’ said the waiter. ‘Tango or Fruit Shoot?’ Atticus chose Tango. Oscar peached that fizzy sugary drinks send Atticus off his rocker. Atticus agreed.

I flew from Marseille to Gatwick, rode the Gatwick Express to Victoria, and walked down the thoroughfare of Victoria Street eating a Marks & Spencer egg and tomato sandwich. In Victoria Street, I bought a shirt, pattern of flying ducks, from the House of Fraser selected menswear sale, to replace the sweat-soaked one I was wearing. Then I cut through the passage leading to Palmer Street and dropped in for an unpremeditated haircut at the Pall Mall barbershop. The chap who cut my hair was lively and talkative. Where had I come from today? France, I said. France? He didn’t like France. He’d tried it a few times but France didn’t agree with him. He just couldn’t get on with it. And what were my plans for the rest of the day?

At 7 p.m., panting, I knocked on the door of room 201 of the Hotel InterContinental, Marseille, expecting it to be opened by Patrick Woodroffe, the man who has splendidly lit Rolling Stones gigs for the past 33 years, who would, I believed, hand over two tickets. With any luck, and on the strength of our slender acquaintance, I hoped these tickets would be upgraded to seats a little closer to the action than the ones we had paid quite enough for. Eventually, the door was opened instead by a timid woman wearing a hijab. She blinked at the words ‘Rolling Stones’ but they meant nothing to her. We ran back downstairs to the concierges’ desk. ‘Nope,’ they said, checking a stack of envelopes. ‘Nothing for you here under that name.

I heard the last and final call for flight 6114 to Nice while shuffling forward in the unexpectedly long queue for security. My chances of catching it now looked slim. They looked slimmer still when my bag was nudged into the line of those needing to be searched, and I despaired at my rotten luck. Eventually, my bag was placed on the metal search table and I presented myself as the owner. Across the table, I faced two women, both aged about 60. One was in command, the other subordinate. The commanding one had a smoker’s face with a touch of the eldritch about it that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Richard Dadd fairy painting. It was immediately clear, however, that this woman dealt only in material realities and that she took no prisoners.

Homesick for England, family and friends, I flew back, and the next day went for a long walk with my brother. We’ve both had the same cancer, my brother and I, and we’ve both been chemically castrated. We attend the same oncology department, and we are both recovering. (In my brother’s case this is almost miraculous, given that when his cancer was first identified it was found to be spreading as rapidly as Islam in the 7th century.) And for both of us, the shock of diagnosis, and the prospect of an early death, was quickly followed by a surprising joy, which intensified during treatment, then diminished as the tumour shrank, the alarm bells died away, and the prospect of a reprieve became first an undreamed-of possibility, then a reality.