Low life

Catriona went to England and Scotland for ten days. The last thing she said to the lean and slippered pantaloon as he stood on the doorstep to wave her off was: ‘Please eat healthily, darling.’ Pretty much the first thing I did after I’d watched her disappear down the path and rubbed my hands together was to peel, salt and boil a kilogram of spuds. I monitored them carefully and removed the pan from the heat at the point where a little pressure on a sharp knife was needed to penetrate right to the middle. The dear thing had left the fridge crammed with nature’s bounty, including sealed containers of her incomparable homemade soups. I squinnied past these and rifled about until I spotted it. No, I hadn’t been dreaming. An unopened pack of smoked streaky bacon.

A dear friend came to stay for two nights. Could I be persuaded, wondered he and Catriona, on the first morning, to venture out to a restaurant for lunch? Descending the stairs to welcome guests these days takes a bit of effort. Bare feet, boney ankles, flapping pyjama bottoms; the guests look up in fascinated horror as the anchorite wobbles down the creaking wooden steps attended by importunate flies with his revelry face on. They have even stopped insisting how well I look. I might last an hour in an armchair in the sitting room, refusing alcohol, before exercising an ague’s privilege, excusing myself, and returning to the horizontal upstairs.

After commuting to Marseille for nine days of radiotherapy, I spent the week alone in the cave, in bed, in a mess of morphine foils and empty coffee cups. Sister Catriona was in the UK overseeing the birth of her first granddaughter. Friends and neighbours kindly kept me supplied with staples. Every day the sun shone. The astounding insolence of the mosquitos and flies in this Indian summer has to be seen to be believed. Maybe I ought to change the sheets. The martins who live up here on the cliff are enjoying the unseasonal airborne feast, circling and swooping just outside my permanently open bedroom windows. Far below, the village celebrated its annual quince fair. From up here I could hear music and cheering.

The day British media commentators were christening Rishi’s coronation as Britain’s ‘Obama moment’, French ones were calling the particularly horrible murder of a 12- year-old French girl by an Algerian woman staying in the country illegally as France’s ‘Floyd moment’. Gilles turned his phone to ‘landscape’ and we watched the TV coverage as we sped down the motorway. Lola’s funeral, live, was shown on one half of the screen and various sonorous old geezers in dark suits queued up in the other to say that the psyche of France had been so grievously wounded by the horrific details of the case that she would never be the same again.

The grandsons are putting two and two together. Grandad is always lying down and groaning when they video call and he has suddenly become a soft touch when asked to stump up for their material acquisitiveness. ‘By the way, Grandad, can I have the new Liverpool away kit? With Mo Salah on the back?’ ‘You certainly can my dear chap.’ ‘Oh and I forgot, can I get some Nike Air Force 1 basketball trainers?’ ‘The pleasure is all mine. I’ll get on to it right away.’ ‘Oh and I’m using Klynton’s phone because mine’s stopped working.’ ‘Gawd. So you need a new one?’ ‘Yep. Plus I need £100.’ ‘What for?’ ‘I can’t tell yiu.’ ‘I see.

Our neighbour Michael is a keen and knowledgable attender of vides-greniers, the equivalent of our car-boot sales. His focus is on old bottles, full or empty, and old china, but he’ll pick up anything that piques his fancy. Some months ago, for example, he bought for €1 a glass tube of opium tablets issued to the French infantry during the Great War. Last week he reissued me with three of these little brown pills knowing that I had an abiding interest in the first world war and was using a modern version – white crystals of morphine sulphate in a red gelatine pill – to mask the pain I was experiencing due to the metastases in my bones.

At eight o’clock in the morning a nurse injected me with a radioactive marker and told me to go away and amuse myself for three hours. The metal chairs in the waiting room were uncomfortable and there was nothing to rest my head against. So I wandered outside the 19-storey hospital to look for somewhere to lie down. Every outside space was taken up with parked cars, thousands of them everywhere you looked, some of them jammed in opportunistically at fantastic angles. Eventually I found a patch of rough grass between two car parks. The grass was strewn with stones, rubble and litter but I lay down gratefully, resting my head on my folded hoodie.

Two football friends, brothers, Mick and Pete, came to visit last week. We’ve been going to matches together since 1969, aged 12, in the good old skinhead days when the police enjoyed a punch-up as much as anybody. We used to travel all over the country on Lacey’s Coaches for away games and looked up to the older hooligans as gods. Those dockers were good honest scrappers, kind, fearless and very fun, in an era long before the sociologists or politicians started paying attention or hooligans wore designer jumpers. Mick still goes with Arthur, his son. Me and Pete haven’t been to a game since the team moved to its soulless new stadium. They were staying in Languedoc and made a day-long detour to see their old mate, whom they’ve always known as Clarice.

We were four round the little table in the nunnery kitchen: a 90-year-old German lady and her man; a nun called Sister Mary of the Angels; and me. We had just come in from the early morning mass. The German lady’s man was a Spaniard of about 35. It was impossible to tell but interesting to speculate on the nature of their relationship. Was he an unusually devoted carer? A manservant? A lover? The German lady was cross-examining me. She was deeply sceptical about a Protestant presence in the nunnery, about my being alone, about my claim to have advanced cancer, and she wanted answers. She had a powerful, commanding personality but she was also quite deaf, slow to comprehend and easily confused. On account of these defects the cross-examination drew in the other two.

The end that we knew must come eventually, the end we dreaded so much that we could barely think about it, was signalled by a momentously upraised forefinger, diverting our attention to an announcement on the French radio news station. The announcement was in English, live from Balmoral castle. ‘Following further evaluation this morning, the Queen’s doctors are concerned for Her Majesty’s health.’ Previous medical bulletins in the past few weeks on the Queen’s ‘mobility issues’ had made us glance sideways at one another suspiciously. Thank goodness they had turned out to be no more or less than the truth.

In Frederic Manning’s classic Great War novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune, the shattered battalion shambles out of the line after battle to parade briefly before being dismissed. Noting a general loss of soldierly comportment as the infantrymen limp into camp, a watching NCO urges: ‘Come on, get hold of it now.’ As my bone pain worsens, passing milestone after milestone with dismaying rapidity, Manning’s anonymous fictional NCO speaks that expressive army phrase into my mind. He gives the order sternly, with unmistakeable undertones of regimental pride and kindliness.

Finally rain. None for months, then a violent tropical storm lasting two days. It marked the end of high summer as clearly and distinctly as a clarion of trumpets. Afterwards the nights were cooler and the sun less fierce and it was easier to maintain one’s temper. We could begin to look forward again instead of merely enduring. The week before the storm burst the village had been stretched to its collective mental limit. You could see it on the exhausted faces of the waiters and in the traffic negotiating normally unfrequented side streets.

An isolated Provençal stone farmhouse from the outside; from the inside a comfortable English country house. Sunk into the garrigue a short distance away is an impossibly blue infinity swimming pool. My two grandsons came here direct from their tiny house in Basingstoke. Catriona was fortuitously asked to house-sit for ten days. I’m the wounded Master of the Revels. We have looked forward to their regular summer visit for months. The presiding unspoken feeling this time was that this might be the Master of the Revels’ farewell annual appearance.

The view from the upstairs window was of other large and secluded houses perched on other still-green Surrey Hills. I spent six days here. Every day the owner would go to London leaving me alone with two rare and valuable prick-eared, six-toed house cats called Tio and Luna. The only instructions I was under concerned these low-slung, vividly marked cats. Under no circumstances were they allowed outside except on a lead. I was to be especially careful not to let them slip out between my feet when I opened the front door. A well-rehearsed system of ‘air lock’ door opening and shutting, if punctiliously observed, rendered the possibility nigh on impossible.

I’m staying for a week in an 1850s house in the Surrey hills that looks-wise might have been built for the suburban 1920s. I came last night. ‘Sorry about the rain,’ said the UK Border Force lady. ‘Rain is exactly what I was hoping for,’ I said. This morning the owner went to work, leaving me alone in the atmospheric old house. Before he left he warned me about the dictatorial cleaner. ‘She’s called Maria and she comes from Madeira and she’s particular about you not being in the same room while she cleans,’ he said. When she came in I was sitting at the kitchen table looking out of the window at the darkening, gathering rain clouds.

In theory TikTok knows nothing about me. I have posted two videos: one of my grandsons kicking a football in a garden, the other of their much younger selves running through the dry desert house at Paignton zoo. They are the most unremarkable clips imaginable. The last time I looked, the football being kicked in the garden had been watched 3,700 times and ‘liked’ by 650 people. Astonishing. Apart from those two videos, I haven’t posted. My grandsons love TikTok. They are on it every day. They post videos of football cards they have collected and the ones they want to swap. Except when my grandsons post one, I never press the red heart to ‘like’ a video that appears on my daily feed.

Here come the global elites. They love it here. Their spiritual second home. The heat, the rosé, the food, the service, the quaint and deserted villages. One way and another I get to meet some of them. Catriona manages holiday villas and those renters she likes she asks up to our place for a drink. The day Boris resigned a couple of these elite social-equity fanatics floated up to the house speechless with ecstasy. Post-Trump, Boris was their Satan, prince of lies. Now he’d resigned. Or as good as, if princes of lies can ever be believed. One last heave and they’d done it. Got the bastard out. Thankfully, a former deputy chief whip had got falling-down drunk and touched someone’s bottom in the Carlton Club. Someone had complained to someone else.

My days pass largely in a state of inanition. The fit and able-bodied express their sympathy, claiming it’s much the same for them. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m sleeping all the time.’ ‘Oh, but so are we in this terrible heat!’ Meanwhile the young get browner and more beautiful every day while going on with their energetic lives as if affected by the heat scarcely at all. For instance, I look at the cheerful lads digging up our road, putting in fibre broadband in 40 degrees of heat. I want to run up to them and implore them, with the fervour of a dying man preaching to dying men, to enjoy it while it lasts. When I was a binman elderly people used to come to the back door and say that to me often.

All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those two states. By six o’clock the temperature had relented from 38 degrees to a comparatively easier 27 and I heard ice cubes tinkling into a glass. Catriona called up the stairs, offering gin. I said I’d rather a pot of tea and that His Lordship would rise and come downstairs for it. So I put on my shorts, went down and joined her out on the terrace for the six o’clock shape-changer. For a pleasant change Catriona had no evening invitations or work commitments. We sat side by side sipping and looking out over the village rooftops and watched the wheeling acrobatics of the swifts and martins.

I’m looking backwards: old journals, old photographs, old notebooks. What strikes me above all is the vigour and energy I once took for granted. The following little descriptions I found in the same pocketbook. The first is an oddity because I have absolutely no recollection of the action being reported. It can’t be fiction or an idea for a piece of fiction because I relinquished that fantasy a very long time ago. It’s scribbled down in black ballpoint. ‘There’s Sophie and there’s Maddie at the moment. Sophie I met at a poetry reading. “Why are you wearing that tie?” she said. “Are you a bourgeois?” “Why are you wearing that scarf?” I said. “Are you a Palestinian?