Still Life

Provence Apart from three Covid years, the German rock cover band Five and the Red One (named, so they say, because one of them has a ‘fire mark’) have played a free concert on the Cours here in the village every summer since 2008. I first saw them in 2009 when my three daughters were teenagers. The four of us, along with our friends Monica and André, who were then in their mid-sixties, stood together near the front jumping up and down and singing along. Some of the wee ones who sat on their fathers’ shoulders behind us might have children of their own by now. Last year a rowdy coterie let the well-built 6ft 3in guy who owns the expensive hat shop in the village crowd-surf and, discovering the burden was beyond them, let go. As he fell he narrowly missed crushing tiny Monica.

After a 5 a.m. start, I arrived at the departure gate in Nice airport to discover there was an air traffic control strike and my flight had been delayed by two hours. Annoyance gave way to relief when the board turned red and all later flights were cancelled. This was the week of the Spectator summer party and, because of work commitments and for reasons of economy, I was flying back at 5 p.m. the following day. I was packing a lot into those hours: on arrival a late lunch in Pimlico, where I was staying in a flat belonging to a friend, Kate, who was away; the party; a hungover breakfast with Will, The Spectator’s features editor, the following morning; a solitary wander round the National Gallery and lunch with Martin Vander Weyer, before a dash back to the airport.

Late spring. Sitting in the armchair in the living room, I was chilly and disconsolate. My middle daughter was seven-and-a-half months pregnant and unwell. The pregnancy had triggered two serious autoimmune disorders. She’d been successfully treated for thyroid cancer a few years before, but this new disease was attacking her lower spine; she was exhausted and in almost constant pain. At times she couldn’t pick up her two-year-old daughter. I could barely afford to fill up the car, never mind pay for parking and a flight back to England, and every night lay awake worrying. Beside the chair to the left, a live rock wall, and in front, a wood-burner.

Four of us go for lunch once a month. My hippy ceramist neighbour, Geoffrey, is a foodie and one of the best cooks I know. He was born a few years after the second world war and, along with his brother, who went on to become a Michelin-starred chef, developed an interest in food from his English, Belgian and Italian grandparents and Swiss mother. I couldn’t afford to heat the little painting studio downstairs this winter and have only sold one work since November, so our choice of restaurants has been necessarily modest.

Two years ago, at five to eight in the evening of Monday 22 May 2023, I ran into the department store Galeries Lafayette at CAP 3000 next to Nice airport, grabbed two black blazers and rushed to the nearest checkout. ‘Je suis vraiment désolé, Madame, mais nous fermons.’ ‘Please, it’s not eight o’clock yet. My husband died yesterday morning – I need a smart jacket for the funeral on Friday. There are no shops where I live.’ Shaking and fighting back tears, I tried on both in front of the two assistants at the till. ‘Quelle?’ They agreed on the first, and with no mirror close by I took their word for it and paid. I was on the way to pick up my youngest daughter.

My youngest daughter and her husband moved to New York last October. Three days after they arrived, she tripped on a step and broke her ankle. ‘So annoying, I was wearing such a good outfit, Mumma.’ They didn’t know anyone. In a boot and on crutches she tackled umpteen flights of stairs in search of permanent accommodation, avoided crazy people in the street and faced up to taciturn bank and phone-shop employees. The unfriendliness of the city upset her more than the pain and inconvenience of the break. I couldn’t afford to visit then – so when a friend, American Cathy, who’s got a second home near me in Provence, offered to buy flights and organise a trip for me and my daughter to visit her in D.C. last month, I accepted.

Provence Molly MacCarthy launched the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in the spring of 1920 with two aims. The first was to bring together the old Bloomsbury set who’d been dissipated by the first world war and the second was to encourage her dilatory husband, Desmond, to write his memoir. She was successful in the first but not the second. The original club was composed of old friends and family members: the MacCarthys, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes. The aim was ‘serious but also to amuse’. There were few rules, ‘one of which was that no one should be affronted by anything read or said in the Club’. For years I tried to get a small memoir club going down here in Provence; winters can be cold, dark and lonely.

My eldest daughter and her family are moving from a three-bedroom Art Deco semi with a garden and garage on the edge of a housing scheme to a top-floor tenement flat in a trendy family orientated area of Glasgow. They’re having to increase their mortgage to do so but think that the benefits to their overall quality of life will be worth it, and if they move to my son-in-law’s native Como for a while, the flat will be easy to rent out. Surveying the contents of the garage, she messaged: ‘What shall I do with your big portrait, Mum?’ When I was young I was painted quite often, mostly by my artist ex, because I was there and didn’t mind modelling for him.

What hope is there for artists following the sale recently of the robot Ai-Da’s portrait of Alan Turing, entitled ‘A.I. God’, for a cool $1 million? Someone has perhaps paid over the odds for a 3D print with a few marks added by a robotic arm and a few more by studio assistants to areas of the canvas Ai-Da couldn’t reach. Innovation wins. Rather like the art schools which demanded portfolio evidence of artistic ability, AI will stifle talent In the 1970s, the walls of art school degree shows were studded with plaster casts of students’ genitals. By the 1980s, students were discouraged from attempting realist painting, but messy grey abstract works were still acceptable. Then it was found objects and piles of stuff.

Provence One of my daughters and a few pals, thinking I need company, have been urging me to get Bumble, the online dating app where women make the first move. I’ve thought in the past month or so that I might like some sort of relationship, but contemplating the reality is scary. When someone you love passionately dies, love lives on but sometimes too much; both sweet and painful memories can be paralysing. ‘You can’t be on your own in the cave for ever,’ someone said recently.  Why not? Friends Dave and Kate met on Bumble. He said: ‘You must remember, Catriona, there are lots of decent men out there who haven’t read The Waste Land. Don’t let it put you off.

Provence My older, adopted sister came to stay. She suffers from peripheral neuropathy secondary to diabetes and is registered disabled. It’s a worry watching her negotiate the cliff path and the 12 stone steps to the front door with her stick, but she adores it here. Since reversing her insulin-dependent diabetes with an extreme fasting keto diet, her mobility has improved and she no longer uses a mobility scooter. My sister got cross when I doubted the veracity of both his ID and love for her Obesity and diabetes killed her twin brother five years ago this week. He was 62. First he partially lost his eyesight, then sensation in his feet and fingers, and finally his legs. Anthony was a kind soul: a hardworking mechanical engineer who loved his family.

Provence A few days before my middle daughter’s Oxfordshire wedding this summer, my youngest announced that she and her fiancé, who’ve been together for years, were getting married within weeks. They’re moving abroad and bringing their wedding forward would help, she said. Two daughters married in less than a month. Mrs Bennet would be proud or envious. On hearing the news I panic-booked an easyJet flight to Edinburgh for the day before the youngest’s wedding, only to realise it got in at midnight, just 12 hours before the ceremony, and had to abandon that and rebook for the previous day.

Provence ‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to ask the man who told me last autumn it was time to move on. I hoped he didn’t mean find a new boyfriend. I like him and his wife a lot and it was meant kindly – so I kept quiet as we stood in their kitchen and they gave me instructions for my weekly visits to check the house after they left for winter. But it stung. Jeremy was still with me night and day in everything I did. I tried not to let my face fall a second time when the man told me he was paying someone else to drive his Aston Martin back to England. I wanted to ask the same question of another man, a widower friend of a friend, who said, in an otherwise ordinary message: ‘This isn’t an offer or a request, but how do you feel about sex?

Provence My eldest daughter’s husband is from Como. In the early 2000s George Clooney caused a stir in the town when he bought a villa on the lakeside nearby, triggering what’s become known as the Clooney effect – a rise in house prices and the number of ‘bougie’ shops and restaurants catering for an increasing number of visitors. Rather than take a boat trip and gawp at the Villa Oleandra, visitors would be better heading to Gardone on Lake Garda and visiting Gabriele D’Annunzio’s insane Il Vittoriale. Unlike Clooney, D’Annunzio (1863-1938), whose motto was ‘Me ne frego’ (I don’t give a damn), was a short, ugly, almost blind, toothless early 20th-century proto-communist/fascist war hero.

Provence Summer has arrived. The evenings are warm enough to sit out on the balcony terrace and watch the lights come on in the village below. Each night at ten, the great limestone cliff, into which my little house was built, is floodlit for a couple of hours. On cue two huge baby eagle owls (fully grown wingspan 170cm) begin rehearsing for adulthood and flap clumsily, then majestically, around the rock, calling for their parents and terrorising the smaller nesting birds hidden deep within the crags and crevices. English women wearing broderie anglaise dresses, straw hats and anxious smiles drift about The annual migration of tourists has begun too. On market day the car parks are full by 9.30 a.m. and the queue for Patricia’s cheese stall is 12 deep.

The other week my eldest daughter and I were staying with friends in Richmond for the launch of Jeremy’s third collection of Low Life columns. The night before the anniversary of his death – the day of the launch – I woke at 2 a.m. and unable to sleep was back in the cave holding Jeremy’s hand; machines clicking and beeping as his life ebbed unpeacefully away. He died at 9 a.m.  A few weeks after Jeremy died, I dreamt he walked into the house… he looked fit, strong and full of life At 9.05 a.m., in tears and still wearing a nightie, jumper and flip-flops, I ran downstairs, almost colliding with one of our hosts, out the back door to the bottom of the garden. Beyond the high wooden fence and gate a path ran parallel with the Thames.

On the mantel shelf of the cave there’s an invitation to my middle daughter’s wedding in August. This happy event is causing anxiety on several counts, not least finding something to wear. I hate shopping. Algorithms send me dozens of hideous armour-plated mother-of-the-bride outfits daily but I want to know what Kate Moss would wear if she were shorter, ten years older, half a stone heavier, had a budget of £450 (including accessories) and didn’t look like Kate Moss. One of the things I like about this part of France is the lack of voracious consumerism Last month I finished a portrait painting. The sitter was pleased and came over with the second instalment, €1,000 in cash, which I put in my handbag.