Jeremy Clarke

Of course the varifocals I bought online were a waste of money. When they came in the post and I first put them on I could see the world up to and including my fingernails but anything beyond was a blur. I should have guessed that emailing a photo of my face with a credit card fixed to my forehead, as directed, was too rough and ready a guide to the correct measurements. If the glasses had been right it would have been more of a surprise. Being poor is always more expensive in the long run. I’d have been better off spending the £200 on some class As and a hat and going to a party. These were the second pair of glasses I’d bought online whose only possible use was as an executioner’s blindfold.

Considerate to the last, she had her order of service arranged in her mind. I sat close with my notebook. She didn’t want a eulogy, she said, but she is definite about the hymns and readings. To kick off, she would like that old Russian roof-raiser ‘How Great Thou Art’. Then, ‘Lord, For the Years Your Love Has  Kept and Guided’. And for the big finish: ‘In Christ Alone (My Hope Is Found)’. If there is to be a psalm, she would like number 121: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ Lately there’s been a funeral a week in the village church. Currently on the mantelpiece are three funeral order of service booklets commemorating deceased neighbours.

The mental fruit of yet another sleepless night was that my mother was determined to arrange her funeral as quickly and as cheaply as possible. A friend had told her, she said, that the Co-op do a version called a ‘Simple Funeral’ for less than £2,000. Please would I look it up on the internet for her? The state-funded carer had been in and out already and she was washed and dressed and sitting in her electric recliner, wet hair combed back like a teddy boy, and in her eyes you could see her will burning brightly. I, on the other hand, had slept long and profoundly and was not yet fully returned from a very long way away. I was still in my pyjamas.

So far this latest Mistral wind has blown for two and a half weeks. The Mistral is said to blow for three hours, three days or three weeks. It is also said to unhinge people. I had just arrived back in France when it started, and lately I have felt distinctly homicidal for no particular reason. Every morning, too, I’ve congratulated God for not making me responsible for my dreams. Since this wind got up, I’ve been out to lunch once and twice to dinner parties. The lunch was jolly and I was perfectly sane. After it, the foreign correspondent stood up, drained his glass, said: ‘Don’t you just love the smell of tear gas!’ and headed off to Paris to report to camera from the midst of a predicted May Day riot. The first of the two dinner parties was at our place.

Santino was unusually short in the leg and, in his mid-twenties, was already rapidly losing his hair. He had recently come from Argentina to France to train as a tourist guide. He was earnest about his vocation and hoped one day, he told us, to become a guide specialising in Unesco World Heritage sites. To this end he was studying every night into the small hours, cramming into his head as much French history — and whatever else guides have to learn to pass the rigorous guiding exams — as he possibly could. When Santino smiled, his eyes closed automatically and the effect was endearing until one saw the abjectness.

‘How’s your day going?’ said the taxi driver as he snapped his knob into drive. If I caught the plane it would be a miracle. Angry with myself for failing once again adequately to plan a simple journey to Bristol airport, I decided to tell him. ‘Well, my mother is dying of cancer, my brother’s cancer has spread to his hip, and mine is showing signs of waking up. I’ve just had a tax bill for 30 grand, I’ve had three hours’ sleep in the last 36, and unless you get me to the airport in 40 minutes I’m going to miss a plane. Otherwise everything is tickety-boo.’ ‘So where are you off to today?’ he said, sincerely envious. ‘France,’ I said. ‘France!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you like wine?

We drove north and parked in the designated car park with a quarter of an hour to spare before the minibus was due to pick us up and take us to our holiday destination. On it would be up to six strangers with whom we were to spend a week in the confined space of a boat. Marvellous. Happy days. There was only one slight snag. Catriona and I would be enjoying the holiday for free in exchange for my writing an article about it. And the company sponsoring us had asked me not to tell the others, who were paying a great deal of money, about this arrangement. We had chosen a spot next to a tricolour-decked modernist monument to General de Gaulle and sat with our luggage on the monument’s plinth in the sunshine and waited.

In the Easter holidays, plus two school days, for which his mother will be fined or, as a serial offender, she will be summoned to appear in court (not that she’s bothered, bless her), I took grandson Oscar to Provence for a week. The flights cost us nothing because a neighbour passed on his air miles to us, plus an upgrade to Club Europe, which is business class. Grandad was excited about the upgrade because it would enable Oscar to see how the other half lived, and perhaps make his own judgment about whether a slightly wider seat on a plane was worth trying harder at school for. The night before the flight we stayed at a hotel. ‘Why aren’t you at school?’ said the receptionist to Oscar. Our Club Europe tickets entitled us to use the business lounge.

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.