Throughout my life, whenever I have been in pain or have felt lost or confused, I have set myself on course for the sea. The sea heals me; its rhythms calm me; its boundless horizons revitalise and free me, easing out those cages I feel closing in around me. Today is no exception. The sea is the healing source I crave now. And tireless physical work. I want to bury myself and my misery in furious activity. No resting, no grieving, no taking stock.
For this I need to be back at the farm. I need the uncomplicated happiness of playing with the dogs, of preparing the house for the invasion of summer guests and the return of my husband, whose intense kindness I can no longer do without. And when I am worn out from work, I want to idle away time on the terraces and stare out at the distant skyline. At the end of each complete and fading day, I want to slip in a CD and drown myself in the blues, drink gallons of wine, take refuge in that Provençal light, those rays of bruised and coppery colours falling across the limpid stillness of the Mediterranean, until it is time to creep indoors and light the candles. And when the night draws in, I want to fall into bed exhausted and curl up like a damaged squirrel, ready to wake early with a list as long as my arm of tasks to be achieved.
Equally, I long to walk the beaches listening to the waves, to sit on the sand, breathe deeply and inhale the intense perfumes of pines and eucalyptus gums, to feed greedily off nature’s munificence and, in isolation, unfold the disappointment and the sense of failure raging in my heart.
But I cannot face the airports, the queues, the nightmares of security and luggage, the gaggles of travellers and tourists I am bound to encounter during these early days of the height of the summer season. Even the journey from city to airport threatens to overwhelm me and my jumbled self, which gibbers and trembles as though shot.
My delayed response to my specialist’s news is a defensive one, and not entirely logical. It leads me to embark on a series of decisions which threaten my safety because my reason is blinded by pain and is running haywire.
There are six more days until Michel is scheduled to arrive home from Sydney, which means that I have the time to choose not to fly, and so I decide to buy a car. The possibility of taking a train simply does not cross my mind. I will buy a car in London and drive it home, travelling south through France, moving at my own speed towards the land of olive groves and Judas trees, keeping pace with my thoughts and my solitude.
We have talked of buying another car since the Quatrelle drowned, I argue to myself. This is a fact, but the replacement vehicle of my choice is not the solution. I shell out every penny I have just earned, and a chunk more, on a second-hand Mercedes sports car. Into the boot I pile my chaotically packed bags and off I head for the ferry. I have not telephoned for a reservation; I barely know the registration number of my new acquisition; I have informed no one of my whereabouts or what I am embarking upon except my mother who, the moment she claps eyes on me when I make a stop at her home, en route for Dover, understands that I have lost the baby. She begs me not to act irrationally, to stay a while and rest or take the plane, but I won’t hear of it. I must be on the move, must leave now, hell-bent on a course of my own fashioning: to begin again, pick myself up, dust myself down, be where I believe I am needed and where I have created a world; a world in which life and growth thrive. No self-pity. I must get on with the business of living.
She waves me off with that concerned expression of hers, which I know so well but barely register today.
I cross the Channel without difficulty, striding the ship’s blustery deck relentlessly, back and forth like a soul lost in the swell, heaving in great gulps of salted wind, relishing the strength of its whip against my flushed face.
A certain calm descends when we draw in sight of the coast of France, but it does not last, does not stay my manic resolve. The ship drops anchor into a drizzling late morning, and I am on my way, choosing not to pause for lunch or refreshment of any sort. A full tank of essence and I hit the road again at rally-driving speed.
By the middle of the afternoon, having shot through the Champagne region with barely a glimpse at my surroundings, I become aware of an intermittent fluctuation in the car’s performance. The rev-counter begins to flutter like a nervous butterfly. Peugeots, Renaults, Range Rovers, Porsches and other fast-moving machines gaining ground behind me begin to flash their lights, warning me to get over and out of their flight path. I have no knowledge of mechanics, and what this loss of speed or power means is unclear to me, but I swing to the right and out of the fast lane. I hear a clattering as though some vital part of the whole is trailing me. I mentally close my eyes, determined to believe that nothing is amiss and that this car is bloody well going to get me home in one piece. More or less as soon as I have completed this thought – slap-bang in the middle of the merciless jungle of a French motorway – my new acquisition grinds to a standstill. The engine is still turning, but the accelerator does not respond to the pressure of my foot and the erstwhile fluttering instrument has settled at zero. Now what?
Blind to the risks involved, I fling open the car door and step out, waving for help. Juggernauts are thundering by and horns begin to blast all around me, like rapid rounds of gunshots. The drivers, through open windows, are shouting at me in various European languages, threatening me with clenched fists as though I were doing this on purpose, or cursing me with degrees of blasphemy which amount to ‘get off the fucking road’, while I, stunned, am swept to and fro, weaving my way in and out of cars, until I eventually stagger back towards my stationary vehicle. I continue flailing my arms in the vain hope that one of these truckers will understand, stop and take pity. I have no mobile phone so I have no means, without assistance, of contacting anyone. After several dozen monsters have roared angrily by, one slows, his wheels or brakes emitting high-pitched squeals, and draws to a halt a hundred metres or so ahead.
The driver, a barrel of a man with blond, crewcut hair, clambers from the cab of his pantechnicon, waves and advances towards me. His gait is stiff, paddling, creating the impression that his joints are held together with screws. He is wearing a billowing scarlet T-shirt, khaki shorts, has hairy, muscular legs, solid boots and elongated cotton-wool pods sticking out of each ear. It is a means of protecting his hearing, no doubt, from the vehicle’s constant rattling and the boom and roar of the motorways, but this, added to his overall appearance, inspires me to believe that I am about to be saved by a cuddly toy from outer space.
He is Belgian. He does not speak French, he explains – he must be one of the only remaining Belgians on God’s earth who exclusively speaks Flemish and it’s just my luck to fall upon him – but he manages to make himself understood with a spattering of English and jolly-sounding German.
After several exchanges achieved predominantly through hand signals, minutes spent staring beneath the bonnet of my wretched car, head-shakings, tuts and grave sighs, he offers to drive me to the next SOS telephone, which is a half a kilometre or so further along, or that is the gist of what I understand from the statement, ‘Hare nix gut. Must you SOS calling frome ze point. Nix longe. Dry hoondred metres.’
While I, in the middle of this scorchingly hot, noisy and traffic-clogged afternoon, want to scream – not at him; he’s a sweetheart – or just walk away, yes, that’s it, walk off the road into the adjacent brushland, the wilderness, curl up beneath a leaf and disappear. Lose myself in the landscape, leaving everything behind me, particularly this useless sports car.
But this vat of a Belgian is a kindhearted soul who ruffles my hair and tells me not to cry, ‘Not zo krying, pliss.’ Then hands me his mobile phone ‘Vife, you, telefon, want you?’ he asks.
I shake my head, uncertain what he is offering. He shoves the phone at me again, more forcefully this time. ‘Vife, Herr, Madame und Monsieur, wanting you, telefon?’
Eventually, I understand that he is lending me his mobile to call my husband.
‘Thank you, but no.’
‘Pourquoi?’
‘Sydney.’ He doesn’t understand. ‘He’s in Sydney. Australia,’ I reply with emphasis.
He nods uncertainly but quickly withdraws the phone.
I haul myself aboard his impossibly difficult-to-get-into cab while he rips off a length of ham baguette sandwich and offers it to me. I refuse, he shrugs and we rattle up the road to the SOS point, where he deposits me. He must be ‘runnig’, on his way, he explains, while writing on a sheet an excuse for his stop. ‘Ist verboten de liffts,’ or to help anyone out at all, it seems. Still, I am mightily grateful to him for his monumental kindness. He ruffles my hair once more, and I muster a smile for him as he waves like an old friend, calling, ‘Bye bye Frau Sydney!’, and zooms away in his articulated machine.
At the yellow distress box, I am informed, when I get through, that the wait will be an hour and I am firmly instructed to remain by the car. I decide that I have time to visit the next service station, which I see just a short walk ahead of me.
There, I buy a much-needed coffee, hand over 100 francs for the highest-unit phonecard on offer and put through a call to Michel in Australia. He is sleeping but instantly picks up the anguish in my voice.
‘Carol? Chérie, what is it? What’s happened?’
‘We may be cut off. I’m on the motorway going back to the farm; my car has broken down.’
‘Car? Which car?’
The sound of Michel’s voice over such an immense distance and his concern flood my emotions and I am unable to contain my feelings. The tears pour helplessly out of me. Crouched on the floor in the cabin of the callbox, I am hiccuping and blubbering misery.
‘Carol, Carol what is it? What’s happened?’
‘I lost her. I lost our little girl.’
There is a pause, a parenthesis, a heartstopping silence. Twelve thousand kilometres away, in another hemisphere, another time zone, my husband is taking this in.
‘I’m sorry, Michel.’
‘Chérie, where are you? Are you all right? Well, no, obviously you’re not. What are you doing on a motorway? Where …?’
And so I pour out my tale, or incomplete, disjointed parts of it, of the loss of our child. ‘We’re going to be cut off.’
‘Leave the car, get to Paris. I’m coming back. Wait for me in Paris.’
‘I didn’t go through Paris. I’m somewhere near Beaune, I’m not sure where exactly.’
‘Leave the car, then, wherever you can. Does the insurance include a relay? No, don’t think about it; I’ll deal with it when I get there. Go home. Promise me, you’ll go home.’
I promise with a silent nod, but the line has gone dead.
Our home is our shelter from the world. Not only because it sits alone on its hill, set back from the lane and is protected by dozens of venerable, arcane olive trees and modest acres of terraced land. It is a place where Michel and I can be together, where the interface that exists between us can continue to evolve and take on its own shapes, where we can continue to create us and ourselves as individuals and where we can heal ourselves, lick our wounds and each other’s, from the blows, the calamities and the uncertainties of life. A house is so much more than a house. It is a great deal more than its physical representation. Or it is to me, at least. For this home, this farm, is a place of healing for me in another sense, too. Perhaps in a way that it is does not need to be for Michel.
Certain eminent psychoanalysts claim that we spend our adult lives attempting to heal the traumas of our childhood. I had never taken that idea fully on board until we moved here. For more than a decade I trawled the coasts of the world, alone, looking for ‘my house by the sea’, but it was not until I met Michel, until we found our abandoned olive farm, Appassionata, and set about the arduous and satisfying task of singing the place back into existence, of giving it back its elegance and its vibrancy after years of neglect, that I began to understand what I had been searching for and what I am now doing.
I am trying to heal the scars of domestic violence. To release the weight of that entrapment. To redraw the canvas, to paint over with rich, sensuous colours a childhood that was tormented by fear and burdened by guilt. To create beauty where before there was sorrow. The colours that dominate my memories are the red of my mother’s painted fingernails and lips, and red again for spilled blood, the result of brutalities, the black nights in my bedroom as I lay awake listening to the hammer-and-tong exchanges in the living room beneath me, and black again for the cavern of despair that engulfed me. My father was a hot-tempered passionate man; a musician of average talent but a superb bandleader, a toastmaster (in red frock coat), a master of ceremonies with a magnetic sense of humour; charming, handsome and an incorrigible Lothario.
Once my mother, who had the lips, curves and cleavage of a Gina Lollobrigida, had given birth to my sister, she and my father grew estranged in the bedroom. Twenty-six years old at the time, she shut down that expression of herself. She believed that she had good reason for her distance – perhaps she had – but whatever it was that happened between them gave him every excuse for his endless stream of infidelities and he began to stay away from home more and more frequently.
My mother is a staunch Irish Catholic, a principled woman with an indomitable and courageous spirit, innocent in the ways of the world yet well able to gauge the worth of the material universe as well as its appraisals of her. Whatever the circumstances, she believed that it was her moral duty and her right to cling to her marriage, to hold it together and, on occasion, I believe, she has mistaken prudishness and punishment for discipline and values.
Both of these people are heedful spirits and they certainly did not set out to traumatise anyone. In fact, at my father’s deathbed, as he lay unconscious, slipping away from us, it was heartbreakingly clear how deeply and loyally my mother loved him, but they had spent their lives grappling with a post-war marriage governed by Catholic values which my father did not adhere to and my mother insisted upon, and they never found the common ground where those differences could be resolved. In spite of the emotional bond, the physical differences between them left no space for their individual personalities to come together and their frustrations grew dark and angry and eventually found their outlet in violence.
I was conceived in the early days, the heyday of their relationship, the courtship days soon after the wedding. I sometimes fancy that those months were my mother at her truest, a time in her life when she let herself go and gave flight to her passionate and beautiful self. She was in love, after all.
Although I was not the trigger for their marriage, I became the habitual object of their frustrations, the reason for their imprisonment. In short, I was blamed. Children in unfulfilled marriages frequently find themselves shoved into the role of hostage. My situation was perhaps more distressing: I was cast in the role of jailer. ‘If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be in this mess, this marriage.’ These words were hurled out thoughtlessly at all too regular intervals; they turned my blood cold and stripped my ribboned heart to shreds.
The world looked at and lived through my disturbed eyes was an angry, violent place where folk who lived together expressed themselves through physical and emotional brutality; where furniture was slung from room’s end to room’s end; where tables bearing hot food crashed to the ground like shot beasts spewing clots of baked beans, soggy toast, smashed plates; where I pressed my ear against closed doors and eavesdropped on the tinkly sound of my mother’s solitary weeping, hovering, not knocking, impotent to offer succour. In fact, not only was I unable to help, as I understood it I was the cause of the tears. Where friendships made at school disintegrated in an instant when the new attachment was, eventually, like all the rest, forbidden to come to my home because I and my background were judged a ‘bad influence’. In among all this there were moments of tenderness for, as I say, my parents were not cruel people, merely trapped in a marriage from which they felt unable to free themselves, or perhaps, deep down, did not want to walk away from.
My newly acquired possession is towed away to the nearest Mercedes garage, who agree to organise its relay to Cannes where, they assure me, the vehicle’s British guarantee will be sorted out. I learn from my insurers that I am entitled to a hire car, but I decline it. At this moment in time, I am safer off the roads. They offer me a first-class rail ticket instead. I spend the night in a very indifferent hotel and then, with my ill-assorted bags, cases and confusions, take a late-morning express to Cannes. The TGV I am travelling on is not equipped with bar or restaurant. This is most surprising for a nation of meal-lovers, but my fellow passengers seem to be au fait with the oversight and have come prepared. As midi approaches – the hour for lunch – everyone in the carriage, bar me, begins unloading their lunchboxes, well-provisioned with sandwiches, charcuterie, a little, coffee, mineral water, dried fruits, fresh grapes, oranges and Mentos mints. They lay out their generous portions of refreshment on their laps or on portable picnic tables, accompanying it with plastic glasses brimming with red wine.
Opposite me sits a huge woman with a Felliniesque bosom, kitted out in matching red cardigan and skirt and chunks of gold and ruby jewellery. Her feet planted firmly on the ground, skirt riding up to her thighs, legs wide apart, she has been nibbling since I boarded while at the same time amusing herself with a crossword magazine. Mouthing possible solutions to her puzzle, she is now chewing bovinely on a baguette sandwich of lettuce, tomato, ham and cheese.
Everyone is content with this lovely sunny day, a little light nourishment to keep inordinate hunger at bay and the impressive countryside flying past the window, when two new travellers arrive and a rumpus begins.
It appears to be a question of seat numbers.
It seems that we have all been allocated seats 21 and 23 in carriage 13. It was of no matter as far back as Chalon-sur-Saône. We all took a seat, any seat, and settled down. But now a heavily made-up Arab woman has climbed aboard at some inconsequential station with seven massive suitcases and a child and insists that two seats in our compartment, only one of which remains unoccupied, are hers. Much heated shouting breaks out and the matter threatens to grow disagreeable.
‘I’ve been sitting here since Nancy and I’m not budging!’ booms the woman who resembles an extra from Amacord, in between mouthfuls of food.
Eventually a guard appears on the scene and the entire carriage, to a man, save me, pounces on him, shouting hysterically, demanding facts, explanations and, above all else, apologies for potential damage to their digestive tracts. ‘We were eating!’ they yell.
‘Sit where you can,’ he announces. ‘Carriage 14 has been forgotten; left in Metz.’
‘Eh, voilà!’
‘Mais oui, on comprend maintenant.’
The misunderstanding has been explained to the satisfaction of everyone. Unfortunately, the difficulty remains. The bevy of lunching women, and one rather timid husband who is nervously twisting his copy of Le Monde, are not willing to vacate their places, while the Arab woman mulishly refuses to seek out another carriage.
Eventually, when everyone is worn out, it is decided to turf the Arab child into the corridor and install her on suitcases, leaving her mother free to claim the remaining seat. Calm is restored and lunch is resumed. I watch the little Arab girl perching sulkily on one of her mother’s numerous valises. She is hungrily eyeing the delicious offerings of the various passengers who are munching contentedly while gazing blithely out at the passing vineyards.
Nothing disturbs the ensuing peace now except our large companion in the red woolly outfit, who is travelling with a print-out of her itinerary. At each station she reaches for it and announces to us all the length of time the train is scheduled to stand in the station.
‘Mâcon! Deux minutes!’ At one minute forty seconds her stubby fingers with their burgundy-varnished nails and ‘rubies as big as hen’s eggs’ (in Scott Fitzgerald’s words), begin tapping the face of her gold watch. She peers at it and tuts crossly. This is followed by loud huffings and the rolling up of her crossword magazine so that it now resembles a short, thick cane. And then the train pulls out and she relaxes back into her lunch.
I believe I am the only one to notice a rather interesting exchange taking place about now. The Arab child in the corridor signals to her mother from beyond the glass that she wants food and the mother responds, also in discreet mime, that she has none.
We roll along in silence for a short while until suddenly the Arab woman wails loudly and dramatically: ‘J’ai mal au cœur!’ ‘My heart! I’m sick! A pain in my heart!’
I am perfectly fascinated.
‘Ah, ma pauvre! I have pills,’ cries the fat woman, and instantly begins rummaging in her handbag for her heart pills and her mineral water – not still water but the gazeuse, which, she assures us all, is better for the digestion. ‘You must have eaten something which disagreed with you,’ she continues.
‘No, no, my heart feels tight. No, I haven’t eaten. Nothing at all. We haven’t eaten since—’
‘You haven’t eaten? Mon Dieu!’ The words are chorused across the carriage. Folk jump to it. A demi-baguette is found, a lump of Brie. The fizzy water is delivered. As are the heart pills.
‘Have you a glass?’ the heart-of-gold fat lady enquires as she passes over her bottle.
The Arab woman shakes her head faintheartedly. ‘Nothing. No time to pack it.’
‘Use mine. Yes, you must. I insist. I am eighty years old. If I had any diseases I would know them by now.’
Eighty years old! This, too, is repeated like a Chinese whisper by one passenger to the next. It is true that the woman does not look such an age. The Arab mother keeps up her play-acting admirably, determined not to let the age of the other detract from the business in hand. She is now drinking the water while fanning herself and moaning softly. She resists the pill, but it is forced upon her and so, reluctantly, she swallows it. We have reached Lyon. The timid husband and his axe-faced wife are now leaving the train. But not before the husband has been ordered by his wife to place all seven pieces of the Arab woman’s luggage up on the rack and offer his seat to the ragamuffin girl, who takes it without a second’s hesitation. As they depart, they leave the remains of their buffet for mother and child, who eat like greedy street urchins.
I return to my private contemplations both amused and surprised that this little scam has worked so successfully.
The last I hear, as they all descend the train together at Marseille, the very best of friends, is our octogenarian remarking: ‘I ask you, what is more beautiful for any maman than the gift of a little girl?’
A reminder, a stab of a pain, and I switch my gaze to beyond the window, to the silver sadness of the sea.
From the station, a taxi delivers me up into the sun-scorched hills, to Appassionata. When I arrive – cautious of the dogs, the driver deposits me at the gate – I climb the olive-terraced drive, pausing every few yards to touch and examine the drupes, which are green and hard but fattening up nicely. The trees glinting in the sunshine are, in the words of Auguste Renoir, who lived his last years on the coast here at Cagnes-sur-Mer, ‘shining like diamonds’.
I pause to pick a purpling fig from our elephantine tree and split it open with my thumbnails. A satin-white milk bleeds out of the still unripe fruit and sticks to my fingers. I lick them clean and then lift the fig to my lips and suck out the pale rose, mildly crunchy seeds.
Le figuier. The fig tree. Its botanical origins are uncertain but, most likely, it has been a native Mediterranean plant from prehistoric times, growing wild with fruits which were at first believed to be inedible. It is possible that this may be the thinking behind its role in the Garden of Eden. Unlike the apple, it could not be consumed. It was a useless thing, good for nothing until its leaf was used as the earliest, most primitive form of underwear. Adam and Eve took it to cover their shame, their sex, their knowledge and nakedness. Or, if Titian’s painting of Adam and Eve in the Prado in Madrid is to be believed, it was Adam, the man, who understood shame and covered himself. Woman was the sinner.
Puberty arrived early for me. I was ten. Around this time, men who came to the house, usually friends or associates of my father’s, began to whisper obscene desires in my ear or touched me in places on my body which left me feeling ashamed of the fullnesses forming there. I grew to perceive myself as a she-devil who induced inexplicable behaviour in heavy-breathing, sour-breathed men. My parents knew nothing of what was happening and I did not have the courage, or faith, to say anything. I believed that, like their marriage, I was to blame for these male manners. I grew withdrawn and secretive. I spent hour after hour locked in the bathroom, washing myself, not clean but out of existence.
I chew on my fig and feast my eyes, inhaling the mid-year quietude. All around is stillness. The farm is at peace in the summer heat, except for the cigales, who are buzzing frenetically, living their final weeks to the hilt, making the most of it, searching for a partner while the going is good, for after their frenzied bouts of mating these little critters pass away. There are no signs of activity and then, in a trice, the dogs come bounding from a dozen different directions all at once, charging at me to greet me with welcoming barks and leapings and wildly overenthusiastic felicity. How pleased I am to have their affection. I bend and stroke and kiss them hard.
M. Halaz, our watering hero, is nowhere to be seen. He must have finished his chores and trundled off for a siesta. His presence is everywhere, though, in the fabulous firework displays of growth.
Shrubs, flowers, climbers are explosions of breathtaking colour. Geraniums are tumbling eagerly from their terracotta pots in bouquets of scarlet and pink and striped reds and whites, hanging like swathes of uncombed hair over the tiled edge of the pool, where one or two stray blossoms have fallen and are spinning gently in the movement of the water. The bougainvillaea bushes straddling the four lower verandah pillars have shot up in a lusty tangle of leaves and flowers, reached the upper terrace and are snaking themselves around the balustrades. Our spring wistaria, which rarely flowers twice, is dripping with blossoming racemes, smaller, more fragile, but blooming, while the roses, which never fare well in our devilish midsummer heat, are bursting forth everywhere. Further to the left of the terrain are the vegetable patches. I see the aubergine plants are still fruiting tiny golden tomatoes. I cannot bear to look, and instantly swing my gaze a terrace lower, where the branches of our quatre saisons lemon tree are bowing beneath the weight of their offerings.
No one is entirely sure where the lemon tree originated. There are no references to it in any Latin sources. The first mention of le citronnier in literature appears to have been in south-east Asia, further east than the earliest-known olive-tree topography, but both the lemon and the orange tree have been growing on this south-eastern French coastline since the Middle Ages. Interestingly, that is much later than the Greek or Roman occupations here, so it is possible that it was neither of these cultures who contributed this member of the citrus family to the Provençal way of life.
In every direction, the garden is an intoxicating celebration of life, which is precisely what I have been craving, and the tiled terraces are as pristine as freshly scrubbed floors. I have every reason to delight in being back home, and how I do delight in it. This homecoming contributes heartily to my determination to move forward and not give in to the weight of sorrow that is gnawing at my gut. I have already wasted money and time on an ill-considered purchase and now I must re-establish my equilibrium and get back to work as soon as possible.
As I pass the stables, still struggling with my luggage, I see that Halaz has dug out every broom the farm owns as well as others I was not even aware we possessed and lined them all up. The count is nine, all of varying shapes and sizes; an assortment of textures and materials for a variety of purposes, standing sentinel like solemn soldiers against one of the outer walls, heads upwards, airing and drying in the sun.
The villa, which has been closed up during these away-from-home weeks, is heavy with trapped, summer inactivity. It reeks of dried herbs, forgotten flowers and, in the bathroom, lingering whiffs of my Chanel No. 5 perfume. I throw open the shutters to let the light flood in and find dust and cobwebs everywhere. Three bright-green stink bugs fall to the floor and lie on their backs, writhing. They are pests to our vegetable beds. Even so, I turn them over and leave them be. Geckos scuttle into shadows, climbing walls at a speed which amazes. On the dining table there lies a stack of curling mail, mostly bills, which can be dealt with later and, hanging like a tongue from the telephone in my den, is a faxed message from Michel. It welcomes me home, begs me to reassure him that I have arrived safely and acquaints me with great tidings: he has managed to change his flight and will be landing in London at dawn the day after tomorrow. Assuming there is no intercontinental delay, his 9.05 plane from Heathrow to Nice will transport him home well in time for lunch. Thirty-six hours to go till love returns on ‘the wings of the morning’.
I decide that, after I have ripped off my clothes and dived into the pool – better to do it now before M. Halaz wanders back up and has another seizure – I will consecrate the remainder of the day to mundane, organisational matters so that tomorrow, tomorrow I can indulge my yearning by making an early-morning pilgrimage to the sea, though to which beach I am still undecided. I am considering Antibes.
Antipolis, the classical Greek name meaning ‘the city opposite’, was bestowed upon the port they founded west of Nice, directly across the Baies des Anges, in the late sixth century BC. Today it is better known as Antibes or, in the Provençal language, Antibou. There is debate even now among scholars as to whether the Greeks were intending its name to describe the harbour’s relationship to Nice – Nikaia to the Greeks and Niço to the Provençal people – or to the island of Corsica or even to their most hostile of enemies, the Ligurians of Liguria, now part of northern Italy.
When the Romans conquered this province, threw out the Greeks and took possession of this northern Mediterranean coast of France, Antibes became as strategically important to them as Fréjus. They used it as a stopover for their coastal fleets travelling between Italy and Arles. So valued was the town that they honoured it as a civita romana instead of deeming it a mere colony.
Today, this seaside port and holiday resort is still famous for its harbour and many, if not most, of its inhabitants are foreigners or members of the itinerant yachting community. Soon after we found our farm, while we were embarking upon the lengthy process of moving down here, setting up home and actually acquiring the deeds, I used to make regular Monday-morning coffee stops one lane back from that port after kissing Michel goodbye at the airport, where he was set to board the dawn flight to Paris. I would sit at a table alone in the rising heat of the morning sunshine, drink several large cups of café au lait and watch, with a child’s admiring gaze, an elderly man frequently seated at the table next to me, who was awaiting the arrival of the London Times. He was, and remains, one of my heroes, Graham Greene. Later, I was fortunate enough to make his acquaintance and exchange precious words with him, but in those early days, during that first warm summer of discovery, I was too shy, too tongue-tied and too in awe of him to strike up a conversation.
It was the owner of the café who told me that M. Greene was a year-round regular at his establishment, and that the acclaimed author lived nearby, not in Antibes itself but on its verdant cape a short drive along the coast.
‘If you haven’t made a tour of the cape,’ the patron told me, ‘you must. There are fine beaches all along its coastline. And a wealth of artists and writers have passed through the doors of its luxurious villas. The place is legendary.’
Of course, in the years since we first arrived here, we have visited on many occasions the legendary cap that M. Greene inhabited and I never tire of its rugged beauty.
Two childhood passions became my lifebelt and gave me the wherewithal to battle on and to dream beyond those early stages of life to a time when I would be grown up, when I could escape and play roles other than that of the bane of someone’s life.
Both these pastimes were lived out in isolation, in the make-believe worlds of a damaged child’s creation.
The first was Tireless Scribblings. I bled Biros dry expressing heartfelt thoughts in a quest for meaning, for the key to the puzzle, filling notepads with quotations squirreled from books, self-pitying poetry and, later, lovesick sonnets. I wrote plays such as The Story of Robin Hood, which I staged at school and at charity institutions. The Cheshire Home for the Retired was one such establishment. Looking back, I am convinced that none of those bemused pensioners had a clue what I and my classmates were about, nor what my almost certainly ill-constructed story was saying. I was twelve at the time. I walked home in the autumnal darkness feeling despondent and perplexed by their lukewarm responses. Twelve, and already staring Critical Acclaim in the back. Curiously, though, the experience cemented my desire to write.
My second survival mechanism was Dressing Up. At some stage my father had acquired an entire costume department from a local amateur theatre that had lost its funding and was closing down. Most of these he stored in a long glass conservatory in the garden, while the rest went into the spare bedroom, which consequently reeked of stale sweat, mothballs and the faint traces of the panstick stage make-up which still stained collars and cuffs. This was where I was exiled as a punishment, and punishment it could be. Late at night the costumes, particularly the dark frock coats, terrified me because I was convinced they were moving, inhabited by invisible spirits.
However, in the hours of daylight I loved this room, because it had a square wooden rostrum in one corner – something to do with the design of the stairs – which became my theatre. Here I painstakingly pieced together a monster circular jigsaw which I kept laid out for reference. It showed a bust of Shakespeare surrounded by a still life from each of his thirty-seven plays. I studied those drawn characters, trying to imagine how they sounded, moved and behaved. Decked out in impossibly large and fraying costumes from those metal racks, tripping over dragging hems, I attempted to breathe life into my interpretations, reciting with intense ardour and dramatic emphasis the master’s lines, struggling to find meaning in words weird and unfamiliar to me, such as ‘coxcomb’, ‘palfrey’ and ‘humours’.
In the course of any one, usually rainy, afternoon I could be transformed into Mistress Quickly, ‘Proud’ Titania, Hermione, Rosalind, Viola, Shakespeare himself, with his goatee beard, which I drew on my face with a crayon, as well as his wife Anne (my middle name) Whateley of Temple Grafton, whom I had vaguely read about. But the character I loved the best, the queen of them all, the glamorous mistress and goddess of love, was Will’s Egyptian monarch, Cleopatra who, in my mind’s eye, possessed the luxuriant black hair, the curves, cleavage, low-cut frocks, stiletto heels and red lips of my mother. She exuded passion, had inspired war and epic emotions. She would have no truck with the grubby, furtive fumblings of decrepit old men, which was how the visitors to my parents’ house appeared to this pubescent girl.
To recite her lines, enact that embodiment of femininity, would inspire applause, bouquets of flowers and international acclaim. Thus it was here, in those nights of isolated agony as well as in the hours I spent in empty auditoriums watching my charismatic father rehearse with his musicians, that my actress’s ‘immortal longings’ and deep-rooted ambition were born. My dreams grew grandiose. I pictured myself as a movie star – Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door – or as a grande dame of the theatre, and I longed for the days when I might stand on a stage, gaze beyond the footlights and be uproariously applauded and adored.
For many years acting and my devotion to its craft gave me a vocation. I channelled all my confused emotions into work and my creative universe, but I discovered early on that there were two areas of this life that were unsatisfactory. The first was that the parts on offer to women, particularly on television or for the cinema, were not as varied or as challenging as those I had allocated to myself in the spare bedroom. Usually the choices were delineated by men’s ideas of the woman’s role, the woman’s look, and, in my twenties, I frequently did not have the right look, did not fit the picture. I was too plump, too voluptuous. Secondly, there always came the moment when it was time to go home: the end of the day or, worse, the end of the shoot.
Home was a rented top-floor flat in Kentish Town where I lived alone. Sometimes, in the early, struggling days, I would let out a room to one fellow actor or another to help pay the bills, and sometimes there were mates staying who were passing through town or who had been thrown out of their own base by an erstwhile partner. In other words, I had company. Frequently, we whiled away the midnight hours listening to rock and jazz music, drinking bottles of rather poor wine, Hirondelle or Bulgarian Bull’s Blood. Sometimes, I went to bed with one male friend or another and, occasionally, I had an affair which, for a brief period of time, actually made me quite happy and reasonably excited about life. There was one longish-term on-off romance with a young actor I cared deeply for, but it did not last. He married someone else. So nothing, no one, assuaged the emptiness I carried around within me. It was profound, but it was also relatively unconscious.
I believe now that I shadow-boxed with love, cloaked everything in a romantic haze. Much of the loving part of my nature, the nurturing side, I had cordoned off somewhere during my tormented teens. Outwardly, I was feminine, flirtatious and romantic, but within I was defensive, brutalised and terrified to reveal more of myself than I could regulate. I feared that the real me, the angry, abused young person, would explode like a volcano and overwhelm anyone who came too close. I was incapable of entrusting another with my heart; it was way too scrambled an organ. The deepest of my female urges, the atavistic desires for partnership and childbearing, I poured into my ambition. I never disclosed my past. I rarely talked about my private life at all, even to very close companions. I spent my out-of-work days, or my off-set hours, if I was filming away from London, on my own, travelling, searching for what I described as ‘my house by the sea’, which I don’t believe, back then, I thought would ever materialise.
The following morning I am out of bed and clear of the house by sunrise or, in Colette’s words, à la naissance du jour, making not for the sixteenth-century fortressed town of Antibes, because the town’s beach is small and not very interesting, but to that legendary peninsula the Cap d’Antibes. In this season there is no possibility of enjoying the coast or of hoping for a moment to oneself unless you arrive bright and early and are gone before the tourists have woken, for once they are up and about the beaches and the cafés are seething with activity.
Taking Michel’s deafening old car because we have no other transport, I hit the coast on the Cannes side of Golfe Juan and from there drive alongside the gently lapping sea, hugging the pearly, calm waterfront. The sun is rising beyond the Alps into a cloudless, iris-blue sky. Chugging past Tetou and Nonou, the two well-known fish restaurants, both deeply fashionable and renowned for their delicious bouillabaisse and, in the case of Tetou, astounding prices, I am reminded of the time Michel and I dined at Nonou, where we were seated at a table next to Vera Lynn and her late husband, Harry. Afterwards, Michel asked me about the elegant woman we had been talking to and I told him that, during the Second World War, Vera had been dubbed the Forces’ Sweetheart. Her name meant nothing to him, which served to emphasise the years and the different lives we had inhabited before our worlds so sweetly collided. Our fathers, neither of whom were actually in combat, were nonetheless on opposite sides of the war in which Vera sang for the British troops.
I drive on, passing through the beach town of Juan-les-Pins which, thanks to the influx of rich, partygoing Americans, became the hot spot on this stretch of coast in the 1920s, the Jazz Age. I am making for the western side of the cap. Yards from the shore, perched in the sunshine on glistening wet rocks, I spy several black cormorants, and there are Mediterranean, black-headed and herring gulls flocking and swooping everywhere. This is hardly surprising, given that the early-bird fishermen with their baguette breakfasts, coffee flasks and woven fishing baskets inhabit this rocky coastline. I count eleven already.
I am right alongside the Musée Naval et Napoléonien. Stylish tracksuited joggers, sweatbands keeping expensively cut hair out of eyes, remind me that this museum neighbours the exclusive Hôtel du Cap Eden Roc, situated on the south-western tip of the cape. I peer in through its imposing black iron gates at the fabulous palm-lined alleys. This fashionable address was immortalised as the Hôtel des Etrangers in Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night.
The Eden Roc was the first hotel on the Côte d’Azur to construct an open-air swimming pool. It was also the first to throw open its doors to summer guests. That was in 1923, the year Coco Chanel, in the company of the Duke of Westminster, broke with tradition and escaped Paris to enjoy this coast as a summer visitor. Until then the Riviera had always been a fashionable winter resort and dead to the chic world for the remaining months of the year.
I am travelling along John F. Kennedy Boulevard. Not far from here, buried in a wooded parc, is the Jardin Thuret, created in 1856, where the British planted the very first eucalyptus trees, which they had imported from Australia. President Kennedy was also a visitor to this neck of the woods. Half a mile or so back, I passed the magnificent beachside art-deco villa where in times gone by he was a guest, as was Marilyn Monroe, along with numerous other luminaries.
In the early days, before I knew who had graced its terraces, every time we drove past that well-proportioned cube of white house, sitting pieds dans l’eau, from where you can climb straight out of bed, gaze beyond the rocky, shorelined garden across the sweeping, semi-circular bay known as Port de l’Olivette to Cannes and, still clad in your silk pyjamas if that’s your fancy, dive directly into the Med, I used to say to Michel: ‘I wouldn’t mind owning that villa.’
I began to feel like Charles Dickens who, walking up a hill in the Medway town of Chatham in Kent and passing his favourite house, used to make a similar statement to his father every morning: ‘One day I am going to own that house.’ Later in his life, when he was a bestselling author, he bought the house of his dreams. When this villa went on the market recently and I heard about it, for no more justifiable reasons than avarice and curiosity, I telephoned the agents. Yes, they said, it is for sale. ‘How much?’ I asked. A snip, at £7 million.
Years ago when I first began looking for ‘my house by the sea’, I had no clear idea of where that Elysium would be, what it would look like or if it could ever exist, but what I knew for certain was that it would be an enchanted place, vibrant and ringing with joy and passion. My childhood had upped the stakes, as it were, for what was required of that house by the sea. Generations of families, visitors, artists and friends would pass through its doors and leave traces of themselves, their imprints, behind them. There would be animals, there would be music and laughter and a free-spiritedness fed by the nature and the climate and home-grown food and the chaotic, unlikely combinations of the people present. And, at the centre of it, the axis that made it all spin, would be love. A love which would offer me peace of mind and the freedom to creep away and write; a love that would encourage me, enable me to discover who I am. And a love that bore children, innocent infants running about naked, unselfconscious and safe.
I signal and turn right into a seemingly insignificant tree-shaded chemin, actually adorned with gracious villas, which leads me to the renowned Plage de la Garoupe.
Here I park and sit a moment to contemplate the awesome beauty of the natural arena laid out before me. In the distance beyond the Baie des Anges, the amphitheatre of Alps. In the olden days, before roads were cut through, they served as a natural protection for Nice against inclement weather and unwanted invaders. In winter, they are a deep purple and capped at the summits by snow. This morning, they are a blueish-mulberry in the early light.
I shan’t swim in this bay today. It is full-blown summer and the sea is heaving with svelte ivory yachts. Many of the yachties ditch their detritus overboard, sullying the shallow waters. Before I was wise to their habits, I once swam into a used Tampax and, believe me, I, who will frolic in a turbid puddle, was out of those waves like greased lightning.
I change into sneakers, take my costume and towel and set off along the path, the sentier pédestre, which winds its way around the cape and which, at this hour, is almost deserted. As I approach the small easterly point known as Cap Gros I see two wetsuited divers wading into the water, hauling their oxygen masks and lungs. I wonder what they are going after. I have never dived these waters but I know that neither the visibility nor the marine life here is exceptional. Distant sailboats at full mast flag the horizon. Startling white against milky blue.
Behind me, set back from the beach, hidden somewhere within the thickets of the lean-trunked pins parasols, is the renowned Château de la Garoupe, rented by Cole Porter in 1922, where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald got regularly soused on whisky sours.
There are a handful of dog-owners at the water’s edge, trailed by their fluffy boutique canines yapping and snapping and jumping up and down on their hind legs. How I would love to bring my rabble-rousers to splash in and out of the wash here but it would be impossible. They’d wreak havoc everywhere and terrorise all these chaps.
The sudden roar of an engine startles me and a young man on his white fibreglass water scooter comes skirring by, churning up the calm sea.
I spy another dawn bather. An elderly bowlegged gentleman in a pale blue swimming cap – the French call them bonnets, so delightfully Edwardian – is clambering over the sharp, slippery rocks in his plastic reef shoes. I wriggle into my costume and follow suit. There are saltwater pools everywhere, still as dark night, in among the dun-and-white rocks bleached by the dry heat. They sometimes give harbour to les oursins, sea urchins, whose five rose-coloured ovaries, dug out of the belly of the creature, make for one of the great seafood delicacies down here, particularly when used in omelettes or scrambled eggs. Today they are just another reason for the plastic shoes, because you don’t want to accidentally step on a sea urchin and end up with one of its black spines through the sole of your foot.
Once at the water’s edge, I wedge my buttocks securely between two boulders, pause to inhale that haunting, sing-song wash of waves licking against a rough barnacled strand, dip my toes into the water, shiver at its delicious tingliness and then plunge myself, stomach first, into the sea.
My father was discharged from the Air Force into postwar Britain. When he met my mother, at a dance hall in south London, she was a trainee hospital ward sister. It was a whirlwind romance. Money was scarce. One Saturday morning, the young couple installed themselves in the top two rooms of my grandparents’ rented four-storey house in Brixton, south London, and went off in Grandad’s horse-drawn taxi cab to get married. No honeymoon was planned. But one Saturday not long afterwards my father checked his football pools coupon and discovered that he had won £180. ‘It was a bloody fortune.’ He was due to share this princely sum with his father, who had chipped in fifty per cent for the coupon, but his dad would take only £80, saying that Peter should keep the hundred as he was newly wed.
So my parents treated themselves. They purchased two train tickets and set off at the beginning of October in the observation car of the Devon Belle for a week’s holiday at the Grand Hotel in Torquay. I was there, in a manner of speaking, accompanying them on that heady honeymoon. A silent, subaquatic witness seesawing about in the womb, my ear to the neck, listening to everything.
Later, they occasionally spoke of those days – how they strolled the beaches hand in hand, visited antique shops and country pubs and made a stopover in a farmhouse in Combe Martin – eulogising the holiday and my father’s timely windfall. It was out of season, but ‘the weather was gorgeous’. It was a benchmark for their lost happiness, I suppose. And I have often wondered if those seven harmonious days didn’t sow the seeds of my addiction to the sea, my sense of it as a ‘palmy state’, a providential environment.
The water is deliciously cool and tangy. Once I have immersed my entire body, I flip over on to my back then kick out a distance so that I can float in peace and quiet without being washed back by the current towards the shore. Bobbing with the beat of the waves, arms and legs outstretched like a Da Vinci diagram, I surrender my traumatised body to the water’s saline buoyancy, to its thalassic remedial powers, and ponder the ether. It seems that I will never know the pain of birth, the breaking of waters, the joy, relief and exhaustion of delivery. Ours was to have been a Christmas baby. I had been dreaming of long evenings by the log-filled fireplace, and now … the anguish of childlessness.
A gentle offshore breeze lifts dampened wisps of my long hair, which settle across my face. The sun, rising hot and fast to the left of me, penetrates my bare, scrubbed skin while illuminating the ghost of a muslin-white, gibbous moon. Overhead, in that same dense expanse of blueness, soaring over mountains and sea, a plane, no, two, en route for Nice airport, leave vapour trails. Two white zips, dividing up, peeling open, the inexorable azureness of this Côte d’Azur sky.
Why has this happened to me? That is the question to which I am seeking an answer. No, I am not seeking, I am demanding. I want to know why. Why me?
Perfect silence, save for waves and screeching herring gulls and distant cries from the shore.
Within the breaches of the division above me, no booming voice of God speaks back; no Old Testament explanation is forthcoming. Nothing is answered, nothing clarified. As far as the Man Above is concerned, I must sort it out for myself.
Or does the answer lie somewhere within the realisation that this is not simply another sticky situation? Throughout my life I have managed to engineer my way out of those. I pride myself on quick thinking, finding ways through, but I cannot negotiate or act my way out of this one. This is a given. One of those junctures from which there is no going back. Not dissimilar to the death of a parent or loss of a loved one, it has to be taken on board. I cannot cast this loss, this set of circumstances, aside. I cannot rejig or rewrite this script.
So now it is down to me. I must find a way through, and I will. I have everything to be grateful for. Not least the golden splendour of this morning.
And so, that’s it, is it? The response to my cry? It is not for me to reason why. My role is to accept – or not – to get on with it, for there lies wisdom, or sanity, at least.
Tomorrow, Michel will be home and I am already grateful, eternally grateful, for his approaching presence, for the spell of his warm embraces and those fabulous blue eyes filled with care and compassion.
And the love that illumines my house by the sea.