Алан Джадд - The Devil's Own Work

December in Antibes is often warm — shirtsleeve weather, but cool enough for a jacket in the evening. The holiday-makers who make the place still more unbearable during the summer — it is already unbearably hot for my taste — have gone, leaving their yachts bobbing and twinkling in the harbour. The town recovers itself, shops and restaurants are open in sufficient numbers to make life comfortable, the covered fruit and vegetable market is bustling but uncrowded and in the bars there are shadows, dark corners and quiet talk. The town has a leisurely, post-prandial feel, conducive to everything and nothing.

Chantal's parents lived with their younger daughter, Catherine, in a modern apartment block overlooking the harbour. Their flat was big and expensive and most of the rooms had views of the sea, the old castle and the rocky coastline beyond. After the endless grey of a mild London winter, the blues and greens and whites and the wholly unexpected brightness made me feel twice as alive. Everywhere was flooded by a great radiant clear light. I could see the effect on Chantal. She seemed simpler, quicker, more natural, less considered. It did us both good to get away from the neurotic tedium of school and she was almost as excited as I was about Edward coming down. We talked about it to her family who, like most of the inhabitants of that coast, found it as natural that a famous foreign author such as Tyrrel should wish to live among them as it was unthinkable that they should read his books. They thought it equally natural that a friend of ours should be the only writer in thirty years to be invited to interview the great recluse, as if there were not many English writers and those there were had to make the best of each other. At Chantal's suggestion I rang Edward to invite him to stay but got only his answerphone. I guessed he had already left since he had spoken of spending a few days in Paris and then making his way south. I was secretly a little relieved because I suspected he would prefer his own arrangements and I didn't want him to turn us down.

One day, before he came, I went with Chantal to Villefranche. We had no particular aim other than the seeing of it and took the little train that runs along the coast at the backs of the houses and flats. It seems to me to be verging on the indecent to see houses from behind, with their washing, their untidy backyards, crumbling brickwork and stained concrete, as if one were getting an unsought view of people whose nether garments were tattered and soiled. I don't like to look and I tried to explain this to Chantal but it only made her laugh.

I was spared the rear view of Villefranche, however, because the station is cut into sheer rock and opens to the sea. It is a beautiful natural harbour, bounded on one side by the old town with its tall, tottering buildings, red roofs and white Roman and Saracen fort, and on the other by Cap Ferrat which curls round like a great protective arm and ends in a fist of rock and greenery. The Cap still has a generous covering of trees and foliage, albeit dotted much more numerously than before with the white walls of villas.

Those down by the sea are palatial, those higher up smaller but more secluded. Even the new flats and hotels, built where the spur joins the coast, did not at that time greatly mar the curvaceous beauty of the place. It was no wonder that Tyrrel chose to live there but it was a wonder that he kept working. To me, it was a place in which I would die gazing, arrested in a lifelong dream.

We wandered through the narrow steep streets of the old town and along the tunnel of shops and doorways that had apparently been of much use to defenders during Saracen raids. In one small square a crew was filming two girls in fur coats getting into and out of a red car. It seemed they were advertising the car but I was more struck by the insouciant beauty of the two girls. One would not, I thought, see such in England, unless in London. Nor would one expect the insolent good looks and offhand charm of the director who talked, Gauloise dangling from his lips, with a series of morose Gallic shrugs and despairing, economical gestures. The girls looked languidly bored.

We found a place for lunch nearby, a narrow-fronted restaurant which looked like a bar and felt good the moment we stepped inside. The tables had plain white paper covers and the tiny bar, which served also as cheese-counter and cash-desk, was of old polished wood. The first room gave onto a smaller and darker inner chamber. Chantal, I think, would have stayed in the lighter room but I am always more fond of depths and recesses, so we went through. From it we could look back into the outer room and down the cobbled street to the harbour.

Coming from the brilliant light outside to the darkness of that little room, we did not at first realize that we were not alone. It was the smell of cigar smoke and a murmuring male voice that made us notice the tall elderly man with white hair who sat sideways on his chair, his back and head resting against the wall. He was with a much younger woman who had her back to us, her long black hair tied in a ponytail. Every so often she put her hand behind her head and flicked her hair free of the chair, upon which it kept catching when she leant back. When the man stopped speaking he re-lit his cigar, his thick fingers fumbling the matches. The woman said something and there was a pause. He spoke and there was another pause. It was as if some well-rehearsed and hopeless negotiation was being desultorily gone over yet again.

Chantal had her back to them both and it was only as my eyes adjusted to the gloom that I realized it was Tyrrel. The cigar, the sprawling white hair, the marvelously wrinkled face and the imperious profile were suddenly familiar from a score of Sunday papers, though they usually had no more of his words to report than I had then. When I told Chantal we both started to laugh. It seemed so absurdly natural, so unreasonably appropriate. It was the sign of providential approval of our holiday, an indication that the world really was adjusting itself to us. I looked forward to telling Edward.

At one moment our laughter at our luck — and at Villefranche, at Antibes, at all good lunches in all good restaurants, at being away from school and London, at ourselves — bubbled over, and Tyrrel's companion half turned towards us. I couldn't see her clearly but had the impression of a sharply attractive face, not the bored touch-me-if-you-dare beauty of the models with the car but a searching, intelligent quickness. We decided, of course, that she had to be Tyrrel's youthful, always unnamed mistress.

There was a commotion in the outer room, voices, laughter, the sounds of tables and chairs being moved, the popping of corks. It was the film crew, upon whose Gallic typicality I had just been expatiating; now I had to swallow my words with my wine because it was immediately apparent that they were all British. We laughed about this, too. Tyrrel turned towards the noise and I had a glimpse of his full face. It was old, sagging and lop-sided, scored and wrinkled like scorched leather. He was such an institution that it was easy to forget how old he was. But the face was alive and beneath his monstrously sprouting white eyebrows he had very blue eyes, like Edward's. He said something to the woman who nodded and flicked her ponytail again. Shortly afterwards they left.

We did not stay long. One's compatriots are always an embarrassment abroad and the tones and clichйs of Sloane Square or Wardour Street, or wherever they all hang out, were like repeated blows on the ear. Also, the sheer noise of all those squealed superlatives was deafening in that small place. It was a relief to close the door on them.

We wandered down to the harbour. Most of the town was shut during the early afternoon and the very sea seemed sleepy. I wanted to explore the fort but Chantal spotted Tyrrel and the woman walking slowly around the curve of the bay towards Cap Ferrat on the far side.