Алан Джадд - The Devil's Own Work

'That is where he actually lives,' she said. 'Shall we follow them? Then we can tell Edward how to get there.'

There were not many people about and we kept well back. Tyrrel walked very slowly, the woman holding his arm. He was tall and leant towards her, his white head nodding, so that it looked from a distance as if she were supporting him. Perhaps she was. I was surprised that someone of his age should attempt that walk, let alone the climb at the end of it which became apparent when we reached the Cap. Long flights of concrete steps led up past large villas to a road junction. They kept stopping and so we had to do the same. At times it almost seemed as if she were forcing him on and during one of their rests he broke away from her, raising his arm. She let him go for a few steps, then caught up with him and took his arm. Each time they stopped we turned to admire the view. The azure sky, the calm twinkling sea, the old white buildings of the harbour, the greenery of the Cap as it beetled down far ahead of us, the three fishing boats drawn up on the beach of a tiny secondary harbour below and one tall old house that seemed to grow straight from the sea were all the stuff of picture-postcards. Then we would turn again to follow the tall old man in brown corduroys and the woman with bare brown legs, a long black ponytail and a loose white skirt.

When we had reached the junction where the road dips down to run along the bottom of the Cap we found there was still more climbing. Tyrrel and the woman had crossed the junction and were ascending a path through grass and trees. This turned out to be the narrow lane, the Chemin des Moulins, which runs along the very spine of the Cap and feeds a number of older cottages and unobtrusive villas. No vehicles can get there, which is probably what has saved the area, though to judge by the number of burglar alarms it was no longer as private as it might once have been. We had to close up on our quarry to see at which gate they would turn. They were going ever slower.

'She'll kill him, making him climb like this,' said Chantal.

The Old Man had one arm round the woman's shoulders and put his other hand on the gateposts as he came to them. Twice they stopped for him to lean against a hedge before eventually they turned in at a small wooden gate. We let them get out of sight and then ambled past. It was an old house and not, from that side, very large, though as most of it faced across the bay it was hard to judge. It had rough plaster walls, small windows and large red curved tiles. A later extension had been added at one end, providing an extra storey which looked out across the water to Villefranche. The garden, which had been levelled in broad steps, was filled with olive trees and fell very steeply to the road below, out of sight. On the other side of the lane the ground dropped just as steeply in a tangle of olive trees and neglected garden. It might possibly also have belonged to Tyrrel since there was no other obvious claimant. Beyond it the coast curved in long lines of surf towards Monte Carlo. From the upper storey of the extension it must have been possible to view both sides of the Cap simultaneously.

We stood for a while looking at the two views until it grew colder and the sun was rapidly swallowed by a black cloud that sprang from beyond the Cap. The harbour changed from blue to indigo and the water became ominously smooth, moving like a carpet with the wind beneath it. I remembered that Tyrrel had written about the squalls that blow up out of nowhere on that coast at certain times of the year, how the sea may boil and blacken in a moment, devouring yachts and small craft as the wind knocks them Bat upon the water.

'It's going to rain,' said Chantal. 'Come on.'

She hated the rain, whereas I like it; it is stimulating and varied and has many moods. I particularly like the small warm rain of an English spring. But this was obviously going to be something different and so we hurried down some steps that ran alongside Tyrrel's garden to the road far below. There was no shelter on the lane but we thought there might be some on the road. After a few yards, I stopped and looked back. The part of the extension facing Villefranche had two large french windows, one above the other and divided by a balcony. In the upper window stood the woman. I was too far away to see her face clearly but again I had the impression of an almost ornithological sharpness. She reached slowly behind her head with both hands, her bare arms uplifted, and loosened her ponytail. She shook her head and spread her hair with her fingers, her eyes all the time on the heavy smooth sea and the black cloud that now covered the harbour. In the room below stood Tyrrel, his hands in the pockets of his corduroys, his shoulders slumped. Like her, he stared at the apocalyptic darkening.

There were some improbably large drops of rain. Chantal called. She was standing at an angle in the steps by a broken-down old shed. I was about to join her when there was a sky-wide flash of lightning. The harbour was now the deepest indigo and heaved as if in labour. The churning clouds thickened and blackened and the old fort on the tip of Ville franc he stood out against sea and sky with an unreal whiteness. There was more lightning, followed by thunder, and more raindrops, heavier and faster.

In the upper room the woman again stretched her arms above her head, looking along each arm at her outspread finger-tips, turning her hands forward and back. She then turned right round, her arms still raised, and walked to the back of the room, disappearing as if into an embrace. Below her the Old Man stood, morosely staring, but as the thunder rolled again and the rain began in earnest he raised his hands to his face.

That occasion was the nearest Chantal and I came to a row before we married. She sheltered in the shed but the corrugated iron roof leaked and made her hair wet. I did not come the moment she called and that annoyed her, even though she would have been no drier if I had and it was me who got soaked running the ten yards from where I had been standing. The rain came at a bewildering variety of angles and with a seemingly personal ferocity. It stung my cheeks and head and all but blotted out the house. The old comparison with stair-rods did not seem such an exaggeration. But I was laughing, which irritated her, and I was keen to tell her about what I had seen, which further irritated her. The surface of our relationship was broken by a deep exasperation which I had not seen before. It was as if the sea, when it was calm and bright, had shown for an instant a glimpse of something sinister.

'Don't be stupid,' she said, emphasizing the last word. It was only a moment and soon she was scolding me for being wet in a manner that anticipated her capacity for prompt and opinionated motherhood, a quality which in those days I found charming. I relished the attention.

Edward arrived not long afterwards. He rang and said he had booked into a small hotel in Antibes, having been unable to find anywhere both open and available in Villefranche. Tyrrel had not asked him to stay. He was slightly reluctant to meet before seeing Tyrrel but I told him we had something important to tell him and so we all three had dinner on his first night at M. Englert's, down by the old harbour. Out of season Englert's is a restful place in which you can sit all day over your coffee with a paper or a book. If I were a writer I would work in places like that, taking a table in a window so that I could watch the world go by, private, unmolested, unseeing when I didn't want, but plenty to watch when I did.

Over dinner that night we all three had the kind of conversation that made Chantal and me realize there was something we missed about London after all, only we had not known until we tasted it again. Edward wore a blazer and tie, rather more formal than his usual dress but it soon ceased to seem out of place and by the end of the evening it felt as if he were the host and we the strangers. His French was good — better than mine — and it came out that he had spent most of his school holidays with French relatives in Chantilly. That was the first time it struck me how little I knew of his background. He came from Yorkshire where his father was a solicitor — his mother too, I think, though they were divorced — and he had a brother and sister of whom he saw little. Most people refer quite often to their past but Edward hardly ever did. Indeed, he referred very little to himself at all. He would talk about what was going on, about books or about people and he would always question whomever he was with, getting them to talk. In this way he gave the impression of being communicative while in fact keeping himself in reserve. There was also something about him that discouraged questions; the impression that things which may have been important to others were, when it came to him, too trivial to bother with. It was as if he were hardly interested in the accidents of history and personality but only in, his purpose, which could never be discussed in any detail without breaching the work-in-progress rule.