J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

Leaving them to it, I walked back to the conservatory. Searching for the men's room, I followed a sign that pointed down an oak-lined corridor to the library. The purple carpet, trodden perhaps by Lloyd George and Clemenceau, muffled my steps, and I could hear a curious wailing, like the bleating of sheep, coming from the smoking room.

I paused by a pair of glass swing doors fitted with ornate brass bars. A television set played in a corner of the smoking room, watched by two more of the dinner guests, sitting in their leather armchairs. The only light came from the screen, its reflection trembling in the glass eyes of the dead moose whose stuffed heads hung from the walls. A stack of video-cassettes lay on a table between the two men, who scanned the clips like film producers seeing their studio's daily rushes. They sat with their backs to me, nodding their appreciation of the finer points of the action. One of the men had cut away his shirtsleeve at the elbow, and a lint bandage covered his forearm, but he seemed untroubled by the injury.

I recognized the scene they were watching, filmed from the terrace steps at the Cardin Foundation, which I had witnessed only a few hours earlier. This time the robbery appeared in close-up, taking place within yards of the cameraman's lens, but there were the same swerving lights, raised truncheons and panic, the same stunned technicians and reeling make-up girls.

I listened to the screaming of the Japanese women. The noise ended when the man with the bandage operated the remote control, and replaced the Cardin cassette with another. The two men sat back to watch a scene filmed in an underground car park, where an elderly Arab in a grey suit lay on the concrete floor beside a car with a broken windscreen.

Some shift of light in the smoking room made both men turn, perhaps sensing my presence. I drew back into the corridor.

Beyond the smoking room was the library, its leather-padded doors slightly ajar.

I stepped into the high-ceilinged room, its stale air heavy with the immemorial odour of unread books, pierced by a sharper and more exotic scent that I had caught earlier that night. Glass-fronted mahogany cases lined the walls, filled with leather-bound volumes that no one had opened for a century. A faint light shone from the gilt-ribbed spines, but a far greater lustre glowed from the booty in the centre of the room.

Fur coats were heaped high on the billiard table, the rich pelts of lynx, sable and silver fox. There were more than a dozen coats, some full-length, others with puffed sleeves and exaggerated shoulders. Two mink stoles and an ocean-blue sheared-mink poncho lay on the floor, their resilient pile still recovering from the booted feet that had stepped across them.

I looked down at this hillock of hair, savouring the curious perfume that had drifted across the night air from the Cardin Foundation. In their terror, the Japanese models had shed the powder from their skin, and the ice-like talc now lay on the dusty linings.

'Paul…?'A voice spoke behind me. 'I didn't know you were here. My dear man, you should have joined us at dinner.'

I turned to find Alain Delage standing in his shirtsleeves by the doors. He greeted me affably, unconcerned by his slurred speech and flushed face. He swayed in the dim light, trying to find his feet, and I noticed the bruises on his chest and arms, as if he had been involved in a violent street-brawl.

In one hand he held a cassette, and he seemed about to present me with a record of our shared evening. Did he know that I had seen the robbery take place? His eyes wandered around my face, searching for a sign of my approval, as if he were a moderate tennis player who had managed to beat the club professional.

'Magnificent, aren't they?' He pointed to the fur coats. 'The finest graded pelts. We should give one to Jane.'

'Alain, that's kind of you. But her generation… they have a thing about fur. What about Simone?'

'Yes, well, she'd love one. Think of the two women in mink together. Jane likes to do what Simone says…'

'Where did the furs come from?'

'I'm not sure.' Delage gazed around the shelves of books, hoping for an answer in their sealed pages. 'We borrowed them from an advertising company. We're using them in a film for Wilder Penrose.'

'They're props, then?'

'That's it.' Alain smiled at me, happy to display a freshly chipped tooth. He blinked behind his lenses, an earnest accountant who was proud to have acquitted himself well in this dangerous action.

I sensed that he wanted to confide in me, and assumed that I was about to become one of his intimate circle.

Frances was waiting for me in the conservatory, brochures under her arm. I already guessed why she had made the detour to the Villa Grimaldi, another stage of my education into the realities of Eden-Olympia.

'Paul, are you all right? You look as if you've seen something.'

'I have.' I opened the passenger door of her car, realizing the role played by the brochures. I glanced at the Range Rover parked across the rose bushes. In his escape from the Cardin Foundation, the driver had torn a deep rent in the wing. ' Frances, for the first time I understand what's going on.'

'Tell me. I've been trying to find out for years.'

'These robberies, the amateur drug-dealing, all this playground violence – the people running Eden-Olympia are pretending to be mad. Frank Halder was right…'

'Paul…? This is very hush-hush. Slip in before anyone sees you.'

A smiling conspirator, Wilder Penrose opened his front door and drew me into the hall. He pretended to glance up and down the quiet avenue, taking in the plane trees freighted with Sunday morning light.

'Safe to breathe?' Penrose closed the door and leaned against it. 'It looks as if only you and the sun are up.'

I let Penrose enjoy his joke and followed him into the living room. 'Sorry for the short notice – we could meet at the clinic, but it's too exposed.'

'It's a hive of gossip.' Penrose beckoned me to a chrome and black leather chair. 'I'm happy to see you here at any time. And Jane. It's not a medical emergency?'

'In a way, it is…'

'Really? Yes, I can see you're under some strain.'

Penrose's heavy mouth parted in a grimace of concern, revealing his strong, unbrushed teeth. He was barefoot, and wore a collarless white shirt that exposed the thuggish build of his shoulders. He was glad to see me, though I had woken him when I telephoned at seven o'clock. He hovered around my chair, so close that I could smell the sleep odours on his unshowered body.

'Paul, rest here while I make coffee.' He snatched at a beam of sunlight, as if swatting a fly. 'There's a dream I can't get rid of…'

When he had gone I strolled around the room, empty except for the two chairs and a glass table, and so cool and white that I imagined it suffused by a residual glow long after nightfall.

Looking around this minimalist space, with its implicit evasions, I thought of Freud's study in his Hampstead house, which I had visited with Jane soon after our wedding. The entire room was filled with figurines and statuettes of pagan deities, like a hoard of fossilized taboos. I often wondered why Jane had taken me to the great analyst's house, and whether she suspected that my leg injuries, which had lasted so many months, were not entirely physical.

By contrast, Penrose's living room was devoid of bric-à-brac, a white cube whose most real surface was the large Victorian mirror in a crumbling frame that leaned against one wall. Its faded silver-screen resembled a secret pool clouded by time.

'Mysterious, isn't it…?' Penrose steered a coffee tray through the double doors. 'I bought it from an antique shop in Oxford. It's just possible the young Alice Liddell stared into it.'