J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'He's an intellectual thug.' Jane massaged my knee. 'That set-to over our bags with Halder. And the nasty way he stared at the African salesmen. He's racist.'

'No. He was trying to provoke us. Visitors from liberal England, we're as naive as any maiden aunt, an unmissable target. Still, he's your colleague now. Remember that you have to get on with him.'

'I will. Don't worry, psychiatrists are never a threat. Surgeons are the real menace.'

'That sounds like hard-won experience.'

'It is. All psychiatrists secretly dream of killing themselves.'

'And surgeons?'

'They dream of killing their patients.' She rotated her seat, turning her back to the computer. 'Paul, that was a weird afternoon.'

'Very weird. I don't know whether you noticed, but a rather odd game is being played. Penrose is testing us. He wants to see if we're good enough for Eden-Olympia.'

'I am.' Jane's chin rose, exposing a childhood scar. 'Why not?'

'So you want to stay?'

'Yes, I do. There are possibilities here. We ought to explore them.'

'Good. I'll back you all the way.'

Jane waited as I embraced her, then held me at arm's length.

'One thing, Paul. It's important. We don't talk about David Greenwood.'

'Jane, I liked him.'

'Did you? I'm not so sure. Face it, we're never going to know what happened to him. He's not coming back, so stop worrying about him. Agreed? Let's go upstairs and unpack.'

Jane led the way, hefting her leather suitcase while I limped after her, stick in one hand and two of the soft bags in the other. Once we reached our bedroom Jane collapsed onto the ivory-white sofa. She ran her cheek along the silk cushions.

'Paul, isn't this a little lavish for a member of staff? Have you wondered why?'

'Are they trying to bribe us? I seriously doubt it. You're a consultant paediatrician, one of the new professional elite.'

'Come off it.' Jane unbuttoned her shirt. 'I'm a barefoot doctor with a short-service contract. Still, sitting in the sun will do you good. Before we leave, you'll be playing tennis again.'

'I might even beat you.'

'Losing to their favourite patients is part of a doctor's job. It happens every day in Bel Air and Holland Park.'

I wandered around the air-conditioned suite, with its dressing room and double bathroom. Despite Jane's comments, the furniture was more Noga Hilton than Versailles, and I guessed that the originals had been replaced. But there were faint ink-marks from a ballpoint pen on the fabric of an armchair by the window.

I moved the chair to one side, then knelt down and felt the dents in the carpet, deep and smoothly polished by the castors.

David Greenwood had probably slumped in this chair at the end of a long day, ticking off the latest bulletins from Médecins Sans Frontières. One May morning he sat with a rifle across his knees and a map of Eden-Olympia, working out a special itinerary.

Jane stood beside me, her dark hair falling to her bare shoulders.

She had stepped from the dressing room and held her nightdress to her chin, admiring herself in the full-length mirror like a child trying on her mother's clothes.

'Paul, are you there?' Concerned, she took my hands, as if leading me out of a dream. 'You were asleep standing up. This house does odd things to people…'

She let the nightdress fall to the floor and drew me towards the bed. I lay beside her, resting my face against her small breasts, with their sweet scents of summer love. Once again I wondered how well she had known David Greenwood. It occurred to me that three of us would sleep together in this large and comfortable bed, until I could persuade David to step out of my mind and disappear for ever down the white staircase of this dreaming villa.

Sunlight was infiltrating the misty lakes and forests of Eden-Olympia, probing the balconies of the residential enclave as if trying to rouse the company chairmen and managing directors, calling them out to play. I stood in the open doorway of the breakfast room, letting the warm air bathe my legs. An advertising plane was taking off from the Cannes-Mandelieu airfield, and I realized that my shadow was probably one of the few human silhouettes still visible from the sky over the business park.

It was 7.45, but my neighbours had already left for work. Long before the sun reached across the Baie des Anges the senior executives had finished their croissants and muesli, their mortadella and noodles, and set off to another long day at the office.

As I settled myself in a poolside chair the sun seemed to pause, surprised to find someone not already bent over a boardroom table or laboratory bench. Along the Croisette in Cannes the day would hardly have begun. The waiters at the Blue Bar would be pausing for a cigarette before they set out the table placements, and the water trucks would still be spraying the side roads off the Rue d'Antibes. But in Eden-Olympia the mainframes would be wide awake, the satellite dishes draining information stored in the sky. A busy electronic traffic was already sluicing through the cabled floors, bringing the Dow and Nikkei indexes, inventories of pharmaceutical warehouses in Düsseldorf and cod depositories in Trondheim.

Thinking of Jane, who had been up at six and off to the clinic before I woke, I eased myself onto the sun-lounger and lifted my right leg above the foam rubber cushion. After only three weeks at Eden-Olympia, as Jane had promised, I was free of the metal brace. Now I could drive the Jaguar and give Jane a rest from the heavy steering wheel. Above all, I was able to walk, and keep up with her as we strolled down the Croisette towards the seafood restaurants of the Vieux Port.

I counted the titanium claws that held the kneecap together.

My wasted right calf was as thin as my forearm, and gave me a rolling, seadog gait. But exercise would strengthen the muscles.

One day I would be able to work the heavy brake pedals of the Harvard and win back my private pilot's licence.

In the meantime I explored Eden-Olympia on foot, logging miles along the simulated nature trails that ended abruptly when they were no longer visible from the road. Ornamental pathways led to the electricity substations feeding power into the business park's grid. Surrounded by chain-link fences, they stood in the forest clearings like mysterious and impassive presences. I circled the artificial lakes, with their eerily calm surfaces, or roamed around the vast car parks. The lines of silent vehicles might have belonged to a race who had migrated to the stars.

By the early afternoon Charles's e-mails brought me final proof pages, cheery gossip about the latest office romances, and queries over the editorial copy of our aviation journals. I missed Jane, who never returned home before seven o'clock, but I was happy to doze on the sun-lounger and listen to the droning engines of light aircraft trailing their pennants across the cloudless sky, news from the sun of furniture sales, swimming pool discounts and the opening of a new aqua-park.

A lawnmower sounded from a nearby garden as the roving groundstaff trimmed the grass. Sprinklers hissed a gentle drizzle across the flowerbeds of the next-door villa, occupied by Professor Ito Yasuda, chairman of a Japanese finance house, his serious-faced wife and even more serious three-year-old son. On Sundays they played tennis together, a process as stylized as a Kabuki drama, which involved endless ball retrieval and virtually no court action.

My other neighbours were a Belgian couple, the Delages, among the earliest colonists of the business park. Alain Delage was the chief financial officer of the Eden-Olympia holding company, a tall, preoccupied accountant lost somewhere behind the lenses of his rimless glasses. But he was kind enough to give Jane a lift to the clinic each morning. I had met the couple, Delage and his pale, watchful wife Simone, but our brief conversation across the roof of their Mercedes would have been more expressive if carried out by semaphore between distant peaks in the Alpes-Maritimes.