For the Time Being (6 page)

The sea around Cannes is pretty well clear, the city fathers have seen to that, and each year more improvements are made, so as long as you don't swallow a bucketful you will come to no harm. There used to be a rather ominous little notice, in brass, tucked away on one of the great pillars in the main hall of one of the
grands palais
which flatly stated that no one would be responsible for you if you bathed from their beach. But I think that's been removed now: it would be comforting to know that it had.

After a time, beach life becomes wearing and expensive and you need to look about for other diversions. If you go up to the hills, within half an hour or forty minutes of the hubbub and racketing of the Riviera Strip, you will find unbelievable peace and contentment in the small villages which top the many craggy mountains overlooking the sea. Greenness and coolth and, perhaps most important of all, silence broken only by the clonking of a distant sheep bell or the cry of a kite or buzzard wheeling high above you in idle swooping circles. This land is still the Riviera, though it bears so little resemblance to the gaudy cities of the plain below.

Up here, in the clean air, the villages have hardly altered since the days when they were used for safety against the invading Saracens and Moors. The narrow streets twist and loop for shade in the summer heat, for warmth in the cold of winter and, above all, for security. The streets are dusty, you can walk barefoot in the powdery ruts or, better still, among the sheets of wild narcissi which cover the hillsides around Thorenc in the spring. Great white drifts which look like the last lingering vestiges of winter's snow until the overpowering scent reminds you that you are indeed treading through millions of flowers.

Further along the valley to the west, lying on a great plain dominated by a tremendous rock called Bauroux (a good 5480 feet high), is the tiny village of Caille – a single village street here, for this is on the plain. The village just huddles round its church under the towering rock, and the street trails out into fields surrounded by dense pinewoods. High among these woods there are secret fields which, like the ones at Thorenc, are sheeted with wild flowers, only here they are not white but gold with cowslips. Acres and acres of them so that you cannot walk without crushing the nodding bell-like heads alive with honey bees from the rows of skeps, or hives, along the edges of the wood.

It is impossible to believe one is so close to the raddled mass on the coast: nothing seems to have altered up here for centuries. Apart from the television aerials ubiquitously thrusting from every tiled roof, nothing very much has.

The people here are of the kindest and warmest. Curious about you, amused by you, but warm and ready to direct you or help you understand their patois, for these are the true people of the mountains and, incidentally, of the Riviera, who came with the Romans, the Italians, the Saracens and the Moors, and all the bloods have mixed together to produce a hardy, tough-living race of astonishingly varied peoples.

It is not everyone who gets any pleasure from walking barefoot in the red dust of the village lanes, or among the superfluity of wild flowers, or who can lie in the whispering mountain grasses listening for the sheep bell. But all this is within the belt called ‘the Riviera',
and you can take your choice. Beyond Cannes there are ravishing villages like Fayance, Auribeau, Bargemon and Seillans, all with excellent restaurants or modest but extremely reasonable hotels. It's worth making the extra effort to heave yourself off the crowded beaches and go up into the hills: you'll find very few, if any, GB-registered cars. The French know the secrets of these lovely places and are wise to keep them to themselves.

If I write at length about Cannes and its hill-villages, it is only because I know this region better than anywhere else. For years I have had my hair cut here, been to the bank, gone to market, bought my plants and visited my dentist. Inevitably it is closer to my heart than Antibes or Cagnes or even the old whore down the coast, Nice.

Nice nevertheless is, I suppose, the heart of the Riviera proper. Cannes has the air of the faded gentry, with the ghosts of the Russian Court still lingering in an air of elegance and polite charm. Nice, on the other hand, is definitely raffish, vulgar and, for some, more attractive. A port city set on one of the most beautiful bays in the world, the bay of the Angels, with a background of snowy mountains hemming her in from the cruel northern winter, she flourishes among her lemon and orange trees like some lascivious slut, the skirts of her gown, so to speak, spread out around her in waves of ugly suburbia which flounce and trail over every hill and valley. Never closed, noisy and squalid with here and there great elements of beauty and relics of the past which still can catch you unawares and force you to hold your breath with delight. Stand in the very centre of the great Promenade des Anglais which curves around the enormous bay, and look to your left and right in wonder. The towering blocks of apartment buildings, the
frou-frou
and nonsense of the remaining
grands palais
all stuck about with wrought iron and lacy plaster-work, the immaculate gardens stiff with palms and flowering yuccas, the millions of coloured lights which flash and change as the great ball of a copper sun slides into the sea as surely as a penny slips into a slot machine. Darkness falls so quickly: there is almost no twilight here, and the whole promenade is suddenly lit by a tremendous necklace of diamonds. The old whore,
defiant of her hidden squalor, radiant, beguiling, brash, beckoning. It is very hard to resist her tattered charms.

In the heat of the morning sun, wander into the old town. An Italian town this, since Nice was, and often still is, called Nizza and belonged to Italy until the late nineteenth century. Here they have very wisely rid the place of cars and trucks and petrol fumes. The old houses lean towards each other, sometimes six or seven storeys high (without lifts). Balconies looped with washing, surrounded with little cages of singing birds and stuffed with old pots and pans frothing with geraniums and petunias.

The streets are silent save for the cries of playing children, or feet hurrying, and the clatter and fluster of pigeons. You can wander into the bread shops (the hot smell of baking almost forces you to) to try a
real
pizza, not one of those dreadful mixtures they shove at you in London and New York, or
eatfougasses
made with anchovies and olives blended together in a thick paste with the sweet bready dough. It all looks, finally, like a piece of well-toasted fretwork. If you have never tried it, and think perhaps that you should, go for a slice of
tapenade;
here again the olive is an ingredient, together with capers and anchovies pounded by pestle and mortar and spread thickly over a slab of pizza-like pastry.

These, apart from the pasta and the fish, are the main delights of Nice from the point of view of gluttony. On the other hand you can just as well give them up and try your hand at the Casino. Both Nice and Cannes have their casinos and you can lose your shirt or win a wardrobe in a short evening.

If this is your kick, try it. You'll see the underbelly of both towns, the pale and anxious, the huddled rich, the Arab princes staking kingdoms, the resentful old women with raddled faces trying again and again to win.

Some do, some don't. That's the Riviera. There is no sympathy, a great deal of envy, some disdain. But no one really gives a tinker's gob: it's all up to you.

Be warned. The Riviera is not cheap. A bottle of fizzy lemonade on the beach at Cannes or at Nice can set you back three quid or more; the mattress on the sands, or on the shingle, and the parasol
against the sun could, added together for two weeks, buy you a small car, if you know what I mean.

But, on the other hand, you can always pull yourself up from the wincingly painful pebbles and drive into the mountains behind the town. There, away from the stink of sun-oil, chip-oil and paraffin-oil, from the pleasure boats which are slowly destroying the glorious bay by killing off the fish, you can be high among the pine forests, the alpine flowers, the startled deer and the chubby marmots. It's altogether a different world but, as with Cannes, you can reach it in less than an hour, depending on your resistance to zig-zag roads and sheer drops. In springtime you could swim in the mornings and ski in the afternoons.

And that's really it: everything you need is there in that amazing stretch of land, from beauty and squalor to richness and poverty (of a kind – a gentle kind because poverty never seems quite so desperate in the warmth of the sun, or so I like to think).

For forty years I have said that each year would be the last: I'd never return. The place has become a ruin, the traffic impossible, the guests resistible, the beaches crowded and filthy, the prices beyond belief. Everything I knew years ago has become smothered in high-rise concrete and fast-lane tarmac; it's gone to hell. The entire place is a disaster area.

But. I've always gone back. And I always will. You see, it's the magic and the Light. And they still, in some unaccountable way, remain and pull one back, and whatever happens to the Riviera, as long as those two major attractions remain, it will always be, for all time, better than Rio, or Hong Kong, or Bermuda, or anywhere else in the world.

Sunday Times,
14 February 1988

Sitting here, as presently I am, the nicotiana is higher than my head. Well, as high as. The scent is overwhelming, drifting out into the still evening air. I suppose that I should try to find a word other than ‘drifting', but that is exactly what scents do on still summer evenings; so it remains. Drifting. It's all part of building up an illusion of peace and calm. I planted the things out in April, earlier than advised, but I did it anyway, and did it so that I should be able to sit one evening quite embowered by blossom and suffocated by heavy scent. And so I am.

A sort of peace descends. It would appear from all outward signs that stress has faded.

Only appear. I still jump like a loon if a book falls, a door bangs, the telephone rings. That's rare. The telephone hardly ever rings. Sometimes it doesn't make a sound for days. And never between Friday afternoon and Monday afternoon. People go away.

Sometimes on Sundays, if it gets really grim, I walk to the station to buy a newspaper I don't need, or want, and talk to the very friendly chap who runs the paper stall. His mate runs the flower stall. We speak of the weather, local football (about which I know nothing), and it breaks the silence.

Heigh-ho. A fat bee nudges rather hopelessly among the fluted white trumpets. If you could talk to a ruddy bee I'd tell it that it was out of luck. You won't get any pollen from that lot; the trumpet is far too narrow. But it's not after pollen. Nectar, that's the word. And it won't get that either.

Trying to engage a bee in conversation, or discuss the state of the day with a portrait, or the wallpaper, is an almost certain sign of incipient madness and/or senility. I don't honestly feel that I
have reached either of those stations of the cross: but I have checked it out with others who live alone, and living alone, they assure me, gets you chatting up a storm. To no one.

Well, it fills the silences. Sometimes they are good, the silences, but at times they do get a bit heavy. Music helps, of course. I listen to more music now than ever before.

The evening sun is warm on my face, the terrace tiles still hot under my bare feet, hot from the glory of the day. It really is a kind of contentment. The bee, the nicotianas, the stillness and, high in the tree beyond, the kestrel.

He arrived like a silent dart a few moments ago. Below, on the close-mown grass two wood pigeons waddle about like a couple of blousy bag-ladies, aware, with the extraordinary vision which they possess, of the danger above, but, disinclined to fly until death swoops, they continue to waddle. Very British.

The tree frills in the slight breeze which arrives suddenly like a sigh. The kestrel sways gently, eyes still on me. The nicotiana, the white and yellow daisies, the scarlet bells of the fuchsia rustle and swing, and suddenly, as if the breeze had been a signal, the kestrel takes off in a long, low swoop, glides across the lawns, flustering the bag-ladies, planes upwards over the trees on the boundary and is lost to sight.

All is still. The breeze has dropped as suddenly as it arrived. The garden is still, fading gently into evening. The ice in my whisky chinks, almost convincing me with the serenity of its delicate sound that there is nothing for me to do, or nothing which has to
be
done. But I know very well that there is. The nightly watering chore has to commence. I do find it pretty boring, carting gallons of water about and trying not to bump into the furniture on the way. Dusk is falling slowly, my ice melting; through the fretwork of the tree the elegant shape of Peter Jones looms, sleek, proud, clearly bent on a collision course with the Royal Court Theatre across the square. Lights spring up somewhere on the top floor, an ambulance siren wails, a window is slammed shut, traffic mumbles distantly, a voice calls out, a woman laughs and feet clack-clack along the pavement.

I am back full circle. I'm where I started out on my journey at the meek and wondering age of seventeen.

Consider: at sixteen, the height of my ambition was to construct a cage from garden-bamboo for a pet linnet. Which I did; only to find that I had misjudged the widths of the bars, through which the bloody bird sped. Story of my life, you might say. But you'd be a bit wrong. At seventeen, refusing education of a higher kind, refusing all chances of becoming an office-boy or a runner at
The Times,
refusing, in fact, to follow my exceedingly clever father into his post as art editor, I agreed to an art school place at Chelsea Polytechnic. At seventeen I was a year too young, but apparently showed ‘interesting talent', so they took me on, unaware of my lack of education and my cavalier method of measurements (check with bamboo bird cage above). However, I went. And sitting here I can almost see the spire of St Luke's, which was not so far from the school. Which is why I can say that I am back full circle. For this was my area, my manor if you like. I knew it, and loved it, well.