Edward’s review was really more an article which dealt summarily with the book in question and then transferred its fire to the whole of Tyrrel’s oeuvre. He was writing for one of the weeklies and so had more space than usual but even that meant only a dozen paragraphs. It was a masterly piece of succinct and reasoned assessment which read like a summing-up by a judge of indisputable wisdom and impartiality, and it was quite devastating. The essence was that Tyrrel had started his career well but then, in thrall to the idea of himself setting the fashion, he had retreated from reality and from any notion of duty to his art and had succumbed to the illusion that he somehow embodied that art. The consequence was a perpetual straining after novelty and an increasing ‘interiority’ in his work. It was not his characters who mattered to him but his own reactions and thoughts; he assumed that they mattered equally to everyone else. It was as if nothing was real unless he had written it. This is not, of course, unknown among novelists and is only gradually fatal but Tyrrel, perhaps more perceptive than most, soon realized that his own thoughts were less sustaining and original than he might have liked and so he sought refuge in style. This was disguised self, this emphasis on style at the expense of everything, this insistence not only that matter and manner could be separated but that the one was more important than the other. In his most famous novels, said Edward, Tyrrel was little more than a fox chasing his tail, hoping by his antics to entrance his audience while all the time his books were about less and less. For all his fame, the great body of his work was really no more than a parody of what he might have done, a dance around emptiness.

  As often with literary controversies, the effects of criticism were beneficial for all concerned. Discussion of Tyrrel’s books further stimulated his sales, the weekly in which the review was published took a step nearer to establishing itself as a serious journal and Edward’s name was made. In fact, what he had written was not actually controversial since nearly everyone agreed with it; the door was already ajar but none before him had thought to push it. Once he had, everyone else hurried through. Edward was immediately spoken of as if he were himself an established author, even a literary authority. His one novel was mentioned as if it were well known, which it then became. Yet it was not that he had said what no one before had thought; rather, he had said what they had all thought, if only they had realized it. He had arrived in one bound.

  The most surprising consequence was the reaction of the Old Man himself. As famed for his refusal to discuss his books as for the secrecy of his personal relations, he nevertheless wrote asking if Edward would like to visit Villefranche and interview him ‘if you are not already weary of writing about me’. Edward showed me the letter when I first took Chantal to his flat to introduce her. We were all three excited: me because I was with her and was introducing her to the man I thought of as my best, if not always my closest, friend; she because she was engaged and was meeting the youthfully famous author; he because of his letter.

  He showed it to us with a smile, saying it would be typical of the Old Man only to have sent it when he knew he was dying and would be gone before Edward arrived. I remember noticing the tiny wavering signature which curled so far downwards at the end that the tail almost rejoined the body. I believe Hitler’s did the same in his final years, the mark, perhaps, of a mind besieged. But there was something sinister, almost cabbalistic, about this signature which made me stop smiling. It seemed to speak of an intense pressure, a little circle of unending pain, unreachable and inexpressible, utterly private. But the others did not seem perturbed and I looked at it no more.

  We all went out for a curry. Chantal and Edward were each at their best and I was happy to see them. I really was very happy and proud. There had been talk of one of Edward’s girlfriends - an imprecise and fluctuating group of women, one or two of whom I had briefly met - coming to join us but he said he hadn’t got round to ringing any of them. As it was, the three of us formed a sort of bond that evening which lasted many years. We agreed we would all meet in France. Chantal and I were going to Antibes during the school holidays to stay with her family there, whom I had not met. With no pressing from me - I had thought of it but feared rejection, always finding his polite, quiet rejections more demoralizing than anyone else’s - Edward volunteered to join us down there and ‘beard old Tyrrel’, as he put it. Antibes would be a few miles along the coast from Tyrrel’s house at Villefranche. We would all get together.

  In so far as happiness consists in a state of anticipation, that evening marked the high point of the last happy period of my life. I have known contentment since, and busy productive engagement, but anticipation has become an ever darker matter and the knowledge of what was put in train then has in any case undermined my belief in the possibility of anything unalloyed.

  CHAPTER 2

  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 clich�s 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.

  ‘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.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8