Beside me, in long maroon outfit, Nadja is alarmingly gracious, as though comforting Daisy for morning rudeness from a lapwing or commiserating Ray Phelps for accusation of unnatural offences, and prepared to stroke Alain on news that he has incurable disease. Better that the Ulmanis had been engulfed by a landslip.
Dick nudges me, pointing at an excited young couple on the adjoining balcony. ‘Free spirits. Plighting their troth with a eucalyptus for witness. Fair blossoms in a dark world.’ He pats Nadja’s arm. ‘Well, there you are. As indeed are we all, dowsed in champagne, cigarette fumes, some of us probably on smack.’ Then, nudging Dick aside, Ray, baldness worn like a helmet, risks linguistics. ‘Pourquoi?’ and gurgles into his glass, Dick resuming behind us. ‘Flying Scots at Twickers’, telling a boring story, promising one ‘still funnier’, then motioning at clowns below.
Drink, uproar, darting flushes of colour further blur my vision. Another face, perspiring ham, swims at me. Voice treacly. ‘If one hears aright, Erich, you’ve penetrated the mysteries of la belle Florentine.’ Nadja’s amused. ‘He thinks you are a Sûreté inspector, which I am almost certain you are not.’
Phelps asks Haylock if he could get him a brioche. ‘Ray, I could, but I won’t.’
‘OK, old chap. Each man for himself. Women and children nowhere.’ Manly grin, confidential wink.
Children in white, flossy as egrets, scamper in and out of lavish sheen of movement. Three-legged teams scuttle like crabs. Mauve shorts, black berets. Elvis gyrations, flames in high wind. Kites jigging, soaring, swerving, with purity free of dust and clamour. The Herr General had controlled my demented box-kite like an army manoeuvre, convincing me of eternal comradeship dedicated to mighty deeds. More children, twirling hula-hoops, dangling yoyos; sharp sprigs of Europe glistening before harvest. The masked and caped lurch forward on stilts, caricatures, perhaps, of British foreign policy. A champion bull, beflowered, bemedalled, led by a bare-torsoed, velveteen-breeched matador stamped with purple artificial bruises. Youths, or would-be youths, doubtless Matelots du Roi, march in poor step, yell ringside expletives, matched from the streets by a chant of ‘Ho Chi Minh’. Bikinied girls move daintily, each displaying a letter collectivized into ‘Dubonnet’. From Dick, ‘Tartlets!’ Others, frilled in damson, on a wheeled, beflowered terrace, perform cancan. Southern frolic.
Hobbyhorses swarm in imitation cloth-of-gold caps, then a hunchback Scaramouche with tricoloured horns, a lascivious Punchinello, Pierrot jiving with Columbine. Anthology of popular culture, language of distilled memories. Fleeting celebrities – female Olympic equestrian, tennis champion, rawhide footballers showered with petals from windows. I see through the magic spectacles of near-intoxication, which stretch faces like elastic, transform colours to the incredible. Deranged planets re-form into ‘Crédit Lyonnais’. Time for St André to discharge a hosedown of sudden tears. Cooling. Instead, relentless heat matched by trumpet salvoes, vivacious, archaic hunting-calls, panoplies of holiday sound in this phantasmagoria of Europe’s Spirit World; the wolf, red-fanged, white-gloved, wringing falsetto bleats from a popinjay saxophone, a mulatto witch bestowing blessings on whorish mermaids, and prancing demons, preceding a Société Joyeuse platoon, brocaded surcoats, peaked caps askew, diamond hues, grotesquely lengthened noses. They caper to shrill pipes, swipe each other with bladders and, strung with tiny bells, jeer and sourpuss the crowds. Claire and Sinclair could earn bit parts, mincing alongside a platform of phallic confectionary driven by a darkly cowled Doctor with swollen yellow beak and briefcase twinkling ‘L’Imposture’.
A man, naked save for mistletoe sprigs – to propitiate oncoming winter, Nadja explains – wears bull-mask and displays corn-cob genitals, hugely popular, target for marigolds. Within the Garde Républicaine band ambles the mayor, Légionnaire d’Honneur, sashed, medalled, bobbing, one hand stilling imagined applause while he ignores a chorus of ‘Stolen Funds’. First mistaking him for ‘blasted Musso’, Dick, rather unsteady, worries Daisy by calling ‘Blasted Eurocrat. Superstate Barmy!’ then looking about him as if this was uttered by somebody else.
By now fatigued, bored, hungry, about to urge Nadja homewards, I am unexpectedly stalled. I know something of Arthurian legend, from Breton and Welsh traditions, some researches of Lars Ivar Ringborn and Nadja’s more cabbalistic works of Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz. I see that, for the first time, she is really interested, opening her notebook.
The cacophony has fallen apart, the gap filled with a single vicious groan, some ritual curse, trained on a tinpot knight bareheaded, elevated in a workaday cart pulled by two mules. He is downcast, disgraced, now flinching from a scurry of dead blossom, cabbage stalks, condoms, broken shoes, to repeated shouts of ‘Elaine’ and farmyard neighs and crows. French political feuds? Some desperado of boudoir scandal or casino morals? Certainly not. Elaine, a word from Nadja, my own diehard memory, reminds me of a Breton tale of a southern lake goddess, confused with Mary Magdalene, simultaneously mother and wife of Arthur’s blood-brother Lancelot du Lac, adulterous paragon who betrayed him. Historically negligible but with a thin patina of psychic truth. Unhorsed in combat, this Lancelot had been forced to return to the royal cuckold in a peasant’s barrow, customary for a condemned felon, the populace discharging stones, dung and, particularly, cast-off shoes.
No more. I expect, vainly, an electrically lit Grail safeguarded by mini-skirted initiates with star-tipped wands advertising Cointreau. The dazzle dwindles to a trickle: a posse of police cadets, quartet of oarsmen in broad, hillbilly hats, uniformed pupils, their party squeakers shooting orange tongues back at gate-crashing scrapings of dosshouse, souk, estaminet, barfly derelicts, a collection of clumping boots and tattered shawls. Vigilantes, I suggest, seeking Latvians, but Nadja does not smile.
We all depart to Hôtel Montmorency. I escort Daisy, herself silent, drunk or redrafting her will in favour of buntings. Dick and Ray argue about the Fête, its expense, absurdity, Frenchness. Certainly, it would not have been envied by such as Malraux and Jacques-Louis David, whose political tableaux have sunk into history. Children are over-tired, anxious for home. Nadja, unusually sociable, perhaps exhilarated by the Knight in the Cart, holds court. Dick, after glancing at Daisy, heaped beside me, inert, asleep or dead, approves not of her but Nadja. ‘She’s sparkling, like a house on fire. Where would we be without her? But, my God, what we’ve endured! Worse than opera. The educated man, my dear fellow… Shakespeare, Galsworthy… Miss Sayers… laws unto themselves. I’m sometimes sorry that fate never cast me upon the shores of our national showcase, Eton. But what did Hamlet say? “I could a tale unfold”?’
He unfolds nothing, scrutinizes me from beneath sandy, ragged eyebrows, sighs, mumbles ‘Bread of Heaven’, nods at the barman.
Returning, we listen to Wagner, his pomp overwhelming the streets below: shouts, rockets, tom-tom beat. Towards Cannes, darkness is pierced by fires, apparently uncontrolled, reddened clouds drifting seawards. Local radio announces a riot from an unnamed port, presumably one of the sporadic outbreaks of vandalism and vendetta to which we are accustomed.