There is a beef stew and more wine, and the conversation goes faster and faster until I cannot keep up. Bertrand sends the dish around for second helpings, and when it is her turn Madame takes the serving spoon and dabs it on her plate, an act that seems hieratic in its significance, like the motions of a priest at the altar. It spots her plate with a portion the size of a fingernail, which she does not touch. Later Bertrand brings chocolate mousse in chilled glasses, decorated with beautiful candied orange peels that wear little half-casings of chocolate. He admits that he made them himself. Afterward I take the children upstairs along the creaking passage. I lie on their bed and read to them, among the dark forms of unfamiliar furniture, while the owls hoot outside. I think of how fortunate it is that there is a word — holiday — which not only explains the experience of going to bed in strange rooms but decrees it to be pleasurable. When I return downstairs it is to find the cognac out and the laughter loud and even Madame grown a little garrulous in her cardigan and blouse and gathered skirt. There is coffee; I ask if I may smoke. Of course, says Bertrand solemnly, I myself was once a great smoker. J’étais un grand fumeur. It sounds like the beginning of a story, but of course it is only the end of one. At some point Bertrand smoked his last cigarette: it is very clear to me, this moment of renunciation. It decorates him like a priestly robe, or a medal. Bertrand has thrown off the temptation to live life without recognizing the finality of all things.
In the morning he is nowhere to be seen. Breakfast is laid out on a round table in the hall, the coffee mysteriously hot and the croissants warm from the oven, like Beauty’s supper in the Beast’s castle. There are esoteric jams, homemade, in white china bowls: they are chestnut and walnut and fig from the dry, scented hillside. Later Bertrand appears and shows us his library with its extraordinary collection of antique volumes, which his mother bequeathed him after her death. He was very close to his mother: now she has become these books that stand in her son’s room, with their densely typed pages and faded beautiful spines; these motionless creatures that rest finished on their shelves while day and night come and go at the window, beating like soft waves against their buried knowledge.
Colors fade: we pass through warm, silent landscapes whose ocher and rust-red and flat, ancient green seem so old and primitive that it is surprising to see houses on the hills or sunk in the distances of the plains. The wind turbines look like strange gods, with their triad heads turning under the blue sky. Later we wind through a spectral, blackened landscape where forest fires have left charred skeletons of trees: it is like a grove of death, the hills coming down steeply to the road and the road winding and turning among them so that nothing but their desolate slopes and petrified forms can be seen. Then all at once we are out, with the mineral-blue Mediterranean sparkling below us and the white Palladian vista of settlements frilled with surf, of Cannes and Antibes and St. Raphaël, stretching all along the hazy shoreline of the Côte d’Azur. We have traveled from one sea to another, from one world to another: suddenly there are palm trees on the roadside and warm maritime breezes and a feeling of liberty, of an almost physical unburdening, like a winter coat being taken off, a pair of heavy shoes unlaced and hurled into the glittering water. All of us feel it, this change: we whoop and cheer as we soar down toward the Baie des Anges. We have closed the door on England as one would close the door on a dark and cluttered house and walk out into the sun. It is this release, from the feeling of interiority, that I relish the most. Yet I love its darkness and clutter, its shady labyrinths of memory and emotion. They give rise to feelings of outward misshapenness, but they have their own value, the heavy metal coins of Englishness that strain and bulge through the fabric of the purse. But now the purse is empty: it is flat and light. We roll down the windows and everything begins to flutter madly, our hair and clothes, our books and bags and sweet wrappers, a whole deck of cards that whirls around like a crazy summer snowstorm, while outside the light leaps and dances on the water and the little boats pirouette in the bay, and a plane like a child’s toy turns in the sky to make its landing at the toy airport of Nice.
In the late afternoon we arrive at Cap Ferrat. We are staying here, on the threshold of Italy: tomorrow we will cross over. The promontory is so still and miniature that it might be made out of plaster. The pastel light grows pinker as the sun declines: the surface of the water is as pale as milk. Behind the walls of 1920s mansions, perfumed gardens begin to emit the pulse of evening. The sea lies quietly in its little pink bays. There is an atmosphere of unreality in the motionless air, a sense of the painted backdrop. This is the habitat of famous actors, of mythmakers: the hand of nature has been stayed. I remember a story a friend told me, of her small son running barefoot across a stretch of lawn here, his upturned soles dyed green from the grass. And indeed the gardens, with their topiary and their waxlike flowers, their barbered palm trees and orderly, rigid, dark green lawns, seem curiously man-made; more so than the romantic houses, which resemble the palaces and castles that clouds sometimes make in the sky on a summer afternoon. A little well-paved path runs all around the perimeter, just above the sea: people are jogging there, in sunglasses and immaculate white shoes, disappearing around the end where the sea splashes against the rocks in an orderly fashion, like a small-scale representation of itself on a stage set.
Our hotel room has a blue-tiled floor and no blankets on the beds. It is clear that winter does not exist here, merely something that I imagine to be like a brief coma, an interlude of unknowing when the houses close their shutters and the gardens stop growing, when the pink light is switched off and the sea is drained like a swimming pool out of season. But now it is awakening: there are people in the cafés; one or two houses have opened their eyes. We change into different clothes, summer clothes that make us look white-skinned and startled in the mirror. We do not yet look as we feel, or feel as we look. We are in some perilous state of preexistence; like unchristened babies, we are not yet saved. The baptism must commence; there is no time to lose: we run down, down to the milk-white waters and the pinkish bay, past the deserted hotel terrace with its empty tables, past the mysterious shuttered houses, the pulsing gardens, down to the little crescent of coarse sand, the waiting waters.
One after another we plunge in and swim out, sending long folds across the silken surface. We cry out; we bellow, and send sprays of water into the air like whales. The sea is cold; a wedge of wintry shadow stands across the beach. At the far end a rhombus of sun remains. There are some wooden-slatted loungers there and I see a stirring of bodies amid them. People are sitting up, apparently to observe our maiden voyage into the unseasonal waters of the Mediterranean. They seem astonished, almost affronted; they shade their eyes with brown wrinkled hands glittering with rings, for most of them are elderly ladies, as thin as lizards, with creased skins the color of tobacco. They stir their dark brown limbs and adjust their bikinis and suck the last of the sun from the sky. Occasionally they raise a skinny arm to shade their eyes and look. They are strange, stirring like lizards in their crevice of sun. But to them we are stranger still, with our white skins, our worship of a cold and contradictory element, our dysfunctional joy.