I had been at Antibes working on a book of mine, a biography of the seventeenth-century poet the Earl of Rochester, for more than a month before Poopy and her husband arrived. I had come there as soon as the full season was over, to a small ugly hotel by the sea not far from the ramparts, and I was able to watch the season depart with the leaves in the Boulevard Général Leclerc. At first, even before the trees had begun to drop, the foreign cars were on the move homeward. A few weeks earlier, I had counted fourteen nationalities, including Morocco, Turkey, Sweden, and Luxembourg, between the sea and the Place de Gaulle, to which I walked every day for the English papers. Now all the foreign number-plates had gone, except for the Belgian and the German and an occasional English one, and, of course, the ubiquitous number-plates of the State of Monaco. The cold weather had come early and Antibes catches only the morning sun—good enough for breakfast on the terrace, but it was safer to lunch indoors or the shadow overtook the coffee. A cold and solitary Algerian was always there, leaning over the ramparts, looking for something, perhaps safety.

It was the time of year I liked best, when Juan les Pins becomes as squalid as a closed fun-fair with Lunar Park boarded up and cards marked “Fermeture Annuelle” outside the Pam-Pam and Maxim’s, and the Concours International Amateur de Striptease at the Vieux Colombier is over for another season. Then Antibes comes into its own as a small country town with the Auberge de Provence full of local people, and old men sit indoors drinking beer or fastis at the glacier in the Place de Gaulle. The small garden, which forms a roundabout on the ramparts, looks a little sad with the short stout palms bowing their brown fronds; the sun in the morning shines without any glare, and the few white sails move gently on the unblinding sea.

You can always trust the English to stay on longer than others into the autumn. We have a blind faith in the southern sun and we are taken by surprise when the wind blows icily over the Mediterranean. Then a bickering war develops with the hotel-keeper over the heating on the third floor, and the tiles strike cold underfoot. For a man who has reached the age when all he wants is some good wine and some good cheese and a little work, it is the best season of all. I know how I resented the arrival of the interior-decorators just at the moment when I had hoped to be the only foreigner left, and I prayed that they were birds of passage. They arrived before lunch in a scarlet Sprite—a car much too young for them—and they wore elegant sports clothes more suited to spring at the Cap. The elder man was nearing fifty and the grey hair that waved over his ears was too uniform to be true: the younger had passed thirty and was as black as the other was grey. I knew their names were Stephen and Tony before they even reached the reception desk, for they had clear, penetrating, yet superficial voices, like their gaze, which had quickly lighted on me where I sat with a Ricard on the terrace and registered that I had nothing of interest for them, and passed on. They were not arrogant: it was simply that they were much more concerned with each other, and yet perhaps, like a married couple of some years’ standing, not very profoundly.

I soon knew a great deal about them. They had rooms side by side in my passage, though I doubt if both rooms were often occupied, for I used to hear voices from one room or the other most evenings when I went to bed. Do I seem too curious about other people’s affairs? But in my own defence I have to say that the events of this sad little comedy were forced by all the participants on my attention. The balcony where I worked every morning on my life of Rochester overhung the terrace where the interior-decorators took their coffee, and even when they occupied a table out of sight those clear elocutionary voices mounted up to me. I didn’t want to hear them; I wanted to work. Rochester’s relations with the actress, Mrs. Barry, were my concern at the moment, but it is almost impossible in a foreign land not to listen to one’s own tongue. French I could have accepted as a kind of background noise, but I could not fail to overhear English.

“My dear, guess who’s written to me now?”

“Alec?”

“No, Mrs. Clarenty.”

“What does the old hag want?”

“She objects to the mural in her bedroom.”

“But Stephen, it’s divine. Alec’s never done anything better. The dead faun …”

“I think she wants something more nubile and less necrophilous.”

“The old lecher.”

They were certainly hardy, those two. Every morning around eleven they went bathing off the little rocky peninsula opposite the hotel—they had the autumnal Mediterranean, so far as the eye could see, entirely to themselves. As they walked briskly back in their elegant bikinis, or sometimes ran a little way for warmth, I had the impression that they took their baths less for pleasure than for exercise—to preserve the slim legs, the flat stomachs, the narrow hips for more recondite and Etruscan pastimes.

Idle they were not. They drove the Sprite to Cagnes, Vence, St. Paul, to any village where an antique store was to be rifled, and they brought back with them objects of olive wood, spurious old lanterns, painted religious figures which in the shop would have seemed to me ugly or banal, but which I suspect already fitted in their imaginations some scheme of decoration the reverse of commonplace. Not that their minds were altogether on their profession. They relaxed.

I encountered them one evening in a little sailors’ bar in the old port of Nice. Curiosity this time had led me in pursuit, for I had seen the scarlet Sprite standing outside the bar. They were entertaining a boy of about eighteen who, from his clothes, I imagine worked as a hand on the boat to Corsica, which was at the moment in harbour. They both looked very sharply at me when I entered, as though they were thinking, “Have we misjudged him?” I drank a glass of beer and left, and the younger said “Good evening” as I passed the table. After that we had to greet each other every day in the hotel. It was as though I had been admitted to an intimacy.

Time for a few days was hanging as heavily on my hands as on Lord Rochester’s. He was staying at Mrs. Fourcard’s baths in Leather Lane, receiving mercury treatment for the pox, and I was awaiting a whole section of my notes which I had inadvertently left in London. I couldn’t release him till they came, and my sole distraction for a few days was those two. As they packed themselves into the Sprite of an afternoon or evening I liked to guess from their clothes the nature of their excursion. Always elegant, they were yet successful, by the mere exchange of one tricot for another, in indicating their mood: they were just as well dressed in the sailors’ bar but a shade more simply; when dealing with a Lesbian antique dealer at St. Paul, there was a masculine dash about their handkerchiefs. Once they disappeared altogether for the inside of a week in what I took to be their oldest clothes, and when they returned the older man had a contusion on his right cheekbone. They told me they had been over to Corsica. Had they enjoyed it? I asked.

“Quite barbaric,” the young man, Tony, said, but not, I thought, in praise.

He saw me looking at Stephen’s cheek and he added quickly, “We had an accident in the mountains.”

It was two days after that, just at sunset, that Poopy arrived with her husband. I was back at work on Rochester, sitting in an overcoat on my balcony, when a taxi drove up—I recognized the driver as someone who plied regularly from Nice airport. What I noticed first, because the passengers were still hidden, was the luggage, which was of bright blue and of an astonishing newness. Even the initials—rather absurdly PT—shone like newly minted coins. There were a large suitcase and a small suitcase and a hat-box, all of the same cerulean hue, and after that a respectable old leather case totally unsuited to air travel, the kind one inherits from a father, with half a label still left from Shepheard’s Hotel or the Valley of the Kings. Then the passenger emerged and I saw Poopy for the first time. Down below, the interior-decorators were watching too, and drinking Dubonnet.

She was a very tall girl, perhaps five feet nine, very slim, very young, with hair the colour of conkers, and her costume was as new as her luggage. She said, “Finalmente,” looking at the undistinguished façade with an air of rapture—or perhaps it was only the shape of her eyes. When I saw the young man I felt certain they were just married; it wouldn’t have surprised me if confetti had fallen out from the seams of their clothes. They were like a photograph in The Tatter; they had camera smiles for each other and an underlying nervousness. I was sure they had come straight from the reception, and that it had been a smart one, after a proper church wedding.

They made a very handsome couple as they hesitated a moment before going up the steps to the reception. The long beam of the Phare de la Garoupe brushed the water behind them, and the floodlighting went suddenly on outside the hotel as if the manager had been waiting for their arrival to turn it up. The two decorators sat there without drinking, and I noticed that the elder one had covered the contusion on his cheek with a very clean white handkerchief. They were not, of course, looking at the girl, but at the boy. He was over six feet tall and as slim as the girl, with a face that might have been cut on a coin, completely handsome and completely dead—but perhaps that was only an effect of his nerves. His clothes, too, I thought, had been bought for the occasion, the sports jacket with a double slit and the grey trousers cut a little narrowly to show off the long legs. It seemed to me that they were both too young to marry—I doubt if they had accumulated forty-five years between them—and I had a wild impulse to lean over the balcony and warn them away—“Not this hotel. Any hotel but this.” Perhaps I could have told them that the heating was insufficient or the hot water erratic or the food terrible, not that the English care much about food, but of course they would have paid me no attention—they were so obviously “booked,” and what an ageing lunatic I should have appeared in their eyes. (“One of those eccentric English types one finds abroad”—I could imagine the letter home.) This was the first time I wanted to interfere, and I didn’t know them at all. The second time it was already too late, but I think that I shall always regret that I did not give way to that madness. …

It had been the silence and attentiveness of those two down below which had frightened me, and the patch of white handkerchief hiding the shameful contusion. For the first time too I heard the hated name: “Shall we see the room, Poopy, or have a drink first?”

They decided to see the room, and the two glasses of Dubonnet clicked again into action.

I think she had more idea of how a honeymoon should be conducted than he had, because they were not seen again that night.

“You staying here long?” I asked them, conscious of how clumsily I constructed a conversation compared with their easy prattle.

“We had meant to leave tomorrow,” Stephen said, “but last night we changed our minds.”

“Last night?”

“It was such a beautiful day, wasn’t it? Oh, I said to Tony, surely we can leave poor dreary old London a little longer. It has an awful staying power—like a railway sandwich.”

“Are your clients so patient?”

“My dear, the clients? You never in your life saw such atrocities as we get from Brompton Square and like venue. It’s always the way. People who pay others to decorate for them have ghastly ...