My grandson and I are reprising the 1968 film The Swimmer. Burt Lancaster is an advertising executive at a pool party who attempts to swim eight miles home via his affluent Connecticut neighbourhood’s outdoor swimming pools. We don’t have a pool, but our friends are generous with offers to use theirs. Our aim is to take advantage of these offers by swimming in a different pool every day and working our way through the expat society of this remote part of the Provence.
It’s Oscar’s first trip abroad; he is staying for a fortnight. Today was day four. The effect of the contrast in his plastic mind between a flat above a hairdressers in Newton Abbot in Devon and a daily succession of private pools in a 42°C heatwave in the hills of Provence must be very great. He is red in the face but so far appears to be taking it all in his stride. The enormous, martial, intelligent ants have impressed him so far; also this one particular yellow-and-black lizard, inscrutable and pacific, which he persecutes daily without mercy until it loses its rag and attacks him. Once he brought it into the house with its toothless mouth clamped on the end of a stick.
On his first morning here we packed our Speedos and swam in a pool in front of a magnificent old pantiled Provençal villa. The owners were out, but had kindly left us a glass jug of iced water on a tray with two glasses on a filigree-wrought iron table. The jug was a masterpiece of 1950s design with a curving lip to hold back the ice cubes as you pour. A beautifully elaborate lace doily weighted with coloured beads was draped across the top to keep the flies off.
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