Low life | 4 April 2019

We have a gardener, Philippe, who comes once a week. He lives in a ruin a little way down the cliff, which he is carefully and sensitively restoring using traditional materials and techniques. Philippe is in his late twenties, single, tall, slender, beautiful, hard-working, ambitious, educated, courtly, gentle, speaks good English and has a ponytail and a plaid leather bracelet on his tawny wrist. Catriona thinks he’s an oracle, as well as beautiful, and goes to him for advice on practical matters of every sort, as if she thinks that if we were all dominos I’d be a double blank and Philippe an ivory-backed double six.

He stepped in for a gin-and-tonic the other day. Catriona’s oldest girlfriend was staying. Also Catriona’s youngest daughter. The three of them received him in the living room. I was upstairs in bed, ill, but could hear everything. Confronted by these three Glaswegian women trying to rein in their vivacity, Philippe was undeviatingly polite and the conversation remained well within the bounds of respectability. So the three women adroitly got him on to their next favourite subject, which is babies. Yes, Philippe adores babies too, we discovered. In fact he’s the marrying kind and he simply can’t wait to have babies of his own. No, alas, he hasn’t found anyone yet.

Detectable beneath the three Glaswegian women’s baby talk, however, was the hilarious conviction that if Philippe ever got them on their own he could do whatever he liked to them, their total ruination not a problem. After he’d left, they waited until his lovely long legs had taken him out of earshot and shrieked for joy. Catriona’s oldest and best friend seriously claimed that she had almost wet her pants.

Three weeks ago Catriona bought a ‘Magic Hose’ to replace the existing sun-hardened plastic one.