Super-Cannes. Ali Smith

as Jane had promised, I was free of the metal brace. Now I could drive the Jaguar and give Jane a rest from the heavy steering wheel. Above all, I was able to walk, and keep up with her as we strolled down the Croisette towards the seafood restaurants of the Vieux Port.

      I counted the titanium claws that held the kneecap together. My wasted right calf was as thin as my forearm, and gave me a rolling, seadog gait. But exercise would strengthen the muscles. One day I would be able to work the heavy brake pedals of the Harvard and win back my private pilot’s licence.

      In the meantime I explored Eden-Olympia on foot, logging miles along the simulated nature trails that ended abruptly when they were no longer visible from the road. Ornamental pathways led to the electricity substations feeding power into the business park’s grid. Surrounded by chain-link fences, they stood in the forest clearings like mysterious and impassive presences. I circled the artificial lakes, with their eerily calm surfaces, or roamed around the vast car parks. The lines of silent vehicles might have belonged to a race who had migrated to the stars.

      By the early afternoon Charles’s e-mails brought me final proof pages, cheery gossip about the latest office romances, and queries over the editorial copy of our aviation journals. I missed Jane, who never returned home before seven o’clock, but I was happy to doze on the sun-lounger and listen to the droning engines of light aircraft trailing their pennants across the cloudless sky, news from the sun of furniture sales, swimming pool discounts and the opening of a new aqua-park.

      A lawnmower sounded from a nearby garden as the roving groundstaff trimmed the grass. Sprinklers hissed a gentle drizzle across the flowerbeds of the next-door villa, occupied by Professor Ito Yasuda, chairman of a Japanese finance house, his serious-faced wife and even more serious three-year-old son. On Sundays they played tennis together, a process as stylized as a Kabuki drama, which involved endless ball retrieval and virtually no court action.

      My other neighbours were a Belgian couple, the Delages, among the earliest colonists of the business park. Alain Delage was the chief financial officer of the Eden-Olympia holding company, a tall, preoccupied accountant lost somewhere behind the lenses of his rimless glasses. But he was kind enough to give Jane a lift to the clinic each morning. I had met the couple, Delage and his pale, watchful wife Simone, but our brief conversation across the roof of their Mercedes would have been more expressive if carried out by semaphore between distant peaks in the Alpes-Maritimes.

      Intimacy and neighbourliness were not features of everyday life at Eden-Olympia. An invisible infrastructure took the place of traditional civic virtues. At Eden-Olympia there were no parking problems, no fears of burglars or purse-snatchers, no rapes or muggings. The top-drawer professionals no longer needed to devote a moment’s thought to each other, and had dispensed with the checks and balances of community life. There were no town councils or magistrates’ courts, no citizens’ advice bureaux. Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.

      By the afternoon, all this tolerance and good behaviour left me feeling deeply bored. After a light lunch I would set off on foot around the business park. A few days earlier, while circling one of the largest lakes, I came across a curious human settlement in the woods. This was the lavish sports centre advertised in the brochure, a complex that contained two swimming pools, saunas, squash courts and a running track. It was fully staffed by helpful young instructors, but otherwise deserted. I assumed that the senior administrators at Eden-Olympia were too tired after a day’s work to do more than eat supper from a tray and doze in front of the adult movie channel.

      Jane had been swiftly drawn into this regime of fulfilment through work. She was stimulated by the new corporate ethos, so different from the shambles of a London teaching hospital. Guy’s was a city under siege, filled with the sick, the lost and the confused, a shuffling host perpetually on the move in a vast internal migration.

      At Eden-Olympia the medical staff were calm and unrushed, as I found when my knee was X-rayed. The lakeside reception area resembled the sun deck of a cruise liner. The cheerful young Frenchwoman who settled me on the X-ray table chatted to me about my flying days in the RAF and her own hang-gliding weekends at Roquebrune. I had the strong sense that we were friends who had known each other for years. Yet I had forgotten her face within seconds of leaving her.

      Jane met me afterwards, barely recognizable in trim business suit and court shoes. I thought fondly of the hippie doctor I had met at Guy’s, a chocolate bar next to her stethoscope in the frayed pocket of an off-white lab coat. She introduced me to the director of the clinic, Professor Kalman, a distracted but amiable man in his sixties who was a specialist in preventive medicine but had somehow failed to anticipate the outbreak of sudden death on his own premises. Jane accepted his generous compliments, and then proudly showed me round her comfortable suite with its bathroom and kitchen, almost as much a home as the villa we shared. Four months earlier it had been David Greenwood’s office, and it surprised me that he had seen enough of his colleagues to dislike them, let alone set about killing them.

      That evening, I drove Jane into Cannes. Holding her arm, I swung myself through the crowds on the Croisette. We drank too many Tom Collinses on the Carlton terrace, ate seafood from metal platters at a quayside restaurant, feeding each other titbits of petite friture, sea urchins and crayfish. We wandered tipsily around the Vieux Port, and I remade Jane’s lipstick before showing her off to the Arabs lolling with their women on the white-leather after-decks of their rented yachts. I knew we were very happy, but at the same time I felt that we were extras in a tourist film.

      A blind shivered behind a bedroom window on the first floor of the Delages’ house. It rose and fell, manipulated by someone tired of the darkness but unimpressed by the possibilities of the day. The blinds settled themselves, and Simone Delage stepped onto the balcony, a dressing gown around her shoulders. She had slept late, and her cheeks seemed blanched by whatever exhausting dreams had drained away the night. Her handsome face, as grave as a cancer specialist’s secretary, showed no expression when she noticed the Riviera coast, and her eyes scanned the contour lines of the Alpes-Maritimes in the way she might have glanced through a suspect biopsy. She had scarcely acknowledged my existence, and often sunbathed naked on the balcony, as if the anonymity of Eden-Olympia made her invisible to her neighbours.

      Was she aware of me watching her? I suspected that this private and moody woman – a trained mathematician, according to Jane, with a doctorate in statistics – took a perverse pleasure in exposing herself to the solitary man lying by the pool with his apparently withered leg. At night she and her accountant husband would wander naked around their bedroom, visible through the slatted blinds like figures on a television screen, unconcerned by their own bodies as they discussed sink funds and tax shelters.

      She loosened her robe, then noticed a light aircraft that was circling Eden-Olympia, advertising a satellite-dish agency in Cagnes-sur-Mer. She retreated into her bedroom and stood by the window, smearing face cream onto her cheeks with an automatic hand.

      I put aside the page proofs and watched the Cessna climb the hills above Grasse, its pennant shivering in the cooler air. The ligaments in my knee had begun to ache — more a response to stress, Jane told me, than a sign of recurring infection. I missed my old Harvard, now abandoned in its storage hangar at Elstree aerodrome, which I had bought by telephone at an aircraft auction in Toulouse. Once it had trained Nato pilots in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and later posed as Zero and Focke-Wulf fighters in countless war movies. Traces of its film-studio livery, the rising-sun roundels and iron crosses, clung to its fuselage. I spent countless hours refitting the heavy-winged trainer, with its huge radial engine, pitch prop and retractable undercarriage, but I knew now that I might never take its controls again.

      The Harvard had nearly killed me, on an autumn weekend a year earlier, when I set off to an aviation fair near St-Malo. Distracted by gossip of Charles’s faltering marriage, and the financial settlement that would virtually break the firm, I had forgotten to file a flight plan. The tower recalled me, and I missed my take-off slot. Impatient to be airborne, I was heavy-handed with the throttle and pitch settings. As the powerful engine hurled me down the runway