Low life
Greene and pleasant land
Jeffrey Bernard
This year's break was definitely beta minus and I have just come home after only five days on the Cote d'Azur. I was shoved from hotel to hotel. Every one that I booked into told me that I could only have a room for one night because they were booked up, usually by groups of Germans. And what awful-looking groups. I should have thought that they would want to get away from each other, but it must be ingrained in them to want to stamp en masse all over Europe.
To choose Nice as a base was not very clever of me either. The streets were jammed with window-shoppers wearing silly teeshirts and a vodka was £4. I should have saved my money for the forthcoming sunset in a nursing home.
The best thing that happened was meet- ing Graham Greene again. I had lost his telephone number but I went to Antibes one morning on the off chance of seeing him and, lo and behold, there he was sitting in his favourite restaurant and he made me welcome. It is not only a pleasure to know the man but also a privilege. He said some very amusing things about some well-known people and it is bad luck on you that I won't repeat them. I do not think it would be right but there must have been some burning ears in Grub Street. He may be moving to Switzerland in which case I shall have to overcome my prejudice about that country to go on the piste with him.
The next day I travelled along the coast in the opposite direction and visited Ro- quebrune at Cap St Martin before going to Menton for lunch. Dear God, there is something awful about resorts. But the lunch was memorable and the helpings very generous: six grilled sardines followed by six lamb cutlets. A sniff of the claret told me that it was so good that I didn't give it the chance to breathe. Incidentally, I don't see why the wine is as expensive as 'Would you like to tcll me who has been calling you a fruit cake?' it is in the country that makes the stuff. Perhaps they can see you coming.
That evening an odd thing happened. I went to a bar that had quickly become my favourite in Nice and to my utter amaze- ment a middle-aged homosexual actually made a pass at me. You don't need to be fluent in French to know when somebody is making a pass. Being as vain as the next man I felt rather flattered and then it slowly dawned on me that the man must have been a necrophiliac. I took a close look at myself in the mirror and to be sure all that is left of me is my hair. But he bought me a drink and he may be the first and only Frenchman to have done that.
When he realised that I was not gay — I was paying a lot of attention to two stunning-looking women at the next table — he tried to fix me up with one of them. They were prostitutes. I hadn't realised, since you don't see them any more in London and I am not used to them ever since Lord Wolfenden banished them from the public view. But what is very odd is that in spite of all the nuts, rogues and villains I have met over the years never have I come across a homosexual pimp before. When I turned him down and then the two lovely whores he shrugged as if to say I was the last straw, mad and English as well. I am a bad ambassador perhaps and no wonder the French think we are lousy lovers, staid and unromantic. Perhaps all three of them took some consolation from the fact that I look as though I am HIV positive.
On reflection I rather wish I had gone with one of the two women. I haven't done that since 1949 in Paris when I was 17 and John Minton paid for my visits to see Mimi in her room two floors above a café called Ambience. I must have been very fit then because I remember being up and down her stairs like a rat up a drain. But I am no longer a rat and in any race I now compete in I usually end up as an 'also ran'.
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