He adjusted his woollen bonnet and straightened the collar of his old check shirt. ‘C'est vrai?’

  Yes, I said, absolutely true. His name had even appeared in The Sunday Times. Perhaps I should organize a signing session for him.

  ‘Ah, Monsieur Peter, vous rigolez.’ But I could see that he was not displeased at the idea, and he went off holding his book as carefully as if he were carrying a fragile and expensive bidet.

  The voice on the other end of the phone could have come all the way from Sydney, cheerful and twangy.

  ‘G'day. Wally Storer here, from the English Bookshop in

  Cannes; plenty of Poms down here, and your book's going nicely. How about coming along to sign a few copies one day during the Film Festival?’

  I have always had doubts about the literary appetite of people in the film business. An old friend who works in Hollywood confessed that he had read one book in six years, and he was considered a borderline intellectual. If you mention Rimbaud in Bel Air it is assumed that you're talking about Sylvester Stallone. I didn't hold out much hope for writer's cramp and mammoth sales. Even so, I thought it would be fun. Maybe I'd see a star, or a topless sensation on the Croisette or – the rarest sight in town – a smiling waiter on the Carlton Hotel terrace. I said I'd be happy to come.

  It was hot and sunny, bad weather for bookshops, as I joined the traffic crawling into town. Bright new signs on the lamp-posts announced that Cannes was twinned with Beverly Hills, and I could imagine the mayors finding endless excuses to exchange visits in the cause of municipal friendship and the shared interest of taking free holidays.

  Outside the Palais des Festivals, what seemed to be the entire Cannes police force, equipped with revolvers, walkie-talkies and sunglasses, was busy creating a series of traffic jams and making sure Clint Eastwood didn't get kidnapped. With the skill that comes from many years of practice, they directed cars into snarling knots and then whistled at them furiously, sending the drivers off to the next snarling knot with irritated jerks of the head. It took me ten minutes to cover fifty yards. When I finally reached the vast underground car park, I saw that an earlier victim of the chaos had scrawled on the wall: ‘Cannes is a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to spend the day here.’

  I went to a café on the Croisette to have breakfast and look for stars. Everyone else was doing the same thing. Never have so many unknowns inspected each other so carefully. All the girls were wearing pouts and trying to look bored. All the men carried listings of the films to be shown that day, and made important notes in the margins. One or two cordless phones were placed with casual prominence next to their croissants, and everyone displayed plastic delegates' badges and the obligatory Festival bag, with Le Film Français/Cannes 90 printed on it. There was no mention of Le Film Américain or Le Film Anglais, but I suppose that's one of the advantages of being the host on these occasions; you get to choose the bags.

  The Croisette was planted with a forest of posters carrying the names of actors, directors, producers and, for all I knew, hairdressers. They were positioned directly opposite the big hotels, presumably so that the hero of each poster could see his name every morning from his bedroom window before having the traditional Cannes breakfast of ham and ego. A feeling of hustle was in the air, of big deals and big bucks, and the groups of hustlers walking along the Croisette were oblivious to the old beggar sitting on the pavement outside the Hotel Majestic with a lonely 20-centime piece in his upturned, tattered hat.

  Fortified by my dose of glamour, I left the moguls to it and went down the narrow Rue Bivouac-Napoléon to the English Bookshop, preparing for the odd experience of sitting in a shop window hoping for someone – anyone – to ask me to sign a book. I'd done one or two signings before. They were unnerving occasions when I had been stared at from a safe distance by people who were unwilling to venture within talking range. Perhaps they thought I'd bite. Little did they know the relief authors feel when a brave spirit approaches the table. After a few minutes of sitting on your own, you're ready to clutch at any straw and sign anything from books and photographs to old copies of Nice-Matin and cheques.

  Fortunately, Wally Storer and his wife had anticipated author's funk and had stocked the shop with friends and customers. What inducements they had used to drag them off the beach I didn't know, but I was grateful to be kept busy, and I even started to wish I'd brought Monsieur Menicucci along. He would have answered much better than I why French drains behave and smell the way they do, which I found to be a topic of common curiosity among English expatriates. Isn't it strange, they said, that the French are so good at sophisticated technology like highspeed trains and electronic telephone systems and Concorde, and yet revert to the eighteenth century in their bathrooms. Only the other day, an elderly lady informed me, she had flushed her lavatory and the remains of a mixed salad had surfaced in the bowl. Really, it was too bad. That sort of thing would never happen in Cheltenham.

  The signing came to an end, and we went round the corner to a bar. Americans and English outnumbered the natives, but natives in Cannes are few and far between. Even many of the police, I was told, are imported from Corsica.

  They were still patrolling the Croisette when I left, toying with the traffic and eyeing the girls who sauntered by in varying stages of undress. The old beggar hadn't moved from his pitch in front of the Majestic, and his 20-centime piece was as lonely as ever. I dropped some coins in his hat and he told me, in English, to have a nice day. I wondered if he was practising for Beverly Hills.

  7

  Passing 50 Without Breaking the Speed Limit

  I have never paid any great attention to my birthdays, even those which marked the accomplishment of having tottered through another ten years of life. I was working on the day I turned thirty, I was working on the day I turned forty, and I was quite happy at the thought of working on my fiftieth birthday. But it was not to be. Madame my wife had different ideas.

  ‘You're going to be half a hundred,’ she said. ‘Considering the amount of wine you drink, that is some kind of achievement. We should celebrate.’

  There is no arguing with her when she has a certain set to her chin, and so we talked about how and where the deed should be done. I might have known that my wife had already arranged it; she was listening to my suggestions – a trip to Aix, a déjeuner flottant in the pool, a day by the sea at Cassis – out of politeness. When I ran out of inspiration, she moved in. A picnic in the Lubéron, she said, with a few close friends. That was the way to celebrate a birthday in Provence. She painted lyrical pictures of a sun-dappled glade in the forest. I wouldn't even have to wear long trousers. I'd love it.

  I couldn't imagine loving a picnic. My picnic experiences, limited as they had been to England, had left memories of rising damp creeping up the spine from permanently moist earth, of ants disputing with me over the food, of tepid white wine and of scuttling for shelter when the inevitable cloud arrived overhead and burst on top of us. I loathed picnics. Rather ungraciously, I said so.

  This one, said my wife, would be different. She had it all worked out. In fact, she was in deep consultation with Maurice, and what she had in mind would be not only civilized but highly picturesque, an occasion to rival Glyndebourne on a dry day.

  Maurice, the chef and owner of the Auberge de la Loube in Buoux and a serious horse-fancier, had over the years collected and restored two or three nineteenth-century calèches, or open carriages, and a horse-drawn limousine, a stagecoach, une vraie diligence. He was now offering his more adventurous clients the chance to trot to lunch. I would love it.

  I recognize inevitability when it stares me in the face, and it was settled. We invited eight friends and kept our fingers crossed, less tightly than we would have done in England, for fine weather. Although it had rained only once since early April, two months before, June in Provence is unpredictable and sometimes wet.

  But when I woke and went out into the courtyard, the seven o'clock sky was a never-ending blue, the colour of a Gauloise packet. The flagstones were warm under my bare feet, and our resident lizards had already taken up their sunbathing positions, flattened and motionless against the wall of the house. Just to get up to a morning like this was enough of a birthday present.

  The beginning of a hot summer day in the Lubéron, sitting on the terrace with a bowl of café crème, the bees rummaging in the lavender and the light turning the forest to a dark burnished green, is better than waking up suddenly rich. Warmth gives me a sense of physical well-being and optimism; I didn't feel a day older than forty-nine, and looking down at ten brown toes I hoped I'd be doing exactly the same thing on my sixtieth birthday.

  A little later, as warmth was turning into heat, the hum-buzz of the bees was blotted out by the clatter of a diesel engine, and I watched as a venerable open-top Land Rover, painted camouflage green, panted up the drive and stopped in a cloud of dust. It was Bennett, looking like the reconnaissance scout from a Long Range Desert Group – shorts and shirt of military cut, tank commander sunglasses, vehicle festooned with jerricans and kitbags, face deeply tanned. Only the headgear, a Louis Vuitton baseball cap, would have been out of place at El Alamein. He had crossed enemy lines on the main N100 road, successfully invaded Ménerbes and was now ready for the final push into the mountains.

  ‘My God, you're looking old,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I make a quick call? I left my swimming trunks at the house where I was staying last night. They're khaki, like General Noriega's underpants. Very unusual. I'd hate to lose them.’

  While Bennett was on the phone, we rounded up our two house guests and three dogs and packed them in the car for the drive up to Buoux, where we were meeting the others. Bennett came out of the house and adjusted his baseball cap against the glare, and we set off in convoy, the Land Rover and its chauffeur attracting considerable interest from the peasants, waist-deep in the vines on either side of the road.

  After Bonnieux, the scenery became wilder and harsher, vines giving way to rock and scrub oak and purple-striped lavender fields. There were no cars and no houses. We could have been a hundred miles away from the chic villages of the Lubéron, and it pleased me to think that so much savage, empty country still existed. It would be a long time before there was a Souleiado boutique or a real estate agent's office up here.

  We turned down into the deep valley. Buoux dozed. The dog who lives on the woodpile just past the Mairie opened one eye and barked perfunctorily, and a child holding a kitten looked up, small white saucers in a round brown face, at the unusual sight of traffic.

  The area round the Auberge resembled a casting session for a film which had not quite decided on plot, characters, wardrobe or period. There was a white suit and a wide-brimmed Panama, there were shorts and espadrilles, a silk dress, a Mexican peon's outfit, scarves and bright shawls, hats of various colours and ages, one immaculately turned out baby and, leaping from his Land Rover to supervise kit inspection, our man from the desert.

  Maurice appeared from the horses' parking area, smiling at us and the glorious weather. He was dressed in his Provençal Sunday best – white shirt and trousers, black bootlace tie, plum red waistcoat and an old flat straw hat. His friend, who was to drive the second carriage, was also in white, set off by thick crimson braces and a magnificent salt-and-pepper moustache, a dead ringer for Yves Montand in Jean de Florette.

  ‘Venez!’ said Maurice. ‘Come and see the horses.’ He led us through the garden, asking about the state of our appetites. The advance party had just left by van to set up the picnic, and there was a feast on board, enough to feed the whole of Buoux.

  The horses were tethered in the shade, coats glossy, manes and tails coiffed. One of them whinnied and nosed at Maurice's waistcoat, looking for a sugar lump. The youngest guest, perched on her father's shoulders, gurgled at the sight of such a monster and leaned forward to poke one tentative pink finger into its shining chestnut flank. The horse mistook her for a fly, and whisked a long tail.

  We watched as Maurice and Yves Montand hitched up the horses to the open caléche, black trimmed with red, and the seven-seater diligence, red trimmed with black – both of them oiled and waxed and buffed to a state of showroom finish. Maurice had spent all winter working on them and they were, as he said, ‘impecc’. The only modern addition was a vintage car horn the size and shape of a bugle, for use when overtaking less highly-tuned carriages, and to éclater any chickens who were thinking of crossing the road.

  ‘Allez! Montez!’

  We climbed in and moved off, observing the speed limit through the village. The dog on the woodpile barked goodbye, and we headed out into open country.

  To travel in this way is to make you regret the invention of the car. There is a different view of everything, more commanding and somehow more interesting. There is a comfortable, swaying rhythm as the suspension adjusts to the gait of the horse and the changes of camber and surface. There is a pleasant background of old-fashioned noises as the harness creaks and the hooves clop and the steel rims of the wheels crunch the grit on the road. There is the parfum – a blend of warm horse, saddle soap, wood varnish and the smells of the fields that come to the nose unobstructed by windows. And there is the speed, or lack of it, which allows you time to look. In a car you're in a fast room. You see a blur, an impression; you're insulated from the countryside. In a carriage, you're part of it.

  ‘Trottez!’ Maurice flicked the horse's rump with the whip and we changed into second gear. ‘She's lazy, this one,’ he said, ‘and greedy. She goes more quickly on the way back, when she knows she will eat.’ A long scarlet field, dense with poppies, unrolled slowly in the valley below us, and in the sky a buzzard wheeled and dipped, wings outstretched and still, balancing on air. As I watched it, a cloud covered the sun for a few moments and I could see the rays coming out behind it in dark, almost black spokes.

  We turned off the road and followed a narrow track that twisted through the trees, and the sound of the horse's hooves was muffled by ragged, fragrant carpets of wild

  thyme. I asked Maurice how he found his picnic spots, and he told me that every week, on his day off, he had been exploring on horseback, sometimes riding for hours without meeting anyone.

  ‘We're only twenty minutes from Apt,’ he said, ‘but nobody comes up here. Just me and the rabbits.’

  The forest became thicker and the track narrower, barely wide enough for the carriage. Then we turned past an outcrop of rock, ducked through a tunnel of branches and there it was, spread out before us. Lunch.

  ‘Voilà!’ said Maurice. ‘Le restaurant est ouvert.’

  At the end of a flat, grassy clearing, a table for ten had been set in the shade of a sprawling scrub oak – a table with a crisp white cloth, with ice buckets, with starched cotton napkins, with bowls of fresh flowers, with proper cutlery and proper chairs. Behind the table, a long-empty dry stone borie had been turned into a rustic bar, and I heard the pop of corks and clink of glasses. All my misgivings about picnics vanished. This was as far away from a damp bottom and ant sandwiches as one could possibly imagine.

  Maurice roped off an area of the clearing and unhitched the horses, who rolled on their backs in the grass with the relief of two elderly ladies released from their corsets. The blinds of the diligence were drawn, and the youngest guest retired for a nap while the rest of us had a restorative glass of chilled peach champagne in the tiny open courtyard of the borie.

  There is nothing like a comfortable adventure to put people in a good humour, and Maurice could hardly have hoped for a more appreciative audience. He deserved it. He had thought of everything, from an abundance of ice to toothpicks and, as he had said, there was no danger of us going hungry. He called us to sit down and gave us a guided tour of the first course: melon, quails' eggs, creamy brandade of cod, game pâté, stuffed tomatoes, marinated mushrooms – on and on it went, stretching from one end of the table to the other, looking, under the filtered sunlight, like an implausibly perfect still life from the pages of one of those art cookbooks that never sees the kitchen.

  There was a short pause while I was presented with the heaviest and most accurate birthday card I had ever received – a round metal road sign, two feet in diameter, with a blunt reminder of the passing years in large black numerals. 50. Bon anniversaire and bon appétit.

  We ate and drank like heroes, getting up in between courses, glasses in hand, to take recuperative strolls before coming back to the table for more. Lunch lasted nearly four hours, and by the time coffee and the birthday gâteau were served we had reached that state of contented inertia where even conversation is conducted in slow motion. The world was a rosy place. Fifty was a wonderful age.

  The horses must have noticed the increased weight of their loads as they pulled out of the clearing towards the road that led back to Buoux, but they seemed more frisky than they had been in the morning, tossing their heads and testing the air through twitching nostrils. Sudden gusts of wind plucked at straw hats, and there was a growl of thunder. Within minutes, the blue sky turned black.

  We had just reached the road when the hail started pea-sized and painful, stinging the tops of our heads in the open calèche and bouncing off the broad wet back of the horse. She needed no encouragement from the whip. She was going full tilt, head down, body steaming. The brim of Maurice's straw hat had collapsed into bedraggled ears and his red waistcoat was bleeding on to his trousers. He laughed, and shouted into the wind, ‘Oh là là, le pique-nique Anglais!’

  My wife and I made a tent out of a travel blanket, and looked back to see how the diligence was dealing with the downpour. The top was obviously less weatherproof than it looked. Hands appeared from the side, tipping hatfuls of water overboard.