I spent the next couple of days just mucking about, really, over at Jericho. There was no point in my making any definite effort to trace James until I had heard something, if I ever would, from the people at L’Hermitage. I’d give it a couple of days or so, I thought, and get down to thinking out my new property.

The weather was kind. I found my way about Saint-Basile-les-Pins in a short twenty minutes. It was a developers’ village; the only original part of it was a small chapel at a crossroads in the pine woods and a battered little bar-tabac called La Source. It had a single-meal menu, a zinc, six tables and a blaring radio. The people who ran it, a young man and his dispirited wife, were civil and almost welcoming. I ate in the restaurant obviously what they were having themselves that day. She didn’t seem to me to be the kind of woman who was about to cook two meals. There were children banging about, and the atmosphere was casual, friendly, incurious. I gathered, by the second day, that they had just bought the place, were not locals, had moved down from Arras in the north and were, as he said ruefully, more foreign there than I was.

‘They don’t like us from the north. Don’t like the accent. But my wife has a kind of consumption, and the dry air here is better for her breathing than up there. Too damp. The fogs in winter …’ He cleared my plates and said that there was cheese if I wanted it. I declined and finished my demi-carafe of not very good local wine.

All around La Source and its mournful little chapel, closed as it so happened because there was rot in the roof timbers, the pine woods were stuck about with hideous little Paris-rustic villas, each with a small fishpool, an arch, a flying buttress, roman-tiled roofs and chain-link fences. They sat like Disney-dainties in tiny plots of land, pottery cigalas on every wall, wreathed in an agony of wrought-iron gates and shutters. They were almost all summer rentals; a few pinched-looking aged people moved about slowly, wrapped in thick sweaters, anoraks and plastic hats. It was altogether very depressing: I couldn’t imagine, even in the heat of summer, that there was any joy or pleasure, laughter or music, in this sad, still, damp pine wood. I had a feeling that Madame at La Source might have been better off in Arras. At least there was air in the north. Down here, in this silent no-place, there was almost no air and no view. Hemmed in by tall trees, dark in winter, shaded gloom in summer, Saint-Basile-les-Pins had been developed by some bright spark because there was absolutely nothing else to be done with it.