Super-Cannes. Ali Smith
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new France. Ten miles to the north-east of Cannes, in the wooded hills between Valbonne and the coast, it was the latest of the development zones that had begun with Sophia-Antipolis and would soon turn Provence into Europe’s silicon valley.
Lured by tax concessions and a climate like northern California’s, dozens of multinational companies had moved into the business park that now employed over ten thousand people. The senior managements were the most highly paid professional caste in Europe, a new elite of administrators, énarques and scientific entrepreneurs. The lavish brochure enthused over a vision of glass and titanium straight from the drawing boards of Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry, but softened by landscaped parks and artificial lakes, a humane version of Corbusier’s radiant city. Even my sceptical eye was prepared to blink.
Studying the maps, I propped the brochure on my knee-brace as Jane steered the Jaguar through the afternoon traffic on the Grasse road. The stench of raw perfume from a nearby factory filled the car, but Jane wound down her window and inhaled deeply. Our disreputable evening in Arles had revived her, swaying arm in arm with me after a drunken dinner, exploring what I insisted was Van Gogh’s canal but turned out to be a stagnant storm-drain behind the archbishop’s palace. We had both been eager to get back to our hotel and the well-upholstered bed.
The colour was returning to her face, for almost the first time since our wedding. Her watchful eyes and toneless skin were like those of an over-gifted child. Before meeting me, Jane had spent too many hours in elevators and pathology rooms, and the pallor of strip lighting haunted her like a twelve-year-old’s memories of a bad dream. But once we left Arles she rose to the challenge of Eden-Olympia, and I could hear her muttering to herself, rehearsing the risqué backchat that so intrigued the younger consultants at Guy’s.
‘Cheer me up, Paul. How much further?’
‘The last mile – always the shortest one. You must be tired.’
‘It’s been a lot of fun, more than I thought. Why do I feel so nervous?’
‘You don’t.’ I pressed her hand against the wheel, steering the Jaguar around an elderly woman cyclist, panniers filled with baguettes. ‘Jane, you’ll be a huge success. You’re the youngest doctor on the staff, and the prettiest. You’re efficient, hardworking … what else?’
‘Slightly insolent?’
‘You’ll do them good. Anyway, it’s only a business park.’
‘I can see it – straight ahead. My God, it’s the size of Florida…’
The first office buildings in the Eden-Olympia complex were emerging from the slopes of a long valley filled with eucalyptus trees and umbrella pines. Beyond them were the rooftops of Cannes and the Îles de Lérins, a glimpse of the Mediterranean that never failed to lift my heart.
‘Paul, down there …’ Jane pointed to the hillside, raising a finger still grimy from changing a spark plug. Hundreds of blue ovals trembled like damaged retinas in the Provençal sun. ‘What are they – rain-traps? Tanks full of Chanel Number 5? And those people. They seem to be naked.’
‘They are naked. Or nearly. Swimming pools, Jane. Take a good look at your new patients.’ I watched one senior executive in the garden of his villa, a suntanned man in his fifties with a slim, almost adolescent body, springing lightly on his diving board. ‘A healthy crowd … I can’t imagine anyone here actually bothering to fall ill.’
‘Don’t be too sure. I’ll be busier than you think. The place is probably riddled with airport TB and the kind of viruses that only breed in executive jets. And as for their minds …’
I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lost behind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycads and bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d’Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.
We left the Cannes road and turned onto a landscaped avenue that led towards the gates of the business park. The noise from the Jaguar’s tyres fell away as they rolled across a more expensive surface material – milled ivory, at the very least – that would soothe the stressed wheels of the stretch limousines. A palisade of Canary palms formed an honour guard along the verges, while beds of golden cannas flamed from the central reservation.
Despite this gaudy welcome, wealth at Eden-Olympia displayed the old-money discretion that the mercantile rich of the information age had decided to observe at the start of a new millennium. The glass and gun-metal office blocks were set well apart from each other, separated by artificial lakes and forested traffic islands where a latter-day Crusoe could have found comfortable refuge. The faint mist over the lakes and the warm sun reflected from the glass curtain-walling seemed to generate an opal haze, as if the entire business park were a mirage, a virtual city conjured into the pine-scented air like a son-et-lumière vision of a new Versailles.
But work and the realities of corporate life anchored Eden-Olympia to the ground. The buildings wore their ventilation shafts and cable conduits on their external walls, an open reminder of Eden-Olympia’s dedication to company profits and the approval of its shareholders. The satellite dishes on the roofs resembled the wimples of an order of computer-literate nuns, committed to the sanctity of the workstation and the pieties of the spreadsheet.
Gravel tore at the Jaguar’s tyres. Waking from her reverie, Jane braked sharply before we reached the gatehouse, sending the old sports saloon into a giddy shunt. Two uniformed guards looked up from their electronic screens, but Jane ignored them, readying a two-finger salute that I managed to conceal.
‘Jane, they’re on our side.’
‘Sorry, Paul. I know, we want them to like me. Open your window.’ She grimaced at herself in the rear-view mirror. ‘That cheap perfume. I smell like a tart …’
‘The most gorgeous tart on the Côte d’Azur. They’re lucky to have you.’ I tried to settle her hands as she fretted over her lipstick, obsessively fine-tuning herself. I could feel the perspiration on her wrists, brought out by more than the August sun. ‘Jane, we don’t have to be here. Even now, you can change your mind. We can drive away, cross the border into Italy, spend a week in San Remo …’
‘Paul? I’m not your daughter.’ Jane frowned at me, as if I were an intruder into her world, then touched my cheek forgivingly. ‘I signed a six-month contract. Since David died they’ve had recruitment problems. They need me …’
I watched Jane make a conscious effort to relax, treating herself like an overwrought patient in casualty. She lay against the worn leather seating, breathing the bright air into her lungs and slowly exhaling. She patted the dark bang that hid her bold forehead and always sprang forward like a coxcomb at the first hint of stress. I remembered the calm and sensible way in which she had helped the trainee nurses who fumbled with my knee-brace. At heart she was the subversive schoolgirl, the awkward-squad recruiter with a primed grenade in her locker, who saw through the stuffy conventions of boarding school and teaching hospital but was always kind enough to rescue a flustered housekeeper or ward orderly.
Now, at Eden-Olympia, it was her turn to be intimidated by the ultra-cerebral French physicians who would soon be her colleagues. She sat forward, chin raised, fingers drumming a threatening tattoo on the steering wheel. Satisfied that she could hold her own, she noticed me massaging my knee.
‘Paul, that awful brace … we’ll get it off in a few days. You’ve been in agony and never complained.’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help with the driving. Cannes is a long way from Maida Vale.’
‘Everywhere is a long way from Maida Vale. I’m glad we came.’ She gazed at the office buildings that climbed the valley slopes, and at the satellite dishes distilling their streams of information from the sky. ‘It all looks very civilized, in a Euro kind of way. Not a drifting leaf in sight. It’s hard to believe anyone