Super-Cannes

by J. G. Ballard

  ‘Even better. Agree, Paul?’

  ‘Totally.’ I knew Jane was teasing the psychiatrist. ‘We’ve been here ten minutes and haven’t seen a soul.’

  ‘That’s misleading.’ Penrose pointed to two nearby office buildings, each only six storeys high but effectively a skyscraper lying on its side. ‘They’re all at their computer screens and lab benches. Sadly, you can forget Cyril Connolly here. Forget tuberoses and sapphirine seas.’

  ‘I have. Who are the tenants? Big international companies?’

  ‘The biggest. Mitsui, Siemens, Unilever, Sumitomo, plus all the French giants – Elf-Aquitaine, Carrefour, Rhône-Poulenc. Along with a host of smaller firms: investment brokers, bioengineering outfits, design consultancies. I sound like a salesman, but when you get to know it you’ll see what a remarkable place Eden-Olympia really is. In its way this is a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future.’

  I turned to glimpse a vast car park concealed behind a screen of cypresses, vehicles nose to tail like a week’s unsold output at a Renault plant. Somewhere in the office buildings the owners of these cars were staring at their screens, designing a new cathedral or cineplex, or watching the world’s spot prices. The sense of focused brainpower was bracing, but subtly unsettling.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ I told Penrose. ‘It beats waiting at tables or working as a checkout girl at a Monoprix. Where do you get the staff?’

  ‘We train them. They’re our biggest investment. It’s not so much their craft skills as their attitude to an entirely new workplace culture. Eden-Olympia isn’t just another business park. We’re an ideas laboratory for the new millennium.’

  ‘The “intelligent” city? I’ve read the brochure.’

  ‘Good. I helped to write it. Every office, house and apartment cabled up to the world’s major stockbrokers, the nearest Tiffany’s and the emergency call-out units at the clinic.’

  ‘Paul, are you listening?’ Jane’s elbow nudged me in the ribs. ‘You can sell your British Aerospace shares, buy me a new diamond choker and have a heart attack at the same time …’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Penrose lay back, nostrils pressed to the worn seats, snuffling at the old leather smells. ‘In fact, Paul, once you’ve settled in I strongly recommend a heart attack. Or a nervous breakdown. The paramedics will know everything about you – blood groups, clotting factors, attention-deficit disorders. If you’re desperate, you could even have a plane crash – there’s a small airport at Cannes-Mandelieu.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ I searched for my cigarettes, tempted to fill the car with the throat-catching fumes of a Gitanes. Penrose’s teasing was part camouflage, part initiation rite, and irritating on both counts. I thought of David Greenwood and wondered whether this aggressive humour had helped the desperate young Englishman. ‘What about emergencies of a different kind?’

  ‘Such as? We can cope with anything. This is the only place in the world where you can get insurance against acts of God.’

  I felt Jane stiffen warningly against the steering wheel. The nearside front tyre scraped the kerb, but I pressed on.

  ‘Psychological problems? You do have them?’

  ‘Very few.’ Penrose gripped the back of Jane’s seat, deliberately exposing his bitten fingernails. At the same time his face had hardened, the heavy bones of his cheeks and jaw pushing through the conversational tics and grimaces, a curious display of aggression and self-doubt. ‘But a few, yes. Enough to make my job interesting. On the whole, people are happy and content.’

  ‘And you regret that?’

  ‘Never. I’m here to help them fulfil themselves.’ Penrose winked into Jane’s rear-view mirror. ‘You’d be surprised by how easy that is. First, make the office feel like a home – if anything, the real home.’

  ‘And their flats and houses?’ Jane pointed to a cluster of executive villas in the pueblo style. ‘What does that make them?’

  ‘Service stations, where people sleep and ablute. The human body as an obedient coolie, to be fed and hosed down, and given just enough sexual freedom to sedate itself. We’ve concentrated on the office as the key psychological zone. Middle managers have their own bathrooms. Even secretaries have a sofa in a private alcove, where they can lie back and dream about the lovers they’ll never have the energy to meet.’

  We were driving along the shore of a large ornamental lake, an ellipse of glassy water that reflected the nearby mountains and reminded me of Lake Geneva with its old League of Nations headquarters, another attempt to blueprint a kingdom of saints. Apartment houses lined the waterfront, synchronized brises-soleils shielding the balconies. Jane slowed the car, and searched the windows for a single off-duty resident.

  ‘A fifth of the workforce live on-site,’ Penrose told us. ‘Middle and junior management in apartments and townhouses, senior people in the residential estate where you’re going. The parkland buffers the impact of all the steel and concrete. People like the facilities – yachting and water-skiing, tennis and basketball, those body-building things that obsess the French.’

  ‘And you?’ Jane queried.

  ‘Well…’ Penrose pressed his large hands against the roof, and lazily flexed his shoulders. ‘I prefer to exercise the mind. Jane, are you keen on sport?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Squash, aerobics, roller-blading?’

  ‘The wrong kind of sweat.’

  ‘Bridge? There are keen amateurs here you could make an income off.’

  ‘Sorry. Better things to do.’

  ‘Interesting …’ Penrose leaned forward, so close to Jane that he seemed to be sniffing her neck. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘You know …’ Straight-faced, Jane explained: ‘Wife-swapping, the latest designer amphetamines, kiddy porn. What else do we like, Paul?’

  Penrose slumped back, chuckling good-humouredly. I noticed that he was forever glancing at the empty seat beside him. There was a fourth passenger in the car, the shade of a doctor defeated by the mirror-walled office buildings and manicured running tracks. I assumed that Greenwood had suffered a catastrophic cerebral accident, but one which probably owed nothing to Eden-Olympia.

  Beyond the apartments was a shopping mall, a roofed-in plaza of boutiques, patisseries and beauty salons. Lines of supermarket trollies waited in the sun for customers who only came out after dark. Undismayed, Penrose gestured at the deserted checkouts.

  ‘Grasse and Le Cannet aren’t far away, but you’ll find all this handy. There’s everything you need, Jane – sports equipment, video-rentals, the New York Review of Books …’

  ‘No teleshopping?’

  ‘There is. But people like to browse among the basil. Shopping is the last folkloric ritual that can help to build a community, along with traffic jams and airport queues. Eden-Olympia has its own TV station – local news, supermarket best buys …’

  ‘Adult movies?’

  Jane at last seemed interested, but Penrose was no longer listening. He had noticed a trio of Senegalese trinket salesmen wandering through the deserted café tables, gaudy robes blanched by the sun. Their dark faces, among the blackest of black Africa, had a silvered polish, as if a local biotechnology firm had reworked their genes into the age of e-mail and the intelsat. By some mix of guile and luck they had slipped past the guards at the gate, only to find themselves rattling their bangles in an empty world.

  When we stopped, pointlessly, at a traffic light Penrose took out his mobile phone and pretended to speak into it. He stared aggressively at the salesmen, but the leader of the trio, an affable, older man, ignored the psychiatrist and swung his bracelets at Jane, treating her to a patient smile.

  I was tempted to buy something, if only to irritate Penrose, but the lights changed.

  ‘What about crime?’ I asked. ‘It looks as if security might be a problem.’

  ‘Security is first class. Or should be.’ Penrose straightened the lapels of his jacket, ruffled by his involuntary show of temper. ‘We have our own police force. Very
discreet and effective, except when you need them. These gewgaw men get in anywhere. Somehow they’ve bypassed the idea of progress. Dig a hundred-foot moat around the Montparnasse tower and they’d be up on the top deck in three minutes.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Not in the way you mean. Though it’s irritating to be reminded of the contingent world.’

  ‘A drifting leaf? A passing rain-shower? Bird shit on the sleeve?’

  ‘That sort of thing.’ Penrose smoothed himself down, hands pressing his burly chest. ‘There’s nothing racist, by the way. We’re truly multinational – Americans, French, Japanese. Even Russians and east Europeans.’

  ‘Black Africa?’

  ‘At the senior level. We’re a melting pot, as the Riviera always has been. The solvent now is talent, not wealth or glamour. Forget about crime. The important thing is that the residents of Eden-Olympia think they’re policing themselves.’

  ‘They aren’t, but the illusion pays off?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Penrose slapped my shoulder in a show of joviality. ‘Paul, I can see you’re going to be happy here.’

  The road climbed the thickly wooded slopes to the north-east of the business park, cutting off our view of Cannes and the distant sea. We stopped at an unmanned security barrier, and Penrose tapped a three-digit number into the entry panel. The white metal trellis rose noiselessly, admitting us to an enclave of architect-designed houses, our home for the next six months. I peered through the wrought-iron gates at silent tennis courts and swimming pools waiting for their owners to return. Over the immaculate gardens hung the air of well-bred catatonia that only money can buy.

  ‘The medical staff…?’ Jane lowered her head, a little daunted by the imposing avenues. ‘They’re all here?’

  ‘Only you and Professor Walter, our cardiovascular chief. Call it enlightened self-interest. It’s always reassuring to know that a good heart man and a paediatrician are nearby, in case your wife has an angina attack or your child chokes on a rusk.’

  ‘And you?’ I asked. ‘Who copes with sudden depressions?’

  ‘They can wait till morning. I’m in the annexe on the other side of the hill. North facing, a kind of shadow world for the less important.’ Penrose beamed to himself, happy to speak frankly. ‘The company barons who decide our pecking order feel they’re beyond the need of psychiatric attention.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘For the time being. But I’m working on it.’ Penrose sat up and pointed through the plane trees. ‘Slow down, Jane. You’re almost home. From now on you’re living in a suburb of paradise …’

  3

  The Brainstorm

  A GIANT CYCAD threw its yellow fronds across the tiled pathway to a lacquered front door, past a chromium statue of a leaping dolphin. Beyond the bougainvillaea that climbed the perimeter wall I could see the streamlined balconies and scalloped roof of a large art-deco villa, its powder-blue awnings like reefed sails. The ocean-liner windows and porthole skylights seemed to open onto the 1930s, a vanished world of Cole Porter and beach pyjamas, morphine lesbians and the swagger portraits of Tamara de Lempicka. The entire structure had recently been repainted, and a phosphor in the white pigment gave its surface an almost luminescent finish, as if this elegant villa was an astronomical instrument that set the secret time of Eden-Olympia.

  Even Jane was impressed, smoothing the travel creases from her trousers when we stepped from the dusty Jaguar. The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water. Reflections from its disturbed surface seemed to bruise the smooth walls of the house. The light drummed against Jane’s sunglasses, giving her the edgy and vulnerable look of a studio visitor who had strayed into the wrong film set. Almost without thinking, Penrose stepped forward, took the glasses from Jane’s face and placed them firmly in her hands.

  A concrete apron sloped from the road to the aluminium shutters of a three-car garage. Parked on the ramp was an olive-green Range Rover of the Eden-Olympia security force. A uniformed guard leaned against the driver’s door, a slim, light-skinned black with refined and almost east African features, a narrow nose and steep forehead. He picked the dust from the buttons of his mobile phone with a pocket knife, and watched without comment as we surveyed the house.

  Penrose introduced us, his back to the guard, speaking over his shoulder like a district commissioner with a village headman.

  ‘Jane, this is Frank Halder. He’ll be within radio call whenever you need him. Frank, help Dr Sinclair with her luggage …’

  The guard was about to step into his Range Rover. When he opened the door I noticed a copy of Tender is the Night on the passenger seat. He avoided my eyes, but his manner was cool and self-possessed as he turned to face the psychiatrist.

  ‘Dr Penrose? I’m due in at the bureau. Mr Nagamatzu needs me to drive him to Nice airport.’

  ‘Frank …’ Penrose held his fingernails up to the sun and examined the ragged crescents. ‘Mr Nagamatzu can wait for five minutes.’

  ‘Five minutes?’ Halder seemed baffled by the notion, as if Penrose had suggested that he wait for five hours, or five years. ‘Security, doctor, it’s like a Swiss watch. Everything’s laid down in the machinery. It’s high-class time, you can’t just stop the system when you feel like it.’

  ‘I know, Frank. And the human mind is like this wonderful old Jaguar, as I keep trying to explain. Mr Sinclair is still convalescing from a serious accident. And we can’t have Dr Jane too tired to deal with her important patients.’

  ‘Dr Penrose …’ Jane was trying to unlock the Jaguar’s boot, hiding her embarrassment over this trivial dispute. ‘I’m strong enough to carry my own suitcases. And Paul’s.’

  ‘No. Frank is keen to help.’ Penrose raised a hand to silence Jane. He sauntered over to Halder, flexing his shoulders inside his linen jacket and squaring up to the guard like a boxer at a weigh-in. ‘Besides, Mr Sinclair is a pilot.’

  ‘A pilot?’ Halder ran his eyes over me, pinching his sharp nostrils as if tuning out the sweat of travel that clung to my stale shirt. ‘Gliders?’

  ‘Powered aircraft. I flew with the RAF. Back in England I have an old Harvard.’

  ‘Well, a pilot …’ Halder took the car keys from Jane and opened the boot. ‘That could be another story.’

  We left Halder to carry the suitcases and set off towards the house. Penrose unlocked a wrought-iron gate and we stepped into the silent garden, following a pathway that led to the sun lounge.

  ‘Decent of him,’ I commented to Penrose. ‘Is humping luggage one of his duties?’

  ‘Definitely not. He could report me if he wanted to.’ Enjoying his small triumph, Penrose said to Jane: ‘I like to stir things up, keep the adrenalin flowing. The more they hate you, the more they stay on their toes.’

  Jane looked back at Halder, who was steering the suitcases past the gate. ‘I don’t think he does hate you. He seems rather intelligent.’

  ‘You’re right. Halder is far too superior to hate anyone. Don’t let that mislead you.’

  A spacious garden lay beside the house, furnished with a tennis court, rose pergola and swimming pool. A suite of beach chairs sat by the disturbed water, damp cushions steaming in the sun. I wondered if Halder, tired of waiting for us, had stripped off for a quick dip. Then I noticed a red beach ball on the diving board, the last water dripping from its plastic skin. Suddenly I imagined the moody young guard roaming like a baseline tennis player along the edge of the pool, hurling the ball at the surface and catching it as it rebounded from the far side, driving the water into a state of panic.

  Penrose and Jane walked on ahead of me, and by the time I reached the sun lounge Halder had overtaken me. He moved aside as I climbed the steps.

  ‘Thanks for the cases,’ I told him. ‘I couldn’t have managed them.’

  He paused to stare at me in his appraising way, neither sympathetic nor hostile. ‘It’s my job, Mr Sinclair.’

  ‘It’s
not your job – but thanks. I had a small flying accident.’

  ‘You broke your knees. That’s tough.’ He spoke with an American accent, but one learned in Europe, perhaps working as a security guard for a local subsidiary of Mobil or Exxon. ‘You have a commercial licence?’

  ‘Private. Or did have, until they took it away from me. I publish aviation books.’

  ‘Now you’ll have time to write one yourself. Some people might envy you.’

  He stood with his back to the pool, the trembling light reflected in the beads of water on the holster of his pistol. He was strong but light-footed, with the lithe step of a professional dancer, a tango specialist who read Scott Fitzgerald and took out his frustrations on swimming pools. For a moment I saw a strange image of him washing his gun in the pool, rinsing away David Greenwood’s blood.

  ‘Keep flying speed …’ He saluted and strode away. As he passed the pool he leaned over and spat into the water.

  We sat on the terrace beneath the awning, listening to the gentle flap of canvas and the swish of lawn sprinklers from nearby gardens. Far below were the streets of Cannes, dominated by the twin domes of the Carlton Hotel, a nexus of noise and traffic that crowded the beach. The sun had moved beyond La Napoule and now lit the porphyry rocks of the Esterel, exposing valleys filled with lavender dust like the flats of a forgotten stage production. To the east, beyond Cap d’Antibes, the ziggurat apartment buildings of Marina Baie des Anges loomed larger than the Alpes-Maritimes, their immense curved facades glowing like a cauldron in the afternoon sun.

  The swimming pool had calmed. Halder’s glob of spit had almost dissolved, the sun-driven currents drawing it into a spiral like the milky arms of a nebula. An eager water spider straddled one of the whorls and was busy gorging itself.

  Penrose’s tour of the house had impressed Jane, who seemed stunned by the prospect of becoming the chatelaine of this imposing art-deco mansion. I hobbled after them as Penrose guided her around the kitchen, pointing out the ceramic hobs and the control panels with more dials than an airliner’s cockpit. In the study, virtually a self-contained office, Penrose demonstrated the computerized library, the telemetric links to hospitals in Cannes and Nice, and the databanks of medical records.