Chapter One
Visitors to the Dream Palace
THE FIRST PERSON I met at Eden-Olympia was a psychiatrist,and in many ways it seems only too apt that my guide to this`intelligent' city in the hills above Cannes should have been aspecialist in mental disorders. I realize now that a kind of waitingmadness, like a state of undeclared war, haunted the office buildingsof the business park. For most of us, Dr Wilder Penrose wasour amiable Prospero, the psychopomp who steered our darkestdreams towards the daylight. I remember his eager smile whenwe greeted each other, and the evasive eyes that warned me awayfrom his outstretched hand. Only when I learned to admire thisflawed and dangerous man was I able to think of killing him.
Rather than fly from London to Nice, a journey as brief as aplastic-tray lunch, Jane and I decided to drive to the Côte d'Azurand steal a few last days of freedom before we committed ourselvesto Eden-Olympia and the disciplines of the Euro-corporatelifestyle. Jane was still unsure about her six-month secondmentto the business park's private clinic. Her predecessor, a youngEnglish doctor named David Greenwood, had met a tragic andstill unexplained death after running amok with a rifle. By chance,Jane had known Greenwood when they worked together at Guy'sHospital, and I often thought of the boyishly handsome doctorwho could rouse an entire women's ward with a single smile.
Memories of Greenwood were waiting for us at Boulogne as theJaguar left the cross-Channel ferry and rolled its wheels across thequayside. Going into a tabac for a packet of Gitanes — illicitcigarettes had kept both of us sane during my months in hospital — Janebought a copy of Paris Match and found Greenwood's face onthe cover, under a headline that referred to the unsolved mystery.As she sat alone on the Jaguar's bonnet, staring at the graphicphotographs of murder victims and the grainy maps of the deathroute, I realized that my spunky but insecure young wife neededto put a few more miles between herself and Eden-Olympia.
Rather than overheat either Jane's imagination or the Jaguar'selderly engine, I decided to avoid the Autoroute du Soleil andtake the RN7. We bypassed Paris on the Périphérique, andspent our first evening at a venerable hotel in the forest nearFontainebleau, spelling out the attractions of Eden-Olympia toeach other and trying not to notice the antique hunting rifle onthe dining-room mantelpiece.
The next day we crossed the olive line, following the long,cicada miles that my mother and father had motored when theyfirst took me to the Mediterranean as a boy. Surprisingly, manyof the old landmarks were still there, the family restaurants andliterate bookshops, and the light airfields with their casually parkedplanes that had first made me decide to become a pilot.
Trying to distract Jane, I talked far too much. During the fewmonths of our marriage I had told my doctor-bride almost nothingabout myself, and the drive became a mobile autobiography thatunwound my earlier life along with the kilometres of dust,insects and sun. My parents had been dead for two decades,but I wanted Jane to meet them, my hard-drinking, womanizingfather, a provincial-circuit barrister, and my lonely, daydreamingmother, always getting over yet another doomed affair.
At a hotel in Hauterives, south of Lyons, Jane and I sat in thesame high-ceilinged breakfast room, unchanged after thirty-fiveyears, where the stags' heads still gazed over shelves stocked withthe least enticing alcohol I had ever seen. My parents, after theirusual bickering breakfast of croissants and coffee helped downby slugs of cognac, had dragged me off to the dream palace ofthe Facteur Cheval, a magical edifice conjured out of pebbles theold postman collected on his rounds. Working tirelessly for thirtyyears, he created an heroic doll's house that expressed his simplebut dignified dreams of the earthly paradise. My mother tipsilyclimbed the miniature stairs, listening to my father declaim thepostman's naive verses in his resonant baritone. All I could thinkof, with a ten-year-old's curiosity about my parents' sex-lives,was what had passed between them during the night. Now, asI embraced Jane on the parapets of the dream palace, I realizedthat I would never know.
Cheval might have survived, but the France of the 1960s, withits Routier lunches, anti-CRS slogans and the Citroën DS, hadbeen largely replaced by a new France of high-speed monorails,MacDo's, and the lavish air-shows that my cousin Charles and Iwould visit in our rented Cessna when we founded our firm ofaviation publishers. And Eden-Olympia was the newest of thenew France. Ten miles to the north-east of Cannes, in thewooded hills between Valbonne and the coast, it was the latestof the development zones that had begun with Sophia-Antipolisand 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 businesspark that now employed over ten thousand people. The seniormanagements were the most highly paid professional caste inEurope, a new elite of administrators, énarques and scientificentrepreneurs. The lavish brochure enthused over a vision ofglass and titanium straight from the drawing boards of RichardNeutra and Frank Gehry, but softened by landscaped parks andartificial lakes, a humane version of Corbusier's radiant city. Evenmy sceptical eye was prepared to blink.
Studying the maps, I propped the brochure on my knee-brace asJane steered the Jaguar through the afternoon traffic on the Grasseroad. The stench of raw perfume from a nearby factory filled thecar, but Jane wound down her window and inhaled deeply. Ourdisreputable evening in Arles had revived her, swaying arm in armwith me after a drunken dinner, exploring what I insisted was VanGogh's canal but turned out to be a stagnant storm-drain behindthe archbishop's palace. We had both been eager to get back toour hotel and the well-upholstered bed.
The colour was returning to her face, for almost the first timesince our wedding. Her watchful eyes and toneless skin werelike those of an over-gifted child. Before meeting me, Jane hadspent too many hours in elevators and pathology rooms, andthe pallor of strip lighting haunted her like a twelve-year-old'smemories of a bad dream. But once we left Arles she rose tothe challenge of Eden-Olympia, and I could hear her mutteringto herself, rehearsing the risqué backchat that so intrigued theyounger 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 sonervous?'
`You don't.' I pressed her hand against the wheel, steeringthe Jaguar around an elderly woman cyclist, panniers filled withbaguettes. `Jane, you'll be a huge success. You're the youngestdoctor 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 wereemerging from the slopes of a long valley filled with eucalyptustrees and umbrella pines. Beyond them were the rooftops ofCannes and the Îles de Lérins, a glimpse of the Mediterraneanthat never failed to lift my heart.
`Paul, down there ...' Jane pointed to the hillside, raising afinger still grimy from changing a spark plug. Hundreds of blueovals trembled like damaged retinas in the Provençal sun. `Whatare they — rain-traps? Tanks full of Chanel Number 5? And thosepeople. They seem to be naked.'
`They are naked. Or nearly. Swimming pools, Jane. Take agood look at your new patients.' I watched one senior executivein the garden of his villa, a suntanned man in his fifties with a slim,almost adolescent body, springing lightly on his diving board. `Ahealthy crowd ... I can't imagine anyone here actually botheringto fall ill.'
`Don't be too sure. I'll be busier than you think. The placeis probably riddled with airport TB and the kind of viruses thatonly breed in executive jets. And as for their minds ...'
I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lostbehind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycadsand bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long afterthe Côte d'Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers wouldpuzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritonsand stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides likeaquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a raceof visionary geometers.
We left the Cannes road and turned onto a landscaped avenuethat led towards the gates of the business park. The noise fromthe Jaguar's tyres fell away as they rolled across a more expensivesurface material — milled ivory, at the very least — that wouldsoothe the stressed wheels of the stretch limousines. A palisadeof Canary palms formed an honour guard along the verges, whilebeds of golden cannas flamed from the central reservation.
Despite this gaudy welcome, wealth at Eden-Olympia displayedthe old-money discretion that the mercantile rich of the informationage had decided to observe at the start of a new millennium.The glass and gun-metal office blocks were set well apartfrom each other, separated by artificial lakes and forested trafficislands where a latter-day Crusoe could have found comfortablerefuge. The faint mist over the lakes and the warm sun reflectedfrom the glass curtain-walling seemed to generate an opal haze, asif the entire business park were a mirage, a virtual city conjuredinto the pine-scented air like a son-et-lumière vision of a newVersailles.
But work and the realities of corporate life anchored Eden-Olympiato the ground. The buildings wore their ventilation shaftsand cable conduits on their external walls, an open reminder ofEden-Olympia's dedication to company profits and the approvalof its shareholders. The satellite dishes on the roofs resembled thewimples of an order of computer-literate nuns, committed to thesanctity of the workstation and the pieties of the spreadsheet.
Gravel tore at the Jaguar's tyres. Waking from her reverie, Janebraked sharply before we reached the gatehouse, sending the oldsports saloon into a giddy shunt. Two uniformed guards lookedup from their electronic screens, but Jane ignored them, readyinga 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 yourwindow.' She grimaced at herself in the rear-view mirror. `Thatcheap perfume. I smell like a tart ...'
`The most gorgeous tart on the Côte d'Azur. They're lucky tohave you.' I tried to settle her hands as she fretted over her lipstick,obsessively fine-tuning herself. I could feel the perspiration onher wrists, brought out by more than the August sun. `Jane, wedon't have to be here. Even now, you can change your mind.We can drive away, cross the border into Italy, spend a week inSan Remo ...'
`Paul? I'm not your daughter.' Jane frowned at me, as if I werean intruder into her world, then touched my cheek forgivingly.`I signed a six-month contract. Since David died they've hadrecruitment problems. They need me ...'
I watched Jane make a conscious effort to relax, treating herselflike an overwrought patient in casualty. She lay against the wornleather seating, breathing the bright air into her lungs and slowlyexhaling. She patted the dark bang that hid her bold foreheadand always sprang forward like a coxcomb at the first hint ofstress. I remembered the calm and sensible way in which shehad helped the trainee nurses who fumbled with my knee-brace.At heart she was the subversive schoolgirl, the awkward-squadrecruiter with a primed grenade in her locker, who saw throughthe stuffy conventions of boarding school and teaching hospitalbut was always kind enough to rescue a flustered housekeeper orward orderly.
Now, at Eden-Olympia, it was her turn to be intimidated bythe ultra-cerebral French physicians who would soon be hercolleagues. She sat forward, chin raised, fingers drumming athreatening tattoo on the steering wheel. Satisfied that she couldhold her own, she noticed me massaging my knee.
`Paul, that awful brace ... we'll get it off in a few days. You'vebeen in agony and never complained.'
`I'm sorry I couldn't help with the driving. Cannes is a longway 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, andat the satellite dishes distilling their streams of information fromthe sky. `It all looks very civilized, in a Euro kind of way. Not adrifting leaf in sight. It's hard to believe anyone would be allowedto go mad here. Poor David ...'
David Greenwood's death dominated our time at Eden-Olympia,hovering above the artificial lakes and forests like the ghosts ofPrincip over Sarajevo and Lee Harvey Oswald over Dallas. Whythis dedicated children's doctor should have left his villa on amorning in late May and set out on a murder rampage hadnever been explained. He had killed seven senior executivesat Eden-Olympia, executed his three hostages and then turnedhis rifle on himself. He had written no suicide note, no defiantlast message, and as the police marksmen closed in he had calmlyabandoned himself to death.
A week before our wedding, Jane and I had met him at aLondon reception for Médecins Sans Frontières. Likeable but alittle naive, Greenwood reminded me of an enthusiastic Baptistmissionary, telling Jane about the superb facilities at the Eden-Olympiaclinic, and the refuge for orphaned children he had setup at La Bocca, the industrial suburb to the west of Cannes.With his uncombed hair and raised eyebrows, he looked as ifhe had just received an unexpected shock, a revelation of all theinjustices in the world, which he had decided to put right. Yethe was no prude, and talked about his six months in Bangladesh,comparing the caste rivalries among the village prostitutes withthe status battles of the women executives at Eden-Olympia.
Jane had known him during their internships at Guy's, andoften met him after she enrolled with the overseas supply agencythat recruited Greenwood to Eden-Olympia. When she firstapplied for the paediatric vacancy, I had been against her going,remembering her shock on hearing the news of Greenwood'sviolent death. Although she was off-duty for the day, she hadtaken a white coat from the wardrobe in our bedroom andbuttoned it over her nightdress as she laid the newspapers acrossmy knees.
The entire London press made the tragedy its main story.`Nightmare in Eden' was the repeated headline above photographsof Riviera beaches and bullet-starred doors in the offices of themurdered executives. Jane hardly spoke about Greenwood, butinsisted on watching the television coverage of French policeholding back the sightseers who invaded Eden-Olympia. Blood-drenchedsecretaries, too speechless to explain to the cameras howtheir bosses had been executed, stumbled towards the waitingambulances, while helicopters ferried the wounded to hospitalsin Grasse and Cannes.
The investigating magistrate, Judge Michel Terneau, led theinquiry, reconstructing the murders and taking evidence from ahost of witnesses, but came up with no convincing explanation.Greenwood's colleagues at the clinic testified to his earnest andintense disposition. An editorial in Le Monde speculated that thecontrast between the worldly power of Eden-Olympia and thedeprived lives of the Arab immigrants in Cannes La Bocca haddriven Greenwood into a frenzy of frustration, a blind rage atinequalities between the first and third worlds. The murderswere part political manifesto, so the newspaper believed, andpart existential scream.
When the case at last left the headlines Jane never referredto Greenwood again. But when the vacancy was advertised sheimmediately called the manager of the supply agency. She wasthe only applicant, and quickly convinced me that a long breakin the Mediterranean would do wonders for my knee, injured in aflying accident nine months earlier and still refusing to mend. Mycousin Charles agreed to take over the publishing house while Iwas away, and would e-mail me copy and proof pages of the twoaviation magazines that I edited.
Eager to help Jane's career, I was happy to go. At the sametime, like any husband from a different generation, I was curiousabout my young wife's romantic past. Had she and Greenwoodonce been lovers? The question was not entirely prurient. Amass-murderer had perhaps held her in his arms, and as Janeembraced me the spirit of his death embraced me too. Thewidows of assassins were forever their armourers.
On our last night in Maida Vale, lying in bed with our packedsuitcases in the hall, I asked Jane how closely she had knownGreenwood. She was sitting astride me, with the expression ofa serious-minded adolescent on her face that she always worewhen making love. She drew herself upright, a hand raised to hitme, then solemnly told me that she and Greenwood had neverbeen more than friends. I almost believed her. But some unstatedloyalty to Greenwood's memory followed us from Boulogne tothe gates of Eden-Olympia.
Baring her teeth, Jane started the engine. `Right ... let's takethem on. Find the clinic on the map. Someone called Penrose willmeet us there. Why they've picked a psychiatrist, I don't know.I told them you hate the entire profession. Apparently, he washurt in David's shoot-out, so be gentle with him ...'
She steered the Jaguar towards the gatehouse, where the guardshad already lost interest in their screens, intrigued by this confidentyoung woman at the controls of her antique car.
While they checked our documents and rang the clinic I staredat the nearby office buildings and tried to imagine Greenwood'slast desperate hours. He had shot dead one of his colleagues at theclinic. A second physician, a senior surgeon, had suffered a fatalheart attack the next day. A third colleague had been woundedin the arm: Dr Wilder Penrose, the psychiatrist who was aboutto introduce us to our new Eden.
Excerpted from Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard. Copyright © 2000 by J.G. Ballard. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2000 by J.G. Ballard. All rights reserved.