The intense heat is gone and so are the grandsons

Finally rain. None for months, then a violent tropical storm lasting two days. It marked the end of high summer as clearly and distinctly as a clarion of trumpets. Afterwards the nights were cooler and the sun less fierce and it was easier to maintain one’s temper. We could begin to look forward again instead of merely enduring.

The week before the storm burst the village had been stretched to its collective mental limit. You could see it on the exhausted faces of the waiters and in the traffic negotiating normally unfrequented side streets. You could hear it in the buzz of the packed outdoor restaurants on the village square, and in the competing cacophonous street music, and always some amateur female soloist with a really terrible voice screeching: ‘And I pray/Oh my God do I pray/I pray every day/For rev-o-lu-tion.’

The sticky night markets selling candles and soaps and cheap jewellery and fluorescent-coloured sweets and the ephemeral galleries and boutique tat shops open at night. The overflowing recycling bins, in spite of being emptied daily. The drooping or collapsed giant aloes and stressed plane trees. The dry and dusty fountains. The county English and Californian-American voices. The astonishing bare legs of the male locals who wear shorts only in extremis.

The two grandsons were with us for a fortnight. For the first week we house-sat a lovely old place with a pool and they were in the pool five, six hours a day, bombing, wrestling and squirting each other while Grandad circled with his slow, old-maidish breast stroke. For the second week we did the same in swimming pools offered by friends and neighbours. When Grandad’s shoulder gave out he lolled in a shaded chair and spectated.

When bombing and fighting palled they finally decided they wanted to learn how to swim a swimming stroke, preferably front crawl. So a delighted Grandad shouted instructions and refinements from the margins and to everybody’s surprise Klynton, not the brightest, always second best, sometimes tearfully so, mastered the basics, including the tricky sideways breath every fourth stroke, and even his brother joined in the astonished congratulations.

That second week we spent two hours a day at the various pools. Grandad went from having a little energy to spare on trips to the pools to none at all. He moved around when he moved at all like a two-toed sloth, groaning. The lads spent a greater part of the day on their devices, with the shutters closed, in darkness, under a fan, looking at football apps, mainly. Catriona took up the slack, organising trips to the village for ice creams and lemonades and gift-shop tat for homecoming presents: a hand-carved parrot, a brass liner, cubes of semi-precious stones for the ladies.

One day, the last of the season’s Airbnb guests arrived, Zz and Ray from LA. Catriona and the lads were out buying tat when they called for directions from the car park and I rose from my couch and went down the path to meet and greet them. This year a large proportion of our guests have been gay couples. The three gay couples from the US all said right away that they were very relieved to be out of the country because they sensed it was descending into madness. All of them said that. One couple apologised for the state of their country, saying it embarrassed them.

Zz and Baz from LA were sitting patiently on the wall. As I led them up the path, they too said they were so very relieved to be out of their country. ‘I know, I know,’ I sympathised. ‘My only criticism of Donald Trump is that he didn’t go far enough.’ The path up to the cave is narrow and tortuous and I was leading so I didn’t see the reaction. But I sensed a silent consternation or perhaps confusion as to whether they’d heard me correctly above the noise of trolley-bag wheels on gravel and stones.

Arriving at the small garden in front of their Hobbit-like home, as unperplexed as a migratory bird, I said brightly: ‘Do you think things are shaping up for a civil war?’ Baz pondered the question gravely. ‘Civil disorder certainly,’ she said.

And that same night came that amazing crescendo of thunder and lightning and torrents in the streets. The day afterwards there were noticeably fewer tourists and and plenty of vacant restaurant tables in the early evening between deluges. Our summering English friends began to depart, saying, ‘Maybe see you at Christmas.’ And with them, via easyJet from Marseille, went my two grandsons: tanned, exhausted, swimming fit, surfeited with croissants, French yoghurt and Mini Magnums and with a hundred Great British pounds apiece in their wallets. I’ve booked return flights for them in February. I hope I make it that far.