The Pillars of Hercules

“I saw you on the ferry from Nice.”

Hearing English conversation, a novelty to them, the soldiers goggled like dogs, their mouths hanging open.

“She is my friend,” I said in French.

“Okay, okay.” And they went away, muttering and laughing, and kicking sand.

“Thank you,” the young woman said.

“You are traveling alone?”

She replied in French. She said, “My English is no good. Do you understand French? Good. Yes, I travel alone. Usually I have no problems.”

“Where are you from?”

“Japan.”

She said that she was studying French in Lyons and that she wanted to learn it well enough to read French literature when she got back to Japan. She was twenty-two. Her English was poor, her French was shaky.

I said, “I was under the impression that Japanese people traveled in groups.”

“Yes. But not me.”

“Aren’t Japanese women taught to be dependent and submissive?”

“Now they are the equal to men.”

Her name was Tomiko. She was four foot ten. She hardly spoke any language but her own. Here she was sitting on the beach at Ajaccio, alone.

I said, “Would you do this in Japan? I mean, go to a place alone, where people were all strangers?”

“No, I would go with a friend. But my friends did not want to come with me here to Corsica.”

“Maybe you’re brave. Maybe you’re foolish.”

“Foolish, I think,” she said.

“I admire you, but please be careful.”

All this convinced me that she was a good person, and she followed me back into town, talking ungrammatically. I realized that by being disinterested I had won her confidence, and she clung for a while, until I sent her on her way.

That night, Gilles Stimamiglio gave me the telephone number of Dorothy Carrington, the author of the only good modern book about Corsica, Granite Island. I called her from a phone booth and asked whether we might meet for a meal.

She said, “I am very old. It has to be lunch—I am no good in the evenings. And I’m slow. I have ‘intellectual’s back’—the discs are all bad from sitting. Or it might be called ‘hiker’s back.’ I’ve done so much hiking here.”

She gave me elaborate instructions for finding her apartment (“I am in what the French call ‘first basement’ ”) and I said I would take her to lunch the next day.

James Boswell visited Corsica in 1765; Flaubert visited as a young man and filled nineteen notebooks in ten days; Lear traipsed around in 1868 and produced pictures and his Journal. Mérimée roamed Corsica, looking for settings for his novels. But although these people raved about Corsica’s beauty, they left after their visit.

One person visited and stayed and distinguished herself by writing the best modern book in English on Corsica: Dorothy Carrington, author of Granite Island. Frederica, Lady Rose (her proper name), was in her eighties, with a radiance that certain serene people achieve in old age, with pale eyes and the gasping expression of the elderly that is also a look of perpetual surprise. She warned me over the phone that she was frail, and yet in person she gave an impression of being unusually hardy, game, alert, not deaf at all; one of those down-to-earth aristocrats that the English have always exported to thrive in hardship posts.

She had once been truly gorgeous—the proof was a Cecil Beaton photograph propped on the mantelpiece in her small damp apartment. In the photograph she was a willowy blonde, languid, reclining on a sofa, a cigarette holder in her dainty fingers. A frowning man stood over her, and they were surrounded by hideous paintings. Beaton had been a friend. She had had many friends in her long interesting life.

“I’d like to take you to a good restaurant,” I said.

“That would be Le Maquis. It’s a bit out of town, but it’s good food.”

It was a fifteen-minute drive to a spot on the coast south of Ajaccio, a five-star hotel with a restaurant which had been awarded three forks by the Michelin guide. Only one other table was taken.

“No one can afford to come to Corsica anymore,” Dorothy said. “Now what would you like to know?”

“How did you happen to come here?”

She began, at my insistence, with her birth in England. Her mother had been diagnosed as having cancer. “Have another child and you’ll be cured,” the local quack had assured the woman. And so Dorothy was born, and when she was three her mother died, of cancer. Her father, General Sir Frederick Carrington, had (with Cecil Rhodes) helped conquer Rhodesia and claim it for Britain. Dorothy was raised by uncles and aunts in rural Gloucestershire, in Colesbourne, “in a very grand house, much of it built by my Elwes grandfather when he was having an attack of megalomania.”

They were landed gentry, with the usual mix of soldiers and misfits. It was not a farming family. “We thought the soil was too bad and we were too high—three hundred meters.”

“What did the family do?”

It is an American question, What do you do?, but there it is.

Perhaps reflecting on the intrusiveness of the question, Dorothy Carrington’s pale eyes grew even paler.

“We rode to hounds,” she said.