Beware the French Lieutenant's grockle

With apologies to John Fowles

If, in the late autumn of 1995, you had been a guest at the oddly-named Buena Vista Hotel, in the town of Lyme Regis - and had chosen to take tea in the Tivoli Rooms - you might have discerned, by inclining slightly to your left, the figure of a man emerging hurriedly from the shadowy front door of a neighbouring house.

This man, of an appearance that the conventions of the time declared to be that of an author - salt-and-pepper beard, arboreal check shirt, coarse corduroy trousers with fly undone in the English style - would pass beneath the window, his jaws working with suppressed anger. Despairing of your scones you might have decided that greater diversion was to be had from following the tall figure wherever he might lead.

See him at the top of Steep Pond Street, cursing the late visitors that throng the narrow streets and methodically fail to find the waste-bins with their hand-scrunched chip wrappings. Now his literary form carves a swathe through Broad Street, scattering the continuity girls from a BBC film unit engaged in yet another Jane Austen adaptation. Shrieking and giggling they flee for the shelter of a mobile tea van, from which free bacon sandwiches are being dispensed to the cast.

Follow him through the car-park, striking out at the stationary motor vehicles, whose red, green and blue metal frames have conveyed here the groups of gaily attired grockle folk (as Lyme nomenclature has it) clogging the town. At last he stands at the Cobb Gate, a blustery easterly buffing the redness of his cheeks, and surveys the long curving mole.

Follow his gaze down the sea-rampart of the Cobb, whale-like in its immensity, but still fragile as it holds on tenuously to the sombre shore. What you and he see is the figure of a woman, clothed all in black, staring Streep- like out to sea.

* * *

The author approaches, but does not speak. The woman looks up. Five minutes pass before, shading her face with her hand, she turns away. He examines her in silence and then turns, wordlessly, to stare at the sombre, grey sea. She turns to him, her pale lips part momentarily, but she says nothing. Then she turns away.

Next, something happens so unexpected that an atom bomb being detonated on the old road to Charmouth could not be more surprising. He speaks. "You're French. Is it your bloody Deux-Chevaux parked half on the pavement outside my house?" She turns away. "You are wrong on two counts", she replies. "I am the woman of a French lieutenant, not the French woman of a lieutenant of indeterminate nationality. Besides, I came here in a coach with fellow members of Women Against Harassment By French NCOs. We are celebrating our recent grant from the National Lottery. Now please leave and do not get all romantic. I am not in the mood for corn on the Cobb." And she turns again to contemplate the sun-plashed but sombre sea.