Low life | 4 February 2016

Denis was my guide to and from the new out-of-town Lidl superstore at Salernes in Provence. I drove. The road was a smooth ribbon of asphalt newly laid through an ancient forest of dwarf oaks. The in-car conversation with Denis was, as usual, easy and undogmatic and wide-ranging, which is the only sort of conversation I am capable of, for I can never remember what my opinions are, let alone which set of beliefs gave rise to them. In this uncommitted way we drifted aimlessly on a gentle swell until we bumped up against the subject of ghosts. I had never seen or heard or felt a ghost, I said. Neither had I met anyone who had. So no, I didn’t believe in them. Denis had and did, however, claiming to have frequented two houses that were quite definitely haunted.

He once rented a house in Hampshire and became friendly with a neighbouring family who lived in a very beautiful old house that was, in his words, ‘haunted to buggery’.