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.