AS WE flew back to Britain on Sunday I knew that a culture shock awaited us. “Put on your jacket,” I said to Alexander. “It will be cold outside.” It was. And I don’t just mean the weather. In the course of a week, we had adopted the mores of our holiday surroundings, where all transactions, however trivial, begin and end with a formal greeting by both parties. What’s more, we had seen no news of the outside world — nothing but the headlines in Corse Matin of forest fires and an occasional newsflash of the Olympics.
The effect of our sudden re-entry was to make our accustomed world seem, for a little while, impossibly exotic. I can’t get used to the fact that the Brits never speak or make eye contact with strangers, and felt bruised and idiotic when I said “good evening” to the bus driver and the girl at the newsagent’s till, and both times found that they averted their gaze as though from a maniac. And when I opened the Sunday paper, which I’d just bought from the silent shop assistant, I rediscovered some even odder traditional customs — our fascination with sex, for a start.
With a mighty wrench of memory I can just recall that when we embarked on our outward journey, the papers were fearfully aerated about two things. One was a fling between the (unmarried) manager of the England football team and an (equally unmarried) secretary at the FA. The other was the fact that “England’s wonderkid footballer”, Wayne Rooney, 18, had gained some early sexual experience by visiting a brothel, or in newspaperspeak, a “sleazy backstreet establishment”.
In both cases, the consensus among journalists was emphatically that they didn’t ought to of done it. Mr Rooney’s fiancée (Coleen, also 18) also seemed distinctly put out — so much so that she had (said the papers) flung her engagement ring into a squirrel sanctuary, a choice of target that subsequently caused no end of problems, but had the handy journalistic advantage of neatly combining the twin Brit obsessions — sex and furry animals.
As I opened the paper to catch up on what had been going on here in our absence, I began to feel worried. As well as the stately mores and excellent cooking of rural Corsica, I seem to have absorbed the disgusting lack of hysteria about sexual matters of Francophone Europe.
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The hot news, it appears, is still Wayne and the brothel. The only thing more thrilling is the fact that the (unmarried) Home Secretary has been stepping out with a journalist (who is both married and of American origin). For a long time I think about these things and why they should be worthy of the thunderous quantities of moralising that they have attracted. But for the life of me, I can’t see it.
Wayne Rooney has done nothing more than pursue what used to be the traditional young man’s path to sexual experience. What’s more, he seems to have done it rather engagingly, even signing autographs as he sat in the waiting room. If he’d sired a couple of children with girlfriends whom he’d then abandoned, I can see why his fiancée, and even the papers, might have grounds for complaint. But he hasn’t. He has paid for sex (with cash, rather than the middle-class blandishments of dinner, theatre tickets, jewels and so on), and presumably learnt something in the process. So what, really?
The Home Secretary, meanwhile, has been treading another, equally traditional path — that of the powerful man to whom pretty, intelligent (and sometimes married) women are attracted. One person here has grounds for making a fuss, and he is the cuckolded husband, to whom solemn promises were presumably made, by his pretty, intelligent wife, along the lines of “forsaking all others”.
And yet. The day after all this hoo-ha broke, I read in The Times the obituary of another American expatriate, Susan Mary Alsop who, as the devoted wife of Wiliam Patten, a diplomat in postwar Paris, met the then British Ambassador to Paris, Duff Cooper, and began an affair that lasted until his death. Was there a great scandal? Did the papers gasp and stretch their eyes until the parties, ruined and humiliated, retired for ever from public life? No, there wasn ‘t. And no, they didn’t.
“Susan Mary was the ideal mistress,” wrote Philip Ziegler in his biography of Duff Cooper’s wife, Diana. “She made a most important contribution to Duff’s happiness . . . and did so in a way that gave almost as much pleasure to Diana.”
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Coo, fancy that. An extramarital relationship that brought contentment to everyone involved. Imagine the depravity.
Only, human nature being the complicated and mutable thing it is, it happens all the time. Yup, even here, in sex-hating Britain. In predominantly Catholic countries, where the notion of human fallibility is accepted, sex outside marriage provokes more tolerance than scandal. Only Britain and America (and then only in the form of the press, ludicrously tricked out in the petticoats of Mrs Grundy) obstinately cling to the magnificent, preposterous ideal of “ forsaking all others”.
And when you consider the grim outriders of that ideal — prurience, betrayal, humiliation, ruin and intolerable sadness — it makes you wonder whether a little sin, kindly and privately conducted, is such a very bad thing, after all.
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DIFFERENT RULES FOR TOFFS?
TWO other things catch my eye as I skim the week’s papers. The first is that the Government appears determined to force through a foxhunting ban early in September. The second is that, as my colleague Tony Halpin reported on Wednesday, Greek and Latin as exam subjects in state schools appear doomed, because the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance board, which offered a syllabus suitable for state-school students with no early knowledge of the languages, has withdrawn the subjects from 2006.
There is something odd going on here. In the first case, the Government appears able to force though a measure that has no basis in logic or animal welfare, purely because MPs are obsessed with the idea that toffs do it. In the second, although the Schools Minister opposes an outrageous restriction of intellectual liberty, he appears unable to act. But why, if the Prime Minister on a whim can prevent toffs from hunting foxes, cannot he employ the same whim to enable state-school children to enjoy the same privileges as their classically educated toff contemporaries?