Hilary Fannin: The women were not alone in the quiet bay where French marines were on a training exercise

The two elderly women lay side by side on the stony beach, one of them nut-brown and thin as a whippet with long grey hair that she sat up to plait and then let fall over one mahogany shoulder. Looking seaward, she reached into her basket for goggles and bathing cap while her friend stretched out under the yellow sun and untarnished sky of Virgin Mary blue.

She stood then, the woman with the plait, and walked without hesitation, all haunch and shank and gritty determination, over the sharp stones and down to the shore, before slipping into the water.

Her friend sat up to watch her swim a long distance, out to where yellow buoys bobbed around a handful of craft moored beyond the harbourside clock tower. When the swimmer finally turned and began making her way back to the shore, arms slicing through the brine, the other woman proceeded, a little gingerly, down to the water and gently lowered herself into the velvet Mediterranean too.

They were not alone in the quiet bay. Just beyond their bobbing heads, French marines in helmets and camouflage were on a training exercise. On command, they threw themselves, armed and wearing heavy backpacks, into the sea, where they clambered over an obstacle course made of barriers, ladders, ropes and bridges.

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We were in Collioure, a small town on the French side of the Pyrenees, just a stone’s throw from the Spanish border, where we’d rented a flat for a week. The flat, up a couple of flights of narrow linoleum-covered stairs, had a two-ring cooker in the kitchenette, blue-and-white teacups and bowls on a shelf above the sink, a mezzanine bed and, overlooking the cobbled street below, a terrace, on which stood two dry plants and a table and chairs. I loved it.

I sat on the terrace in the mornings and ate bread and drank coffee from the teacups, and looked down at the dinky shops underneath our temporary home. They peddled quality souvenirs: hooped silver earrings, turquoise necklaces, wooden salad bowls, truffle oil, floaty cotton dresses that you’d only ever really wear in a place like that, where a somewhat older cohort, it seemed to me, wandered the tight streets absorbed in friends and lovers.

I lay quietly on my towel, my body white and tired, and closed my eyes, hoping that her second-hand French smoke would drift in my direction, like the snippets of the women’s conversation, on the bare whisper of wind

It is a place that was once colonised by painters, a place where light and shadow cut clear geometric shapes into the old stone walls, like past and present, night and day, and where the sun pebbledashes the sea and time seems to pass differently, at first slowly and then too fast.

Few of the town’s many galleries show any restraint with the new work on display there. It’s as if Collioure’s reputation as a favourite destination of the fauvists has unleashed an unrestrained school of garish work with equally uninhibited price tags.

I read somewhere that when the skint and depressed Henri Matisse first arrived in the Catalan fishing port with his family, in 1905, he was so enlivened by the light that he immediately got in touch with his pal André Derain. The two artists would go on to paint side by side in the town, with the debonair Derain comparing the colours of Collioure that summer to sticks of dynamite.

The two elderly women on the stony beach were French, maybe locals, maybe not, although their ease and familiarity marked them out among a smattering of early-season tourists. After their swim, the less energetic of the two, an elegant woman with long legs and a beautiful, surly face, who had floated in the shallows while the soldiers toiled beyond her, reached into her basket and took out her cigarettes.

I lay quietly on my towel, my body white and tired, and closed my eyes, hoping that her second-hand French smoke would drift in my direction, like the snippets of the women’s conversation, on the bare whisper of wind.

Presently another pal joined them, lithe and boyish. She also had a basket with her, and what seemed to be a husband in tow, and soon the four of them were eating a light picnic — anchovies and tomatoes and bread — with their fingers. When they’d finished their repast, another cigarette was lit, the gunmetal smoke spiralling up into the still air.

I watched this confident, aged, implacable tribe, their insouciant exhalations a chimerical vision that only partially obliterated the sight of soaking-wet young soldiers running breathless and exhausted along the shoreline, the steady sun glinting off their all-too-real weaponry.