Willem’s memory judders and stalls.
He rallies, talks with wonder at his good fortune, proud that it used to take him no more than an hour and a half out and back on his bike to swim in the sea, drying himself off in a brisk walk along the edge of the dunes. I have several times bathed with him, sharing our enthusiasm for water. A scene runs through my head: of us walking together across the sand, Willem tall, upright, his thin legs browned by the sun, totally naked.
Willem has prostate cancer and often disappears to piss. He drinks too much cheap wine. Henriette, Elizabeth’s mother, says booze has always been his problem, provoking anger and despair. In the summer Willem’s penis swelled painfully and the medication he took caused restriction in the blood supply to his legs, for which he is fitted twice a day by the Kleycamp nurses with elasticated calf-bands, soaked in balm.
22 December
Lunch yesterday with Henriette, at her flat on the ground floor of a grand town house, sandwiched between the embassies of Austria and Oman, where she has lived for twenty years. I’ve never before been to this home, filled with objects familiar to me from their earlier family house, one of which – the brass carrying-candlestick with pierced white porcelain windshield – I admired, and she said I could keep, with the voice and gaze of a love still warm for her daughter’s once-husband, who walked away ages ago, in 1980. I refused, rejecting emotional re-involvement. Good object, though. Almost the only simple shape in her crowded double room, with its moulded ceilings, adjoined by a conservatory leading to the garden.
Elizabeth’s mother’s kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, all three firmly old-fashioned, are down a flight of five stone steps. She gives only cold suppers nowadays, so she can host drinks for her guests. ‘I always missed the cocktails,’ she complains. ‘I was always cooking. Jan served the drinks.’ Jan-Peter, my father-in-law, died in the autumn of 2000.
My ex-father-in-law.
My only father-in-law.
On a pre-breakfast walk this morning through the woods of the Palace of Clingendael, I passed close by a heron, standing on the lawn by the house. Plumed, vigilant, it didn’t bother to shift.
Frida, Willem’s friend and helper, dislikes the herons, devoted instead to swifts. Once a swift learns to fly it spends the next four years in flight, never leaving the air, sleeping on the wing, she tells me, until mature enough to nest and raise the first of its many broods of children. Remember, as I walk, Willem responding yesterday with child-like pleasure to my noticing on his veranda at Kleycamp a solid box, a munitions container which he had found abandoned twenty years earlier, a relic of the war in which as a young man he was awarded the Dutch ‘VC’ for bravery. He is guilty, angry, in a sense regretful at surviving the Second World War, the bravest and best of his generation left dead on the battlefield, he feels. Since reading in Melbourne Library in the early 1950s of the post-war Tokyo Trial and its political aftermath, Willem has devoted his life to persuading the world of the significance of Article Nine of Japan’s Showa Constitution of 1947:
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of setting international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
Willem’s thick cotton shirts are frayed at the collars and cuffs and stained briar-pipe brown. He declines the waste and industrial impurity of soap to wash his body. He is almost blind and his eyes, staring into swirls of mist, show pain. My understanding of how Willem feels is coloured, I know, by witnessing today his struggle to type at the multi-magnified screen and enlarged keyboard. Short letters of riotous temper, to which nobody ever replies – they couldn’t, Willem’s words combustible, dangerous to touch. He is able to work for half an hour only before the strain on his eyes becomes insufferable. The same with reading, which he does by scrolling details from a page laid onto a horizontal mirror, heavily lit and enlarged, reflected up onto a vertical screen. His leather bootlaces are overlong, tied in a double loop around his ankles. Onto strands of salvaged sea-rope he has knotted marrow-bones, for decoration.
The scruffy modern square near his condominium Willem has nicknamed Place des Invalides, because of the aged residents who totter on their sticks and zimmers from tea shop to bank to hairdresser to chemist to post office.
A month or so ago I would have been incapable of engaging with any of this.
23 December
Willem appears at my guest-bedroom door, six floors below his, at 5.20 a.m. Unable to sleep, he doesn’t want to waste this opportunity of our talking some more, before I leave at seven-thirty to catch my train for Paris. He asks me to get myself out of bed and come upstairs for breakfast, entices me with the promise of pressed fresh oranges. I see his eagerness, his aliveness, and quell my irritation.
Because he cannot properly see, Willem’s utilitarian kitchen is filthy, the orange squeezer encrusted with the remains of numberless juicings. He wants to talk, doesn’t notice that I do not drink.
Because he’s old, unwell, we know that we may never see each other again, and at this last moment I manage to sort out my main disagreement, throughout the years of conversation, with Willem’s thesis: his belief that the majority judgement at the Tokyo Tribunal, after which five of Japan’s war-leaders were hanged, on Christmas Eve 1948, ‘universalizes’ Article Nine.
It doesn’t, Willem now agrees.
Instead, it contains the more limited yet highly significant implication of international approval of the concept of A9, and of acceptance that the effective rule of world law must be imposed by a supra-state military force. The victims require as much justice as the victors, and national leaders must be brought to trial more often than the ordinary soldier.
Willem is right. Entangled in his lifelong thread of animosity and guilt, he’s never been able to make his argument clear. Too late. He’s dying.
Arrive at Alex’s flat in Paris – beneath the eaves, with incised heliographic borders on the walls, which are lined in packing-case planks, unpretentiously bohemian. I am sent from pillar to post in search of a resolution to the heating/hot water failure, from flat to flat, floor to floor, eventually to the Post Office in Rue Beautrellis to determine the international code for a rescue call to Alex, who is spending Christmas in London. While out I buy, from individual shops in the Marais, fine cheeses, fresh bread, olives, wine, fruit etc. and begin to feel at home. I’m seated now at a table in a nearby restaurant recommended by Alex, warm, content, with a rocket salad in front of me and hare to follow.
Effiloché de lièvre aux champignons des bois, eaten with a side dish of mashed potato.
At the top right hand corner of the mirror in Alex’s bedroom is pinned a photograph of Ginny, standing at the centre of the nearby gardens of Place des Vosges, and in the other corner of the mirror a postcard of the church at Cothelstone.
24 December
I’m in the Musée Delacroix, converted from the painter’s town house on the south bank of the Seine – in the back garden is the atelier, which he built to his own design in 1857. The place displays memorabilia: pottery vases which Delacroix bought as souvenirs in Algeria, and bequeathed on his death to an artist friend; his gilt-bronze mounted mahogany painter’s table, fitted beneath its hinged top with lead-lined containers, a deep drawer below; his sketch of the abbey at Valmont, owned by a cousin, in the nearby countryside to which the painter regularly retreated for quiet study of light and landscape; the leather armaments on which he modelled the dress given to Saracen horsemen in his big history paintings. One of my tutors at Cambridge, Lee Johnson, a Delacroix specialist is credited on the museum’s label with authentication of the unsigned oil sketch of an Arab fighter’s helmet on a pole.
Try to sense some of the man’s radicalism as a pa
inter, the attempt overshadowed by my fusty respect for museum curios.
Pompidou Centre. Watch for an hour the Peter Fischli/David Weiss film of 1983, The Right Journey, a recent purchase by the French State from the Swiss artists. Two actors (it seems from the credits – while watching, I had assumed to be the artists themselves), one wearing a brown bear costume and the other dressed as a panda, go on an adventure, into caverns and caves, down rapids, through woods, across the prairie, over an ice flow, finally to end within sunset view of the Matterhorn, playing ‘found’ instruments – blowing thick sticks which sound like tubas, beating wood-block drums, the bear swirling his tail like an aboriginal whirligig, demanding of each other to sing deeper and deeper in celebration of survival. Along the way the two had fought in mud, there was an episode with a pig, the bear had rescued the panda from death and, amongst much else, one of them had puked up poisonous mushrooms.
25 December
Paris, on Christmas morning. I’ve carried with me two small presents wrapped in brown paper, from Beth, and a card, which on opening I see hints at the work-in-progress she’s making out of cardboard boxes salvaged from her job at Brendon Books. One of her parcels is a paperback of William Fiennes’ The Snow Geese, described on the front cover: ‘A profoundly moving account of joy, of one man’s rediscovery of the world.’ I begin reading it this moment.
The road leading from the Eiffel Tower to the Palais de Chaillot, past much-photographed fountains, is named Avenue Hussein-1er-de-Jordanie. It is the most peopled spot I’ve come across in the whole of Paris, half the crowd of Arab descent. Leading downhill from the front of the Palace, once the home of the city’s commissioners and now a year late in transformation into the Cité de L’Architecture et du Patrimoine, I walk along the Avenue du Président-Wilson. The next building along the thoroughfare is the office of the Western European Union, with a new curved glass-hung extension housing the EU-backed Institute for Security Studies. The names and titles amuse and annoy me.
One of Beth’s presents was a CD of the songs of Marlene Dietrich, and I pass a public gallery in which a Dietrich exhibition had closed on 15 December, the neo-classical temple shut now for restoration. Opposite is the Musée d’Art Moderne de La Ville de Paris, also closed, because of building subsidence. Beside it, Le Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art institute open from midday to midnight on every day of the year except today, 25 December. I aim to return.
Where the fruit and vegetable market used to be at Les Halles, I watch for half an hour in a cool grey breeze a game of boules between friends, working men, joined by ageing spectators, who shake hands, mutter greetings in sonorous throaty voices and offer their friends seasonal cigars. A tropical arboretum flourishes in an underground greenhouse near St Eustache, where in the forecourt lie two dozen Christmas trees, at reduced prices. In a side-altar of the church is a painted triptych by the graffiti artist Keith Haring – I hadn’t realized he was so young when he died in 1990, aged only thirty-two – not at all interested in his work.
At dinner at Petit Bofinger, one of the few restaurants open on Christmas Night, over a glass of rosé I begin to read in my latest copy of the TLS a review of Judith Brown’s new biography of Nehru, whose last Harrow School report apparently read: ‘A thoroughly good fellow and ought to have a very bright future ahead of him.’ King Hussein also went to Harrow and his youngest brother, Prince Hassan bin Talal, was later in the same house there with me. I’ve several times stayed with Hassan and his wife Sarvath in the Royal Palace in Amman.
The rumour hounds claimed that my expulsion from school was for bribing the young prince to requisition a Royal Jordanian helicopter to fly me to a dance in Norfolk!
Half-a-dozen oysters arrive, delicious with squeezed lemon and French bread. They have beautiful shells, which remind me of grotto-work in Italian villas, seventeenth century, baroque, such a variety of extravagant external shapes, the insides of the shells washed by white clouds against a grey sky.
26 December
It’s a twenty-minute steady walk uphill from Le Marais to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. Wandering in from the southern entrance, I’m attracted by the occasional polished black granite mausoleum built amongst the old stone edifices along the main boulevard. Turning to the backs of these new tombs I notice that, when alive, many of the recent-dead had bought a ‘Concession à Perpetuité’ in this prime location. Unlucky others, having neglected to secure a perpetual lease, have been moved to a less salubrious spot, replaced by today’s rich. By people like Roger Strauss, in a colossal structure inscribed merely with his name. And by the family Lathvillière, in a plain tomb inaugurated in 1979, later presented with the body of an infant who lived only eight days, together with the family’s most recent corpse, Georges Lathvillière, the boy’s father, who died last year.
On the sepulchres I note the names of many nineteenth-century sculptors, familiar to me from my Sotheby’s Belgravia days: Jean Dampt, Bartholdi, Jean Carriès, Etex. And Bartholomé, with his cave-like monument to the war dead. My first book, published in 1975, when I was twenty-nine, was about nineteenth-century bronzes, covering the work of many of these artists.
See hundreds of fresh roses at the base of the composer Alfred Musset’s tomb. And watch a devotee of the philosopher Allan Kardec remove the dead petals from dozens of pot-plants decorating his memorial of 1870, sculpted by the husband and wife team of Hippolyte Riviol and Amèlie Boudet.
Honoré de Balzac’s tomb is topped by a portrait bust by David d’Angers and at the base with a bronze book and quill. The writer died in 1850 and his widow, Eve Comtesse Rzewuski was buried there in 1882.
I don’t have a map of the cemetery, and can’t find Delacroix’s grave.
Père Lachaise opens every day at 8 a.m.
At home I own a d’Angers medallion dated 1831, the posthumous portrait of a Napoleonic general, Jean-Baptiste Kléber. It hangs in my bathroom.
On my route back to town, down Rue du Chemin Vert, I call at a bar for a cup of coffee and pear tart. People drop by to place their bets for the Rapido. The patron, a dishevelled companionable man with thick spectacles, grey suit and overhanging stomach, rushes into the street at sight of a traffic warden: ‘He knows my car. He knows my car,’ he calls – my schoolboy French tells me – in the direction of his dusty van, parked on a pedestrian crossing. He escapes a ticket and returns, all smiles. The television, mounted high on a wall, plays soundlessly. The mosaic floor is carpeted in cigarette butts, sugar papers and destroyed lottery tickets.
Along the street a fire engine blocks traffic. Young firemen in golden helmets climb an extended ladder and break through the double balcony doors of a third floor flat. They close the lace curtains behind them. Shop assistants stare from the windows below of Mode Young, Import Export Fabricant, Gros et ½ Gros. I wait for ten minutes, hoping that the fireman will reappear, in heroic explanation.
No movement of the curtains.
Move on, delighting in the French reasonableness of the parking reservation marked in yellow: RAISON.
28 December
Home.
First thing this morning I take a worried walk around my territory, and dirty my fingerless woollen mitts in pulling up errant saplings, noticeable now in the frost-contracted wilderness. I’d worn in Paris the black mittens, with my black mackintosh. Animals have everywhere rustled for grubs in the warmer and wetter earth beneath the dead leaves on the paths. Beth’s present, of a sculpted-cardboard open bookcase for my CDs, is wonderful, the salvaged boxes folded in curls to add strength, sanded flat, the MDF shelves covered in brown paper to unify the texture, a beautiful touch.
Awaiting here on my desk to be read are notes of the Somerset Butterfly Group’s meeting held on 23 November, assessing the season’s worth. There were 17 people at the gathering, and it was recorded in the minutes that on 31 July at Hinkley Point, beside the monolithic nuclear power station, its concrete sides painted a fashionable grey-blue, that 659 gatekeepers were seen in the s
pace of eighty minutes.
29 December
On our three-hour walk in the mist across the side of the hill, Beth and I came across an ancient apple tree covered in mistletoe, growing low enough for me to pick the white berries. Janet has told me of placing mistletoe seeds at Aisholt in slits cut in the crooks of branches of apple and ash, binding them there with coverings of earth, and years later responding with delighted surprise at the bursts of Christmas mistletoe in her leafless trees. Maybe I, in time to come, will experience this same pleasure.
30 December
Last night, late, something happened which was as distressing as anything else in recent months. The details do not matter, and I would not help myself by writing about them. Things must change. They will, they will. Somehow.
2 January
Walked up over the top for coffee this morning with Janet at Aisholt and, at the zenith, the sky clear, saw a shaft of sunlight move with the wind across the snow-covered peaks of the Brecon Beacons off out there in Wales. On my return journey I found, close to the ground in Hugh’s high untampered pastures, protected by mufflers of grass, enough waxcaps to make myself a fresh sauce tonight. These slimy conical mushrooms have psychedelic colours: crimson, white, yellow, green and buff. The buff specimens are the tastiest, I read, the yellow and green ones inadvisable to eat. What I call ‘the waxcap meadow’, down here nearer the house, seems to be without mushrooms this year.
Ash before Oak Page 18
