A Short Walk from Harrods

by Dirk Bogarde

  ‘What’s up? Is this the last tin of tomato juice, for God’s sake?’

  ‘More in the cellar. I got it yesterday.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m just thinking.’

  ‘You are the only person in the world I know who can imbue the word “thinking” with chilling terror.’

  ‘Well, the chairs and settees. They really are tatty now. Shabby. Tired … And it’ll soon be summer and the guests will be upon us …’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We ought to have everything recovered. In white.’

  ‘White! With two dogs and wellingtons and mud everywhere!’

  ‘I suppose it would cost the earth to do?’

  ‘The earth.’

  He came slowly up through the middle room holding his glass with care. ‘I knew I should be alarmed when you said “thinking”. Where do you suppose the money is coming from? And white … Six armchairs and one, two, three sofas. Christ!’

  ‘Well, sell one of the pictures. We never see them, sitting wrapped up in the vaults at Lloyds in Cannes. Now do we? Too valuable to have on the walls, so there they lie, in brown paper and Sellotape. They cost money to store too … Better to have something to look at for the price I pay in storage.’

  ‘The pictures are supposed to be your “insurance” against disaster.’

  ‘Well, it is a sort of disaster. Living in this awful room. Drab, used, mucky.’

  Forwood sat in one of the offending chairs, sipped his drink. ‘How will you go about selling them? Any idea?’

  When confronted by difficult questions I rather try to gain thinking-time. So I wandered down to the bar, opened up another beer. ‘Monte Carlo. That’s what I’ll do …’

  ‘Monte Carlo what?’

  ‘Sotheby’s, Christie’s. Lots of important dealers down there. Good market; they all have representatives in that hideous little place. All vastly rich, catering for vastly rich people.’ I joined the small tableau of Forwood flanked by his dogs.

  ‘What do you have in mind to sell? The Ben Nicholson? Or the Egon Schiele? You’d be mad if you did. They are neither of them “fashionable” at the moment. Wait a little longer. You bought them as an investment, so wait until the time is right. Advice offered. Do as you see fit. Not my pictures.’

  ‘I’d try for the Schiele, I think. I don’t like it much. I think it might sell pretty well down here. The Nicholson is very English; they don’t even know who he is in France. Not popular at any rate. And I feel it might be wiser to sit on that for a while. It cost enough; it should be an investment. But the Egon Schiele could go. I think it might make enough to cover all these …’

  ‘I have doubts,’ Forwood said. ‘Your Schiele is about the only “respectable” one he ever drew; painted, whatever. Monte Carlo would far prefer the erotic open-legged ones. Not enough sexuality in yours. No gaunt depravity …’

  ‘I think it very beautiful. Reclining Woman. It came from the Marlborough Galleries: they don’t make mistakes.’

  ‘You may be. Selling too soon. Anyway, please yourself. You usually do. But take my advice about the Nicholson. One day it’ll be worth a lot. Keep it.’ He got up and went out on to the terrace, stood in the brilliant spring sunlight. ‘The cherry trees are pink with bud. I’ll have to get down to the ants soon.’

  He had an obsession about the little fourmis d’Argentine, millions of which swarmed up and down and over the vine, the cherries, the citrus trees in undulating black ropes, and which (it was said by Monsieur Rémy) had arrived in the area at the beginning of the century in the luggage of some idiot Brazilian. (French logic again.) They had, within a very few years, spread up from the coast at Nice and almost destroyed the entire orange and lemon crops, the vineyards and the fruit in the area. The olives, for some reason, had been more or less spared. Forwood’s battle against the insects was harsh, unending and passionate.

  But I, once I had an idea in my mind, would not be deflected – an all white Long Room: chairs, sofas trim and clean on the highly polished tile and brick floors on which Lady spent hours with her electric buffer and which presently shone conker-brown in the early sunlight. White it should be. Occupied with my overwhelming picture of glittering perfection to come, I paid scant attention to the fourmis d’Argentine. A pity, as it turned out.

  Various establishments were contacted in Monte Carlo; some even in Geneva. It all took some time and a lot of telephoning, which, by now, had become a little easier. No longer did one have to spell the exchanges phonetically: amazingly we were on automatic by this time and simply dialled numbers.

  Eventually three gentlemen were summonsed from three hugely respectable firms and arrived at Le Pigeonnier for the, apparent, purpose of valuing its entire contents. For insurance. This way, I reckoned, they’d all get a look at the Schiele and the Nicholson without undue pressure and would give me an idea of their worth. Forwood viewed the whole thing with lurking suspicion: he didn’t reckon that the contents of the whole house amounted to much more than a few thousand, most of it, if not all, having been gathered together from auctions, junk shops and modest antique shops in the Home Counties area. I had an eclectic collection of what he called ‘bogus old masters’, some quite good modern works and one or two, like the ones I was presently considering flogging off for yards of heavy white cotton, bought mainly as safe investments. But there really was nothing there to excite any smooth young gentleman from long-established houses. I’d be ridiculed he felt. Wisely.

  The first gentleman to arrive bounced slowly and unhappily up the rough track in a white Mercedes, terror-stricken that his springs would bust. They didn’t, and he drew up at the porte d’entrée in a frantically apprehensive state, only considering his journey back down the track.

  ‘My God! How did you find this place? By helicopter? It has taken me nearly two hours! I took the wrong turning after the autoroute …’ He calmed down with a glass of sherry (he refused anything stronger until he had done his survey) and, armed with a biro and a pad, went off alone, as he wished, and combed the house. I showed him where to go and told him to holler if he needed explanations. He didn’t bother.

  After about two hours he came down on to the terrace, greeted effusively by the dogs, which clearly alarmed him – rabies and the fear that they might soil his elegant Féraud suit. Forwood, strapped into the vast cylinder of ant poison, straw hat on his head, spray-gun in hand, called ‘Good morning’ and I offered a glass of chilled champagne, left over from Christmas or something. He declined but accepted a Perrier and sat, gingerly, in a chair with his pad and biro.

  He wore one of those smug, half smiling expressions which indicated clearly that only he knew that he farted honey. I disliked him instantly, for I knew that his pad contained nothing of any interest to him or, for that matter, myself. He had obviously been quietly amused by my English presumption that I was Randolph Hearst or even a minor Paul Getty. However, he retained basic good manners, and instead of just suggesting that I dynamite the house and contents instantly and claim some form of modest compensation, he spoke kindly of a ‘pleasing’ Georgian table in the top little bedroom, an ‘attractive’, but ‘heavily restored’ Carolean chair, a not ‘important’ but ‘amusing’ buffet and so on and so on. I was wearying of the safe platitudes which accompany rejection. I asked boldly about my two investments and he dismissed the Schiele as ‘interesting but unfashionable’ and the Ben Nicholson as ‘unknown English, twentieth century. Abstract, but rather naive.’ I was absolutely delighted watching him wince his Mercedes down the track to the coast, irritated greatly by Forwood’s quiet smile pumping up the ant-cylinder, and angered by my own stupidity in asking him.

  However, he was only one of the three, and over the next weeks they arrived. One behaved precisely in the same manner, drank only a large vodka-tonic, dismissed both paintings with a sad smile and drove away in a BMW; and the third (and last) was a plump, pink young man with impeccable English and slightly exaggerated English suiti
ng, weskits and a nipped-in hacking jacket and brogues, who dismissed the contents of the house as ‘very pleasant things to live with’ and of no intrinsic value, but flipped, in a very controlled manner, for the Schiele. Like the others he was fairly dismissive of the Ben Nicholson but did admit that he had heard of him. He had worked for two years in London with a major auction house. I liked him instantly. The champagne was reoffered and this time accepted and even Forwood joined us with his Bloody Mary and oil-stained overalls, wreathed in a heavy odour of ant poison.

  Having lived in England for two years, Theo (his name) was accustomed to eccentricity. He had also seen me in some movies and was as silly as all the others who were suddenly confronted by a familiar figure of normal height instead of one in Cinemascope or Panavision. We talked easily and comfortably. Schiele, he knew, was unfashionable at the moment, but his time was coming and he knew ‘a gentleman in Geneva’ who could be very interested. He asked permission to take it away with him when he left? To ‘offer it up’, so to speak?

  I agreed. Forwood looked acutely alarmed but said nothing – after all it was my picture – and Theo eventually bounced cheerfully down the track in his shooting brake, the Schiele repacked in its brown paper and Sellotape, and, for this important voyage, wrapped up in a good linen sheet. He promised to write, or call, as soon as he had any news. Forwood pointed out, pleasantly enough, that he thought this was most unlikely. ‘You have just let the chap cart the thing away. You don’t really know if he is who he says he is. If he works for whom he says … Total, idiot trust! Sometimes I do wonder for your sanity. After over thirty years of your company I begin to seriously consider you to be barmy.’ The ant poison was strapped on and he strode off with his spray-gun held high, the dogs at his heels.

  But some months later, when we sat surrounded by splendid white chairs and sofas tightly covered in expensive Cogolin cotton, he nodded wisely and almost claimed it all as his idea. Anyway, he conceded, it was better to look at the splendour of the sparkling Long Room than at Egon Schiele’s Reclining Woman wrapped up in a vault. Theo had managed to get me a glorious five-figure sum from his contact in Geneva, and in spite of his own commission and the French tax (less venal by far than the British), I still had enough to spend as I had never done since arriving in France. I even agreed, albeit reluctantly, to a tiny Sony TV set, which was hidden on the lower shelf of one of the bookcases so that Forwood could watch Yvonne Printemps, Josephine Baker, Jean Gabin, Mistinguette and others in the old black and white films which flickered about on Sunday. It was only about ten inches by eight, so it didn’t really show, and I never watched it anyway. Beds were bought for the guest room, new chintzes brought roses-and-lilac-on-trellis to the lives of the invités, a new oven and rotisserie arrived, and more cypress trees were stuck across the land, and, at some expense, Next Door were completely hidden from sight by a long line of flourishing golden bamboo which marched down the length of the boundary fence and caused faint, but protesting, whimpers that it was ‘unsuitable’ for the landscape and cut off their view of something or other. But it, and I, prevailed. And in time (a couple of years) a veritable jungle, ready to hide lurking tigers, raced down the chestnut paling fence under the apple trees. I was secured in my acres.

  Beginning the porte d’entrée, 1973

  Finished. Autumn 1973

  November 1968

  September 1977

  The first time I saw the house after the conversion, July 1968

  The Long Room, 1985

  The chimneyplace, 1968

  The chimneyplace, 1985

  Starting the kitchen extension. Self, Monsieur Danté, Monsieur Rémy. 1974

  Finished. May 1980

  Le Pigconnier, August 1979

  The start of the Big Fire, August 1986

  The moon country. Crete de Ferrier, Provence. Winter

  The first Christmas, 1969

  The terrace, 1986

  Last photo of the terrace, 1986

  A pretty fatuous thing to observe: no one, and nothing, is ever secure.

  By secure, in this instance, I of course really mean ‘safe and for ever’, which is what I have, like the rest of mankind, believed from my earliest days to be perfectly possible. Even expected. And in the end they lived happily ever after.

  So I was taught. And what does ‘ever after’ mean? Anyway, this childish notion was really soundly abused each and every time it dared to thread its way into my young, and tumultuous, thoughts. I learned very early on in my life that nothing was for ever; so I should have been aware of disillusion in early middle age. But, somehow, we try to obliterate early warnings and go cantering along hopefully, idiotically.

  I can remember, so vividly, brilliant summer mornings when we went down to the beach at Deauville or Trouville. The beaches there always seemed to be so much wider than the beaches in England. The sea lay like a glittering silver sheet far, far away across the hard rippled sand. The sky arched above transparently blue, with lazy chalk marks scrawling little clouds so that they could drift gently across the sun. I remember bare feet splashing through the little pools of leftover sea among the ridged sand, the salt smell of the long strands of bladderwrack drifted in from a rockier part of the coast and curled now like bits of brown bobble-edged ribbons; remember scrabbling in the heavy damp sand with a little red spade to start the foundations of what would be the fort. Moats were dug, walls patted into shape, towers and turrets built, cemented with water carried from the distant sea in a red and blue pail, the water slopping down the bucket sides and bare brown legs. The sea, frilled all along the immense length of the beach, flapped softly in the sunlight, sparkling, sighing, winking in the high morning light. Shells were sought along its crystal edge: razor shells, tiny pink ones, like a baby’s fingernails, shards of blue mussel and, most prized of all, limpet shells with their conical tops – these were to cap the turrets, so four, at least, were essential. They crowned the huge efforts of the morning. A morning obliterated completely by achievement or the desire for achievement.

  The building of the fort occupied one so completely that even food and drink were taken in one sand-encrusted hand while the other shaped the crenellations and loopholes of the battlements, working against time. The turning of the tide. Sitting back on one’s heels, surveying the work accomplished, the moat, the drawbridge, the limpet-capped towers, the arches and ramps drying hard in the midday sun, one relished work well done and quite forgot its impermanence until, suddenly looking up, the tiny little seabirds which had seemed to look like sparrows bobbing and teetering along the sea rim miles away, were no longer sparrows and no longer miles away. They were at arm’s length and they were gulls. Black, gold and bold of eye, hooked of beak, orange legs striding arrogantly, plumage taut and silky. They were the unwelcome heralds of coming destruction. The limpid edge of the sea was starting to nudge, run, trickle, dribble and spill over one’s feet, into the moat, swirling in lacy wavelets round the shell-decked walls, sparkling and glinting as it seeped beneath the towers, crumbled the ramp to the arched drawbridge. Sighs of despair from children’s throats, the deadly call from the grown-ups! ‘The tide has turned! Be sharp now. Come along, come along …’

  Then the hopeless droop of shoulder, the shrug of helplessness, sanded hands hanging limp with despair while the moat filled with swirling water, turrets began to dribble down, sag and spill, limpet shells tumbling, walls bulging, flopping with whispering splashes into the deepening water hurrying away the brown-bobbled ribbons into the dancing distance. The fort slowly dissolved before one’s eyes. The inevitable was mutely accepted. The ‘work done’ was obliterated in the scream and wheel of gulls.

  Remembering that instance, how odd it is that one is not prepared for the ‘dissolving of the fort’ one has constructed with such care in later life. But we do not learn. We always believe that it’ll be all right for us. That our fort will stand, the tide will never turn. But, of course, it does.

  The years on the hill were partial
ly measured for me by the growing-up of Monsieur Rémy’s children. Marie-Thérèse, in the early days of the washing machine, was a plump mewling creature in a push-chair, draped with broderie anglaise frills. Her brother, Christian, was a bit older and sometimes came with his father to throw stones at the goldfish in the pond, a gleeful, curly-haired child. One day Marie-Thérèse was five, then ten, then twenty and then in love and then married, and Madame Bruna was, to her hysterical delight, a grandmother.

  Christian, ahead of his sister by a couple of years, first caught tadpoles, then beat the olives, then drove the battered truck, was apprenticed to a nursery gardener, and smoked shag-filled cigarettes which he rolled himself. His presence in the house lingered in every nook and cranny, even in the upholstery of the white chairs and sofas, for days. But he was a splendid worker so that had to be set aside … Anyway, he was ‘family’.

  Marie-Thérèse married Gilles, a football fanatic from Aix who drove long-distance trucks, the Paris–Nice–Brussels route. The wedding was in the village church on a brilliant Saturday afternoon in March. Marie-Thérèse was radiant in a gigantic crinoline, tiara and floating veil, clutching a bouquet, tottering in high-heeled silver shoes; Madame Bruna tearful in rustly grey nylon taffeta, a feathered confection sitting high on her bright henna’d hair, lace gloves on hard-worked hands; Monsieur Rémy bulging in a too-tight suit, collar and an alarming geometric tie, a giant spray of carnation and fern on his chest. Dr Poteau was there with his one-armed, pretty wife. Florette Ranchett, Madame Pasquini, even Monsieur Danté had come, stooped in a crumpled blue suit and waistcoat, white carnation and drooping white moustache. Christian was Gilles’s best man and supporter. Truck driver or not, he was sweating with terror beside his laughing, sparkling bride. The family sat together in a close huddle, heads bowed; we, the invités, sat discreetly at the back. Children ran around playing tag, a small dog ran in, looked around, ran out again. An organ soared and a full girls’ choir rang lightly and cheerfully from a tape, hired for the occasion, crackling and reverberating through a pair of speakers rigged high above the altar by Christian.