A Short Walk from Harrods

by Dirk Bogarde

  Afterwards there were kisses all round in the car park, and everyone clambered into cars and trucks and drove off to the wedding breakfast at the Lion d’Or in town.

  ‘When you go away to England next time,’ said Marie-Thérèse, ‘I can come and look after your house. We’ll need the money. I’m going to have a baby.’

  Leaving the house for any length of time was always something to be dreaded. Usually it was for a film, in order to make some money, or, latterly, to promote a book, as I now had started to write seriously rather than act. Every year, while my parents were still alive, I went back to England for family reunions, which were fun and usually of short duration. Duties done, touching base with friends again, buying books for the long winter haul on the hill (English books were hard to get outside Paris: Cannes and Nice had bookshops but they usually sold only paperback thrillers or guide books), stocking up with Marmite, face flannels (unknown in France) and pudding bowls (equally unknown) and the hard rubber balls for the dogs, the return journey was made on the earliest flight out. With relief.

  Someone who lived in a nearby village once told me that, when he and his wife had to leave for the UK, he would be in such distress the night before his departure that he would go weeping among his olive trees and embrace them passionately, promising to return as quickly as possible. I didn’t quite go to those lengths, but I fully understood his feelings. He was Irish, of course, which made him more emotional and volatile, but I could well imagine behaving in that manner. If pushed. Instead, I quietly touched a tree here and there, murmuring that I wouldn’t be away for long, wasn’t deserting them again as they had been before, and that I’d be back. Potty, I suppose. But that was how things were. Mind you, I did have four hundred trees to my local friend’s dozen, so it would have posed quite a problem to salute each and every one. Some, in any case, were vast in girth, unembraceable. One, indeed, was so old and so huge that it had split into five separate trees. It was reckoned to be well over eight hundred years old and was always counted as a single tree because the five ‘splits’ all grew from the same enormous root which was buried deep in the tussocky grass when it wasn’t sneaking down in arm-thick roots through the big stones of the terrace wall above which it stood. I remember Glenda Jackson standing in among the five ‘trees’ struck silent by the majesty of something so old and still living. ‘It was here before Elizabeth! Before Columbus! Perhaps before the Conqueror …’

  And, indeed, if carbon dating is true, so it was. There was one near Menton which was considered to be over a thousand years old. I never saw it, but there were lots of postcards to prove it was a very aged thing. Olive trees, I reckon, are lucky.

  Making a film usually meant a three-month absence and then my sister Elizabeth and her family came out to take over. Her husband, George, was a tree surgeon and landscape gardener, so he was in his element on the hill and the trees were cherished. So that was all right. For shorter absences, like book promotions, which only took about a week or ten days, Marie-Thérèse and Gilles and their abominably spoiled baby came instead. The house was rapidly filled with plastic toys, trucks and stuffed dolls, boxes of baby food, plates and dishes covered in bunnies and badgers, piles of disposable nappies and ropes of coloured plastic beads and baubles. The air was filled with the odour of cheap talcum powder, regurgitated milk and mashed carrot. Gilles also smoked shag and that drifted about and caught in the throat. The dogs slunk through the fug, choking, with half-closed eyes of resentment; but Marie-Thérèse loved them dearly (after all, she had grown up with them), and only hit them savagely when they attacked her wretched child. Which was not often, but did, on occasion, occur in a gentle sort of way: a ‘snap’ rather than a ‘rending’. Anyway, departure from them all was hastened. Even the airport seemed less frantic. Certainly less smelly.

  This is how it was for some time, at least until Marie-Thérèse’s child could stagger about on its own and chuck the Picasso ashtrays into the fireplace. It was very gradual, the change, when it came. Almost imperceptible.

  Forwood had a slight ache one day in his foot. Nothing much: just an ache and slightly irritating. It went on for a week or two.

  ‘You tripped up again today. In the market. Is your foot playing up?’ We were unloading the car in the garage behind the house.

  ‘A bit. Nothing really, I must have wrenched it. Can you cope with the Codec bag? I’ll open the kitchen door.’

  I dumped the stuff in the kitchen and went up to my office, back to the typewriter, to round off a paragraph which was working out pretty well. I’d sorted out a finishing line driving into town.

  But it wasn’t ‘nothing really’. Poteau, who had by this time retired but kept a ‘friendly and caring eye’ on us, said that it was ‘just a touch of Parkinson’s. There is a pill which will control it.’

  Well, there is no such thing as ‘just a touch of Parkinson’s’. Even I knew that. But I kept silent. However, a signal light had gone on in my mind. Red for Alert. Life just moved on as if nothing had slipped in to change things. Although I knew, and I suppose Forwood knew, that something had. The tide had changed far across the sands: I don’t know which of us really realized this at the time. We neither of us discussed the situation.

  What we did discuss, however, was the arrival of the new Socialist government in France, who, among many other changes, made it illegal to employ unregistered aliens. No more ‘moonlighting’, no more Plum-Bum and Fraj; Monsieur Rémy was reduced to picking up only registered workers when and where he needed them and only for specific jobs. No longer did I have a more or less permanent gang to help on the land. It was possible to engage those refugees from Sousse, Tunis and other lost colonies only if they had their ‘papers’. So that was that.

  We were now left with the terraces and the mowing, the harvest and the stone-walling, all to do on our own. I was sixty-one, Forwood five years older and slowly finding that ‘a touch of Parkinson’s’ was exhausting. He was not able to do as much on the land as he had before. This irritated him greatly. Helplessly he would sit on the terrace and watch the ants race up and down the vines which he had once so savagely sprayed, no longer able now to carry the weighty cylinder of the poison on his back, nor to stride, as once he had done, up and down the steep terraces with the German giants. He had to content himself with quietly raking up the tall grasses which I had had to cut, inexpertly: I was not as good with the heavy machines as he had been. Gradually, very gradually, terraces were regretfully abandoned. I concentrated on the ones immediately round the house, and he cut long, elegant, green pathways through the rest. It was a bitter compromise, but all life had quietly become a series of compromises.

  For the time being driving the car was no great problem – he still had perfect control of that – but one day, sitting beside him on the way back from market, I noticed, with that dull stab of fear, that a slim trickle of saliva had run down his chin. He felt it later, brushed it off, but it was to remain part of his life from now on. A part of ‘just a touch’.

  Florette Ranchett one day called me into the store-room behind the Mini Market, and, among crates of mineral water, beer, stacked tins of beans, peas, pineapple, and great avalanches of kitchen paper and washing powders, told me that a new young doctor had arrived in the village. She was certain I would be glad to know that. Didn’t say why, but we both understood exactly what was implied.

  ‘He’s taken rooms, for his bureau, just up the hill. The tall house with the blue shutters. It’s been empty for years, but Monsieur the Maire, my husband, is having it restored. We need a doctor in the village. It is developing so quickly.’

  Patrick was young, very bright (it would appear), spoke excellent English, and was married to a very pretty wife, Solange. Certainly Forwood had a mild form of Parkinson’s, and a hernia which was caused by wrenching about with the big mowers, but apart from those things all was well. For a time anyway. And we all settled down as friends as well as doctor and patients, for I joined in too: with no Poteau
now to ease the tensions of life, one was in need of a sympathetic ear.

  Patrick was mad about jazz, and pop, and knew and followed all the groups with the passion of a ‘groupie’. Together he and Solange raced off to any of the huge pop concerts which exploded all along the coast during the summer; so getting ill had to be rather ‘arranged’, although he did hold his morning surgery in the new bureau in the village.

  For a while no one went near him. He was new, young, a stranger from the north. The older people were afraid of him, the younger men didn’t want their wives examined by a young, and handsome, doctor, the women didn’t trust him with their children because, as Madame Pasquini said, he ‘is a child himself! Hardly out of school! He has no experience of life! How can he be a doctor?’

  So life was pretty dull at first, and the pop concerts were a great relief to him and filled in his time. However, after two terrible traffic accidents at the crossroads in the village, which he attended, and at which he was seen to be extremely capable and tough, there was a slight easing of tension, and when Florette Ranchett’s aged mother was suddenly taken desperately ill with a twisted hernia, after lugging sacks of potatoes about, she summonsed Patrick. The only other doctor was six kilometres away, her mother was in agony, so Patrick it was. And that gesture of Florette Ranchett saved both her mother and Patrick. He coped perfectly, the old lady made an exemplary recovery. He had been efficient, impressive, knew all the top surgeons at the Clinique des Magnolias in town, and there was no longer any doubt in the village that he was, in fact, ‘un vrai!’ A real doctor. He was almost swamped with patients from then on; bought a bright red car and raced about the countryside bringing relief to numbers of ailing farmers and their families, scattering prescriptions about like confetti, a normal occurrence in France where six bottles of different pills, or suppositories, are usually recommended for tennis elbow. It is all very comforting. And the Government pays for it anyway. So …

  My office up in the olive store became a sort of refuge: now that I was writing seriously, or anyway seriously for myself, I was faced with the anxiety of deadlines and a slightly impatient publisher who wanted everything as ‘soon as can be managed’. Also, I became greatly involved with my characters, which was right and proper – after all, I had invented them – and spent hours staring, apparently, into space but in fact trying to work out the twists and turns of ever more complicated plots and patterns of construction. Time spent like this melted away, but I could hear, at all times, the muted roar of the mower (the lighter one) while Forwood was cutting his elegant swathes through the high grass of the terraces. I knew that as long as I could hear that sound all was well, I could continue work in my womb-like little room. If it stopped then I too stopped, hands raised above the typewriter, frozen, listening, alert like a frightened hare.

  Sometimes the stopping indicated only that a terrace had been finished, or a blade had hit a stone, a plug had got furred up with chaff. Sometimes it only meant a rest period. But at all times I was aware, never at ease, and if the pause continued I went, with extremely controlled casualness, down to seek the cause. If questioned I would simply say that I had got stuck. I had to clear my head for a minute. This was accepted, and as soon as I had checked to my satisfaction that the stopping was of no import, I’d go back and settle down to work. With one ear alert for the next stop.

  And one day it was longer than usual. I heard Forwood crunching heavily across the pebbles under the lime tree beneath my window. He went into the house. I heard the door opened, heard him clinking and rummaging about in the bar-cupboard. I gave it ten minutes, so that I did not appear to be anxious. It was almost, by my watch, noon anyway. Time for the morning’s Bloody Mary. He was sitting in one of the big white sofas, the tall scarlet glass in his hand. He looked up when I came in, stirring his drink with a plastic swizzle-stick we’d pinched in a bunch years ago from the Plaza, in New York.

  ‘Finished? Or stuck again?’ he said.

  I poured a beer. ‘Finished. Well, a paragraph. I’ll take a break, it’s no use forcing things.’ I sat down on the stool by the telephone. ‘Have you finished? It’s about time. It’s getting hot now. Don’t overdo things.’

  He set the swizzle-stick in an ashtray. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Can’t overdo things now. I’m too feeble.’

  I lit a cigarette. ‘Nonsense. Feeble! You have a hernia … mild … that’ll pull you down. It is tiring anyway, pushing that Wolf about.’

  ‘It’s no good pretending. I’m bloody feeble. I’ve noticed it happening. I just feel flat, not up to par.’

  ‘It’s the weather. Humid. I feel drained today. That’s why I’ve packed it in.’

  Bendo, his prize boxer, whose father was champion of Austria, came crashing into the room, tongue hanging, saliva dripping, heaving for breath. He huffed about, then slumped with a crash and a sickening shudder in the middle of the rush matting of the cockpit, a sunken area at the far end of the Long Room where we were sitting.

  ‘Where has he been? Did you leave the gates open?’

  ‘No. There’s a cat in the oak wood. He’s determined to get it.’

  We sat in silence for a moment; silent apart from Bendo’s gasping and sudden bursts of panting.

  ‘It’s a bugger frankly.’

  I reached up for an ashtray. ‘What’s a bugger? The cat …?’

  ‘No. Falling apart like this …’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘I never meant to get old.’

  ‘You aren’t old! Balls to that. But you are over sixty. Can’t expect to do all the things we did when we came here first. I’m over sixty, too, for Pete’s sake …’

  ‘I’m losing weight.’

  ‘I can’t see it.’

  ‘I can. The scales in my bathroom are accurate. I weigh myself every day.’

  ‘It’s the heat! Honestly … and we don’t eat all that much in the heat … you don’t put on weight eating salads and fruit …’

  ‘I’m losing it. And too quickly. I know. Not a fool.’

  ‘Well, Patrick is coming in this morning. He’s got a tape he wants us to hear.’

  ‘Oh God, not one of his own? Strumming his guitar?’

  ‘Afraid it is. Plus his own English lyrics. But ask him to have a look at you? If you are worried?’ Playing the casual bit was pretty difficult sometimes. But it was far wiser to appear perfectly normal and calm because I knew that he was feeling anything but calm. He always gave one the impression of enormous ease and confidence, but underneath that very cool English exterior anxiety lay shallow.

  Patrick, when he arrived, was brisk, practical. Two days later, thanks to his influence with the top surgeons at the Clinique des Magnolias, we got an early appointment, followed by barium meals, followed a day later by X-rays, and then a bit more waiting. Waiting was something that became familiar from then on. Patience and a calm heart became essential parts of learning courage.

  I saw the little red car come racing up the track one morning. Patrick jumped out, slammed his door, grinning. ‘What do you feel about my tape? I’m worried about my English grammar. I only pick it up from the radio and the Beatles or Elton John. He’s terrific, yes?’

  ‘Terrific, yes. I haven’t really listened to your own tape. Not yet. I will as soon as I can. Have you got the X-rays? From the clinic?’

  He had arrived unexpectedly. Forwood was walking with Bendo high up by the oak wood looking, I supposed, for the cat. He had seen the red car and was on his way down. I heard him calling to the dog. Patrick accepted a vodka and tonic, stretched long legs. ‘No problem! Just some matière, some, what do you call it? Matter? Maybe a little polyp … they can just nick it out. Easy.’ He raised his glass in salute just as Forwood came in, slightly behind an eager, gasping, shouldering, snuffling boxer.

  ‘It’s a polyp, maybe. Or just some matière. So be calm! But you have a double hernia now! Too much work … I did tell you to stop.’

  Forwood lost years in seconds, poured a B
loody Mary, mixed in the Worcestershire sauce, stirred it too rapidly. ‘That all? Really? Nothing worse, Patrick?’

  We sat about for a while, agreeing that it was perhaps wiser to go to London to get the polyp, if that was what it was, ‘nicked out’. It was easier to deal with in English. Forwood had said that he was pretty good at coping with the inside of a washing-machine, a television set, record-player or even, at a pinch, a car in French, but that the medical terms in French of his own guts completely eluded him. ‘I’d rather be ill in my own language.’

  He went upstairs to get Patrick his fee. One had to pay, or it was better to pay, in cash and at the time. Especially as Patrick and Solange were pretty hard up and she had discovered a week before, to her delight, that she was pregnant.

  ‘You are certain, about a polyp?’

  Patrick set his empty glass down, gathered the X-rays up in a bundle, shuffled them into an envelope. Shot a quick look at the staircase.

  ‘I think so. They do occur quite frequently, after a certain age. But get him to London, he’ll be more comfortable there. I know he hated the clinic.’

  ‘How long have I got? To get him there, make arrangements?’

  ‘This week? It might be a good idea … no use in letting things wait …’ He patted the dog affectionately. ‘Good fellow! What a hot dog! It’s only Monday today …’

  ‘Could it be anything else, Patrick?’

  He was rubbing his hand over Bendo’s head and neck, smoothing it along his muscular back. He didn’t look directly at me when he said: ‘It could be cancer. They’ll check in London. I can’t do it … and the clinic say it is just a polyp.’