A Short Walk from Harrods

by Dirk Bogarde

  ‘But it could be cancer?’

  He looked at me directly. Bendo loped off out into the garden.

  ‘It’s possible. Yes. But look, this is important. When you go to London, will you try to get this album for me? It’s quite new, impossible to get it here, they have never heard of them. They’re terrific, amazing, quite, quite amazing! Will you try? I have written down all the information here, serial number …’ He gave me one of his visiting-cards with something scribbled on the back.

  ‘Try for me? Please? They are amazing. It’s a new group, called the Cure.’

  Chapter 7

  It’s so easy, writing like this, without any firm reference book, diary, journal at hand to set one on one’s path (I burned all my stuff just before I left) to forget to round up all one’s sheep.

  My first publisher, and editor, Norah Smallwood, always used that phrase when I had submitted a few chapters to her for her tough criticism. ‘Round up all your stray sheep. It drives the reader mad if you don’t and you’ll get into a ghastly mess yourself.’ Right of course. She almost always was: I am still enormously influenced by her – always will be. So I’d better chivvy in some stray sheep. Like a dog … And dogs are what immediately come to mind.

  There were dogs all through my life. I am not, oddly enough, a dog person, nor yet a cat person. I swoon at the sight of neither and am pleased to avoid both when possible. I don’t, frankly, need them. I think one ‘needs’ animals for comfort, as a sort of surrogate companion, lover, child, what you will. That’s about all. But I will perfectly cheerfully have one if the situation demands their presence in my life.

  And thus it was with dogs. I lived a country life from my earliest childhood; impossible not to have a dog under those circumstances: fields, woods, long dusty lanes, wild moorland, curving, swelling Downs, all demanded, as it were, the presence of a dog. A childhood without an animal is unthinkable, and extremely bad for the future man or woman. Through an animal one is taught responsibility, comfort, trust, authority, duty, care and, to a great degree, love. So you have a dog. It seems reasonable. There have been masses of dogs in my existence. All sorts, kinds, conditions. Some wonderful, some awful, a few mad, most just perfectly pleasant ‘dogs’. There were a Rogan, Chug, Chug 2, Chug 3, Sheba, Carla, Candida, Bogey and so on: they provided part of the calm, secure, background to ordinary country life. To life, actually. But, frankly, I gave most, if not all, my childish affection to grass snakes, toads, mice, tree frogs, rats and any other small rodent, mammal, reptile or fish available to me.

  Fish and reptiles were, I suppose, my favourites. I spent hours building aquariums, or vivariums, and stuffed them with ferns and weeds, rocks and pebbles, and did my best to create a fragment for myself of living rock-pools or damp and steamy tropical marshes. The theory was always much better than the practice. But there lay my love. Dogs were very secondary to these scaly, warted, tailed, finned creatures.

  Leaving England for abroad (I was at first uncertain where exactly I would settle: Italy, France or even, at one time, Austria, an aberration quickly excised from my whirling mind by one crashingly severe winter in Vienna – cold is not fun) was made poignant for me by the dumping, as it were, of two dogs – a large English mastiff (Candida) and an ageing corgi (Bogey) – a Siamese cat and a flutter of tropical finches in a bamboo cage, plus, and this was the most painful part of all, the abandoning of my beloved parrot, Annie, a perfectly ordinary Brazilian green, who was detested by everyone and reciprocated happily by loathing (with red-eyed hatred) everyone in sight: except me. I loved her with unbridled passion. We kissed, whispered and muttered together in a most nauseating manner, and if she flew away it was never very far, just to the top of a local wild cherry. She sat up there all day, screaming and laughing like a mad woman, until dusk fell, and then she would condescend to descend, slowly, clambering branch by branch from her perch to my arm. But only if I verbally flattered her, cajoled her softly, and whistled the first few bars of ‘As Long As He Needs Me’ from Oliver. It was an act we built up together. Most impressive to ourselves, viewed with hostility or alarm by others. However, when I left the UK, she had to go. Just as the dogs and the cats and finches were forced to find alternative accommodation, so, alas, was she.

  Elizabeth took the dogs, the cat; the gardener took the finches; and Annie was given to a fearfully grand private zoo not far away where she spent the rest of her days screaming ‘Dirk!’ at the top of her voice and hysterically laying eggs from time to time. I don’t know if there was any message there? She lasted for years anyway, and as I had had her for many years before, it seemed a reasonable time of loving for us both. But leaving her caused me far more grief than leaving the dogs. There has to be something pretty squint there.

  However, when I got to Le Pigeonnier, I was quite determined that there would be no more painful separations, no responsibilities to helpless animals, no fuss, heartbreak and bother. Never again. Blithely forgetting that I already had a dog of a sort, Labo, which I had been hauling across Europe, from Rome to Paris, Munich, Trieste, etc. I would just build the pond of my dreams, stock it with carp and orfe, impersonal things, and that would be that. I reckoned without Forwood, who was as ‘doggy’ as I was ‘un-doggy’: ‘I know that it is your house and that you are, as you always have been, Little Master, even at your advanced age, but I can’t live up here on this hillside, surrounded by acres and acres of rock and brush, rabbits, pheasant, partridge and even foxes and a badger without a bloody dog … So put up with it.’

  One day, after finishing marketing at Marché Forville in Cannes, he saw a small boxer puppy tumbling about in a too small cage with some other dogs in a chic pet shop near the Croisette and, against all my earnest and gentle protests, bought it. Never, under any circumstances, buy a dog from a chic pet shop. Especially such an establishment in, of all places, Cannes. Those fiendish people, the breeders, usually destroy the runts of the litters and puppies which are surplus to their needs, or, on the other hand, sell them off to pet shops with extremely vague pedigrees (usually ‘mislaid’ at the cash register). ‘Daisy’ (this is what she got called, after Forwood’s grandmother, Daisy Lockton) was such a creature. Her stump was bleeding from poor docking, but her ears were unclipped. That is to say, they were not bandaged or in points, which is why he bought her. Cutting, pricking, the ears he rightly considered to be barbaric. So hers just flopped. And I of course, a year or so before, had been adopted by the stray hill dog in Rome during the time that I was deciding just where to put down my roots. This was Labo. So I really couldn’t, in all fairness, sulk about Daisy. Thus she came to the hill, and we had – hey presto! – ‘instant country household’.

  Irritating but inevitable. As she grew older, Daisy became rather evil, for she sensed, as all animals do, that Labo was disabled in that he had been savagely beaten at some time – his leg broken in three places – and he limped. So she got him into corners from time to time and tried to tear out his throat. This was not too bad in open country, but very tiresome in a dining-room full of eating guests. Blood flew in spattering arcs across whitewashed walls, women screamed, glasses crashed, bottles fell, Labo shrieked and howled and, after furious separation, Daisy beamed brightly around the room wagging her stump, while Labo dragged himself to hide upstairs, under my bed. It was all ‘delightfully real and rural’, and everyone rather enjoyed it. It was part and parcel of the vie de bohème en France.

  Daisy died eventually; she got some ugly disease. We spent days over in town sitting with a mixed clutter of ailing cats, dogs, budgerigars, rabbits and gerbils, hunched sickly in wicker cages, for hours until Dr Santori could see us. Plump, kind, careful, wise and vastly expensive, he failed to save cancerous Daisy and she had to be put down. A glorious, easy, dignified way of death if ever I saw one. Forwood, stubborn and untrusting, refused to leave her body with Dr Santori for fear of vivisection, and she was carried, head lolling, in the car boot, back to a private burial up in the potager, where the soil wa
s more or less friable and holes were easier to dig, a boulder to mark the place.

  Forwood was broody for some weeks, Labo radiant, I relieved to have only one meal a day to prepare. But the brooding gave way to beaming smiles when Dr Santori was summonsed to a ‘quite wonderful litter of boxers with astounding pedigrees’. The sire was champion of all Austria. They were five weeks old, in three weeks they’d be ready for collection. Bendo joined us on the hill. Ears unpricked, he therefore never made the Kennel Club in Europe. However, he was a splendid animal and, being a dog, got on pretty well with Labo, who took him off on secret journeys and taught him the facts of life. Forwood was forever trailing round local farms and smallholdings where there was a bitch on heat. Tiresome, perfectly natural, but smelly often and the cause of severe, and bloody, battles between the village dogs and the team from Le Pigeonnier. However, one was assured, that was life and perfectly all right.

  Labo died after about fifteen years of companionship, or thereabouts. It was difficult to age him exactly, for when he arrived in my life, broken and starving, he was about a year or even two. Anyhow, one day, washing up and in a hurry, unthinkingly I chucked a small lamb bone across the kitchen. Too late heard him snap frantically at it, too late saw him gulp it down. Too late all round. He died, a day after, haemorrhaging copiously, in my guilty arms. He was carried up to the potager, buried in a deepish hole under a pear tree, his grave marked by another large boulder. End of a chapter. Or series of chapters.

  Thus it was only Bendo who was left for Marie-Thérèse to care for when we eventually left for London after Patrick’s cautious warning about cancer and his desperate imploring that I should find him a recording of the Cure. The trip was pretty unpleasant. Marie-Thérèse and Gilles, with his hand-rolled shag, and their disgusting baby had to hang on for some weeks while Forwood recovered from a five-hour operation at Edward VII for cancer of the colon. No polyp here – a savage growth. Patrick had been right, and on one of those desolate afternoons wedged anxiously between hospital visits I managed to find his wretched album in a shop in Marylebone High Street. Mission accomplished.

  We returned to the hill just as the late-March daffodils nodded and bowed in the coarse grass round the pond, where toads cavorted obscenely in their mating waltz and long tassels fell with golden splashes from the tall willow I had planted as a wand years before. Spring had arrived: Forwood became stronger, and it seemed more and more unlikely that it would ever come to leaving that beloved patch. We’d surely join the dogs one day, under boulders in the potager. Wouldn’t we?

  We wouldn’t.

  Every three months we had to make the trip to London to be sure that all was well. I became adept at packing swiftly, neatly, and only cabin baggage. The scent of shag seeped into the Cogolin cotton covers, and the disgusting child grew old enough to throttle at the sight of yet another piece of ineptly mended china lying in the slowly accumulating pile on my desk in the office.

  ‘Oh dear! Marie-Thérèse … ma belle … this was a piece of Chelsea …’

  ‘That’s a place, eh?’ Wiping the crumb-and-spittled chin of her child.

  ‘Yes. Some china comes from there. Lovely things. I think, next time, I’d better put everything away, don’t you? Gabriella is starting to move about pretty well now.’

  ‘Ah! You don’t trust me? I try to stop her! But I can’t be here and there all the time, and with the tiled floors! Voilà, what do you expect? Poor Gabriella! She didn’t mean any harm. Did you, ma chérie? I am sure you were as naughty when you were her age? Silly china! Naughty china! It could have cut my poor little Gabriella! Eh?’

  Cut her throat would have been more to the point and very acceptable. I tactfully removed everything breakable to a height of five feet or more, carried some Staffordshire bits up to my office, and hid some Meissen birds behind boxes in the wardrobes. Marie-Thérèse looked sullen and vexed, but I would only smile agreeably: I’d need her and her family again in three months. Every visit to London very gradually increased hope, encouraged strength. Nothing had ‘spread’. Only the Parkinson’s increased; not violently, just cruelly, so that a cup of tea had now to be in a mug – a tea-cup resembled a mid-Atlantic storm too easily. But we managed: sharing out the jobs, employing outside help for the really tough mowing and pruning, and reassuring ourselves, to ourselves (for we still did not discuss things at this stage), that we would sweat things out.

  One day in the market in town, weighing something or other, I found Poteau at my side. He had his string bag and was buying leeks for the evening soup. We talked amiably, discussed our mutual problems: he had been hit by a car while on a ladder trimming his hedge and had suffered various breaks and contusions. ‘The Parkinson’s?’ he asked. I said not too good. Increasing rather. ‘It will …’ he sighed. ‘It will. It is so sad for very active men. He was a serious gardener, eh?’ I corrected him – he was an active one, to be sure – and admitted that he had worked from dawn until dusk, but that he was now desperately distressed at his incapacity to cut, rake, mow, burn and spray. The ants had beaten him, finally; he could no longer carry the poison cylinder: too heavy.

  I remember, now, Poteau reaching across the stall for a bunch of red and white radish. ‘He did use his mask?’ he said, and dropped the radish in with the leeks and carrots, handed his tin over to the stallkeeper.

  ‘Not all the time. No. Frankly never. He hated wearing the mask. Couldn’t breathe, he said.’

  Poteau looked up at me with astonishment through his spectacles. They were speckled with leaf shade from the trees above. ‘He breathed all right,’ he said. ‘Deadly poison. Voilè – toxic, so toxic …’

  I can still see the bright scarlet and white bunch lying in his weighing-tin as he shook his little leather purse looking for small change. ‘Do you mean that the poison, the ant-stuff, could be responsible for the Parkinson’s?’

  He sorted out his money, handed it over, shrugged gently. ‘Ah! Difficult to be certain. But you know there are very clear instructions on the bottles? Even a skull and cross-bones. It is folly to inhale that stuff. How long has he been using it?’ He emptied his tin into his string bag.

  ‘Years, I’m afraid. We gave up using the little arsenic envelopes years ago.’

  Poteau grunted in agreement. ‘Useless! They only have power to protect a single tree … no use at all. The Cooperative in Saint-Jennet has the stuff.’

  I walked with him through the bustle and noise of the market. ‘That’s where this stuff came from, the Co-operative. They have allowed us to go there now that I am officially an agriculturalist.’

  He stopped at the street leading down the hill to the parking. ‘Voilà! It is possible, I’m afraid. You may be told it is not so, in England … but here it is different. We know that poison, there are many cases like that. He should have used his mask. At all times … Alors …’

  We shook hands and I wandered back up to the market stalls miserably. Resolved never to say what might possibly have brought such disaster to a strong, gentle giant of a man. Too late for recriminations, for ‘if onlys’ … the damage had been done and would never be mended. Set that all aside and continue with the performance.

  Life had simply changed gear, I told myself, nothing very much more. The engine was still running, the car was perfectly serviceable, one just had to take things a little more carefully, coast down hills when possible, avoid curves, and try to ease the load going uphill. It was all perfectly manageable: just a question of sensible compromise and careful improvising. It was wiser to take each day just as it came and not to think ahead. Thinking ahead was a pretty silly thing to do now; there was the constant pricking of fright, like a buried thorn in the thumb, about the result of every three-monthly trip to Harley Street, the concealed look when a glass was lifted, a plate set down, a saucepan filled, a page turned, and handwriting grew smaller. Trivial things became, very slightly, hazardous. But I tried to batter along and find things to do which would be convincing proof that everything was,
in fact, perfectly normal. I even made an appearance in a gigantic TV series for the Japanese about the glories and treasures of the Louvre, with Charlotte Rampling. We did the commentary on Ancient Rome and the wonders of Flemish art. I knew as much about both as I know about taxidermy. Less, frankly. But we mugged it all up from guide books and the rather dire script provided. I never saw a foot of the two-week epic – I rather think that the Japanese had the same good fortune – but I was paid a whacking great fee which covered the fares on Air France and the bills at the Connaught when the London visits arrived. I even accepted, because it was apparently an honour, and it was not very far away, to be the President of the Cannes Film Festival, which I enjoyed about as much as being squeezed into the Iron Maiden. However, I did it with passionate seriousness, thereby making quite certain that I’d never be invited to be President again, or even, I reckoned, invited to the Festival.

  This time Marie-Thérèse and Gilles would not be at the house: while I stayed in modest luxury in the Hotel Majestic (it was impossible to try and commute daily), Forwood stayed on the hill and Elizabeth and George came out to take charge. A lovely little break for them after the rigours and grey light of an English winter. Except that it was the wettest Festival on record and the hill was, at all times, in deep cloud, the rains tore across the land, swamped the pond, broke terraces, trundled boulders everywhere and wrenched branches from the trees. The fire burned brightly night and day and so did the electric lights. It was a sodden group of four who finally, when the cinema stint was over, all went back to London for the May check-up. Forwood now had to use a wheelchair, which he accepted with enormous good humour, and Air France saw to it that the British press never knew, and that he had a seat right beside the door at all times. This was something that ‘The World’s Favourite Airline’ found it quite impossible to arrange. So Air France gained handsomely every time: it was the only possible way to travel.