A Short Walk from Harrods

by Dirk Bogarde

  ‘I am certain’, said the happy voice all the way from Cannes, ‘that you will be very satisfied. We use them almost all the time and it is August, you know? Holidays?’ Meaning, politely, accept.

  So I just shut up. Even I couldn’t quite believe that disaster could strike again. Which was daft.

  Now the evenings in the Chelsea house were filled with conversation and plans were drawn, albeit with a shaky hand but still plans, and for three or four days we drove across the Park to measure up the rooms. One day we arrived to find a huge sofa sticking out of a great hole in the wall where the sitting-room, on the second floor, was. I now had a sofa, found by diligent Maude, which would have to travel into the same room very shortly by the same route. I grabbed the two toiling gentlemen, Frank and George, who were covered in brick dust and mortar, and kept them for myself. I was starting to become involved as well. I had not the least idea how to go about finding a replacement for Monsieur Rémy in the middle of Kensington. So these two were the birds in the hand and not in the bush. Some weeks later they swung my second-hand sofa through the same hole in the wall, re-bricked it, and stayed on to build bookcases and do whatever decorating was needed. Not much, but the bookcases were essential.

  One hot day a bored voice called to say that all my worldly goods had arrived at their depot outside London. We were all together at last after a year, separated now by a short distance, but on the same island. Even I felt more cheerful, my slight worry about the new house merely being that the front door opened immediately on to the street, and that already someone had pushed a used condom through the letterbox. But this, after all, was London, not the hill. And lots of people’s houses opened directly on to the street in London. I’d have to get used to it. I never, quite frankly, ever did.

  There was a first, very unhappy visit to the XYZ depot outside London. No one was about; it was, I was informed by a lard-faced girl in glasses eating a Mars bar, the lunch break, but she showed me where the stuff would be. Huge warehouses set among acres of cracked concrete roads, threading through tufts of ugly weeds and bramble. Wire, rust, broken boxes, old crates, a forgotten mantelpiece lying among crushed tea-chests. Far up an alley between the warehouses I saw a group of men sitting around a big white table, in someone’s armchairs. They were eating sandwiches and drinking from cans of beer. Closer I saw that it was my big white table from the terrace, and I was the someone in whose chairs they were sitting: the white armchairs in the Cogolin cotton from the Long Room.

  They looked up, vaguely hostile, as I got nearer. ‘You want something then?’ I had interrupted a game of cards.

  ‘Well, help, if possible?’

  ‘Lunch break. Come back two-thirty.’

  ‘You are sitting in my chairs. At my table. Could you tell me where the rest of my stuff is? Just so that I could check through. I did speak to your Mr Broad.’

  ‘He’s a fart, to begin with. Broad. These your chairs?’

  ‘Yes. And the table. Sorry.’

  A tall, red-headed man got up, wiped his hands on dirty overalls.

  ‘You who I think you are?’

  ‘I don’t know who you think I am.’

  ‘Bogarde. Dirk Bogarde. A film star? Right?’

  ‘Years ago. No more. But I am Bogarde. Yes.’

  ‘Shouldn’t have put it on the pallets. Your name. That was barmy. On the papers, the invoice like, inventory, it’s not that. It’s Van der something …’

  ‘That’s my true name. The other is my stage name.’

  ‘Well …’ He sat down again. In my white chair. ‘Mistake to put it on the pallets. Very tempting, that is. When they unloaded the stuff at Calais someone must have wrote your name in big letters all over them. Red chalk. Asking for it that was. Very naughty.’

  I know that I stood perfectly still in shock. ‘Unloaded the stuff. At Calais?’

  Another man screwed up his sandwich wrapper, squashed a couple of beer cans in his fist. ‘Yers. Reloaded on a British ferry. From the containers. Can’t ship the containers. Your stuff’s along there, down the left, shed 5. We’ll be down there soon. Come on you lot, up!’

  I went back to the car. Forwood was sitting on a box by the side of the pathway ticking things in his inventory. He looked up as I reached him.

  ‘Found someone?’

  ‘It’s all been repacked. Our stuff. From the French containers. At Calais. Some of it’s already been unpacked and being used. Give me your wallet, I’ve got to buy some goodwill, I fear.’

  ‘Oh dear God! Not a repeat of last time?’

  ‘Well, it’s begun pretty grimly. If you have tears, as they say, prepare to shed them now.’

  He handed me his wallet and I helped him to his feet.

  Pretty funny, if you think about it.

  Chapter 10

  I have said that I am writing from memory, with no diaries or journals to aid me, but there are, however, a few odd pieces of stuff which have survived only because they originated here, in England, after the move from France. Not much, and nothing of value to me except perhaps the original inventory made by Forwood before we quit Le Pigeonnier. This he kept in a bright new school exercise book. He was using it on that wretched day at XYZ’s storage depot, sitting on the box by the concrete road. The inventory itself is of no account: almost everything on it has been dispersed now. But, tucked away at the back, written much later (I can tell by his handwriting), is what appears to be the draft of a letter. It is unfinished, undated, and I can’t guess to whom it was addressed, or even if it was ever sent. I reckon it was perhaps to someone in America, judging by one reference, but I can’t really be sure. However, I only discovered it today, wondering how to start this chapter, and it seems to me that it fits quite well. Anyway, here it is as written.

  I know you’ll forgive the elegant writing paper, but [sic] you may not so cheerfully hack a path through the tangled Jungle [sic] that passes for handwriting. I’m simply not accustomed to writing without a machine, and in addition to that there is a tendency, if one has Parkinson-related problems, for one’s handwriting to shoot suddenly up through the ceiling, and our three machines are in storage, isn’t all that detail just fascinating? Anyway it was a joy to get your letters during a ratty Christmas, with D. slowly recuperating and fighting off this December Bronch.[sic] Not very satisfactory it must be admitted; but half of the London population seems to be prey to it and the glories of Kensington High Street are heard as from a dog show. Yes, leaving Le Pigeonnier was dreadful, as we always knew it would be when the time should come, and it came, when it decided to, very suddenly. One minute we seemed to be on the terrace and a quarter of an hour afterwards we were ensconced in the Lancaster in Paris – another climate, another world. But Coward [Noël Coward] always said ‘If you have to be ill be ill in English’ and as usual he was right. I suppose. I’m on a course of a new Japanese invention, by which I mean just tablets, and I seem to feel certainly well on them. Of course neither D. nor I have any remote form of Health Insurance in this country, and between the two of us we could probably open our own clinic.

  So now we are here, in a little early 18th century cottage in what might be called ‘London’s Little Montmartre’. I have no doubt that it is referred to in such terms and it certainly has qualities of Paris about it. And D. dislikes it intensely so I reckon we’ll be on the move again ere long. In the meantime it really is rather attractive, but no-where to have a living in maid or man-servant. D. without his little studio up at Le Pigeonnier, has not found it possible to write, so he’s fairly grotty. We were supposed to spend Christmas with David and Patsy Puttnam, but I really didn’t feel quite up to it. They have a lovely house: in a mill in fact: in Berkshire. I think that David is returning to L.A. [Los Angeles] before packing up and quitting the place. I am sad about it – we all are – but I really never saw it coming to pass. I just do not see any major American Studio in the hands of a Limey.

  And there it ends, unsigned. It is curious to read it now, not pleas
ant. It feels sneaky, reading someone else’s letter behind, as it were, their back. I can’t think to whom it was addressed. Someone in America? I don’t think he’d ever have compared the house in Kensington, or its area, to Montmartre to anyone in France. But it does prove that he did like the house and that I disliked it.

  I did my best never, I thought until this letter, to let it show. I suppose it sort of emanated from me or something? I didn’t actively display my dislike, I was determined only that he should be comfortable. He hadn’t much cared for the little Chelsea house because he thought it was ‘too frilly and feminine’ and found renting someone else’s furniture and bedding ‘unattractive’. He was at all times the most incredibly fastidious of men.

  His reference to the Puttnams is interesting. He was devoted to them both, admiring David enormously for his vision, honesty and determination, and Patsy because he loved the look of her, her beauty and her solid-down-to-earth sense, and above all for her devotion to her husband. He considered Puttnam, rightly I believe, to be the only possible hope of a renaissance, if there ever could be one, in the British film industry. No one else had his audacity or courage. We dined together at Taillevant in Paris the night before they left for L.A. and his Columbia deal. It saddened Forwood that Britain should lose him. Saddened him deeply when it all turned to slander, pain and humiliation. But that evening at Taillevant he made a short-list for Patsy of his most cherished friends in L.A. whom, he knew, could help them both to settle in. Unhappily it didn’t work out that way. They hardly had time to settle in before they were deliberately eased out.

  I have said ‘wretched’ about the day up at the storage depot: that’s precisely the word I have to use. Every pallet, the large chipboard containers in which all one’s goods are packed, opened up to reveal heartbreak upon heartbreak. It was an exact repeat of the trip that they had made out to France. Even worse.

  I moved tactfully about the card-playing group sitting at my terrace table that day pressing ten-pound notes into accepting hands as freely as communion wafers. Twenty, in the case of the red-haired gentleman who said that he was Ernie, who turned from truculence to infinite kindness once he discovered, for himself, just what a disastrous error it had been to have my name, my ‘film star’ name, scrawled across the chipboard walls. As one piece of ruined furniture followed another, as one broken frame, smashed mirror, torn and legless chair, splintered piece of rosewood, or canvas landscape thrust through by a marble lampbase made its appearance, Ernie muttered sadly, ‘My word. They have done you over.’ Presumably out of spite and, could it be, envy?

  The only things which had survived more or less intact were those which had been packed in the cardboard boxes. Wrapped, as Elizabeth had said, in tissue paper, brown paper, and sealed all around with red and yellow sticky tape with the name of the packers in Cannes. Everything else, unwrapped on the dock side at Calais (Ernie had seen it all with his own eyes), was damaged almost beyond repair.

  Worse even: some things had simply never arrived. Pictures, ornaments, a ravishing Capellio poster, life size, of Mistinguette, pots and jars, bedheads and footstools – all were apparently left behind on the dock. Because, as Ernie said, there wasn’t room for them in the pallets. Naturally enough: slung into the things like skips, it was junk ready for the tip – there would be no room.

  But the thing which was the most damning, when it came to lawyers and solicitors and all the rest, and of course it did, was the fact that the junk was wrapped roughly in sheets of newspaper. English newspapers. Of a date far later than the original date of the packing, which was October of the year before. Proving that all the care lavished on the stuff in France had been a waste of effort. Someone had unwrapped every individual piece and dumped the lot: hence the white armchairs, now covered in oil stains, and the terrace table plus four or five of its small tin chairs, being used by the firm’s employees as a restful set-up for a game of poker and a few cans of Heineken. The one cheering thing was that almost all the large paintings from the Long Room had remained intact. Packed with meticulous care they had obviously escaped damage, probably because they were too difficult to unwrap, or rip off, due to their protective covering. Perhaps there was just not enough time to take a bash at them? Or because they could not be actually seen they did not incite destruction? Anyway, I could, more or less, judge which they were by their shapes, and rather like Helen Keller felt my way about and collected up five of the smaller ones (the Ben Nicholson among them) and stuffed them in the boot of the car.

  Ron, our driver, was a little doubtful that this operation was ‘quite all right’. They had to be checked out with the inventory? But Ernie turned a blind eye, said he ‘hadn’t seen nothing’, and ‘our Mr Broad’, who apparently held the inventory, very wisely decided not to present himself. I saw him coming down the alley at one point, flourished a Queen Anne chair leg at him, which stopped him dead, and when I raised a splintered panel of satinwood in my other hand he turned back to the sanctuary of his office with the whey-faced Mars-bar-eater. We never set eyes on him again. Which, in a way, was sad, because I had a violent desire to ram his wire-rimmed glasses down his throat, but that would only have meant a charge of grievous bodily harm, which would have been the truth but more than I could handle just at that time, so I decided not to try and pursue him and got on with the miserable job in hand. I had witnesses in Ron and, indeed, in Ernie, who said that he would be happy to give evidence against ‘our Mr Broad and the sodding firm’. Which is why he exists under a pseudonym here.

  After a good deal of denial, then whining, and blustering, and frothy whinnying, XYZ, faced with lawyers and solicitors and the rest, grudgingly agreed to pay for ‘restoration’ without ever admitting that there might have been an error on their side. As before, years ago in France, they were terrified of publicity, and when I had suggested, pleasantly, that I could arrive at the depot with a representative and photographer from a tabloid newspaper, they rapidly caved in. ‘Restoration’ didn’t amount to a fortune. It was the utter loss and destruction of things which saddened me. Some things which I had cherished for years were not restorable. And even if, as the disdainful little valuer from Monte Carlo once had said, the things were ‘amusing’ and of ‘no intrinsic value’, I had bought them and lived with them and loved them. Anyway, you can’t fight an old-established firm.

  Maude swung into action and came to my rescue. After pouring a good deal of Scotch down my throat – I was hoarse with woe and anger – she arranged for a friend of hers, a man of impeccable pedigree in the auction rooms, to remove all my pallets (I think there were twelve altogether) from the depot, plus the wreckage, and have the whole lot transferred to another depot in Fulham. Safer there and easier for me to go to from Kensington. I think this is what happened. It is hardly surprising that XYZ permitted this violation of their premises. Once the words ‘press’ and ‘photographer’ were mentioned they had withdrawn as swiftly as the snail into the shell. So I never got the chance to deal with ‘our Mr Broad’ – and I did mind that very much indeed.

  The Kensington house began to take shape. Smaller by far than Le Pigeonnier, it required less furniture, which was just as well frankly, and most of the big pictures simply couldn’t be got up the narrow staircase. So they had to be sent back to storage and the ones that fitted were the ones I had to accept. It was an imperative weeding out. Much of the furniture was equally restricted because it wouldn’t go round the staircase bend. We couldn’t go on banging holes in the walls and tearing out the windows to sling things in and out, even though Frank and George were willing and able.

  So we settled for what would fit the Doll’s House and then began the real unpacking. Elizabeth, Maude and Brock’s wife, Kim, came to help unwrap pots and pans, cups and saucers, knives and forks, and various bits of china. The kitchen, in the basement with shadowy views of whitewashed walls on both sides, rang with happy cries of ‘Where does this go?’ or ‘You’ll never use this here!’ or ‘If you don’t want it I�
��ll take it, willingly …’ and ‘Three saucepans! With buttercups on them. Anyone found the lids?’

  It was happy confusion and the dustbins filled with paper and straw and the women looted joyously, because I chucked everything away that I couldn’t immediately think of placing or, more important, using. As I could hardly crack an egg or boil water I didn’t know what many things were for. I kept Forwood out of the way and made him fiddle about with his stereo equipment and Montserrat Caballé up in the sitting-room.

  Eventually it all got sorted out, roughly, and the first month ended. We had a base at last, familiar things – those not being repaired, veneered, polished, screwed together – around us. Shirts, socks and vests were in most of our drawers. We were in.

  I didn’t hear the wind at first. Stuffed with sleeping-pills in my narrow bed up in the attic, I only really became aware of anything unusual when I opened doped eyes and saw, silhouetted against the landing light, the naked figure of Forwood holding his portable radio. The BBC news at three o’clock informed us, in a calm voice, that there was a hurricane blowing. I remember putting on a lamp, staggering towards the window which was slamming and crashing and trying to secure it with the belt of my dressing-gown. I got Forwood down the stairs back to his bed and we sat listening to the radio. No mistral this: a real, honest to God hurricane. And in three hours’ time the car was due, and we were supposed to be in Pentonville Road, for the scanner.

  I dressed and at four wandered out into the gusting dawn. Light was slowly leaking into the night. At the top of Church Street there was a double decker bus, all the lights blazing, abandoned in the street. Desolation. The canopy from the Indian corner shop bucketed and jigged down the hill, papers flew like demented gulls, bricks, slates, shards of chimney pots, slabs of shattered tile from somewhere formed a rockery of ruin all the way down the street. Only the traffic lights seemed to have retained their normal function: endlessly red, amber, green … A branch, hysterical with twisting leaves, sailed frantically away, eddied upwards, crashed into the doorway of the Pâtisserie Française.