Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  I’d been broke for so long, now all at once I had vacant possession of a house on the Côte d’Azur and one third of a million sterling in the bank. Life seemed a rich feast that sunlit day in Chelsea, the world had become my oyster.

  When I came out of the off-licence with two bottles of Moët in a carrier bag a few moments later I sensed the oddest twinge in my chest, a clench, a burning. The pain sharpened as I made my way past the Town Hall. Keep going, I told myself. It was a phrase Nanny had used when I dawdled as a child. Keep going, it will pass. But it didn’t. Soon it became so fierce I had to sit down on the pavement and prop my back against a wall. I noticed people staring at me curiously as they strolled by. ‘Are you all right?’ someone asked.

  ‘Fine, just fine,’ I answered. Despite the cramp of pain on my ribs, I was aware it must appear odd to be lolling on the pavement in this fashionable spot. I felt very strange by now. The world looked different and darker, as though I were seeing it in a dream. Stumbling to my feet, I teetered to the kerb and waved down a cab. ‘Waterloo station,’ I told the driver as I got in. The clamp in my chest tightened a further squeeze. ‘Better make that the nearest hospital,’ I said.

  Ten days later I was still in hospital awaiting the result of an angiogram, the only definitive method of assessing the damage following a coronary. To perform the test, a cut is made in the patient’s groin and a rubber tube poked through the main artery far as the heart. This is then flooded with radioactive ink whose progress through the startled organ is filmed by an X-ray movie camera.

  Back in the ward afterwards I was in a dopey drowse when the young doctor who’d directed the process came to give me the result. Sitting by my bed he said, ‘I want you to look at this,’ and passed me a cartoon. The drawing was of funny little men at work in a factory; two of the processes they were engaged in had been cancelled out by black crosses. Intended to represent the heart, a child could have understood it; stuperous from sedation, I could not. ‘I’m a devoted skier,’ I muttered. ‘Will it affect that?’

  My question only irritated him. ‘Oh no, you’ll never ski again,’ he told me with professional certitude. His verdict delivered, the job done, he took up his cartoon and left.

  Up to the date I quit Garrett’s I’d had a series of sports cars: an XK120, an AC Aceca, a Lotus, an E-Type, the Aston Martin. All belonged to the company, I was spared the responsibility and care of ownership, yet when I crashed or damaged one even moderately my feelings for it changed. I could not stand its imperfection and would replace it at once. I realised I felt the same way about my own body.

  After leaving hospital I suffered attacks of chest pain and the fear that comes with as I waited for the pills to work, wondering if this was the big one. I was fifty-four, I felt in shock over what had happened. I could walk no further than a hundred yards without growing short of breath; I didn’t know if I could make love, I’d been warned not to try. I hated my decrepitude. The engine was blown, I wanted to trade myself in for a new model.

  Under the circumstances that wasn’t practicable, but I badgered my doctor to lay on a heart bypass operation. The procedure is surprisingly popular, I learned, no cardiac surgeon had a slot in his schedule for six months. Then one morning I received a call to say one had had a ‘cancellation’. Neat euphemism, I thought, as I packed a bag with toothbrush and books and got ready to take the departed patient’s place.

  The operation involves being sawn in half down the breast bone, split and pinned open flat as a kipper while the job’s done. It takes five and a half hours. You are warned that in the days that follow, the resulting pain can be controlled with morphine but the trauma to body and mind is so severe you will experience spells of horror. I was advised to have ready some sure and tranquil mental image to focus on at such moments.

  Why – I ask myself now – why did I not choose Arisaig? But it was almost forty years since I’d been there and I seldom thought of that rainswept wilderness of mountain and loch and solitude that had made my soul. Instead I chose the south of France. The mill I’d inherited on the old sisters’ recent death was a sprawling, tumbledown ruin. It was vast, it would require a fortune to restore, but it backed on to the river and a waterfall; it was surrounded by the forest and could be transformed into something extraordinary and unique.

  In hospital, the night before the operation, I decided that if and when I recovered I would devote myself to laying out a garden by the water, put in a swimming lake, and in that lovely secluded setting restore the ruin into a hideaway for myself and my few sure friends. A retreat: a shared and secret Walden Pond with a library but without a telephone.

  Having made the decision I chatted to the anaesthetist when he dropped by, saying I considered his role much more crucial than the surgeon’s and would he do his very best not to turn me into a vegetable next morning. He left. I prayed to God along roughly the same lines, read George Herbert for a while, took a pill and went to sleep.

  The effect of being sawn open and your heart stopped while someone slices away at it with a knife is, as I’d been warned, profound. I felt as though I’d been gang raped by a herd of bull elephants. I hardly knew who or what I was at times; there were moments of nightmare. I got through them by prayer, and by focusing on the mill and the swimming pool I’d install there, which would be lined in rock, irregular in shape, part overhung by trees … and if I’d concentrated on Arisaig instead the course of my subsequent life would have been entirely different.

  Following the operation, with characteristic generosity Jenny Beerbohm converted her living room into a sick room and looked after me over five weeks of convalescence. With her and Edward I recovered a more-or-less stability and mobility. Then I flew out to recuperate chez the Mayles in the Luberon.

  They were the perfect hosts, ever tolerant of the chain of small disasters an unwitting guest brings upon a household. At their farmhouse, lying by the pool, eating perfectly cooked meals at the massive stone table in the shaded courtyard, in their undemanding company I regained health and the proper tan.

  Since I’d last seen them their lives had turned around completely. Peter’s book, A Year in Provence, had – contrary to the publisher’s meagre expectations – become a runaway success, a huge international best seller topping the charts across the globe. Become bewilderingly rich, the Mayles struggled to maintain a simple life in the place they had chosen for its beauty and seclusion. But it was impossible, for fame had trampled a path to their door.

  After lunch one day I was lying with the two of them by the pool. It was a hot, cloudless afternoon, the only sound the hum of insects and occasional call of a bird from the forested slopes of the Luberon at the bottom of the garden. It was in its way perfection, the vision which had led them and myself out of advertising to a hidden corner of Provence. The day was utterly still … and then, unmistakably, I heard the crunch of gravel and sound of a heavy vehicle pulling up outside the house … which was followed by a noise as of a flock of birds, a rustling and chirping growing in volume as it approached. And then around the wall of the pool appeared, in orderly column, a horde of small Japanese people. All were dressed in dark clothes, all at first glance looked identical, and each one of them was carrying a hardback book. At the sight of Peter for a second they paused and the twittering rose to a crescendo. Then, all together, chirruping excitedly, they swooped upon him, thrusting out their copies for him to sign. And the same thing happened all the time.

  There comes a moment when even the best of hosts are glad to see you leave. One morning I packed my trusty leather grip, said goodbye to Peter and Jennie, got into my rented car and drove to the autoroute, taking the direction signed AIXEN-PROVENCE, CANNES, NICE …

  Moving into the tumbledown mill where the old sisters had lived, I spent the next two years and a fortune doing it up. By the summer of 1990 the mimosa quatre saisons I’d planted was in flower, scenting the air as I stood on the mill terrace with a cup of decaffeinated coffee in my hand, waiting for the man
from John Taylor, the leading real estate agents on the coast, who was on his way to value the renovated property. The rebuilding was finished. No, not really finished, a mass of detail remained to complete, but 500 square metres of roof had been replaced, the building’s exterior walls secured and internal walls constructed, the house rewired and replumbed, five bathrooms and three kitchens installed. Meanwhile, the grounds had been cleared and landscaped, a swimming pool excavated, and a giant boulder hoisted into position as a diving rock. The garden had been laid out, planted, and was in flower.

  And most of it had been a pleasure to accomplish. After my brush with the Angel of Death in the King’s Road it was good to experience the warmth of the sun and douceur of the south, to work physically a little longer each day, to sense vitality returning to my wasted body.

  The winter following my return I’d taken up skiing again. I was weak, my muscles feeble, but I persisted and it was exhilarating to defy the doctor’s verdict of only nine months before. Strength came back fast and soon I regained a level of skill. I didn’t attack black runs with the same reckless abandon as before, but I could come down in the controlled style suitable for a man older than he thinks he is.

  It had been naïve of me to think I could return to the south of France and install myself just upriver of Magda without experiencing problems. Before doing so we’d had what politicians describe as ‘a full and frank discussion’, but it served for nothing. Seemingly straightforward at first, our interaction grew thorny. Also, the cost of rebuilding the place mounted alarmingly higher than planned – as it always does. I’d been obliged to borrow heavily to complete the work and it was this, together with the difficulties posed by Magda, which convinced me that transforming the property into a Walden Pond for myself and friends was not a practical idea. It’s not realistic to think you or others can sit contemplating the water in search of the truth that sets you free if someone’s concealed behind a nearby bush throwing rocks at you. So I’d sell the place, I determined.

  As I stood there I saw a Citroën come up the drive to park below me. A youngish Englishman with wispy blond hair got out. Plying his trade in London, he would have worn a blue striped suit, aping the manner of a merchant banker. Here he’d adopted a blazer and resort shoes, plus that sniffy disdain which croupiers affect that comes from handling large sums of other people’s money.

  I walked him over my land, showing him the river and the pool before taking him through the house. He looked around, made the usual disparaging comments agents always utter … and came up with a price of 6.5 million francs. At the exchange rate of the day that was roughly £750,000.

  After he’d gone I poured myself a glass of wine. To some £750,000 is not a lot of money; to me it seemed a tidy wad. Enough. That amount of ready cash brought with it something I’d never experienced: financial security. It was an odd, unaccustomed thought. As I stood there, glass in hand, looking at the sunlit view I was feeling pretty … smug is an unattractive word but it’s unquestionably accurate.

  29

  Waitrose

  It was the autumn of 1998 and I was standing at the cheese counter of Waitrose supermarket in Chelsea studying the selection. My friend and lawyer Ernest Chapman was about to arrive at my nearby small rented flat. I had a bottle of wine and biscuits there, but nothing to put on them. I chose a piece of Cheddar. The assistant weighed it, wrapped it and slapped a price ticket on the package: 68p. At the check-out I paid with a 50p and 20p piece. I pocketed my change and walked out into the street.

  That 2p was all I had left. I had no mill, no assets, no job, no income, no expectations, and I owed over £200,000. I had enjoyed a total reversal of fortune, an experience shared by many in the ’nineties. Property values in the south of France had collapsed. Unable to sell the mill, I’d held on to it as long as I could in the face of mounting debt and mounting anxiety until it was finally repossessed, leaving me with nothing; indeed, less than nothing.

  In the course of that eight-year journey from apparent wealth to penury and debt Father had died. He was up an apple tree in the garden angrily sawing off a branch when something broke in him. He was seventy-nine years old. Adriana got him to hospital; I went next day to see him. His bed in a ward on the ground floor was by a picture window which looked out on the snow-covered garden. As I walked in he looked confused, then his face lit up in pleasure. The response was so uncharacteristic I knew something was badly wrong with him. He’d not spoken since his fall, but when I said something he’d react, looking at me with a strangely mild expression I’d never seen before. He was in no pain and I don’t believe it occurred to him for a moment that he was dying. Adriana stayed at his bedside throughout the entire week. It was against hospital regulations; nurses and doctors remonstrated with her, insisting she go home, but she utterly refused to leave her post. She said that if they put her out she’d wait in the snow outside the window, like the old dog Greyfriars Bobby in the film. She remained by Father until he died.

  Throughout my youth, meetings with him had taken place in inconvenient, usually wet and windy spots, and the remote country graveyard to a disused church in deepest Hampshire where he chose to be buried was no exception. In light, persistent drizzle he was laid to rest in a grave alongside his mother’s, his estate insufficient to cover the funeral expenses. A few months later Adriana rallied my brothers and myself to put up a stone, and the question of the inscription arose. His mother’s headstone bore two lines he’d chosen for her:

  I have warmed both hands before the fire of life,

  It sinks and I am ready to depart

  I suggested Father’s gravestone should be engraved with the same epitaph, but below the couplet we should add a further line: PS. Please pay coal merchant.

  The Grim Reaper had called on Father, but shortly before that cheese purchase in Waitrose the same hooded figure had also given me a sharp nudge in the ribs to remind me he was there and waiting. Since my coronary I’d kept up an active life, walking for a couple of hours or swimming every afternoon, but occasionally I experienced bouts of chest pain. One evening this became so fierce I realised I’d better get to hospital. A week later I was still there, having had the full range of tests measuring the state and function of the heart. ‘Your arteries are congested,’ a doctor told me, ‘You should consider having the operation redone.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’ I asked. He told me: they would continue to fur up until either a piece of the accumulated gunk broke off to plug and stop the heart, or one of the arterial grafts split – and I would die. When this might occur he would not guess.

  Promising – falsely as it turned out – to stay in touch, I packed my toothbrush and went home.

  I’d have liked to have eaten alone that evening in a first-class restaurant to ponder the implication of his words. I was too broke for that, but I did plunder my living allowance for days to come by buying a half-lobster and a bottle of champagne. I bathed, changed, lit the candles and took my place at table. I drank Perrier-Jouët from one of the two unbroken crystal glasses surviving from Gilston Road, and had dinner with Marcus Aurelius.

  The Meditations of that second-century Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher had been part of my life for some time; I turned to him quite often. The fundamental lesson of stoicism is that events are merely events, in themselves neither good nor bad. It is how we react to them that defines them so – and defines us, our character. When we meet with any mishap or reversal, he suggests we call to mind the example of others to whom the same thing once happened: ‘Well, what did they do, how did they behave? They sulked, they bitched, they blamed. Will you be like unto them and snivel in the selfsame fashion? Let your only care be to make a right use of such accidents, for they will prove fit matter for you to work upon …’

  I drank some more champagne and thought about my own life. Or, rather, what remained of it. I did not want to go through another operation. It had been a hideous experience, I couldn’t afford it privately now and, because of m
y age, I’d be low in the NHS waiting list. And why clutch at life, trying to extend it? How was I to fund my life, even if I did manage to extend it? The only possible way I had of making money was to write a book, but I’d lost the knack of writing fiction. I had no idea why, but the ability had left me. A life is, in a way, like owning a yacht, I thought. Accompanied by money it can provide enormous fun for yourself and your friends; without funds to maintain the vessel it becomes an inconvenience both to yourself and to others.

  So I reasoned over dinner. Not depressed but in a sort of odd limpid calm. I sipped some wine and turned again to Marcus Aurelius. ‘What do you desire?’ he asks. ‘To live long? Why? To experience your own decline, lose your wits and become senile? Ask yourself, is this truly a worthy objective to desire?’

  No, it wasn’t. But pulling me in a contrary direction back into life was a counter-force. The problem was that, most inappropriately at this untimely moment, I had fallen in love.

  One afternoon I’d run into Kim Waterfield in the King’s Road. ‘I thought you were breeding horses in Ireland,’ I said.

  He told me he came to London rarely, but later I went for a drink with him and his ex-wife Penny, whom I’d always admired. It was over twenty five years since I’d first met her and thought she had the best legs I’d ever seen; now I realised that was still the case. At the end of the evening she gave me a lift home in her beat-up station wagon.