The mas was put into the hands of an estate agent. Alas, one had missed the boom period. Interested buyers could not afford the price and the house remained on sale for another two years, when a European arms millionaire made a reasonable offer.
The year the mas was sold, there happened to have been a property scandal in the area. A villa had been bought illegally by one of Giscard’s ministers. Soon after, the minister was found dead in a marais outside Paris and, to this day it is not known whether his death was suicide or murder. My notaire had negotiated the sale. This put everyone in a tizzy, for the mas was being sold as it had been bought, the sum above the declared price being paid under the table.
The day the deal was to go through, the buyer and I met in the estate agent’s office, and there we all had the sticky task of counting out several thousand, freshly minted franc notes. It was nearing mid-day when we all walked across to the notaire and only when I had finished signing away the mas did the agent hand me the wad under the notaire’s table.
I remained in the mas for another three months. The very last visitor was Old Bill, who arrived with a present of some leftovers out of his fridge. He had just been through another divorce and was having a ‘walkout’, he said, with an actor’s wife, having seduced her in a sandpit opposite his house. I knew of this pit. It was where, when I went to stay with him in the Sarthe, Suki and the village cats did biggies and pee pee, and it struck me as odd that anyone should find it an ideal seduction site.
Old B. stated he was on his way to Corsica to visit a widower whom he had known for thirty years.
‘Poor old chap. Buried alive on that island.’ They were going to have a nostalgic get-together to bemoan the fact that at their age it was no longer so easy to find a well-endowed young wife. Corsica. That old flame of mine. Might I come too? So Old B. wrote and arranged for me to go with him.
Some days before our departure, he kept running on to the terrace dragging a length of string. Finally, I became curious.
‘Whatever are you doing?’
‘It’s in your interest,’ he said, and darted out again. Coming back, he stated, ‘Your car being two inches shorter than mine, we’ll go in yours. It’ll be cheaper on the ferry.’
Come D-Day, late in the evening, I put little Suki and her basket on to the back seat of the car. Old B. said irritably, ‘Can’t you leave that cat on the terrace? She can fend for herself.’
We arrived in Nice with time to kill.
‘We’ll go into a café and order a sandwich,’ said Old B. Sit over a sandwich for a couple of hours? No siree! I drove into the old quarter, where the flower market was held, and we found a small restaurant with a menu at fifty francs each: fish soup, grilled sardines with sauté potatoes, cheese, bread and fruit, and a carafe of vino. While Old B. was working out to the last sou each one’s share of the bill, I said, ‘I’ve had such a tiring day. Would you mind driving the car on to the ferry?’
‘I’m not your chauffeur,’ was the response. We argued all the way to the quai, and can Old B. get flushed and snappy, when he’s not getting his own way.
We arrived on the jetty and I said, ‘I think it’s best if you go over without me.’ He hauled his suitcase out of the boot and with it a blanket, for he planned to sleep like a down-and-out in a gangway and I set off home. He telephoned early next morning, while I was drinking coffee on the terrace. Was his car all right? Why, did he fear that I had pushed it over the brink of the hill? He was returning in a couple of days, he said. He arrived with a present of a tiny bottle of crude alcohol that his host had given him.
A few weeks later, I wrote to Old B.’s friend and suggested I visit him on my own. An exchange of letters followed. He wrote to say he would meet me on the quai of Ajaccio. I drove into Nice at dawn, to find a queue of people waiting to buy car tickets and the ferry jam full. Passengers were pressed like sardines against the rails. Three quarters of an hour later, I walked out of the bureau with my car ticket to see the ferry part from the jetty and sail majestically out to sea. Back in the bureau, the man said, ‘There’s another ferry leaving from Marseille this afternoon. If you hurry, you might catch it.’ I drove straight back to the mas, stopping on the way to send a telegram that reached Ajaccio two days later.
Still being in possession of a ticket to Ajaccio, I wrote again, inviting myself. Third time lucky. I took the plane to Ajaccio and there was Tim standing at the luggage belt behind a trolley that he had thoughtfully procured for my baggage. Uneffusive, passive and polite, my mother would surely have classified him as being ‘the perfect gentleman’. He never stopped opening doors.
‘After you.’ ‘No, after you.’
Is not excessive politesse slightly suspect? A camouflage? A way of keeping your distance? Whatever. Give me a more direct approach. Why the hell have you come? What a bore it’s been having to meet you at the airport. Tim drove silently to his house where we were greeted by a huge, woolly-haired dog, a monster on hind legs.
‘Down! Down! Rachmaninov, down!’ Suki had to be hidden.
The house was style Charles Addams. On one corner was a circular tower like a castle on a chessboard. French windows looked on to an unattended garden. Plumbago grew rampant. There were citrus trees with large, crinkly marmalade oranges. Tim lived three flights up on the top floor with a lovely view of the harbour, partly hidden by towering blocks of flats, their terraces strewn with washing, men’s shirts being strung up by their cuffs. Tim lived simply: no television; only a little radio to listen to jingle-jingle music. From his dining area, one saw fishing smacks scudding across the water. In the evenings, strains of Tino Rossi drifted our way. Lights flickered and the reddening sky was a picture. Tim prepared nice meals: napkins; a couvert; Danish sprats fumées and packaged in Germany; packaged Italian ham sliced thinly; crabmeat, fancy grade, produce of Thailand, Rotterdam merchandising; boxed Caprice des Dieux cheese. The only indigenous food were tomatoes and lettuce. In the evening, we had fish soup, the crustaces fished off Corsica and tinned on the Continent, with Corsican vin rosé and lots of it – not for the effect, he claimed, but for la soif.
On Corsica you never wear a tie. You put espadrilles on your feet. Tim’s walking consisted of circling the local supermarché with a trolley every day. He never frequented cafés, except once a week, when he had a standing date with an English couple for a Dutch dinner. The four of us met in the Trou, a café on the port, and then went on to a restaurant. Everyone ordered the menu. The three indulged in local gossip. All I had to do was to go on eating. The wife, Lady Tartempion, wore a spotless, sleeveless, white dress; her arms were freckled. She had just come from the hairdresser, where she went regularly, driving miles into the mountains to return with a Mrs Thatcher look. She resembled that lady in other ways, being energetic, vivacious and a forceful talker. On her third glass of rosé, she turned to me.
‘You were married to Cyril Connolly?’
‘Yes.’
‘What a dreadful man. We used to see a lot of him on the Brains Trust.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh yes. Every week. He never said much, but looked thoroughly disagreeable with food all over his waistcoat. Conceited, too.’
‘He wasn’t, you know.’
‘Well, he was very ugly, you can’t deny that.’ The attack went on, with me parrying, until she suddenly snapped. ‘Why are you defending him? You left him, didn’t you?’
A few days later, Tim drove me into the country. We had been invited up to their English pre-fab, which looked rather incongruous plonked in a Corsican gully: posh bathrooms, gleaming knobs, clinical atmosphere. While drinking Moët et Chandon on the terrace, we admired the bleak, blue swimming pool. The husband had left us to sit in his caravan.
‘He often sleeps in it,’ she said, ‘with his ham radio going, tuned into people all over the world.’ They mentioned another ‘Lady’ on the fringe of the English contingent. I said I would like to meet her. ‘She couldn’t stand Cyril. He snubbed her once throughout
an entire luncheon. She wouldn’t fancy meeting you.’
As we left, Lady Tartempion said, suspiciously, ‘Staying long?’
I asked Tim if he found her attractive.
‘Well, she does take care of herself and, when she goes to England, she often gets picked up on the boat. Does anyone ever pick you up?’
From then on, should either of the ‘Ladies’ get a mention, I referred to them as the ‘Dead-Men Haters’ and the atmosphere chilled, though Tim went on being a good host, creeping down the stairs so as not to disturb me; or was it the espadrilles which gave that impression? He was prompt at swishing a letter under my door, forthcoming about changing a forty-watt bulb for one I could read by, and good at providing clean sheets and towels, pretty ones too, from Peter Jones, when a note would be left in the hall: ‘Laundry swap for HELP am tomorrow.’ All this had an odd effect. I, too, crept about in espadrilles, hid behind doors, scuttled away at the sound of footsteps, whispered to Suki and every morning, at the precise hour of 10.30, peeped through the lavatory slats to watch Tim get into his Fiat, rev the engine, reverse and drive very carefully down the vertical hill to his supermarché. Then I relaxed and dressed and, leaving Suki stretched out like a sphinx on the veranda, walked by a devious route to the same market and climbed up again lugging cat food. Then I fled for the day, when a great weight of sadness lifted, to lie on the sands and read Tribune. Should we meet simultaneously at the front door, Tim would smile, and say, ‘About to take your walk? You’ll find it hot.’ I, too, left notes: ‘Ants climbing the drainpipe, heading for the watch tower,’ and the next time we clashed on the porch he said, ‘I’m grateful to you for telling me that.’ We even got together, heads down, trying to follow their trail.
Along the Cours Napoléon there is a constant embouteillage and no parking space. Sitting in one of the cafés on the Cours Grandval, where a stream of traffic roared past, a treat of the day might be an icecream.
‘Trois boules. Vanille, praline et fraise, sans crème, s’il vous plaît.’
Pack-laden girls plodded by in a temperature of ninety degrees and one saw a certain amount of provincial chic, women with unshaven armpits and false pearls, dressed entirely in black with husbands in cheap tan suits. There were excursions into the maquis. To Bonifacio. Sarthène. Cargèse. These tours were supposed to be gay; the drivers were pale, fat and black-chested, with sex appeal. The radio droned out sad, sentimental music; while turning a hairpin bend, the driver would grab the mike and give interesting information on the scenery, another chène liège or ‘There’s a myrtle. Olives. See?’ Or else he’d joke.
‘Pourquoi Napoléon n’a pas attaché son cheval à un arbre?’ He’d regard us through the windscreen mirror and, undaunted, continue, ‘Parce que les Corses ne sont pas les sandwiches.’
Trying on shoes on the Cours Napoléon, the salesgirl was very young and particularly agreeable. Nowadays, sales ladies are inclined to snap so. She even took the precaution of making sure the sandals fitted. They were hectic pink and she said, ‘Ce n’est pas trop vilain comme couleur?’ Pleased with the transaction, I asked if she would mind throwing away my smelly espadrilles; she laughed and said excitedly, ‘Are you English?’
‘Yes, but I live in France.’ (After living in a country for fifteen years, it’s irksome to be taken for a tourist.)
‘You remind me so much of Lady Carrington. Dorety.* Do you know her?’ The salesgirl beamed and her praise of Dorety was ardent. ‘Elle est si sympa,’ she repeated. Had I heard of Dorothy? From Tim. Bien sûr. He had mentioned having had to pick her up once at the airport, and wow! the number of suitcases; and how, during her visit to England, he had climbed up on to the hot little terrace of her apartment every day to water the plants. And one didn’t have to inquire whether or not he’d been ‘put owt’ by it.
Thinking it might amuse him, I repeated the sympa story.
‘You don’t look at all like her, you know.’ His tone was very grave, confirming what I had already suspected. The salesgirl had been paying me a nice compliment. How agreeable it would have been to have met Dorothy; at this stage, almost anybody would have done. ‘She never took to Cyril, you know.’ Tim’s tone was vehement.
Still, Corsica had not lost all its charm. Old church bells still chimed. The people remained quite friendly – Corsican people, that is. The charcuterie was good; the confit de chataigne and tomatoes were delicious. And there would always be Tino Rossi.
One wonders sometimes what goes on behind the scenes in restaurants. In Corsica you don’t have to look that far. Dining alone in Ajaccio, a cockroach actually ran across the plate and, in spite of several attacks with a napkin, got away, taking my appetite with it.
* Dorothy Carrington wrote Granite Island, a now classic account of the history and civilisation of Corsica.
Chapter XXI
Adieu, Poules
They fuck you up your Mum and Dad. They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.
‘This Be the Verse’, Philip Larkin
I cannot terminate these memoirs without relating the bane of my life – teeth – having inherited dental trouble from poor Mummy who, to cure chronic indigestion, at the age of forty had all her uppers pulled out by Mr Pain. In order to avoid a similar fate, I have run through almost as many dentists as lovers.
In France, I have been to several more. There, if you owe money, it is not the secretary who presses you to pay, but the dentist himself, who follows you out shouting abuse, or his wife waylays you with a bill while looking pointedly at any jewellery pinned to your suit. Added to which, most dentists in France are considered to be millionaires. Mr Santanelli, of Italian origin, had a superb waiting room overlooking the sea in St Tropez. The first time I went to him I had no money on me. Although I had made a further appointment, he confiscated my emerald ring while I walked across to a bank. The next dentist was a Spaniard who had a reputation for being the best parodontologist on the coast. He practised in an apartment overlooking the sea in Menton, where I would drive twice a week, a journey of two hours or more each way. His remedy for bleeding gums was to burn them, medieval fashion, with a poker-like instrument. I then consulted Mr Meyer, who held court in even more sumptuous surroundings overlooking the sea, not far from the Carlton in Cannes. He had also been trained in the States. Bernard came with me and, after our painful treatment, we were both handed treble whiskies which went down tenfold on my bill. Bernard got away without ever paying.
Mitterrand was about to be elected President. Assuming the country had gone communist, Meyer fled to Texas. I then became resigned to being treated by an Algerian in Cogolin. But he never pleaded for money; instead, as I lived so near, he sent a threatening emissary up to the mas. By this time, so much had been spent on dentistry that I had hardly any money left over to eat. So I fled to Recloses to stay with François Michel. When he saw how the Algerian had treated my teeth, he said it looked as though I had the same dentist as Queen Elizabeth of England. Whereupon Bernard was instantly loyal – one of the rare occasions when he was. He said to François, who had no teeth at all and was always leaving his false set on the dining table, that he looked as though he had the same dentist as Malraux, whom everyone knew had no teeth left either.
I then went to a Paris dentist who had been recommended by Meyer. Altmayer respected Meyer and thought he would regret fleeing the country to become a ‘big frog in a tiny Texas pool’. The walls of the inner sanctum of Altmayer’s quarters on the Avenue Montaigne were covered with signed photographs of celebrities. If I wanted to impress, I told people that I had the same dentist as the President. But even multimillionaires like to be paid.
*
Whereas in our hey-day, as soon as he awoke, Bernard would come up to my room and inquire how I’d slept, on his last visit, after hauling in four suitcases, he said, ‘I suppose you know why I’m here. I’ve come to finish my book.’ And from then on he only mounted the
stairs to prepare the spare room for his mother, who arrived a month later. Sometimes when I went down to prepare my breakfast, I was likely to find this kind of thing propped over the sink:
Dear Little Madame Gaylord-Hauser, If Bernard Shaw lived to such a great age (he died short of 100) it wasn’t because, as you think, he didn’t eat meat but because he hardly ever made love and because he had great contempt for pour ce trou qui vous sert de tête. PS Very happy to have instructed you on such a point of detail, Le Pic de la Miraudole.
Maigret, Simenon’s hero, always addresses his wife courteously as ‘Madame’; and I have been told that even in this day and age in France, with some couples, the closer the relationship, the more formal the address. However, I was never particularly flattered should Bernard, disturbed by my stacking, enter the kitchen and exclaim, ‘Oh, c’est VOUS! I thought it was the cat.’ And he didn’t mean Mell or Suki, but the black Tom that used to haunt the terrace, depositing crottes.
In the final months at the mas, evenings were very sad. While Bernard worked out an endgame of chess that he followed in Le Monde, I played solitaire. So I was surprised and flattered when reading Un Siècle Débordé to come upon this:
La Retraite à Quarante Ans: Aux bords de la quarantaine je quittai Paris pour un couvent près de Grimaud dont la mère supérieure était une anglaise d’une grande beauté qui m’apprit la frugalité, les vertus du silence et le plaisir, portagé avec des fouines et des renards, d’avoir des poules. Et forcément je me remis à écrire; aurais-je fait d’autrel?*
– implying that our puritan existence had suited him. During the last month, his mother fell ill and when she came out of hospital, rather than remain in Paris, we thought she might prefer to convalesce in the Midi. Bernard prepared her room with great care, laying down a rug. And I went to pick her up at St Raphael. Madame Frank did not seem to be at all frail. She ate well, took short walks, until one afternoon she disappeared for hours, having got lost in the forest, and was brought back by a stranger. Then suddenly she fell ill again and I drove her into the clinic, where she underwent an operation. Bernard visited his mother every day. Either I would drive him in or he ordered a taxi. We were both getting on so badly that I did not behave as well as I should and the circumstances of her sudden death in the middle of the night, when neither of us heard the telephone, even now can instil a feeling of guilt.
'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More' Page 45