by Dirk Bogarde
A SHORT WALK FROM HARRODS
DIRK BOGARDE
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
For
GARETH AND LUCILLA
With very much love
‘… at sixteen the height of my ambition was to construct a cage …
for a pet linnet. ’ Sussex, May 1937
Chapter 1
Sitting here, as presently I am, the nicotiana is higher than my head. Well. As high as. The scent is overwhelming, drifting out into the still evening air. I suppose that I should try and find a word other than ‘drifting’. But that is exactly what scents do on still summer evenings; it’s what this scent is doing. So it remains. Drifting. It’s all part of building up an illusion of peace and calm. I planted the things out in April, earlier than advised, but I did it anyway, and did it so that I should be able to sit one evening quite embowered by blossom and suffocated by heavy scent.
And so I am.
A sort of peace descends. It would appear, from all outward signs, that stress has faded.
Only ‘appear’. I still jump like a loon if a book falls, a door bangs, the telephone rings. That’s rare. Rarer than falling books or banging doors. The telephone hardly ever rings. And never between Friday afternoon and Monday afternoon.
People go away.
Sometimes, on Sundays, if it gets really grim, I walk to the station to buy a newspaper I don’t need, or want, and talk to the very friendly chap who runs the paper stall. His mate runs the flower stall. We speak of the weather, local football (about which I know nothing, but I nod and listen), and it breaks the silence.
Heigh ho. A fat bee nudges rather hopelessly among the fluted white trumpets. If you could talk to a ruddy bee I’d tell it that it was out of luck. You won’t get any pollen from that lot, the trumpet is far too narrow.
But it’s not after pollen. Nectar. That’s the word. And it won’t get that either. A hopeless, fruitless search.
Talking aloud to oneself, or trying to engage a bee in conversation, or discuss the state of the day with a portrait, or the wallpaper, is an almost certain sign of incipient madness and, or, senility.
I don’t honestly feel that I have reached either of those stations of the cross; but I have checked it out with others who live alone and living alone, they assure me, gets you chatting up a storm.
To no one.
Well, it fills in the silences. Sometimes they are good, the silences, but at times they do get a bit heavy. Music helps, of course. I listen to more music now than I ever did before.
The evening sun is warm on my face, the terrace tiles still hot under my bare feet, hot from the glory of the day. It really is a kind of contentment. The bee, the nicotianas, the stillness and, high in the tree beyond, the kestrel.
He arrived like a silent dart a few moments ago; sussed me out, snapped his head round, fixing me with huge golden eyes. Steady. Below, on the close-mown grass, two wood pigeons waddle about like a couple of blowsy bag-ladies. Aware, with the extraordinary vision which they possess, of the danger above but disinclined to fly until death swoops, they continue to waddle. Very British.
The tree frills in a slight breeze which arrives suddenly like a sigh. The kestrel sways gently, eyes still on me. The nicotiana, the white and yellow daisies, the magenta bells of the fuchsia rustle and swing and suddenly, as if the breeze had been a signal, the kestrel takes off in a long low swoop, glides across the lawns, flustering the bag-ladies, planes upwards over the trees on the boundary and is lost to sight.
All is still. The breeze has dropped as suddenly as it arrived. A crow across the garden cries out in raucous worry; its mate, squatting on a rickety platform of twigs, calls back two or three times; the bag-ladies shake ruffled feathers and nose and bob, cooing in relief.
Danger has passed.
The garden is still, fading gently into evening. The ice in my whisky chinks, almost convincing me with the serenity of its delicate sound that there is nothing for me to do, or nothing which has to be done. But I know very well that there is.
The nightly watering chore has to commence. I do find it exhausting, carting gallons of water about and trying not to bump into the furniture on the way. Dusk is falling slowly, my ice melting; through the fretwork of the tree the elegant shape of Peter Jones looms, flags limp now in the breezeless air, sleek, proud, clearly bent on a collision with the Royal Court Theatre across the square.
Lights spring up somewhere on the top floor, an ambulance siren wails, a window is slammed shut, traffic mumbles distantly, a voice calls out, a woman laughs and feet clack-clack-clack along the pavement.
I am back full circle. I’m where I started out on my journey at the meek and wondering age of seventeen.
Consider: at sixteen the height of my ambition was to construct a cage from garden-bamboo for a pet linnet. Which I did, only to find that I had misjudged the widths of the bars, through which the bloody bird sped. Story of my life you might say. But you’d be quite wrong.
At seventeen, refusing education of a higher kind, refusing university, refusing all chances of becoming an office boy, or a runner, at The Times, Printing House Square, refusing, in fact, to follow my exceedingly clever father into his post as art editor, I agreed, fairly ungraciously I have been told, to a place at art school in Chelsea Polytechnic. At seventeen, just turned, I was a year too young but apparently showed ‘interesting talent’ so they took me on. Unaware of my lack of education and my cavalier method with measurements or anything requiring thought. (Check with bamboo bird cage above.)
However, there it was: I went. And sitting here I can almost see the spire of St Luke’s church, which was not so far from the school. Which is why I can say that I am back full circle. For this was my area, my manor if you like. I knew it, and loved it, well.
So.
At seventeen an art student, at nineteen I was scrubbing out the pans and pots in the tin wash at Catterick Camp. At twenty-seven, after a good bit of voyaging, I was back again, became a ‘film star’, and at forty-eight, deciding to take stock and readjust the seasoning of life, I left England for Provence and sat up on a mountain among my olives and sheep very contentedly until I was sixty-seven. When the heavens all of a sudden fell.
So I came back here. To the area in which I had begun to grow up; or, if not that exactly, to set down tentative roots, and commence an adult life. It was familiar territory, I walked among ghosts, pleasant ones, and felt not so strange, and people were initially very kind, until I decided, quite by myself, that solitude was better by far than being ‘in demand’. So I cut adrift and went on my way. A dinghy bobbing along happily in the fog of unfamiliarity.
Being ‘in demand’ simply meant that you were presentable enough, not an unspeakable bore, that you could talk left and right at a dinner or luncheon table, be agreeable, amusing (moderately), and, above all, that you were unattached. That was the most important thing of all: no wife or mistress to trail about, just you yourself. Free, available, the desperate hostess’s dream. You had become a ‘spare pair of trousers’. It is not as disagreeable as perhaps it sounds. You get your supper free - you just have to do a bit of singing for it. Not difficult. Merely tedious.
The deadliest thing of all was the agonizing sameness of it. After over two decades away I had grown far distant from the chatter and behaviour of the people with whom I now dined or lunched. I did my best to bone up, as it were, on London events by readi
ng a great many daily newspapers. I could talk about, for example, plays and films and books which I had never seen or read simply because I had studied their critics. All of them, so that I could work out for myself how things were in that performance or production or book. I read about politics, something I had hardly ever bothered to do in France; even got into American politics through the pages of the glossy news magazines. Nervously I went to my dinners if not in a black tie, which I did not possess and refused to wear anyway, at least moderately well armed with general information. What bugged me most was that I was not at all au fait with the local politics of the neighbourhood. I had no idea who was sleeping with whom, who had gone off with a wife or husband, boyfriend or lover, and where they had all hidden. I didn’t know who was ‘in’ or ‘out’, and was amazed, above all, to discover that the only thing which really had not changed over the years was the speech pattern of the guests at these unquestionably perfect, elegant, beautifully presented and, ultimately, dull evenings.
Generally speaking my hosts, hostesses and their guests were all, to my silent consternation, merely marking time. A long-forgotten roar from my regimental sergeant-major at Aldershot drifted often into my mind while I toyed with a slim Baccarat wine glass: ’On your marks! Slow march!’ And this is exactly what they were doing, apparently quite unaware and uncaring. Perhaps it was all too late for them anyway? It seemed to me that they were digging themselves into a hole of their own making. Trapped hip deep in the past. Their scenario was sepia, thumbed and tattered.
I had, personally speaking, chucked my copy away years ago when I left the grey-white cliffs of Dover for a new life. But now on returning I discovered, to my dismay, I had to dig it out again, dusty and faded by the years, and play it over once more. Or, rather, replay it, without the confidence and knowledge that once I had possessed. It was very worrying really, but, I suppose, better than boiling up one of those deathly plastic bags, or crumbling Carr’s water biscuits into a tin of heated-up soup over the sink. I couldn’t do more, frankly. Boiling an egg had become either ‘Victory’ or ‘disaster’. Even with an egg-timer from the Reject Shop. It was extremely insular and (a name the papers decided to lumber me with) ‘reclusive’ to hang in just with myself. I really couldn’t complain that the telephone never rang, because I was fast becoming a deadly, unsociable boor. My own fault. Therefore I decided to accept the invitations which did come my way from generous and affectionate friends from way-back-when. To go out and discover life among the living! Not to sit there alone in my room, to go where the music played …
Okay. But did it? Let me describe an average evening. You can make up your own mind. It was a far cry from my life before. I had known Victoria for years, since my earliest days in the post-war theatre. She had a very pretty house in Charles Street filled with minor treasures. Flowers, silks, good paintings, good furniture. It was not by any means an ‘arrogance of good taste’; it was extremely comfortable, pleasing and very expensive. She had arrived from America years before with a glorious figure with which to carry her clothes and a glorious figure with which to purchase them from the great houses and to please her bankers and her future, pretty useless but titled, husband. In short, Victoria survived radiantly, and by the time I met her, after my first big West End success, she was intent on launching me into Society. I didn’t desire that, and there really wasn’t much ‘Society’ flying about by that time, 1947–50. What was left after cruel decimation in the war and vicious taxation didn’t amount to very much. Victoria’s world was crumbling like an Alka Seltzer. Only she, and her guests, didn’t dare face the fact.
One happily peaceful evening she telephoned me. Her voice, light, warm, only very slightly inflected by distant Philadelphia, coaxed me. ‘Now, sweetie, don’t be tiresome. Put this down in your little book. The 17th. Supper here, eight-thirty, come about 7.45. There will be eight. So exciting that you are back at last! What an abberation that all was! A peasant farmer in the hills! Madness. Abroad is so “alien”, don’t you think? Not black tie. I have two Socialists coming. They write books but aren’t at all vegetarian, which has pleased Mario enormously. Oh! It’s exciting that you are back again! A delicious “spare pair of trousers”. You’ll be swamped with offers. But I have got you first, haven’t I? What huge fun it is to have you home!’ I didn’t in all truth feel elated.
Sheraton table gleaming, silver, crystal winking in soft light. An air of comfort and old-fashioned elegance and riches. Served superb food by three sullen Filipinos. It always was at Victoria’s. Whatever else you might have to put up with, the food was glorious. Mario was the best private chef in London at the time. Eight of us at table, the silk-covered walls spread with Piranesi engravings, Colefax and Fowler swags at the windows, candles sparkling in Georgian silver. I sat between Phyllida and Margot. Margot had informed us in the drawing-room that she had called a taxi one evening to go to the Savoy and, in her anxiety not to be late for dinner, crashed straight into a lamp-post, smashing her nose. She now, in consequence, was forced to wear a black frilly lace mask. It was very becoming. I wish to differentiate here between Margot with a mask and without one. With was far more acceptable.
Across the table, separated tactfully, were the two book-writing Socialists. Perfectly acceptable as it would appear: she in sprigged voile with puffed sleeves, her hair braided across her head like a Viennese loaf, he in, predictably, a red tie worn with a white suit and a very high collar in the manner of Tom Wolfe. She was quiet, rather nice, asked if I missed France and did I ever make jam from my figs? I said no. He said that the theatre should be an ‘event’. Last from nine a.m. until eleven p.m. Not just ‘a pathetic two hours with arrogant, overpaid property developers and their women only longing for the interval and the bar’. It should be for the working man. Elevating, enriching, a form of subsidized ‘feeding for the mind’. Pretty unworkable, I should have thought, but I said nothing.
Between them poor Constance Pullinger sat toying wist-fully with a little silver box. ‘My pilly-pill-pills.’ She opened and closed the enamel lid with one finger, urgently. Smiling sadly across at me, she rattled the box like a castanet. ‘I’d be lost without these. Too awful to be sent to prison or a concentration camp and not be allowed them. I’d willingly die then.’
Margot suddenly turned from her partner, a plump middle-aged man called ‘Bunny’ Dilford-Pryce, prodded my arm to deflect me from Constance opposite. ‘High as a kite,’ she hissed in a whisper, and then aloud said, ‘Bunny says you now live permanently in London?’ She was what she would have called ‘twinkling’ encouragingly behind her froth of black lace. ‘Sold up in France? Too sad … although I simply loathe the French personally, but one has to remember Elizabeth David and Cézanne and that clever Mister Proust, and all … but even so. You will be in demand! Where are you exactly? Victoria said a flat?’ I told her, she crumbled a piece of her bread roll, nodded agreeably, head bent towards me listening. ‘I know! I know exactly. Nanny has a dentist there. Perfectly acceptable …’
Obviously I had passed some sort of private test which she had set, for she was still smiling, lips pursed in a roguish smile. ‘Not quite SWI but not far off and only a short walk from Harrods. Wonderful for you!’ Satisfied that she had filed me away in her memory bank, plus my district, she returned to ‘Bunny’ on her right.
Constance, meanwhile, still listening blankly to ‘Tom Wolfe’, quietly opened her little silver box, took a pill, swigged it down with a gulp of Sauternes and shuddered as if she had bitten into cyanide. Which as far as I could tell, she might have done. Catching my curious, kindly eye, she smiled across, hand to throat. ‘Sometimes they catch in one’s gullet. At the bendy bit. Did you know? And don’t quite go down. So they don’t take effect for simply ages. Not the idea at all. Instant oblivion is all I ask. I dote on oblivion. Did Margot say Harrods?’
‘She asked where I lived now. I told her and she seemed pleased for me that I was just a short walk from the place. I gather that’s a good area
in which to be?’
‘I simply wouldn’t know. I never go to Harrods now. Really impossible, all those guided tours with miserable Americans and bespectacled Japanese, and dreadful young women spraying one with the maid’s scent. Perfume, they call it! Who wants to shop in a souk, after all? Too fraying. I think my little pill went down. Peace descends.’ She smothered a tiny yawn, blinked, smiled at me, turned away to listen to ‘Tom Wolfe’, wearily.
Bunny Dilford-Pryce suddenly leant across Margot’s wide bosom and whispered to me as if we were in some conspiracy together. ‘I saw you on the box the other day! Simply dire. Did you see it? Terrible bunk … something about India? I know there was an elephant. Ages old. You were indecently young. Black and white, of course.’
I assured him that I never watched myself on television. The Filipinos had started to remove the first course and re-lay for the second. Victoria busily repinned her Carrier clips at her breast, eyes darting about her table. ‘Fascinating!’ she said, I supposed to Bunny. ‘I so adore really ancient films like that. We were all so naïve then. And what fun it all was. Was there an elephant?’
‘Never watch yourself? Really?’ Bunny probed diligently. ‘Not ever? Surely yes?’
‘No, never.’
‘Well normally I don’t. Ever. Detestable thing, television. Should be in the staff quarters. Written and made by, and for, housemaids. That’s where I saw it. Just a peek. My man was doing the silver, so I took a look. Too eerie. You were so boyish!’
‘It was a long time ago,’ I murmured helplessly. I mean, what do you say to that kind of idiot chatter? But he suddenly cackled with delight, finger raised so we should all attend. ‘Ah ha! Ah ha! I know! Only a dog returns to its own vomit! That it?’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
Bunny squealed with delight at his quip and Victoria very speedily came to my rescue, adjusting her little black veiled hat (always worn at her dinner parties), smiling sweetly to defuse any possible irritation.