by Dirk Bogarde
Thus there were Titty-Brown Hill, Fig Meadow, Long Walk, Pond Lawn, Bamboo Fields, Crescent Lawn, Bonfire Field and so on. They were instantly identifiable if one spoke of them after work in the evenings. ‘I’ve done all round Charlie, and raked up round Brock and Kimbo’ meant that the front of the house and the flowerbeds by the terrace had been weeded and the Pond Lawn had been cleared. Simple. And equally it brought into use the names of much-loved friends or members of the family.
Some of the trees, latterly, were named for the people who had given them as gifts – much more useful and enduring than anything else – and if I was ever asked by some generous guest what to offer as a token of thanks it was always a rose bush, a plant or a sapling tree which proved the most acceptable.
From Titty-Brown you could look out over a giant patchwork of vines, carnations, jasmine, roses, and acres and acres of olive trees. Olive groves, I should perhaps say. Our area was known to produce a particularly excellent fruit, and my land, L’Aire Pigeonnier, was noted for the best olives of all. For years, well, ever since the war, the trees had been neglected badly. The land had flooded from time to time, the trees were saturated and had grown lavishly, producing no fruit. Within about three years (olives fruit only every two years or so) I had once again a good harvest.
At first there were only two of us, Forwood and myself, to do the picking. Crawling about on hands and knees in an anorak and boots, with fingers blue from cold, sodden knees and an aching back, collecting the fallen berries in the frosted grass and wide-spread nets was not at all what I had imagined the olive harvest to be. Fortunately, in time, Monsieur Rémy and Madame Bruna, plus their children, came into the act: they took what they could pick and kept the oil, which provided them with enough virgin-pressing from the mill for a year at least. Our crops were prodigious, and the trip down to the mill in Saint-Sulpice was always one of the splendours of the endeavour.
At dusk, about four o’clock (the harvest started in mid-December and lasted until mid-March), we carted the sacks and buckets down to the village, queued up to get them weighed, took the fiche which stated the quantity (to the last gram) we were due, and then tipped the sacks into the great churning mess being crushed and pulped by the giant granite wheel. The scent of the virgin oil, the heavy sweet odour of the brown pulp, with a thread of paraffin wafting from the lamps hung high on the rough stone walls and, above all, the smoke of rough Gitane cigarettes drifting through it, a binding scent for the others, were pungent and immensely comforting. The physical result of hours of back-breaking labour, it was altogether most satisfying.
But quite apart from the vineyards, the roses, carnations, jasmine fields and dense olive groves below Titty-Brown, by far the most exciting, and to some extent worrying, thing was the glorious view over all this land far down to the sea and Africa beyond. Sometimes (fortunately rarely) the great bank of clouds on the distant horizon of the sea would lift for half an hour and the jagged peaks of Corsica, soft pink in the early morning sun, would thrust shimmering high into the pale aching winter sky. I use the words ‘worrying’ and ‘fortunately’ here because I had been told often enough by Monsieur Danté that if you could see the mountains on Corsica, then a terrible mistral would shortly arrive. It was time to batten down the hatches, secure the doors and shutters, and huddle in the depths of the huge fireplace under the chimney. Safest place in a really bad mistral or forest fire. Should this occur, then Monsieur Rémy, Danté and Plum-Bum called to each other in concern like chickens, and with a deal of head shaking they would rattle off in the battered truck before the end of the working-day to get their own places ready. You used mostly to see the mountains in the very early morning for some reason. And seldom in summer. When you caught the awesome sight, the mountains were washed by the rising sun glinting on the snows. Corsica has pretty high mountains. Anyway, to see them was not good news, and it always proved to be the case.
Sometimes the mistral would blow for days, and life became extremely miserable: even the dogs crept about wincing, their eyes half closed against the stinging dust, tails curled between their legs, ears flat. The pond turned into a raging sea, waves leapt and bounced, spilling into the rushes, roaring away down the rutted track to the gates in a furious cataract of stones, fish and foaming water. The rain pelted steel arrows, olives writhed and tossed in agony, cypress trees waved, bent and whipped like pheasant plumes. The noise was as savage as a bombardment of rockets. My main anxiety was for the oaks up the rocky hill behind the house: the wind roared and tore among their dense branches with such brutal force that one could only communicate by screaming to each other in short bursts. But, as they’d stood there for many centuries, one prayed they’d hang on a bit longer. And they did, save for a limb or two and bushels of leaves. But they stood stolid and solid. There were occasions when the mistral caught us all on the hop, so to speak – then we had to dive for shelter before decapitation from flying roof tiles.
Once we all huddled in the woodshed. Monsieur Danté, Fraj, Plum-Bum and Monsieur Rémy started to scratch at the wall with a piece of twig. The old whitewash, not yet restored, flaked away. ‘Voyez? A name?’ he said. ‘Many names here, regardez.’ What I had thought was just a haze of dust and spiders’ webs on the cracked wall were, in fact, tiny gestures of defiance. Human determination in pencil scribbles; a pattern of anguish from a lost time. Name after name was criss-crossed on the crumbling plaster. Esthers, Daniels, Rivkas and Jacobs. All Jewish, all stating, after their names, the date and the town whence they had come. And their morale. ‘Felix Levant. Avignon. Mai 2 ’43. In good heart. Age 13½.’ Across the wall these whispers spread behind the stacked logs, hanging saws, scythes and coiled hose pipe, the rakes and pioches. Monsieur Rémy pushed his cap to the back of his head, a habit which he had when concentrating, a spent match between his gold teeth (in even a moderate mistral like the present one a cigarette was madness). ‘Children. Jewish children. They were collected all over the region. A brave woman from Paillas. She was a singer before the war, very noble, proud. She collected the Jewish children, brought them here, to this house. It was very isolated, the Germans didn’t ever come so far into the valley. When she had a few together we moved them down to the coast, to La Napoule … some to Théoule … Oh! Malheur! It was dangerous! We hid them under the harvest corn, melons, olives, in carts. From the coast they went by fishing-boat to the Spanish coast. At night. Not easy, mon Dieu, not easy. We didn’t lose one! No one gave them away. We stay silent in Provence.’
Apparently the house itself had been empty for years. Only the land was vaguely tended, and during the early days of 1939 and 1940 a French cavalry regiment had been billeted there with their mounts. After June, and the fall of France, they withdrew and the house mouldered into dust and silence, buried in tall grass, rampant myrtle and ruined olive trees. The village youths, and their girls, were the only people who ever came down the track through the oaks to linger and embrace in the silent rooms.
That was how, and where, he had met Madame Mandelli, staying on a visit from Cremona. Apart from the Jewish children, and these self-exploring adolescents hiding from the eyes of parents and occupiers, Le Pigeonnier was deserted on its tumbled terraces and olives. Monsieur Rémy spat on a finger, drew it through a name. ‘Nellie Kaplan. Draguignan. I am well …’ The rest he wiped away in spittle. ‘Long ago. Long ago … Perhaps today she has her own children. Eh?’
They all left shortly after, but I told him to leave a part of the wall unpainted when he came to redecorate, as a memorial. He thought I was idiotic. But he thought that of me anyway. But generously. Humour the lunatic. So, anyway, he left a strip untouched. I suppose he was right? It was pretty silly. But they remained. The scribbled defiances and courage.
My father was being evasive. I knew the signs very well. Every time I suggested that we walk down to the little house which I had every intention of securing as a retirement place for him and my mother, if they agreed, he managed to be doing something greatly preoccupy
ing and which he could not leave. ‘I’m just getting into the swing of things: I’ve got the right “mix” for the sky, I always have difficulty with skies, as you know … you run along.’ Or else he had decided to walk up to the village to buy some cigarettes, or open a beer in the shade, anything as an excuse not to come down through the orchard to the little shuttered house. However, eventually, towards the end of their first visit, I forced the issue and he grudgingly agreed to come with me. ‘It’s fearfully hot for walking, dear boy. I’m getting on, you know.’
‘Nonsense. We’ll be in the shade under the trees, and it’s all level down to the house. It’s a ruin, you realize, but it’s full of possibilities and it’s mine for £18,000 plus all the land. But I have to decide by the end of the year.’
‘Gun at your head. Wretched business,’ said my father.
‘No gun at all. Very reasonable. I’ve had a year to make my decision – it’s just over to you really. It’s a snip at £18,000, plus a vineyard and three hundred olive trees.’
‘I really do prefer a bottle of Worthington, you know. What would we do, your mother and I, with three hundred olive trees? At our age … do be reasonable.’
And so we bickered on down the track, ducking under overgrown apple trees, easing through rampant bamboo and tussocky grass, being whipped by heavy blossomed broom. The house, when we reached it, stood like a small stone box.
Facing south, unadorned, a tiled roof, a front door, two floors, a wide dusty track set before it where carts had once turned, with a giant elm of great age shading it from the burning sun. It had almost the same view as that from my house, just slightly tilted to the west, but ahead lay the same valley, the plain, the ridge of the mountains and the silver glitter of the distant sea. I was constantly ravished, my father far less impressed. His pessimism increased as we opened the front door with a big key and trod into the damp-scented dark of the shuttered house.
‘It smells like a tunnel! Good God, boy, the place is sodden!’
‘It’s been empty for years. And I’m told it’s surrounded by springs … it just needs airing.’
‘Needs a charge of dynamite. Rotten with woodworm, I shouldn’t wonder. Or damp rot. You can smell it. Wonderful place for mushrooms. You’ll make a fortune!’
‘Jean-Claude keeps all his work materials here. It can’t be that damp. He also stores his apples, olives, wine here.’
‘That I can smell. Sour stink. Really awful.’
In the narrow hall, tiled floor, staircase ahead, long cracks in the walls, my father stood quite still. ‘I think you might open a shutter? Get some light, unless you think they’d fall off?’
They didn’t. But the light seemed to compound the scent of decay with the sight of tumbled crates of glass (Jean-Claude was an artist of some kind and made stained-glass windows set in rough concrete), hammers, chisels, buckets and plastic bags from Galleries Lafayette and Casino, filled with hinges, bolts, brackets and yards of rusting chain.
In a corner of one room (there were only two anyway on the ground floor, left and right of the front door), half a dozen wine barrels were ranged along the side of a rough wooden manger. The cracked tile floor was strewn with trodden straw and old, withered, apples. I thought it was quite a pleasant smell: fruit, wine, straw. Pa thought otherwise but conceded that he could make a very good little sketch of the still-life before him and started feeling about his pockets for the stub of pencil which he always carried on him, only I got him to come up the stairs and look about. We finally went all over the house. It didn’t take three minutes.
Four minute bedrooms, no bathroom, but a staggering view from all the windows. Pa was determinedly unimpressed. ‘I do see what you mean. It has possibilities. But after securing it for £18,000 you’d have to spend double that on improving it. Damp courses – I bet it’s built on a marsh from the stink – bathrooms, new floors and what about drains? And lavs? You’ll have to instal lavs … can’t go off into the garden! Not at your mother’s age and mine. Good Lord! What a thought!’
‘We’d do all that. Of course. It would be a tremendous investment. All this land, peace and quiet … off the main road. I really think you’d be very comfortable here. I’d be next door …’
Pa walked carefully down the, admittedly, sagging tile staircase holding on anxiously to the thin iron banister. ‘You know what your mother would say, don’t you? She’d say that she would go mad here in a week. And so she would.’
‘Quite mad, darling,’ she said at lunch under the vine. ‘You are being marvellously dear thinking of Pa and me, but, frankly, at our ages it just wouldn’t work. I’d go quite mad. What would we do? Stuck up here in the dark? No one to talk to, just sheep. Nowhere to go … miles for shopping and your father can’t speak French very well.’
‘I do, Margaret. I do not badly,’ my father protested mildly.
‘It’s the stuff you learned in that war of yours. It’s quite old fashioned and out of date now … No, we simply couldn’t manage.’
Pa helped himself to mustard, tapping it briskly on the edge of his plate, concealing impatience. ‘Well, I warned you. Your mother is gregarious. Loves people. Lots of people. All the time. Amazing really.’
‘Oh I do! I do! I have to make up for all the years I lost when your father wouldn’t let me go back to the theatre. I need an audience!’
Pa sighed, reached for his beer. ‘I told you … it would be impossible.’
‘Well, there is nothing to do up here,’ she said. ‘Nothing! I don’t know how you and Tote’ – Forwood’s name in the family – ‘can stick it. Perhaps you won’t, for long? But for me, just sitting about reading, or sewing or darning. I’d go potty. Anyway, I don’t read now …’
‘Why not? You used to eat books.’
‘I keep on losing my glasses. Daddy reads to me. Trollope. I ask you …’
‘Wilkie Collins. You enjoy Wilkie Collins,’ said Pa wearily, starting on his jambon persillé.
Ma raised her glass and held it up to the sunlight. ‘So pretty! Golden. I was bored witless by The Woman in White … no good pretending. And up here, with bare tiles on the floor and no telephone that really works … No, darling, not us.’
‘I’d rather miss the pub, you know?’ said Pa. ‘And we have been in Fletching a long time now, got lots of friends there … it’d be a wrench to leave. We’re very settled in our ways, and that little house down there will always be damp. Built on a marsh, as I said. Interesting idea. But we’ll just count this as a splendid holiday, eh?’
My mother usually got her own way, although Pa was pretty stubborn too, so between them I realized that I had lost the chance of the little house and the privacy that the extra acres, adjoining my present land, would give me. But I did see their point. They were nodding at seventy, too late now to alter, and Ma would miss the grandchildren which my brother and sister had provided. So … The dream faded, and at the end of the year I had to confront Jean-Claude and regretfully decline the option to buy: he was quite relieved, and said that he really didn’t want to sell the last bit of his family’s property, after five hundred years, and would use the place as a studio and a store room for his ‘work’. He arrived at the house at the hour which we had arranged, on a huge, new, glittering Honda, his long fingernails painted red, his hair, henna’d as brilliantly as Bruna Mandelli’s, falling in long, thin straggles over the shoulders of his expensive leather jacket. Obviously the £75,000 I had paid him for my share of his land had been put to good use. His family, the Marxist wife and a scatter of children, were out of sight somewhere behind the SNCF goods-yard in Nice. A successful man, Jean-Claude. Heaving himself off his bike and attempting to pull it up on to its stand, both he and it fell over.
Forwood muttered something about not slipping a disc and we left him to get to his feet on his own. He was a tall man, angular, with long fingers and longer legs. Petrol poured from the bike, seeping into the dusty path outside the damp house. He struggled for a bit, pulling the bike up, blow
ing through yellow teeth, brushing his leather jacket, tossing his hair, unsteadily, over his shoulders. There was a pungent smell of pot and petrol; he smiled nonchalantly, and asked me for a front door key, which he dropped, giggling. I picked it up and he shrugged. ‘Gentil,’ he said. ‘Félicitations!’ And took it with a mock bow.
In the damp-smelling room with the manger and barrels, he admitted that the place was too damp for anyone to live in; it was, as my father had suggested, built on a marsh. There were many springs in the area, so water would never be our problem even in the intense heat of summer, and that would be very useful if, and when, he would decide to sell up finally, in years to come, because he had a secret dream to take his family to a remote place in India and join an ashram, where they would be close to ‘life’ and ‘Krishna’. I asked, unease scratching like a pin in a new shirt, when that might possibly be. He had wanted to hold on to the family land? Now he was cheerfully talking about ashrams and India and Krishna and peace and love in a warm climate! He waved a scarlet-tipped hand vaguely, stumbled up the sagging tile staircase and called down, over his shoulder, that he had had the land surveyed in the last few months and that it was quite possible to turn the whole area into an ‘up-market lotissement’. That is to say, a building-site. They could drain the land, channel the springs and build seven to eight ‘high-class villas’ on the land my father had so carelessly discarded in favour of his pub in Fletching.
The terrible threat of a lotissement and seven or eight ‘high-class villas’ cast a fearful blight on events for some time to come, but for the moment we were, I thought, safe. Very occasionally the Honda would roar down into the dusty track outside the damp house; there would be a hammering and banging for a time, turquoise sparks flew from some high-powered welding torch, but nothing much else happened. I almost settled down to my usual complacency. Jean-Claude would never go to India, they’d never give permission, in this glorious place, for a lotissement. And then, one day, some peripheral friends, that is to say people I knew but had never entertained, and by whom I had never been entertained in England, arrived on the coast with their two girls to look ‘for somewhere to buy for a holiday home’. The wife, a cheerful, pretty woman, said it would be lovely if we could all meet and perhaps we could give them some advice? About finding a holiday home, I supposed. And I thought of the damp house down the track. Instantly. After all, a pleasant middle-class family with two young girls would be a great deal more attractive than a housing estate of seven or eight villas plus swimming pools. They came up the hill, saw the house, fell instantly in rapturous love with it. Words like ‘possibilities’, ‘peace’, ‘fantastic views’, ‘extensions’ and so on flew about the place like bats at sundown. They were hooked – I was uncertain, not convinced that I had done quite the right thing. After all, it did mean neighbours, even if it was only for a few weeks in the year when the girls were on holiday from school. And what would Jean-Claude say? He was furious. At first. There was the usual breast-beating about ‘family heritage and five hundred years’, and then, when I said that the people who wanted the place were a very good family, careful and loving, who would lavish care and taste on the house and restore the olives and the vineyard because money seemed not to be a problem, he became a little more interested and said that he hoped I had not mentioned the price he had offered the property to me for? I assured him that I had not. And I had not. I wasn’t such an idiot as that. I had the special price for the simple reason that I had been given the year’s option on the property before Jean-Claude had come to realize that money could buy him Hondas and henna, or an Indian ashram.