A Short Walk from Harrods

by Dirk Bogarde

  This particular trip was rather a problem. No cancer but an enlarged prostate. So. Back to Edward VII. And a few more weeks of convalescence at the ever-welcoming Connaught, which had really now, over the years, become my London home – anyway since 1951, when I first dined there with Kay Kendall and Lilian Craig, when Kate, as her friends called her, had a tiny maid’s room in the roof for eighteen shillings a week with the bathroom at the end of the corridor, and King Farouk had the table at which I now sit when I am there. Things have altered rather with the years. Apart, that is, from the familiarity, warmth, affection and absolute perfection.

  Eventually back to the hill in fairly good nick, to the peace again, to the office and typewriter, and to listening, once more, for the song of the mower, which, alas, was now becoming more irregular and slower. But still nothing was ever said: we were both anxious, I suppose, not to put the truth into actual words, hard, clear, fearsome words. Somehow one feels that by not admitting something aloud, unpleasantness will fade away, will never quite become fact. The thing that was most feared was the overt admission that it was time to ‘go back’: the dreaded phrase, used in those days by elderly ex-patriots, was ‘the big E’ Retired people had suddenly to face the return to England: often because of finances, more often because of illness or the break-up of a marriage. But one tried desperately not to consider that, hung on with hope for as long as possible; but the unthinkable was drifting lazily in the mind, like wood smoke, faint, bitter, reminding, meandering. Privately.

  We had been back from the prostate trip about two weeks when Forwood came to my room at three in the morning with a mustard glass full of blood.

  ‘What’s that? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Blood. I’m haemorrhaging. There are four more of these in my bathroom.’

  ‘Full? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Call Patrick … It’s stopped now, but call him …’

  Patrick arrived half an hour later, unshaven, rumpled, asked me the blood group, got me to help dress a fragile, frightened patient, half carried, half dragged him down the stairs to his car. ‘I’ll take him over right away. Clinique des Magnolias. He can’t wait! Get his blood group and get to the clinic quickly.’

  I watched the car race down the track, bouncing and lurching, Forwood’s head rolling helplessly against the seat. Unconscious. Desperately I searched papers, medical reports, everything I could find in the file. No blood group. Called Edward VII and got, I assume, night staff – it was still not dawn – and also (most wonderful hospital) the blood group. And then rang Monsieur Antoine, who had a taxi and a bar in Le Pré. He blearily, and silently, drove me into town, where we sat and waited in the parking, watching the sun rise brilliantly, flooding the world with light, turning the sky from indigo to palest blue. In a small room where he had been hurriedly placed as an emergency, on a too-short bed, to join two other haggard men surrounded by their entire families, Forwood lay with a wan smile and a dead white face. Patrick was on his usual ebullient form.

  ‘Just in time! I got him here just in time! If we had waited another ten minutes his bladder would have burst! I got Monsieur Alvaro, the best surgeon we have, he’s my friend – He operated before we even got his jacket off! Pulled off his trousers, on to the table, and voila! c’était fait! We did not waste a moment. He’s lost litres of blood! Mon Dieu! –’

  The room was crammed with people – the beds had been hurriedly pushed back against the walls. There was one blank window looking out into a dark well. People sat on the edge of the beds or leant against the walls wretchedly, just watching their ailing relatives. The smell of old bodies and stale ether was overpowering, but I tried to enjoy, as best I could, Patrick’s enormous pride in his job well done. Forwood was only capable, at that moment, of a pale smile which faded into apprehension at the sudden brisk and explosive intrusion of an exhausted-looking nurse. She pushed past roughly, thrust a thermometer at him, shouted, in disastrous English, ‘Shove this up your arse!’ and crashed out again. Patrick assisted Forwood, looked apologetically at me. ‘Is the best I could find, the nurse. She speaks English because she worked for a year in Sydney, Australia. Maybe her speech is a little rough?’ I nodded helplessly, and Patrick assured me that she had a very good heart and would be back immediately; he’d wait with his patient and why didn’t I go home? I left, giving Forwood a look which I hoped might appear encouraging, and wandered out into the corridors and downstairs into the reception area. People in white coats, in plaster, people with crutches, some in bandages, some weeping, all drifting about. It was 8.30 a.m.

  In the parking, no sign of Monsieur Antoine – he’d cleared off to open up his bar, I supposed, so I waited until Patrick, after a time, came hurrying down and, surprised to see me still there, drove me back to the hill. He drove fast, too fast for me, but I sat tautly in my seat trying to listen calmly, and to understand, his exhausting tirade of abuse about the clinic and its staff, and then, in more detail, a full medical report, in French, on Forwood and what had happened. He chuntered on in a high babble of enthusiasm with a great deal of violent handwaving, apparently avoiding collisions every four seconds. I just hung on desperately. In the same way that he could not understand medical terms in English, so I was absolutely incapable of understanding them in French. The Achilles’ heel of living in France. I gradually managed to put together the pieces he scattered so liberally in my direction.

  Since the London operation a small blood vessel, or something like that, had, over the weeks of convalescence, engorged and finally, as I had all too clearly seen, it had ruptured. It was amazing, he assured me, that Monsieur Ricardo Alvaro was on duty at les Magnolias that night, otherwise the journey we were presently taking would have been very different. I had met Monsieur Alvaro and liked him very much, a jovial man, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, peeling off his bloody overalls, looking as much like a butcher as a surgeon possibly could. He offered me an elbow to shake as his hands were covered in grease from his rubber gloves. All would now be well, he assured me; it was a simple, if frightening, little ‘hiccup’. Rest for a while, but he should leave the clinic that night: they were terribly overcrowded and he’d be far better off in his own bed.

  At Le Pigeonnier, Patrick dropped me at the gates and then raced off to shave and prepare for his morning surgery. I let a frantic Bendo out of his kennel and clambered wearily up the stairs to the kitchen to find Lady (whom I had forgotten about) crouched on a chair in the dining-room sobbing in helpless anguish. Seeing me, she suddenly screamed very loudly, crossed herself twice, and hurled gabbled prayers to a number of saints she knew, and the Virgin Mary, rocking backwards and forwards, eyes closed in horror, moaning. The ruin, it seemed, of Forwood’s room, together with assorted mustard glasses slopping over with old blood and blood smears scattered round the bathroom and corridor, had done for her. The shock, she kept crying, would kill her; she could never recover! She had thought, naturally enough, that with an open house, dog locked in kennel, blood everywhere, murder and pillage had taken place. It took half an hour to get her to come to terms with what had actually happened. This was difficult to do because every time I moved to take her hands she shrieked loudly, drew back, hissed at me, spat and buried her face in her woolly jacket, convinced that I was the murderer.

  Eventually, after a slug of cognac, and my repeated assurances that Forwood was alive and well, the sobs faded gradually to sniffs and strangled sobs, until she agreed uneasily to come and clear up the sullied rooms. She finally did it all with great composure once she had been thoroughly convinced by my presence, and I even heard her singing ‘Volare’ after a time, while she busied herself tearing off bloody sheets, banging about, running taps and flushing lavatories. It had been a very stiff cognac which had gone straight to her head. I took charge of the bloody glasses, chucked them into the dustbins. Reassured that Forwood was not yet dead, that I was not a murderer, and that life would be returning to normal as soon as I went into town to collect him that evening,
she polished and vacuumed and hurled the towels and pillowcases about with abandon and, finally, wobbled off down the track on her Mobylette, waving cheerfully, her helmet unstrapped, bouncing about on her head. ‘Volare! Ho! Ho! Cantarè, oh ho, ho, ho! … Volare! Into the blue …’

  I took a handful of olives, a piece of cheese, a can of beer, and sat under the vine on the terrace. A solitary lunch. I seem to remember it was the first time. Always there were two, sometimes six or eight, on occasion fifty. There had been parties. Had been. Time lost: time past. The writing was now on the wall: scrawled in thin letters, but there to read. The unthinkable had to be at last considered. So, after I’d done the clinic run, got the patient back and into his bed, we’d just have to rest up a little and then face the ugliness. If you cut out any form of sentiment whatever, it wouldn’t be difficult. Really.

  Bendo chose that exact moment, I can now see and hear, to lumber up the steps and crash out in the shade, puffing, gasping, fly-snapping. Not a good moment to arrive. It would all be pretty bloody when the actual time arrived.

  I sold the house, on a Wednesday morning, quietly, privately. No one knew. Took it back again the following week (to the consternation of the couple to whom I’d offered it) and decided to try and sweat it out for another year. Apart from health, money was the problem. I had long chucked the cinema – in a way I think it had started to chuck me, but no matter. I left it before the axe fell. A disastrously unhappy experience in a war film which I had been jollied into making as a sprat to catch a mackerel (I was told) put paid, for ever, to any desire I might have had to continue to work in the cinema. It had everything about it that was most detestable and unpleasant in the business, and as a sprat I got stuck right until the final awful day of shooting. We, Larry Olivier, Liv Ullman, Edward Fox, myself and other European players were the sprats needed to catch the American stars who would, of course, guarantee a box-office success worldwide for a thoroughly British disaster. I can’t remember, nor do I wish to know, what happened to the piece finally. I only know that the few sprats caught a boatload of mackerel at obscene expense, and that cheap bait was something I no longer wished to be. I did, a little later, attempt a final trip into the Magic Lantern Land and although this was a remarkable German product, from a director of genius, with some degree of intellect and a serious attempt to honour the writer, Nabokov, by Tom Stoppard, it got hacked about in the cutting-room and I finally pulled up my drawbridge for good.

  Now writing had to support me, and the olive store was never so occupied. Working from home, as they say, meant that I was there to look out for the shaking hands and head, to arrange the London trips, succour a steadily weakening patient, be steady at the often anguished results of lavatorial examination, be encouraging when the car appeared difficult to steer, ready to carry a cup, button a cuff, pour from a bottle, joke lightly at frailty and never let the patient suspect, for one moment, that any future there might be was less than certain.

  Refusing cinema work did, for a little time, cause him alarm. Was it, he wondered miserably, because of him? I was able, I think, to assure him that after the war epic I had turned my back on the cinema and never wished to return. He appeared satisfied with this. Up to a point. But when one time I was asked to accept an extremely attractive, indeed mammoth, role in a film which seemed to have everything going for it except perhaps its location in Colombia, it was difficult to lie convincingly – especially as the doctors in London had, unwisely I couldn’t help feeling, given their permission for me to go, provided the proper injections against all manner of ailments and insects had been administered. So I prevaricated and whined away about my fear of flying, and who would look after the house for so long, and so on. I convinced him really only when I reminded him of the long journey, the heat and disease, and the distance from medical help if it were needed suddenly; and what, I said, about the three-monthly check-ups? They couldn’t be left in abeyance. And, anyway, I had renounced the movies.

  He was, more or less, reassured. We never discussed it again after that, and I never even read the script. But I was rather relieved to hear that the player who finally did the film spent a great deal of his time climbing gigantic waterfalls, cliff faces, gasping through dense jungle or wandering about in priestly raiment drenched by spume and torrential rain. It seemed that even though I might be the right age for the role I was the wrong age for so much agonizing activity, blundering around piously in South America. I stayed in the olive store and wrote my books.

  Norah Smallwood had, by this time, died. Wretchedly, miserably, frail and bedraggled, in a public ward in Westminster Hospital. An era had ended. I was accepted by a powerful and attractive literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, and as my old publishers made no effort to keep me, she got my new book auctioned and I found myself with a brand new publisher, and a new beginning. In a world as uncertain and shifting as the one into which I now found myself entering, it was vastly important to me to have security, some feeling of constancy and encouragement … and I received this to a very comforting degree. There was now nothing to challenge my work at the hardboard desk on the pair of trestles from Galleries Lafayette. I spent all my time and effort (when not on the land) at a typewriter, or thumbing through the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Larousse and Fowler.

  One day over at La Colombe in Saint-Paul, where we had driven (a confidence test run, really) for lunch, I learned of a brilliant professor at the Institut Pasteur in Nice who specialized in Parkinson’s. My informant suffered herself from the disease, but Professor Martin had helped her ‘amazingly’ and she was convinced that he could cure her – or at the very least bring the hideous symptoms to a manageable degree. She generously agreed to speak to the Professor and arrange an appointment. His ‘book’, she said, was ‘closed’, he could cope with only a very limited number of patients. He agreed to see Forwood.

  At that time I had been offered a Graham Greene short story to adapt for TV. Since this fell into my writing life, I accepted. And when it was suggested that I also play in the piece, I accepted that, for one simple reason: it was all to be shot in the South of France over a period of six weeks. In Nice. And six weeks was exactly the amount of time that Professor Martin needed to assess the needs of his patient. If there were no improvements after six weeks the case was possibly too far advanced for treatment. I accepted both jobs, and the house was left to Marie-Thérèse and Gilles once again, while rooms were taken at the Hotel Negresco. Martin’s treatments usually took place in the early mornings, and the waiting about could be for hours, for he treated every one of his patients with extreme care and personal attention. So you never knew how long you might have to hang about the weary waiting-room of the Pasteur. Wiser therefore to be stationed in Nice. After six weeks, indeed after only three, the treatment seemed to be working: the Professor himself became cautiously encouraging, hope glimmered for a time, but it was a false dawn. However, it was a tremendous morale booster.

  The Professor’s office was a perfect illustration of what all absent-minded professors’ offices should look like: a shabby room, peeling walls, grimy windows, a cluttered desk set in the centre of a sea of pamphlets and tumbled books looking like the aftermath of a hurricane. On the desk, prominently placed between him and his patient, a human brain, sliced, dissected and pickled in some brackish liquid. It very much resembled yellow bully beef and put me off that for years to come. But the man was full of kindness and encouragement, gentleness and confidence. He pointed out very fairly that it was all ‘experiment’. As a willing guinea-pig this had to be, and was, fully accepted. In any case, it was better to be at the Pasteur with hope than to be isolated on the hill with only apprehension.

  The television film and the treatment finished almost together, and it was back to Le Pigeonnier and the routine of summer once more. Spring had arrived for its extremely short duration and summer had exploded, as it always did on the hill, in abundance and acres of lush green grass. There never was that gentle distance between the fading daffo
dil or narcissus, the primrose and the bluebell, and the wanton whoring of the gloire de Dijon or Grandemère Jenny, or the prodigal spillings of alyssum, eschscholtzia and dianthus. It was all, quite suddenly, a splendour of scents and colours. The things I had managed to grow in beds hacked from the limestone shale and filled with good loam and compost which arrived up the track in great trucks were simple cottage plants that I had known as a child in Sussex and knew how to handle: larkspur, delphiniums, Canterbury bells, petunias, antirrhinums, pelargoniums and so on. I never went in for anything exotic: just the ordinary old seed packet favourites.

  And there was nothing much wrong in that. They flowered far more extravagantly than they ever did in the cool of England; the blooms were larger, more brilliant, in the clear, dazzling light of the hill, and seemed to be more strongly scented. However, the bounty was excessive: the grass on the terraces was hip-high, the broom bushes tumbled uncontrolled, valerian exploded from the terrace walls, roses became smothered in every kind of aphid and grub and, of course, the spraying, now that it had taken its human toll, was banished. However, the vine flourished in green profusion, the de-bunching business (a back-breaking process which had to take place every May and June as one stripped the too-many bunches away and carted them down in barrow-loads to the compost heap) had gone on, as had all the other garden jobs which were now ‘manageable’ for one pair of hands and another pair less certain but eager and determined to assist. Everything that could be done as before was done. More or less.

  Life, for the last summer on the hill, went along much as it had done for twenty years. There was no way that a change of pace should, or could, be introduced. The house had very tactfully been sold, to friends of the original people who had so wanted it, but it was agreed that everything would go on as usual. Until October. Then, and then only, would I hand over the keys, close the shutters for the last time, and quit. Parkinson’s, the vague threat always present of something untoward happening to the lymph glands, the general unease now when driving in the car to the market and the one overwhelmingly disastrous fault of mine, the fact that I was unable to drive, sealed the fate of life at Le Pigeonnier. It was a matter of now saving what one could and abandoning ship. A door had slammed, the corridor had crashed into darkness.