A Short Walk from Harrods

by Dirk Bogarde

  I told very few people: my friends in the village, Florette Ranchett, Madame Pasquini, the Mandellis of course and those others who were particularly close, somehow knew or guessed and had to know. I tried, in some futile way, never to put it into words, hating to state the fact brutally. Marie, a widow now, living alone in her cramped little flat, arrived for tea one day, well aware that all was not well and that I would be bound to give her information she would prefer not to hear: when I did, as gently as I could, she wept silently, hopelessly, her head in her hands, and all I could hear were her smothered words of grief. Now she was quite alone in the world: Le Pigeonnier had been her only family. I never told the Meils, I never told anyone in the market or in the villages. I never even told the de Beauvallons, my neighbours in their splendid new house under Titty-Brown Hill. I had it in mind that, when the time came, I would just go away as silently and as unannounced as I had arrived that hot summer day so long ago. Every farewell would be a deep laceration, a wounding which I knew Forwood in his condition would not be able to sustain and which I must not myself endure, for I had to be the strong one now. It was all on my shoulders. I hoped very much they’d not weakened after the years of happiness and peace. So the final summer went as planned. People came to stay, Lady (who, of course, I did tell and who immediately asked if I was taking all the furniture because if I was selling anything she’d like first offer – she had, after all, polished and cared for everything, and she had had her eye for years on the Magi-Mix) – anyway, Lady whipped sheets off beds, changed pillowcases, and we went on, it might appear to a stranger, pretty much as always. Only very close friends like Rosalind and Nicholas Bowlby, who came out to help me through a difficult four-day shoot for a TV documentary, Pat Kavanagh and my new editor, Fanny Blake, knew the full facts. Elizabeth and my brother Gareth were told, for I would desperately need their help when the final shutters were closed. They were both ready. ‘That’s what families are for,’ said Gareth. ‘We’ll be there, don’t worry.’

  It would not, I knew, be a question of a severance, but of an amputation.

  In September, when the last of the guests had departed and the bathing-towels had long since been washed and folded away by Lady, Forwood and I sat under the vine and watched the sun slide in an apricot glow behind the mountain above the town. The air was soft and cool in the shade. A cicada was singing on the lime tree. Bendo lay sprawled exhaustedly under a big pot of white petunias.

  ‘And him?’ said Forwood.

  ‘I’ll deal with all that. In good time.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m very grateful,’ he said.

  Chapter 8

  Occupied, as I was in the last chapter, in rounding up metaphorical sheep, I now realize that I quite forgot to round up the real ones: the ones on the hoof. They did, in fact, inhabit the land for a while.

  Madame Meil got her way in the end, and I got her old friend the shepherd Labiche from Feyance. Plus flock. No longer young, he was a tall, stooped man, in a ragged overcoat, a frayed tweed cap, heavy, cracked calloused hands clasped over his blackthorn crook, polished and shining as a liquorice stick. His flock amounted to about 250 beasts: I never managed to count them truthfully, but they were pretty mouldy looking, and when I first set eyes on their scrawny bodies skittering about beneath my lovingly tended olives I confess that I was mildly alarmed. I suppose that I was thinking of the fat roly-poly sheep with which I had become familiar in childhood on the South Downs: fat, complacent, trim and woolly. Not a whit like these wretched mountain creatures, lean to the point of famine, long of knobbly leg, wild of yellow-orbed eye, feeding frantically on my lush spring grass, then starred all about with wild anemones and crocuses.

  The land, as Madame Meil said, had always carried sheep in the old days, and now she had seen to it that it was carrying sheep once again. It was obvious really that it should: it was well watered and grew an abundant crop of excellent green fodder, the best on the hill, and for a time I was persuaded that the scraggy flock saved me an immense amount of toil. They cropped close to the root. Every fragment of moss or lichen went down, each stunted myrtle, broom or box-bush was cropped to the very stumps. The entire area looked as if a great blanket of green baize, undulating over the bumps and humps, had been thrown for approval before my apprehensive eyes. So far, so good. Clean the land they did and all was perfectly acceptable – if you didn’t count the outraged screams and howls coming from the dogs locked in their kennels and the massive quantity of ticks they released liberally over the entire area. Not to mention the fact that the only things permitted actually to grow were the olives: and as they were as old as the land itself, and as tough, they remained. Lesser vegetation went swiftly.

  But sometimes, I confess, it gave me intense pleasure to sit and watch this biblical scene being played before me on my own fragment of France. Olive trees of great age, silence, green terraces, lambs gambolling, or whatever the things do, the pleasing wrenching sound of grass and herb being devoured by gentle creatures, skinny but none the less charming to look at, with only the tonkle-tonkle of their bells to break the serenity.

  However, there were some alarming problems connected with all this serenity. The dogs worked themselves into hysterical frenzies from which I sometimes thought that they would never recover. So great was their hatred for the old Labiche sheepdog, and the entire flock of invading stilt-legged creatures, that they literally foamed at the mouth, eyes rolling in their heads, bulging, gleaming like hard-boiled eggs. It was unnerving and not at all restful; it quite frankly ruined the peaceful contemplation of my biblical scene. The terrace walls suffered greatly as well: so carefully repaired, and with such precision and elegance, by Fraj, they had the hell bashed out of them by capering animals intent on leaping to the next patch of tempting green. Fraj watched, impassively, as huge corner stones spun like empty cigarette packets among the trees, and showers of smaller pebbles and limestone shards rattled down on to the lower fields jamming the mowers and bending the blades. (Mowing, incidentally, still went on even with the sheep to assist us.) Fraj stoically shrugged, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and began all over again, relaying stones constantly. Calm, unruffled. I was far less equable. I had to pay for his labour every time, and it didn’t really come cheap on a limited budget.

  I suppose, though, that the ticks were the final disastrous problem, and were most certainly the reason that Next Door and, indeed, the de Beauvallons, firmly refused to have Labiche and his troupe on their land. Both families were extremely urban and would honestly have been far better off in Gerrards Cross or Neuilly respectively, for they shuddered at the sight of a toad, shrieked if a lizard got jammed in a shutter, even winced in polite frenzy if they were approached by a welcoming dog. They were not country people at all. However, I rather saw their point about the ticks. Labiche did not: he was furious, because the estates all joined and, together, would have provided him, as they had in the past, with enough grazing until he marched his leggy creatures up to the high hills for the summer.

  However, he made do with my piece, paying me, as the law insisted, grazing-rights yearly. This I established as one single franc, and this he gave me wrapped in a piece of paper among the glittering foil-wrapped bonbons contained in the belly of a chocolate fish every 1st of April: le poisson d’Avril, a French custom like our April Fools’ Day. Sometimes I did wonder if I was being had, but on two early occasions he most generously added to the poisson one newborn lamb, headless, skinned, gutted, bloody, ready for the spit. My anguished face may have suggested to him that I was either mad or vegetarian, or both. Either way the gift was abandoned and so indeed were the grazing-rights eventually.

  After a few years it really did become a burden rather than a pleasure: what with frenzied dogs, falling walls, a total lack of wild flowers and a plethora of ticks, I had to call it, very regretfully, a day. Labiche was pretty cross and Madame Meil shook a finger at me from time to time, scowling. But in the end it all faded away.

  One of the mai
n problems turned out to be the sheep-droppings, which were precisely the same size, shape and colour as the olives which spilled so abundantly across my land from December until March. Monsieur Rémy always insisted that they added body to the oil. I have no doubt that he was right. I only know that my bidons, brought heavy from the mill and filled with the golden treasure so painfully gathered at every harvest, did indeed have a particularly ‘fruity’ flavour. I didn’t admit to enthusiastic gourmets, who praised it lavishly, the possible reason for their delight. Well, consider things: numb fingers in frost-spiked grass, back and knees aching, eyes watering from the bitter wind blowing down from the mountain. It was not impossible that one had reached out for a scatter of doubtful fruits. One little black sphere, under those conditions, did look very much like another. Anyway, no one died. As far as I am aware.

  So. That was the herd of sheep, part of the lyrical life I led. The olives, the mowing, the grazing and the whole glory of, at last, being an accredited agriculturalist and, what was much more important, being taxed as such. I could, and did, claim grants for restoration of the neglected property, the State profited from my oil and, one supposed, the excellence of Labiche’s sheep – and, incidentally, from Madame Meil’s ewe’s-milk cheese, which I am assured was delicious. In spite of her fingernails and the noisy privy.

  But apart from rounding up sheep, I have almost forgotten that I also nearly mislaid a dynasty. Forwood, divorced rather unhappily after the war, had a son, Gareth, who became a permanent part of his regular life from about the age of seven and continued to be so for a long time to come. At university in Aix he met an enchanting French girl, Véronique, married her, and had a son, Thomas. Thus Forwood became, to his intense pride and overwhelming joy, a grandfather. Thomas first arrived on the hill when he was less than one year old, but at three he sat on his grandfather’s knee and ‘drove’ the Peugeot up the track.

  The Forwood dynasty was secure, and the doting grandfather smothered the walls of his little office with photographs of his grandson: an hour old, in arms, aged twelve months, in a bath with a yellow plastic duck, taking first steps with his aged great-grandfather, as a cowboy, standing under a Christmas tree, riding his first tricycle, wearing a paper hat, kicking a football, lugging a satchel to school. Gradually the baby gave way to the child, the child to a boy, the boy to a tall youth. All recorded on the office walls until the time came for them to be unpinned and packed away. Thomas’s parents divorced very early in his life. Véronique remarried and he then had a new ‘father’ and, in time, two stepbrothers, plus his doting grandfather, who kept a cautious, but continual, eye on his progress: a progress which brought him up the hill, for the last time, when he was thirteen. He came with his ‘new’ parents, as usual, and as usual no one spoke at all about the tiny warning cracks which had first started with a very slight ache in one foot. Least said, one thought, soonest mended.

  Every year Lady and Manolo, plus their two children (a small boy had been born almost on the kitchen floor one morning, but she managed to hang on to him until she reached her own kitchen and had him on the floor there), drove off in a battered Renault to Granada and their cave-haunting families. That they should go on a well-deserved holiday no one could possibly dispute; what one did dispute was the kindness of her heart and the taste which produced such perfectly awful presents. And what, and how, to do anything about them once they had been so proudly offered and warmly accepted? It was quite impossible to ever be rid of the things which accrued through the years, for she dusted and adjusted each and every one every day of her life, preening with pleasure that they were so prominently displayed even though, she did once admit, she had not meant them for the bedrooms or the offices, but rather for the Long Room or, at a pinch, the dining-room.

  There is a limit, one would imagine, to dancing ladies in frilly and spotted flamenco skirts, to long-legged gentlemen twisted into agonizing shapes on their high heels, to castanets with ‘GRANADA’ painted on them in gold or, worse, glittering in pink sequins. A limit to the ‘antique’ worm-holed wood plaques holding one thermometer and two key-rings, to ashtrays with bulls and matadors on them, to lampshades covered in wine labels. But there was no limit. There were enough souvenirs of sunny Spain gathered together under the roof of Le Pigeonnier to fill a funfair, and there was absolutely no way that I could dispose of them by, say, any artful fall, sudden gust of vicious wind, or just having one of the dogs savage a frilly lady. They stayed and endured, grim reminders of a loving heart.

  But the worst gift of all, perhaps, was the one which had cost her the most thought and pesetas. It was to be the last she ever did bring back from her holidays and it was brought, on her lap, all the way from the mountains behind Granada or Alicante or wherever she had found it, to remind me of all the years of devotion she had given the house and its owners. Wherever we went, she said, we would be reminded of her. And how …

  So delicate was this gift that it could not even be wrapped for fear of damage to the exquisite elegance of its shape and form (the same thing, but that’s what she said). For two whole days and one long night (they slept in the car in a lay-by) it was proudly carried in her hands so that nothing could possibly disturb the elegance and sleek perfection of her possession. A fat red-legged partridge. Stuffed. Alert, head to one side listening for the hunter, it stared glassily into space, speckled, plump, firmly wired through vermilion legs to a chunk of plaster rock glued here and there with viridian green moss. Unbreakable, unspeakable, destined, as she pointed out as I held it in stunned hands, for the stone bracket high in the dining-room where the ‘imitation’ bird stood: my Picasso owl. That was merely ‘old pot’, she said, whereas this was the real thing, and as I collected birds she knew that I would be overwhelmed. Well, I was. In a manner of speaking. While she dusted all my Meissen birds with infinite care, as long as I was present, she assured me that she would never have to dust the partridge. A flick with a feather duster was all it needed, but never actually got, because, after I had glumly placed it on the bracket, it proved to be far too high for her. So there it stood for ages, feathers, feet, folded wings and tilted head, commanding the room. Plumes riffling in any draught, eyes growing gradually filmier with dust. I know that it gave her infinite pleasure each time she passed it; it reminded her, she said, of the long journey home and I almost expected her to genuflect as she went up to the top floor with the polisher and the can of beeswax, for she venerated the bird as she would have venerated a fragment of the True Cross or the Turin Shroud. When the time came to begin to pack up the house she anxiously suggested that the removal men accord the bird a separate large box. With, she thought, sawdust to protect it. I promised her that when the time came the partridge would be greatly cared for and the very last thing to go.

  It was.

  There was a final check-up in London before the packing began. Just to be quite clear about things and where we stood generally. No real sign of anything untoward, but the three-monthly check-ups could not be abandoned. Sudden changes could occur swiftly. One could never be absolutely certain. The patient was not told this – I was; but the three-monthly business was made clear to him. To continue to try and do this from the South was impossible: exhausting, and far too costly. The taxi to the airport was not a gift, air fares were expensive, the hotel situation, although pleasant, was simply not affordable with, anyway, Marie-Thérèse and her family living happily up on the hill.

  This latest London check-up coincided comfortably with the publication of my book Backcloth, so the hotel, the cars, the fares even, were paid for – but I was not capable of publishing a book every three months. So a new idea began to formulate in my mind. Neither Forwood nor I wanted to leave France. I had spent more than a third of my life there, had grown to love and respect its people and the quality of its life. I had come to terms not only with the language but also the logic. I was an agriculturalist and a resident, and I had been honoured by my adopted country with the ribbon of the Commandeur des Arts
et des Lettres, a singular honour for a foreigner. To leave after so long, with roots so strongly planted, would be unthinkable, but to move up to Paris and find a pleasant flat was not. Near to London for emergency, but still in France. The fear of sudden illness (the prostate panic was ever in mind) and costly taxi journeys down to Nice, where the best hospitals and clinics were, settled things. A flat in Paris could be a perfectly splendid way of restarting an interrupted life.

  The London doctors had given me my train set. Tunnels, crossings, signals and even the stations. The lines had been laid, the engine set firmly on the track, now all that I had to do was insert the key and wind it all up. That done, the tender, the trucks and the carriages would all follow along behind. Somehow or other. The hardest job I had to face was the inserting of the key and making the first twist. It started, of course, with Bendo.

  Forwood was quietly, perfectly, calmly, distraught.

  ‘He’s not going to be put down because he’s ill. But because I am.’

  ‘And because, if it’s a flat in Paris, he’ll go spare after all these acres and never having to wear a collar or be on a leash, and if it’s England, as it could be – we have to face that – he’ll die anyway with six months in quarantine.’

  ‘Perhaps the Mandellis or Marie-Thérèse would take him …?’