by Dirk Bogarde
‘And after that?’ I said.
‘After that I send it to Paris. You have somewhere in Paris where I can send it?’
‘Well, not yet … well, yes. Hotel Lancaster. Rue de Berri. Eighth. They’ll accept it. We’ll be there for a little while. Thank you, Madame … It’ll be sheets from five beds, and pillowcases … towels … napkins, five … I can’t think how many … face cloths …’ I was trying, automatically, to do our ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ list, but she cut me short with a hand wave, got back into her car.
‘You are impertinent, Monsieur. Eh? Madame?’ She was half smiling. ‘Your brother? A demain…’ and she reversed and drove very quickly down the track.
I don’t have the least recollection of the rest of that evening. I suppose we ate something? I think I checked the dead bonfires, I know I fixed Forwood a few decent vodkas and we washed up and set out the mugs for breakfast and filled the kettle. The teabags were in a half-used packet. I remember that clearly. And there was a brown teapot. And the one spoon we had to share, and Elizabeth taking a bunch of wilting flowers (some yellow anthemis daisies) and stuffing them into a dustbin sack and then all of us going up to bed in the echoing house.
Forwood called down to her about having something to read? And she called back that she was too tired, but she’d have a look at the Virginia Woolf she hadn’t packed yet. And then it was the next day, last day but one, and the vans arrived and we just loaded things. That’s all. When they had driven away, about six in the evening, the house seemed to be holding its breath with the shock, indignation and distress of being raped. The rooms were still; pillaged. The green plants stood patiently in a huddle in the Long Room waiting for Marie-Thérèse, to whom they had been promised, and a powder blue car came racing up the drive, bumping and battering, and pulled into the curve outside the porte d’entrée with a scatter of gravel. It was Florette Ranchett. She mouthed a muffled greeting, wound down a window, looked apprehensively about the parking.
‘There is no dog,’ I said. She nodded, reached to the seat beside her, handed me a bidon.
‘Potage. My Mama’s special. With my compliments. For your supper.’
I can remember very clearly how she deliberately avoided my eye, and how she handed me three soup plates and said, briskly, ‘Don’t bother about them. For the poubelle (dustbin) tomorrow, they are only from Monoprix. It’ll save Madame cooking, or washing up …’ She wound up the window, reversed, drove rapidly away. I never saw her again. I still have one plate.
Vivienne (the widow of the man who embraced his olive trees) arrived a bit later with a bottle of Bollinger cradled in an ice bucket in a plastic bag from Monoprix. So we sat out on the terrace, under the vine, for the very last time, and it really didn’t hurt. So much. Elizabeth was extremely irritated by the arrival of Marie-Thérèse and her ebullient child, Gabriella, when they came to collect the plants from the Long Room.
‘Clambering in and out the bloody window all the time! I could brain them. Honestly! Simply no sense of occasion. No feelings …’ They went away after a time, all my cherished plants crammed into the small car and its bulging boot. We waved. What else?
Wandering about the empty house, mugs in our hands, Vivienne suddenly said, ‘I see a stuffed partridge. Unpacked. Are you having a problem?’
‘Yes. Frankly. A huge problem.’
She reached up and took it from its dusty perch. ‘You aren’t any longer,’ she said, and shoved it under her arm.
We went down on to the terrace, she dropped the bird into the Monoprix bag, and I poured the last of the champagne. It seemed fitting, somehow. I had not lied to Lady when I said it would be the last thing to go. Apart from ourselves, it was.
I have only the vaguest memories of the last day. A man in the kitchen packing all the knives and forks. Someone whistling ‘La Petite Tonkinoise’. Watching my bed being taken round the deep bend in the staircase. Stubbing a cigarette carefully in a saucer of water on the terrace. Dead-heading a fuchsia by the door. Looking to see if the vine had started to turn. Nothing. Futile incidents. Moments. Sounds.
And then watching the cheerful, gaudy vans swaying slowly down the track, hesitantly turning left like great yellow elephants. A majestic, stately, lumbering pair, moving carefully down the narrow winding lane to the main road. I saw the last of the sun flicker and ripple along the lengths of their roofs until they were quite lost to sight behind the fig trees up on the high bank.
On the terrace Elizabeth went over to her modest pile of luggage; checked it. I looked at Forwood, he looked at me. We smiled.
‘Having your drink?’
‘Sun’s over the yard arm.’ Banality. I’d only ever laughed at people who actually said it.
Elizabeth called, ‘Here he is. Awfully late …’
Up at Titty-Brown Hill, Alain and Christine had seen him too. They turned and came slowly, reluctantly down towards us.
But this, I think, is where you came in?
It was Forwood’s seventy-first birthday.
Chapter 9
The Hotel Lancaster is the last of the splendid hôtels particuliers left standing in rue de Berri. I watched all the others being demolished over the years and hideous modern buildings take their place. Now it sits rather like an ageing, still-elegant duchess at a rave-up, bewildered by the awfulness around her, steadily pretending that all is as it was before.
So discreet is the hotel that it is quite possible to walk past it and never even know it exists. Which is fine by those of us who seek its shelter. Marble floors, thick carpets, brass, light, tapestries, walls ablaze with family portraits of the thirties (it was a private house then), great urns of floral splendour; and, right in the centre, almost the hub of this lovely building, is the scarlet- and gold-lacquered lift which silently ascends to the top floor and the rooms which have terraces and views from Sacré Coeur to the Eiffel Tower, and where I normally stayed.
But that was a long time ago, before I left Le Pigeonnier. Now, a refugee, with some fourteen suitcases, an invalid, plus a bundle of walking-sticks and umbrellas, I could no longer afford the top floor: we were hotel residents now, and made do with a modest suite elsewhere, but still with a view over the secret garden in the courtyard below, and the trees and ivy of the neighbouring buildings. I mean, there was something green to look at, not just grey walls and slate roofs. The suite was small: a tiny sitting-room, a twin bedroom with, thank God, two bathrooms and two beds. This, until I could find the perfect flat in Paris, was now home. It is alarming how easily one can become institutionalized. Rather like being in a hospital, one settles down to the routine which is, in some odd way, imposed on one. I had never actually lived in an hotel before. Staying and living are not at all the same thing. To cope with life on the third floor – the narrowness of the little sitting-room, the unwished for intimacy of the twin-bedded room, each bathroom up a step in opposite walls so that the most private functions were no longer possible (from the sound point of view anyway) – one arranged life carefully and accordingly.
Thus, petit déjeuner arrived in the sitting-room, a tray for two: coffee, croissants, butter, milk, confiture or marmalade. A Herald Tribune and The Times. I got myself dressed and out of the way to give Forwood plenty of time for all his various activities. The outline of the day would commence after he had closed the door to the bedroom. I’d look at a paper, out the window, at the heavy silk curtains, at the ivy over the courtyard on the wall of a tall house opposite. Six storeys high. Bosky green. The roosting place for a million starlings who swept in screaming and wheeling at dusk every evening. I’d go for a walk. Perhaps to the paper stall opposite the Travellers Club, maybe down to the Place de la Concorde and back. Nothing.
At precisely eleven-thirty I’d be in my chair, a large winged thing, in the bar. It was permanently reserved, with a small table and a bucket of ice and a bottle of the house champagne. I’d talk to any member of the staff who was there or willing, skim a magazine I might have bought, accept the lunc
heon menu.
‘Today we offer Poulet Sauté Espagnol? Or, if you order now, there are three delicious Loup de Mer … Shall I reserve one?’
And Forwood, dressed as elegantly as the English M’Lor he was always considered to be, came down in the red lacquer lift, tapping carefully with his dog’s-head stick, across the marble hall.
‘Did you get Figaro?’ He eased himself into the twin of my chair, the wine poured by an attentive waiter.
So we sat. Every morning. Two elderly men in suits, sipping champagne. Reading the property column in Figaro.
‘There is nothing we’d want. A mass of places in the wrong arrondissements … not much in Seven or Six … nothing in the Marais …’
By noon people were drifting in from outside, actors, lawyers, pretty girls who could have been either. There was chatter, chinking glasses and cigarette smoke. We reserved the Loup de Mer, agreed we’d go to see a flat in the Claridge building, knowing I’d hate it and could not afford it.
That was, suddenly, what life became. The trip, after leaving Le Pigeonnier, to London to check on the lurking shadow on the liver proved inconclusive, not the trip so much as the examination. No one agreed what it was. Decided that it wasn’t; sent us back to Paris if not elated at least relieved. To some extent. But it wasn’t much of an existence, just sitting like this. There was no room to write in the suite: the desk was meant to hold a jar of flowers, a telephone, an ashtray and the breakfast menu. That was all.
We got to the Claridge, a dark conversion job in what had been a famous old hotel. Beige walls, orange carpet, high cracked-tiled bathrooms, a view over a tarred courtyard to fifty other conversions. All shuttered. The sky somewhere above. You had to take that on trust.
‘Which way does it face? North or south?’
Forwood shrugged. ‘Does it matter? They want half a million. Quid. I don’t see why we’d have to pay so much for an invitation to suicide.’
Or otherwise there were apartments for Rich Sheikhs – with the emphasis on the capital letters – Glittering, carpeted, gold and pale blue, miles of marble, yards of ruched pink silk. At no time, in the five months I trailed about looking at dreadful places, was there even one with a balcony, or one which looked out on to trees. Anything green. Even the sky would do.
Nothing until someone suggested a family in the Swedish or Danish embassy who had finished their tour of duty and had a ‘ravishing’ flat on Parc Monceau. Apart from all the nannies, and the romping children screaming up and down on swings and slides, the Parc was in the right area and fairly green – for Paris. I mean, there were trees, and shrubs, and paths to walk about on if one wanted to walk. A vaguely Proustian atmosphere. One might have seen Swann or Odette.
But the flat was hideous, the top part of an old house, facing north. No one had done anything to it, apart from smoke and eat in it, for some years. The Scandinavians are not all, as this awful place proved, house-proud or even, for that matter, very clean. Lady would have had a fit. I did.
And that, with a moment or two of delight, was the ‘even tenor of our days’, as they say. The moments of delight came from seeing friends, dining with or lunching with them in brasseries or restaurants. One is seldom asked to anyone’s house or apartment. So one lived in suits, clean shirts, polished shoes, a good tie. All day. Every day. ‘Restaurant clothes’, I called them. Olga, Charlotte, Jean-Michel, Rolande, Loulou, Jane, Benedict and Dominique were all fun, all loving, all wonderfully kind. But they all of them worked, had families, kept house, marketed, telephoned, wrote and were, quite simply, occupied in living their lives. The time they could spare was limited, and splendid as it was to be with them, there was little that I could contribute in the way of conversation. I hardly ever went anywhere: no theatre, rarely a cinema, never a concert. Sitting for any length of time among a lot of people panicked Forwood, used, as he had been, to the silence and freedom of the hill. As, indeed, it panicked me. We walked once as far as the Left Bank and I bought some prints on the Quai Voltaire, for the new flat. Its first gift. Only we never found a flat. Nothing was considered to be possible, or else affordable.
Once, I remember, we walked in arctic crystal-clear air, under a sky the blue of a thrush’s egg, beneath tall chestnut trees rusting slowly in autumn frost, and down at the Rond Point, where the gardens were massed with crimson, yellow and bronze chrysanthemums, the police held us back as Monsieur Mitterrand raced up the broad avenue, outriders roaring, huge black cars following, sirens screaming, lights flashing, heading for the Arc de Triomphe to lay his wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was the 11th of November. Armistice Day.
‘It’s Armistice Day. Did you know?’ I said.
Forwood pulled the big beaver collar tight round his neck. ‘Don’t get chilled. Standing here. It’s really bloody freezing. Let’s wander back,’ he said.
So we did. We drifted back up the Champs-Elysées among the crowds surging up to the Arc. Children were running, a girl was laughing, holding on to her lover’s, or husband’s, arm, there was the sound of distant military music, and it was just exactly twenty years to the day and hour that I had first looked through the oak trees down to Le Pigeonnier. But I didn’t say anything. No point.
We turned back to rue de Berri, and the champagne bucket, as distant guns boomed out for the silence. I reckon that he knew.
I can’t remember what colour the wallpaper in the little sitting-room was. God knows, I should remember it: I stared at it for long enough. Five months all told. I remember the carpet was green; the silk curtains a slate green. Can’t at all remember the walls. I suppose, like so many other dreary things, I have wiped them from memory. Sometimes I saw my face in my bathroom mirror and caught it with surprise. So that’s what anxiety looks like? Blank, no worry-lines, just flat. I’ve always thought anxiety, worry, made one frown. It doesn’t really. If it’s very serious the face just goes sort of slack. I must remember that; another clove to stick in the orange of my observing mind, to make up a rough pomander of ‘visual odour’. I haven’t wiped those faces from my mind. I marked them at the time for later use. I suppose all players, and writers, do that? Squirreling bits of self away. I can’t remember the sitting-room walls but I can remember the curtains in the bedroom. I suppose because I got fierce bronchitis twice, and lay in coughing misery for nights. Desperate that I was keeping Forwood awake, that I would be exhausted the next day. Which I was. The curtains were yellow. Parakeets looping about with blue and red balloons and spiralling ribbons. A wide repeat. I looked at them all night through hacking, barking coughs and tears of anguish streaming. Wavering, yellow, blurry silk.
And then there was Christmas. I remember that too: but this is all about remembering bits and pieces, as I have told you. The first prick of horror that we were moving towards the festive season was a great jar of berried holly being set up on a pedestal. Then a tree, simpering, twinkling, wreathed in gold loops of tinsel. The first hideous poinsettia in the bar, ivy strung about, a branch of mistletoe over the telephonist in the corner. A hotel Christmas, if you are a resident anyway, isn’t a great deal of fun. The menu alters a little and more seasonal fare is displayed. But young people never seem to stay in hotels. Only the old do. The young go to the mountains to ski. Anyway they do in France. There is a spurt of excitement just before Christmas Mass on Christmas Eve, and then the silence settles like dust and stays there thickly laid until the eve of New Year. That is marginally jollier.
There was a staff party, and I was made a member of the Concierges’ private club, a rare honour. I was presented with the two crossed keys in gold, which was very pleasant. And Charlotte Rampling had invited us to lunch with her family and the children on ‘the day’ and we drove back through snow and sleet just as the starlings swung into the great wall of ivy opposite, squealing and chattering as dusk fell. We didn’t fare too badly for the first Christmas away. Apart from bronchitis twice and steadily increasing Parkinson’s.
Forwood had a desperate and touching beli
ef in his professor in Nice, so we bundled off there once more and Martin looked as he always looked: unfathomable. He’d be in London, perhaps, in February. He had a paper to read at some hospital. Perhaps we could meet there? Perhaps another specialist might be approached? Perhaps. Everything was moving into perhaps-time. Unsettling.
But to London anyway for the three-monthly check and that mainly proved that getting to London from Paris was not a quick flip of half an hour or so. It was almost five hours from door to door. Exhausting for a sick man. The consultation in Harley Street was not, this time, worrying, but it was not, on the other hand, comforting. Perhaps we ‘might do better to stay in London for a time?’ ‘How long? What is “a time”?’ Polite shrugs. How could anyone possibly tell me?
The bills at the hotel, although most generously adapted to my situation, were still tremendous by the standards of life at Le Pigeonnier. The taxis and air fares, the consultants’ fees, the pills and potions all added up to a frightening amount, weakening disastrously the supporting beams of my ever-optimistic structure, which began to sag now quite a lot. Added to which the drabness of an inactive life, the routine of meals, wandering off to look at hideous and unsuitable apartments, living in cramped, if elegant, quarters were desperately bad for morale.
And now that Forwood could no longer, with safety, really be allowed to go for his walk round the block unattended, it made life cruelly restricting for him. He was able to go down to the lobby on his own, provided he used the lift, and took his stick, and one morning he came back with the mail. A packet from London. From the BBC. A script for a TV film. To be shot, over seven weeks, in London starting early March. It just seemed that fate might have had a hand in things.
‘What’s it like? Any good? I’d be surprised …’
‘It’s not bad. It’s literate. Well written. I am not being asked to play someone’s grandfather or a druid.’