A Short Walk from Harrods

by Dirk Bogarde

  Some time ago the same nurse sent me a card to explain, and hoped that she ‘hadn’t gone too far? Trying to say to patients what will be helpful is difficult. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t. I very much wanted to get it right for you …’ She has my eternal gratitude. God knows, she got it right for me.

  About three weeks later I was considered fit enough to relinquish my bed to a more deserving case, and got smuggled out by a secret door to avoid the ever-lurking photographers hiding behind parked cars. I managed to walk, almost on my own, to Ron and his car and then to the National Film Theatre, where some film of mine was being shown, and managed, without help, to walk on to the stage before a full house and confound the press. It was a very pleasant feeling, and one that I never again dared to lose.

  In Kensington my brother Gareth had organized the house as he might have organized a frigate. My bed had been lugged down to Forwood’s room, a mini-ward had been created, which made things easier for Jacquie, who took temperatures (of us both: Forwood was slowly becoming weaker) and brought up trays. She had been a SRN before marriage, so she knew the job. I managed to hop about from bed to bathroom, but did not yet attempt the stairs. I was determined now to become mobile. Forwood’s pale, haggard face forced me. He had finally started the Japanese pills. We waited with patience to see if they might have some effect. He was not bed-ridden, and managed to haul himself down to the sitting-room or the kitchen (miles down below in the basement) for meals.

  One evening, when everyone was having supper and I forked listlessly through a congealing bowl of pasta which Rupert had brought to my bed, I suddenly set everything aside, dressed, as best I could, hanging on to the bedpost with one hand, pulling things over my head, determined to go down to the kitchen and show them just what I was made of. I’d bump down on my backside, however long it took, and get to my feet at the kitchen door. Surprise! Surprise! What a clever fellow!

  Well, I did all that: inched down – it took hours – and reached the closed door into the kitchen. Pulled myself up by the banister rail. Stood teetering, and composing myself for my grand entrance. Vague muffled voices came from the table, chink of cutlery, a tap running, a chair dragged across the tiled floor, a burst of laughter and then, just as I was about to launch myself into the room: ‘ … can’t leave the family all on their own much longer …’ I stopped. The tap was turned off. ‘… It’s a bit hard on that bloody floor every night…’ A saucepan was scraped busily. ‘… Of course, until you can manage again, we could try and get you into a decent place. Residential…’ I stood frozen. ‘I know of a jolly nice place outside Henley. Lawns down to the river … Expensive, but very good, you could have your own furniture …’ I turned away from the door as Jacquie’s voice called out happily, ‘Anyone want some more Parmesan?’

  I got up the stairs rather more quickly than I got down. Never eavesdrop on other people’s conversation: you may just hear the truth. The next morning I was up, shaved, dressed, and hauled myself down the stairs into the sitting-room. Everyone was surprised and delighted. Patted my head. The clever dog had learned his tricks. A few days later Maude sent a faintly fey lady over to start work on my leg. She’d cure me in a ‘couple of weeks’, she said, pressing folded hands hard on the top of my head. Did I not feel the hot electrical flow emanating from her into me? All I could truthfully feel were a pair of clammy little hands squashing my skull as if it was a grapefruit. Hot indeed they were, healing not at all. I needed something a bit more than simple faith now that I had managed to pick up the reins.

  *

  There was a Christmas and I had bronchitis again. Jacquie brought over a small tree, insisted on decorating it, and covered it in flashing lights which wouldn’t stop winking unless the plug was removed. There was the sudden surge of spring. Birds were singing in the gardens opposite, there were daffodils in pots on people’s windowsills. Kathleen Tynan found me a splendid lady, Mrs Pink, who came across the Park with a box of electrical things which slowly began to bring my slightly withered leg back into use. Clumsily, uneasily, but at last I managed one day to walk unaided to the end of the street; later, much later, limped to the Indian shop on the corner for boil-in-the-bag things; eventually I was able to get as far as High Street, Kensington, and all the glittering magic and mysteries of Boots and Marks and Spencer’s. I had a working household again – wobbly, uncertain, easily stalled, but managing, at last, for itself.

  The Japanese pills didn’t seem to have much effect really. Warning lights went on. Making tea one day for Frank and George, who were installing bookcases, Forwood poured the milk into the teapot and spooned the tea into the kettle. It got sorted out; we all laughed. But it wasn’t comfortable.

  ‘Have you got the soup on?’

  He was reading and didn’t look up when he said, ‘Yes. Probably boiling away by now. Better lower the gas.’

  I went down and saw it was on the stove. But not boiling. There was no gas. The sealed tins lay in an empty saucepan.

  It was too difficult now for him to carry things up from the kitchen. So he had to have his tea every day, as normal, at five, sitting at the round table. I got him a cake of some kind from the French baker at the corner. It was important for me to use my leg as much as possible. I sat with him for company while he got his mug up to his lips, tried, and usually succeeded, in eating some of his cake.

  One day I was filling a jar with water at the sink. My back was to him and he said, ‘If things don’t work just as Peter Wrigley said, about pain, I mean, you’d help me out? Wouldn’t you?’

  I assured him that I would and put the jar of freesias on the table. ‘It’s lunatic to think like that. You haven’t given the pills time, really.’

  He was silently unconvinced. I crushed the little cardboard box the cake had been carried in, stuck it into the pedal-bin. ‘The stuff you would need’, he said, carefully pressing a shaking finger on some crumbs on the table, ‘is in my tartan washbag. Patrick gave them to me. Ages ago. Just make certain they haven’t got stale. I’ve had them ages.’

  I was busy doing something, trying to be brisk, dragging about as if there was a definite point to what I was doing. ‘You are talking rubbish. I know it’s going to work. In my bones.’

  ‘I’d be perfectly all right,’ he said evenly, ‘if I was at home. When do you think you’ll be fit enough to go?’

  Chapter 11

  The spring which had surged so promisingly, birds singing all over the gardens of the monastery, daffodils tall on window-sills, gradually buckled down to wretchedness. The sun might shine outside, the birds sing, blossoms bloom in gardens, but within the walls of the elegant little Doll’s House things were getting pretty grim.

  It was not for desperate want of trying to enliven things in this brilliant spring; one did one’s very best. Wallflowers and little pink daisies were thriving in the window-box over the pit-patio. I filled the rooms with cut flowers, threw wide all the windows, I even sang; and Maria, the ‘daily’ (another discovery of Maude’s) moved about the place as stately and as broad in the beam as a galleon, with all her pennants flying. Maria was, as Forwood had told me in hospital, from Colombia, a very black lady dressed in vibrating colours. A tropical Matisse, without a reasonable word of English. But she was very affectionate and a fiend with Flash and Sanilav. So that was all right. She was also very nice and jolly. But even her vivid cotton skirts, the glitter of gold and ruby glass, the violent carmines and yellows of her ample blouses couldn’t lift the general atmosphere of increasing unease.

  To begin with, the Japanese pills suddenly gave out; and the anxiety of the waiting for the next allocation from Tokyo was almost impossible to conceal. No one, really, had any idea if they were doing the tumour any harm. Which is what was longed for. One recent visit to Harley Street seemed to confirm that they had. A little. Triumph? But there had been so many false triumphs and dented hopes that no one actually opened champagne and sprayed it round the place like racing drivers. We meekly accep
ted the possibility and went on crossing our fingers. And then the beastly things ran out. As, indeed, they were bound to one day. We had to try and contain ourselves until the next lot came in.

  Meanwhile I now took to walking in front of Forwood on his increasingly rare walks round the block, in front so that I could advise him of cracks, dog turds, kerbs and misplaced pavings. A lot of them around the Kensington area. This ploy didn’t always work. There were ugly falls, which were distressing and often embarrassing but caused no cuts or serious bruising.

  Until the one ‘adventure’, final as it turned out, when he insisted on going as far as the High Street to have a look at something. I forget now what it was. The crowds were thick, a tube had just vomited its load from the depths and blind, vacant-eyed people struggled like elvers along the jammed street. Somehow they got between him and myself, we lost contact for a moment, and he fell sickeningly, with his full weight on a pile of paving-stones ready for re-laying. He had had his hands in his anorak pockets. Thus, unable to save himself, he just crashed on his face. Blood poured, he lay like a fallen pillar, the streaming crowd of elver-humans split up round his head, one line to the right, the other to the left, and went on their anguished, sightless way. No one looked, stopped, even turned a head. I got him to his feet, eased his hands out of the pockets, found a handkerchief and tried to staunch the blood, without much success.

  Standing there, swaying, locked together in the swarm of blank-eyed shop assistants, typists and bank clerks, or whatever they were, I wished very much that we had decided to stay on the hill after all. If he’d fallen in Saint-Sulpice, in the market, on Rue d’Antibes, it would have been a very different matter. There is more compassion in the country, I suppose? In the cities one becomes inured to violence.

  As we started to shuffle up to the crossing by the lights, a young woman, carrying a giant floral display in a Cellophane tent, did stop. Her pale face creased with concern. ‘Is he all right? I could fetch a policeman, somebody …’, but I led him on, thanking her. We got to the lights and stood there until they flicked to green. I suppose we must have presented an odd sight? A tall, pale, ageing man streaming with blood from a wide gash, blood spattering his anorak, spilling on my hands which supported him, in a crowd of people all steadily watching the traffic lights, ready for the signal to swarm across to Church Street. Not a single person among the lot looked anywhere else but ahead. I’d forgotten, of course, that in England it is impolite to stare and that one should not draw attention to anything unpleasant. You could, happily, if it was funny or amusing. Not otherwise. And dangerous, of course, to become ‘involved’.

  At the firm, Dr Peter Wheeler stitched him up. ‘I’m rather good at sewing. They won’t show. Not a stitch!’ As if it mattered really. But it was kind, comforting, and Ron drove back very slowly, so as not to jolt the patient, across the Park.

  It seemed to me, that morning, that every kind of wretched thing had been slung his way since we had reached the UK and crossed that benighted stretch of deck-chaired grass. A perfectly unreasonable piece of reckoning, I agree. But I was not in a reasonable frame of mind. It didn’t end there either, with a simple fall outside Barker’s in High Street, Kensington. Fate had more wooden balls to chuck at the coconuts. The punishment increased, gradually, but relentlessly.

  One evening Forwood decided to go up to his bed. No supper, didn’t finish his drink, excused himself to the two valiant ladies who had come to join us for a packet of Marks and Sparks heat-up. Supper was cancelled.

  ‘I don’t feel frightfully good. Sorry,’ he said and I took his temperature.

  A few days later a day nurse and a night nurse, Natalie and Anna, both Australians, young and pretty, arrived at the Doll’s House. ‘Why do we need them?’ he asked. I told him that he had a ‘slight urinary infection’. (Which is what I was told. Tactfully.) And that I couldn’t now manage quite on my own. Of course, he didn’t believe me. He appeared satisfied with my excuse, but his ingrained good manners and sense of good behaviour would never permit him to behave otherwise. He knew bloody well that a ‘slight urinary infection’ was a euphemism for something far uglier, but he was not about to distress others – or himself. Let it lie. So be it.

  ‘You remember what you promised? That afternoon?’ he whispered one day before his voice completely failed. ‘In my tartan washbag?’

  I was giving him his Bloody Mary; it was the lunchtime drink he always preferred, usually in a tall glass, this time on a pad of cotton wool pressed to his dried lips. He could no longer swallow much more than saliva. He was also almost completely paralysed.

  ‘Of course. I remember. I’ve checked them. They are okay. But you aren’t in pain? Are you?’

  He gently shook his head from side to side, smiling, made a sign with his eyes for another taste of his Bloody. ‘I must look like one of those money boxes? No teeth, big grin?’

  Sometimes I sat with him while Natalie or Anna sat glued to the TV downstairs watching Neighbours. They swooned with nostalgia for Australia as I dealt with urine bottles, shifted bedpans and eased pillows. It was only on twice, as far as I remember, a day, and it really did cheer them up tremendously.

  Finally there were no more visitors. They were stopped. There never were many: he felt too weary and far too vain, as he confessed. He didn’t look very good. So eventually visiting was limited only to Mary Dodd, his cousin, whom he loved very much, and Betty (Lauren) Bacall, who made him laugh and bashed away with enormous brio and affection, as if nothing whatever was wrong. She was the force of life for him.

  Brock was allowed once, Maude, and Rosalind and Nicholas, I remember, but even his son Gareth and his grandson Thomas were finally forbidden. It was useless to have visitors, he said once (by this time I had to put my head to his chest to ‘read’ the vibrations: he no longer had a voice), because even though he had asked them much earlier on, and even though the ones he asked to see all had a car, none of them would agree to take him home. He knew that I wouldn’t take him home. I kept telling him that he was at home … There was a small hand-grip for a change of underwear, and he would be able to direct them once they got to Avignon.

  One night, helping Anna to turn him, he made signs that he wanted to speak, and when I pressed my face to his chest it was to say that if we had done such a thing to a dog we’d have been arrested. He so longed to ‘go home’ that one night he started to dress himself. Pulled on a jacket, his overcoat. Anna had left the room for a moment. When she came back he was sitting on the edge of the bed, trying to get on a shoe. A long shoe-horn in his hand. He shouted angrily at her, with full, amazing voice. I heard him in my room above and rushed down in time to duck and weave away from the furious, flailing shoe-horn, wielded like a baseball bat. Anna had a cut cheek. I tried to make him get back to bed, he raged about going home. He had to go home! He was needed there! He had a meeting with Monsieur Rémy. I must let him go. Must!

  Jonathan arrived, rumpled, weary, called from his bed to give him a sedative.

  ‘They try to stop me going home!’ The voice was frail now. The power had gone, the final burst of furious strength ebbed away. He never spoke again.

  He slept all the next day, slipped into a coma. I sat at his bedside looking silently at the dreadful demolition job being wrought on a good, kind, gentle man. It was quite enough to make anyone question any possible belief in God. Sometime in the early hours of the morning Anna shook me awake. He was very ill, breathing badly. Come down. He was quite still, eyes shut, lying on his left-hand side. I took his hand in mine. He whispered a soft, imperceptible almost, sigh and then was still. ‘I think he’s gone,’ I said. Anna burst into tears, covered her face with her hands, head bowed. A replay of Christine on the terrace long ago.

  I gently put his hand under the bed covers. In case it got cold? Touched Anna’s shoulder, gave her a kiss, went down to the sitting-room to telephone his family. It was 2.15 a.m.

  *

  And what happened then? After this length
of time I’m not absolutely sure of the sequence of events. It’s the ‘engraved goblet’ business again: vision through space to vision. If you watch, with a steady gaze, fifty years of your life being carefully negotiated down a too-narrow staircase in a plastic body-bag you do rather come to a full stop. It is a dulling sensation. Numbing.

  I watched through a crack in the door-hinge, feeling it wiser, after past treachery, to keep out of the way. So his son put on a black tie and did all that was necessary for the final untidiness of death.

  As soon as he and the undertakers had moved off into the dawn light of Kensington I remember wandering over to the window. Opposite, in the monastery garden, an elderly monk was removing side-shoots from sweet peas, a prayer book in his hand, sandals on bare feet, his lips moving. Who was he praying for, I wondered. Himself? Or just cursing the greenfly? I wasn’t really interested.

  The house was very still now. No crackle of crisp white overalls, no clattering of kettles and cups, no sickly theme tune from Neighbours. Nothing. It wasn’t Maria’s cleaning day. The air was still. Dense as fluff. I could hear the cistern filling up in one of the bathrooms. A bubbling sound. It stopped and the monk opposite opened his prayer book and continued his morning wander. Anna had left earlier, after a two-hour doze on the settee, face creased with weary sleep, a small grip in her hand. She said she’d write to me from Cannes. She was going to do the South of France after her next job. Mr Forwood loved Cannes, didn’t he? Not all that much really, but I didn’t say so. She gave me a kiss, told me to look after myself now and left. Then it was all silent again.

  I stood motionless at the window until the milk-cart purred to a stop and I went down and paid a bill that I owed and got some milk. We were short of milk. The nurses drank coffee endlessly. I was short of everything. Direction mainly. What on earth to do? It was the suitcase metaphor again. Pieces scattered everywhere, bits lying around. Unconnected. Unfamiliar suddenly. And I had not the least notion of how to start repacking. What to keep, what to leave out. I realized fully just how bloody useless I was on my own. There was absolutely no need for anything that I might do now. No morale to boost, no tray to set up, no sandwiches or take-aways for nurses. No Bloody Marys to soak in the cotton wool. No work. No future. Bewilderment all round. My carousel had ground to a halt. I had no idea how to restart it.