Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  A will was found in Raphael’s safe. Dated two days before his death, it left Penny a one shilling piece and four nude photos of herself. She challenged it in the High Court. The case, which became notorious, was tried at the Old Bailey. Raphael’s business partners were convicted of forging the document and sentenced to jail – though one fled the country before the trial. Penny inherited an estate reported by the media to be worth £500,000, which included control of the property company Land and General and, most romantically of all in my eyes, of the Stirling Submachine Gun Company, one of its subsidiaries.

  Both she and Kim were remarkably good-looking, they made a stylish couple. Their base was the country estate in Wiltshire he’d owned since the early sixties. By now he’d sold Ann Summers, which he’d founded, and was engaged in setting up a new business. As he was explaining this to me I saw behind him the slender figure of his wife making her way towards us across the crowded room. Moving with a model’s unhurried languor, she wore a miniskirt that was no more than a twist of fabric around her hips. She had the longest and most perfect legs I’d ever seen … and I completely lost the thread of what Kim was saying to me.

  On reaching us, her blue eyes flicked over me in what might have been an apology for interrupting before she said quietly … what? Would that one could remember the first words of the woman who, twenty years later, becomes the great love of one’s life. The sad truth is that memory is a defective instrument … and one can’t.

  Parties, elegance and the social round played little part in Magda’s and my own life at the mill. Here the day consisted of manual labour, eating, reading books and sleep, life was reassuringly down to earth and simple. To help us rebuild the mill we had taken on Vincent, a dwarf mason, a carpenter and a main d’oeuvre, who were part of a nearby workers’ commune inhabiting a stone cottage and shanty outbuildings set in a field of wild flowers and lacking all modern amenities. The commune consisted of six young men and women plus an ancient grandmother, a blond child who looked like an angel, a parrot, hens, dogs, cats and any passing backpacker who chose to share their life. All were communists, pooling what they earned.

  We saw them every day and had become close friends.

  On Christmas Eve Magda and I spent réveillon with them. Their cottage was without telephone or electricity, we dined by candlelight at a rickety trestle table. We ate oysters, traditional at réveillon, and drank a great deal of Muscadet. It was a magical evening. I’d grown to know all of them, but Vincent, who was under five feet tall, had become an especial friend. He’d been born Catalan, on the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War. When things got very bad his parents had attempted to escape to France, taking the infant Vincent, his brother and their possessions loaded on a donkey. Crossing the Pyrenees was arduous, twice they were turned back. It took them a month to reach a refugee camp at Perpignan, and by then they’d been so short of food they’d had to eat the donkey.

  Magda and I had brought wine and flowers to réveillon, and elaborately wrapped gifts for everyone. At the end of the evening as Vincent was walking us back to the mill beneath a night sky clear and brilliant with stars, he told us of the first Christmas presents he’d ever received, at the age of five in the refugee camp. They’d consisted of an orange wrapped in silver paper and a bar of chocolate. His brother had stolen the orange but he’d managed to keep the chocolate hidden. He’d found it so marvellous, so unbelievably delicious, that by nibbling only very tiny pieces he’d made it last until Easter.

  It was one in the morning on Christmas Day; I was moved and humbled by his story.

  On Sundays throughout that winter I drove to the English church in Nice, then drank pastis and played the tiercé with a jaunty old tramp who lived and slept in the leafy square outside. The Victorian parish church, its vicarage, garden and graveyard, were as incongruously English as a cricket pitch in the middle of this Mediterranean city. The service was that which I’d known in boyhood, readings from the St James version, and the elderly expat congregation sat as far distant from each other as the pews allowed. The hour and a half I passed there each week brought a sense of stability and order, and a warm enduring gratitude for the life God had granted me in France. Then, early in the new year, on a day that dawned blue and crisp and bright, I rediscovered skiing and my happiness was complete.

  Three stations lay within an easy drive from the mill; I could listen to the weather report at first light and if conditions were good I’d strap skis on the car and head into the Alps. Except for weekends and school holidays the slopes were almost empty. Though some of the lifts were closed, the ‘egg’ to the summit and valley beyond was always running. Once at the top I’d often be alone on the mountain, coming down fast with mind and body one, the sky blue above the icy peaks, the sun warm and glittering on fresh powder snow, and I was exalted and drunk with the sheer joy of it, a part of it, and life as perfect as it can get to be this side of paradise.

  23

  Arcadia

  ‘In summer,’ Magda remarked in her distinctive accent, ‘people call up all zee time saying can zay come to stay? And often vee are not remembering who zee fuck zey are – let alone friends. But for nine months of zee year vee know only zee commune, vee haf turned into pecnauds, country bumpkins.’

  Seated in the shade of a parasol, she and I were having lunch on the mill’s terrace, from which a handsome flight of rustique stone steps led down to the river flowing below. The paved terrace and our own apartment at last had been completed, but even after two years of reconstruction the rest of the mill was still a building site. For the moment we were alone; this was midi and the commune workforce had gone back to their cottage to eat. Much as we liked them, it was a relief to be in peace.

  ‘Yes, but the resident expats are so awful,’ I said.

  On the whole they were; living here had had a bad effect on them. All were older than us, and retired. Without the job and habit of their previous existence had come an emptiness filled only by drink and food. ‘Life’s just drinkies and sleepies now,’ one had put it. Most lived on fixed sterling incomes, and in two years the pound had fallen from 11 to 7.8 francs. To their disbelief and anger they were poor, and their relentless partying had an edge of desperation. I was going on to Magda about how dreary I found their drunken dinners when she held up a beautifully manicured hand to stop me. ‘The telephone,’ she said.

  I went to pick it up and a voice enquired, ‘What’s the weather like down there?’

  It was Peter Mayle. I’d met him once or twice at the black-tie awards the advertising business stages to celebrate itself, but I knew him only slightly. ‘Sunny, how’s it in New York?’ I asked.

  ‘A foot of melting snow and no taxis. Vile – like advertising. Jennie and I have decided to give it up and live like bums in the south of France. Can you find us a house?’

  ‘To restore?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely not. I want to write, not get involved in tiresome building nonsense,’ he told me.

  After several weeks unurgently looking around, I found a small house on the ramparts of St Jeannet, a nearby village perché. I mailed him photographs and he asked me to set up a meeting with the local notary. He flew from New York to sign the compromis de vente. I met him at Nice airport. He was in his late thirties, slim and extremely good-looking, dressed in a blazer and flared trousers badly creased from the long flight. Coming out into the sunshine he tipped back his head to draw in a deep breath of mimosa-scented air. ‘You’ve no idea how good it feels to be here,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes I do,’ I assured him.

  He’d taken the job of creative director at Ogilvie and Mather only a couple of years before and moved to New York with Jennie Armstrong, a talented and pretty girl I already knew, for she ran one of Garrett’s subsidiary companies. But both of them had now reached the point I had myself some while before; they’d had their fill of neurotic demanding clients and come to loathe the work they did.

  Only after signing the compromis and pa
ying a deposit did Peter get to see the house I’d chosen for him. To my great relief he loved it. ‘Right! So where shall we go for lunch?’ he asked.

  There was a restaurant on the quay in Nice, I said. Wonderful shellfish.

  ‘Excellent!’ he said, rubbing his hands in anticipation. We climbed into the car, collected Magda and drove there. ‘The oysters are superlative,’ I advised him.

  Peter was picking up the check; he was in expansive mood and still on a NY salary. Taking my advice on the oysters, he and we went on to order royally. We had oursins, praires, amandes, bigorneaux, sea-snails, and crustaces, all eaten with brown bread and a thick slab of white butter.

  Normally Magda and I ate quite modestly at the mill. This lunch was a treat, and it was an especial treat to be enjoying it with someone our own age with whom we had so much in common, in both situation and much else as well. It would be eight months before Peter gained possession of his new house. ‘I can’t stand it that much longer in New York,’ he remarked. ‘We’ll have to rent a place here till it’s free.’

  ‘No, no!’ Magda and I both cried together. ‘Come live with us.’

  He and Jennie moved to France soon after, to live for more than a year in one of the mill’s primitive and incomplete apartments. The two of them had quit jobs, partners, homes and families to be together. They were often broke – as we were, for restoring the mill was proving far more costly than imagined. Invariably Peter or myself – sometimes both – were waiting for funds to come in. In my case the last payments due on my Garrett shares, in his from books.

  ‘What made you start writing?’ I asked him once, settling back for a literary conversation cut short by his answer, ‘Sheer desperation.’ Boarding a London–New York flight, he’d been seated beside an insistently talkative fellow passenger. To silence her he’d called for paper and hunkered down to authorship. He’d outlined his first book by the time the plane touched down at Kennedy.

  Now installed in France he sat in the window of their mill flat and wrote. Meanwhile, I continued working with the commune, and, sometimes alone, on the restoration. At one lunch, following a morning when he’d watched me labouring on a dam I was building in the river, he remarked, ‘You should keep a journal.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ I asked, reaching for the wine bottle with a callused hand.

  ‘There might be a book in it.’

  I considered the idea. ‘I don’t think so. People fall in love with the fantasy of a home here, but the day-to-day reality is just aggro and dealing with a bunch of feckless Provençal workmen who don’t show up.’

  ‘Mmm,’ he said.

  While the Mayles were with us was an enchanted year. For Magda and myself the days were filled by the work and pleasure of rebuilding the mill into something entirely beautiful, and laying out a garden. While Peter wrote, Jennie searched brocanteurs for items for their new house. Both were on the run from advertising, like myself; physically occupied, all of us were in retreat from what we’d known before. Deliberately, even a little self-consciously, we embraced a bucolic lifestyle. Hidden away in this forested valley, the river pool became our Walden Pond and Jennie Mayle would launder their sheets by hand, spreading them over the huge boulders on the bank to dry while we swam, lay in the sun and read. For the four of us throughout that summer the Côte d’Azur was aka Arcadia.

  Peter’s lawyer was coming to visit and talk business. I accompanied Peter to Nice airport to meet his flight from LA. Neither of us had shaved, we were dressed in the disgraceful old clothes we always wore, espadrilles and no socks. Smelling strongly of Calvados and garlic, for we’d eaten a heavy lunch, we drove slowly down the winding country road to the coast. Peter’s car matched our peasant image; a beat-up 2CV Citroën plastic jeep, it was the most basic of utility vehicles and definitely unsafe, it had once blown over in the wind. Parking the wreck, we ambled into the airport concourse to welcome Ernie Chapman.

  A high-powered showbiz lawyer still operating on LA time, he erupted from the arrivals gate to head in our direction with rampant energy, starting to talk well before he reached us. ‘Where’s the car?’ he demanded and gathered us up in the wind of his pace as he strode towards the exit. A burly figure grasping a leather bag, he radiated the force of a purposeful bear and contracts, sales, deals-in-negotiation poured from him as we trotted to keep up. Bursting out into the sunlight we dashed the few yards to the battered jeep. Still travelling at full speed, Ernie stepped over the buckled side and swung into the passenger seat, in the same uninterrupted motion and, without looking, thrusting his hand down beside it … to find nothing. He looked up, startled. ‘Where’s the telephone?’ he demanded in disbelief.

  Outside Arcadia life was real, life was urgent, and Ernest its trusty messenger. He was the north wind, gusting into our subtropic Eden, and a further blast from the life we had relinquished arrived in the shape of Frank Lowe, Mammon’s ambassador to the Côte d’Azur. A hyperactive bon vivant, he’d recently been appointed chief executive of Collett Dickenson, now a public company. Despite strikes in Britain, devaluation of the pound, the three-day week and economic chaos brought upon the country by Ted Heath, the agency – which handled Benson and Hedges and Silk Cut – was doing phenomenally well. Frank had decided its management – himself – required a rustic hideaway in which to replenish its creative juices. Southern exposure and a good view were essential.

  He asked me to find him the ideal spot, and after driving around for a while I did so. Four acres of hilltop near Mougins, a thousand feet above sea level, it had a panoramic view of the coast ten miles distant. Rough, rocky land, covered in scrub; a farmhouse built in the style of Jean de la Florette, and just as primitive, stood in a grove of gnarled olive trees. If I were a stressed-out CEO it would be exactly the pastoral retreat I’d want, I thought.

  Frank bought the property at first glance. On the day following purchase a workforce of twenty men moved on to the site with heavy-duty equipment. By nightfall the farmhouse had been razed to the ground. In the course of the next few months a château of stressed concrete with an imposing tour rose in its place, then a team of specialists from Shepperton Studios was trucked down and set to work. The breeze-block and raw concrete structure was sprayed with a mix of stucco and oxide which dried to antiquity over a sunny afternoon. The salon’s mirrored walls were faded and stained with acid, its frescoes and eighteenth-century painted ceiling distressed by electric sanders in a choking cloud of iridescent dust. In the space of two weeks the building aged by 250 years to stand venerable and imposing in a ravaged wasteland of torn earth and uprooted trees.

  I watched in awe as a swimming pool went in, a stream was added, a boulodrome and tennis court installed, and a carpet of cropped green turf unrolled to make a croquet lawn. When the undertaking finally was complete I stood with Frank and Vincent the dwarf builder – who was in charge of the French crew – on the château’s balustraded terrace, looking over the landscaped grounds to a view that embraced the whole coast from Nice to the Estoril, except for a small section of Cap d’Antibes masked by a rise of land at the bottom of the garden.

  ‘Super, absolutely super,’ Frank pronounced, then turned to Vincent, ‘But lose that hill.’

  As Dorothy Parker said, it made you realise what God could have done if only He’d had the money.

  But these encounters with the wider universe were rare. The life we followed was active, but hardly social. At the end of a day’s work I’d sit on the riverbank, glass in hand, and watch the stream flow by. Confucius had passed his last years doing the same, growing wiser all the while, and Thoreau gained insight from gazing at Walden Pond. I hoped to find a similar enlightenment, but largely it eluded me. In fact quite my most significant aperçu came not from contemplation of the river but over lunch with Nigel Broackes.

  He and Joyce had a villa on Cap d’Antibes and a yacht plus crew at Cannes. Magda and I were invited occasionally to make up a lunch party. He had earned his knighthood by now, they were Sir N
igel and Lady Broackes. He’d become immensely rich and successful; he owned the Ritz and Berkeley Hotels, the Cunard Shipping Line, half the North Sea’s oil, and most things in Britain that weren’t actually nailed down. As proprietor of Express Newspapers he was familiar with the corridors of political power, wealthier than his close chum Michael Heseltine and with more successful hair. He stood, as he put it, ‘quite close to the centre of things’. The villa’s salon contained photographs of him hobnobbing with the Queen.

  He’d just bought the QE II. The British economy had collapsed, Heath’s government fallen, and Denis Healey was threatening to squeeze the rich till the pips squeaked … it looked unlikely anyone in England would take a cruise on a luxury liner in the foreseeable future. ‘Any ideas what to do with it?’ Nigel asked me.

  ‘Why on earth did you buy it?’

  ‘Because it means the next £15 million we make will be tax free,’ he said.

  The world he operated in was incomprehensible to me, but our immediate surroundings were comfortably familiar. We sat amid the debris of a large lunch on a shaded terrace overlooking the garden of his villa. Coffee and a glass of brandy stood before each of us as we reminisced.