A Short Walk from Harrods (12 page)

Sometimes the mistral would blow for days, and life became extremely miserable: even the dogs crept about wincing,
their eyes half closed against the stinging dust, tails curled between their legs, ears flat. The pond turned into a raging sea, waves leapt and bounced, spilling into the rushes, roaring away down the rutted track to the gates in a furious cataract of stones, fish and foaming water. The rain pelted steel arrows, olives writhed and tossed in agony, cypress trees waved, bent and whipped like pheasant plumes. The noise was as savage as a bombardment of rockets. My main anxiety was for the oaks up the rocky hill behind the house: the wind roared and tore among their dense branches with such brutal force that one could only communicate by screaming to each other in short bursts. But, as they'd stood there for many centuries, one prayed they'd hang on a bit longer. And they did, save for a limb or two and bushels of leaves. But they stood stolid and solid. There
were
occasions when the mistral caught us all on the hop, so to speak – then we had to dive for shelter before decapitation from flying roof tiles.

Once we all huddled in the woodshed. Monsieur Danté, Fraj, Plum-Bum and Monsieur Rémy started to scratch at the wall with a piece of twig. The old whitewash, not yet restored, flaked away. ‘
Voyez
? A name?' he said. ‘Many names here,
regardez
.' What I had thought was just a haze of dust and spiders' webs on the cracked wall were, in fact, tiny gestures of defiance. Human determination in pencil scribbles; a pattern of anguish from a lost time. Name after name was criss-crossed on the crumbling plaster. Esthers, Daniels, Rivkas and Jacobs. All Jewish, all stating, after their names, the date and the town whence they had come. And their morale. ‘Felix Levant. Avignon. Mai 2 '43. In good heart. Age 13½.' Across the wall these whispers spread behind the stacked logs, hanging saws, scythes and coiled hose pipe, the
rakes and
pioches.
Monsieur Rémy pushed his cap to the back of his head, a habit which he had when concentrating, a spent match between his gold teeth (in even a moderate mistral like the present one a cigarette was madness). ‘Children. Jewish children. They were collected all over the region. A brave woman from Paillas. She was a singer before the war, very noble, proud. She collected the Jewish children, brought them here, to this house. It was very isolated, the Germans didn't ever come so far into the valley. When she had a few together we moved them down to the coast, to La Napoule … some to Théoule … Oh!
Malheur!
It was dangerous! We hid them under the harvest corn, melons, olives, in carts. From the coast they went by fishing-boat to the Spanish coast. At night. Not easy,
mon Dieu,
not easy. We didn't lose
one
! No one gave them away. We stay silent in Provence.'

Apparently the house itself had been empty for years. Only the land was vaguely tended, and during the early days of 1939 and 1940 a French cavalry regiment had been billeted there with their mounts. After June, and the fall of France, they withdrew and the house mouldered into dust and silence, buried in tall grass, rampant myrtle and ruined olive trees. The village youths, and their girls, were the only people who ever came down the track through the oaks to linger and embrace in the silent rooms.

That was how, and where, he had met Madame Mandelli, staying on a visit from Cremona. Apart from the Jewish children, and these self-exploring adolescents hiding from the eyes of parents and occupiers, Le Pigeonnier was deserted on its tumbled terraces and olives. Monsieur Rémy spat on a finger, drew it through a name. ‘Nellie Kaplan. Draguignan.
I am well …' The rest he wiped away in spittle. ‘Long ago. Long ago … Perhaps today she has her own children. Eh?'

They all left shortly after, but I told him to leave a part of the wall unpainted when he came to redecorate, as a memorial. He thought I was idiotic. But he thought that of me anyway. But generously. Humour the lunatic. So, anyway, he left a strip untouched. I suppose he was right? It was pretty silly. But they remained. The scribbled defiances and courage.

My father was being evasive. I knew the signs very well. Every time I suggested that we walk down to the little house which I had every intention of securing as a retirement place for him and my mother, if they agreed, he managed to be doing something greatly preoccupying and which he could not leave. ‘I'm just getting into the swing of things: I've got the right “mix” for the sky, I always have difficulty with skies, as you know … you run along.' Or else he had decided to walk up to the village to buy some cigarettes, or open a beer in the shade, anything as an excuse not to come down through the orchard to the little shuttered house. However, eventually, towards the end of their first visit, I forced the issue and he grudgingly agreed to come with me. ‘It's fearfully hot for walking, dear boy. I'm getting on, you know.'

‘Nonsense. We'll be in the shade under the trees, and it's all level down to the house. It's a ruin, you realize, but it's full of possibilities and it's mine for £18,000 plus
all
the land. But I
have
to decide by the end of the year.'

‘Gun at your head. Wretched business,' said my father.

‘No gun at all. Very reasonable. I've had a year to make my decision – it's just over to you really. It's a snip at £18,000, plus a vineyard and three hundred olive trees.'

‘I really do prefer a bottle of Worthington, you know. What would we do, your mother and I, with three hundred olive trees? At our age … do be reasonable.'

And so we bickered on down the track, ducking under overgrown apple trees, easing through rampant bamboo and tussocky grass, being whipped by heavy blossomed broom. The house, when we reached it, stood like a small stone box.

Facing south, unadorned, a tiled roof, a front door, two floors, a wide dusty track set before it where carts had once turned, with a giant elm of great age shading it from the burning sun. It had almost the same view as that from my house, just slightly tilted to the west, but ahead lay the same valley, the plain, the ridge of the mountains and the silver glitter of the distant sea. I was constantly ravished, my father far less impressed. His pessimism increased as we opened the front door with a big key and trod into the damp-scented dark of the shuttered house.

‘It smells like a tunnel! Good God, boy, the place is sodden!'

‘It's been empty for years. And I'm told it's surrounded by springs … it just needs airing.'

‘Needs a charge of dynamite. Rotten with woodworm, I shouldn't wonder. Or damp rot. You can smell it. Wonderful place for mushrooms. You'll make a fortune!'

‘Jean-Claude keeps all his work materials here. It can't be
that
damp. He also stores his apples, olives, wine here.'

‘That I can smell. Sour stink. Really awful.'

In the narrow hall, tiled floor, staircase ahead, long cracks in the walls, my father stood quite still. ‘I think you might open a shutter? Get some light, unless you think they'd fall off?'

They didn't. But the light seemed to compound the scent
of decay with the sight of tumbled crates of glass (Jean-Claude was an artist of some kind and made stained-glass windows set in rough concrete), hammers, chisels, buckets and plastic bags from Galleries Lafayette and Casino, filled with hinges, bolts, brackets and yards of rusting chain.

In a corner of one room (there were only two anyway on the ground floor, left and right of the front door), half a dozen wine barrels were ranged along the side of a rough wooden manger. The cracked tile floor was strewn with trodden straw and old, withered, apples. I thought it was quite a pleasant smell: fruit, wine, straw. Pa thought otherwise but conceded that he could make a very good little sketch of the still-life before him and started feeling about his pockets for the stub of pencil which he always carried on him, only I got him to come up the stairs and look about. We finally went all over the house. It didn't take three minutes.

Four minute bedrooms, no bathroom, but a staggering view from all the windows. Pa was determinedly unimpressed. ‘I do see what you mean. It
has
possibilities. But after securing it for
£
18,000 you'd have to spend double that on improving it. Damp courses – I bet it's built on a marsh from the stink – bathrooms, new floors and what about drains? And
lavs
? You'll have to instal lavs … can't go off into the garden! Not at your mother's age and mine. Good Lord! What a thought!'

‘We'd do all that. Of course. It would be a tremendous investment. All this land, peace and quiet … off the main road. I really think you'd be very comfortable here. I'd be next door …'

Pa walked carefully down the, admittedly, sagging tile staircase holding on anxiously to the thin iron banister. ‘You
know what your mother would say, don't you? She'd say that she would go mad here in a week. And so she would.'

‘Quite mad, darling,' she said at lunch under the vine. ‘You are being marvellously dear thinking of Pa and me, but, frankly, at our ages it just wouldn't work. I'd go
quite
mad. What would we do? Stuck up here in the dark? No one to talk to, just sheep. Nowhere to go … miles for shopping and your father can't speak French very well.'

‘I do, Margaret. I do not badly,' my father protested mildly.

‘It's the stuff you learned in that war of yours. It's quite old fashioned and out of date now … No, we simply couldn't manage.'

Pa helped himself to mustard, tapping it briskly on the edge of his plate, concealing impatience. ‘Well, I warned you. Your mother is gregarious. Loves people.
Lots
of people. All the time. Amazing really.'

‘Oh I do!
I do!
I have to make up for all the years I lost when your father wouldn't let me go back to the theatre. I
need
an audience!'

Pa sighed, reached for his beer. ‘I told you … it would be impossible.'

‘Well, there is nothing to
do
up here,' she said. ‘Nothing! I don't know how you and Tote' – Forwood's name in the family – ‘can stick it. Perhaps you won't, for long? But for me, just sitting about reading, or sewing or darning. I'd go potty. Anyway, I don't read now …'

‘Why not? You used to
eat
books.'

‘I keep on losing my glasses. Daddy reads to me. Trollope. I ask you …'

‘Wilkie Collins. You enjoy Wilkie Collins,' said Pa wearily, starting on his
jambon persillé.

Ma raised her glass and held it up to the sunlight. ‘So pretty! Golden. I was bored
witless
by
The Woman in White
… no good pretending. And up here, with bare tiles on the floor and no telephone that really works … No, darling, not
us.'

‘I'd rather miss the pub, you know?' said Pa. ‘And we have been in Fletching a long time now, got lots of friends there … it'd be a wrench to leave. We're very settled in our ways, and that little house down there will always be damp. Built on a marsh, as I said. Interesting idea. But we'll just count this as a splendid holiday, eh?'

My mother usually got her own way, although Pa was pretty stubborn too, so between them I realized that I had lost the chance of the little house and the privacy that the extra acres, adjoining my present land, would give me. But I did see their point. They were nodding at seventy, too late now to alter, and Ma would miss the grandchildren which my brother and sister had provided. So … The dream faded, and at the end of the year I had to confront Jean-Claude and regretfully decline the option to buy: he was quite relieved, and said that he really didn't want to sell the last bit of his family's property, after five hundred years, and would use the place as a studio and a store room for his ‘work'. He arrived at the house at the hour which we had arranged, on a huge, new, glittering Honda, his long fingernails painted red, his hair, henna'd as brilliantly as Bruna Mandelli's, falling in long, thin straggles over the shoulders of his expensive leather jacket. Obviously the
£
75,000 I had paid him for my share of his land had been put to good use. His family, the Marxist wife and a scatter of children, were out of sight somewhere behind the SNCF goods-yard in Nice. A successful man, Jean-Claude. Heaving himself off his bike and attempting to pull it up on to its stand, both he and it fell over.

Forwood muttered something about not slipping a disc and we left him to get to his feet on his own. He was a tall man, angular, with long fingers and longer legs. Petrol poured from the bike, seeping into the dusty path outside the damp house. He struggled for a bit, pulling the bike up, blowing through yellow teeth, brushing his leather jacket, tossing his hair, unsteadily, over his shoulders. There was a pungent smell of pot and petrol; he smiled nonchalantly, and asked me for a front door key, which he dropped, giggling. I picked it up and he shrugged. ‘
Gentil
,' he said. ‘
Félicitations!'
And took it with a mock bow.

In the damp-smelling room with the manger and barrels, he admitted that the place was too damp for anyone to live in; it was, as my father had suggested, built on a marsh. There were many springs in the area, so water would never be our problem even in the intense heat of summer, and that would be very useful if, and when, he would decide to sell up finally, in
years
to come, because he had a secret dream to take his family to a remote place in India and join an ashram, where they would be close to ‘life' and ‘Krishna'. I asked, unease scratching like a pin in a new shirt, when that might possibly be. He
had
wanted to hold on to the family land? Now he was cheerfully talking about ashrams and India and Krishna and peace and love in a warm climate! He waved a scarlet-tipped hand vaguely, stumbled up the sagging tile staircase and called down, over his shoulder, that he had had the land surveyed in the last few months and that it was quite possible to turn the whole area into an ‘up-market
lotissement'
. That is to say, a building-site. They could drain the land, channel the springs and build seven to eight ‘high-class villas' on the land my father had so carelessly discarded in favour of his pub in Fletching.