A Short Walk from Harrods (22 page)

I wrapped him in his old bed blanket, and Monsieur Rémy carried him down to the hole he had previously dug, and we buried him with his food bowl, the yellow ball from Kensington, and set a giant boulder on top, so that wandering foxes or badgers would not disturb him. He had a big white oleander to shade him.

So that was done. ‘
Malheur,'
said Monsieur Rémy. ‘
C'est tellement triste ça
…'

‘The infection in his pads was the real problem. He had to have them dressed
every
night, and I was the only person he'd ever let do it, not even Monsieur Forwood … they were terribly painful.'

We walked together back to the tool shed carrying the big spade and the choke-chain.

‘
Comme même, c'est triste.
It is
all
sad,
all
sad, Madame and I, Madame Bruna, will be losing our
true
friends …'

To my surprise, and to my grief, I saw that his eyes were rimmed with tears and he made it clear with a brusque movement of a hand that he had no wish to speak any more. I stood on the terrace and watched
my
true friend bump slowly down the track. I confess that my vision of his departure was not perfectly clear.

The hot still day on which Bendo died, ‘the vile day', as Forwood called it, was the signal for further disaster. The following day, after a still, blistering night, sinister in its utter silence and breathlessness, a moderate mistral began to blow. Nothing much, as far as violence was concerned, no pots were smashed and hurled about, no limbs torn from the trees, no tiles sent scudding into the grass. Just a steady, blistering, parching wind. An oven, belching fire. And that is precisely what it did: about three in the afternoon.

Forwood, who had been sorting out papers up in his office, called down to say that there was smoke, a lot of smoke, across the valley up on the Tanneron range. We stood and watched in sudden horror as the plume became a massive cloud, then a gigantic mushroom, tumbling, towering, bellying, forking sheets of distant flame into the shattering blue of
the sky. It was to be the worst, and most catastrophic, mistral we had ever known. It blew for three days. The fires raged unabated, uncontrollable, in spite of a massive onslaught made by the Canadair pilots who dumped thousands and thousands of gallons of sea water, scooped up from the bay, over the blazing forests.

Before nightfall of the first day, the wind had veered, grown in fury, and thundered into us up on the hill, howling, raging, slamming shutters, wrenching at doors, ripping the vine about like tangled knitting, scorching the plants, tearing, whipping at the cypress trees, flattening the arum lilies round the pond and surging the once placid water into towering waves which crashed over the banks, shouldering boulders and rocks aside, spewing fish and water-weed churned into balls of mud and silt. We huddled, shutters clamped, doors locked, under the big chimney in the Long Room in the dark. The only light came from the ghastly rosy glare of the fires through cracks in the woodwork of the door and the wind-split shutters. Later I lit an oil lamp, standing it with great care
inside
the empty stove against any possible accident. We were too scared to light the gas to boil some soup.

Forwood had managed to back the cars (we had two, a shopping car and a travelling car) out of the garage as far away from the house as he could get them for fear that the petrol tanks might explode. I had to crawl on my belly to drag him back across the field behind the house. It took us quite a time: even though he had lost a great deal of weight, he was still a heavy man. We lay in a heap at the foot of the stairs up to the kitchen terrace, breathless, exhausted, old and, frankly, fearful. Around us the night was crimson, yellow, orange and, wavering right above our heads, rosy pink filled
with a hideous black confetti of ash, spiralling and spinning, in the belching eddies of hot air. It was altogether a disagreeable business and it took a bit of time to drag my companion up the stairs and get the kitchen door opened. We did this on hands and knees, rather wobbly, in the flickering palette of vicious light from the fires. However, the kitchen was relatively calm; we sat on the steps down to the dining-room and tried to sleep, heads against the wall. It didn't work, of course, and eventually we lay flat and, in spite of the roar of the wind, did sleep.

After three days it blew itself out and trailed away to sea. We were pummelled, bearded and weak. The damage before me, in the first light of the first windless day, was daunting. Far over the Tanneron range the smoke still drifted for over sixty square miles, a slow meandering veil which now and again would rend apart to throw out a sudden burst of carmine flame or the intense blue of the sky. The land was overwhelmed with fallen boughs, clumps of branch and leaf, bits of fencing from somewhere, a tatter of blowing plastic sheeting from some old sack and shattered tiles.

Monsieur Rémy arrived one morning, after he had coped with the damage at his own house, and brought with him Monsieur Danté and, of all people, Plum-Bum. I was astonished to see him after so many years. Hardly recognizable now, a paunch, grizzled hair, a stippled beard, the splendid teeth long since removed, replaced with a chatter of what looked like Chiclets. We shook hands warmly, nodded and smiled, the Chiclets gleamed. Four children now, and he had managed to secure himself a
carte de résidence,
or whatever he needed to make him legal. His father had served with the French Army in Benghazi or somewhere. It didn't matter
much, we just got down to work trying to clear up the wreckage. But the very sight of him served to remind me, if I had even remotely forgotten, just how long a time it was that I had been the ‘proprietor' of my acres.

Here he was, from radiant glossy youth to sagging gut-heavy, middle-aged Arab. With false teeth. How we change! I wondered how much I had altered in the years and put the fleeting thought behind me. There was enough work ahead to cope with. Without vanity.

The telephone was pretty busy with friends calling from all over to know if we had been spared. The news had obviously spread to Paris, London, New York, even insular Los Angeles. The house had faced worse days and nights, I supposed, since its walls had been raised, foundationless, on its little plateau in 1641. But the friends and the family who called were all those who, at one time or another, had sat out under the vine and watched the fireflies sparking away across the grass under the olives in the soft velvet hush of evenings, and heard the frogs fiddle and agree far down in the valley while the nightingales sang joyously in the willow by the pond. But we were safe. For the time being. Not, however, secure.

Forwood grew more and more frail, Patrick more concerned, and there was yet another trip down to Nice, not to the Pasteur this time, but to a clinic where two more polyps were removed and X-rays were done. A new taxi this time, a big fat American number, a good driver, Monsieur Jacques, who was patient, understanding and silent. I hung on to him. The problem with Monsieur Antoine at the bar in Le Pré was that the bar came first and his taxi a poor second: willing though he was, and kindly, reliability could not possibly be his first, or even fourth, name. So Monsieur Jacques from
Nice stayed with me on call and did the Institut Pasteur runs to Professor Martin until the day that Patrick arrived on the terrace with the X-rays. A shadow on the liver.

I think that we had had so many ugly moments that this one seemed almost easy to accept. It made leaving now imperative. A few days later, in my dark suit, white shirt and London shoes, I was standing in the
notaire's
office in his village ready to sign the house away. It was the same
notaire,
and the same office, as when, so long ago, Jean-Claude's ageing father, as head of his family, had renounced, as was then required by law, all rights to his house and land in perpetuity to me. The land had been in his family for many centuries; he can only have felt a little sadder than I as I did exactly the same for Alain and his wife, Christine.

They drove me back to the hill in complete silence after we had signed and shuffled papers and shaken hands all round and bobbed and bowed ourselves away from the offices. Silence because I had a bit of a lump in my throat and had nothing to say, and because their tact was as graceful and elegant as their appearance.

In the dining-room I poured tea, and we discussed what they would purchase by way of furniture. Alain said, with a shrug, that he'd be happy if I just took my suits and left everything, but realistically we came to terms with the ugliness of profit and loss and cost generally. But all of us were flummoxed by the value of the things. Finally, they indicated what items they felt would be essential to them and we were left to fix our own prices. How big a flat would it be in Paris? What would I be able to afford? I had been forced to sell the house at the maximum price under the strict Socialist government rules as an agricultural property. It was absurdly
little, the wealth tax bit deep. So the flat would have to be, to begin with anyway, modest.

All the big stuff, the contents of the Long Room for example, would never fit into a modest flat, and the long walnut table, erected from a wreckage of legs, planks and stretchers in the dining-room, could never be taken out again unless it was, once more, reduced to kindling. So that would have to stay, plus the eight chairs, and the big pine dresser, and on and on it went, right down to all the terrace furniture and the garden pots and urns, for who could possibly find room for all those in a Paris apartment? Some things, garden statues, would go into storage against such time as they were perhaps, one day, needed, but everything which had given Le Pigeonnier its ‘air' should, as far as possible, be retained. This seemed only fair, and Alain and his wife wanted nothing whatever changed. They were, later, to copy or reproduce almost everything which I removed.

It is said that it takes four months to clear the Baie des Anges, that blue arc of glittering sea between Nice and Cannes, of the film of oil left by the holidaymakers of summer. Much of it is oil from motor boats and cabin cruisers,
most
of it, astonishingly, is sun-tan lotion. Ambre Solaire and all the rest. It spreads an iridescent membrane of rainbow colours over the water, and four months of winter weather is how long it takes to drift it away. It took four
days
to clear Le Pigeonnier after two decades of life there.

Elizabeth, Gareth and one of his sons, Rupert, arrived to help pack up. The Mandelli family pitched in as well. Monsieur Rémy's truck carted away mowing-machines, garden tools, the sawing-horse, clothes props and the entire contents of the woodshed and workshop, which I begged
him to strip. He did. So thoroughly that he made a new discovery, in a dark corner which we had never really explored and in which spare shutters, poles, lengths of wood and reclaimed ancient oak beams were stacked. He discovered, on the plaster, yet more scribbled names of Jewish children to be added to those we had preserved.

‘I guard these? Or not?' he said, cap at the back of his head, Gitane drooping from his lip.

‘No. Don't keep them. I think the new owners will probably turn this into a flat for their guardian. With my office studio above.'

He shrugged and dragged away an old door (moved from the original kitchen), and ripped off half the plaster and all the timid scribbles of hope and defiance. I was too weary to be saddened and, after all, it was all a long time ago now.

One evening, while Gareth was unravelling yards of tangled flex from the many picture lights and Rupert was loading his battered car with the sewing-machine, blankets and various iron casseroles and things which he and his wife, Jacquie, would need in their new house near Perpignan, Elizabeth and I went down to the pond with a couple of watering-cans. Forwood was in his room looking out his clothes. I had burned all my papers from my office in careful piles, right by the pond, watering-cans at the ready to douse any possible spark (which is why we were there: it was a useful reservoir). The evening was soft and still; we had that day just eased into October and the sun had lost some of its heat.

‘What have you burned? Everything? Not
everything,
surely?' She dunked her can.

‘Stuff I really can't cart around. Letters, postcards, diaries,
journals, all the press cuttings I ever saved, that sort of stuff…'

‘What about your American friend, whatever her name was? She wrote every day …'

‘And those. Hundreds of them. What's the use of keeping them? I'll never use them. I started to work on an edited bundle of my letters to her, but no one was interested. So that's gone too, all kinds of bits and pieces. There's too much to cope with now. I think I'll have about fourteen suitcases to cart around, plus typewriters and walking-sticks.'

I remember there was suddenly a little riffle of a breeze and a sharp leap of flame from the smouldering piles by the cane-break. We were both alert instantly, lugging the cans of water, dousing everything to steaming, sodden, black ash.

‘Your books? You haven't burnt
those
here, have you? You can't have done that!'

I was more worried about starting another fire than my books.

‘No. The manuscripts and some personal letters, important ones, from Olivier, Gielgud, Garland, that sort of stuff, my school reports, first poems, you know? I've kept them. Boston University want them. So I'll ship them out.'

‘Why Boston? In America?'

‘No one else wanted them.'

‘All the letters you sent Daddy, during the war? He saved them all for you.'

‘Burned those too …'

She stood watching me dribble the last of a can into the steaming embers of half a lifetime.

‘I think you're quite daft,' she said.

I suppose that she was right. But at that time, without any
clear idea of a future, or where there would be one, I wanted to cut everything down to the minimum so that I would be free to travel light. It was an old trick learned, very sensibly, in the Army. Everything I had during those six years fitted neatly into one canvas bag which I could carry. I never lacked for anything, that I can remember.