A Short Walk from Harrods (16 page)

The start of the Big Fire, August 1986

The moon country. Crete de Ferrier, Provence. Winter

The first Christmas, 1969

The terrace, 1986

Last photo of the terrace, 1986

A pretty fatuous thing to observe: no one, and nothing, is ever secure.

By secure, in this instance, I of course really mean ‘safe and for ever', which is what I have, like the rest of mankind,
believed from my earliest days to be perfectly possible. Even expected.
And in the end they lived happily ever after.

So I was taught. And what does ‘ever after' mean? Anyway, this childish notion was really soundly abused each and every time it dared to thread its way into my young, and tumultuous, thoughts. I learned very early on in my life that nothing was for ever; so I should have been aware of disillusion in early middle age. But, somehow, we try to obliterate early warnings and go cantering along hopefully, idiotically.

I can remember, so vividly, brilliant summer mornings when we went down to the beach at Deauville or Trouville. The beaches there always seemed to be so much wider than the beaches in England. The sea lay like a glittering silver sheet far, far away across the hard rippled sand. The sky arched above transparently blue, with lazy chalk marks scrawling little clouds so that they could drift gently across the sun. I remember bare feet splashing through the little pools of leftover sea among the ridged sand, the salt smell of the long strands of bladderwrack drifted in from a rockier part of the coast and curled now like bits of brown bobble-edged ribbons; remember scrabbling in the heavy damp sand with a little red spade to start the foundations of what would be the fort. Moats were dug, walls patted into shape, towers and turrets built, cemented with water carried from the distant sea in a red and blue pail, the water slopping down the bucket sides and bare brown legs. The sea, frilled all along the immense length of the beach, flapped softly in the sunlight, sparkling, sighing, winking in the high morning light. Shells were sought along its crystal edge: razor shells, tiny pink ones, like a baby's fingernails, shards of blue mussel and, most prized of all, limpet shells with their conical tops – these were to cap
the turrets, so four, at least, were essential. They crowned the huge efforts of the morning. A morning obliterated completely by achievement or the desire for achievement.

The building of the fort occupied one so completely that even food and drink were taken in one sand-encrusted hand while the other shaped the crenellations and loopholes of the battlements, working against time. The turning of the tide. Sitting back on one's heels, surveying the work accomplished, the moat, the drawbridge, the limpet-capped towers, the arches and ramps drying hard in the midday sun, one relished work well done and quite forgot its impermanence until, suddenly looking up, the tiny little seabirds which had seemed to look like sparrows bobbing and teetering along the sea rim miles away, were no longer sparrows and no longer miles away. They were at arm's length and they were gulls. Black, gold and bold of eye, hooked of beak, orange legs striding arrogantly, plumage taut and silky. They were the unwelcome heralds of coming destruction. The limpid edge of the sea was starting to nudge, run, trickle, dribble and spill over one's feet, into the moat, swirling in lacy wavelets round the shell-decked walls, sparkling and glinting as it seeped beneath the towers, crumbled the ramp to the arched drawbridge. Sighs of despair from children's throats, the deadly call from the grown-ups! ‘
The tide has turned! Be sharp now. Come along, come along
…'

Then the hopeless droop of shoulder, the shrug of helplessness, sanded hands hanging limp with despair while the moat filled with swirling water, turrets began to dribble down, sag and spill, limpet shells tumbling, walls bulging, flopping with whispering splashes into the deepening water hurrying away the brown-bobbled ribbons into the dancing distance. The
fort slowly dissolved before one's eyes. The inevitable was mutely accepted. The ‘work done' was obliterated in the scream and wheel of gulls.

Remembering that instance, how odd it is that one is not prepared for the ‘dissolving of the fort' one has constructed with such care in later life. But we do not learn. We always believe that it'll be all right for us. That
our
fort will stand, the tide will never turn. But, of course, it does.

The years on the hill were partially measured for me by the growing-up of Monsieur Rémy's children. Marie-Thérèse, in the early days of the washing machine, was a plump mewling creature in a push-chair, draped with broderie anglaise frills. Her brother, Christian, was a bit older and sometimes came with his father to throw stones at the goldfish in the pond, a gleeful, curly-haired child. One day Marie-Thérèse was five, then ten, then twenty and then in love and then married, and Madame Bruna was, to her hysterical delight, a grandmother.

Christian, ahead of his sister by a couple of years, first caught tadpoles, then beat the olives, then drove the battered truck, was apprenticed to a nursery gardener, and smoked shag-filled cigarettes which he rolled himself. His presence in the house lingered in every nook and cranny, even in the upholstery of the white chairs and sofas, for days. But he was a splendid worker so that had to be set aside … Anyway, he was ‘family'.

Marie-Thérèse married Gilles, a football fanatic from Aix who drove long-distance trucks, the Paris–Nice–Brussels route. The wedding was in the village church on a brilliant Saturday afternoon in March. Marie-Thérèse was radiant in a gigantic crinoline, tiara and floating veil, clutching a bouquet,
tottering in high-heeled silver shoes; Madame Bruna tearful in rustly grey nylon taffeta, a feathered confection sitting high on her bright henna'd hair, lace gloves on hard-worked hands; Monsieur Rémy bulging in a too-tight suit, collar and an alarming geometric tie, a giant spray of carnation and fern on his chest. Dr Poteau was there with his one-armed, pretty wife. Florette Ranchett, Madame Pasquini, even Monsieur Danté had come, stooped in a crumpled blue suit and waistcoat, white carnation and drooping white moustache. Christian was Gilles's best man and supporter. Truck driver or not, he was sweating with terror beside his laughing, sparkling bride. The family sat together in a close huddle, heads bowed; we, the
invités,
sat discreetly at the back. Children ran around playing tag, a small dog ran in, looked around, ran out again. An organ soared and a full girls' choir rang lightly and cheerfully from a tape, hired for the occasion, crackling and reverberating through a pair of speakers rigged high above the altar by Christian.

Afterwards there were kisses all round in the car park, and everyone clambered into cars and trucks and drove off to the wedding breakfast at the Lion d'Or in town.

‘When you go away to England next time,' said Marie-Thérèse, ‘
I
can come and look after your house. We'll need the money. I'm going to have a baby.'

Leaving the house for any length of time was always something to be dreaded. Usually it was for a film, in order to make some money, or, latterly, to promote a book, as I now had started to write seriously rather than act. Every year, while my parents were still alive, I went back to England for family reunions, which were fun and usually of short duration.
Duties done, touching base with friends again, buying books for the long winter haul on the hill (English books were hard to get outside Paris: Cannes and Nice had bookshops but they usually sold only paperback thrillers or guide books), stocking up with Marmite, face flannels (unknown in France) and pudding bowls (equally unknown) and the hard rubber balls for the dogs, the return journey was made on the earliest flight out. With relief.

Someone who lived in a nearby village once told me that, when he and his wife had to leave for the UK, he would be in such distress the night before his departure that he would go weeping among his olive trees and embrace them passionately, promising to return as quickly as possible. I didn't quite go to those lengths, but I fully understood his feelings. He was Irish, of course, which made him more emotional and volatile, but I could well imagine behaving in that manner. If pushed. Instead, I quietly touched a tree here and there, murmuring that I wouldn't be away for long, wasn't deserting them again as they had been before, and that I'd be back. Potty, I suppose. But that was how things were. Mind you, I did have four hundred trees to my local friend's dozen, so it would have posed quite a problem to salute each and every one. Some, in any case, were vast in girth, unembraceable. One, indeed, was so old and so huge that it had split into five separate trees. It was reckoned to be well over eight hundred years old and was always counted as a single tree because the five ‘splits' all grew from the same enormous root which was buried deep in the tussocky grass when it wasn't sneaking down in arm-thick roots through the big stones of the terrace wall above which it stood. I remember Glenda Jackson standing in among the five ‘trees' struck silent by the majesty of
something so old and still living. ‘It was here before Elizabeth! Before Columbus! Perhaps before the
Conqueror
…'

And, indeed, if carbon dating is true, so it was. There was one near Menton which was considered to be over a thousand years old. I never saw it, but there were lots of postcards to prove it was a very aged thing. Olive trees, I reckon, are lucky.

Making a film usually meant a three-month absence and then my sister Elizabeth and her family came out to take over. Her husband, George, was a tree surgeon and landscape gardener, so he was in his element on the hill and the trees were cherished. So that was all right. For shorter absences, like book promotions, which only took about a week or ten days, Marie-Thérèse and Gilles and their abominably spoiled baby came instead. The house was rapidly filled with plastic toys, trucks and stuffed dolls, boxes of baby food, plates and dishes covered in bunnies and badgers, piles of disposable nappies and ropes of coloured plastic beads and baubles. The air was filled with the odour of cheap talcum powder, regurgitated milk and mashed carrot. Gilles also smoked shag and that drifted about and caught in the throat. The dogs slunk through the fug, choking, with half-closed eyes of resentment; but Marie-Thérèse loved them dearly (after all, she had grown up with them), and only hit them savagely when they attacked her wretched child. Which was not often, but did, on occasion, occur in a gentle sort of way: a ‘snap' rather than a ‘rending'. Anyway, departure from them all was hastened. Even the airport seemed less frantic. Certainly less smelly.