A Short Walk from Harrods (19 page)

I remember, now, Poteau reaching across the stall for a bunch of red and white radish. ‘He
did
use his mask?' he said, and dropped the radish in with the leeks and carrots, handed his tin over to the stallkeeper.

‘Not all the time. No. Frankly never. He hated wearing the mask. Couldn't breathe, he said.'

Poteau looked up at me with astonishment through his spectacles. They were speckled with leaf shade from the trees above. ‘He breathed all right,' he said. ‘Deadly poison.
Voilè
– toxic,
so
toxic …'

I can still see the bright scarlet and white bunch lying in his weighing-tin as he shook his little leather purse looking for small change. ‘Do you mean that the poison, the ant-stuff, could be responsible for the Parkinson's?'

He sorted out his money, handed it over, shrugged gently. ‘Ah! Difficult to be
certain.
But you know there are very clear instructions on the bottles? Even a skull and cross-bones. It is
folly
to inhale that stuff. How long has he been using it?' He emptied his tin into his string bag.

‘Years, I'm afraid. We gave up using the little arsenic envelopes years ago.'

Poteau grunted in agreement. ‘Useless! They only have power to protect a single tree … no use at all. The Cooperative in Saint-Jennet has the stuff.'

I walked with him through the bustle and noise of the market. ‘That's where this stuff came from, the Co-operative. They have allowed us to go there now that I am officially an agriculturalist.'

He stopped at the street leading down the hill to the
parking. ‘Voilà!
It is possible, I'm afraid. You may be told it is not so, in England … but here it is different. We
know
that poison, there are many cases like that. He should have used his mask. At all times …
Alors
…'

We shook hands and I wandered back up to the market stalls miserably. Resolved never to say what might possibly have brought such disaster to a strong, gentle giant of a man. Too late for recriminations, for ‘if onlys' … the damage had
been done and would never be mended. Set that all aside and continue with the performance.

Life had simply changed gear, I told myself, nothing very much more. The engine was still running, the car was perfectly serviceable, one just had to take things a little more carefully, coast down hills when possible, avoid curves, and try to ease the load going uphill. It was all perfectly manageable: just a question of sensible compromise and careful improvising. It was wiser to take each day just as it came and not to think ahead. Thinking ahead was a pretty silly thing to do now; there was the constant pricking of fright, like a buried thorn in the thumb, about the result of every three-monthly trip to Harley Street, the concealed look when a glass was lifted, a plate set down, a saucepan filled, a page turned, and handwriting grew smaller. Trivial things became, very slightly, hazardous. But I tried to batter along and find things to do which would be convincing proof that everything was, in fact, perfectly normal. I even made an appearance in a gigantic TV series for the Japanese about the glories and treasures of the Louvre, with Charlotte Rampling. We did the commentary on Ancient Rome and the wonders of Flemish art. I knew as much about both as I know about taxidermy. Less, frankly. But we mugged it all up from guide books and the rather dire script provided. I never saw a foot of the two-week epic – I rather think that the Japanese had the same good fortune – but I was paid a whacking great fee which covered the fares on Air France and the bills at the Connaught when the London visits arrived. I even accepted, because it was apparently an honour, and it was not very far away, to be the President of the Cannes Film Festival, which
I enjoyed about as much as being squeezed into the Iron Maiden. However, I did it with passionate seriousness, thereby making quite certain that I'd never be invited to be President again, or even, I reckoned, invited to the Festival.

This time Marie-Thérèse and Gilles would not be at the house: while I stayed in modest luxury in the Hotel Majestic (it was impossible to try and commute daily), Forwood stayed on the hill and Elizabeth and George came out to take charge. A lovely little break for them after the rigours and grey light of an English winter. Except that it was the wettest Festival on record and the hill was, at all times, in deep cloud, the rains tore across the land, swamped the pond, broke terraces, trundled boulders everywhere and wrenched branches from the trees. The fire burned brightly night and day and so did the electric lights. It was a sodden group of four who finally, when the cinema stint was over, all went back to London for the May check-up. Forwood now had to use a wheelchair, which he accepted with enormous good humour, and Air France saw to it that the British press never knew, and that he had a seat right beside the door at all times. This was something that ‘The World's Favourite Airline' found it quite impossible to arrange. So Air France gained handsomely every time: it was the only possible way to travel.

This particular trip was rather a problem. No cancer but an enlarged prostate. So. Back to Edward VII. And a few more weeks of convalescence at the ever-welcoming Connaught, which had really now, over the years, become my London home – anyway since 1951, when I first dined there with Kay Kendall and Lilian Craig, when Kate, as her friends called her, had a tiny maid's room in the roof for eighteen shillings a week
with the bathroom at the end of the corridor, and King Farouk had the table at which I now sit when I am there. Things have altered rather with the years. Apart, that is, from the familiarity, warmth, affection and absolute perfection.

Eventually back to the hill in fairly good nick, to the peace again, to the office and typewriter, and to listening, once more, for the song of the mower, which, alas, was now becoming more irregular and slower. But still nothing was ever said: we were both anxious, I suppose, not to put the truth into actual words, hard, clear, fearsome words. Somehow one feels that by not admitting something aloud, unpleasantness will fade away, will never quite become fact. The thing that was most feared was the overt admission that it was time to ‘go back': the dreaded phrase, used in those days by elderly ex-patriots, was ‘
the big E'
Retired people had suddenly to face the return to England: often because of finances, more often because of illness or the break-up of a marriage. But one tried desperately not to consider that, hung on with hope for as long as possible; but the unthinkable
was
drifting lazily in the mind, like wood smoke, faint, bitter, reminding, meandering. Privately.

We had been back from the prostate trip about two weeks when Forwood came to my room at three in the morning with a mustard glass full of blood.

‘What's that? What's wrong?'

‘Blood. I'm haemorrhaging. There are four more of these in my bathroom.'

‘Full? Why?'

‘I don't know. Call Patrick … It's stopped now, but call him …'

Patrick arrived half an hour later, unshaven, rumpled,
asked me the blood group, got me to help dress a fragile, frightened patient, half carried, half dragged him down the stairs to his car. ‘I'll take him over right away. Clinique des Magnolias.
He can't wait
! Get his blood group and get to the clinic quickly.'

I watched the car race down the track, bouncing and lurching, Forwood's head rolling helplessly against the seat. Unconscious. Desperately I searched papers, medical reports, everything I could find in the file. No blood group. Called Edward VII and got, I assume, night staff – it was still not dawn – and also (most wonderful hospital) the blood group. And then rang Monsieur Antoine, who had a taxi and a bar in Le Pré. He blearily, and silently, drove me into town, where we sat and waited in the
parking,
watching the sun rise brilliantly, flooding the world with light, turning the sky from indigo to palest blue. In a small room where he had been hurriedly placed as an emergency, on a too-short bed, to join two other haggard men surrounded by their entire families, Forwood lay with a wan smile and a dead white face. Patrick was on his usual ebullient form.

‘Just in time! I got him here just in time! If we had waited another ten minutes his bladder would have burst! I got Monsieur Alvaro, the best surgeon we have, he's my friend – He operated before we even got his jacket off! Pulled off his trousers, on to the table, and
voila! c'était fait!
We did not waste a moment. He's lost litres of blood!
Mon Dieu!
–'

The room was crammed with people – the beds had been hurriedly pushed back against the walls. There was one blank window looking out into a dark well. People sat on the edge of the beds or leant against the walls wretchedly, just watching their ailing relatives. The smell of old bodies and stale ether
was overpowering, but I tried to enjoy, as best I could, Patrick's enormous pride in his job well done. Forwood was only capable, at that moment, of a pale smile which faded into apprehension at the sudden brisk and explosive intrusion of an exhausted-looking nurse. She pushed past roughly, thrust a thermometer at him, shouted, in disastrous English, ‘Shove this up your arse!' and crashed out again. Patrick assisted Forwood, looked apologetically at me. ‘Is the
best
I could find, the nurse. She speaks English because she worked for a year in Sydney, Australia. Maybe her speech is a little rough?' I nodded helplessly, and Patrick assured me that she had a very good heart and would be back immediately; he'd wait with his patient and why didn't I go home? I left, giving Forwood a look which I hoped might appear encouraging, and wandered out into the corridors and downstairs into the reception area. People in white coats, in plaster, people with crutches, some in bandages, some weeping, all drifting about. It was 8.30 a.m.

In the
parking,
no sign of Monsieur Antoine – he'd cleared off to open up his bar, I supposed, so I waited until Patrick, after a time, came hurrying down and, surprised to see me still there, drove me back to the hill. He drove fast, too fast for me, but I sat tautly in my seat trying to listen calmly, and to understand, his exhausting tirade of abuse about the clinic and its staff, and then, in more detail, a full medical report, in French, on Forwood and what had happened. He chuntered on in a high babble of enthusiasm with a great deal of violent handwaving, apparently avoiding collisions every four seconds. I just hung on desperately. In the same way that he could not understand medical terms in English, so I was absolutely incapable of understanding them in French. The
Achilles' heel of living in France. I gradually managed to put together the pieces he scattered so liberally in my direction.

Since the London operation a small blood vessel, or something like that, had, over the weeks of convalescence, engorged and finally, as I had all too clearly seen, it had ruptured. It was amazing, he assured me, that Monsieur Ricardo Alvaro was on duty at les Magnolias that night, otherwise the journey we were presently taking would have been very different. I had met Monsieur Alvaro and liked him very much, a jovial man, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip, peeling off his bloody overalls, looking as much like a butcher as a surgeon possibly could. He offered me an elbow to shake as his hands were covered in grease from his rubber gloves. All would now be well, he assured me; it was a simple, if frightening, little ‘hiccup'. Rest for a while, but he should leave the clinic that night: they were terribly overcrowded and he'd be far better off in his own bed.

At Le Pigeonnier, Patrick dropped me at the gates and then raced off to shave and prepare for his morning surgery. I let a frantic Bendo out of his kennel and clambered wearily up the stairs to the kitchen to find Lady (whom I had forgotten about) crouched on a chair in the dining-room sobbing in helpless anguish. Seeing me, she suddenly screamed very loudly, crossed herself twice, and hurled gabbled prayers to a number of saints she knew, and the Virgin Mary, rocking backwards and forwards, eyes closed in horror, moaning. The ruin, it seemed, of Forwood's room, together with assorted mustard glasses slopping over with old blood and blood smears scattered round the bathroom and corridor, had done for her. The shock, she kept crying, would kill her; she could
never
recover! She had thought, naturally enough, that
with an open house, dog locked in kennel, blood everywhere, murder and pillage had taken place. It took half an hour to get her to come to terms with what had actually happened. This was difficult to do because every time I moved to take her hands she shrieked loudly, drew back, hissed at me, spat and buried her face in her woolly jacket, convinced that I was the murderer.

Eventually, after a slug of cognac, and my repeated assurances that Forwood was alive and well, the sobs faded gradually to sniffs and strangled sobs, until she agreed uneasily to come and clear up the sullied rooms. She finally did it all with great composure once she had been thoroughly convinced by my presence, and I even heard her singing ‘
Volare'
after a time, while she busied herself tearing off bloody sheets, banging about, running taps and flushing lavatories. It had been a
very
stiff cognac which had gone straight to her head. I took charge of the bloody glasses, chucked them into the dustbins. Reassured that Forwood was not yet dead, that I was not a murderer, and that life would be returning to normal as soon as I went into town to collect him that evening, she polished and vacuumed and hurled the towels and pillowcases about with abandon and, finally, wobbled off down the track on her Mobylette, waving cheerfully, her helmet unstrapped, bouncing about on her head. ‘
Volare
! Ho! Ho!
Cantarè,
oh ho, ho, ho! …
Volare
! Into the blue …'

I took a handful of olives, a piece of cheese, a can of beer, and sat under the vine on the terrace. A solitary lunch. I seem to remember it was the first time. Always there were two, sometimes six or eight, on occasion fifty. There had been parties. Had been. Time lost: time past. The writing was now on the wall: scrawled in thin letters, but there to read. The
unthinkable had to be at last considered. So, after I'd done the clinic run, got the patient back and into his bed, we'd just have to rest up a little and then face the ugliness. If you cut out any form of sentiment whatever, it wouldn't be difficult. Really.