A Short Walk from Harrods (20 page)

Bendo chose that exact moment, I can now see and hear, to lumber up the steps and crash out in the shade, puffing, gasping, fly-snapping. Not a good moment to arrive. It would all be pretty bloody when the actual time arrived.

I sold the house, on a Wednesday morning, quietly, privately. No one knew. Took it back again the following week (to the consternation of the couple to whom I'd offered it) and decided to try and sweat it out for another year. Apart from health, money was the problem. I had long chucked the cinema – in a way I think it had started to chuck me, but no matter. I left it before the axe fell. A disastrously unhappy experience in a war film which I had been jollied into making as a sprat to catch a mackerel (I was told) put paid, for ever, to any desire I might have had to continue to work in the cinema. It had everything about it that was most detestable and unpleasant in the business, and as a sprat I got stuck right until the final awful day of shooting. We, Larry Olivier, Liv Ullman, Edward Fox, myself and other European players were the sprats needed to catch the American stars who would, of course, guarantee a box-office success worldwide for a thoroughly British disaster. I can't remember, nor do I wish to know, what happened to the piece finally. I only know that the few sprats caught a boatload of mackerel at obscene expense, and that cheap bait was something I no longer wished to be. I did, a little later, attempt a final trip
into the Magic Lantern Land and although this was a remarkable German product, from a director of genius, with some degree of intellect and a serious attempt to honour the writer, Nabokov, by Tom Stoppard, it got hacked about in the cutting-room and I finally pulled up my drawbridge for good.

Now writing had to support me, and the olive store was never so occupied. Working from home, as they say, meant that I was there to look out for the shaking hands and head, to arrange the London trips, succour a steadily weakening patient, be steady at the often anguished results of lavatorial examination, be encouraging when the car appeared difficult to steer, ready to carry a cup, button a cuff, pour from a bottle, joke lightly at frailty and
never
let the patient suspect, for one moment, that any future there might be was less than certain.

Refusing cinema work did, for a little time, cause him alarm. Was it, he wondered miserably,
because
of him? I was able, I think, to assure him that after the war epic I had turned my back on the cinema and never wished to return. He appeared satisfied with this. Up to a point. But when one time I was asked to accept an extremely attractive, indeed mammoth, role in a film which seemed to have everything going for it except perhaps its location in Colombia, it was difficult to lie convincingly – especially as the doctors in London had, unwisely I couldn't help feeling, given their permission for me to go, provided the proper injections against all manner of ailments and insects had been administered. So I prevaricated and whined away about my fear of flying, and who would look after the house for so long, and so on. I convinced him really only when I reminded him of the long journey, the heat and disease, and the distance from
medical help if it were needed suddenly; and what, I said, about the three-monthly check-ups? They couldn't be left in abeyance. And, anyway, I had renounced the movies.

He was, more or less, reassured. We never discussed it again after that, and I never even read the script. But I was rather relieved to hear that the player who finally did the film spent a great deal of his time climbing gigantic waterfalls, cliff faces, gasping through dense jungle or wandering about in priestly raiment drenched by spume and torrential rain. It seemed that even though I might be the right age for the role I was the wrong age for so much agonizing activity, blundering around piously in South America. I stayed in the olive store and wrote my books.

Norah Smallwood had, by this time, died. Wretchedly, miserably, frail and bedraggled, in a public ward in Westminster Hospital. An era had ended. I was accepted by a powerful and attractive literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, and as my old publishers made no effort to keep me, she got my new book auctioned and I found myself with a brand new publisher, and a new beginning. In a world as uncertain and shifting as the one into which I now found myself entering, it was vastly important to me to have security, some feeling of constancy and encouragement … and I received this to a very comforting degree. There was now nothing to challenge my work at the hardboard desk on the pair of trestles from Galleries Lafayette. I spent all my time and effort (when not on the land) at a typewriter, or thumbing through the
Concise Oxford Dictionary, Larousse
and
Fowler.

One day over at La Colombe in Saint-Paul, where we had driven (a confidence test run, really) for lunch, I learned of a brilliant professor at the Institut Pasteur in Nice who
specialized in Parkinson's. My informant suffered herself from the disease, but Professor Martin had helped her ‘amazingly' and she was convinced that he could cure her – or at the very least bring the hideous symptoms to a manageable degree. She generously agreed to speak to the Professor and arrange an appointment. His ‘book', she said, was ‘closed', he could cope with only a very limited number of patients. He agreed to see Forwood.

At that time I had been offered a Graham Greene short story to adapt for TV. Since this fell into my writing life, I accepted. And when it was suggested that I also
play
in the piece, I accepted that, for one simple reason: it was all to be shot in the South of France over a period of six weeks. In Nice. And six weeks was exactly the amount of time that Professor Martin needed to assess the needs of his patient. If there were no improvements after six weeks the case was possibly too far advanced for treatment. I accepted both jobs, and the house was left to Marie-Thérèse and Gilles once again, while rooms were taken at the Hotel Negresco. Martin's treatments usually took place in the early mornings, and the waiting about could be for hours, for he treated every one of his patients with extreme care and personal attention. So you never knew how long you might have to hang about the weary waiting-room of the Pasteur. Wiser therefore to be stationed in Nice. After six weeks, indeed after only three, the treatment seemed to be working: the Professor himself became cautiously encouraging, hope glimmered for a time, but it was a false dawn. However, it was a tremendous morale booster.

The Professor's office was a perfect illustration of what all absent-minded professors' offices should look like: a shabby
room, peeling walls, grimy windows, a cluttered desk set in the centre of a sea of pamphlets and tumbled books looking like the aftermath of a hurricane. On the desk, prominently placed between him and his patient, a human brain, sliced, dissected and pickled in some brackish liquid. It very much resembled yellow bully beef and put me off that for years to come. But the man was full of kindness and encouragement, gentleness and confidence. He pointed out very fairly that it was all ‘experiment'. As a willing guinea-pig this had to be, and was, fully accepted. In any case, it was better to be at the Pasteur with
hope
than to be isolated on the hill with only apprehension.

The television film and the treatment finished almost together, and it was back to Le Pigeonnier and the routine of summer once more. Spring had arrived for its extremely short duration and summer had exploded, as it always did on the hill, in abundance and acres of lush green grass. There never was that gentle distance between the fading daffodil or narcissus, the primrose and the bluebell, and the wanton whoring of the gloire de Dijon or Grandemère Jenny, or the prodigal spillings of alyssum, eschscholtzia and dianthus. It was all, quite suddenly, a splendour of scents and colours. The things I had managed to grow in beds hacked from the limestone shale and filled with good loam and compost which arrived up the track in great trucks were simple cottage plants that I had known as a child in Sussex and knew how to handle: larkspur, delphiniums, Canterbury bells, petunias, antirrhinums, pelargoniums and so on. I never went in for anything exotic: just the ordinary old seed packet favourites.

And there was nothing much wrong in that. They flowered
far more extravagantly than they ever did in the cool of England; the blooms were larger, more brilliant, in the clear, dazzling light of the hill, and seemed to be more strongly scented. However, the bounty was excessive: the grass on the terraces was hip-high, the broom bushes tumbled uncontrolled, valerian exploded from the terrace walls, roses became smothered in every kind of aphid and grub and, of course, the spraying, now that it had taken its human toll, was banished. However, the vine flourished in green profusion, the de-bunching business (a back-breaking process which had to take place every May and June as one stripped the too-many bunches away and carted them down in barrow-loads to the compost heap) had gone on, as had all the other garden jobs which were now ‘manageable' for one pair of hands and another pair less certain but eager and determined to assist. Everything that could be done as before was done. More or less.

Life, for the last summer on the hill, went along much as it had done for twenty years. There was no way that a change of pace should, or could, be introduced. The house had very tactfully been sold, to friends of the original people who had so wanted it, but it was agreed that everything would go on as usual. Until October. Then, and then only, would I hand over the keys, close the shutters for the last time, and quit. Parkinson's, the vague threat always present of something untoward happening to the lymph glands, the general unease now when driving in the car to the market and the one overwhelmingly disastrous fault of mine, the fact that
I
was unable to drive, sealed the fate of life at Le Pigeonnier. It was a matter of now saving what one could and abandoning ship. A door had slammed, the corridor had crashed into darkness.

I told very few people: my friends in the village, Florette Ranchett, Madame Pasquini, the Mandellis of course and those others who were particularly close, somehow knew or guessed and had to know. I tried, in some futile way, never to put it into words, hating to state the fact brutally. Marie, a widow now, living alone in her cramped little flat, arrived for tea one day, well aware that all was not well and that I would be bound to give her information she would prefer not to hear: when I did, as gently as I could, she wept silently, hopelessly, her head in her hands, and all I could hear were her smothered words of grief. Now she was quite alone in the world: Le Pigeonnier had been her only family. I never told the Meils, I never told anyone in the market or in the villages. I never even told the de Beauvallons, my neighbours in their splendid new house under Titty-Brown Hill. I had it in mind that, when the time came, I would just go away as silently and as unannounced as I had arrived that hot summer day so long ago. Every farewell would be a deep laceration, a wounding which I knew Forwood in his condition would not be able to sustain and which I must not myself endure, for I had to be the strong one now. It was all on my shoulders. I hoped very much they'd not weakened after the years of happiness and peace. So the final summer went as planned. People came to stay, Lady (who, of course, I did tell and who immediately asked if I was taking all the furniture because if I was selling anything she'd like first offer – she had, after all, polished and cared for everything, and she had had her eye for years on the Magi-Mix) – anyway, Lady whipped sheets off beds, changed pillowcases, and we went on, it might appear to a stranger, pretty much as always. Only very close friends like Rosalind and Nicholas Bowlby,
who came out to help me through a difficult four-day shoot for a TV documentary, Pat Kavanagh and my new editor, Fanny Blake, knew the full facts. Elizabeth and my brother Gareth were told, for I would desperately need their help when the final shutters were closed. They were both ready. ‘That's what families are for,' said Gareth. ‘We'll be there, don't worry.'

It would not, I knew, be a question of a severance, but of an amputation.

In September, when the last of the guests had departed and the bathing-towels had long since been washed and folded away by Lady, Forwood and I sat under the vine and watched the sun slide in an apricot glow behind the mountain above the town. The air was soft and cool in the shade. A cicada was singing on the lime tree. Bendo lay sprawled exhaustedly under a big pot of white petunias.

‘And him?' said Forwood.

‘I'll deal with all that. In good time.'

‘Thank you. I'm very grateful,' he said.

Occupied, as I was in the last chapter, in rounding up metaphorical sheep, I now realize that I quite forgot to round up the real ones: the ones on the hoof. They did, in fact, inhabit the land for a while.

Madame Meil got her way in the end, and I got her old friend the shepherd Labiche from Feyance. Plus flock. No longer young, he was a tall, stooped man, in a ragged overcoat, a frayed tweed cap, heavy, cracked calloused hands clasped over his blackthorn crook, polished and shining as a liquorice stick. His flock amounted to about 250 beasts: I never managed to count them truthfully, but they were pretty mouldy looking, and when I first set eyes on their scrawny bodies skittering about beneath my lovingly tended olives I confess that I was mildly alarmed. I suppose that I was thinking of the fat roly-poly sheep with which I had become familiar in childhood on the South Downs: fat, complacent, trim and woolly. Not a whit like these wretched mountain creatures, lean to the point of famine, long of knobbly leg, wild of yellow-orbed eye, feeding frantically on my lush spring grass, then starred all about with wild anemones and crocuses.

The land, as Madame Meil said, had always carried sheep in the old days, and now she had seen to it that it was carrying sheep once again. It was obvious really that it should: it was well watered and grew an abundant crop of excellent green fodder, the best on the hill, and for a time I was persuaded that the scraggy flock saved me an immense
amount of toil. They cropped close to the root. Every fragment of moss or lichen went down, each stunted myrtle, broom or box-bush was cropped to the very stumps. The entire area looked as if a great blanket of green baize, undulating over the bumps and humps, had been thrown for approval before my apprehensive eyes. So far, so good. Clean the land they did and all was perfectly acceptable – if you didn't count the outraged screams and howls coming from the dogs locked in their kennels and the massive quantity of ticks they released liberally over the entire area. Not to mention the fact that the only things permitted actually to grow were the olives: and as they were as old as the land itself, and as tough, they remained. Lesser vegetation went swiftly.