A Short Walk from Harrods (23 page)

Elizabeth was in charge, during the pack-up, of the kitchen stuff and the laundry and linen. She doled the three of us out with one knife, fork and spoon, a plate, a mug and a glass each. That left everything, apart from a saucepan, frying-pan, a potato-peeler plus kitchen knife and kettle, free for the removal men who were to arrive from Cannes at dawn. She would, as she had done when I left England, oversee the packing. She was very good at that, and removal men seem to take more notice of women than they ever do of their own kind. The arrival at Le Pigeonnier all that time ago had been a disaster. The packers in England had managed to break more than half the contents of their vans. To such an extent that the French customs men who attended the ‘breaking of the seals', that hot morning so long ago, had shaken their heads in dismay and with sympathetic salutes drove away. They didn't examine anything at all. Not even the pictures.

I didn't want the reverse to happen this time around: that the British would shake their heads in dismay at the wreckage caused by the ‘hopeless' French packers.

So Elizabeth would keep guard, although, to be fair, the people who were to move us back to the UK had been present at the arrival of my stuff from England and had had the misfortune to see for themselves the grotesque wreckage from London. They were the most renowned firm on the
entire coast, so I felt a great degree of ease there. However, a bossy Englishwoman, with a beady eye, would be no hindrance. But I knew that enormous care would be taken; and so it was.

‘My dear!' said Elizabeth. ‘They wrap everything in yards of paper. Tissue paper, then
brown
paper, and then cardboard, and then, after all
that,
everything gets sealed with huge strips of yellow and red sticky tape. It's ghastly! The firm's name everywhere. You'll
never
get it off.'

I felt very much safer. There is a reason for this short diversion into care, packing and storage. You'll discover why later.

Walking up with the empty watering-cans from the damped-down fires, we saw Forwood leaning out of his bedroom window. We waved, he leant out wagging something in a fist.

‘What is it?'

‘Coat hangers. I've looked out all my stuff, ready to pack. What about coat hangers?'

‘Leave them all in a neat pile on the floor, the men'll pack them tomorrow.'

‘They are expensive. Coat hangers. These ones. Wood. I've got hundreds …'

‘Just put them in a pile. Do you want a drink? There's a bottle of vodka and I've washed your glass from lunchtime.'

I remember that clearly, but I'm not so good at what followed in the next two days. It is all, as I said earlier, snatching at memories, memories of moments etched on glass, vision through space, to vision. I remember Gareth going off to the airport for his flight, remember Rupert's car sagging on its springs, overloaded with what we all called
loot. Remember us watching him ease down the track, pause at the gate, wave, and turn left into the lane and Gareth saying something about him breaking down on the first hill he'd encounter; and embracing, and thanking him, his taxi humming outside the
porte d'entrée
and then Elizabeth and I quite alone. She found a rubber bone, blue, we looked at it in silence, and then she threw it into the evening.

A car came up, and it was Madame Bruna, brisk, ‘surprised' eyebrows, with a large cardboard box with ‘JAFFA ORANGES' on the side. She told me to put all the dirty linen and stuff into it and that Monsieur Rémy would come up to collect it before we left on the last day.

‘And after that?' I said.

‘After that I send it to Paris. You have somewhere in Paris where I can send it?'

‘Well, not yet … well, yes. Hotel Lancaster. Rue de Berri. Eighth. They'll accept it. We'll be there for a little while. Thank you, Madame … It'll be sheets from five beds, and pillowcases … towels … napkins, five … I can't think how many … face cloths …' I was trying, automatically, to do our ‘clean' and ‘dirty' list, but she cut me short with a hand wave, got back into her car.

‘You are
impertinent,
Monsieur. Eh? Madame?' She was half smiling. ‘Your brother?
A demain
…' and she reversed and drove very quickly down the track.

I don't have the least recollection of the rest of that evening. I suppose we ate something? I think I checked the dead bonfires, I know I fixed Forwood a few decent vodkas and we washed up and set out the mugs for breakfast and filled the kettle. The teabags were in a half-used packet. I remember that clearly. And there was a brown teapot. And
the one spoon we had to share, and Elizabeth taking a bunch of wilting flowers (some yellow anthemis daisies) and stuffing them into a dustbin sack and then all of us going up to bed in the echoing house.

Forwood called down to her about having something to read? And she called back that she was too tired, but she'd have a look at the Virginia Woolf she hadn't packed yet. And then it was the next day, last day but one, and the vans arrived and we just loaded things. That's all. When they had driven away, about six in the evening, the house seemed to be holding its breath with the shock, indignation and distress of being raped. The rooms were still; pillaged. The green plants stood patiently in a huddle in the Long Room waiting for Marie-Thérèse, to whom they had been promised, and a powder blue car came racing up the drive, bumping and battering, and pulled into the curve outside the
porte d'entrée
with a scatter of gravel. It was Florette Ranchett. She mouthed a muffled greeting, wound down a window, looked apprehensively about the
parking.

‘There is no dog,' I said. She nodded, reached to the seat beside her, handed me a
bidon.

‘
Potage.
My Mama's special. With my compliments. For your supper.'

I can remember very clearly how she deliberately avoided my eye, and how she handed me three soup plates and said, briskly, ‘Don't bother about them. For the
poubelle
(dustbin) tomorrow, they are only from Monoprix. It'll save Madame cooking, or washing up …' She wound up the window, reversed, drove rapidly away. I never saw her again. I still have one plate.

Vivienne (the widow of the man who embraced his olive
trees) arrived a bit later with a bottle of Bollinger cradled in an ice bucket in a plastic bag from Monoprix. So we sat out on the terrace, under the vine, for the very last time, and it really didn't hurt. So much. Elizabeth was extremely irritated by the arrival of Marie-Thérèse and her ebullient child, Gabriella, when they came to collect the plants from the Long Room.

‘Clambering in and out the bloody window all the time! I could
brain
them. Honestly! Simply no sense of occasion. No feelings …' They went away after a time, all my cherished plants crammed into the small car and its bulging boot. We waved. What else?

Wandering about the empty house, mugs in our hands, Vivienne suddenly said, ‘I see a stuffed partridge. Unpacked. Are you having a
problem?'

‘Yes. Frankly. A huge problem.'

She reached up and took it from its dusty perch. ‘You aren't any longer,' she said, and shoved it under her arm.

We went down on to the terrace, she dropped the bird into the Monoprix bag, and I poured the last of the champagne. It seemed fitting, somehow. I had not lied to Lady when I said it would be the last thing to go. Apart from ourselves, it was.

I have only the vaguest memories of the last day. A man in the kitchen packing all the knives and forks. Someone whistling ‘La Petite Tonkinoise'. Watching my bed being taken round the deep bend in the staircase. Stubbing a cigarette carefully in a saucer of water on the terrace. Dead-heading a fuchsia by the door. Looking to see if the vine had started to turn. Nothing. Futile incidents. Moments. Sounds.

And then watching the cheerful, gaudy vans swaying
slowly down the track, hesitantly turning left like great yellow elephants. A majestic, stately, lumbering pair, moving carefully down the narrow winding lane to the main road. I saw the last of the sun flicker and ripple along the lengths of their roofs until they were quite lost to sight behind the fig trees up on the high bank.

On the terrace Elizabeth went over to her modest pile of luggage; checked it. I looked at Forwood, he looked at me. We smiled
.

‘
Having your drink?'

‘
Sun's over the yard arm.' Banality. I'd only ever laughed at people who actually said it.

Elizabeth called, ‘Here he is. Awfully late
…'

Up at Titty-Brown Hill, Alain and Christine had seen him too. They turned and came slowly, reluctantly down towards us.

But this, I think, is where you came in?

It was Forwood's seventy-first birthday.

The Hotel Lancaster is the last of the splendid
hôtels particuliers
left standing in rue de Berri. I watched all the others being demolished over the years and hideous modern buildings take their place. Now it sits rather like an ageing, still-elegant duchess at a rave-up, bewildered by the awfulness around her, steadily pretending that all is as it was before.

So discreet is the hotel that it is quite possible to walk past it and never even know it exists. Which is fine by those of us who seek its shelter. Marble floors, thick carpets, brass, light, tapestries, walls ablaze with family portraits of the thirties (it was a private house then), great urns of floral splendour; and, right in the centre, almost the hub of this lovely building, is the scarlet- and gold-lacquered lift which silently ascends to the top floor and the rooms which have terraces and views from Sacré Coeur to the Eiffel Tower, and where I normally stayed.

But that was a long time ago, before I left Le Pigeonnier. Now, a refugee, with some fourteen suitcases, an invalid, plus a bundle of walking-sticks and umbrellas, I could no longer afford the top floor: we were hotel residents now, and made do with a modest suite elsewhere, but still with a view over the secret garden in the courtyard below, and the trees and ivy of the neighbouring buildings. I mean, there was something green to look at, not just grey walls and slate roofs. The suite was small: a tiny sitting-room, a twin bedroom with, thank God, two bathrooms and two beds. This, until I could find the perfect flat in Paris, was now home. It is alarming
how easily one can become institutionalized. Rather like being in a hospital, one settles down to the routine which is, in some odd way, imposed on one. I had never actually
lived
in an hotel before. Staying and living are not at all the same thing. To cope with life on the third floor – the narrowness of the little sitting-room, the unwished for intimacy of the twin-bedded room, each bathroom up a step in opposite walls so that the most private functions were no longer possible (from the sound point of view anyway) – one arranged life carefully and accordingly.

Thus,
petit déjeuner
arrived in the sitting-room, a tray for two: coffee, croissants, butter, milk,
confiture
or marmalade. A
Herald Tribune
and
The Times.
I got myself dressed and out of the way to give Forwood plenty of time for all his various activities. The outline of the day would commence after he had closed the door to the bedroom. I'd look at a paper, out the window, at the heavy silk curtains, at the ivy over the courtyard on the wall of a tall house opposite. Six storeys high. Bosky green. The roosting place for a million starlings who swept in screaming and wheeling at dusk every evening. I'd go for a walk. Perhaps to the paper stall opposite the Travellers Club, maybe down to the Place de la Concorde and back. Nothing.

At precisely eleven-thirty I'd be in my chair, a large winged thing, in the bar. It was permanently reserved, with a small table and a bucket of ice and a bottle of the house champagne. I'd talk to any member of the staff who was there or willing, skim a magazine I might have bought, accept the luncheon menu.

‘Today we offer Poulet Sauté Espagnol? Or, if you order now, there are
three
delicious Loup de Mer … Shall I reserve one?'

And Forwood, dressed as elegantly as the English M'Lor he was always considered to be, came down in the red lacquer lift, tapping carefully with his dog's-head stick, across the marble hall.

‘Did you get
Figaro
?' He eased himself into the twin of my chair, the wine poured by an attentive waiter.

So we sat. Every morning. Two elderly men in suits, sipping champagne. Reading the property column in
Figaro.

‘There is nothing
we'd
want. A mass of places in the wrong
arrondissements
… not much in Seven or Six … nothing in the Marais …'

By noon people were drifting in from outside, actors, lawyers, pretty girls who could have been either. There was chatter, chinking glasses and cigarette smoke. We reserved the Loup de Mer, agreed we'd go to see a flat in the Claridge building, knowing I'd hate it and could not afford it.

That was, suddenly, what life became. The trip, after leaving Le Pigeonnier, to London to check on the lurking shadow on the liver proved inconclusive, not the trip so much as the examination. No one agreed what it was. Decided that it wasn't; sent us back to Paris if not elated at least relieved. To some extent. But it wasn't much of an existence, just sitting like this. There was no room to write in the suite: the desk was meant to hold a jar of flowers, a telephone, an ashtray and the breakfast menu. That was all.

We got to the Claridge, a dark conversion job in what had been a famous old hotel. Beige walls, orange carpet, high cracked-tiled bathrooms, a view over a tarred courtyard to fifty other conversions. All shuttered. The sky somewhere above. You had to take that on trust.

‘Which way does it face? North or south?'

Forwood shrugged. ‘Does it matter? They want half a million. Quid. I don't see why we'd have to pay so much for an invitation to suicide.'