A Short Walk from Harrods Read online

  ‘Bunny dear! Not at my table. Frightful word to use before one’s food. Vomit! Really! And look’ – she placed a very firm restraining hand on my arm - ‘Here come those delicious little quails’ breasts that Mario does so superbly. Brilliant! What a lovely evening you are all giving me!’

  The room was suddenly noisy with the clatter of dishes and service. ‘Tom Wolfe’ was barking with laughter. Constance was happily blank.

  I realized, with some amusement, that far from coming out to join the living, as I had thought, I was actually sitting among the living dead. I made a silent vow there and then at Victoria’s table never again to put on a dark suit to dine in a cemetery.

  *

  In a pretty short time I gave up that sort of exhausting frivolity, preferring my own company and a large Scotch. Or two large Scotches. I didn’t have to shave and struggle into a clean shirt at seven o’clock, to drag myself off and be bored witless, lost and floundering. No demands were made on me on my own. Nothing was taken from me. I could just please myself. It was rather attractive. Whatever energy still remained to me was not dispersed and exhausted by talking inanities with the lost. So I hung the dark suit up in the wardrobe and let it be known, gently but firmly, that I was no longer about to give ‘evening performances’. Simply ‘matinées’.

  And it worked. I began to enjoy being by myself and to that end, trying to revert to the shade of a life long ago ended, I bought a cheap pair of jeans, a pair of trainers, never wore a tie and hunched myself comfortably into my worn, and pretty filthy, anorak. I felt all at once happy dans ma peau, a French saying which means exactly what it says: ‘in my skin’. To exercise, which I now had to do twice a day at least, I made extremely brave efforts to walk quite long distances in order to stretch my ailing leg and to get plants and things for my terrace, which now had to become my summer living-room. There was also the vexed question of food, food that didn’t need cooking. Because of my not being able to at first. So that meant marketing for one. A worrying business. One chop? One cod fillet? One piece of steak? I had not the least idea what to do with the things, should I buy them. In supermarkets, I was quick to discover, things were usually packaged for two or more. And had sell-by dates so that one was forced to wear glasses just to buy a tub of yoghurt … No cooking. Nourishing. Easy. Like tinned soup.

  At home in France, marketing was easy. You could always buy one slice of pâté, a leek, a carrot, one potato to bake. A tranche of ham was served and wrapped with as much respect and reverence as if one had ordered breast of peacock. But that was in the market. Not a pre-packaged, neon-lit immensity of harassed women clattering trollies about. I pretty soon learned that hanging around in the check-outs was not a good idea. I was, amazingly and disconcertingly, recognized a good deal. There was a lot of ’Yes it is!’ and ’No it isn’t. He’s getting bald’, or ’You ask him. Go on…’, and I got a bit tired of being asked if I ‘used to be someone famous, whatchermacallit?’

  So I gave up supermarkets and kept to the smaller, less frightening shops. Some of which I had found close to hand because anyway I was unable to walk very far. But now, exercising determinedly, I managed to get out on longer journeys. Once I actually got halfway up the Kings Road, scuttling along quite quickly for me, like an apologetic turtle, hunched, head down in the anorak collar to avoid recognition. But it didn’t help much.

  From a table in the courtyard of the Pheasantry I was hailed by a shout above the traffic. ‘Durk! Durk! I do not believe it. I just do not! I am in awe!’ It was Mae-Ellen, a half-remembered friend from long ago in Los Angeles. I didn’t really want to remember her. She was all right, but exhausting. She hugged me with obvious pleasure, insisted that I walk back with her to her place. ‘It’s just right here. Sydney Street. Oh, come on …’

  I said that I really was a bit jaded, had walked enough, was lame and all that stuff. She insisted, and I buckled and gave in. ‘It’s right here! If you got this far you can get to my little house.’ If I collapsed in the street, my name and address and telephone number were in my wallet. It was always possible that whoever picked me up, if anyone should stoop to do such a thing, might not remember who I used to be. Mae-Ellen had a dusting of freckles, red hair cut in what she termed ‘a bang’, wore white stockings, which seem to be a favourite with certain kinds of American women who lean towards intense intellectualism, which gave her legs the un-happy impression of up-ended milk bottles thrust into neat little lace-up shoes. She wore wire glasses, a Madras cotton skirt, a too-big Aran sweater and a rope of various tropical seeds strung on a thread round her neck. She was very warm and welcoming when we reached her place off Sydney Street, offered me herbal tea, which she said she was just about to infuse because I’d interrupted her cup at the Pheasantry, but I declined this offer, and sat in a creaking wicker chair while she hurled about with a kettle and teapot.

  ‘I just can’t believe bumping into you like that! So weird! When was the last time? At Ruthie’s place on Doheney? Aeons ago. My, how time flies. And here I am in Europe again! Can you believe? You haven’t changed. Really. Well, we all get old, inevitably, but you look just great. It suits you. I’m with the embassy now. First Washington, now London. I’ll be here for a while then I get to go to Frankfurt, Germany. It’s so worth while.’ She poured hot water into her pot. ‘I am a counsellor. You know that? To army wives on the bases. I can’t say exactly where, but you know … they are real lonely those wives. They suffer.’

  I was beginning to suffer myself. She was being kind but boring, I felt trapped and wanted to pee anyway. I had felt instant claustrophobia the moment she shut us into the narrow hall of her dark little house. ‘You want a cracker? Candy? This isn’t my place, you know, I just borrow it from my friend Cindy. She’s great. She’s in Uttar Pradesh or some place … If there is a famine, a war or an epidemic, Cindy’s off! She is so caring! Sure you won’t have some peppermint tea? It’s refreshing.’

  The dingy little room looked out over St Luke’s churchyard. Bamboo and cane furniture, dragged blue walls, a dusty bunch of faded pink larkspur bound with twine in a twig basket. Mae-Ellen was stirring her tea with a pencil. ‘What I am doing is reely important, I just go along and talk with these women and they talk right back. They are just lonesome for conversation. They call me their new Avon lady! Isn’t that adorable? It releases them: conversation. They are stuck on the base, with their kids, and then there are hos-tle women just outside, in tents and things, with placards, ‘Yanks Go Home!’, and worse. It’s not friendly, and they feel vulnerable. Lonely. They have the PX, sure, they get movies, there are the padrés, a rabbi as well, can you believe? And they get wonderful medical treatment for the kids. But they still feel lonesome. Stuck on a base. It’s spooky. Unnatural. And with those awful hos-tle women … well …’

  I nodded. I was busting for a pee and would have to ask her where to go. I sat still containing myself because she was off again. ‘I say to them, look, I say. There are just wonderful compensations. You have your husbin, you have your children. That is so right, so traditional, so American. The Family. Right? Together, united. They love you and that is one helluva deal today. To have a loving family around you. Love. You want proof of that love. Well: the very first proof of that love is the very first gift which your child will offer you. You, the giver of life. You, its mother. And you know what this gift is? It is shit!’ She sat back in her chair, her glasses glittering with triumph. I asked her where the lav was and she looked bewildered. ‘Oh! That! The john? It’s right up there, on the left. Okay?’

  When I returned she was refilling her mug. ‘Defecation … To continue … defecation is the very first “Thank you” from your child. It is just automatic. I think it is kinda marvellous, don’t you? Uplifting. Of course in our terms we would say it was just an automatic reflex, but I say no! It is a deep psychological desire, buried way deep down in the subconscious of the new-born, that just insists on giving thanks for its life. I tell my women that: somehow I feel that it h
elps them. Comforts them. It gives them a new angle on their lives. Are you sure you won’t take some peppermint?’

  But I managed to get away. Slightly overwhelmed. I didn’t get this kind of stuff on the hill. Perhaps being back in London was going to be altogether rather exhausting? I hadn’t seen Mae-Ellen for years. And then only twice at parties in Los Angeles. The risk of collision in the Kings Road was worrying. I had hoped not to see her again. Breathing air, however much it was polluted, was better by far than sitting in her dreary little room.

  The Kings Road was still the same road that I had first walked in wonderment at seventeen and now, at seventy, it still had the same effect in spite of quite disastrous architectural changes and the ones which had taken place among the people who now thronged and jostled in it. But it all felt the same, and I still felt seventeen. I was surrounded by ‘familiars’, altered, of course, but still recognizable. I have said, earlier, that I walk with ghosts. And so I do. Not all of whom I knew or ever met. But they must still be about. Their shades? Comforting me. Oscar Wilde coming from Tite Street, Lily Langtry going up to the Cadogans’, Carlyle walking slowly to his tobacconist, Augustus John in sagging dressing-gown and slippers off to the Five Bells. My parents were here too – when they were young and I just born. Off they went to the Good Intent, or to the Embankment to the Blue Cockatoo. Henry Moore bought his packets of vine charcoal from Green and Stone’s, and Kathleen and Graham Sutherland, elegance and beauty beyond anything I had ever witnessed in my life before, and known among us students at the Polytechnic as ‘The Beautiful People’, long before that phrase (coined then) was so debased later for far less glorious creatures. But they had all been here. And Danuta! She must be around somewhere. Heavy Polish breasts bouncing under her cheesecloth shirt, broad feet in lattice-leather sandals, striding with swinging Percheron hips into the little studio which she rented in a crumbling Regency house where the fire station stands today. I well remember her removing my virginity there, before a plopping gas fire on a runkled rug, and casting it, and finally myself, aside as contemptuously as an old jacket. In 1939 she went home to Krakow for the summer recess. And that was that.

  So I am not unfamiliar with my area. Bewildered perhaps, but it fits me. Even though the players on the stage have altered beyond recognition, the play, as it were, remains much the same. Same format. Different sets and players. There are black faces now among the white. Bedraggled girls in Doc Marten’s, black tights, black velvet pull-on hats, flowing black shifts to their calves. In mourning for youth? Shaven-headed young men in leather and floral prints, headbands or baseball caps, arrogantly astride glittering motorbikes the size and splendour of Cadillacs.

  There is a stink of greasy food now, of mushy pasta and pizza, of cheap coffee and pot, the thump thump thump of heavy metal music from the open doors of tacky shoe shops. All around, the nasal whine of adolescent life, wandering idly up and down, sucking ice creams, chewing gum or hamburgers, laughing, and squawking like apprehensive parrots. All on the edge of things. Waiting. Moving. Oddly different in so many ways, but familiar. Different from the people that we were at their age. But, remember, at their age I was making a bird cage for a linnet.

  My local grocer’s is still open. I take a wire basket and wander in wondering what to eat for my supper. A fraught business. A tin of soup? Easy. No mess. One dish to wash. Perhaps some ham? Cold ham and boiled potatoes. Perhaps with a bit of chutney. I was, I realized, muttering aloud to myself. One reaches such a state when approaching a pressing decision on one’s own. And, because I had momentarily deflected myself through my anxious preoccupation with supper, I tripped over one of those blasted shopping-trollies, usually tartan, which elderly ladies drag behind them in supermarkets. The woman, in a plum-cloth coat and pudding basin hat, glared at me as if I had attempted to snatch her bag, shrugged off my apology and turned back to her companion, a thin woman in a knitted beret. ‘You was saying?’

  ‘Well. I said to ‘im, well then I said, what’s that lump doing there? Wasn’t there lunchtime. Very nasty it looks. Very nasty. You watch your bleedin’ mouth ’e says to me. Don’t meddle! Well, I says, you go to Boots cash chemist and get something to put on it. Get lorst! ‘e says. Silly old cat. My own child! Own flesh and blood. Flabbergarsted I was.’

  Considering ham or pie at the counter, listening with curiosity to the conversation behind me, I was all unaware of mounting irritation from the woman next to me. She started to push hard at my wire basket with her own.

  ‘Do you frightfully mind?’ Her voice was cold with disdain.

  We had crossed the Great Divide. This was no lady from the Dwellings, this one was bent on battle. There would be no democratic encounter here between her mushroom hat, well-cut silk dress, tight grey hair and my aged anorak, dirty jeans and trainers. I was ready for the sacrifice, and armed with this reassurance she pressed forward.

  I did not budge. Not a millimetre. I willed her to have another bash at my basket and this she did, swinging at mine like a demolition ball and chain.

  ‘I did ask you to move. I am trying to shop.’

  ‘And I, madam.’

  ‘Here before you. And I know exactly what I want. So.’

  ‘And I do. Exactly.’

  A youth hovered about behind the glass counter. She raised a jewelled fist to summons him.

  ‘Young man! Smoked salmon. Scottish not farmed. Eight ounces.’

  She turned to me once again and demanded that I move. I said that I would.

  When I had been served.

  This unseemly, trivial squabble had reached the point where I thought she might see fit to swing her basket at my head, her eyes burned with such dislike and contempt; but at that instant Mr Collinson, crisp in white apron, eyes sparked with mischief behind thick glasses, was quite suddenly in attendance.

  ‘Ah! M’lord! There you are. What can we do for you today? Gala pie?’

  The mushroom hat and the silk dress moved swiftly away. She stared at me, white with hostility.

  Mr Collinson, beaming at a minor victory, clasped his hands. ‘The tongue, m’lord? Of course. Can I tempt you to three slices?’

  Behind me in the queue a woman’s voice said, ‘Oh my dear … Gerald and I had to dine with them at their place on Tuesday. They really won’t do, you know. I mean, Christmas cards from Kensington Palace stuck all over the room. In June! Quite impossible …’

  Takes all sorts in my manor. A goodly mix, as my father would say.

  At the check-out plum-coat had beaten me to it.

  ‘My own flesh and blood, Chrissie. Did you ever?’

  Walk up to my square, sunlight freckling through the plane trees.

  But no dogs leaping in idiot welcome, no scent of freshly cut hay, no scuttering lizards on the stone walls, no quick ‘plops!’ from suddenly disturbed fish in the pond. No pond. No voice from the terrace calling, ‘Were the London papers in yet?’

  Emptiness sighs. Perfectly all right. No problem.

  How the hell did I get here?

  Chapter 2

  Memory seems to come to me in snatches: I suppose because one suppresses so much that was untenable. Is it that? Or is time somehow altogether too vast to hold in detail? Or am I merely getting old? The latter most probably.

  I can remember that evening pretty clearly. I cannot pinpoint much in the immediate days before it. But that evening, that last dreadful evening, is as clear to me now as if it was yesterday evening. Clearer in fact. But apparently etched on to glass. It has a strange transparency about it, like a Lawrence Whistler goblet. Vision, through space, to vision.

  It was about six. The time when, normally, I’d be pouring my first glass of wine and, depending on the season, settling into the big chair by the stove or my ‘place’ in the deep striped chair on the terrace under the vine. But this particular evening was unlike any others. Time was wrenched.

  Elizabeth said quietly, ‘He’s late.’ Meaning the taxi from Nice.

  She was standing a
t the edge of the terrace, toes hooked over the rim, looking down across the little lawn, beyond the terraces to the gate in the lane. The gate was wide open. We would see the roof of the taxi glittering in the last of the sun running past the hedges, flickering through the olives.

  I think that I said, ‘Yes. He said six o’clock precisely. But maybe the traffic was heavy … he has to come right across the town.’ Something like that.

  Forwood was sitting perfectly still in one of the big striped chairs, his stick with the greyhound’s-head between his knees, hands clasped over the handle. He was perfectly still, contained, except that one foot trembled gently.

  Up the track towards Titty-Brown Hill, in the orange light of the evening sun, Christine and Alain had wandered away from us. She was playing with a sprig of rosemary she’d pulled from the hedge. They were being mercifully tactful.

  I went into the Long Room to the corner cupboard where I had, purposely, left half a bottle of Haig and a litre of Evian and some little mustard glasses. I took a brimming glass and downed it. Lost my breath, refilled, added a little water.

  Apart from the fact that there were no flowers, no green plants, no pictures, no books, the room was still recognizably mine. As it had been for over twenty years. Christine and Alain had bought nearly all the furniture.

  A cushion on one of the big arm-less chairs I’d bought in Milan bore a body dent. I automatically took it up and ‘plumped’ it. A perfectly idiotic gesture. It was no longer my cushion to ‘plump’. Or my chair. Or my room. I’d never see it again in my life.

  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 …’