A Short Walk from Harrods Read online

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

  Forwood eased himself up from his chair, I put the glass back in the bar cupboard. I did not look round again. Elizabeth had slung her shoulder bag over her arm.

  The wheels of the taxi crunched into a swerve as he took the corner of the drive beyond the porte d’entrée, a door slammed. I called out, ‘Jacques?’

  ‘Oui, monsieur. Ouf … mon dieu! Le traffic … à l’aeroport. C’est complètement fou’. He lifted the lid of the boot, we started loading up.

  Christine was standing in the centre of the terrace, the vine leaves casting trembling shadows like torn lace across her face, her hands twisting the sprig of rosemary.

  Suddenly she burst into agonizing tears, buried her head in her hands, bent forward sobbing. I hurried to her, put my arms round her shoulders.

  ‘Don’t cry! Please don’t cry. I should be crying, not you. Don’t cry, for God’s sake, on the first evening in your new house.’

  I shook hands with Alain in silence. We got to the car. I helped Forwood into the front, which he preferred. Elizabeth and I got in at the back. Jacques slammed the boot. I settled my hand-grip and the bundle of walking-sticks and umbrellas. ’Allez vite!’ I said and we reversed, turned, crunched slowly across the parking past the pond, past the bay thicket, left down the track. We none of us spoke or looked back. At the gates I got out, the car eased into the lane, I slammed the gates just as I had slammed them every evening for so many years. But this would be the very last time. Final. Finished. Closed.

  The gates clattered together, the chain and padlock swinging, scoring an arc in the waggon-green paint. There was rust on the tin sign, ‘CHIENS MÉCHANTS! ATTENTION!’ But there were no chiens méchants now.

  I got back into the car, slammed the door, we moved down the lane slowly past the three big plastic dustbins brimming with junk. A battered brass lamp that I’d never been able to fix, but always meant to, lay in thistles. No one spoke, not even when we got to the T-junction at the main road and turned left up towards the village. There were some people crossing the road going towards the Mini-Market, but I couldn’t tell who they were.

  Jacques cleared his throat softly. ‘A Saint-Paul, eh?’

  ‘Saint-Paul,’ I said.

  That’s how it ended.

  Rather dragging along the lane with two full baskets, I was shoved into the rough grass verge by a rusting Citroën. It stopped with a lurch and groan of brakes, a window was wound down. A grey-haired woman called out in French, ‘Do you want help? They look heavy.’

  ‘They are. Thank you. Just to the little calvary.’ My French was almost serviceable.

  I got in beside her, shoved the bags in the back. It was a jumble of children’s toys, towels, baskets, a giant bundle of carnations. She was rather small with grey hair, and could just see over the steering-wheel. A cigarette, with a worrying inch of ash, drooped from her mouth. She didn’t remove it during the trip. She was in her early seventies, wore a man’s wrist-watch and a grey flannel suit.

  ‘My name is de Beauvallon. I live at Clos des Lilacs.’

  We started up, jerked, began to bounce unevenly along.

  ‘Tiens! I must have a flat tyre! I thought so in the village. I’ll just make it I think …’

  ‘It’s not far. I live just up the hill from you. I can see your entrance from my bedroom window.’

  ‘My two cypress trees? And my columns?’

  ‘They are very fine, Madame.’

  ‘You notice that one of the balls on a column is lost? My idiot son-in-law ran into it with his Peugeot. Are you staying with Jean-Claude and Jacqueline?’

  ‘No. I live there.’

  She turned swiftly to face me, eyes off the road, ash on the cigarette. She squinted through her smoke.

  ‘Live there! Since when? I’ve been in Paris for three months. Live there?’

  ‘I have bought it from Jean-Claude. He’s moved to Nice. It is my land now.’

  She, thankfully, returned to her driving, rounding a sharp bend, coming out on to the straight. At the far end two enormous cypress trees, fifty feet high, dwarfing two tall stone columns. One minus a stone ball on its top.

  ‘You are English? American? Do you have a name, M’sieur, par hasard?’

  ‘English.’ I told her my proper name. The ‘van’ and the ‘den’.

  ‘Americans don’t speak French very well. They have a hideous accent. How long have you been propriétaire?’

  ‘I bought it in November. But I moved in only two weeks ago.’

  ‘July. He never breathed a word. Strange man. You have a wife?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You will need assistance on that land. It has not been tended for years, the olives haven’t been taillé, pruned, for years. Disaster.’

  We had reached the calvary and the gateway to her house. My track went up the hill to our left. I started to clamber out, grabbed the bags, thanked her. She said, in perfect English, ‘So, we have a new neighbour! I had no idea. The families, Jean-Claude’s and my husband’s, own all the land here. So you will be safe from development. But the place is a ruin.’ The ash suddenly fell from her cigarette, spilling down her jacket. She paid no attention, the butt hung on her lip.

  ‘You speak wonderful English. I wish I could speak French so well.’

  ‘I was at a convent near Watford. As a girl. Before the First World War.’

  She started her car again; it rattled. ‘I shall have to limp down to the house. The tyre is old, so is the car, so am I. Good luck. One day we must have a meeting. The electricity board demand to put up an enormous post right here. On our land and right in your eye-line. Unless you don’t care about that …?’

  ‘I care very much indeed.’

  The car shuddered and she started to limp lopsidedly between the cypresses.

  ‘I’ll speak to you.’ She waved a hand vaguely out of her window and went off in little puffs of pink dust.

  I turned and clambered up the hill. At the entrance, so to speak, for there was no gate apart from one in my active imagination, there was a battered tin post-box on a thick wooden post. To my surprise, there were some letters. Real letters at last. Someone had found out where I’d got to. More importantly, the sorting office, I supposed in town – Nice? – had discovered me.

  I was not completely abandoned in the midst of rural France. I had a telephone and a postman knew that I lived at the farm. Progress was being made!

  Forwood was doing something to the car. I don’t know exactly what he was doing because I don’t know anything about cars. After a horrendous accident in monsoon rain in Calcutta when I had, wretchedly, killed a couple of people by driving into them (not my fault, I hasten to add: during the unpleasant trial which followed I was completely exonerated), I never drove again. Never will. But I could sense a problem: the doors were all open, bonnet raised, engine running. He was blowing something hard which he held in his hand.

  ‘Found what’s wrong? Why I had to lug all this down to the village and back?’ I set down my baskets.

  ‘Dirt. In the plugs … I think.’ He held something up to show me. ‘This is a plug. Got it? The car won’t run without plugs. I used a spare. Okay?’

  ‘Yes. If we don’t have a car up here, we’ll be done for. That is a very long walk to the village …’

  ‘All downhill.’

  ‘Uphill from the corner with the nasty little caravan.’

  ‘One day I’ll have to get a mower. They have plugs too. Perhaps a scythe? Look at the height of the grass. Feet. Tough as a wire broom.’

  I took up the bags again and went up to the cellar door. ‘It’ll have to be a scythe. Haven’t got the money for a mower, for God’s sake!’

  He switched off the engine, slammed the doors, closed the boot.

  ‘Should you have thought of that before you signed the deeds, perhaps?’

  ‘Well, how was I to kno
w there were acres of savannah here? We weren’t even allowed on to the terrace. Almost. I didn’t know the place was a ruin, the land flooded. The olives dying.’

  ‘Waving goodbye, in fact. You are lumbered. Four hundred dying olive trees, “the youngest of which is two hundred years, the eldest one thousand”, according to the deeds.’

  He picked up the yellow plastic bucket in which he kept his spanners and a strip of dirty rag, pushed the old plug into its package.

  ‘You keep on muttering about having a car up here. You’ve got a car. Only you can’t drive the thing.’

  ‘I know. Entendu. That’s why you agreed to come here: to drive the car.’

  He pulled the rag from a clatter of tools, started to wipe his fingers. ‘Unpaid chauffeur. I don’t mind for a bit. But how will you cope when I decide to pull out? I only agreed a year, remember?’

  I took up the straw basket. ‘Sure. Fine. Okay. I remember. I’ll learn to drive again. Much easier out here: less traffic, no zebra crossings, buses, mad cyclists. Someone down at the garage will teach me. No problem.’

  Forwood chucked the oily rag into the bucket, which he hung on a hook high on the wall. ‘I am constantly amazed by your implicit belief in your own dishonesty. God! Now, did you remember the two kilos of bullock’s cheek? Dog food, Dirk?’

  ‘Ah! That’s what it was. I knew there was something. It was nagging … Hell … ’

  ‘That’s what you went down there for. Manage on your own. Sure?’

  ‘Perfectly. Never fear. Perhaps you’d go down, then, and get the cheek, now you have a nice clean plug? Otherwise I’ll boil up some rice. I know I got the rice.’

  ‘Terrific. You’ll have an awful lot to learn in a year, chum.’ He sat down on an old packing-case left over from the move. It had a wine glass and an umbrella stencilled on the side. Began cleaning his nails with a bit of stick.

  ‘Well, perhaps you’ll enjoy it here?’ I said, picking up the second basket, weighing them both without much thought. ‘I mean, decide not to return to the UK after all? I might have to do a film again one day. For the money. For a mower, the kitchen roof … You’d have to deal with that, wouldn’t you? Contracts, script approval …’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘Well, yes …’ He was starting to make me feel slightly uncomfortable. He had a habit of doing that. Calm, reasoning, very pleasant. Firm. Perhaps he would clear off? In a year. He had never absolutely promised to stay on once I was ‘settled in’. I swung the baskets gently, to and fro.

  ‘You have dealt with every film, every contract, the tax, all that jazz, for over twenty years. Every tax return. How could I do all that?’

  ‘As you will with your driving. And how to change a plug. If you can drive a car, change a plug, and start and push the mower, you’ll be able to deal with the contracts and the tax. No problem.’

  I set the baskets down, feeling a little uneasy. ‘Well, I shall. I know all about plugs, for God’s sake. Plug-hole, earplug bath plug, Rawlplug - I’m not a complete idiot.’

  He rose, hitched up his jeans, started towards the cellar steps. ‘You are giving a quite brilliant impersonation, that’s all. And mind your head on this beam.’ He tapped it with an oily hand.

  ‘Well, it could grow on you here? What on earth would you do back in the UK? At your age? Who would you manage? You said yourself it was all changing, the time now of the dialects and the uglies… not your scene. And there will be a mass to do here: mowing, driving, the garden. And if I didhave to make a film here, for the loot only, you’d be essential …’

  ‘Thank you.’ I heard the edge of dryness in his voice. ‘We’ll see how it goes. Okay? I’m not totally convinced … remember what I just said? About this beam here?’

  ‘You said, “Duck.”’

  He cocked his head lightly to one side, grinned at me. ‘Got it. Very good. Then do.’

  I collected my baskets.

  We went up the stairs from the windowless cellar into the kitchen – a dark pit: hooded stove in one corner, chipped stone sink in another, a smell of stale grease. I set the baskets on the table, unloaded. A six-pack of beer first.

  ‘Fat-head. That’s what weighed you down. The beer.’

  ‘I need the beer.’

  ‘Need a dislocated spine as well?’

  He was washing his hands at the sink; the water was running so I did not feel obliged to answer. There were a bag of rice, six candles, some leeks, carrots, a green net-sack of potatoes, a pack of brown sugar with a parrot on the cover, a cartouche of Royal Longues - cigarettes which some-one who did not smoke had assured me were made from dried lettuce and therefore harmless. I counted the change, spread it on the table among the leeks and carrots.

  ‘Not cheap, France. That’s the change from five hundred francs.’

  Forwood was drying his hands on a piece of kitchen paper.

  ‘Beer and cigarettes cost. Luxuries. We need the food.’

  ‘There is also some mail. The sorting office in Nice, or some-where, seem to have found us. The second batch in three weeks.’

  ‘Anything urgent looking? And where’s the bread?’

  ‘In the basket. A complet. Nothing urgent-looking. No official signs, or OHMS.’

  I found a glass, opened a bottle of beer and went down the slate stairs into the Long Room below. I called up about Madame de Beauvallon, the car, the flat tyre, the concrete post which was apparently about to be stuck right in the view down to La Napoule.

  ‘Ask them to paint it green,’ he shouted. ‘Won’t see it so much. I’m off to the village now …’

  ‘By car?’

  ‘How else?’

  ‘It didn’t work …’

  ‘It does now. I can’t stand the Ben Nicholson and sundry faux old masters sliding about the wainscoting any longer. What’s the French for “picture hooks”?’

  On the terrace, under the vine, in a spiking of self-sown hollyhocks of varied hue, I sat on a white-painted tin chair from Monoprix (end of season sale) while a thousand bees nudged and shouldered into the frilly red and pink discs.

  It was calm, cool, under the vine, the savannah ahead trembled and wavered in the heat. The car came wobbling slowly over the ruts from behind the house. Stopped. I raised my glass in a salute, a window wound down. ‘Won’t be long. I’ll get the dog meat. Did you get a London news-paper?’

  ‘No. Not in when I was there. Careful of Madame de Beauvallon, she’s lethal with that Citroën – can’t see over the steering-wheel. Can’t steer anyway. But she is well disposed.’

  ‘Understood.’ At that moment Labo the wild stray–dog I’d picked up in Rome, tore across the terrace, having heard the car, screaming with delight. Car-mad, he was scooped up, dumped in the back. They bounced slowly off again over the ruts in the track deep and hard as frozen plough.

  We’d have an awful lot to do to an awful lot of things. In time. For the moment I watched the listless dust rise and fall in fading clouds behind the inching car, fished a struggling bee out of my beer, flicked it into the hollyhocks with contented carelessness. I wasn’t fifty yet. There was plenty of time for drowning olives, rutted tracks and the unopened mail in the kitchen.

  My chunk of France lay almost dead-centre of a triangle of villages. Well, one proper village, Saint-Cyprien, up behind my land, Le Pré to the west, and Saint-Sulpice to the east. Le Pré straggled along the main road: a bar, some shops, two garages – an Elf and a Shell – a café with a juke-box, and a modest restaurant which served all right-ish food. Occasionally. Saint-Sulpice was not much more than a crossroads, a monument to its liberation by the Americans on August the 21st, 1944, a row of ageing mulberry trees, a wide place where the annual fair and circus was held and, along the road up towards Saint-Cyprien, the olive mill with its enormous wheel. Above the crossroads, on a modest hillock, stood the church with its Provençal flat roof, surrounded by olive trees and cypresses. There were some scattered houses, a churchyard sliding down the hill, the monuments and marble
angels looking like a tilting chess set, and at the bottom of all this, neat and trim, the bureau de poste. The bureau de poste was to play a vastly important part in my life, although I was unaware of that fact in my early weeks – as unaware as I was that, just up the road beyond it, glittering in chrome and plate glass, the Mini-Market, opened in the week I took up my residency, would almost become my pivot.

  The mayor of Saint-Sulpice, Etienne Ranchett, a fierce little man with a face like a loganberry, was rumoured to keep a young (and disagreeable) mistress in a hideous little modern villa on the edge of the village. To make life more tolerable for his wife, and avoid gossip, he permitted the erection of the Mini-Market on the old vegetable garden of the house which belonged to his mother-in-law. His wife, a warm-eyed, splendid figure of a woman, Florette Ranchett, became the owner. It shut her up: she turned a blindish eye to the mistress on her doorstep and threw herself with alacrity into the role of shopkeeper in this unlikely modern box set among the olives and rough-walled vegetable garden of her mother’s house.

  The trouble was that, even with the imposing awning in brown and orange with Mini-Market in gold all along its scalloped edge, the glitter and the hum of the freezer, the sparkle and shine of the brilliantly tiled floor (mashed carrot and spinach), in spite of all these attractions no one very much came into the place. Its very glamour put them off and inhibited them. They much preferred the cold, cruddy, dark little shop which had apparently originally stood in its place, run by Madame Ranchett’s mother. It was comforting, it had worn linoleum, I was told, fly papers, good bread, and gave credit. In the new shop a new and alarming machine rolled out your bill, all figures and signs, and at the end, after Thank You for Shopping Here (in English) there was a more alarming note which, hastily translated, simply said NO CREDIT.

  No good French peasant could put up with that for long. And they didn’t. They went elsewhere, even if it meant taking the local bus, and Florette Ranchett sat stoically behind her counter, among mountains of lavatory rolls, kitchen paper and serried rows of Harpic, Tide and Omo, on her own. Sometimes, very occasionally, someone would hurry in for something they had suddenly found themselves to be short of, and tourists parked to buy stuff for picnics to take down to the beaches or up into the hills. Otherwise the tins and bottles gathered dust, the stall of vegetables outside under the awning wilted, and Madame Ranchett read Nice-Matin from cover to cover six times a day.