A Short Walk from Harrods (18 page)

‘Could it be anything else, Patrick?'

He was rubbing his hand over Bendo's head and neck, smoothing it along his muscular back. He didn't look directly at me when he said: ‘It could be cancer. They'll check in London. I can't do it … and the clinic say it is just a polyp.'

‘But it
could
be cancer?'

He looked at me directly. Bendo loped off out into the garden.

‘It's possible. Yes. But look, this is important. When you go to London, will you try to get this album for me? It's quite new, impossible to get it here, they have never heard of them. They're terrific, amazing, quite, quite amazing! Will you try? I have written down all the information here, serial number …' He gave me one of his visiting-cards with something scribbled on the back.

‘Try for me? Please? They are
amazing.
It's a new group, called the Cure.'

It's so easy, writing like this, without any firm reference book, diary, journal at hand to set one on one's path (I burned all my stuff just before I left) to forget to round up all one's sheep.

My first publisher, and editor, Norah Smallwood, always used that phrase when I had submitted a few chapters to her for her tough criticism. ‘Round up all your stray sheep. It drives the reader mad if you don't and you'll get into a
ghastly
mess yourself.' Right of course. She almost always was: I am still enormously influenced by her – always will be. So I'd better chivvy in some stray sheep. Like a dog … And dogs are what immediately come to mind.

There were dogs all through my life. I am not, oddly enough, a dog person, nor yet a cat person. I swoon at the sight of neither and am pleased to avoid both when possible. I don't, frankly, need them. I think one ‘needs' animals for comfort, as a sort of surrogate companion, lover, child, what you will. That's about all. But I will perfectly cheerfully have one if the situation demands their presence in my life.

And thus it was with dogs. I lived a country life from my earliest childhood; impossible
not
to have a dog under those circumstances: fields, woods, long dusty lanes, wild moorland, curving, swelling Downs, all demanded, as it were, the presence of a dog. A childhood without an animal is unthinkable, and extremely bad for the future man or woman. Through an animal one is taught responsibility, comfort, trust, authority, duty, care and, to a great degree, love. So
you have a dog. It seems reasonable. There have been masses of dogs in my existence. All sorts, kinds, conditions. Some wonderful, some awful, a few mad, most just perfectly pleasant ‘dogs'. There were a Rogan, Chug, Chug 2, Chug 3, Sheba, Carla, Candida, Bogey and so on: they provided part of the calm, secure, background to ordinary country life. To life, actually. But, frankly, I gave most, if not all, my
childish
affection to grass snakes, toads, mice, tree frogs, rats and any other small rodent, mammal, reptile or fish available to me.

Fish and reptiles were, I suppose, my favourites. I spent hours building aquariums, or vivariums, and stuffed them with ferns and weeds, rocks and pebbles, and did my best to create a fragment for myself of living rock-pools or damp and steamy tropical marshes. The theory was always much better than the practice. But there lay my love. Dogs were very secondary to these scaly, warted, tailed, finned creatures.

Leaving England for abroad (I was at first uncertain where exactly I would settle: Italy, France or even, at one time, Austria, an aberration quickly excised from my whirling mind by one crashingly severe winter in Vienna – cold is not fun) was made poignant for me by the dumping, as it were, of two dogs – a large English mastiff (Candida) and an ageing corgi (Bogey) – a Siamese cat and a flutter of tropical finches in a bamboo cage, plus, and this was the most painful part of all, the abandoning of my beloved parrot, Annie, a perfectly ordinary Brazilian green, who was detested by everyone and reciprocated happily by loathing (with red-eyed hatred) everyone in sight:
except
me. I loved her with unbridled passion. We kissed, whispered and muttered together in a most nauseating manner, and if she flew away it was never very far, just to the top of a local wild cherry. She sat up there all day,
screaming and laughing like a mad woman, until dusk fell, and then she would condescend to descend, slowly, clambering branch by branch from her perch to my arm. But only if I verbally flattered her, cajoled her softly, and whistled the first few bars of ‘As Long As He Needs Me' from
Oliver.
It was an act we built up together. Most impressive to ourselves, viewed with hostility or alarm by others. However, when I left the UK, she had to go. Just as the dogs and the cats and finches were forced to find alternative accommodation, so, alas, was she.

Elizabeth took the dogs, the cat; the gardener took the finches; and Annie was given to a fearfully grand private zoo not far away where she spent the rest of her days screaming ‘Dirk!' at the top of her voice and hysterically laying eggs from time to time. I don't know if there was any message there? She lasted for years anyway, and as I had had her for many years before, it seemed a reasonable time of loving for us both. But leaving her caused me far more grief than leaving the dogs. There has to be something pretty squint there.

However, when I got to Le Pigeonnier, I was quite determined that there would be no more painful separations, no responsibilities to helpless animals, no fuss, heartbreak and bother. Never again. Blithely forgetting that I already had a dog of a sort, Labo, which I had been hauling across Europe, from Rome to Paris, Munich, Trieste, etc. I would just build the pond of my dreams, stock it with carp and orfe, impersonal things, and that would be that. I reckoned without Forwood, who was as ‘doggy' as I was ‘un-doggy': ‘I
know
that it is your house and that you are, as you always have been, Little Master, even at your advanced age, but
I
can't live up here on
this hillside, surrounded by acres and acres of rock and brush, rabbits, pheasant, partridge and even foxes and a badger without a bloody dog … So put up with it.'

One day, after finishing marketing at Marché Forville in Cannes, he saw a small boxer puppy tumbling about in a too small cage with some other dogs in a chic pet shop near the Croisette and, against all my earnest and gentle protests, bought it. Never, under any circumstances, buy a dog from a chic pet shop. Especially such an establishment in, of all places, Cannes. Those fiendish people, the breeders, usually destroy the runts of the litters and puppies which are surplus to their needs, or, on the other hand, sell them off to pet shops with extremely vague pedigrees (usually ‘mislaid' at the cash register). ‘Daisy' (this is what she got called, after Forwood's grandmother, Daisy Lockton) was such a creature. Her stump was bleeding from poor docking, but her ears were unclipped. That is to say, they were not bandaged or in points, which is why he bought her. Cutting, pricking, the ears he rightly considered to be barbaric. So hers just flopped. And I of course, a year or so before, had been adopted by the stray hill dog in Rome during the time that I was deciding just where to put down my roots. This was Labo. So I really couldn't, in all fairness, sulk about Daisy. Thus she came to the hill, and we had – hey presto! – ‘instant country household'.

Irritating but inevitable. As she grew older, Daisy became rather evil, for she sensed, as all animals do, that Labo was disabled in that he had been savagely beaten at some time – his leg broken in three places – and he limped. So she got him into corners from time to time and tried to tear out his throat. This was not too bad in open country, but very
tiresome in a dining-room full of eating guests. Blood flew in spattering arcs across whitewashed walls, women screamed, glasses crashed, bottles fell, Labo shrieked and howled and, after furious separation, Daisy beamed brightly around the room wagging her stump, while Labo dragged himself to hide upstairs, under my bed. It was all ‘delightfully real and rural', and everyone rather enjoyed it. It was part and parcel of the
vie de bohème en France.

Daisy died eventually; she got some ugly disease. We spent days over in town sitting with a mixed clutter of ailing cats, dogs, budgerigars, rabbits and gerbils, hunched sickly in wicker cages, for hours until Dr Santori could see us. Plump, kind, careful, wise and vastly expensive, he failed to save cancerous Daisy and she had to be put down. A glorious, easy, dignified way of death if ever I saw one. Forwood, stubborn and untrusting, refused to leave her body with Dr Santori for fear of vivisection, and she was carried, head lolling, in the car boot, back to a private burial up in the
potager,
where the soil was more or less friable and holes were easier to dig, a boulder to mark the place.

Forwood was broody for some weeks, Labo radiant, I relieved to have only one meal a day to prepare. But the brooding gave way to beaming smiles when Dr Santori was summonsed to a ‘quite wonderful litter of boxers with
astounding
pedigrees'. The sire was champion of all Austria. They were five weeks old, in three weeks they'd be ready for collection. Bendo joined us on the hill. Ears unpricked, he therefore never made the Kennel Club in Europe. However, he was a splendid animal and, being a dog, got on pretty well with Labo, who took him off on secret journeys and taught him the facts of life. Forwood was forever trailing round
local farms and smallholdings where there was a bitch on heat. Tiresome, perfectly natural, but smelly often and the cause of severe, and bloody, battles between the village dogs and the team from Le Pigeonnier. However, one was assured, that was life and perfectly all right.

Labo died after about fifteen years of companionship, or thereabouts. It was difficult to age him exactly, for when he arrived in my life, broken and starving, he was about a year or even two. Anyhow, one day, washing up and in a hurry, unthinkingly I chucked a small lamb bone across the kitchen. Too late heard him snap frantically at it, too late saw him gulp it down. Too late all round. He died, a day after, haemorrhaging copiously, in my guilty arms. He was carried up to the
potager,
buried in a deepish hole under a pear tree, his grave marked by another large boulder. End of a chapter. Or series of chapters.

Thus it was only Bendo who was left for Marie-Thérèse to care for when we eventually left for London after Patrick's cautious warning about cancer and his desperate imploring that I should find him a recording of the Cure. The trip was pretty unpleasant. Marie-Thérèse and Gilles, with his hand-rolled shag, and their disgusting baby had to hang on for some weeks while Forwood recovered from a five-hour operation at Edward VII for cancer of the colon. No polyp here – a savage growth. Patrick had been right, and on one of those desolate afternoons wedged anxiously between hospital visits I managed to find his wretched album in a shop in Marylebone High Street. Mission accomplished.

We returned to the hill just as the late-March daffodils nodded and bowed in the coarse grass round the pond, where toads cavorted obscenely in their mating waltz and long
tassels fell with golden splashes from the tall willow I had planted as a wand years before. Spring had arrived: Forwood became stronger, and it seemed more and more unlikely that it would ever come to leaving that beloved patch. We'd surely join the dogs one day, under boulders in the
potager.
Wouldn't we?

We wouldn't.

Every three months we had to make the trip to London to be sure that all was well. I became adept at packing swiftly, neatly, and only cabin baggage. The scent of shag seeped into the Cogolin cotton covers, and the disgusting child grew old enough to throttle at the sight of yet another piece of ineptly mended china lying in the slowly accumulating pile on my desk in the office.

‘Oh dear! Marie-Thérèse …
ma belle
… this
was
a piece of Chelsea …'

‘That's a place, eh?' Wiping the crumb-and-spittled chin of her child.

‘Yes. Some china comes from there. Lovely things. I think, next time, I'd better put everything away, don't you? Gabriella is starting to move about pretty well now.'

‘Ah! You don't
trust
me? I try to stop her! But I can't be here and there all the time, and with the tiled floors!
Voilà,
what do you expect? Poor Gabriella! She didn't mean any harm. Did you,
ma chérie
? I am sure
you
were as naughty when you were her age? Silly china! Naughty china! It could have cut my poor little Gabriella! Eh?'

Cut her throat would have been more to the point and very acceptable. I tactfully removed everything breakable to a height of five feet or more, carried some Staffordshire bits up to my office, and hid some Meissen birds behind boxes in
the wardrobes. Marie-Thérèse looked sullen and vexed, but I would only smile agreeably: I'd need her and her family again in three months. Every visit to London very gradually increased hope, encouraged strength. Nothing had ‘spread'. Only the Parkinson's increased; not violently, just cruelly, so that a cup of tea had now to be in a mug – a tea-cup resembled a mid-Atlantic storm too easily. But we managed: sharing out the jobs, employing outside help for the really tough mowing and pruning, and reassuring ourselves, to ourselves (for we still did not discuss things at this stage), that we would sweat things out.

One day in the market in town, weighing something or other, I found Poteau at my side. He had his string bag and was buying leeks for the evening soup. We talked amiably, discussed our mutual problems: he had been hit by a car while on a ladder trimming his hedge and had suffered various breaks and contusions. ‘The Parkinson's?' he asked. I said not too good. Increasing rather. ‘It will …' he sighed. ‘It will. It is so sad for very active men. He was a
serious
gardener, eh?' I corrected him – he was an
active
one, to be sure – and admitted that he had worked from dawn until dusk, but that he was now desperately distressed at his incapacity to cut, rake, mow, burn and spray. The ants had beaten him, finally; he could no longer carry the poison cylinder: too heavy.