A Short Walk from Harrods (14 page)

Supper at the long walnut table: a giant golden
feuilleté de jambon,
hot from the oven; bowls of salads – tomato, potato, early lettuce, spring onions; cheeses in quantity, if only to prove to the disbelieving British that not
all
French cheeses were Camembert simply because they were round; baguettes crisp, cracked and packed with Normandy butter; wine in brimming goblets. Candles flaring and cries of delight at the arrival of the
bûche de Noël,
a huge ‘log' of chocolate, coffee, sugar and sponge-cake, spiked with a robin or two and filled with promises of good luck.

It was all enormous pleasure. The house was bathed in laughter, music and the chink and scraping of plates as Lady and Madame Bruna cleared, set, and chattered and beamed away into the kitchen. By the time we had all finished and the last car had wavered a little uncertainly down the track into the starry, frosty night, one sort of Christmas was finally over, but the ancient house had been alive again with life and happiness. However, it is really true to say, remembering it as now I do, that the best Christmases were really those when the day was just an ordinary day … not
quite
ordinary. I
remember I always put on a clean shirt, changed my jeans, and there were rather more flowers than I usually allowed myself to buy, anemones in big rough pots, perhaps an azalea from someone, an old Spode footbath planted, ages before, with paper whites and hyacinths. I would bring in the logs at dusk, just as the day faded to night above the mountains, and lights sprang up in the valley and the wind rose. But
ordinary.
That's really what happened every winter evening for a great many years. No one came to feast or for Mass, the dogs slumped snoring before the blazing Godin stove, wide open in vermilion light, Forwood in his chair reading or working at his journal, which he kept faithfully every day. I'd be in my chair scratching away at a drawing for a new book or, more often, correcting and redrafting the work I had done that day in the olive-store office, or studio. Faint on the wind, thin and tinny, the church at Saint-Sulpice clanging the halves and the hour.

It was perhaps pretty dull, although it never occurred to me that it was. I was far too happy to have renounced the cinema, discovered that perhaps I could write a little, which at least paid for some of the bounty with which I was surrounded. It was a very good feeling and even the surprise telephone call, perhaps from some friend in a distant land (I remember Kathleen Tynan once calling from Ontario to send messages of love and bridge the distances) or the family in Sussex, made the day less ‘ordinary', but then it is so easy to take security and peace for granted: to accept them, because they have become quite familiar, as just normal. Expected, usual.

I would know, sitting there with my pen, exactly what the remaining hours of that evening would bring: a supper of a
sort, a few amber whiskies, shoving the reluctant dogs out for their final pee before bed, and then stoking the stove for the morning, laying up the tea trays, closing the last of the shutters, turning keys, winding up the old wall-clock … perfectly normal, routine behaviour stemming from security and contentment.

It never even remotely occurred to me then that all this could be transient, and that as with Bella the cypress tree I had planted with such care and lost years before, this existence was planted above a giant rock buried deep below, and that the ‘roots' would one day strike the rock and that the withering would commence. Never once did I really think of that.

I do now.

After about eight years or so I got bored with all the chairs and fat sofas in the Long Room and wondered, idly at first and then with growing interest, if I should try to have them re-covered. They were fitted and comfortable in coarse blue linen which I once had considered to be suitable for a whitewashed room in a seventeenth-century converted shepherd's house. But after eight years the cornflower blue seemed to fade to a kind of drab blotting-paper haze and looked depressing. Previously the chairs and things had been assembled together in this one long room, all of fifty-six feet long, from many different rooms in the house in England. Thus there were bits of Colefax and Fowler chintz, stripes from somewhere else, and things in tight buttoned velvets. All hideously unsuitable and reminiscent of a furniture display at the Old Times Furnishing Company. And shabby. So into the blue they were buttoned, stitched and frilled, at great cost. Now, I felt, they had to be discarded. The Long Room must be lighter, integrated.

Sitting hunched in the empty fireplace, a glass of beer in my hand, a cigarette hanging from earth-stained fingers, I pondered the ungainly clutter before me. Forwood came down from somewhere above with a clatter and panting of dogs at his heels, went down to the bar cupboard to mix his Bloody Mary. It was, I realized, noon exactly. I was uncertain of the day or the date. They seemed to melt into timelessness on the hill, unless a dentist, lawyer, bank, barber beckoned.

‘What's up? Is this the
last
tin of tomato juice, for God's sake?'

‘More in the cellar. I got it yesterday.'

‘What are you doing?'

‘I'm just thinking.'

‘You are the only person in the world I know who can imbue the word “thinking” with chilling terror.'

‘Well, the chairs and settees. They really are tatty now. Shabby. Tired … And it'll soon be summer and the guests will be upon us …'

‘So?'

‘We ought to have everything recovered. In white.'

‘
White!
With two dogs and wellingtons and mud everywhere!'

‘I suppose it would cost the earth to do?'

‘The earth.'

He came slowly up through the middle room holding his glass with care. ‘I knew I should be alarmed when you said “thinking”. Where do you suppose the money is coming from? And white … Six armchairs and one, two,
three
sofas. Christ!'

‘Well, sell one of the pictures. We never see them, sitting wrapped up in the vaults at Lloyds in Cannes. Now do we? Too valuable to have on the walls, so there they lie, in brown paper and Sellotape. They cost money to store too … Better to have something to look at for the price I pay in storage.'

‘The pictures are supposed to be your “insurance” against disaster.'

‘Well, it
is
a sort of disaster. Living in this awful room. Drab, used, mucky.'

Forwood sat in one of the offending chairs, sipped his drink. ‘How will you go about selling them? Any idea?'

When confronted by difficult questions I rather try to gain
thinking-time. So I wandered down to the bar, opened up another beer. ‘Monte Carlo. That's what I'll do …'

‘Monte Carlo what?'

‘Sotheby's, Christie's. Lots of important dealers down there. Good market; they all have representatives in that hideous little place. All vastly rich, catering for
vastly
rich people.' I joined the small tableau of Forwood flanked by his dogs.

‘What do you have in mind to sell? The Ben Nicholson? Or the Egon Schiele? You'd be mad if you did. They are neither of them “fashionable” at the moment. Wait a little longer. You bought them as an investment, so wait until the time is right. Advice offered. Do as you see fit. Not my pictures.'

‘I'd try for the Schiele, I think. I don't like it much. I think it might sell pretty well down here. The Nicholson is very English; they don't even know who he is in France. Not popular at any rate. And I feel it might be wiser to sit on that for a while. It cost enough; it should be an investment. But the Egon Schiele could go. I think it might make enough to cover all these …'

‘I have doubts,' Forwood said. ‘Your Schiele is about the only “respectable” one he ever drew; painted, whatever. Monte Carlo would far prefer the erotic open-legged ones. Not enough sexuality in yours. No gaunt depravity …'

‘I think it very beautiful.
Reclining Woman.
It came from the Marlborough Galleries: they don't make mistakes.'

‘
You
may be. Selling too soon. Anyway, please yourself. You usually do. But take my advice about the Nicholson. One day it'll be worth a lot. Keep it.' He got up and went out on to the terrace, stood in the brilliant spring sunlight. ‘The cherry trees are pink with bud. I'll have to get down to the ants soon.'

He had an obsession about the little
fourmis d'Argentine,
millions of which swarmed up and down and over the vine, the cherries, the citrus trees in undulating black ropes, and which (it was said by Monsieur Rémy) had arrived in the area at the beginning of the century in the luggage of some idiot Brazilian. (French logic again.) They had, within a very few years, spread up from the coast at Nice and almost destroyed the entire orange and lemon crops, the vineyards and the fruit in the area. The olives, for some reason, had been more or less spared. Forwood's battle against the insects was harsh, unending and passionate.

But I, once I had an idea in my mind, would not be deflected – an all white Long Room: chairs, sofas trim and clean on the highly polished tile and brick floors on which Lady spent hours with her electric buffer and which presently shone conker-brown in the early sunlight. White it should be. Occupied with my overwhelming picture of glittering perfection to come, I paid scant attention to the
fourmis d'Argentine.
A pity, as it turned out.

Various establishments were contacted in Monte Carlo; some even in Geneva. It all took some time and a lot of telephoning, which, by now, had become a little easier. No longer did one have to spell the exchanges phonetically: amazingly we were on automatic by this time and simply dialled numbers.

Eventually three gentlemen were summonsed from three hugely respectable firms and arrived at Le Pigeonnier for the,
apparent,
purpose of valuing its entire contents. For insurance. This way, I reckoned, they'd all get a look at the Schiele and the Nicholson without undue pressure and would give me an idea of their worth. Forwood viewed the whole thing with
lurking suspicion: he didn't reckon that the contents of the whole house amounted to much more than a few thousand, most of it, if not all, having been gathered together from auctions, junk shops and modest antique shops in the Home Counties area. I had an eclectic collection of what he called ‘bogus old masters', some quite good modern works and one or two, like the ones I was presently considering flogging off for yards of heavy white cotton, bought mainly as safe investments. But there really was nothing there to excite any smooth young gentleman from long-established houses. I'd be ridiculed he felt. Wisely.

The first gentleman to arrive bounced slowly and unhappily up the rough track in a white Mercedes, terror-stricken that his springs would bust. They didn't, and he drew up at the
porte d'entrée
in a frantically apprehensive state, only considering his journey back
down
the track.

‘My God! How did you find this place? By helicopter? It has taken me nearly
two hours!
I took the wrong turning after the
autoroute
…' He calmed down with a glass of sherry (he refused anything stronger until he had done his survey) and, armed with a biro and a pad, went off alone, as he wished, and combed the house. I showed him where to go and told him to holler if he needed explanations. He didn't bother.

After about two hours he came down on to the terrace, greeted effusively by the dogs, which clearly alarmed him – rabies and the fear that they might soil his elegant Féraud suit. Forwood, strapped into the vast cylinder of ant poison, straw hat on his head, spray-gun in hand, called ‘Good morning' and I offered a glass of chilled champagne, left over from Christmas or something. He declined but accepted a Perrier and sat, gingerly, in a chair with his pad and biro.

He wore one of those smug, half smiling expressions which indicated clearly that only he knew that he farted honey. I disliked him instantly, for I knew that his pad contained nothing of any interest to him or, for that matter, myself. He had obviously been quietly amused by my English presumption that I was Randolph Hearst or even a minor Paul Getty. However, he retained basic good manners, and instead of just suggesting that I dynamite the house and contents instantly and claim some form of modest compensation, he spoke kindly of a ‘pleasing' Georgian table in the top little bedroom, an ‘attractive', but ‘heavily restored' Carolean chair, a not ‘important' but ‘amusing' buffet and so on and so on. I was wearying of the safe platitudes which accompany rejection. I asked boldly about my two investments and he dismissed the Schiele as ‘interesting but unfashionable' and the Ben Nicholson as ‘unknown English, twentieth century. Abstract, but rather naive.' I was absolutely delighted watching him wince his Mercedes down the track to the coast, irritated greatly by Forwood's quiet smile pumping up the ant-cylinder, and angered by my own stupidity in asking him.

However, he was only one of the three, and over the next weeks they arrived. One behaved precisely in the same manner, drank only a large vodka-tonic, dismissed both paintings with a sad smile and drove away in a BMW; and the third (and last) was a plump, pink young man with impeccable English and slightly exaggerated English suiting, weskits and a nipped-in hacking jacket and brogues, who dismissed the contents of the house as ‘very pleasant things to live with' and of no intrinsic value, but flipped, in a very controlled manner, for the Schiele. Like the others he was fairly dismissive of the Ben Nicholson but did admit that he
had
heard of him. He had worked for two years in London with a major auction house. I liked him instantly. The champagne was reoffered and this time accepted and even Forwood joined us with his Bloody Mary and oil-stained overalls, wreathed in a heavy odour of ant poison.

Having lived in England for two years, Theo (his name) was accustomed to eccentricity. He had also seen me in some movies and was as silly as all the others who were suddenly confronted by a familiar figure of normal height instead of one in Cinemascope or Panavision. We talked easily and comfortably. Schiele, he knew, was unfashionable at the moment, but his time was coming and he knew ‘a gentleman in Geneva' who could be very interested. He asked permission to take it away with him when he left? To ‘offer it up', so to speak?