A Short Walk from Harrods (24 page)

Or otherwise there were apartments for Rich Sheikhs – with the emphasis on the capital letters – Glittering, carpeted, gold and pale blue, miles of marble, yards of ruched pink silk. At no time, in the five months I trailed about looking at dreadful places, was there even one with a balcony, or one which looked out on to trees. Anything green. Even the sky would do.

Nothing until someone suggested a family in the Swedish or Danish embassy who had finished their tour of duty and had a ‘ravishing' flat on Parc Monceau. Apart from all the nannies, and the romping children screaming up and down on swings and slides, the Parc was in the right area and fairly green – for Paris. I mean, there were trees, and shrubs, and paths to walk about on if one wanted to walk. A vaguely Proustian atmosphere. One might have seen Swann or Odette.

But the flat was hideous, the top part of an old house, facing north. No one had done anything to it, apart from smoke and eat in it, for some years. The Scandinavians are not all, as this awful place proved, house-proud or even, for that matter, very clean. Lady would have had a fit. I did.

And that, with a moment or two of delight, was the ‘even tenor of our days', as they say. The moments of delight came from seeing friends, dining with or lunching with them in brasseries or restaurants. One is seldom asked to anyone's house or apartment. So one lived in suits, clean shirts, polished shoes, a good tie. All day. Every day. ‘Restaurant clothes', I called them. Olga, Charlotte, Jean-Michel, Rolande, Loulou, Jane, Benedict and Dominique were all fun, all loving, all
wonderfully kind. But they all of them worked, had families, kept house, marketed, telephoned, wrote and were, quite simply, occupied in living their lives. The time
they
could spare was limited, and splendid as it was to be with them, there was little that I could contribute in the way of conversation. I hardly ever went anywhere: no theatre, rarely a cinema, never a concert. Sitting for any length of time among a lot of people panicked Forwood, used, as he had been, to the silence and freedom of the hill. As, indeed, it panicked me. We walked once as far as the Left Bank and I bought some prints on the Quai Voltaire, for the new flat. Its first gift. Only we never found a flat. Nothing was considered to be possible, or else affordable.

Once, I remember, we walked in arctic crystal-clear air, under a sky the blue of a thrush's egg, beneath tall chestnut trees rusting slowly in autumn frost, and down at the Rond Point, where the gardens were massed with crimson, yellow and bronze chrysanthemums, the police held us back as Monsieur Mitterrand raced up the broad avenue, outriders roaring, huge black cars following, sirens screaming, lights flashing, heading for the Arc de Triomphe to lay his wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was the 11th of November. Armistice Day.

‘It's Armistice Day. Did you know?' I said.

Forwood pulled the big beaver collar tight round his neck. ‘Don't get chilled. Standing here. It's really bloody freezing. Let's wander back,' he said.

So we did. We drifted back up the Champs-Elysées among the crowds surging up to the Arc. Children were running, a girl was laughing, holding on to her lover's, or husband's, arm, there was the sound of distant military music, and it was
just exactly twenty years to the day and hour that I had first looked through the oak trees down to Le Pigeonnier. But I didn't say anything. No point.

We turned back to rue de Berri, and the champagne bucket, as distant guns boomed out for the silence. I reckon that he knew.

I can't remember what colour the wallpaper in the little sitting-room was. God knows, I should remember it: I stared at it for long enough. Five months all told. I remember the carpet was green; the silk curtains a slate green. Can't at all remember the walls. I suppose, like so many other dreary things, I have wiped them from memory. Sometimes I saw my face in my bathroom mirror and caught it with surprise. So
that's
what anxiety looks like? Blank, no worry-lines, just flat. I've always thought anxiety, worry, made one frown. It doesn't really. If it's very serious the face just goes sort of slack. I must remember that; another clove to stick in the orange of my observing mind, to make up a rough pomander of ‘visual odour'. I haven't wiped those faces from my mind. I marked them at the time for later use. I suppose all players, and writers, do that? Squirreling bits of self away. I can't remember the sitting-room walls but I can remember the curtains in the bedroom. I suppose because I got fierce bronchitis twice, and lay in coughing misery for nights. Desperate that I was keeping Forwood awake, that I would be exhausted the next day. Which I was. The curtains were yellow. Parakeets looping about with blue and red balloons and spiralling ribbons. A wide repeat. I looked at them all night through hacking, barking coughs and tears of anguish streaming. Wavering, yellow, blurry silk.

And then there was Christmas. I remember that too: but this is
all
about remembering bits and pieces, as I have told you. The first prick of horror that we were moving towards the festive season was a great jar of berried holly being set up on a pedestal. Then a tree, simpering, twinkling, wreathed in gold loops of tinsel. The first hideous poinsettia in the bar, ivy strung about, a branch of mistletoe over the telephonist in the corner. A hotel Christmas, if you are a resident anyway, isn't a great deal of fun. The menu alters a little and more seasonal fare is displayed. But young people never seem to stay in hotels. Only the old do. The young go to the mountains to ski. Anyway they do in France. There is a spurt of excitement just before Christmas Mass on Christmas Eve, and then the silence settles like dust and stays there thickly laid until the eve of New Year. That is marginally jollier.

There was a staff party, and I was made a member of the Concierges' private club, a rare honour. I was presented with the two crossed keys in gold, which was very pleasant. And Charlotte Rampling had invited us to lunch with her family and the children on ‘the day' and we drove back through snow and sleet just as the starlings swung into the great wall of ivy opposite, squealing and chattering as dusk fell. We didn't fare too badly for the first Christmas away. Apart from bronchitis twice and steadily increasing Parkinson's.

Forwood had a desperate and touching belief in his professor in Nice, so we bundled off there once more and Martin looked as he always looked: unfathomable. He'd be in London, perhaps, in February. He had a paper to read at some hospital. Perhaps we could meet there? Perhaps another specialist might be approached? Perhaps. Everything was moving into perhaps-time. Unsettling.

But to London anyway for the three-monthly check and that mainly proved that getting to London from Paris was not a quick flip of half an hour or so. It was almost five hours from door to door. Exhausting for a sick man. The consultation in Harley Street was not, this time, worrying, but it was not, on the other hand, comforting. Perhaps we ‘might do better to stay in London for a time?' ‘How long? What is “a time”?' Polite shrugs. How could anyone possibly tell me?

The bills at the hotel, although most generously adapted to my situation, were still tremendous by the standards of life at Le Pigeonnier. The taxis and air fares, the consultants' fees, the pills and potions all added up to a frightening amount, weakening disastrously the supporting beams of my ever-optimistic structure, which began to sag now quite a lot. Added to which the drabness of an inactive life, the routine of meals, wandering off to look at hideous and unsuitable apartments, living in cramped, if elegant, quarters were desperately bad for morale.

And now that Forwood could no longer, with safety, really be allowed to go for his walk round the block unattended, it made life cruelly restricting for him. He was able to go down to the lobby on his own, provided he used the lift, and took his stick, and one morning he came back with the mail. A packet from London. From the BBC. A script for a TV film. To be shot, over seven weeks, in London starting early March. It just seemed that fate might have had a hand in things.

‘What's it like? Any good? I'd be surprised …'

‘It's not bad. It's literate. Well written. I am not being asked to play someone's grandfather or a druid.'

‘Is it a decent part. Size, I mean?'

‘Three main characters. Yes. I mean I'm not supporting or anything.'

He read it, as he always did every film script or play I had ever accepted, and passed his opinion. Whatever his opinions, I always made the final decision. ‘I'd think it was quite a decent idea. I'd go for it, if the director is any use. Do we know him?'

Knew of, had all the details to hand: splendid Eileen Atkins had agreed, they were trying to get Lee Remick to commit. She would if I would. In that little sitting-room I suddenly knew this was a chance I'd not be offered again. The chance to get out of the welcoming, caring hotel, out of the deadening routine of a non-life, and a reason (if I really needed one) for going back to England. I now realized, fully, that I could no longer avoid the obvious. Life was shredding away rapidly. I would have to accept. Pack the fourteen cases (fifteen with a large box which had arrived one day with ‘JAFFA ORANGES' on its side) and get up and move on to something with at least the chance of a future.

‘I'll say yes. Okay?'

‘Okay. Fine.'

‘You know what it means. Actually? Brutally?'

‘Back. I know that. Accept the thing. Let's start up again. There is still time.'

‘Well, we can always come back. I'll rent a house somewhere. Short lease. Chelsea area. If things work out we can come right back, it'll be summer then, easier to flat-hunt here.'

‘Don't pretend. We won't come back. This part is over. Call them and accept.'

*

A long time ago, outside Senequier on the port at Saint-Tropez, toying with an early drink, I saw, with a slight fall of pleasure I confess, a young actor I barely knew (I had once worked with his stepfather) preening along on this bright September day with a tall, vivid, red-headed girl wearing not very much at all, but what there was were pink and white dots, and it was a bikini. That's how long ago it was. Seeing me he waved and bounded towards my table, the bikini'd girl dragged protestingly (from shyness) behind him. His wife, it transpired, and how were we all? We were all delightfully well, thanks, and do sit down. So they did. I mean, what else?

We all shook hands, ordered drinks, laughed a good deal and were still happily together in a restaurant on the port much later eating lobsters. Maude (my name for her) and I have remained devoted friends ever since. We have been through pretty well every eventuality, good and bad, that life can chuck at one and survived intact. A friendship of that kind is for treasuring.

Her regular friends call her merely by her surname, Mel-ford; her given name is Jill, which dates her and doesn't suit her. I call her Maude because she more resembles a Gaiety Girl than a suburban Jill. Maude Melford is very music hall and jolly. And, with some reluctance at first, she accepted the name and it has stayed thus.

A long preamble, this, but she is a fixture in my life, so it is essential to know her. She acts, she decorates, she can fix fuses and cook up a feast, gardens and plants things, can paint walls and clean floors, muck out ponds, knows every auction room in town as well as half the estate agents. She will drive you to hospital, to a funeral, a garden party. She is gay, bawdy,
sentimental and joyful – in short, she is a sort of Swiss Army knife: screwdriver to scissors, corkscrew and nail file. And extremely attractive. Every man should have one. Who else to call from Paris, therefore, once I knew that I was taking the show on the road again, than Maude?

‘Maudie? Hi. It's me.'

‘Hi! How's “me”? Problems?'

‘In one. I'm in Paris, as you know. Coming back.'

A longish pause.

‘What do you need?'

‘A house. Short lease. Small. Hasker Street, Markham, Bourn? One of those.'

‘I see. Anything else?'

‘South facing. With a garden if possible?'

‘Goodness me. You
do
ask a lot of your friend.'

‘Furnished, darling.'

‘Guessed that. Medical reasons or work?'

‘Bit of both. But work. In a month, six weeks.'

‘You've been away so long you probably don't know how impossible it is to get anything like that. Unless you are very, very rich?'

‘I'm not. Poor after five months here. Pennies.'

‘You
are
in for a surprise. Where do I call you and when?'

I packed the fourteen suitcases in the cramped little sitting-room, gave away enough old clothing to fill a single Oxfam depot to the hotel staff, most of whom, below stairs, were from Vietnam or Algeria, and left for the airport in two enormous cars. It had been suggested that with so much luggage it would have been wise, and more comfortable for Forwood, if we took the train and the ferry. But I insisted on flying, thinking it less tiring, so we did. And that evening, as
we slumped into chairs in a small suite at the Connaught, exhausted but safe, with a large drink each, we watched the news on television.

A ferry capsized in Zeebrugge – Fate obviously had some other trick in store for us. Maude had found a house, just what I had asked for, garden and all, for a very fair rent. The owner, a chum of hers, lived in the basement, I got the rest. It was an agreeable place altogether, and Maude sped about with sheets, soap, magazines and flowers, and after two or three days at the Connaught (to deal with the BBC and the television people) we moved to Chelsea. A new chapter started.

It seemed to me that the line had been traced on the map of the future and that it would be unwise to ignore the route laid down. I was now near (within walking distance of) doctors, there were friends close by, Maude took me to Safeway's and Tesco, explained the prices and money, and we walked round Peter Jones, rented a television set, bought some tea, milk, sugar and so on, and, finally, I unpacked and started to settle down until I learned, too late to weep, that the entire film was now to be made in
Cardiff.
Not London after all. I had signed a contract; we were too far in. Cardiff it had to be, and Cardiff and its alarming Holiday Inn it was. Except that I insisted on getting back to London every weekend. I got to know the motorway extremely well. So one commuted between a plastic and veneer suite five floors up in the Holiday Inn, overlooking a car park and a Private Bookshop, and I started work on my first British-made product for over twenty years.