A Short Walk from Harrods (6 page)

I held up a fist full of francs. ‘For last week's stuff!'

She wiped her face with both hands.
‘Scusa! Scusa! … Momento
…' she said and I leant against the mulberry watching a stream of ants swarming up and down its trunk.

The door opened, the bamboo curtain was parted.
‘Prego
… enter …' She did not look directly at me; by the sag of her shoulders she was resigned and hopeless.

‘Oh Madame! Excuse me … You have such sadness?'

She sat heavily in a chair by the table, head in hands.
'Ecoute moi
…' and she was off.

Well, it really wasn't all that much of a disaster or a catastrophe. All that had happened was that her washing-machine had blown up. It was old, out of date, there were no spares, it was unmendable. That's all. But, of course, for Bruna Mandelli, with her clients and large family, it was disaster enough.

Her face was dragged with grief, her eyes red from weeping, her maroon eyebrows smudged into two livid bruises. So distracted had she been that she had even forgotten to remove her pink plastic rollers. I gave her the money she was owed and said that I would instantly go into town and purchase a new washing-machine, modern, with a full guarantee. She uttered a little scream of horror, covered her mouth with her hands, shook her head frantically. ‘No! No!
Quelle horreur! Jamais!
Never, never …'

I felt as if I had made a fumbled attempt at rape; then of course I realized that I had desperately insulted her as a
woman, as a laundress and a person of deep, intense pride. She hiccupped with anger until I explained in my poor French (you really do need a bit more than menu French for this sort of deal) that it was essential for me to get my laundry done, that I would purchase the machine for us all, and that she would do all my washing and ironing absolutely free until such time as she had paid me back. I thought that that made sense?

Gradually, as she unpinned her rollers, she conceded that it
might
make sense to her. Without the machine she'd be pretty desperate herself, and gravely out of pocket. I reminded her that the priest would be in despair too. All those vestments and the altar stuff? Finally, with a flicking of nervous looks, a blowing of her nose, wiping her face with hard-worked hands, she told me the name of the best electrics shop in town, and with a helpless shrug of resignation, but a verbal agreement that she would do my laundry free until she was out of my debt, she went into the kitchen area, brought out the budgerigar cage and hung it on its hook outside the front door.

As we drove away I looked back and saw that she was carefully arranging a teacloth over it to shade it from the sun. A sign, I felt certain, of acceptance. Storms in the Mediterranean are quite often short and violent.

Two days later, after a deal of tipping here and there, and an instant cheque, not a credit card (viewed with grave suspicion in town) a perfectly gigantic German creation, blinding in white enamel and chrome, was delivered, and fitted, in Quartier des Groules. It appeared to do just about everything except the ironing and the sewing on of buttons. Otherwise it was a miracle machine.

One morning, the day after Robin and Angela his wife had finally managed to get taken off to the airport, with oxygen cylinders, care and attention in abundance, and were headed for London and the final clinic, I opened the front door on to the terrace to let the desperate dogs out to do their pee (we had overslept from sheer exhaustion). I almost tripped over a package wrapped up in red and gold paper, a hoarded piece of last Christmas apparently, to judge by the gold stars and holly sprigs. Inside, a boxed bottle of Chivas Regal.

There was no message.

Everyone knew it as ‘the moon country', and that was long before Neil Armstrong set foot on the thing and proved them right. It was a savage, strange landscape, a desolate limestone plateau one thousand metres up. It looked as if a tremendous wall had been pushed over by a giant and had fallen, quite flat, cracked but unbroken, across the mountain top. It stretched for acres, about a half-hour drive from the house, up a sharply twisting road, which gave some people acute vertigo and others what they called ‘water brash', so that they were compelled to stare desperately at the back of the person in front and dared not look out of a window or through the windscreen. Coming down, of course, was worse. Usually eliciting stifled moans, swallowing gulps and pleas for a rest. As I didn't suffer either from vertigo or travel sickness, I was fairly soulless.

In the summer months, from May until the end of September, the house became a cheap
pension.
People I had hardly nodded to in a different life suddenly wrote effulgent letters saying that they'd ‘be in your area about then, so could we possibly be simply dreadful and ask you to give us a room/ bed/board/meal, whatever?' and it was difficult to refuse. Of course, family and friends were quite different, and hugely welcome. But the others were a bit of a pain, frankly. They also cost a good deal. Although, to be sure, some did bring gifts in kind. Like a cheese, bottles of untried wine, fruits or, worst of all, fresh fish from the market in Nice or Cannes or some other port which, by the time they got it to me, had
gone off. And anyway, usually (always in fact) their meals had already been planned and catered for, so there was nothing to be done with the fresh ‘gone off' fish but chuck it. However, people
did
try.

And, very often, their company on the terrace in the evenings, with a glass of wine and the drifting scent of good tobacco under the vine, was comforting.

However, it was the usual thing to do to go up to the moon country after lunch. Unless it was absolutely blistering (July and August were hellish), they were stuffed into cars and led up the twisting road in order, I always insisted, to aid their digestion. The fact that many longed to throw up the three-course lunch just consumed was neither here nor there. Anyway, to me. The dogs, Labo and a boxer, Daisy, they too didn't give a fig: their screams and shrieks at the mere mention of the word ‘motor car'; the very slightest move towards leash and collar turned them into raging tigers.

So we'd set off. Once on top, in the clear, cool air of the plateau, people began to regain their balance and almost quite liked the whole operation. Apart from the descent, that is. However, in the winter it was all very different. The days were shorter, lunch took a little longer, we left the washing-up and went off in that hour or two left just before the light began to fade and the sky drained of colour and the evening star sprang into the pale, clear, winter emptiness as if a switch had been snapped on, heralding the night.

Then we clambered across the corrugations of the honeycombed limestone, the screes of shale and fallen rocks, the low clumps of thyme, box and juniper hiding in crevasses, and round the rims of little sunken fields which had been, literally, scratched, centuries ago, from pockets in the harsh
land, raked and tended, each with a cairn of stones and shards ploughed up from the thin earth.

There were no trees at this height – the wind saw to that – just stunted writhen pines, straining to exist, clinging desperately with exposed roots like aged, knuckled fists clutching the steep sides of the scratchings of fallow soil.

In the early spring, clumps of hellebore hung acid-green bells in clusters along the goat tracks, or a wind-wrenched bramble thrust tiny buds against the aching ice-blue sky. In the little fields, or dells, the new barley and wheat were a green gauze, as thin and sparse as a hair transplant. Crows and ravens stalked about grubbing, or seeking twigs and straw for nests. Sometimes, but very rarely and only when the dogs had capered miles away, you might catch a fleeting sight of a wildcat, but they melted into the thyme and rock-hugging juniper and myrtle. And one was never really quite certain that they had been there, otherwise the silence sang, and only the distant tonkle of a goat bell or the very vaguest whisper of trickling water from a hidden spring broke the perfect glory of the silence.

The summer, of course, was quite another matter. Fat green lizards baked on the oven slabs of limestone, vipers swung and curled away into the cracks and crannies, and in the places where the little springs had made modest pools among the tumbled stones, tadpoles wriggled and dived in the crystal, cold water.

However, in the winter these same springs and pools froze solid, looking shiny, like molten glass spilled across the rocks, dragging ragged curtains of icicles where they had started to trickle over ledges, until the frost had stilled them and frozen movement.

But in early spring, and before the day trippers arrived from the coast, on the high plateau the landscape was benign and sweet. Every patch of grassland was sheeted with great drifts of blue and gold crocuses, white narcissi, cowslips, clover, scarlet anemones and, in the sheltered cracks of the rock, clumps of tiny cyclamen: their combined scents on still days was overpowering, the humming of a trillion bees foraging for nectar filled the air.

Sometimes, driving up from the plain, one could be in for a surprise, although very often I was warned ahead. Washing up at the sink, I could see the top of the mountain from the window plumed with cloud, which meant that the voyage up would be hazardous. Zig-zagging up and turning at one of the steep bends, there would suddenly be a solid wall of dank, dripping, drifting fog. Visibility down to a couple of metres, sidelights on; windscreen-wipers squealed and whispered, moisture dripped and beaded and the rare car coming towards one would inch slowly past in the thick gloom, lights faded to amber through the mist, number-plates almost unreadable. The silence was odd. Profound, empty. One felt absolutely alone, isolated, with no connection to the world so recently left behind on the plain below. And then, very slowly, the fog would rip into shreds; it would tear and rend, whirl and fray, melt into tatters and suddenly, within an instant, it had gone, spiralling aloft into a sky as clear and sparkling as polished glass, blue as cornflowers. No clouds. Glittering, brilliant, washed and sharp-edged.

At the top of the pass a new world lay ahead. Looking back, the great bank of fog loomed sullenly, a sombre blanket of boiling cloud, dark and impenetrable, cold, clinging. It always amazed me that we had driven safely through.

The air up there was cool, the distant hills softer, greener, the far mountains of the pre-Alps jagged against the porcelain blue. At the far edge of the great tumble of limestone rock, proper fields, not the scratched little dells in the stone, were lush with serried rows of potatoes, peas, beans, carrots. People worked among the crops, stooping, striding, stacking boxes brimming with ‘early' vegetables for the markets down on the plain, exhausted now by the heat. But, in time, even up there at this height, in June and July, all this bounty was shrivelled by the burning sun. The spring flowers went as swiftly as they had arrived and succumbed to the relentless heat in the high, pure air.

Up there the houses, too, altered. No longer Roman-tiled roofs and vines for shelter, no olives: now sharp-roofed chalets, with wooden balconies and log stacks amidst sentinel firs set among beech and poplar trees. A mountain landscape and a mountain people. Provence was always surprising.

Madame Pasquini was the
chef de bureau
at the post office in Saint-Sulpice. A trim little woman, she managed her
bureau
with enormous efficiency, dealt with stamps, pensions, parcels and the telephone cabinet in the corner of her small room from behind a high counter. One of the pleasantest sounds I could hope to hear was the
Bang! Bang! Bang!
as she franked the day's mail ready to be sacked and collected by the yellow mail van for the sorting office. It meant that I had not actually ‘missed the post'.

Her office was sparse: apart from the counter, some scales, a pickle jar of wild flowers and the telephone, there was nothing there to make one linger. A deliberate effect: even her little pot-bellied stove for use in the bitter winter was
well behind the counter so no one could huddle round it and have a chat. She was far too brisk and busy for that sort of life. When I first got to the village she was, if anything, distant. I was unfamiliar with the cost of stamps and the various bits and pieces of money. I know I often irritated her, but she did her best to say nothing. And it was only when she discovered that I had obtained my
carte de séjour,
allowing me to stay in the area of the Alpes Maritimes for six months, and after my indication that my stay would be permanent, that she eased up on coolness and allowed herself a flinty smile. That vanished, the flintiness, after an encounter we had up in the moon country. Vanished for ever.

She had a little red Renault and a large, hairy dog. I don't know what sort of dog it was … a mix-up, but it was aged and she adored it. She felt secure with it curled up on a strip of grubby carpet at her feet. No one would cosh her or rob the till with Joujou about. The fact that Joujou had a sparse allowance of yellow teeth and rheumy eyes and had to be well into late, if not old, age seemed not to have occurred to her. Or perhaps it had? Anyway, she set it aside, as people do, and refused to consider the facts before her.

Driving through the limestone rocks one Sunday afternoon, I saw the red Renault parked far ahead by a stone basin into which a spring gently bubbled. Up on the top of the ridge, hard against the skyline, a tiny figure windmilled frantic arms.

‘I think that is Madame Pasquini, waving away up there,' I said.

‘Fool of a woman! Run out of petrol probably. Women. Honestly, hopeless about cars …' Forwood was always dismissive of women drivers, but he did, that time at least,
start to slow down as the figure up on the ridge came scrambling towards us, arms flailing, legs skittering about on the rock and shale.

She was calling out, but for the moment (windows closed, dogs squealing with excitement, the air conditioning belting – it was the first really hot day of spring) she was soundless. I got out and began to clamber up towards her, waving back, I suppose to reassure her that I was on my way? Idiotic the things one does.