A Short Walk from Harrods (9 page)

Driving back to Saint-Paul that morning, unwilling to view any other house, I found Simone Signoret at her accustomed place behind the olive wood table in the bar of La Colombe, playing Scrabble. She looked up squinting through cigarette smoke, a Bloody Mary in one hand, a scatter of letters in the other. ‘
Et alors
? Any luck?' I sat on the end of her bench while she placed her letters on the board carefully. ‘
U, et E, et T. Voilà! “Taquet”.
A word. I win.' She put the cigarette in an ash tray.

‘I've found a house.
The
house.'

She nodded slowly, took a sip of her drink, put the cigarette back between her red lips. ‘With land? How much land?'

‘Twelve to fourteen hectares. Four hundred olive trees, an oak wood. A well. Isolated.' ‘Price?'

‘About 75,000.'

Her eyebrows rose an inch. ‘
Francs?'

‘No. No. Pounds. About.'

‘Make an offer. It is agricultural, eh?'

‘Agricultural. Yes. In poor condition.'

‘An offer. It's been a bad year. Remember the
évènements
in May? That has frightened a lot of the locals. Another revolution. Make an offer: they're probably desperate to sell.'

Three days later I took her to have a look at the place. From the outside only. The owner was selling without having informed his wife and family, and until I had made a definite offer I was not allowed to return to the area. We had been round once: not enough time really to be certain, unless you were as mad as I.

Simone came up the track from the bottom road, and also had a look through the oak trees on the top road, and declared that it was ‘
Une
vrai
maison
' and that I should make an offer immediately. There were another twelve hectares adjoining, with a crumbling little house, which I could have for a further eighteen thousand quid and a year's option to buy.

I went up to the bar, ordered a beer from Pierrot. He opened it and poured it, watching me thoughtfully. ‘You have found a house? Perhaps it's good luck today?'

I said that I had found the house I wanted. Told him where. He grinned and wiped the counter down with a sponge. There was a dull flash of silver, or maybe even pewter, from his rather thin mouth.

‘Ah ha! So maybe you will soon be
Monsieur le Propriétaire
? It is possible?'

I said it was possible: I had to make the offer.

‘And
then
you give me a little piece of paper. I will ask Maman if it's good for you. It is useful to know and she is never wrong, not once. She was sure about Madame Julia and meningitis, sure about the sheep Monsieur Isoardi lost, sure about the American boy, you remember? Last summer. Dead in the Vallon Rouge and no one knew where, apart from Maman! You give me your paper. I'll find out for you.
Compliments! Compliments!'

Pierrot, who was somewhere in his early fifties, thin, stocky, balding, gaunt, kind, an excellent barman, heavy handed with the rich tourists, considerate with ‘regulars', had an aged mother (with whom he still lived) who was famous in the village, and indeed the whole district, for her predictions. You might have called her a witch, something like that. But she did have an amazing success with her powers, and even the local police, one was assured quietly, had often asked for her help. All you were required to do was write something on a piece of paper, anything at all – a telephone number, a name, a line of a song – and she would hold it in her hand and consider whatever it was you were demanding. And, eerily, she was as often as not correct. So, anyway, I wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to Pierrot.

I was not superstitious, you understand, merely cautious. But, in any case, after a long session with Forwood, and a longer one with Simone in the evening after dinner, and with a good amount of Estandon Blanc going round the table, I went off to Claire the next morning and made my offer. I did not quibble, agreed what was asked, even though Pierrot
and Simone and Madame Titin, who ran La Colombe, looked shocked that I did not bargain, and was accepted.

When I returned from my mission, dizzy with delight, amazed at my audacity, overcome to think that I was in train to be the owner of a chunk of this glorious land, Pierrot poured me a drink and said, in a low voice, that his Maman considered the deal to be very advisable. I'd live in the house longer than she would live. Daunting, but in some way satisfying. As it happened, she was right. And Pierrot was to die before I had to leave. I often wonder if she ever knew
that.
Probably not. And just as well perhaps.

However, I was really quite relieved, after I had made my offer, to know that Maman's prognosis, or whatever you care to call it, was favourable. I would always have had a slightly uneasy feeling if her silver-fanged son had looked solemn and hissed mournfully that the signs were occluded in his usual, uncomfortable, manner of relaying unfavourable information. Although technically the house was mine, the deal having been signed, witnessed and sealed with a glass of red wine, I was, for various odd reasons, unable to take possession of my property until the following April.

However, I did manage to get into the house once or twice with my good architect Leon, who was straining at the leash to rip down walls, doors, and tear up cracked tiles and broken bricks. But that had to wait; all we could do at that stage was plan and arrange and measure. And wander about the neglected land with a suddenly doubting Simone. She was all in favour of the place, but could not really come to terms with the fact that I had voluntarily left my own country to come and live in France and, after years in the business of theatre and cinema, could give it all up and turn
instead into a peasant. And, what really worried her, good Communist that she was, a very
poor
peasant. After all the years of plenty, as she imagined, would I be able to adjust to a life on the inhospitable limestone and shale of Provence? Would I really relish the splitting of logs, the mowing of the terraces, the pruning of the trees, the digging and sowing, the rough and tumble of true country life? Without very much knowledge of the French language, without newspapers, without even, at the time, a working telephone? I reckoned that I'd manage a great deal better than she and her husband, Montand, would.
They
would have been wildly out of place on my smallholding. I fitted far better.

But she loved the possibilities of the house, the plans and ideas that Forwood and I and Leon had in mind. I think too that she enjoyed our courage, as she called it, and eventually set aside her very real doubts and joined in with us joyfully.

One evening, driving her back to La Colombe, where she lived when she was not working, in preference to Paris, we stopped at her favourite bar in the square, under a great tree, at Vence. During the early days of the German Occupation she and her mother had kept discreetly out of sight here. Being half Jewish she knew it was prudent to fade into the backcloth of life. The hotel-bar gave them a small room. She worked the tables and washed dishes and glasses and survived.

We sat out on the terrace and ordered a Ricard each; they arrived with a jug of water and just one little flask of water which the elderly waiter set before her.

‘
Voilà!
Madame Montand,' he said, ‘do you recall these little things? They are nearly all broken now. You served enough of them in your time!' – a small flask, holding just enough water for one measure of pastis, a laughing, winking
waiter engraved on its side. She gave it to me. To remind me of the evening and her first visit to the house proper, but also as the first gift for the house. A welcoming present. I have no need to be reminded of that signal event. The flask is still with me, a faded moss-rose stuck in its throat. The two of us are the only survivors of that April evening on the bar terrace in Vence. Seeing it gives me infinite comfort.

When I said that memory comes to me, now, in snatches, it is depressingly true. I chucked all my diaries and papers some time ago, so there is no possibility of being able to sit down and, say, open a diary of 1972 and look up the first Sunday in March or July, or whenever. There is no jerk, no jog, of remembrance there. I can't refer back to anything. So I suppose it is rather foolish to try and fill a book with memories brought back by small things like Simone's pastis flask, or a snatch of song, a drifting scent, a forgotten envelope with half-forgotten handwriting.

However, I do remember many, many things – vividly. I am just not always quite certain of exactly when they occurred. I don't really think it matters much? As long as one remembers a moment, a face, a situation, a planting of trees, a thread of music, the fabric of one's life is still intact, even though the pattern or the dyes are faded. But odd
things
trigger memory. A plastic bag, just now, swinging on the handle behind the door in this small London kitchen. I don't know what is in it, truthfully, it's just a plastic bag with modest bulges; probably the pickling onions. But instantly I am off down the path to Madame Meil with the goat-bag, another plastic bag which always hung on the handle of the kitchen door in a different house, a different country. But I
remember it with pin-point clarity. I should, after all, because it was my usual chore almost every evening after having fed the dogs. For some reason, which I now no longer recall, the dogs got fed at five o'clock in the afternoon, not earlier. Perhaps a vet gave that advice? Perhaps it was simply because of the time I gave shelter to the ruin of an abandoned puppy, starving, with shattered leg, ribs like barrel hoops, festooned with worms (literally) and bemedalled with pussy sores. In my kitchen outside Rome one late afternoon, about five o'clock, I, most unwisely as it turned out, gave in to animal supplication and fed him. I say unwisely merely because from that instant on Labo remained. And stayed beside me for fourteen years. It was a brutal struggle between us for survival at first. However, that was dogs' feeding-hour, and it remained so from then on. While they snuffled bowls round the kennels, I took a plastic bag stuffed with all the edible kitchen refuse: green stuff, cold spaghetti, stale bread, plate scrapings, gone-bad peaches, bruised apples, fish heads – whatever a goat would eat a goat got. And as far as I was aware, the only things that a goat did not eat were barbed wire, broken glass or ten-inch nails. Everything else went down easily.

Anyway, that's what Madame Meil always said. She and her husband, Emile, lived in a farm down the lane from me on the de Beauvallon border. It had been an attractive-looking little place: outhouses, haystacks, tin baths hanging, a huge cart, a rusty tractor, scabby mongrel dogs yapping – all clustered round the main house, unremarkable but shaded by two gigantic olive trees, five or six hundred years old, which towered over the whole collection from their position on a high bank on the road just above. You really couldn't see
very much for the deep silver-green leaves and the gnarled branches. A flash of tile, a pink wall, the privy roof cushioned with house-leeks, the kennel, a pitchfork thrust into a straw stack. Fragments … rather like my memories.

The Meils farmed diligently. She had her chickens and ducks, he his goats: a splendid herd of sable-brown beasts with black faces and hoofs. Very handsome. I don't remember what they were called, but they were rare, valuable, and produced an abundance of milk for the cheeses which Madame Meil made and sold in the village on Saturdays. I was not tremendously impressed by her mahogany brown hard-worked hands. The fingernails hooped in mourning, knuckles calloused, unwashed always. It was extremely difficult to avoid the offered cheese when I took down the goat bag. I liked goat cheese – liked it greatly. I was just a bit anxious about the proximity of the privy to the shed where the cheese was made. There was the most amazing hum of insect life emanating from that privy. The door fitted well, but had a heart cut into the front at eye level. So that, I assumed, if one was occupied, one still could see anyone approaching. Quite often as I hung the bag on a small spiky branch of one of the olive trees, I would be caught by Madame emerging from the humming privy, tucking in her pinafore, and pulling up her thick grey stockings. ‘
Ah! Voilà! Monsieur Fauchon! Ah bon …'

Fauchon is the most famous grocer in Paris, perhaps in the world, and supplies delicacies of all kinds to the rich. I was, of course, Monsieur Fauchon because I brought delicious things down to the goats: the spaghetti, bread, stale cake and so on. It was
then
that I
had
to avoid the gift of a cheese offered in hard-worked hands straight from the privy. It was ungallant
of me, I know, but as Forwood always pointed out, tetanus or typhoid can kill, dysentery and meningitis aren't a whole lot of fun either, and so it was wiser to invent any lie rather than accept a gift so primed with lingering, awful death.

‘But no cheese? Ah,
dommage
… You should have a hat!' she said. Her silver teeth catching the sun, she brushed her greyish hair from a nut-brown forehead. Green-bellied flies hummed and droned round the scaling pine door with the cut-out heart behind her.

‘I know, Madame … I was in a hurry.'

‘But in this sun,
patron
! It's strong at this time of afternoon. Five hundred metres up, we are here. Eh? Dangerous. A hat will keep your head cool and you would also be able to shade your eyes.'

I started up her dusty garden path, past a foam of cosmos, a tumble of Bourbon roses. Apart from goats, chickens and the ducks, Madame gardened wildly, and everything she stuck in flourished; she just literally pushed things in anywhere and they were instantly ablaze with bloom. Very frustrating. I never had much success with such nonchalance and trust. The little garden she had dug out of her farmyard was as vulgar, gaudy and as unlikely as a Helen Allingham print.

‘Your roses this year! Madame! Fantastic …'

‘The goats eat them. Goats are idiots. My man has just put up an electric fence on the lower pasture. You didn't see him?'