A Short Walk from Harrods (33 page)

Tuesday, loth October
Bandol

Jane, Bertrand and I worked after dinner at the script. Hacking away. Looks are more useful than words. The cinema is a visual medium. One brilliantly exchanged look between two people is worth far more than two paragraphs of sweet polemic. Yesterday Bertrand patted my head, kissed Jane. We felt like teacher's pets and liked it. I wrote him a letter last night to tell him just how amazing he is, if I simply
said
it he'd forget it in half an hour. I want him to remember. So I write it down. The written words linger. Spoken they evaporate.

Saturday, 14th
Bandol

A weekend. Alone. Oh well. Many stage actors insist that cinema work is not acting at all. Dead easy, boring. All that waiting about. You can do it reading the small ads in the
Evening Standard.
That's why, I suppose, they are seldom any good on the big screen but make it on TV? Every character actor becomes a star on the small screen. For a little time. Bertrand works in ten- to twelve-minute takes. A whole magazine. Exciting for theatre-trained players. Tough on the others. Exhausting but nerve-wracking if one makes a titchy error. All that work over again, and Jane and I overlap and ad-lib a lot. A luxury in which I revel. Forbidden in my early days in the British cinema. The script was always sacrosanct. And inevitably stilted. Mostly they were written by elderly ladies of both genders. Disasters all.

Brock, amazingly, has just called to say that he and Kimbo are to make me a great-uncle! Do I mind? Wow! Great
!

Wednesday, 11th
Bandol

Shooting in the dreary bar of a closed-up hotel. Jane leads me with amazed joy into an even drearier little room adjoining, which contains a plaque stating that Katherine Mansfield wrote two novels here. I wonder if she died here too? It's so depressing and dark. Perhaps in her day Bandol was glorious? Now, like so much along the coast, it has all gone. A vast marina full of hideous yachts bobbing and swaying, gladioli in jars on all the cockpit tables. The standard yachting decoration. High-rise flats where the pines once were. The present inhabitants, anyway at this time of year, all over sixty, in floral prints, sagging shorts, ‘cardies', both sexes, hillocked with varicose veins. I trudge through this lot every evening to the harbour to try and get an English paper. Only the
Financial Times
or the
Mirror.
Both useless. Take
Newsweek
at vast expense. Hobble back here in the fading evening. Walking still tiring, breathing pretty breathy. I'll manage.

Tuesday, 17th
Bandol

The location, an empty hotel up the hill, is hellish to get to. I drag up each day on foot. It's only minutes from my hotel but might be at the end of the earth. Leg bloody painful. So have to rest every twenty yards or so. Feel so silly just standing in the gutter resting my slightly withered ‘relic'. And I gasp like a fish out of water. I now understand absolutely what the phrase means. My French, however, after three years in England, is coming back at last. A great joy. The kindness of the crew almost makes me blub, if I were the blubbing kind. Tonight they have all gone off to the dailies. I never do. Never have. The feeling on set is pretty good; we manage to work about sixteen hours a day with no draining tea-breaks. Jane
and I share one room in the empty hotel to dress in, there is a single working loo, no seat or bolt on the door. Otherwise it's into the pines. Wouldn't do for some. The single loo is for us all, crew included. So it does get rather ‘noisy'. I can't imagine any of the bruvvers in the UK accepting this deal.

Bertrand works very much like Visconti; he is the nearest director I have come to who has that kind of magic with his players. A complete understanding of the mind at work. I really am beginning to enjoy this. Thank God, or Fate, that Bea made that daft telephone call for Mr XYZ's number. The thaw has started. I really do believe.

Friday, 20th
Bandol

Last night Bertrand sent me a ‘love letter'. Slipped it under my door when I was down at dinner. ‘You made me weep during the dailies tonight. I do not do that.' I was touched and very happy. However, the dailies are screened in a clapped-out little flea-pit in the next town. The sound is out of sync, the picture bleeds across the proscenium curtains and the walls. It only has a regular screen, and the colour is a washed out navy blue and yellow. So how can he tell? Maybe
that
is what made him weep? Lab reports from Paris, however, are excellent and full of praise for us all. So that's all right. Perhaps?

Thursday, 26th
Bandol

A difficult day today: we are getting tired. Ton-Ton, the sound engineer, can't speak a word of English but knows instinctively when a scene has been right. He just sticks up a thumb high above his head, earphones clapped to his ears. Jane and I play some of our
scenes in English only. Ton-Ton has a desperate job on this location. Gulls screaming continuously, ring-doves cooing in the trees all round the place. They have colonized the woods. A half-hourly ferry chugging
slowly
across the bay to the islands, motorbikes of yobbos who rev up just to infuriate him and screw up a take. Plus helicopters and Mirage jets from the base at Toulon! It plays hell with intimate scenes. Ton-Ton fires a vast gun into the air in fury. This scatters the birds and sends the gulls into a frenzy because they fear that one of their number has been killed. Peace until the next ferry; we try to grab a scene of ‘heart-breaking intensity', or something, but the gulls return in a dreadful squadron and dive-bomb us with rage. It's all tremendous fun. But a great deal better than sitting alone in my room. Life is a cabaret, they say … Never been a truer phrase.

Friday, 27th
Bandol

The last day, apart from one day in Cannes next week, arrives. They usually do. Chaotic, grabbing bits and pieces, extra lines to record for voice-overs, we all do everything we can except actually say ‘Goodbye' or ‘That's a wrap.' It isn't anyway, but only a token crew will come to Cannes. So it
is
the end for most, and it has been intensely happy. We have been a family for weeks. Now there is nothing left to do but start wrecking the sets and packing. Tavernier wandered away, alone, down the dusty lane to his hotel. I called out after him and he stopped and we embraced in silence. Very firmly. I watched until he was out of sight hidden by the oleanders and pine trees, walking alone down to the sea. It has been a wonderful, healing time for me. Now it's all over. Funny way to earn a living, I reckon. Filming. And this is the very last I'll ever make. It's a splendid way to finish.

I abandoned the Smith's diary about then, just entered dates and times and things, so I rather flounder now, relying on my memory – not awfully good at the best of times. I do remember that the last day of work was on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes at dawn, to avoid the traffic noises and crowds, and that we played a key scene, Jane and I, in the half-light of the morning, clutching our buttocks with apprehension while someone held up the traffic on the Croisette.

And then it really was all over, and we all peeled off and I wandered off to find a chemist I had known for years, and a bookshop-newsagent I always went to when Forwood and I came down into town to the bank or to get haircuts. They had both gone. Wrecked. Holes in the ground, like the old Palais de Festival which had held so many memories. But it was useless to even think of memories now, no good looking for the past, it wasn't there any more. Time, even a meagre three years, had cleared away so many things and places I once knew.

Back at the hotel I lay in splendour on my company paid-for bed and dialled Madame Bruna up the hill. A sharp cry of delight.
Quel plaisir
! Why and where? Was I well? Yes, all was
d'accord
with her. Marie-Thérèse had another child, Gilles might have gone off for good, she wasn't certain at the moment. He was a very sensitive boy. Did I know about Etienne Ranchett? Dead? Poor Florette,
quelle catastrophe
! He died in the Peugeot of Monsieur Forwood. Bought it from the
garagiste
in Saint-Sulpice who had bought it from us. He was so thrilled because it was all electric. And air-conditioned! Perfect for him when he went on safari to kill birds and deer and all the other animals in Senegal. He
always
went to Senegal, did I recall? To kill
innocent
creatures. And died in the Peugeot because, in the middle of a sand storm, the electric circuit failed. The windows wouldn't open, the air conditioning seized up and he died, roasted to death from a heart attack in his oven! Wasn't that
incroyable? Et vous, cher Monsieur,
vous
etês coupable
! Delighted laughter.

But all was otherwise very well. Madame Pasquini? Ah, she had been moved to Le Foux now, there was a new person at the
bureau de poste;
and a terrible Club Méditerranée, with 2,000 beds, had been built up on the hill behind Sainte-Anne-le-Forêt, the lights on all night, six tennis courts! And boom, boom, boom from the disco until dawn.
Ah si, si
! I left just in time, the whole region was becoming ruined. Germans, Dutch, Americans and Belgians. Yes, yes,
bien sûr,
Monsieur Rémy was well, and very occupied with all the new properties being built. Monsieur Danté had retired. He had dislocated his back and finished work. Now he just sits in the bar at Le Pré. Oh! She was
so
happy to hear me. There had been a photo of me in
Nice Matin
last week. Did I see it? Should she find it for me? It was very good, I looked so well and happy, it was in colour, and my French was
much
better now than it had been when I lived there. How strange! I said it was perhaps because I was no longer ‘timid', and she laughed a good deal and we blew kisses and I sent messages of love to everyone, and that was that.

The next morning I got the first flight out for London. Nice airport, once so cruelly familiar, was still the same airport. The palms were the same palms, the newspaper stall still the same stall and in the same place. Monique, behind the till, recognized me after a moment of considered doubt and exclaimed with pleasure. We kept a line of irritated passengers
waiting to pay for their journals and cigarettes while we discussed who had left and what had happened to Dominique. Did I know that she had married a boy from Villeneuve Loubet and was now working as a waitress at Le Coin Joli? People got restless. I paid for my two cigarette lighters, one for me, one for Brock. Mine had ‘I Love Cannes' on it. Monique and her friend, plain as an old galosh, had always kept the Sunday papers for me under the counter. If Monique or Dominique were on duty we had a luxurious evening up on the hill. If not, well we might have to just rely on
Nice Matin
or
Figaro,
but she always did her best.

In the Pullman Bar, on the observation floor, it was just as it always had been over the years. The same chairs and tables, the same Muzak tape gently soothing the nervous traveller with ‘Strangers in the Night' and ‘Autumn Leaves', the same hideous murals, the same affectionate waiters: Bernard, Jules.
Ah, Monsieur! Mais Monsieur Forwood? Hélas, il est mort, Jules. Ah. Quel dommage, un vrai ‘gentleman', eh? Un vrai.

On the flight I didn't look out of the window, I never said farewell to anything. I never had and now never would. Over the Alps I looked vaguely down into snow, felt the gentle bumping in the currents of air, sipped an altogether too early glass of champagne. I'd always insisted before that you could drink champagne for breakfast. And that's exactly what I was doing. I had no sadness, no regret, just a feeling of quiet surprise that I'd managed the trip and the film all by myself. Proving once and for all that I could manage on my own if I had to. I'd just been too bloody lazy. Protected. I must confess that I was pleased with myself. It seemed to me, sitting in my seat high above Grenoble, that somewhere
along the way down my corridor, which had grown pretty dark for a time, after the slamming of a door, I had seen a very thin crack of light far ahead. It was not all Stygian dark and gloom. A slight push at the door marked ‘Saki' had been rewarded. Behind the door there was a glorious ball going on to which I had been invited. I had accepted the invitation.

I remember, ages ago, saying to Forwood when things had got really wrought, that if he desperately wanted me to rummage in the tartan wash-bag I would do so. He had thanked me and told me that the time had not yet come. He would still try to hang on. I remember saying then that I would get the last brick off the top of the chimney for him, if I had to, but if he felt he
could
manage that he should. He said that he would manage, for as long as he could. He was not frightened, just, as he said, ‘bloody angry, there is so
much
I still want to do'.

Looking down across the snow-capped peaks sliding slowly below, I decided to put my self-administered
fatwa
on hold. I had learned my lesson, there was still so much that
I
wanted to do now, and, as far as I was aware, I was being permitted to do those things. The first mission had been accomplished.

And then we were over Kew Gardens, belts were fastened, last cigarettes stubbed out, the pagoda swung into view, the Palm House, the coiling loops of the river swung away. I was back again. I felt a drift of pleasure when I thought of the fort waiting for me and, if I was very lucky, Maria. It was a Wednesday, her day to clean things. And then all at once there was Ron, leaning over the rail at Immigration, taking my luggage. All well? A good flight? All well, this end,
thank you, sir. No news, not to speak of anyway, and yourself? I looked very well. Brown. Good weather? The trivia of pleasant small talk as we drove through the grey light up the Cromwell Road.

Maria was there, smiling, dressed moderately today: no longer the florid colours of Colombia, now the more sober greys and browns of Kentish Town. I had bought her a glittering bird of paradise brooch in red, green and blue glass. It weighed a ton and looked a little out of place on her in London. It had seemed perfectly all right in the sunlight of Bandol. Typical. But she liked it and showed me, with enormous pride, the clean ticking cover on the settee. ‘I wash. In machine. But is now more
small.'
It
was
‘more small'. But I didn't really give a fig. I was home. I remember that I said that aloud to Maria, ‘
I am home
and she laughed with relief and said that I wouldn't notice the cover really because she had found ‘string and needle. I put all right. You see.' It looked very like an overweight man in a too-tight suit. Gaps and bulges. I gave her a kiss and told her to go away, I'd see her on Friday. The fort, the flat, house, whatever, looked sparkling and bright. She'd polished every piece of wood, every bit of glass, washed every bit of porcelain. They all looked welcoming, familiar, cherished, in place. Well, she had had weeks in which to do it all.