24 November 2010
Drive up the coast road from the Italian border (as Edward Fox did in Day of the Jackal) along the French Riviera as far as Roquebrunne (as Ernest Hemingway did in Men Without Women), and climb the hairpins (as Grace Kelly and Cary Grant did in To Catch a Thief, and indeed as Grace Kelly ultimately failed to do in real life) until you see the blue bay of Monte Carlo below.
You’ll reach the Moyenne Corniche at Beausoleil (where Robert de Niro crossed in Ronin), just below the hotel at La Turbie that overhangs the cliff like some demented, frozen suicide leap. There’s a little red petrol station, and a bus stop on the left, then another staggered on the right, and suddenly, cut into the verge, a little lane darts down and up again. At the top of the lane, you stop at the big double gates. You get out, and ring the bell.
Slowly the gates yawn open and you enter. You walk across the broad, smooth patio, your eyes squinting in the sharp, bright, Mediterranean light reflecting off the glassy blue sea below. As the sliding doors whisper apart, you step into the cool, dark foyer and your eyes squirm again.
‘We are here to see Mr. Butcher’.
Until recently, Bill would have been sitting out on the patio, ordering a juice and gazing across to Corsica, but now Bill is in the other side: where residents are locked up at night for their own safety. They wander, they are confused, they shout out, and the other residents start to shout too, and before long there’s mayhem and it takes hours to restore order. During the day, residents are free to walk the corridors or mingle within the wing, but can only enter the public areas if they have a visitor.
We took the table at the window. The tables are square, and have a chair on each of three sides. On the fourth side, the resident is wheeled into position. It’s not easy, honestly, to tell how much Bill follows now. I’m not even certain he recognises us. He is a wisp, a feather, with tight white skin and tiny, pale blue eyes like little marbles. We sat. Bill can’t talk any more, mainly because he no longer speaks any French and no one at Font Divina speaks English. Actually, Mary speaks English, and so does Roy.
Mary is impeccably dressed and immaculately coiffed. Her clothes are always spotlessly clean, she has beautiful manners and she enunciates perfectly with graceful grammar, an engaging & imaginative vocabulary, and reassuringly colourful idioms. Mary also has a short-term memory slightly shorter than the time it takes to speak a complete sentence. Last summer we took Bill on a day excursion to Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Mary—apparently thinking it was a trip open to the general public—simply climbed in the back so she came too. There are no awkward silences with Mary, as any topic of conversation can be endlessly repeated. We took the car all the way up into the Old Town where we parked and wheeled Bill to a little café terrace. We came back to find we had collected a sizeable parking fine but, as the barman in the tabac told me when I tried to buy the stamp to pay it, they’re only after the Italians so we left it and we’ve never heard anything more.
And Roy is married to Susie. They used to live in Monaco together in a luxurious apartment overlooking the Grand Prix circuit. Susie still lives there, but Roy’s up at Font Divina now. Susie came up to Menton for lunch in April, and entertained us with stories of Roy’s magnificent exploits. She comes up to see Roy, of course, and Roy likes that. But otherwise Roy is in his chair in the corridor behind the big wooden doors that only open with the correct six-digit security code.
We photographed Bill, and we had orange juice with him. I helped him to lift the plastic cup to his lips. He said nothing. He took my hand and gripped it tight. We sat, silently gazing at one another, holding hands, smiling. Bill is 93, and Bill was my best man at our wedding.
When it was time to return him to his room, the nurse gave us the security code and we wheeled him back into the other side. Just behind the doors was Roy, in a big blue jumper and black eyebrows, lounging in his wheelchair and grasping his walking stick with his left hand.
‘I can’t shake hands’, he began, lifting his right hand, held in a loose clench. ‘There’s this sort of puff. I don’t know where it came from, but I really mustn’t let it go.’
‘Why don’t you let me take it for a while?’ I offered, and gently prised open his fingers, carefully transferring the imaginary smoke to my own safe hands.
Heather hugged Roy.
‘Ah, yes, very good. I need to keep an eye. Now, then, is it Wednesday they come? It’s generally a Wednesday, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Roy, Wednesdays as a rule’, I tried to reassure him. ‘And I think for several days, at least that’s what they tell me on reception. But we’ll check again a bit later’.
‘Well, yes, that’s splendid. Of course, there aren’t too many of them. It’s not very filling.’
‘There’ll plenty to go around, I’m certain of it. Lovely to see you, Roy’.
‘Yes, lovely, I’ll come and see you again soon. Goodbye everyone’.
When Agnes at the desk tells us that Bill’s running low on clothes, we buy trousers, jumpers, underwear and shirts, and put them in his chest of drawers. Soon, despite naming every item with indelible pen, the clothes enter the soapy lottery that is the Font Divina laundry service. Occasionally, we glimpse one of our sweaters or a pair of our trousers on another resident. Sometimes, Bill has entirely inappropriate items of clothing delivered to his room, and sometimes Roy’s trousers end up on his hangers.
The clearly-written name tag in the trousers reads ROY SALVADORI, but that doesn’t stop his trousers wandering independently through the corridors. And we should be grateful for that. For, in certain quarters, this name conjures an especially potent magic. Roy used to drive cars, and Roy used to race them. And in 1959, Roy won the Le Mans 24 hours; Roy Salvadori was a famous grand prix driver. I’m tempted to swipe his trousers and put them on eBay.
We returned Bill to his room, reversing him into the doorway like a cuckoo into its clock. He seemed perfectly happy in his chair. In reception, a circle of women were singing, accompanied on the enormous black grand piano by a member of staff. Roy was rolling his chair around the occasional table in front of the lifts.
Back in the sun, and contemplating the journey back down to the coast road, and dinner, I lifted my left hand, still held in a fist, and released Roy’s little puff into the warm evening breeze. It tumbled above Monaco in silvery slivers, and eventually out of sight over the deep sea.
