In accordance with my earlier plan, I had made up my mind to make the time go as happily as possible. In addition to my adopted role of butler, I also became sommelier, skivvy and chauffeur to the household. And I went about my duties with enthusiasm. I arrived in the house every morning, and after clearing up the kitchen and putting the washing out to dry, I nipped out to buy the wine and food for dinner.
Susie preferred to cook, though sometimes she just issued instructions from the sofa. I would announce dinner, and with elaborate courteousness hold the back of Stanley’s chair and smoothly slide it in as he undertook the complex, time-consuming and painful manoeuvre of sitting down. Then I laid the napkins across their laps, bowed and shimmied off for the wine.
‘Red or white, sir?’ I shouted.
‘I think we’ll have white. Is that all right darling?’
Susie nodded. I went to the fridge, removed the bottle and cradled it in two hands to present the label to Stanley.
‘Very nice,’ he said. I knew that, as I had paid for it.
‘Bien choisi,’ I said, laying the accent on with a trowel. ‘May I compliment you on your choice? Parfait avec le tart du cottage.’
‘Marvellous, very good. Carry on,’ said Stan – I couldn’t tell if he was playing or had enjoyably slipped out of reality, as he loved to do with his model making.
I threw in another bow for fun. I then drew the cork, sniffed it, and returned to pour the wine with an extravagant twist of the wrist.
With them seated and yelling at each other, I darted about the room, and brought the cottage pie to the table. I served from their right-hand side and later removed the empty plates from the same side with an ostentatious flourish.
When I sat down to eat, Stanley asked ‘Is there any salt?’
‘My sincerest apologies,’ I said, and leapt up and reached for the condiment, also picking up pepper, mustard and HP sauce (which I knew he had a soft spot for) as if it were the most pleasurable thing to be asked to do.
After dinner they sat on the sofa and watched the English weather forecast with just a corner of France at the bottom of the screen, and not the corner they lived anywhere near, and stared at the English news, open mouthed at the distant political storms of Brexit and the election, while I silently placed the dirty dishes in the machine and wiped the surfaces.
My services as a butler allowed Susie to throw some drinks parties, which I, drunk on my own idiocy, enthusiastically encouraged.
‘Would you do the honours?’ Stanley would say to me when the doorbell buzzed with the first guests and he dragged himself away from a six-hour stint on the Sopwith Camel.
‘By all means, mon plaisir,’ I said and clicked my heels. I had plenty of time before any of them made it up the stairs. I was thinking I should get an apron, although I would have preferred a full uniform, preferably one with tails I could pirouette in before proffering a flute of champagne on a silver salver to Stanley. I furiously polished the glasses, lining them up meticulously on the tray, and went about unpackaging the canapés.
‘Hello,’ Susie and Stanley croaked at full volume, while I stood behind, waiting to lead the deaf and disabled guests to their seats and wheel the trolley of canapés into range, which was quite short considering they were all either blind, arthritic or both.
There was nothing like the cocktail conversation of octogenarian expats. Think of pulling a dead horse across a ploughed field in heavy sleet. It wasn’t quite that much fun. One thing I did learn was that however old, no one actually died of boredom. I nodded and smiled and clapped my hands as if I were savouring the repartee of Noël Coward. Every bungled attempt at a funny story, and every punchline suddenly forgotten at the crucial moment, was met with a shriek of pure delight from me. And I lost count of the number of times Stanley said ‘Of course the bloody frogs ran away, as they always did,’ and I shouted ‘Very witty! Well said! By god that’s funny.’
I wasn’t being sarcastic. I was just determined to be relentlessly upbeat. In their bent forms – and lame, repetitive conversation – I could see my future coming towards me. This was how I was going to be in a couple of decades. Maybe sooner. I wanted to cut them some slack, and at the same time squeeze every last drop of fun, however silly, from the time we all had together. Also, living with people who took ten minutes to get a glass from the fridge and spilt wine on the counter trying to fill it made me think I was in better condition than I thought. I could do that in about ten seconds. I was 60 and careworn, but in that house, I felt young and carefree.
Susie soon discovered that being infirm and old made her invitations difficult to refuse more than twice. She kept going until everyone she knew – and many she didn’t – had come to see her. Sometimes the wrinkly invitees turned up to drinks with their own children, who were glum and obedient, themselves nearing retirement age, and had been forced to waste a week of valuable annual leave to travel to one of the most uneventful places on earth to check up on the parentals and deal with the hassles of decaying houses and bodies. Needless to say, for most expats, the gloss had gone off living in La Belle France with the slump in the pound, looming Brexit and laws around inheritance tax that tied in knots those English who wanted to favour one child over the rest. Every expat who came for drinks turned out to be trying to sell their house. Only Susie and Stanley were committed to staying – in their own way.
The happiest party was the day some good news had been received from Britain: property prices were on the slide. Yes, UK property was officially going down, and this gladdened the hearts of every English expat around the globe who had sold up in Blighty, bought abroad and then watched with stoney sunburnt faces the value of the house they had sold in the UK rocket, while their new place stagnated.
My mother took control of the conversation at the drinks parties, where with an audience trapped either by immobility or good manners, and most were disadvantaged by both, she let rip.
There was quite a lot of ground to cover, so interruption was not allowed. The municipal car park planting, and the difficulty and COST of watering it, had to be explained. She made out that the gift of the water from her tap to the village to keep the berberis alive was on a level with Andrew Carnegie’s libraries to Scotland. She then moved straight on to her recent book, published six years ago, a memoir, and the favourable reviews of it. Then it was on to the garden at her last house, followed by a quick round-up of anything that had been ill-organised and needed condemnation … bringing her back to the mayor and the planting, which – had she not been on hand – he would have made a mess of. There were one or two impromptu tangents that she couldn’t resist, which usually included either famous or rich people she had befriended in the area. There was a popular historian with a holiday home close to where Susie had lived whose name Susie could weave into absolutely any story.
One of the salient features of Susie’s conversation, or should I say monologues, for that was what her cocktail parties became, was repetition. Alone with me, Susie had the grace, or front, I never knew which, to preface a story she had told me about thirty-two times with the words ‘Did I tell you about the time …’
And one of the most well-worn phrases I heard people saying to Susie was ‘Yes, I think you did mention that,’ along with ‘so you said the other day …’ meaning ten minutes ago. But neither made the slightest interruption to her flow. One to one she had to occasionally at least pretend to listen briefly to what the other person was saying, but with a small audience she was lethal. Standing at attention with the bottle in my hand and my other arm behind my back scanning for empty glasses I had time to observe her method and work out why she did it.
I personally feared telling a story twice to the same person. I hated noticing that blend of dawning recognition, embarrassment and then pity cross my interlocutors’ faces, which in turn made me stutter and fumble for a way to get out of the story as fast as I decently could without making it too different to the last time I told it, or admit what was going on. Since spending time with Susie I found myself looking into my friends’ eyes and listening to their laughter, wondering whether they were enjoying my anecdote for the first time or just being kind.
Susie, on the other hand, shamelessly and deliberately repeated herself because she loved it, and she could. Imagine sitting in front of five people listening delightedly with rapt attention to a story that reflected really well on you, as Susie’s tended to do, for the third time. She had her own trumpet and she was sodding well going to blow it, and if you got the kind of reaction she received, so would you. None of them could leave. Half of them couldn’t even stand up.
Absolutely nobody complained. Me included. Quite the reverse. We pretended we were hearing the anecdotes for the first time. How we all chuckled with delight at the telling of the hilarious time the biographer pulled out his fridge plug to put his electric toothbrush on charge because he had to have a special toothbrush he was on TV so much, and he forgot to put the fridge plug back in and in the morning his milk had gone off.
She was magnificent and indomitable. Each detail was greeted with an impressed ooh, a sigh of open jealousy, or a tinkle of friendly laughter. Maybe the guests’ memories were so bad they had forgotten the stories, but I very much doubt it. Susie’s stories had a habit of sticking in the mind. Particularly after ten tellings.
She blew her own trumpet, loudly and often, even though her repertoire was small, revelling in the fact that she was protected from interruption simply by being old. She knew perfectly well that her friends were too polite even to hint they had heard her tell four times over the one about the hilarious time she had taught the biographer to cook veal blanquette and he had burnt the onions, before she doubled back for good measure to the village car park with its trees that had now become so diseased in the retelling that they had to be felled not to improve Susie’s view but for reasons of health and safety. Only two tellings later Susie had averted the near certain disaster of the trees crashing onto the packed school bus.
The tunes she played on her trumpet were the songs from the album of her own life. Her greatest hits. She told her entranced audiences about the time she met Jeffrey and Mary Archer, the lunch when Shirley Williams turned up, and she blew older tunes from her and my father’s undergraduate days at Oxford, about Anthony Crossland, Christopher Chataway and Freddy Raphael, names that meant little or nothing to the hotchpotch of expats at her drinks parties who in the UK had been plumbers, or in the army, or fitted satellite dishes. Then she changed the mood with protest songs from the peace group, and out came the chestnut about the day Bruce Kent and Diane Abbot came to one of her meetings, and a letter of thanks from the Bishop of Gloucester was passed with extraordinary reverence and patience around the cocktail party.
She was scared that no one would blow her trumpet after she was dead. That it would lie silent, tarnished and dented. She was singing her swansong. She was telling anyone who would listen: I have lived on this earth for eight decades, and I lived a life of events and consequences. I had a great garden. I travelled the world. And I knew these celebrities and they knew me. My trumpet may fall silent when I die. But hear it now.