A Short Walk from Harrods Read Online Free PDF

Watford. As a girl. Before the First World War.’
    She started her car again; it rattled. ‘I shall have to limp down to the house. The tyre is old, so is the car, so am I. Good luck. One day we must have a meeting. The electricity board demand to put up an enormous post right here. On our land and right in your eye-line. Unless you don’t care about that …?’
    â€˜I care very much indeed.’
    The car shuddered and she started to limp lopsidedly between the cypresses.
    â€˜I’ll speak to you.’ She waved a hand vaguely out of her window and went off in little puffs of pink dust.
    I turned and clambered up the hill. At the entrance, so to speak, for there was no gate apart from one in my active imagination, there was a battered tin post-box on a thick wooden post. To my surprise, there were some letters. Real letters at last. Someone had found out where I’d got to. More importantly, the sorting office, I supposed in town – Nice? – had discovered me.
    I was not completely abandoned in the midst of rural France. I had a telephone and a postman knew that I lived at the farm. Progress was being made!
    Forwood was doing something to the car. I don’t know exactly what he was doing because I don’t know anything about cars. After a horrendous accident in monsoon rain in Calcutta when I had, wretchedly, killed a couple of people by driving into them (not my fault, I hasten to add: during the unpleasant trial which followed I was completely exonerated), I never drove again. Never will. But I could sense a problem: the doors were all open, bonnet raised, engine running. He was blowing something hard which he held in his hand.
    â€˜Found what’s wrong? Why I had to lug all this down to the village and back?’ I set down my baskets.
    â€˜Dirt. In the plugs … I think.’ He held something up to show me. ‘This is a plug. Got it? The car won’t run without plugs. I used a spare. Okay?’
    â€˜Yes. If we don’t have a car up here, we’ll be done for. That is a
very
long walk to the village …’
    â€˜All downhill.’
    â€˜
Up
hill from the corner with the nasty little caravan.’
    â€˜One day I’ll have to get a mower. They have plugs too. Perhaps a scythe? Look at the height of the grass. Feet. Tough as a wire broom.’
    I took up the bags again and went up to the cellar door. ‘It’ll have to be a scythe. Haven’t got the money for a mower, for God’s sake!’
    He switched off the engine, slammed the doors, closed the boot.
    â€˜Should you have thought of that before you signed the deeds, perhaps?’
    â€˜Well, how was I to know there were acres of savannah here? We weren’t even allowed on to the terrace. Almost. I didn’t know the place was a ruin, the land flooded. The olives dying.’
    â€˜Waving goodbye, in fact. You are lumbered. Four hundred dying olive trees, “the youngest of which is two hundred years, the eldest one thousand”, according to the deeds.’
    He picked up the yellow plastic bucket in which he kept his spanners and a strip of dirty rag, pushed the old plug into its package.
    â€˜You keep on muttering about having a car up here. You’ve
got
a car. Only you can’t drive the thing.’
    â€˜I know.
Entendu.
That’s why you agreed to come here: to drive the car.’
    He pulled the rag from a clatter of tools, started to wipe his fingers. ‘Unpaid chauffeur. I don’t mind for a bit. But how will you cope when I decide to pull out? I only agreed a year, remember?’
    I took up the straw basket. ‘Sure. Fine. Okay. I remember. I’ll learn to drive again. Much easier out here: less traffic, no zebra crossings, buses, mad cyclists. Someone down at the garage will teach me. No problem.’
    Forwood chucked the oily rag into the bucket, which he hung on a hook high on the wall. ‘I am constantly amazed by your