.
So we did. The next weekend we went down to Chichester together. I took my family with me. I wanted them to be there for this. He was a wonderful Falstaff, big and boomy, rumbustious and raunchy, yet full of pathos. My two boys (ten and eight) kept whispering at me every time he came on. “Is that him? Is that him?” Afterwards we went round to see him in his dressing-room. Terry said I should go in first, and on my own. “I had my turn a long time ago, if you remember,” he said. “Best if he sees just one of us to start with, I reckon.”
My heart was in my mouth. I had to take a very deep breath before I knocked on that door. “Enter.” He sounded still jovial, still Falstaffian. I went in.
He was sitting at his dressing-table in his vest and braces, boots and britches, and humming to himself as he rubbed off his make-up. We looked at each other in the mirror. He stopped humming, and swivelled round to face me. For some moments I just stood there looking at him. Then I said, “Were you a polar bear once, a long time ago in London?”
“Yes.”
“And were you once the convict in Great Expectations on the television?”
“Yes.”
“Then I think I’m your son,” I told him.
There was a lot of hugging in his dressing-room that night, not enough to make up for all those missing years, maybe. But it was a start.
My mother’s dead now, bless her heart, but I still have two fathers. I get on well enough with Douglas, I always have done in a detached sort of way. He’s done his best by me, I know that; but in all the years I’ve known him he’s never once mentioned my other father. It doesn’t matter now. It’s history best left crusted over I think.
We see my polar bear father – I still think of him as that – every year or so, whenever he’s over from Canada. He’s well past eighty now, still acting for six months of the year – a real trouper. My children and my grandchildren always call him Grandpa Bear because of his great bushy beard (the same one he grew for Falstaff!), and because they all know the story of their grandfather, I suppose.
Recently I wrote a story about a polar bear. I can’t imagine why. He’s upstairs now reading it to my smallest granddaughter. I can hear him a-snarling and a-growling just as proper polar bears do. Takes him back, I should think. Takes me back, that’s for sure.
I’d never been to Provence, but I had met my Aunt Mathilde a few times when she’d come to see us in our little apartment in Paris. I remembered her being big and bustling, filling the place with her bulk and forever hugging and kissing me, which I never much cared for. She’d pinch my cheek and tell me I was a “beautiful little man”. But she’d always bring us lots of crystallised fruits, so I could forgive her everything else.
I was ten years old and had never been parted from my mother. I’d only been out of Paris once for a holiday by the sea in Brittany. I told her I didn’t want to be sent away. I told her time and time again, but it was no use.
“You’ll be fine, Yannick,” she insisted. “You like Aunt Mathilde, don’t you? And Uncle Bruno is very funny. He has a moustache that prickles like a hedgehog. And you’ve never even met your cousin Amandine. You’ll have a lovely time. Spring in Provence. It’ll be a paradise for you, I promise. Crystallised fruit every day!”
She did all she could to convince me. More than once she read me Jean Giono’s story “The Man Who Planted Trees”, the story of an old shepherd set in the high hills of Provence. She showed me a book of paintings by Paul Cézanne, paintings, she told me, of the countryside outside Aix-en-Provence, very close to Aunt Mathilde’s home. “Isn’t it beautiful, Yannick?” she breathed as she turned the pages. “Cézanne loved it there, and he’s the greatest painter in the world. Remember that.”
A city boy all my life, the paintings really did look like the paradise my mother had promised me. So by the time she put me on the train at the Gare de Lyon I was really looking forward to it. Blowing kisses to her for the last time out of the train window, I think the only reason I didn’t cry was because I was quite sure by now that I was indeed going to the most wonderful place in the world, the place where Cézanne, the greatest painter in the world, painted his pictures, where Jean Giono’s old shepherd walked the high hills planting his acorns to make a forest.
Aunt Mathilde met me off the train and enveloped me in a great bear hug and pinched my cheek. It wasn’t a good start. She introduced me to my cousin Amandine, who barely acknowledged my existence, but who was very beautiful. On the way to the car, following behind Aunt Mathilde, Amandine told me at once that she was fourteen and much older than I was and that I had to do what she said. I loved her at once. She wore a blue and white gingham dress, and she had a ponytail of chestnut hair that shone in the sunshine. She had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. She didn’t smile at me, though. I so hoped that one day she would.
We drove out of town to Vauvenargues, Aunt Mathilde talking all the way. I was in the back seat of the Deux Chevaux and couldn’t hear everything, but I did pick up enough to understand that Uncle Bruno ran the village inn. He did the cooking and everyone helped. “And you’ll have to help too,” Amandine added without even turning to look at me. Everywhere about me were the gentle hills and folding valleys, the little houses and dark pointing trees I’d seen in Cézanne’s paintings. Uncle Bruno greeted me wrapped in his white apron. Mother was right. He did have a huge hedgehog of a moustache that prickled when he kissed me. I liked him at once.
I had my own little room above the restaurant, looking out over a small back garden. An almond tree grew there, the pink blossoms brushing against my window pane. Beyond the tree were the hills, Cézanne’s hills. And after supper they gave me a crystallised fruit, apricot, my favourite. All that and Amandine too. I could not have been happier.
It became clear to me very quickly that whilst I was made to feel very welcome and part of the family – Aunt Mathilde was always showing me off proudly to her customers as her nephew, “her beautiful little man from Paris” – I was indeed expected to do what everyone else did, to do my share of the work in the inn. Uncle Bruno was almost always busy in the kitchen. He clanked his pots and sang his songs, and would waggle his moustache at me whenever I went in, which always made me giggle. He was happiest in his kitchen, I could tell that. Aunt Mathilde bustled and hustled; she liked things to be just so. She greeted every customer like a long-lost friend. She was the heart and soul of the place. As for Amandine, she took me in hand at once, and explained that I’d be working with her, that she’d been asked to look after me. She did not mince her words. I could not expect to spend my summer with them, she said, and not earn my keep.
She put me to work at once in the restaurant, laying tables, clearing tables, cutting bread, filling up breadbaskets, filling carafes of water, making sure there was enough wood on the fire in the evenings, and washing up, of course. After just one day I was exhausted. Amandine told me I had to learn to work harder and faster, but she did kiss me goodnight before I went upstairs, which was why I did not wash my face for days afterwards.
At least I had the mornings to myself. I made the best of the time I had, exploring the hills, stomping through the woods, climbing trees. Amandine never came with me. She had lots of friends in the village, bigger boys who stood about with their thumbs hooked into the pockets of their blue jeans, and roared around on motor scooters with Amandine clinging on behind, her hair flying. These were the boys she smiled at, the boys she