The Last Days

Abstract

Now I am nearing the end…I think of Bandol and our little villa ‘Beau Soleil’ on the sea, the big balcony windows looking toward the sea, another window at the side overlooking a field of yellow narcissus called ‘soleil’ and pine-trees beyond and again the sea. I remember sunny days when the waves came flying along with white manes, they looked as if they might come flying right up the terrace into his room. There were plants in his room and they flowered so well and I said to him: ‘Why, oh why, can’t you flourish like those?’ I remember what a beautiful and strange time it was. One day a cat, a big handsome yellow-and-white cat came in; Lawrence chased it away. ‘We don’t want it. If we go away it’ll be miserable. We don’t want to take the responsibility for it’; but the cat stayed, it insisted on it. Its name was ‘Micky’ and it grew more and more beautiful and never a cat played more intelligently than Micky…he played hide-and-go-seek with me, and Lawrence played mouse with him…Lawrence was such a convincing mouse…and then he insisted: ‘You must put this cat out at night or it will become a bourgeois, unbeautiful cat.’ So very sadly, at nightfall, in spite of Micky’s remonstrances I put him out into the garden. To Mme Martens, the cook, Lawrence said: ‘Vous lui donnez à manger, il dort avec moi, et Madame l’amuse’.

From Not I, But the Wind, pp. 287–96.