“You’ve got to squeeze life, and that’s all.” “I guess you’ve just got to take each day at a time,” he says. At 3am, worry seems to be my default mode.” High on the list of the things he worries about is Kristina, who he wants only to be healthy and happy. We feel very vulnerable.” As he has got older, he has become a worrier, and he doesn’t like it one bit. “To be with someone all your life is quite wonderful. But now, in their late 70s, they’re shacked up together. “We’ve been together since she was 17, and I was 19, and if you ever meet her, you’ll see why.”įor many years, he and Kristina chose to live separately, in different parts of the country they enjoyed missing each other. “She’s tough,” he says, though less in mitigation at his absence from her side, I think, than to reassure himself she will be OK.
The prospect is bliss, but it’s also crimped by the fact that Kristina, his wife of more than 50 years – they married in 1968 – is marooned in the US, where she is having an operation she won’t be able to join him for a while. Tomorrow, Ford will appear in Oxford and then he will travel to Holyhead to take the ferry back to Dublin, where he rents a house, and plans to spend most of the summer (he has loved Ireland ever since the days when he taught at Trinity College Dublin). Photograph: Mireya Acierto/Getty Imagesįord is here now for Hay, at which he appeared the previous day with his friend John Banville this house belongs to another pal, who last night celebrated his 90th birthday around its vast dining table. “Let’s admire the view before we talk.” So this is what we do, crossing the lawn until we reach its very edge, a vantage point that enables us to gaze at the valley below – and also, more bizarrely, at a small metal sign that marks the spot from where, in 2001, Bill Clinton, having flown in for the Hay festival nearby, drove a golf ball clean into the River Wye.įord with his wife, Kristina, in 2015. “Shall we walk a little?” he asks, on hearing that I’ve travelled from London and will be returning there immediately after we’ve finished our conversation. He looks marvellous: brown-skinned, straight-backed, quietly zestful. It is as if a play by Noël Coward is about to begin – either that, or one has just ended.īut then I hear a voice – a male, American voice – and Richard Ford appears, distinctly un-Coward-like in shorts and Converse trainers he has accessorised with neon pink shoelaces. But alas, no one occupies the squashy sofas no lunchtime cocktail sits on a card table, awaiting a manicured hand. Pressing my face to the glass, I peer in. Where is everyone? Have I come to the wrong place? My knocks on the front door having gone unanswered, I scoot through a gate to the back of the house, where a sweeping lawn rises to meet a set of french doors that open on to a grand drawing room. If the setting is picture-perfect – the weather is glorious – it’s also unnervingly quiet, the only sound to be heard that of the swifts careening in the blue sky above.
From a taxi, I emerge, a little anxiously, to look around. The scene: a large manor house somewhere in rural Herefordshire in late May.
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