I have always been in the habit of rising early. When the house is silent, I slip out for a long walk and a swim, like a full-sail galleon scudding across a cloudless sky, leaving my cares behind me. But during these anxious days, these fretful days of waiting for Peter’s operation, once out of bed I dally, hang back before heading for the beach, watching over my husband until I feel secure about leaving him.
This early-May morning, my knees tight against his side of the bed frame, I gazed upon him. Peter, my beloved, swathed in a twisted, sweaty sheet. He was fighting for equilibrium. His heart had become his enemy, hammering furiously at him. It pained me to observe his suffering, his visible decline. I bent low to him, stroked his shoulders, reassuring him of my love, while taking care not to disturb him. I crouched, laid my cheek against the fleshy part of his upper arm, softly kissing it. I inhaled him, the night on him. The heat, the worry sweat. He claimed he was not apprehensive about what lay ahead, but I would have argued otherwise. I was witness to his unsettled dreams.
I am the spectator, tuning in to his restlessness.
Throughout his waking hours, I had begun to remark a new expression in Peter’s eyes. A fixed stare, glassy, as though his pupils had glazed over or been coated in a thin layer of varnish. This focus disguised his fear, blocked it out, blocked me out. Peter was pushing me away, which, according to his logic, was to protect me. He believed that he was sheltering me from his terror, or sheltering himself from my terror, my inability to confront the worst possible outcome: his death.
I dreaded losing my husband, his heart packing up without warning, ‘worn out by strain’, in the consultant’s ominous words. Snatched from me while he was sleeping or, when the appointed day arrived, while he was under sedation. A being submerged beneath the effects of medication who would never awaken.
I refused to compare it to the past, to the first time I had lost someone, a lover who never resurfaced, the years it had taken me to come to terms with it.
Had Peter made the connection, cast his mind back to 1968, ‘our first summer’ together at this house, our long, carefree days together on this beach? Until calamity had struck.
It had come as no surprise to me that Peter was diagnosed with atrial or supraventricular tachycardia, SVT. He had lived his life at a supersonic pace, in the turbo lane. He had travelled ceaselessly, worked incessantly, handled and triumphed over high-profile legal cases, which had won him a coveted international reputation and the honour of a CBE. However, alongside the acknowledgements came high stress levels. His caring heart carried the burdens of those less fortunate, those whose liberties he fought for and won. In his juridical field, few reputations, if any, surpassed Peter Soames’s.
Long-haul flights were his norm, sometimes once or even twice a week. He was always out of bed by five thirty a.m. no matter when we had turned in the night before. Even after we had stayed up till two watching a movie, he had set his phone alarm for five. And then he’d switch it off and roll over for half an hour, indulging in his ‘lie-in’.
I longed for him to slow down. Some days I felt as though I’d never catch hold of him, never pull him by his shirt tails and draw him in slow motion back to me, begging, ‘Hey, what’s the rush? Bide time with me.’
I turned now from the bedside and pattered to the open window, leaning my elbows on the sill, mesmerized by the swallows dipping and circling above the pink-tinged beach. I loved this time of year, with the first stirrings of summer ahead. I loved this old cliff house built high into its scrubby hillside overlooking the Mediterranean. Heron Heights. Peter had inherited it, this rather splendidly eccentric sunlit villa, from his late aunt, an artist, Agnes Armstrong-Soames. Yes, the painter. The very same.
I loved the privacy, the isolation, the villa’s distance from the nearest town. Our lives here have become secluded, our world privileged. The environment has cocooned me, allowed me to feel safe, even from the past. My past. Our past. The tragedy that took place here too long ago to remember. Except that I do remember. I have never allowed myself to forget it, but I have forgiven myself. Forgiven myself for the foolish, brainless role I played in someone’s death.
Peter and I never talk about it, never allude to it. That long-ago midsummer night.
Our bedroom is on the second floor in the tower. Once upon a time, this capacious loft was Agnes’s studio, her atelier. Today, it is our sunlit sleeping quarters. There remain traces of her paints, smudges and stains, rainbows of glorious colours on the walls and woodwork, which we have never decorated over. Her autograph writ large as a memory, a reminder. I am convinced she lives on here in spirit with us. Agnes Armstrong-Soames, our guardian angel.
This airy space faces out to the beach and the sea. Often, at this early hour, there is a tanker or two to be seen far distant, navigating the silvery-blue line of the horizon, way beyond the four small islands visible from the seashore, ploughing westwards, towards the modern port of Marseille. Since we settled here in the mid-nineties, giant cruise ships have begun to invade these waters. We catch sight of them more and more frequently. They drop anchor for an overnight in one of the large resort cities along this coastline, Cannes, Villefranche, Sète, then steam on east to Italy or in a westerly direction to Barcelona and the Balearic Islands of Spain.
Reassured that Peter was sleeping soundly, I tugged on my bathers and shorts, my espadrilles awaiting me beyond the sliding glass doors of the veranda. My early-morning ritual always takes me to the beach.
I skipped down the steep zigzag track – passing the terracotta pots of tumbling geraniums to be watered on my way back – to the foot of the land, where I reached jagged rock and the hand-hewn set of steps that leads to our strip of beach, our ‘hidden’ cove. Ours is a coastline of creeks, shingled bays, hilltop paths and underwater caves decorated with Neolithic art, which only the most skilled of divers can access and survive.
The bay, our bay, was deserted, as it always is. It is really only reachable by boat or from our cloistered plot of land. Little visited and more or less private. I could walk for miles clambering over boulders, balancing on rocky ledges, toes licked by the sea, picking my path to the next inlet or cove and, during the out-of-season months, never encounter a soul.
I am no longer tormented by the past, the tragedy that wrecked my youth. The secrets I kept out of the light, hugged tight against my bruised heart. Peter and this house have healed me.
I paused to catch my breath, perched against one of the great granite stones that encircle us, and watched the early-dawn return of the first of the small fleets of fishing boats. Motoring slowly towards shore, with their deep knowledge of the sea and the wealth of their overnight catch, they were too distant yet for me to identify who was aboard.
Later, I might drive to the village and buy half a dozen red mullet or a shovel-load of shellfish for dinner, choosing directly from the boatmen’s catch. My purchase would be our supper, which I would enjoy cooking. We have no help, only Geneviève, who drives up from Cassis two mornings a week to help with the domestic chores – the cleaning of rooms, the airing and changing of our bed. Apart from her, there is no one to trouble us or intrude upon our lives. Few guests. Peter has twin daughters from his first marriage, I no children. (Childlessness was part of the price I paid for ‘my sin’.) And I’d had no previous marriage, just this one to Peter.
Since Peter retired, we have spent less time in London, preferring to base ourselves here, by the sea, relishing the solitude, our endlessly carefree days in one another’s company. While I garden, Peter devotes long hours to writing his memoirs, locked away upstairs in his den. It gives him a purpose and, lately, has served as a distraction from his upcoming operation.
My time is spent idly, pottering, keeping myself busy with cooking and decorating, house maintenance, tending the vegetable patches. Fingers dirty, no make-up, sloppy old clothes. I revel in it, the anonymity, the release. I don’t miss the world of stage and film any more, although I’m still employed if I choose to be.
Surprisingly, the offers of work still trickle in for me and occasionally something comes along that excites me. However, until Peter’s operation is over and we have been assured that his convalescence is on course, I have taken myself off the market. No more acting for the present.
Fortunately, we are not without funds. Peter’s career has rewarded him handsomely, as has mine, and Agnes’s generosity, along with her ever-increasing posthumous eminence, has been our silver lining.
Two decades after what we still refer to as ‘that first summer’, Peter found me again. Out of the blue, he stepped back into my life. By then, I had healed and I was ready for him, open to his love, a love that he asserts had always been waiting for me.
Even to this day, he swears it was love at first sight. Peter, the uncompromising romantic. In that, he hasn’t changed. It goes with the territory: the idealist who wooed me into his life, his Utopia. It was Peter’s magnetism and conviction, his noble mind, that fired me with passion for his cause, during those heady Paris days of 1968.
Before the fall.
Peter never allowed my behaviour of that first summer to stand between us. It was me who occasioned the rift. He had forgiven me before I even knew I was grateful for and in need of his forgiveness.
I had not long blown out the candles on my sixteenth birthday cake when Peter and I first met. A callow, eager girl looking for thrills. Fifty years ago. How many heartbeats does that equate to? I am attempting a calculation.
Peter’s weakened, troubled heart was firing at a hundred and twenty beats a minute. Twice the pace of a healthy heart, it was a ticking bomb. In one hour that adds up to 7,200 heartbeats. In one day … My brain is going fuzzy: it’s too early for mathematics. The sun is still rising, dawn barely broken.
In one day, 172,800 heartbeats. One hundred and seventy-two thousand, eight hundred beats of his heart. A formidable amount of work for such a small muscle. And there was no tea-break, no let-up, no summer holiday from its commitment to pumping. His heart was set to keep on at such a frantic rate until it stopped, worn out. Expired.
‘We’ll beat this,’ Peter encouraged me, when he saw the black cloud of misgiving furrow my brow, when he knew, because we read one another as swiftly as shorthand, that the fears were rising within me again, plaguing me.
My dread of losing him. Peter gone. No more.
‘We’ll find a way.’
And then a miracle, a promise of respite, modern medicine offering a solution.
Peter’s upcoming operation will be a state-of-the-art affair, which could last several hours. His surgeon is a rhythmologist, one of only a handful in the world who specialize in this adolescent branch of medicine: the rhythms of the heart.
I had never heard of it before.
‘We go in,’ the consultant informed us calmly, a pencil entwined between his delicate well-manicured fingers, ‘and we choose the heartbeats to conserve while the rogue over-enthusiastic devils we extinguish.’
I closed my eyes while he described the procedure.
The operation is achieved without opening the body, without peeling away the flesh on Peter’s breast plate. ‘A small instrument, something not dissimilar to a tracking craft on a space ship, sets off through the veins, sailing the blood flows. Its objective: to make contact with the electrical pulses of the heart, to identify and annihilate those that are beating out of time with the principal heartbeat. These are false pumpers, abnormal, and they need to be killed off.’
What if they target the wrong pump? I was silently asking myself.
‘Of course there are risks. No physician would kid you otherwise, and it’s my duty to warn you of them. Notwithstanding, we carry out this procedure four or five times a week here at this Marseille clinic and there has not been a problem so far.’
I made no comment. Tight-lipped and terrified.
What are the perils? A haemorrhage? Heart failure? I tamped down the army of questions assembling within me. My own heart had upped its rhythm as a result of the challenge that lay ahead, and my anxiety in the face of it.
‘What do you think?’ I asked my husband, half under my breath, while fingering for his hand.
Peter gave it a second’s consideration, then nodded. ‘We’ll give it a try.’
And so it was decided. Forms were signed. We needed only to await the date for the operation, which, we were promised, would take place within six to seven weeks.
That was almost four weeks ago.
Until the set date, our lives were to continue as normal. As long as we took no risks, as long as Peter did not over-tax himself, was not subjected to unnecessary stress or shock, all should be fine.
So, a gentle existence was set to be ours for the interim, cruising through the days until the operation and convalescence had been successfully achieved.
‘Will you inform the girls?’ I asked him, during our homebound drive from the clinic. The ‘girls’, his daughters. Adult women with families of their own. Five grandchildren in total.
Yes, he confirmed that he would, and he did.
‘Oh, Daddy, let us come,’ begged Samantha. ‘I’ll organize it with Jenny. We’ll be there as soon as we can.’
‘No rush, my darling.’ His voice was calm. Always the pillar of strength.
Why was I going back over all this again? Why did I feel a nagging rush of cold air brush up against me? As though a ghost was rising from the depths.
I walked to the village most mornings. It’s not a walk, it’s a fair old hike. Either I made my way negotiating the sandy bays and coves, or I chose the mountain trail with its powerful scents of herbs – juniper, thyme, rosemary, bay laurel – and mellifluous wild flowers. From the high track, I cut down to the coast at the last dusty pass and wended my steep, winding way from there. Either route took me the best part of an hour, but I delighted in the exercise and fresh air. I looked forward to it and it kept me trim.
If Peter was in good spirits and hard at work in his study, I frequently lingered, sitting outside one of the several cafés in our small fishing village. I bought our morning paper, Le Monde, or read a book while sipping my cappuccino. Out of season, I was familiar with the majority of the faces, all of whom nodded, Bonjour. I took pleasure in observing the fishermen as they hauled in their boats, dragged out their laden nets, crouching low along the diminutive quay to rinse their loads before offering their catch to passing shoppers. Two or even three times a week I’d exchange a handful of euros for a plump rainbow-skinned sea bass or a delicate John Dory – two of Peter’s favourites – or I’d opt for a shimmering kilo of the small Mediterranean sardines, glinting and shiny, like newly minted sixpences, succulent to grill on the barbecue when the weather was fine and we were planning to dine on the terrace. My routine was simple. Our lives were unembellished and I was at peace with the undemanding existence we had carved out for ourselves. It soothed me, was curative.
Today was the beginning of the second week of May – the tenth, according to my phone. I was seated at Chez Clément, one of my preferred cafés down by the small harbour. Aside from the Easter onslaught, which had been and gone, it was too early for anything more than a dribble of tourists, which meant that any newcomer along the cobbled front would automatically draw my attention.
I glanced up from the novel I was reading and gazed vacantly at a man, a stranger, passing in front of me before returning to the pages of Isabel Allende’s The Japanese Lover. With the sun bouncing off the water, blinding me with its direct light, the silhouette was little more than an outline lacking detail and form. But hadn’t he walked by once already?
Without really being conscious of it, I raised my head again. The rising sun was causing me to squint, added to which my mind was distracted. Was I lost in the story I was reading or was I thinking a million other irrelevant thoughts? Perhaps I was worrying about Peter’s health. Still, even in my abstracted frame of mind, I had vaguely noticed the passer-by. I focused on him now because he struck me as odd. Out of place. He was wear
ing a suit, a rather ill-fitting cheaply cut grey one, which was unusual attire for this part of the world and even more curious in this weather. Along with it he sported, not carried, a lightweight, silky raincoat. He was a little portly, not fat, and was wearing sunglasses and a Panama with a wide brim. A bizarre ensemble. He ambled to the quay’s edge, looked out beyond the station of berthed boats towards the open sea, hands in his pockets. There he remained, striking this seaward pose, his back to me.
I suppose I would have lost interest in him about then anyway, but my phone began to ring and my concentration was immediately drawn to it. It was rare for anyone to call me so it immediately caused me to think the worst. Something amiss with Peter’s health? I glanced at the screen. It was Peter. He had rung off too soon. I pressed Call Back. He answered within seconds. My heart somersaulted.
‘All well?’ I was attempting to keep the edge out of my voice. I jumped too easily, these days, over nothing.
‘Yes, and you?’
‘I’m in the village, down near the dock. Do you need anything?’
There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘Are you bringing fish?’
I glanced upwards towards the quay where the man in the hat had turned his attention from the sea. His back was to the water now and he was facing the small esplanade of shops and bars where I was seated at a table on the pavement. I quickly scanned the quayside. No fishermen in their boats were in sight.
‘I can, if you fancy some. I’d considered red mullet but I think François must have already sold his load or he’s offering his catch in Cassis today. I haven’t seen him here this morning but I wasn’t really paying attention.’
The man in the hat and shades was strolling in my direction. I dropped my gaze, uninterested in him, concerned by this call. ‘Peter, is everything fine?’
‘Sam phoned. Change of plan. She and Jen are bringing the children and arriving today. They’ll be on the five-twenty train into Marseille from Paris this afternoon. I thought it would be fun to serve a big baked fish. Or a bouillabaisse.’
The House on the Edge of the Cliff Page 2
