The House on the Edge of the Cliff

by Carol Drinkwater

Was Peter also aware of the lovers?

  A fleeting romance in Paris would be cool. Quite the thing.

  ‘What would you like?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  He didn’t wait for my response, as he hadn’t waited to learn my name. He ordered two coupes. Cups of champagne. His French was impeccable. His accent, almost without trace, was swoony sexy. The tall slender flutes were set down before us with a white porcelain dish of salted peanuts. I lifted up my first ever glass of champagne.

  Bubbles effervesced into my nostrils. Oh, it was delicious, beyond sophisticated. My fingers wrapped about the chilled glass, imprinted the condensation.

  ‘Welcome to Paris, Grace.’

  I nodded, blushing, swept off my feet by a young Cary Grant.

  The street smelt of evening, of sweet chestnuts coming into blossom. Of expensive perfumes, a cornucopia emanating from bodies pressed all about me. Of traffic fumes. Of Peter, who was so elegant and sophisticated. Totally out of my league, but I must be ready for everything. I wanted to be. This was the sixties – not simply the sixties but the Sixties. I was here for all of it. Before I returned home to start my drama-school training I needed to experience life, a skinful of growing up. Free love. Romance. Drugs. Psychedelia. LSD. Well, maybe not LSD. But then again, why not?

  His voice broke into my reflections.

  ‘Where are you from, Grace? England, yes, of course, I realize that, but whereabouts?’

  Should I confide enough to keep his curiosity bated, spill the beans on my relatively humble upbringing? Three up, three down, and much strife. Not the ugly stuff, not that.

  ‘My dad’s a musician.’

  ‘Really? Jazz?’

  ‘Bass and guitar. Trad jazz. Has his own dance band.’

  Out all hours. God knew with whom. Women. Obviously. Lipstick smudged against cotton sleeves – residue of carmine – and that cloying perfume on his evening shirt. Sugary. Cheap. ‘Like the tarts he keeps company with,’ my mother might have sniped, as she tossed his soiled laundry into the washing basket. She thought I didn’t know. She tried to protect me.

  ‘I should take you to some of my favourite jazz clubs. The city’s full of them.’

  My head was bowed, and I was staring at my fingers intertwined on the table. I didn’t recount the horrors from home. I was not sharing any of my domestic ordeals with Peter. No way. I was there to forget my troubles, to reinvent myself.

  ‘Hey, Grace, where are you from?’

  ‘Kent,’ I replied. ‘And you?’

  He frowned, but made no further comment on my straying thoughts. ‘We’ve lived so rarely in the UK but when we did it was in Knightsbridge with my grandparents. Father’s family. I was born there.’

  ‘Knightsbridge. You mean near Harrods?’

  He nodded.

  Posh. Like the apartment where he lived in Paris. ‘Resides’, he’d said, not ‘lives’. People like him reside. With a maid. I glanced about me at the bustling boulevards spreading outwards to form a star configuration. Gatherings of people smoking, heads close, engrossed in chatter. Queues across the street for the cinema.

  ‘I wonder what’s playing there? I love the cinema.’

  Throughout my early adolescent years, I had wiled away whole afternoons and evenings at our local playhouse. The fleapit. Dreaming of my future on celluloid, all pearly white and gleaming. Minty teeth. No decay. Sequin frocks. Ginger Rogers. Satiny, like the imagined pumps on my delicate feet. Hollywood or Paris? I’ll take Paris. Truffaut. Brigitte. BB, who studied dance. Ballet. My mum had nurtured grand notions of me becoming a ballerina. I was at ballet classes from the age of four. ‘It teaches you poise,’ she used to encourage me. I loved to dance and I wasn’t bad at it.

  The only place I had ever seen couples kissing like they do on the streets in Paris was in the cinema, in the dark, the back row. Snogging and fumbling. Not for me. My ambitions were classier.

  Peter glanced across the street, following my eyeline. ‘So you like the cinema, do you?’ he asked me then. A new thought that might offer a clue to the identity of his rather reticent companion. I wondered if he picked girls up in cafés as routine. Did it matter? This was Paris, after all, and tomorrow I’d be gone, back to my own level, a cramped room in a grubby pension somewhere on the outskirts. And Peter would have forgotten me.

  ‘I’m going to be an actress.’ I grinned.

  ‘You’re pretty enough.’

  My elation sank. I wanted to be scintillating in sexy tights and feather boas. Cinch-waist corsets. Drop-dead gorgeous.

  ‘Very, very pretty.’

  I wanted my smile to break hearts, for men to die from unrequited love. I lifted my glass and swigged back the remainder of my champagne. It sang as it zipped down my throat.

  ‘You remind me of Anouk Aimée,’ he whispered.

  A Man and a Woman. I gasped, replaying the soundtrack in my head, the famous carousel tracking shot, almost choking on the swallowed champagne. Anouk Aimée, Jeanne Moreau, Françoise Hardy, Audrey Hepburn: I’d have settled for any of them. And stardom.

  ‘Shall I order us another?’

  ‘Ooh, yes, please.’

  The Present

  ‘Yes, I need a lift …’ His response seemed to be addressed to the weather, not me. He wasn’t looking at me. ‘We can talk together.’

  I was about to throw the car into reverse and allow it to roll back down the incline.

  ‘Cassis suits me fine,’ he replied, before he strode round the bonnet of the car and pulled hard to open the passenger door. As he climbed in, a host of ghosts, of wind-blown, messed-up phantoms, took their places in the vehicle alongside me.

  He slammed the door and we sat a moment in silence, the engine purring. It was the only docile sound in a hostile late morning.

  For a moment I was incapacitated, brain out of synch, couldn’t think how to engage Peter’s old banger into gear. My hands were trembling. I was numb. No, not numb. Overwhelmed by the amalgam of emotions this man’s presence was provoking.

  ‘Would you prefer I took the wheel?’ he offered. His voice was unexpectedly soft. Tame, hypnotizing, the lilt of his northern accent apparent. The same almost indiscernible trace was still there after all these years.

  How could this be?

  For years I had pictured him decomposing at the bottom of the sea. For years I’d remembered him, yearned to be perched alongside him again in his open-top Cadillac.

  I shook my head.

  Little doubt remained in my mind that I was in the presence of … my past.

  What do you want? What are you doing here?

  Have you risen up with this tempestuous weather, been disgorged by an angry unforgiving sea? Have you come in search of me? Been waiting for me? To punish and harm me?

  A surfeit of questions surfaced within me. Perhaps uppermost now in my thoughts was: should I get out of the car, battle my way back to the house and fetch Peter? Peter, who is sick, whose heart is weakened and must not be shocked or strained. No, that was out of the question. Such a revelation, resurrection, could kill him, freeze his heart for ever.

  Why did I fear this man so, perceive him as malevolent? Was it my own guilt?

  If I handed over the wheel to him, where would he take me? Was I relinquishing control? To be kidnapped, murdered, driven and disposed of somewhere? Indubitably, I judged his presence as a threat. Why? Because I had walked away, turned my back on him? I had not saved him. I had done precious little to rescue him or save his life.

  I took a deep breath, slung the gearstick into first and released the brake.

  ‘Cassis then,’ I mumbled, my voice rasping with terror.

  Once on the upper road, where the wind seemed, inexplicably, illogically, to be a little calmer, I pressed the first question. ‘Are you …?’ I was unable to finish the sentence. I took a breath. ‘We used to know someone who was called Pierre …’

  An intake.

  ‘We thought Pierre was … Are you Pierre?’


  ‘Pierre? Fancy that.’ The man at my side let out a guffaw, a bitter half-laugh. ‘Yes, you could say that. Yes, I’m Pierre.’ Soft and yet savage. ‘I thought you’d’ve forgotten all about Pierre. Thought I might be obliged to jog your memory.’

  I wrapped the palm of my hand tight over the gearstick. The sweat locked like glue.

  ‘That little affair, thought it meant nothing to you. Given how your life’s turned out. Famous and successful.’

  ‘Pierre, list–’

  ‘George,’ he said flatly. ‘It’s easier if you call me George.’

  ‘Sorry? So, you’re not Pierre?’

  For one insane, exhilarating moment, I believed him. I believed I had been mistaken. Mistaken identity. Lack of sleep, too many nightmares from the past that had resurfaced and squatted in my present, then the dread of losing Harry, or Peter, his ill-health, bleeding into my sanity.

  ‘I made it up, spur of the moment.’ He clicked his rain-wet thumb and finger.

  ‘Made what up?’

  ‘All those years ago. Told you I was Pierre. I am Pierre, yes, but my name’s George Gissing.’

  ‘You mean you gave me … Why would you have done that?’

  He thought about this for a moment, then shrugged. ‘We were in France. Pierre sounded more French than George.’

  I let this change of his identity sink in. So, I hadn’t been mistaken. Whatever his name, it was him, and he had returned. ‘Pierre, very well. If you prefer, I will call you George.’

  ‘Gissing.’

  ‘I see.’ How many times over those long ago summer months, with their false emblems of happiness, had I wondered about Pierre’s surname, which I had never known?

  ‘And I came to find you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you, Grace. And him. You married him, right? That bloke you were with back then, right? I read about it, your wedding, in the newspapers. We got given newspapers, not every day but … I liked to catch up with the news. See the stars, the TV personalities, who was doing what. Kept me daydreaming. I saw your picture. I watched you on the telly from time to time, and then when you were in that series that was playing every week, I was glued to the screen. Couldn’t take my eyes off you. Beautiful. Wanted to touch you, hankered to be close to you, feel your skin. You haven’t changed that much. A few wrinkles, broader of beam but not that much. Still sexy. To touch you, feel your skin.’ His voice was flat, unemotional, which made his words all the more unnerving as he stared straight ahead, out of the rain-splattered window, his hands inert in his damp lap. The wipers were slapping back and forth in a careless, messy fashion.

  Dear God, what was he after?

  The passion I had felt back then was long gone, irretrievable. Surely he didn’t expect that we could pick up where we’d left off all those decades ago.

  I felt the urge to pull over. To force him out of the car but … there were remnants from that summer. His voice, that accent. I had mourned this man’s death, through lonely, aching years. Now I felt fear and a sense of dread.

  ‘So, Pi– George, if you came to find me, is there something you want, something we’ – I emphasised we – ‘can help you with?’ I had to keep a level head, a restrained demeanour.

  ‘I’m the Revenant, right. George Gissing. That’ll be a bit tricky for you, eh? Did you see that film, The Revenant? We watched films sometimes. There were occasional screenings. Once a week, actually, in the visitors’ room. I didn’t go every week but I enjoyed that one, The Revenant. It was one of the last I saw before they … That kid, Harry, he’s your grandson, yes?’

  ‘No, no, he’s not my grandson.’

  And if you hurt one hair on his head, I wanted to add, I will kill you. Kill you, do you hear me?

  But this man, whom I had loved with a treacherous intensity, Pierre or George, was the man who had lifted my darling Harry to safety out of the rock crater. Why was I assuming he meant me or Harry harm?

  Because he had come back to find me.

  For what reason?

  Because we had run out on him, left him for dead?

  I pulled the car to the side and switched off the engine. Too shaken to continue onwards. This route, deserted today, was little better than a dust track cut through the bracken and brush, this ‘upper road’, as we had christened it, all the way back to Agnes’s days. Even after all these years it had never been tarmacked and we preferred it so. It kept our corner of the world hidden, inaccessible, kept the prying eyes of tourists that bit further out of our precinct in summer. Encroaching strangers, like the person sitting alongside me in my car.

  He, this man, reincarnated as George, was a stranger. Too many years had passed for it to be otherwise. Pierre, the young golden Adonis I had loved beyond reason, was gone. The drenched figure at my side was no longer the young man whose death I had mourned for more years than I cared to count. A man to whom I had so foolishly, recklessly, selfishly given myself. Before leaving him to his fate.

  Hot tears were rolling down my cheeks. They seemed to burn a deep blue, like flames searing, scorching my flesh.

  What sort of a life had he led? What had happened to his face? It was not young Pierre’s, which had been unspeakably beautiful.

  When had Pierre been transformed into this ugly creature, whose real name was George?

  Wet through, like a soaked, abandoned cur out in the rain. His nails were chewed, I noticed now. No rings, no jewellery, a cheap watch with a frayed black strap. The long fine fingers that had so skilfully whittled a fishing rod had grown stubbier, bitten away. Nothing about him had flowered, had grown into the potential I would have wagered upon. The charisma that had caused me to sin. Was it a sin? Yes: the pain I had caused Peter was beyond cruel. But I had been a girl. Sixteen. Little more than a child.

  The ignorance and callousness of youth.

  ‘So, if you’ve come looking for me …’ I coughed, clearing my throat, attempting to bring some resonance, steadiness to my voice. My trained vocal cords. ‘Do you want something from me or …’ I let out a laugh, a pathetic gurgling ‘… or is it …?’

  Did I dare ask him if it was money he was after? Hadn’t he mentioned money out there on the rocks after he had pulled Harry to safety? He didn’t give off an air of someone well-heeled.

  ‘Retribution,’ he replied, without hesitating. ‘My just deserts. Poetic justice.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What is a life worth? Have you ever asked yourself the question? What – is – my – life – worth? What’s to regret, what’s left to live for?’

  I shook my head. I was reaching back to a winter long buried while staring through teary pupils at my hands wringing in my lap.

  ‘I have, Grace. I have spent a great deal of time cogitating – some might say too much time, day in, day out, but then I had time on my hands and to spare evaluating the question. The worth of my life. My life, a man’s life. How many years are we talking about here? Fifty, give or take a few months. The pitiful sum of a grand a year equals fifty thousand. Ten grand for every twelve months? Half a million. You see, it soon tots up.’

  ‘So, you’re asking f–’

  ‘However, Grace, there are other measures and those are not financial. The lack of children, for example.’

  I let out a deep-rooted sigh.

  He’d had no children.

  He kept talking while I brushed away a tear from the tip of my nose.

  ‘The opportunities snatched from a man, the chance of raising a family, having kids of one’s own. A faithful partner, loving wife. A loving wife, Grace. Not some whore who couldn’t give a shit. To have known love, real love, Grace. To have been loved, caressed, wanted. So, what would you say? One child, two? There are so many ways to balance the scales, you see. Do you see, Grace?’

  Pierre’s child.

  He turned his head towards me. His eyes were glassy, his gaze zealous, almost delirious. ‘Do you see where this is going?’

  ‘The loss of children,’ I repeated.
Another tear rolled off my nose.

  ‘You have none. I have none. But your husband there, posh Peter, he has two. Both girls, right? And they have – how many? – five between them?’

  How had he acquired all this information? He appeared to know everything about our lives. This realization set alarm bells ringing. Was I being set up, taken for a fool?

  Was this man George, who was claiming to be the love of my youth, merely a stalker, an imposter? Had he somehow dug into my past, found information that few, if anyone, could know and was now using it to threaten me? I was confused. And yet that voice, his accent, it resonated with so many distant memories. The shadow of a gesture flashed me back to those sweltering days, those lovesick nights. Even so … there was little else to persuade me that this was the same young man to whom I had given myself with such abandon. Whoever he was, whatever he wanted, I had to pull myself together. Drive him to Cassis, get him out of the car and, if necessary, register this with the police.

  ‘Mr Gissing, you mentioned money. Or are you making some form of veiled threat against my – my husband’s grandchildren?’

  ‘Calculations,’ he murmured. ‘Suppositions. Let’s suppose it had been me you’d married, let’s just imagine you’d married a Gissing, me, and not the toff. How different our lives, mine, might have been.’

  I closed my eyes, spooling back in time, picturing myself lying on the beach in the arms of the young Pierre. Striking, swashbuckling Pierre.

  ‘Let’s suppose there had been no jealousy, no violence and no attempted murder …’

  ‘Murder? What are you saying …?’

  ‘Attempting to drown a man, leaving him for dead?’

  ‘There was no attempted murder, George. We – we didn’t leave anybody for dead. We searched for you!’ There was rage, panic mounting in my voice. ‘What nonsense are you concocting?’

  ‘Drugged out of your pretty little brains. Wasn’t that how it was, Grace? What do you know of the truth? Your posh husband could have told you anything and you’d have believed him. What can you remember? Quite a sensation, eh? Think of the headlines. The murky past of Grace Soames. That would put a dent in your squeaky clean image.’