‘Peter!’ I screamed.
I was desperate to escape the mayhem.
All my belongings, my squirrelled-away savings were at Pascal’s. I had about ten francs in loose change in my pocket. I couldn’t even pay for a pension, a room to hide in till the pandemonium blew over.
I roared Peter’s name again, but my cry was stifled by others.
Violence was what I had fled from.
Then, ahead of me, close up to the barricade line, I spotted a pair of guys I recognized. We had spent an evening together in a bar with Peter. I shouldered my way through the crowds, trying to remember their names and praying they would help me.
Pascal had been arrested, I learned from Peter late that same evening when I finally managed to catch up with him.
‘Will they charge him?’
Peter feared they would. The education authorities had announced faculty expulsions for students arrested and accused of leading or inciting riots.
‘That’s atrocious!’ I cried. ‘It’s not ethical. What happened to freedom of speech?’
Peter nodded gravely, then winked at me. ‘You’re getting the hang of this, eh, Grace?’
The Sorbonne remained closed, awaiting further orders from the college rector, who was not sympathetic to his undergraduates’ requests.
The headline of France-Soir, the evening journal, read: The Sorbonne is surrounded by a large police presence.
‘All of France is reading this,’ I reminded Peter. ‘That’ll go in your favour.’
When I awoke the following morning, Peter was not at my side. I threw clothes on and hurried down to our usual bar for a coffee, hoping he might be there. Disappointed, I bought a newspaper and took it back to the café, to await Peter. Thousands of citizens, I read triumphantly, had expressed shock and disgust at the violence displayed by the police towards France’s younger generation. Some were calling upon de Gaulle to calm the situation while others believed the president was determined to see the agitators punished. He was a soldier after all.
I caught sight of several small groups marching in the streets. Ordinary folk, middle-class members of society, they were adding their voice to the lutte, the battle.
‘Vive la révolution,’ I cried out to them.
When I returned to Pascal’s, Peter was there. ‘Where have you been? I was getting worried. We don’t want you arrested. The government has ceded two points, did you hear?’
I shook my head. ‘They must have read this.’ I handed him the newspaper.
‘The Sorbonne is to reopen,’ he told me. ‘And the authorities have promised to pull back on police involvement, but they’re adamantly refusing to release the arrested “rioters”. The punishments to be meted out will be harsh. Pascal is among those awaiting trial.’
I was shocked.
That morning, Peter had been to visit his friend to offer support. He had tried to get him released, but without luck.
It seemed wrong that we were using Pascal’s studio, making love, having fun, while he was in a cell, but we had nowhere else to crash until it was time to leave the city, and Peter saw no problem with us being there. Even with just the two of us, though, it was cramped. I was dreaming of beaches and the sunny south.
We hardly slept. The pickets and protests were now continuing around the clock.
Over five hundred students and demonstrators had been arrested. Days ran into nights and nights into days. I had been working non-stop building barricades since four the previous afternoon, in rue Gay-Lussac a few doors up from Pascal’s. Peter had been posted elsewhere. I got nattering to a chap in his fifties, with thinning sandy hair. He was a bank manager at the Crédit Lyonnais, and was out in his pyjamas and a duffel coat.
‘I was just off to bed,’ he said, as he heaved stones, ‘when I heard the kerfuffle below. I peered out the window and watched you all for a few minutes and then, well, I couldn’t just go to bed, as though the revolution was not marching by my doorstep. In any case, the noise would have kept me awake. I was young once, with dreams of a better future. That’s what our republic is built on. The man in the street.’
I grinned and straightened to ease my nagging back. I was wilting. I turned my head and watched the industry of the human chain, all the way down the street. Dedicated citizens, all shapes and sizes, who had chosen to stand with the student struggle.
Cool.
They were passing stones and lumps of rock from one to the next while engaging their neighbours in discussion. Any bit of debris was handed along to secure the barricades. I felt such a surge of pride. I couldn’t imagine this happening in Kent. Digging up the high street in Bromley? I didn’t think so.
From open windows along the narrow rue, kindly folk had left their radios playing. They were transmitting Europe One and Radio Luxembourg. These radio stations were our opportunity to keep abreast of the situation, to forewarn us of danger. The television stations were controlled by the government and they were dispatching anti-student stories, blackening our reputation, calling us all ‘Reds’.
‘Sssh, quiet, everybody, listen,’ came the gentle call from a young male student.
‘Although the government has yielded two points,’ a newsreader informed us, ‘they still refuse to release the arrested demonstrators.’
‘Libérez nos camarades!’ Boos and hisses rang out while others worked on silently.
I was part of a team of seven, all French students except me, instructed to build two barricades. One, a metre high, was constructed almost entirely of cobbles pulled up from abutting streets. The second wall, some twenty yards distant, stood almost three metres. It was a creation of dustbins, upturned cars, stones, lampposts, broken chairs. There were wheelbarrows, metal drums, steel girders, cement mixers and several massive blocks of concrete. I had no idea where all this material had been filched from. A nearby building site, I suppose.
One old girl, all in black, like a Greek widow, was heaving a country chair through the door of her ground-floor flat. ‘Lend a hand, someone!’
A young lad ran to her aid.
‘I’ve done this before,’ her raspy voice cried jubilantly. ‘Remember liberating Paris from the Nazis? Vive la France,’ she croaked. Everybody cheered. Such a sense of camaraderie. It ran through my blood, felt stupendous. I was alive and I belonged there.
‘Hush! Hush! Hear that!’ a female voice called.
‘Quiet, everyone,’ laughed another. An expectant lull fell. Feet shuffled on the spot. A small pebble rolled. The tip of a drawn cigarette reddened. Someone coughed lightly. And then a collective silence. Tuning in, we heard from somewhere out of sight, from among the broken bricks and bicycle spokes, a nightingale.
A nightingale was singing.
‘How about that?’
‘God bless us all,’ sobbed my friend the bank manager.
His words hung in the night, like a talisman for our future.
‘Vive la révolution,’ another bloke, several doors along, roared proudly, and everyone in that dusty pre-dawn street raised their filthy sweat-stained arms and cheered with every ounce of breath in their lungs, ‘Vive la France.’
The exultations echoed and bounded off the walls for what seemed to be minutes. I lifted my head to the almost non-existent stars and grinned like a loony. I felt energized, integrated. I was participating in something important. The Hand of History.
France’s revolution for better education, equality, was under way. The state was being challenged for its conservatism, its outmoded attitudes towards sex, women’s liberation, freedom of expression and for the standard of its teaching. University reforms were what we were fighting for, improvements in student rights. Sexual freedom. We were changing the world, or we were about to. Peter and his comrades were calling for reformation of the French constitution. And I was there. I was a part of it. Playing my minuscule role, but participating. This was living. I was sixteen, bursting with life and sap and hope and possibility. Freedom, I cried into the night softly.
> It sure beat jiving to Gerry and the Pacemakers at our less than groovy youth club back home in Bromley.
The Present
While I was still tormenting myself with far-fetched scenarios about Gissing and what had become of him, on an afternoon when there was a spattering of cloud cover to lessen the temperature, Peter suggested we take the children on a nature trail.
Nests were sometimes to be found in the maquis, discreetly secreted among its diverse and highly aromatic vegetation. In olden days, Agnes had told me many years earlier, lynxes and giant tortoises had roamed those peaks and their lairs and dens were buried in the thick density of evergreen bushes. Nests, if ever we sighted any, should be left alone. ‘You wouldn’t want someone poking about in your house, would you? Let’s leave them in peace.’
‘You go,’ I countered. ‘All of you. I’ll stay here in case …’
‘In case, what, Grace?’
‘The clinic might call with a date for –’
‘Grace, what has got into you? They have our mobile numbers. You mustn’t let this weigh on you so. It will do you the world of good to lighten up for a bit. Hiking boots everyone, please.’
We had only been out for twenty minutes, Peter and I holding hands, gently leading the climb, no over-exertion, when Harry shouted triumphantly that he had tripped over a skull.
I felt myself freeze.
‘I’ve kicked someone’s head,’ the child cried. ‘It’s got no skin.’
‘Don’t touch it,’ cautioned Peter. ‘Let me see it first. Stand back a step, Harry, there’s a good lad.’
Peter bent to his haunches, dividing a path in the dense growth of bushes as he did so. The children scrambled to poke their faces and fingers among the mass of prickly or broad-leaved evergreens. And there it was. Bodiless, a decapitation, overgrown by feculent roots and vegetation. It was small and desiccated but well preserved.
‘Sharp eyes, Harry, well spotted.’
He beamed at his grandfather’s praise.
Anna begged to be given it to make necklaces from its parts.
‘What is it, Nanny Two? Is it a squashed man?’
‘A fox or cat, I would think, Harry.’
‘Let me have a closer look, please, Harry.’
We gathered tightly round the bones held now in the palm of Peter’s hand. ‘I’d say it’s a badger.’
‘How do you know, Granddad?’
‘See how the eye sockets are far forward? Teeth of different sizes – look at these. Notice how long and sharp they are.’
The children stared in wonder.
‘Those teeth identify the creature as a carnivore, not a herbivore. It’s the skull of a hunting creature. Yes, a badger, I’m reasonably sure.’
‘What are carni for?’
I took a deep breath, inhaling the magnificence of the view.
It was then that I recalled the drugs. Pierre’s stash.
A day – or was it two? – after Pierre had drowned, fearing the police would search Agnes’s house and Pierre’s car and uncover the contraband, I stuffed everything I could find of his into a bag and buried the haul somewhere up here within the maquis. I dreaded we would be charged for possession of hard drugs, that Peter and sweet Agnes would be incriminated. I deserved whatever was to come to me, but Peter and Agnes were innocent.
I was sweating as I’d climbed, as I’d dug dementedly, displacing gnarled roots, with a garden spade, scratching, grubbing at the ungiving rocky soil until my nails split and my fingers bled. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I was grief-crazed and terror-stricken, haunted by the possibility that Peter would find me, discover my illicit act.
Hadn’t I caused sufficient damage?
I glanced now at the man at my side, hair turned grey, his strength diminishing but soon to return, I prayed, surrounded by a troupe of entranced children, sharing with them his love of this magical landscape. Could I remember now, if I were obliged to, where I had buried that bag of illicit substances? I had stuffed everything deep into an abandoned badgers’ sett on these hills, somewhere high above the house. Nothing of Pierre’s possessions would have survived, of course, not after so many decades. The substances would have rotted, disintegrated into the soil. Or might there be the tiniest residue, a sunken trace of his trade, to use as evidence against him, the Gissing man, should it become a necessity? Should I be forced to defend my family against the unthinkable.
Slowly, as one day rolled into the next, my psyche began to split. I was inhabiting two time zones. At one moment I was sixteen again, living dangerously, recklessly, in Paris with my young hero, Peter, fighting alongside him for the revolution, and then, once we had escaped the capital and landed here, at his aunt Agnes’s, I was soon betraying him with Pierre.
The next hour, I was returned to myself in the present: a sixty-something actress and a granny, Grace Soames, of the present, strung up inside, waiting. Waiting for what? Gissing’s next move. The menace I feared.
The minutes, the hours ticked by, hammering at my head.
I became withdrawn, confused, without even being aware of my changing state. The others noticed. One morning before breakfast, Sam approached me in the kitchen. With an empty coffee cup in hand, I was padding about in a sarong and socks, still not fully awake, having missed my early-morning swim. She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me hard, all tight and squeezy.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Jen and I both know how much you love the children and that you’d never do anything to harm them. I was ratty and uptight because I was dealing with the scary news from the specialist, and the prospect of Dad’s operation, the risks involved.’
I nodded, half asleep, nonplussed.
‘Is it me who’s made you so unhappy, Grace?’ she pressed.
I shook my head. ‘No, no, I …’
‘Then what? What’s troubling you so?’
‘I … I’ve been offered a play. I was mulling over whether I …’
Peter had stepped into the kitchen behind me without my noticing. ‘Grace, if you want to accept the play, then you must. I’ll manage. We’ll manage. Jenny has offered to stay on with the girls, even if Sam needs to leave and get back to the UK.’
‘No, no,’ I protested. I had been digging for an excuse to explain my antisocial preoccupied behaviour. Now it was backfiring. ‘I need coffee,’ I yelled jokily. ‘And I’ve already turned the play down. No more discussion. Let’s have breakfast.’
Later, alone, Peter took me in his arms as I was donning my trainers. ‘It’s a fact that you have been a little remote of late. We’ve all remarked it. All well? Nothing up, my darling?’
I shook my head. I wanted more than anything in the world to reciprocate, to hang my arms around his neck, rest my head against his chest and unburden myself of Gissing – our past, the younger man’s untimely death – but Peter’s health stayed any disclosure.
I was trawling through my bank and savings statements on the internet, jotting down calculations. In preparation. Finances were not my strong suit, but if it came to blackmail and I emptied all my accounts, I could offer him everything I had access to. In the car, on the road to Cassis, Gissing had hinted at half a million. It had been a casually proposed figure, but might it be the number he had in mind? I couldn’t raise that sum, not without assistance from Peter and, with his assent, us tapping into Agnes’s invested capital. But I could give him everything I had in ready money, pray it would satisfy him and buy him out of our lives.
On the other hand, what was the extent of Gissing’s financial resources? Could he afford to rent an entire holiday house throughout the high-season months? Or might lack of funds send him on his way? If he was still here. In which case, no matter what threats he made, it would be ill-advised to agree to give him one single euro. And who knew? With any luck he might already have upped sticks and gone on his way.
If not, why was he so reticent? It was the silence that was driving me up the wall.
Three more days passe
d, and the silence continued, but I was using my time fruitfully, even if agitated. I had avoided all visits to Cassis, accomplishing the minimal amount of shopping we required, which was predominantly the fresh stuff, at the market in La Ciotat. The drive was a little further and sinuous along the summit route, but I had no desire to bump into Gissing until I was ready to face him again.
I had been surfing the internet on my laptop, searching for his name. There appeared to be dozens of them, the GGs. Many were on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tinder and other social-media spaces I had never frequented.
Before I made a move, if I made any, I preferred to have to hand whatever background information I could dig up. This required eliminating the GGs one by one, methodically. I began with those resident in the north of England, given his accent. Those displaying photographs that bore no resemblance to the man I knew as Gissing, which was all of them to date, were instantly deleted. The others, the faceless ones, were more awkward because, to get to know them, I needed to approach them and I had no intention of signing up to be linked in, to request friendship, a dating possibility, with a stranger who might prove to be my potential enemy.
When I was not spending hours on the beach with the youngsters, I tried to do whatever was necessary – from scouring the internet to peeling potatoes – seated in a chair out on the verge beyond the veranda where I had more than a 180-degree bird’s-eye view, a vantage point for every ingress to the property, except the rear. Should Gissing approach the family on the beach from any of the neighbouring bays or from the sea, I would almost certainly spot him before anyone else did. I had allocated myself the role of watchdog.
If, as before, he returned and waited in the rear lane, I would still be the most likely one to discover him. Peter rarely went out, these days, except for brief walks, and these we tried to enjoy together, while Sam and Jenny spent blissful, recreational hours jumping in and out of the sea with their children.
The House on the Edge of the Cliff Page 12
