The House on the Edge of the Cliff

by Carol Drinkwater

  By day five, I was growing suspicious, puzzled. Had Gissing left? Should I drive to Cassis and try to find out? Was the potential horror story over? Or was he being incommunicative in an attempt to jangle my nerves, to up the ante? My hopes were just beginning to rise that this had been little beyond an extended nightmare when a letter arrived addressed to me in bold biro, scrawled lettering. Its stamp was from Cassis. Fortunately I was the one to collect the mail from the box along the track. I tore open the envelope before I returned to the house with the rest of the post. It was, as I had suspected, from him.

  I have been ill. Caught bronchitis in the storm. (My health is vulnerable.) Hence my silence. But I am still here, and I am waiting for you.

  You know where I am staying. You do, don’t you? I have been expecting you to come and find me, talk to me. Be kind to me and keep me company. I am still expecting you. Or would you prefer I come to the house and have a quiet chat with you and introduce myself to your husband?

  How about I teach the children to dive? Your young Harry, he’d come with me.

  What are you waiting for, Grace?

  G

  ‘Teach the children to dive’? ‘Young Harry’? My heart went cold. Pierre had been an accomplished diver. Who else would know that, after all these years?

  It was gone eleven a.m. To set off before lunch would provoke too many questions. I would return to Cassis in the afternoon. No need for an explanation. Peter frequently took a short nap after lunch. It was a recently acquired habit. His heart’s strenuous activity was tiring him. The others would return to the beach.

  Later, during lunch, Sam announced that she was intending to take out Phaedra, unless Peter or I had any objections. ‘We’ll be leaving soon, and now that the weather’s fine again, I thought it would be a fun afternoon outing. Do you mind, Dad?’

  Peter shook his head. ‘Not at all. Why would I? Be careful, is all I have to say. Keep this side of the underwater shelf and don’t let the children swim out of their depth. Are you all going?’

  That would be seven in the boat.

  I wondered why they should want to make this excursion today. I was surprised by the idea but could offer no sensible objection. I kept silent. The boat had hardly been used this year. ‘I suppose it’s in good working order?’ I threw a glance to Peter, who nodded and winked.

  Tomas at the shipyard in the old port of La Ciotat always took care of Phaedra for us and frequently kept her dry-docked over the winter. It was during the colder months that he carried out the servicing and any necessary repairs.

  ‘Will you come with us, Grace?’ Jenny asked, as she poured wine. I shook my head, refusing the wine and as a response to her question. ‘No, thank you. I’m going out for a while a bit later and eight with three adults is pushing it for that little vessel.’ I smiled.

  ‘Nonsense, our cruiser can squeeze everyone in comfortably. You know that, Grace. It’s well suited to a family like ours.’ Peter grinned. ‘Are you off anywhere exciting, darling?’

  ‘The hairdresser,’ I lied.

  The lunch conversation had given me an idea.

  The Strand in the early-season light was all any tourist could wish for, and that afternoon the beach and the street that lined it were peaceful and practically deserted. Two or three cars were parked in front of the terrace of fishermen’s homes. Two old geezers were perched on a boulder with rods bobbing in the sea and a lone woman on the beach was exercising a dog off the lead. The yellow Labrador was scooting in and out of the foam, shaking itself, throwing off silvery plumes of seawater, and wagging its tail. I had written a note in response to Gissing’s. I felt queasy at the prospect of being alone in his cottage with him – I needed to keep distance and the upper hand. Neutral territory.

  If you have something to say to me, meet me on the beach at the calanque d’En-Vau. You can walk there, close to the entrance of the Calanques Park. Before breakfast tomorrow morning. Around 6 a.m.

  You remember where it is?

  No need to respond. I will be waiting.

  Grace

  1968

  May, Paris

  La Lutte Continue … The fight goes on

  I barely set eyes on Peter during those extraordinary days, our last hours in Paris before we were forced to flee. Today was Friday. I was so dog tired I had to stop and think about it. Yes, Friday, 10 May.

  Word was spreading that the entire country, and above all the capital, was now engaged in the student struggle. High-school kids were among us. Middle-class white-collar workers, as well as the working class. Some of the faculty professors had joined our side, which was a real boost to the morale of all those students who had felt betrayed by their lecturers. Even the Communists were waking up to the fact that they were better with the fight than printing leaflets to criticize it.

  Peter and I were on our knees. So little sleep. Woke late. Barely time to drag ourselves out of our makeshift bed to grab a coffee along rue Gay-Lussac. Quick shower, gobbled two croissants on the run and gathered with thousands of others at place Denfert-Rochereau. While waiting for the march to get under way, a handful of students passed through the expectant crowds distributing handkerchiefs soaked in baking powder.

  ‘What’s it for?’ I asked a pretty girl.

  ‘Helps protect against the gas,’ she answered, before moving along the line.

  ‘Helps stave off the choking,’ added Peter, at my side.

  I felt a rod of ice run up my spine.

  We were on the move.

  ‘Egalité, liberté, sexualité.’ A voice from the sea of heads. Others laughed at the joke and cheered, raised aloft their arms. I glanced about me. Several young men were giving piggybacks to young women bearing banners above their heads. Their faces shone brightly, as though they were having a fine day out. There was no malice or anger in their expressions – determination, resolution to effect change, yes, but neither hate nor violence.

  As we made headway, the numbers swelled. More joined the rally, all welcomed with jubilant cries. We were embracing everyone in our path. With every step, the mass of humanity was spreading out into the adjacent lanes and avenues of the sixth arrondissement all the way up to the boulevard Saint-Germain, which, word on the grapevine was reporting, was now chock-a-block with protesters of every age and class.

  Yes!

  Meanwhile, the roads around us were being cordoned off by police, penning us in, forcing us tighter together. I feared a stampede, but just when I thought we were in trouble, we were on the move again.

  I needed to pause a minute, catch my breath, get some sense of the size of this manifestation, but I was like a sapling being torn from its roots. More than thirty thousand students had rallied, I learned later. I turned my head to smile at Peter. We had dropped hands because it was sticky, and we needed fluidity of movement. As I glanced left, beyond my friend, a hideous scene caught my attention. I tried to hold back, stop walking to get a better look, verify it, but the force of movement shunted me onwards. I used my arms as though swimming in water to steady myself.

  A pregnant woman was being battered, yes, battered, and brutally manhandled, by a police officer. I was beyond appalled.

  ‘Stop!’ I roared. The perpetrators were too distant to hear me.

  ‘Let me through.’ I was elbowing my way to the left, out on a flank. Why was no one intervening? The woman’s legs buckled beneath her as she fell. Now she was being hauled by her shoulders and dragged backwards, like an oversized rag doll.

  ‘Stop that!’ I screamed. ‘Leave her.’

  In my mind’s eye I could see my mother, cowering.

  I feared the crowd might just march over the woman, such was the force of its movement.

  ‘Stop!’ I screamed again, sick with impotency. There were so many raised voices all about me that no one took any notice. I had to reach her, had to help. About the same time, several others had clocked what was going on. They were also challenging the police violence. I broke away from the line, broke
away from Peter, pushing myself frantically against the flow of the marchers, struggling to reach the abused woman to end her distress. It was like swimming against a tidal wave. And as I pushed, struggled and heaved, I was losing sight of her. I hollered repeatedly, at the top of my voice. ‘Someone help that lady, for God’s sake.’

  Where were the others who had gone to her assistance? Where was she?

  Nobody was listening. Everybody was lost in their own revolution, marching to victory. The pregnant woman had disappeared. Was she on the ground? Injured, traumatized? My sense of direction was askew. Where had she vanished to? I jostled and shouldered but was knocked off balance. I needed an overview of what was going on behind me, in front, in every direction. Panic was breaking out all around me and its energy was spreading. What was happening? Something had spooked people. What?

  And then, close by me, a police officer lifted his arm above his head. I registered the padded uniform, the thick black gloves clutching an object not much larger than a tennis ball, which he tossed into the crowd. It was a grenade whistling above our heads, a CS grenade. And before we knew what was happening, another whistled our way. And another. Gas. The air about me was thick and cloudy. My eyes were on fire, my throat burning. Choking, coughing, spluttering. And while we were struggling for breath, raised batons began to beat the marchers, slapping, cracking against skulls. Have you ever heard a skull crack? As long as I live, I will never forget that sound.

  The screams and shrieks were deafening. Inexcusable brutality. Blood. It was Armageddon. It was Picasso’s Guernica, Goya’s The Third of May. If the students had believed, and they had, that this march was about standing in solidarity, making clear their position to de Gaulle, they had been cruelly misled.

  This was showdown time.

  Then, before I knew what had hit me, literally hit me, a large body, the weight of a satchel, an arm, a limb, the pole of a banner, a rifle, the toe of a large black boot, whose, what, I never knew, smacked me hard across the face. Whack. Aaargh. Something cracked, broke. For a moment, I was stunned, seeing stars, dazed. A figure in a comic cartoon. The blow winded me, threw me off balance. A real zonking punch to my jaw. I stumbled and reeled, offering a fair imitation of drunken Kid Shelleen in the movie Cat Ballou. I thought my teeth had been knocked out, and the impact of that had caused me to bite my gum. I tasted the metallic tang of blood as I went dancing backwards, kicking up a jig before I hit the ground, smashing my head and upper back against a recently uplifted stone. With that, I lost consciousness. For how long, seconds, minutes, I couldn’t have said.

  The next I knew, a stranger was hauling me to my feet. A big red face shoved close to mine, spitting words. I had no idea where I was or what the surrounding noises were about or where the putrid smell was coming from. It was the tear gas, acrid, sulphurous, but I was too out of it to make sense of the events. I was now on my feet being manhandled by two uniformed officers. They began to drag me, still semi-conscious, backwards. I soon got my wits about me. Was I being arrested? ‘I’m not French,’ I yelled. ‘You have no authority over me.’ I kicked out a foot. It targeted one of them in the side. He recoiled in pain. What a fool I was.

  Assault of a police officer. Even in self-defence, a serious crime.

  At least sixty of those arrested during that week carried foreign passports. It made no difference to the lawmen. They had their own agenda: no one was getting off lightly, and now they had a case against me.

  I had to get myself free.

  I wriggled and resisted, beat with clenched fists, intending to make a run for it but they grabbed me tight, squeezing viciously into the flesh of my upper arms until they crippled me with pain. I cried out some more, writhing, resisting, like a trapped fish. They dragged me by my arms and my long loose hair down a side street, then threw me to the ground. I rolled over onto my bleeding knees, scrabbling on all fours. A tooth fell from my mouth to the unearthed paving stones. Then another. A spurt of blood followed. I was coughing, I lifted my head. It thumped with pain. I could see the police van ahead of me already jammed with captured students. ‘This isn’t my fight,’ I spat at the two men in English. ‘I’m not a student. You can’t arrest me.’ I thought it better to speak English because then they would get it through their thick heads that I was a foreigner and caught up in this by accident.

  They grabbed me by the shoulders and heaved me forwards. I had little strength left for resistance.

  The van was slammed shut, metal clanged. Darkness. The windows were barred. We rolled through damaged streets, sightless, to our destination. I stared at the steel cage that separated me from the officers in the front cab.

  Escape was the only thought on my mind.

  The journey was short. The doors were unlocked; we were frog-marched one at a time and hustled into the Commissariat of the fifth arrondissement. My heart was thudding like Big Ben at midday. Within the station, huddles of young people were waiting to be charged and relieved of their identity papers. Once their names had been logged, they were systematically handcuffed and led below to the basement where, I presumed, were cells. I was shoved forward to a desk where a member of the force was writing down names and confiscating the cartes d’identité of the offenders. My passport was stored at Pascal’s, along with my money and the rest of my gear.

  I was terrified.

  ‘Votre nom?’ the staff sergeant barked, pen at the ready. He must have voiced this question more than a hundred times already today. ‘What is your name? Give me your identity card now, please.’

  ‘I need to faire pi-pi,’ I pleaded, attempting a smile but my mouth was too swollen. Lips like a rubber doughnut.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen. I need to pee.’ One of the two sous-officers from the van pushed his way to the front and elbowed me to the side, to the left of the space I’d been occupying. The bodies surged forward into the gap and I found myself, fortuitously, out of the line of investigation. This was my opportunity. It was now or never. I shuffled a step backwards. My eyes were scanning in every direction, appraising the possibilities. People surged more tightly around me. At the desk, a new fracas was breaking out, hogging the limelight. I edged crab-like further to my left. I could see the door, ajar. I could see light. Freedom. I had to make a run for it. Well, not a run; that was impossible with so many bodies around me.

  I dipped down, not quite as low as to my haunches but to be out of sight. A couple of others who had been in the same transport van must have cottoned on to what I was up to. A bloke with a nice smile and rather wild hair, who had been squashed up against me in the Black Maria, was beside me again now. He glanced down at me and nudged his comrade. One laughed, both eased themselves away from me, creating the opening to a pathway. The first called out to the room, ‘Who’s serving the refreshments, then?’ It caused a titter of laughter but not sufficient to help me. Then the second lobbed a small sharp object – his lighter? – towards the window. The sound of it cracking or spinning against the glass caused all heads to turn in that direction, leaving me free to skedaddle.

  I pushed with my shoulders, waddling, like a duck or a Groucho Marx stunt double, and before I knew it I was at the door. A swift glance. No officer in sight. I rose to my full height and legged it, stumbling along the street, running, hopping, limping, a desperate, demented figure. As I was all but clear of the locality I heard a male voice from behind roar, ‘You there! Halt! You are under arrest.’

  Oh, no, not on your nelly.

  I was dust. I rounded a corner, then another and one more, scuttling into a rather pretty courtyard with forests of plants growing in old tin canisters. There I hid, pressing myself up against a closed door while struggling to control my huffing and puffing. From somewhere, a man’s voice began angrily shouting. I shoved myself sheer against the building’s frontage in the hope of becoming invisible. As I did so, I accidentally kicked over two zinc buckets filled with water, all but drowning a sleeping cat.

  Merde.


  The sounds of splashing water, metal against cobbles and a hissing feline echoed and bounced, like a siren’s call, all around the horseshoe-shaped yard. My breath was coming in gulps and heaves and I was beginning to hiccup. I thought I was going to wet myself, I was so deranged by fear. The door with the overturned buckets outside it opened and the cat flew inside. An old lady hobbled forwards and frowned at me. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ she snapped, staring at me with a confused, suspicious expression.

  ‘May I use your toilet, please?’

  To my amazement she ushered me inside, accompanied me to her dingy but clean lavatory, then poured me a cup of rather burned coffee from the stove.

  ‘Student?’ she asked, when I was seated and she was across from me at the lace-cloth-covered table.

  I nodded.

  ‘But not French?’

  I nodded again. I still hadn’t properly caught my breath and my voice was tight, high-pitched and thin from tension, grating like a wrong note played on a violin.

  ‘Do you know that your face is covered in blood?’

  I lifted a hand to my mouth. My lips were burning as though they’d been scalded. They felt fat and puffy and there was a soft liquid cavity in my mouth into which I poked my tongue. I slipped a finger along my gums, and confirmed that I had lost two teeth. Fortunately not front ones.

  My wrinkled hostess pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and tossed it across to me. ‘Use that. Don’t worry, no germs. It’s clean.’

  ‘Merci.’ I began to dab at my face. It stung like hell.

  ‘You know something?’ the old girl began, as she rose to boil some water in an aluminium saucepan and chucked a handful of salt into it. ‘Here, gargle with this. You know, if I was younger I would have been out there today with you, cheering you along, stepping with you. I’ve been watching the events on the television. You’re a brave young missy. I’ve seen two wars in this city and I did my bit for France during both of them. I lost my husband in the last one. He was in the Résistance. A neighbour ratted on him, the bastard. The Germans arrested him and executed him in a firing squad. De Gaulle was our hero back then. He’s a soldier, not a statesman, and he’s making a right royal mess of this calamity. It should never have reached this level of unrest. If I can help you, just tell me and then I’ll feel I’m still doing my bit for the population of France. Democratic demonstrations are a part of our constitution. This clampdown is a disgrace. We are not Fascists beating up our young. When you’re my age, you will look back on all this and be proud of yourself. You’ll always be able to say “I was there, May ’sixty-eight.” What’s your name?’