The House on the Edge of the Cliff

by Carol Drinkwater

We were overlooking the city. To the west, the commercial and old city ports whence we had climbed. The Mediterranean of trade and commerce dominated here, both underworld and legitimate. Towards the east, the opposite orientation, was the flight path to Agnes’s villa facing out to wide-open waters, a burnished horizon flecked with blue and turquoise, the azure sea, the mauve-rock inlets and canyons of the calanques. Gulls were circling in the near distance. Our clandestine playground. Peter’s and mine.

  Pierre and Peter. The same name. I had only just cottoned on.

  Why was a bloke from the north of England called Pierre? Maybe not his real name.

  Pierre was unfolding the soft top. He pulled open the passenger door, waiting, like a chauffeur. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Sure you don’t mind driving me back?’

  He dismissed my question with a wave of his hand.

  Should his reckless disregard for the rules of the road have alerted me right back then?

  I slid in. As spacious as a motorboat, it exuded class, as Mum might have remarked. Damn. I hadn’t rung home.

  Once in the driver’s seat, Pierre thrust the car into gear. The tyres spun, kicking up small stones and pebbles. We reversed and swung out onto the narrow ocean road, all set to navigate the lofty highway. A bird’s-eye view. The only way to travel. I was picturing my arrival. Drawing up to the rear of Agnes’s house, Bruce growling his disapproval at a nattily turned-out, prosperous-looking stranger in a fancy car. ‘Where have you been all day?’

  I hadn’t sent my folks a postcard and I had been drinking.

  ‘You can ditch me here,’ I said, as we approached one of the final turns in the lane that led to my summer residence.

  Pierre rounded the corner and drew to a halt, depositing me without a word in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere because I’d requested it. The house was nowhere in sight or any other building – well, there weren’t any. Who was to say where this deserted lane led? Still, he didn’t question my request to be set down in this out-of-the-way spot. He expressed no concern for my safety. He took me at my word.

  I hesitated before opening the door.

  When will I see you again?

  ‘Thanks for lunch,’ I was spinning out the moment, elongating it. ‘And thanks for jollying up my afternoon.’

  ‘It was fun, Grace. I hope the rest of your holiday is a blast.’

  I unstuck myself like Elastoplast from the passenger seat and smiled with an all’s-well face, struggling against my disappointment. Was this it?

  I lingered, watching him, anticipating, eager for a last-minute invitation. His elegant yet cherub-featured face. His beauty was not symmetrical. His features were not even. Still, in my eyes, he was perfection, except he hadn’t asked to see me again.

  I raised my arm to offer a little wave. How coy, pathetic. How stupid and girlish of me, to wait there for him to invite me on a date.

  I should have invited him in. ‘Join us for a Campari, darling, why not?’

  We should have rocked up to the door in his snazzy car. I had been thinking of Peter, desirous not to hurt my friend’s feelings.

  Pierre reversed, spun on the track, releasing whorls of grit, while I remained planted to the spot until the fins of his automobile, the lipstick scarlet of the rear lights, had disappeared out of sight. A dot diminishing to nothing, as though the car and he had never existed.

  Cicadas were thrumming in the roadside brush, drowning the diminishing hum of the Cadillac’s departing engine. My golden carriage had evaporated, evanesced.

  Sober, back down to earth, I plodded the last hundred yards of the track, still replaying in my mind the record Pierre had slipped into the car’s 8-track tape deck as we had jetted the higher coastal cols in silence. Chuck Berry’s album, St. Louis to Liverpool. The track playing over in my head and humming on my lips was ‘No Particular Place To Go’.

  Over lunch, I’d asked Pierre where he was staying and he’d replied, ‘Just passing through.’

  So, that was it? The best-looking bloke I had ever bumped into turns out to be my brief encounter in that summer of ’68. ‘Too bitter-sweet. Too bad.’ I cursed, as I kicked at the dust.

  If only it had been the last time I ever set eyes on Pierre.

  My days were super-cool, unfolding in languorous lengths, each moment apportioned: eating, swimming, kicking my heels in the sand, dozing on the rocks with a book over my face, jaunts to the village with Peter for baguettes and wine. We would take Agnes’s car for a spin and sometimes stop for a dip or make a detour to visit one of the bays I hadn’t previously discovered. Peter sought out the isolated spots where no other soul visited. We lay in the sun together, he reading, studying, me daydreaming, getting sticky and covered in sand. We didn’t make love, or infrequently. Some days he laid his book aside and rolled towards me, licking at my flesh, but I fended him off, making excuses. ‘Let’s just enjoy companionable interludes together,’ I would say.

  ‘“Companionable interludes”? Why, Grace? What does that mean? What’s happened? Don’t you love me any more?’

  His words, that question, left me bunched up inside, confused, guilty. It was as though I’d missed a whole movement in the music, an act in the play. We had never spoken of love before.

  On these occasions, I’d jump to my feet, and saunter off across the rocks to watch the mottled brown fish darting and feeding in the shallow pools. Peter could identify them all: the saupes and the sars, the groupers and the turtles. It was enlightening, uplifting, being in his company, discovering the flora and fauna. His knowledge was thrilling on so many levels. I wished then, with a deep ache, that I loved him as passionately as he did me, that I could reciprocate his feelings, but I couldn’t. The intensity of his emotions was a bit scary. I was changing and I didn’t know how to explain it to him without injuring him.

  I considered taking the bus back to Marseille, returning to that bar in the hope of bumping into Pierre, but then the image of the big-bottomed policeman returned. If he should find me hanging around on the hookers’ corner again, for sure he’d haul me in, question me, maybe find out about Paris … So I didn’t.

  Peter studied in his room most mornings and played tennis in the late afternoons. There was a club in La Ciotat, the small town close by. Twice I accompanied him for a set or two, but in the devouring heat of midsummer, I had no energy for the game. I preferred the beaches and the secluded creeks or doing nothing at all. I was becoming expert at doing nothing. Besides, the crowd at the tennis club bored me.

  Agnes was painting from dawn to dusk, transformed into a furious energy. She talked, loquacious as ever, but with brushes in her mouth while her black hair, all disarray, was held in place by paint-stained cuts of ragged old sheets, or bits of string. Trays of paints and utensils surrounded her.

  A local Algerian woman turned up most days to make lunch and clean the rooms because Agnes had declared she had no time for the domestic needs of three. After dinner one evening, she invited me, a rather regal invitation, up to her vast studio. High at the top of the house, it faced out over the sea.

  It’s our bedroom now. Peter’s and mine. There still remain traces of her paint, her industry. Her soul.

  Agnes wanted to paint my portrait, she said, ‘When I return from Italy. If you’re still here, of course.’

  I so hoped we would be.

  ‘Have you and Peter talked through your plans?’

  ‘Not really.’ I shrugged. ‘He said – if it’s all right with you, of course – we’d stay here for the summer. I start college in September.’

  She watched me, appraising me. ‘You’re very young and so very beautiful.’ Her hand reached up and touched my cheek. ‘I can see why my nephew is captivated, enthralled by you. Poor dear Peter.’

  Her remark made me feel awkward. ‘How long will you be gone?’

  ‘Two or three weeks. Back before the end of August.’

  Her studio gave off a pervasive smell of turpentine, as did she, when she was painting, an
d the billowing smocks she wore to work in. Its penetrating odour travelled all the way down the stairs. I found it potent, mysterious somehow, like Agnes herself, and I breathed it in as though it was a Chanel perfume. It was cool up in her eyrie with the windows open wide, facing out in every direction from mountain to sea. On a clear day you could stretch out your arms and let your fingers drift towards the tip of Africa.

  Birds had been nesting in the rafters. The remains of their abandoned roosts were still visible, crumbling and dry. Geckos stalked the walls.

  Agnes kept a record player up there and when she paused to reflect, to consider the stages of the work in progress, she flipped on an LP and tuned in to the music, humming to it, sometimes jiggling her head about, which caused her hair to fall loose. Sometimes I could hear her bare or slippered feet slapping back and forth. She talked to herself, or to an imaginary someone. I could hear snippets of her voice from my room, through my open window where I would kneel for hours and stare out to sea, dreaming of Pierre, while listening to the strains of musicians as varied as Lester Young, Milt Jackson, Juliette Greco and Bob Dylan. ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’. As was I.

  On the wall of the winding stairs that led up to Agnes’s studio was a portrait of a woman, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, facing left against a muted grey background. A young Agnes, surely. It was signed Romaine Brooks. I wondered if the artist had been a friend of hers.

  I was fascinated by my hostess, curiously transfixed by her, her life and all that had gone before. Some days I wanted to be her, to play her in a film, to tell her story, which I still did not know. Mysterious and self-contained, she was. I was overawed by her dedication to her work and the process by which she changed a blank white possibility into vibrant images. Rich, thick, layered oils imbued with the heat of the sun, the generosity of the plants all about us. She trowelled the paints onto the canvas as though she was about to cement a wall and then she dragged the earthy hues, spreading them in all directions until, miraculously, they took shape and form.

  ‘Do you know in advance,’ I asked her, when I dared breathe a word in this sanctuary of silence or music or her own mumblings, but always concentration, ‘how it will look when it’s finished?’

  She laughed, a guffaw more than amusement. ‘I know nothing, not even the subject. The barest outline only.’ She was rubbing a fallen blob of a bright blue oil off one of the wooden legs of the tall easel with a white turpentine-dipped rag. I wondered why she bothered when there were splashes of paint everywhere. Her nails and fingers were an encrusted rainbow.

  ‘Is that you on the stairs?’ I asked boldly, one afternoon, when we were alone in the house.

  ‘The portrait?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s me.’

  She must have been so striking when she was young, if the painting was an honest reproduction. Alluring and poised. I didn’t express these thoughts, though. I tried to imagine her life. Sometimes I sat on the stairs and stared into the picture, willing it to talk to me. There were no signs of her husband anywhere, or possibly she had those memories neatly bundled away. Out of reach of the prying eyes of busybodies such as myself. I was intrigued. I imagined tragic endings. Broken hearts. And while I was cooking up imagined stories of Agnes’s past, I continued to ask myself what had become of Pierre.

  ‘Be kind to our Peter,’ Agnes said to me on another afternoon. ‘Youth can be cruel, selfish, unthinking, and I’m sure you don’t intend any of those.’

  ‘I hope I’m not unkind to him, Agnes. I’m trying hard not to be.’

  We were in the bush, walking up behind the house, working our way along a narrow track where spiny plants snagged at my naked legs. Spindly eucalyptus trees reached out in all directions and waved in the cliff-top breezes. The landscape and views she was offering from this isolated spot were stupendous.

  It was dry and hot, cicadas making a racket, like an African wind instrument. I expected us to encounter rattlesnakes but she dismissed my concerns as foolish. She was wearing her broad-brimmed sunhat and carrying an empty basket. We drew to a halt close to a clearing, an oasis of her making. Quite unexpected in that spot. The garden was encased by a wall of cacti, tall as skyscrapers, with leaves like huge rubber paddles. They were weighed down with orange and burgundy fruits covered with spikes.

  ‘It’s one of my hidden bush gardens.’ She smiled. ‘I cultivate several up here. Let’s sit in the shade and talk and contemplate the view.’ She pointed to a trio of home-crafted wooden stools. I feared she might ask me about my home life, where I hailed from, what had driven me south, but she was far more discreet. For her own reasons, I learned later.

  Her concerns were for Peter. ‘He’s very taken with you.’

  ‘I know and … I don’t want to disappoint him. I’m just not as …’

  ‘As what?’

  ‘Committed to everything. Peter’s very … well, dedicated to whatever he sets his mind to, and I am, well, I’m not sure I have the same depth of loyalty in me. Maybe I’m just shallow,’ I confessed, a lump expanding in my throat.

  She stared at her espadrilles, tapping her feet. It was a rare hiatus in her speech. ‘He is the dearest soul in the world to me, now that I am by myself,’ she said, taking my hand and clasping it between both of hers. Her paint-stained fingers scratched my softer skin. ‘Any advice I give to you would be imprudent, senseless, arrogant. You will find that commitment, the same depth of love, when the moment arrives, when the person fits. I was seventeen when I ran away from England and I would not have listened to a word from anyone. Fortunately for me, it turned out well. I have been blessed with everything I could have dreamed of, except … more time with the one I loved.’ She was silent again for a moment, lost somewhere in her own past, in the companionship of someone cherished.

  ‘Peter is … ready to give his heart. What can I say to you who are so young and open, wide open in the fullness of her callow beauty, for all life’s experiences? You’re not shallow, my dear one, but you are hungry for everything. Try not to break his heart, Grace.’

  I was shocked. ‘I don’t want to.’

  She patted my hand. ‘Remember my words. That’s all I ask, dear, glorious Grace.’

  Before we left, she donned gardening gloves to collect a small basket full of the spiny fruits she called ‘prickly pears’ from the cacti. These she said she would serve later to me as a snack.

  When we had trekked back to the house and poured ourselves tumblers rattling with ice and freshly pressed juice from oranges the colour of the midday sun, Agnes peeled and sliced the prickly pears with a sharp knife and handed me one to try. Their flesh was rich, fibrous, blood red and laden with seeds. ‘What do you think? Very thirst-quenching. You like it?’

  ‘It tastes like bubble gum.’

  ‘Bubble gum.’ She tut-tutted but chortled anyway. ‘Have you ever eaten figs direct from the branches?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘When we’ve time, Grace, after my exhibition, when I’m painting less, we’ll harvest a great haul of them, fresh from the trees, and boil some for jam.’

  Every day was a discovery. I had been seduced. Dreams of future harvests, the months to come. I wanted to stay for ever.

  The trauma of Paris was fading, not ever-present now. Even so, since my excursion of two weeks earlier or more to Marseille I had kept away from built-up environments. Even the sleepy fishing village of Cassis made me a bit jumpy. There were days when I got butterflies in my stomach and grew anxious about being arrested in Paris on my way back to England. Perhaps I just didn’t want to think about leaving Heron Heights, returning home.

  On those days I lay in the grass with a book, eyes closed, listening to the cooing of doves, the humming of bees, or I stared open-eyed at the sky, its vast impenetrable blueness. I watched butterflies flitting between the rose blossoms, the bougainvillaea straddling pillars or I gazed at eagles overhead, small dots circling, growing larger as they descended, before pitching themselves earth
wards to trap and tear their unsuspecting prey from its life. I watched them swooping with lilting calls to their enshrouded nests, their open-beaked young.

  And I fantasized about Pierre. Pierre and me, here.

  Our one afternoon together, our drunken lunch. I wondered where he was now. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen days had passed. He could be anywhere. I looked out for his car along the back lane. His grey-blue eyes burrowed into my listlessness, my despondency, my longing. But he didn’t come back. He never drove our way on the off-chance that I might be out walking the mountain path or meandering through the bush close to where he had deposited me.

  I sprawled in a deckchair on Agnes’s veranda, rolling cubes of ice across my cheeks and down to my cleavage. I was aroused by the chilled water, trickling from my breasts to my underarms. I listened to the blatter of the crickets while I replayed my months in France, but mostly I replayed that one, not even entire, day with Pierre. Where was he now? Picking up another girl, buying her lunch? I couldn’t bear the thought of it. Should I go in search of him?

  The Present

  I skipped breakfast, left a scrawled word on the table beneath the vines explaining to Peter or whoever found it first that I had driven into Cassis and would be back within an hour or two. I gave no explanation for my absence, feeling unable to write a bald lie.

  On the same pad, I scribbled a second message:

  George, I am sorry to have let you down. I tried to meet you this morning, to keep my promise. Unfortunately, the boat wouldn’t start. Don’t think the worst or jump to hasty conclusions. We can and will sort this out. Grace

  When I arrived at the Strand, I parked across the way and ran directly to number eleven, Gissing’s rented accommodation. The curtains were drawn closed. It was after eight thirty in the morning. I had no idea how long he might have waited for me down at the creek. Might he still be there, pacing the bay, watching for our little vessel, stirring himself up into a frenzied state? It was a forty-minute hike from here, give or take. He should have been back now. I rapped hard with the iron knocker and waited. I hoped he wasn’t in. Yet I knew I had to face him again sooner or later. There was no reply. I knocked again, then stuffed the note through the letterbox and hot-footed it back to my car. I sat at the wheel, scrutinizing the house. No sign of life. I was immobile. Worn out, exhausted. My brain was frazzled. I couldn’t go home yet. I needed coffee, space in my head. Replaying over and over my encounters with George. Something felt wrong, was not adding up … A memory out of synch.