The House on the Edge of the Cliff

by Carol Drinkwater

  In Cassis, I sat alone in Thierry’s café, cradling a cappuccino, staring out of the window. It was still early. The place was more or less empty. I had a raging headache. The fishermen were docking and unloading their hauls. I watched them without really seeing, my gaze fixed to the window.

  A detail was troubling me. Unsettling me. Unspecified. A creeping sense of nausea. About our previous meetings. When George removed his sunglasses, the shock of his disfigurement … I was trying to recall, and the pressure beat into my brain …

  Thierry strolled over to my table, whistling softly, slid a small basket of freshly baked croissants onto the table in front of me. ‘You don’t look like you’ve had breakfast, Madame.’ He smiled. ‘Help yourself. I’ll make you a fresh coffee. You’ve barely touched that one.’

  I nodded my thanks absently, thoughts elsewhere. What was I missing? A key, a pointer, overlooked … Eyes squeezed closed, I was spooling back and forth, recollecting Pierre when I’d first met him in Marseille. And then the day he’d fashioned his fishing rod …

  1968

  20 August

  I watched Pierre whittling, singing to himself as he trimmed a length of pliable wood. ‘Blue Bayou’. I loved Roy Orbison. Pierre’s voice was different, softer, equally sexy. I longed to join in, to sing along. The cane was pine or another wood of a slightly more solid variety. Young yew? His hand clasped the staff and ran up and down its length, smoothing and gently flexing it. He was carving a rod. A rod to go fishing. I had seen him crop it from a shrub earlier in the day. There was an almost imperceptible tremor in his hands as he worked diligently, lost in a world of his own.

  He had a sharp knife, one of those Swiss Army things with dozens of pointy bits, and with that he was shearing off nubs, smoothing inconsistencies. On the rock beside him, weighted by a smooth pale pink stone he had picked up along the shoreline earlier that morning, lay a small triangle of sandpaper. With this he planed the rod. I marvelled at his dexterity and the delicacy of his movements.

  Until now, during the last few days since he had been here, he had snorkelled for our fish. The bounty for our starlit, fire-lit barbecue suppers. These we had been consuming as a threesome on the beach, Agnes not with us. She had been working like a fiend: last-minute preparations for her trip. Since Pierre had reappeared, since Peter and I had bumped into him in a portside bar in La Ciotat, he’d been spending a great deal of time with us. I’d wake in the mornings, go to the window, lean out and there he’d be on the beach, bending and rising, amassing debris. Driftwood, stones, shells. He collected his hauls in bags and stowed them in his car. Except the driftwood, which he piled high for fires on the beach.

  Peter and Agnes didn’t say much. They hadn’t commented on Pierre’s arrival out of nowhere. What could they say? They didn’t own the cove, although, before, it had felt as if they did.

  I spent my time observing Pierre, couldn’t take my eyes off him, naked in the water. He was so at ease within his body. I scrutinized him, lusted after him. I was besotted. His blue rubber flippers splashing, drumming up and down. The sun beating on his bronzed buttocks and back, rouging his upper arms, his supple muscles. The circles of salt on his shoulders when the sun had dried off the seawater, the blond hair at his armpits soggy, like tufts of flaxen seaweed.

  I tried not to lust after Pierre, for Peter’s sake.

  But today we were alone, Pierre and I. Now he was running metres of fishing line along the stick. He had a hook at the ready, a bob and a sinker. I marvelled at his resourcefulness. His long, slender fingers were nimble, dexterous even when he was smoking a joint. I’d smoked one with him earlier. I was a bit stoned.

  The rustle of leaves now from behind where we were seated in the bright sunlight drew my attention. For a moment, I thought it must be Peter returned from Italy but it was a bird that had landed in the foliage. A small songbird. It began to sing. Such a melodious tune. I couldn’t have identified it any more than I knew the names of the trees and plants. There were grebes and plovers – Peter had pointed them out to me. I felt sure my present companion could put a name to them all. Agnes, too, would know. I felt sad that Agnes had left us. Off on her trip to Italy, to her exhibition in the Eternal City, jumping with excitement, fizzing with nervous energy.

  Was Pierre my companion, or were we merely strangers who had found ourselves in the same place at the same time? He never proffered information about himself. Peter had asked me, ‘What’s his real name and what is he doing here?’ And why is he hanging around all the time, parking his car alongside our land? Peter hadn’t worded it quite so brutally.

  Pierre inhaled as he dragged on his cigarette, then coughed. I was curious to know what he was thinking during the long silences, lost in a world of his own. Whom might he be dreaming of? A girl back home? Where was his home? I had introduced him to Peter and then to Agnes as Pierre, but he was not French.

  ‘He’s English, isn’t he? Pierre who?’

  Agnes referred to him as a drifter. ‘No reason not to be polite to him, though. It was kind of him to give you a lift from Marseille. Invite him in for a drink with us if you wish to, Grace. Make him welcome.’

  He wore no ring, no jewellery, no adornments of any sort. Nothing to suggest there might be an attachment to another. A sweetheart. He was a free spirit. Of his time and generation. A hippie? A creature of the sixties.

  As I hoped I was learning to be.

  I tried hard not to allow my wandering eyes to settle beneath the pale blue sarong he had casually draped about his unclad torso, his smooth golden abdomen, his nipples a darker shade, like two chocolate stars. His bare legs hung loosely apart on the rock where he was perched, the heels of his upturned feet nestling in the sand. Beneath the loose clothing, he was naked. I closed my eyes, forcing myself not to peek at his genitals, his limp penis.

  He knew I was watching him. But could he surmise the depth of my hunger? Did I betray myself?

  It was love, and it left me weak.

  ‘What’s happened to your boyfriend?’ He asked the question as though he had divined my lust and was deflecting it, reminding me of my betrayal of the man I had been sleeping with intermittently, but not for more than a week now, not since before Pierre had shown up in the bar and bought us a drink.

  In answer to my prayer.

  Pierre’s voice was husky, tobacco-weathered.

  ‘Peter’s not …’ I wanted to make it clear that Peter and I were not committed to one another. We were friends, companions, who were travelling together and who had shared a bed from time to time: there was nothing special between us. But the words choked in my throat, all too aware of Agnes’s words and Peter’s deepening affections for me.

  But, hey, this was the sixties. Who wasn’t sleeping together?

  ‘He’s with his aunt,’ I muttered. ‘He’s taken Agnes’s car and driven them both to Italy. She’s picking up a train for Rome.’

  Pierre made no comment.

  ‘He’ll be gone all day. Might not be back till tomorrow.’

  He lifted his head, half smiling. He crooned a few bars of an Elvis song. Was Pierre asking me to love him tenderly, as the words suggested?

  I might have swooned.

  There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, his nose, the upper parts of his cheeks. He had caught the sun.

  My breath constricted. I was crippled with longing. That flame in his eyes. I loved him. In secret, in the shadows of my heart.

  ‘So, we have this precious day to ourselves.’

  I was skating on thin ice.

  The house, the beach, the sea. It was our playground to do with as we pleased. Agnes would not be returning for about two weeks, but Peter was due back by late evening or at the latest the following morning. ‘I will only be delayed overnight,’ he’d said, ‘if I’m held up at the border.’

  ‘Do you like sleeping in your tent?’

  Pierre glanced up at me, noncommittal.

  ‘Maybe tonight you could stay at the house, if yo
u want. There are plenty of spare rooms.’

  In an instant, the rasp of the crickets and cicadas had grown louder, rising to a crescendo, as if someone had just turned up the sound. Their calls had escalated in pitch almost to screech level, picking into my brains, entering my head. I closed my eyes and replayed that scene from The Birds with Tippi Hedren. Those terrifying creatures – the parrots in the cage, the empty staircase and then, don’t turn that handle, that final climactic attack.

  Was this a warning? An augur, like the chant of a chorus in a Greek tragedy? There will be repercussions. Repercussions for your foolishness, your infidelity.

  Make him welcome, Agnes had said. She wouldn’t object. She was Bohemian.

  Blind to my fate, I dismissed my guilt-ridden nonsense. The overriding emotion was that I had fallen in love and was attempting to draw him closer to me.

  As if in response, Pierre leaped to his feet, fit and agile and confident. There were sand clouds clinging to his legs. They fell away like showers of gold as he began to move.

  ‘Are you going fishing now?’

  He made no answer. Had he even heard me? Lost in his inner world.

  He swiped his transistor from the rock, grabbed his soft pack of Marlboro cigarettes and his coloured shirt and, bearing the newly fashioned rod aloft, strode away. ‘You coming?’ he called. I stumbled forward and hurried to keep step. My cheeks were flushed, stinging with heat and happiness and desire, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t have been more elated.

  Out on the water, in the distance towards the town, a small flotilla of yachts was scudding across the invisible waves. The sea was glistening, shining in the sunlight, like the dorsal ridge on a diving dolphin.

  ‘Are there dolphins along this stretch of coast? I’d like to watch a pod of them frolicking in the water.’

  Carefree I was that day, throughout those hours when there had been no one but the two of us. And what of the eclipsing shadow of guilt? I ignored it, tamped it down.

  ‘Have you got any gear?’ he asked me.

  I misunderstood, assuming he was referring to a second set of fishing tackle, but he was talking about drugs.

  I shook my head, disappointing him. ‘There’s a stash in my car.’ We glanced up beyond the rise of the beach, beyond the sloped dunes to where his fantabulous Cadillac was parked and, alongside it, his small tent. A tent for one. He hadn’t responded to my invitation to move into the house.

  ‘Check the glove compartment.’

  ‘Isn’t it locked?’

  He scoffed at my question and sent me off in search of the hash, adding, ‘Don’t forget the Rizlas. I’ll be on that rock over there.’

  I skipped up the ascent, the sand kicking in whorls about my legs, puddles of joy. We were going to smoke another joint together. An intimate interlude, while waiting for the fish to bite.

  Pierre had switched on the radio. I heard strains of Otis Redding, ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’. One of my favourite songs of the moment. It conjured up summer. Chilling out. My summer of ’68, of meeting Pierre, falling in love. A sacred, dangerous love.

  I reached the car perspiring, and eased myself onto the leather passenger seat. From where I was sitting, Pierre was within my eye-line. He was crouching on one of the big granite boulders, his sarong flapping lightly in the shore breeze. Fronds of hair rose and fell. I opened the glove compartment and found several white envelopes, all tightly folded. Which to choose? The first I drew out, I unpeeled the flap and found a collection of many coloured pills, dozens of them. Vitamins? Medicines? I scrunched closed the scruffy package and placed it back where it had come from, alongside a battery torch. The next contained the dope he had sent me to collect. A chunk of Lebanese gold, a third the size of Pierre’s transistor radio. It was impressive, must have cost a small fortune, its potential a little frightening. Didn’t he fear he would get caught? The car’s roof was open, the glove compartment left carelessly unlocked.

  Did Pierre do drugs all the time, every day, like a habit, or was it because he was on holiday? Hanging out at the coast, getting stoned, watching the ships in the water. Scuba diving. He had a full diving kit in the boot of the car.

  Was he on holiday? Or was this his lifestyle? His existence? Driving his open-top, staying with people he encountered along the way, hitchers, like I would have been on the day I met him in Marseille, erecting his tent wherever he fancied … And then a thought intruded upon me, flashing its message in strident signposts, momentarily crushing my joy: might this be all I was to him, a girl he had crossed paths with along the way? Or might he be falling in love too? I loved him madly. I was certain. I was crazy about him, obsessed by him, and could think of no one else. I tried not to give space to the guilt I felt towards Peter because this was the sixties and adventure was what I had crossed to France in search of. Peter had to understand that. It was part of the philosophy, the spirit of the age, he and his contemporaries were fighting for.

  I closed my eyes for a second, blanking out Agnes’s warning to me up in her cactus garden, ‘Don’t hurt Peter,’ and my response, ‘I don’t want to. I’m trying not to.’

  But it was all too easy, it was clear to me now.

  I cared for Peter. Deeply. He was my friend. The last thing I wanted was to cause him any unhappiness or pain, but my feelings for Pierre, my emotions, were totally different, and out of my control. I was running headlong with no brake, no controls to fetter them.

  I was about to close the glove compartment when, as an afterthought, glancing upwards to confirm Pierre was not watching me, I dug a little deeper, rummaging behind the envelopes. Searching for? A passport? Driving licence? A clue to his real identity? Nothing there. I spun round on my buttocks, tearing my skin. Ouch. The underside of my thighs was puckered and sweaty from the heat and leather. I leaned over to the rear seats where a guitar lay beneath an untidy pile of clothes. Was Pierre a musician like my dad? How cool was that. There was a shirt I recognized, worn on the day I’d first met him. I resisted the temptation to nick it, to hide it under my pillow.

  Pierre would be wondering what was taking me so long. I should get a move on. Somewhere there must be papers for the car. I pulled down the sun visor. Nothing but my own bronzed face, bleaching hair, in a small mirror, and then I stretched over to the driver’s visor. That was where my dad kept his logbook. No paperwork there either. Curious to have no documentation to hand. Might the car be stolen? What had put such nonsense into my head?

  I stepped out and slammed the door.

  Might it be that this was not Pierre’s car? Who was Pierre with those grey-blue eyes that burned through the lining of my skin, peeling me away from myself, leaving me raw and exposed?

  The sand was already scorching beneath my bare feet so I ran on tiptoe, hurrying back to my dreamboat. He could see me even though his back was to me and he was facing out to sea. His newly sculpted rod curved lightly towards the water. Its nylon line gliding, bobbing from side to side with the movement of the shore waves.

  ‘Here,’ I called, as I approached.

  The music had changed. Otis Redding had been replaced by the Mamas and Papas, ‘California Dreamin’’. I loved this song too, owned the LP back in Bromley, the original rendition. On such a summer’s day, it made me want to dance on the sun-drenched rocks by the waves.

  ‘“I’ve been … to find the hash …”’ I was waving my arms above my head, moving in step to the music.

  ‘Why don’t you roll us a spliff?’ he called, concentrating on the water and his task. He had donned a pair of tortoiseshell Ray-Bans. Wayfarers. So hip. As he turned, I caught my reflection in the mirrored lenses. My open shirt billowing, revealing my red and white striped bikini. Me, proffering the crushed envelope. My smile expectant and nervous, with a flash of strong white teeth. My long hair, getting lighter in the sun, flapping like laundry in the salty breeze.

  He smiled at me. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he purred. ‘Too beautiful.’

  My heart swelled, r
ising out of my breast and soaring skywards. A happiness kite. I was glad now that I had asked him to stay. My guilt and foreboding were nothing but adolescent anxieties.

  ‘I don’t have any cigarettes.’

  ‘Here, take one of these.’

  The soft-pack was sticking up out of the pocket of his open shirt. I leaned in close to him. He smelt of tobacco, musky, feral, of patchouli oil, which was not a scent I cared for but, mixed with the pheromones of Pierre, it was intoxicating. My head was spinning and I almost lost my balance. His left hand grabbed my wrist tight. His grasp rubbed, burned, as I regained my footing, but I didn’t object to the pain.

  ‘Whoa, crazy chick, stay with me. Don’t let the wind blow the tobacco and gear away.’ He laughed.

  I threw my head back, closed my eyes, willing him to lean in to me, over me, silently begging him to kiss me. Waiting for that sweetness, eyes tight shut, tighter, here on the shore … He didn’t. When I opened my eyes, he was concentrating on his fishing equipment in the water. Lost in his world. I had been forgotten.

  By mid-afternoon we had smoked three joints and Pierre had caught four handsome speckled fish. Their skins radiated colours, like oil slicks on water. The Doors were crooning ‘Light My Fire’ on the radio and I was feeling as though I had been hypnotized.

  ‘You look like Jim Morrison,’ I murmured. A god-like creature.

  ‘We need beer,’ he announced, carefully wrapping his rod and the fish in his shirt.

  ‘What! That’s disgusting! Your shirt will stink!’ I shrieked with hysterical laughter. Nothing could have been funnier.