The House on the Edge of the Cliff

by Carol Drinkwater

  It was too late. Was it too late?

  How many hours had it been now?

  I had lost count. People can survive days out at sea.

  No body had washed up. No discovery had been reported by the local TV station. I had kept an eye on the screen. No corpse had been sighted floating, bloated eyes pecked out by the gulls, hauled on board by a fishing boat or cruiser, and ferried back to shore.

  Nothing but silence, and emptiness.

  We walked the four kilometres into the town together. Trudged along the rocky shoreline, navigating the great stones, exchanging nothing more than a few intermittent words. Our thoughts were elsewhere, both of us in vastly different places. Still, I found it comforting that Peter was at my side. For months now he had been at my side, and I found it soothing how deserted the beaches were along our stretch between Agnes’s remote house and the fishing town. Busier, though, as we approached habitation. The previous week families had been sheltering from the heat of the sun beneath coloured parasols, sunk into the sand at angles.

  The walk seemed longer than it did habitually, enervating for a body running on empty: no sleep, next to no food. No drugs in my system now but several shots of alcohol had been my fluid intake. I had raided Agnes’s bar in the night, after talking to her on the phone, depleted her vodka stores.

  The sun burned hotter than it had since the day we’d arrived there. Or was it because we had spent the earlier carefree days floating in the Mediterranean at the water’s edge, lying in hammocks in the shade, making love in a shuttered room that I had not correctly evaluated the intensity of the heat?

  When we arrived Cassis was silent, like a ghost town with its pastel-pale irregular-shaped houses. Its spookiness fitted my mood.

  Peter pointed out the police station nestling down a side street, discreetly set back from the main tourist area. Crime had no place among the holidaymakers was the message. When we reached the old building, we found the door locked. A sign to the left, hanging from a lace-curtained window, read Fermé. I pressed my face to the glass. It was more reminiscent of a country-house sitting room than a police station.

  ‘Shit. Now what?’

  ‘Don’t swear, it doesn’t suit you.’

  There were moments when I silently hated Peter. He could be such a prig. Now was one of those moments. ‘Someone’s drowned, for heaven’s sake, and you’re at me about swearing.’

  ‘He hasn’t drowned.’

  ‘Well, where is he, then?’ My drowned angel. I heaved a sigh, bit back tears. ‘Even if he didn’t want to spend more time with us, decided he’d had enough, why would he leave his car? He would certainly have been back to collect that.’ And he’d be after his glove compartment’s treasure trove, which I had emptied. The contents were secreted beneath the sink in my bathroom. The guitar case had also been hiding drugs. Cocaine. I didn’t mention any of this aloud. ‘Why would he just disappear on us?’

  ‘We’ll have to wait to find out.’ Peter glanced at his watch, not listening to me. It read two fifteen. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t consider that everything would be closed for lunch. Nothing opens again till three. There’s no point returning to my aunt’s. I need a cold drink. Come on, let’s go.’ He scratched at his hair and fidgeted with his face. I noticed then that he hadn’t shaved. Out of character. The five o’clock shadow didn’t suit him: it made him look scruffy and surly. Our friendship was souring. It saddened me. I had let him down.

  Every bar we walked by was deserted. The remaining summer population was either on one of the beaches we hadn’t traversed or having lunch elsewhere out of the blazing sun, while the permanent residents would be settling to a siesta behind shuttered windows. I felt tiredness sweep over me.

  I was overwhelmed by grief, by the loss of all that would never be. A man I had made love to, but knew almost nothing about, not even his name. Desolation threatened. It was the prospect of never seeing Pierre again, although what future I had expected or dreamed of I could not have put into words. It was the bleakness. The thought of the dull, commonplace life I would lead without his presence was washing through me in waves. Pierre, with all his glitz, had made the difference. Corny as that might be, I had felt alive in his company. I glanced across at Peter, who struck me then as ramrod rigid. He had been tense, uptight, since before Pierre had disappeared. My feelings, worn too openly, without discretion, were at the root of this change in his demeanour. Agnes had divined them. ‘Don’t hurt him,’ she had warned. I felt rotten, guilty as hell that I had let her down. But I hadn’t asked Peter to get so involved with me. I mean, we weren’t anything permanent. We hadn’t made plans, promises for the future.

  I was sixteen, for goodness’ sake.

  How could the best days of my life be over at sixteen?

  We found a bar, also a bistro, but neither of us had an appetite. It was set back in a leafy pebbled courtyard. We were seated at a small iron table with, shading us from the sun’s harsh rays, a white scalloped parasol decorated with fat green bottles. Bulbous bottles. They were advertising Perrier, a popular mineral water. Somewhere beyond my sightline, water fell in a steady trickle. The flowing fountain cooled the air but attracted mosquitoes. One landed on the upper part of my wrist. I slapped it dead and drew my hand away quickly. The squashed black-brown body remained, its blood streaking a thin uneven line across the back of my hand. I felt disgust. I hate the sight of blood. It reminded me of home.

  One other couple, lost in their own intimate conversation, their four hands entwined against the surface of their table, were seated almost out of sight in a deep shady alcove, our sole companions. They seemed so in love.

  A waiter appeared.

  ‘We’ll have two Perriers, and one large whisky, s’il vous plaît.’

  I made no comment. Peter rarely drank spirits. He must have been suffering the same grief as I was, the same glaring reality that our lives, as we had known them, innocent and blameless, were over.

  The police officer was a local man, who spoke with a thick twang and ringing consonants, like the clopping of horse’s hoofs, iron against cobbles. I was growing accustomed to the Provençal accent and was beginning to break through its maze to decipher partial meaning. He was tall and bronzed, how I pictured an Australian outback ranger. The long-limbed, loping style of someone who has grown up out of doors and practised many sports, who looks as though he is too tall for his bed. He expressed little interest in us or our story.

  ‘A tourist friend has gone missing, you say?’

  Peter nodded.

  ‘Whose relative was he?’ The man coughed, realizing his faux-pas. ‘Is he, I should say.’

  We shook our heads. ‘He wasn’t related to either of us,’ confirmed Peter. I noted that Peter was also using the past tense.

  After that, a roll-call of questions.

  Who was the man? What was his name? The officer let out a sigh as he prodded at a biro from which no ink was flowing. He wore no jacket. An overhead fan spun lazily. Even so it was stifling in the cramped cubicle that acted as Reception. And there was nowhere for us to sit down. I stared at a black-and-white portrait photograph of de Gaulle hanging on the wall.

  ‘His name was Pierre,’ I said.

  ‘French, then?’

  ‘We don’t think so.’

  A frown from the inquisitor. ‘His surname?’

  Peter harrumphed. He glanced at me. I pursed my lips.

  ‘Pierre was the only name he gave us,’ I said.

  ‘We met him in a bar.’

  The lawman squinted, considering the facts, or lack of them. Peter was watching me as though I might be shielding the answer, burying a truth. I shook my head. ‘I don’t know his surname.’

  ‘But he was staying with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  We both spoke at once. I had answered in the affirmative, Peter negative. ‘He was sleeping in his tent close to my family’s villa.’

  ‘After you met him in a bar?’
<
br />   ‘Yes.’

  Should I admit to hitching a ride with Pierre from Marseille?

  It was later, in La Ciotat, we had bumped into him in the bar. Quite by chance. Pierre had spotted us sitting together at a corner table, raised a hand in greeting and approached.

  ‘Oh, look, that’s him,’ I’d squealed. ‘It’s the bloke I met in Marseille, the one I told you about with the car.’

  Peter had let out a groan of dissatisfaction. In spite of the music from the loudspeakers I had heard it distinctly.

  Cradling a tumbler of whisky, Pierre, in loose linen slacks, had strolled towards us, made himself comfortable at our table, without invitation, and offered to buy us both drinks. He had pulled from his back trouser pocket a rolled wad of crisp five-hundred-franc notes, the new francs with the head of the French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, on the back. This was more money than I’d seen in my life.

  Peter turned his head away in disgust. He had been raised to despise such displays of ostentation. Nouveau riche would have been his silent judgement.

  ‘Age?’ asked the ranger-type, bringing me back to the present.

  Again Peter spun his head in my direction. Had my intimacies with Pierre given me an insider’s knowledge? Who knew of those intimacies?

  ‘Older than us,’ I offered. ‘Twenty-five possibly.’

  ‘Do you have any photographs?’

  We shook our heads again. I had no photograph to remember him by.

  ‘Any idea about his profession?’

  I bit my lip. Tricky. Pierre had surely been peddling drugs. Drugs stashed in an otherwise empty guitar case? I hadn’t known about them till this morning. I had planned to ask him to play the guitar for us one evening.

  I tried not to dwell on the fact that he was a dealer because I wasn’t comfortable with it, but it would explain his casual wealth, his super-duper car and the other stash in the glove compartment. His lifestyle, too. I never confirmed Peter’s suspicions. That would have felt like a betrayal of Pierre. If Pierre was a dealer, he was discreet about it. Possibly why he hadn’t revealed his identity. We were three strangers, three travellers, enjoying a summer in the South of France. Indulging our senses. I was sure he was English. The lilting accent. He must have been born in the north and moved south at some point during his childhood, softening the Yorkshire in him.

  I shook my head. ‘He never mentioned his work.’

  ‘Well, what do you know about him?’ the officer enquired, a little tetchily.

  I watched, as he attempted several times to get the ink in his biro to flow so that he could complete the lengthy form he had placed on the cluttered desk in front of him, where papers flapped as the overhead fan turned. Alongside the paperwork there was a black Remington typewriter. He swore under his breath. He had already opened and closed several drawers in his hunt for carbon paper to make the required number of copies of the missing-persons report. The carbon paper was as elusive as the biro was intractable.

  ‘Nothing, really.’

  Everything and nothing.

  ‘And he wasn’t staying with you? Where did you say you are staying?’

  ‘My aunt’s house is situated overlooking the beaches and coves west of Figuerolles. The missing man, Pierre, was a stranger to us. He was sleeping in a tent that he had pitched close by our land. We knew little else about him.’

  Why was Peter lying? To protect Agnes?

  ‘Anything else?’

  Both heads turned to me.

  He liked to fish, enjoyed dancing to Jamaican Ska music when he was stoned. He was always stoned to one degree or another. He’d introduced us to Ska. ‘One Love/People Get Ready’, Bob Marley. The Wailers. He was softly spoken. You’d melt in his presence. Occasionally, in the evenings he wore mascara. In the mornings when he woke, the black make-up had smudged beneath his eyes. His tanned face was bewitching. Tanned body. Firm limbs. Most of the time he was dressed in a batik wraparound and open shirt. Or loose floppy cotton pants that tied with a string at the waist. Almost always topless. He rarely wore anything more than an open shirt. His skin was smooth, his chest hairless. His head hung with long golden locks. And sex with him was transcendental.

  They were staring at me, stony-faced. These two men.

  I shrugged. ‘Nothing else.’

  The officer reached for a map of the coast. One of those detailed ones, the Ordnance Survey variety. They show every nook and cranny, every wiggly path, whether it leads somewhere or nowhere.

  ‘Can you put a cross, please, at the point where you say he entered the water to go swimming at midnight?’

  ‘It was earlier than midnight,’ I insisted.

  Peter took the pen and obliged.

  ‘You mentioned he had a car. Where is that now?’

  ‘Still parked alongside my aunt’s villa.’

  ‘Do you have the key?’

  Peter pulled the key from his pocket and slipped it uncertainly onto the desk. ‘I was thinking we should leave the car a day or two, in case he returns to collect it …’

  The police officer looked at Peter, confused.

  ‘Of course, if you can arrange for it to be towed away, then, thank you, yes, that would be helpful. I would prefer it’s gone before my aunt returns.’

  Afterwards, the policeman requested that we stay in the area, saying he’d be in touch.

  ‘We’re leaving tomorrow. I can give you my parents’ contact details in Paris. This man, Pierre, was not with us, you understand. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to report his disappearance because it’s possible, more than likely, that we were the last to see him before … before he went swimming.’

  ‘It would be most helpful if you could delay your departure, please. I might need to ask you one or two more questions. Leave your telephone number with me before you go.’

  And so we stayed.

  When we woke the following morning, Pierre’s snappy green 1963 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz had gone. The police must have collected it.

  I walked the beach with Bruce. He became my loyal companion, best friend; his company calmed me. Peter and I skirted round one another as though afraid to make physical contact. There was no more sex between us, little affection, even. He had stopped inviting me to his room, which I was relieved about.

  The ghost of Pierre stayed with us. Perhaps more so than when he was alive. You see? I said it. Was. By then I was facing the brutal reality, the fact that Pierre was dead, his body languishing at the bottom of the sea.

  I dug out tomes of poetry from Agnes’s library. Oscar Wilde, Yeats, Pablo Neruda, E. E. Cummings. I immersed myself in others’ heartache, their longing and love stories. I wrote my own lines but threw them away. All the while we, or I, waited for the phone to ring. Nonsensical, unrealistic were my hopes for the police to solve the mystery of the missing body and return Pierre to me.

  The Present

  Gissing’s identity

  Two days later, Capitaine Moulinet was back at our door. It was sooner than I might have expected. I was intending to pop to La Ciotat to buy pyjamas for Peter’s upcoming hospital stay. He and I had always been in the habit of sleeping in the nude and he didn’t own a single pair.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame. A couple of small points, if I may …’

  ‘Yes, Capitaine?’

  ‘Did the victim, the foreigner’ – Moulinet emphasized this word heavily – ‘who went over the edge, speak to you, say or shout out anything before he took his life?’

  I shook my head. ‘He was quite some distance from here. Even if he had shouted, I doubt I would have heard him or been able to distinguish anything more than a noise. No, there was no call that attracted my attention.’

  ‘You mentioned on the day in question a description of the dead man.’

  ‘Did I?’ I was struggling to recall. ‘Oh, yes, that he was dressed in black.’

  ‘You described him as “a foreigner”, which, in fact, is accurate. He was English. I was wondering what made you arrive at this conclusi
on.’

  My head was beginning to spin. Giddiness caused me to take a step backwards.

  ‘Would you prefer we go out onto your veranda where it’s breezier and you can sit down, Madame? Perhaps the fresh air might jog your memory.’

  Without a word, I led the way. Moulinet took a seat and pulled out his tattered notebook. I remained standing, looking out to sea. My legs were jelly and I wasn’t sure I could sit down with confidence or ease. I took a few deep breaths. An actor’s training to alleviate stage fright before setting foot on the boards.

  ‘What made you describe the deceased as a foreigner?’

  ‘The majority of people who stop at that spot are tourists. I assumed that he must be …’

  ‘Do you know the identity of the dead man, Madame?’

  ‘You have asked me that question and I told you that I do not.’

  ‘It’s curious, puzzling me, because your name and address were found in the house where the dead man was staying. Written in ink on a sheet of paper torn from a notebook. Can you explain that?’

  Such a possibility had never crossed my mind. I shrugged and shook my head. And what of the notes I had handwritten to George? On both I had signed my name. ‘Was there anything else, or … only those details?’

  ‘Nothing else so far. The deceased’s name, according to a passport found in a side pocket of his hand luggage – his suitcase stored in his wardrobe is locked and we haven’t yet found the key – was George Andrew Gissing. He was born in Bradford in the United Kingdom. Does that mean anything to you?’

  Andrew, not Peter?

  I shook my head, wondering, after all these years, where the Christian name ‘Pierre’ had come from. Were Peter, Agnes and I the only three ever to know him as Pierre?

  ‘I wonder how you knew where he was staying,’ I said casually, to deflect the conversation away from me.

  Moulinet shrugged. ‘We found several English coins in his raincoat pocket, the soggy remains of a London train ticket. It was not hard to track him down after a few enquiries at various lodging houses and hotels.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I have spoken with Madame Celeste Gurnier, the proprietor of number eleven The Strand, and she confirms that the house had been rented for an open-ended period of time to an Englishman bearing that name.’