The House on the Edge of the Cliff

by Carol Drinkwater

  ‘I see.’

  ‘She has no idea why Mr Gissing was visiting this part of the world. He did not strike her as a typical holidaymaker and he had little luggage for a gentleman planning on a lengthy stay, but then again, who can say? He hadn’t booked the house on the internet or by telephone or agency. So, no traces there. It appears he just turned up in the village looking for a place to “stop for a few weeks”. At least, that was his explanation to the barman, Thierry, at the Café du Port. He enquired there for rentals and was given Madame Gurnier’s address by the proprietor.’

  ‘Unusual,’ I remarked, for want of something more elucidating to add.

  ‘And you are unable to shed any further light on the matter, Madame? Do you know from where he had found your name and address?’

  I lifted my hands as though to give an explanation, make a gesture, to offer some trumped-up clarification and let them fall heavily back by my sides.

  ‘He might have died with the key to the suitcase on his person. It fell out of his pocket, perhaps, as he plummeted. The case will be forced open and, with luck, the details of his presence here and the reason for his death will be explained before the week is out.’

  1968

  Summer’s end

  I was on the upper floor of the villa, in Agnes’s studio and bedroom, with its semblance of quietude, keeping myself out of sight and sequestered from the tensions that were Peter’s and mine. My gaze was locked on a trio of men and one woman who were busying themselves on Agnes’s beach. Uniformed police. Police Nationale. Pressed back from the frame of the window, a shadow hovering beyond the shutters, I reminded myself of Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers in Hitchcock’s film Rebecca.

  I watched sneakily as they cordoned off the area where we, all three, had spent our last evening together. Agnes’s cove. Our playground. All those fabulous evenings. Stoned, music, barbecues. Sex when Peter was not about. Evenings of falling in love under the stars, watching for shooting stars. Days discovering his flesh. A love hidden by me, cherished beneath wings.

  One of the lawmen was donning a pair of rubber gloves. He was poking about in the ashes of our last bonfire, using an instrument, which, at this distance, resembled a giant pair of tweezers. I couldn’t imagine what clues he might be looking for. The dog-ends of our spliffs? If he unearthed any, were we going to get busted? Was I to be arrested for the second time that summer?

  I was getting seriously panicked about the boundaries of our involvement, our obligations. How far would we be implicated? We should have called the cops hours sooner, but Peter had stubbornly resisted the idea. Why? He’d said it was unwise, that Pierre would be fine and he wasn’t our responsibility. Why involve ourselves? Why bring the law snooping about? ‘Wasn’t your first skirmish with the police sufficient for one summer?’ he’d reasoned. His words had stayed with me, put the fear of God into me.

  Yesterday afternoon, Peter was called back to the police station in Cassis to ‘answer a few unsettled queries’. He was monosyllabic when he returned and refused to engage in conversation. Neither would he tell me what the ‘unsettled queries’ had been.

  While he was gone, I took Pierre’s drug stash out of my bathroom cupboard and put it in Agnes’s studio, tucked among the chaos of her paint pots and cleaning materials. I was intending to dispose of everything, every last tablet, but hadn’t yet worked out how or where. I was dreading a raid on the house. An exhaustive search. I realized it had been judicious of Peter to insist that Pierre was not staying here when he drowned.

  A police motor boat out on the water was rounding one of the four islets of Riou and crossing our bay yet again. It reminded me of one of those train sets where the train just keeps turning in loops on the tracks. The cruiser had been out there since morning. The nag of its engine, even up here in the eyrie, had been taunting me since daybreak. I’d taken refuge in Agnes’s sanctuary where Peter wouldn’t think to look for me.

  As soon as Agnes returned, I was planning to set off for London, to take the train from Marseille to the Gare d’Orléans in Paris. And then a Métro to the Gare du Nord where I would board the first boat-train I could secure a seat on. I knew that I was abandoning the last shred of hope that Pierre’s body would be recovered.

  I didn’t intend to stay in Paris with Peter. I told him honestly that I wanted to return directly to England. No matter how adamant or persuasive my arguments, nothing I said destroyed his illusion that we would spend time together in the city. He continued to harbour the hope that I would have a change of heart, would soften towards him, even after I’d advised him, repeatedly, that our relationship was over. How could it not be over after everything that had happened?

  ‘You can’t leave me,’ he’d said. ‘Not now.’

  Pierre’s tent had collapsed, fallen in the wind or been knocked down by Bruce. No one had bothered to right it or pack it away. It had been blown into the scrub. It was caught between bushes, torn and damaged. His belongings, a simple cloth bag, floppy, stuffed with his few articles of clothing, I had cleared out from the room he had barely slept in and thrown away. I regretted that hasty gesture, that I hadn’t held on to something for myself. He seemed to own so little and I was left with only memories, no souvenirs. I recalled his Hawaiian shirts, short-sleeved tropical fantasies. I recalled his bronzed arms, his movements. His softly spoken voice. That smile, the splinter of broken tooth. Rolling joints.

  The days advanced. No corpse was retrieved.

  A phone call came from a police investigation office in Marseille to inform us that we were free to leave at our leisure. I was on the veranda, a book on my lap, another volume of love poems.

  So, that was that. Peter was champing at the bit to get on his way. ‘Go ahead,’ I told him. ‘I’ll hang on.’

  There was nothing to remain for, besides the care of the dog, until the return of Agnes, due any day now.

  ‘We’ll both hang on.’

  I longed to stay for ever. To be alone at the place I had grown to love, but with everything still perfect as it had been. I sat cross-legged on the soft sand, imprinting every image into my brain so that I would never forget the cliff house, the bay. Never forget falling in love with Pierre.

  We met Agnes at the station: she arriving, loaded down with shopping bags from Rome, we departing with our luggage. All three of us embraced fondly, hugged and wept a little. Then Peter handed her the keys to her car, to her home.

  ‘But why must you leave?’

  ‘Father’s beckoning, getting himself into a right stew.’

  ‘What a bore that brother of mine is. Come back soon, both of you. Grace, make sure to come with Peter. I’ll be expecting you.’

  The train to Paris was packed. The wagons-lits had all been reserved. This was the beginning of the end of the holiday season. La rentrée: the return north for families with children, readying themselves for the start of the school year. We were obliged to stand in a crowded corridor, awaiting the chance of a seat at the next station.

  ‘Will there be a stop before Paris?’

  ‘Yes.’ Peter nodded, stroking my hair. ‘Avignon.’

  We were feeding ourselves on packets of biscuits Peter had bought at the station, although I had little appetite. I had lost weight and felt sick most of the time. When I was exhausted and looked as though I might fall over, Peter propped me up. He put his arms about me and pinned me against the window. His caring, his insistence that nothing between us had changed, exacerbated my loss, my grieving for another. Still, his kindness helped me hold it together. On that long journey towards home, the end of my summer of ’68, Peter was all I had.

  Was I all he had? Had we brought misfortune upon one another? I knew I had saddened him, and it tore at my heart.

  I didn’t choose for him to fall in love with me or for me to fall for Pierre.

  I replayed in my mind’s eye the crawling fear, the panic, the knowledge that Pierre and I were drowning, although both of us could swim, those last moments in the water
with him as I clung to him. Had he been fighting for his life? Was he having a fit? A drug-induced heart attack? The kick – did I knock him unconscious? Had I caused his death?

  ‘Swim. Just swim, don’t look back. I’m right behind you.’ Was that what he had called? My brain was furring up, the details growing foggy. He had still been alive when he shouted those words. Right behind you.

  And then what had happened? What had become of Pierre? The questions never left me, never let me go.

  The tablet. My first of several. Pierre had called them ‘tabs’ – ‘Let’s drop a tab’ in that persuasively velvet voice of his. I hadn’t known what it was, what it contained. LSD. Acid.

  My hesitance there on the beach. His open hand proffered, palm upturned, visibly sticky from the heat, holding what looked like a small square of blotting paper. Pink-tinged, innocuous. I was ignorant of the trip that tiny pellet, a ‘tab’, had the power to unlock.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I’d said. ‘I never have.’

  There was an almost invisible trembling of his hand. I remembered that from when he had fashioned his fishing rod.

  ‘All the more reason to. Life is about broadening your horizons.’

  Wasn’t that why I was in France, to broaden my horizons? A hip chick of the sixties.

  ‘You’ll see the world through new eyes. It’ll be as though you were once blind. Opulent colours. A roller-coaster ride of self-discovery, and the sex is transcendental.’

  ‘“Once I was blind, but now I see.”’ I giggled coyly, propelled by temptation. I was sixteen. My clothes, a loose shirt over a bikini, were flapping in the wind, like a grounded bird.

  ‘You’ll fly,’ he encouraged.

  ‘What about Peter?’ I’d asked, turning my head without focusing on any point in particular. Was I to take this pivotal journey alone, without Peter? Why couldn’t it be the three of us, like in Jules et Jim? I hoped it would be mind-blowing, life-altering, but not solitary. I had wanted Peter to be present, to share the experience with us.

  ‘He’s walked into town. He’ll be back. There’s plenty left for him. My supplies are limitless.’ Pierre had winked.

  ‘What about you?’ My eyes pierced his.

  ‘I’m with you.’

  ‘Shall we share one? I’ll start with half.’

  He shook his head, grinned, that roguish broken-faced smile. Like a cherub yet not remotely saintly. His long blond hair flew upwards and stood high above his head. A halo against the horizon and the baking ball of the afternoon sun.

  ‘It’s all or nothing, Grace. There’s little point in taking half. That’s not what it’s about. Shall I go first?’

  I was apprehensive, hesitant, yet I wanted whatever he wanted. I hungered to be a part of him. Would our minds meld? Would we enjoy ‘transcendental’ sex?

  My left arm holding my weight, my outstretched body, in the sand began to give way. I was subsiding, collapsing. The backs of my bare legs were reddening, stinging from the burning sun.

  He lifted the ‘tab’ towards his mouth, leaned forward and kissed me softly. The tip of his tongue worked its way between my lips, excavating, hollowing a space. I closed my eyes. His fingers were at my chin. The drug was on my tongue.

  I wanted the high, but I wanted Pierre more. I would have done anything for him.

  ‘Swallow.’

  I obeyed, then opened my eyes, as though startled, waiting, expectant. It tasted of nothing special, a tiny bit fizzy, rather like weak sherbet. Nothing was happening. He must have seen the puzzlement in my eyes.

  ‘It’s not working.’

  ‘Be patient.’

  ‘What about you? Don’t let me do this alone.’

  He drew an envelope from the breast pocket of his open Hawaiian shirt. It must have been folded a dozen times. Scruffy worn paper, disintegrating into powder at the edges. Deftly he opened it. Secreted within were tablets of varying colours and sizes. A paper purse of pills. Uppers and downers, including several more tabs of acid. With nimble fingers he drew one out and popped it into his mouth before folding away the envelope. His navy and red striped shirt was blowing, like a Phoenician sail, in the wind.

  ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  We strolled along the beach. Once or twice, I glanced backwards, looking for Peter.

  ‘Don’t worry about your friend. He’ll find us. There’s no one else here. Two lone figures in the distance. He’ll know it’s us.’

  I allowed myself to be led, went happily. Docilely. I was beginning to feel light-headed. We walked for a while, feet sinking into the soft, warm sand, spilling through my varnished toes. Fifteen minutes, three-quarters of an hour, I couldn’t have gauged it – time had melted away – until we neared the end of the bay, approaching a cluster of magisterial granite rocks that would need to be scaled if we were to continue onwards at the water’s edge to the next set of coves. I marvelled at the smoothness and roundness of the giant stones in the sunlight, the delicate patches of damp that made them darker, and the dried salt trapped within the perforations and crevices glinting like smuggled stars.

  ‘These are so beautiful,’ I crooned. I stretched out my arm to brush my fingers against the first boulder, to experience its texture, its formidable age. It might have been a giant sleeping seal from a fairy tale. My touch might awaken it. Its outlines began to shift, to change shape, oscillating, rippling, breathing. ‘It’s alive.’ I hooted. ‘This is incredible.’ I repeated those three words over and over. Mind-blowing. Corny. I screeched with laughter and was bent double with my spaced-out chortling.

  We made love. It was not just sex. Stripped in the sand. The scent of him. Pierre’s words had been more than accurate. It was transcendental. Every touch was as though he were switching me on, as though I was coming alive for the first time. In slow motion. He awakened me to countless sensations.

  He was turning me on.

  I’d love to … excite you … blow your mind …

  To … Aaaaah.

  It was before we had gone swimming for the first time that day that I spotted Peter, thought I caught sight of him, high up near the house looking down to where we were prostrate on the beach. He must have returned from town, was looking for me. And then he was gone. Or possibly I imagined him.

  Don’t think about Peter.

  ‘Pierre, where are you going from here?’ It was the first time I had broached the future, the possibility of a relationship.

  Pierre nuzzled his mouth close to my ear. ‘Who knows? Morocco maybe for the winter, take the motor down through Spain. Why? Want to come with me?’

  ‘Seriously?’

  He laughed loudly. Was he mocking me?

  I don’t know what had happened to our clothes. At which point had we discarded them? Bare-skinned, bronzed. A hip young couple, we were, strolling, idling, holding hands, drinking in the view across the horizon, discovering nature, seeing everything through the eyes of a tripping psyche. Me, for the first time. Branches, roots, crabs, the glint of sand, every stone, every flaw in every stone: all was a revelation. A new perspective, as Pierre had promised. What a gift he was offering me: a lustrous universe, vivid and intense. Life through a magnifying glass. In tight close-up. The world about me was pulsing, palpitating. Even the rocks, it seemed, had a heartbeat. Every object and creature throbbed with life. Within everything was memory, a recording. A witness.

  I was a girl climbing out of a closed box for the first time, happening upon a sky that was not blue, but BLUE, vigorously tinted, fervently, thrillingly blue.

  We paused to embrace, to kiss, before he laid me on the seashore. My bed of particles warm and itchy beneath my buttocks. Our legs stretched out, intertwined. ‘Amazing Grace,’ he whispered, his hands pressing into me. I have never forgotten his hands. He had long, elegant fingers. On one hand, the left, I think, yes, the left hand, there was a small wart and to me on that day it was possibly the most beautiful blemish I had ever clapped eyes on.

  His sparse body hair was golden. His fle
sh smooth. He was an Adonis, and for that brief, precious time, he was mine. I was his. On that wide-open, wild, deserted beach, I forgot Peter.

  ‘You’re crying.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, not crying.’

  Someone was watching us, a portly man who laid claim to a few limp strands of dark hair combed from one side to the other across his scaly pate. He was scrutinizing me. Eyes screwed up. His was a cruel look with a downturned lip, as though he had a sour taste in his mouth.

  ‘That man is watching us.’

  His red face, polished and sweating.

  ‘What’s he looking at?’

  ‘Your tears have drawn his attention.’

  I turned in the crowded train corridor, swivelling awkwardly on my feet, pressed my cheek against the window-frame and stared outwards, recalling our arrival in Marseille. My heart once full of hope and joy.

  ‘How long have we been travelling?’

  Heaven knew where my watch was. I seemed to have discarded so much over the summer, been careless with myself, my possessions, profligate with my emotions, with no memory of where the pieces had been abandoned. The shards of me.

  My breathing had calmed. I heard the rhythm of the train’s wheels and the movement no longer alarmed me.

  We were out in the countryside. It could have been anywhere. French farmland. Prettier than English rural scenes. Vines, rows and rows, heavy with darkening fruits. September harvests. A field of goats. Another of donkeys, their tails flapping at the flies on their flanks. We flew by villages with church spires. We had long left the coast behind us.

  I recalled Pierre’s open-top Cadillac, banked against the dunes, on the verge of the wild beach with its tall, spiky grasses. Above which, high in the Mediterranean scrubland, I had eventually buried his stash of drugs, every incriminating package, banking and cramming them into an underground tunnel, heaving huge stones to close off the aperture of the abandoned badger’s sett. Stones so heavy I was obliged to roll them into place, so that Bruce could not sniff them out, dig up the illicit substances and kill himself on an overdose. He wouldn’t be able to shift those stones. Over time, the earth would drift and settle, swallow the breach. The vegetation would grow. No one would ever be the wiser.