We were flying over a bridge, a broad, densely brown river wending its way beneath us. I lifted my eyes heavenwards, pressed my nose against the glass. The sky was china blue. I remember that blue. A hue that offered serenity. The vista was bucolic, unthreatening beneath that sky. A sky that had watched over the events of our summer. I had been carefree, never knowing there would be a price to pay.
The train braked, juddering to a halt between two stations. This was unscheduled. Passengers turned their heads towards the windows demanding an explanation. A child began to bawl loudly. Some muttered, exchanged glances. Everybody was disgruntled and tired. An old woman rummaged in her shopping bag, pulled out half a baguette cut into a lengthy sandwich with slices of charcuterie hanging loosely from between its two halves. Pink and floppy, like a dog’s panting tongue. Bruce. I’d miss him.
‘Where are we?’ I murmured. I was thirsty. Tired. Out of sorts.
Peter did not hear me. I glanced sideways in his direction. I would have liked to rest my head on his shoulder, to take comfort from him, but I had gambled away our relationship. His face was locked in a frown, as though he was puzzling over a problem. I saw him – us – in Pascal’s studio, making love on the floor. Outside were streetlamps and Paris. It seemed a lifetime ago.
The sun’s heat through the glass was making me giddy. A sickness rose up within me.
I’m sorry I’ve pained you, I wanted to whisper into his chest, so sorry, but I kept my mouth shut because I knew, if summer lay ahead of us again, I would make the same choice.
The train had not moved on. Its engine agitated, then settled and remained silent. The passengers were growing restless. Children were crying, fretting, hungry, fidgety.
I needed to pee.
Uniformed men were standing alongside the tracks. Police officers. Half a dozen climbed aboard. Was it they who had intercepted the train? My heart began to race.
They were combing through the compartments, apparently in search of someone. I felt the skin on my back begin to spike. My spine stiffened. A stranger’s feet, plonked either side of mine, shuffled nervously and resettled.
Were we, every one of us, guarding a guilty secret? Skeletons in our cupboards? Had we, all of us, a reason to dread the intervention of the law?
Who were they looking for? The uniformed officers penetrated the length of our carriage surveying faces. Face after face. Some travellers hung their heads to avoid the intrusion, the scrutiny.
A police officer outside, beyond the exterior of the window on the pebbled siding, paused, hovered close by us, glanced my way, frowned, then continued walking onwards. Sweat was breaking out around the back of my neck. My urge to urinate was becoming desperate. I was spooked by the intrusion and wanted to leap from the train and take off. Peter, at my side, remained calm. His body gave off no signs of fear. No animal scents of one who was threatened. He had nothing to rebuke himself over, no reason to feel remorse. Unlike me: I had kicked a Parisian police officer, escaped from an arrest, buried drugs in the south …
A quartet of officers in our carriage, walking in a crocodile, were hustling a path, drawing close, pushing their way slowly, methodically, through the bunched crowds. Head swimming, I recalled Paris, the demonstrations. The batons, the violence. My instinct was to run, to shoulder my travelling companions roughly aside and hotfoot it off the train, fleeing out of the door. I needed an escape route.
The train was beginning to move. It shunted forward a yard or two and was then at a standstill again.
The first officer had arrived alongside me. He took a step sideways, to position himself directly in front of me, his eyes upon me. I lowered my gaze.
‘Name?’ he demanded. The decibel level of his voice was low but charged.
I muttered my response.
‘Are you travelling by yourself?’
My body went rigid. Peter, a hair’s breadth at my side. I nodded. I noticed a furrowed brow. The man with the bald head who had been watching me. He knew I was lying. Might he chirp up? Betray me?
Why had I lied? Because I did not want to give Peter hope. I wanted him to understand that it was over. It had to be.
A second member of the force had drawn up behind his colleague, glaring at me from over a navy blue uniformed shoulder, while the other pair of the four had continued on through the train passing into the next carriage. The train was picking up speed, rolling as it advanced.
The interrogator swung his attention to Peter. ‘Are you travelling alone too?’ he demanded. There was an undertone of sarcasm in his voice.
‘We are together,’ replied Peter, with his impeccable accent.
The man’s attention was back with me, a whip of a turn. He lifted his hand, open palm. ‘Identity papers.’
I reached inside my pocket, fumbled for my passport and handed it over. I was fighting not to blurt out the question, ‘Is this about Pierre? Have you found him? Is he alive?’
The man was studying my passport, turning the blank pages back and forth as though puzzling at their emptiness.
‘British,’ stating the obvious. ‘How old are you?’ He was not asking me. He looked for his answer within the passport, flicking back to the identity page, and then lifted his eyes to mine. Yellow-tinged eyes that drilled into me.
‘Sixteen,’ he spat, pushing the passport back to me. ‘Young to be travelling alone.’ He pulled out a pad and paper. ‘Will you be staying in Paris?’
‘Returning directly to London,’ I murmured, sensing the balance of Peter’s body shift.
The officer considered my reply, accepted it and turned his attention to my companion. ‘Passport.’
Peter delivered it without a word.
‘You are also returning to London?’
Peter shook his head. I observed the tiniest bead of sweat on his temple, smaller than one of the spots on a ladybird. ‘I live in Paris,’ he informed the men. ‘My father is employed at the British Embassy.’
Passport returned, the officer glared at Peter. With a gesture of his head, he ordered his silent underling to pass on through the carriage. He followed a step behind him.
Everyone was watching us. Dozens of eyes upon us, as though we were criminals. I turned my face to the window attempting to reel in the chaos of my private world, remembering a fishing rod. I closed my eyes. Was Pierre alive? Might that be the reason these men were prowling the train? Or had they found clues to something sinister or illegal in his car? A weapon? Some trace that had led them to us?
A tear swelled. I felt its warmth as it slithered like a snail down my cheek to my chin, from where it fell to my T-shirt.
‘Stay a few days with me in Paris,’ Peter pleaded, barely audible.
I shook my head. I knew I was skewering him, but I was too wretched, too engulfed in my own misery, self-pity and nausea to consider anyone’s feelings but mine. Selfish, odious creature that I was. ‘I need to get out of France.’
‘Why don’t I travel to England with you? For a few days. I don’t need to register at the Sorbonne till early October.’
I shook my head, begging him to desist.
‘Grace, look at me, please. We can’t simply drop everything, lose contact. We need time. We need to clear this mess up.’
I felt the sharpe edge of his heartbreak and I did nothing to alleviate it. What could I do? I shook my head again.
I was pushing him away, dismissing him. I didn’t deserve his love and kindness. I should have hated myself for my behaviour towards a young man who had been my best friend, so generous towards me.
But I had fallen in love and lost my special one. In spite of the drugs, the crazy seesawing emotions and the escapades, beneath had lain a real depth of emotion. I had fallen in love with Pierre and now he was gone. Sunk, drowned, dead, disappeared. Gone.
I was sixteen years old and I wanted my life to be over. Finished with. The grief was all-encompassing, more than I could tolerate. I wanted to drown myself in my own misery, to sink to those watery depths where
I could reconnect with Pierre.
1968
London, November
It was bleak and bitterly cold with a wet wind that penetrated my skirts, my skimpy inadequate jumpers, stinging my legs and rattling at my broken heart as I prowled the streets in search of a past that was fading, while trying to get to grips with the present. The heating in my rented room was woefully inadequate. It was a gas contraption into which I had to feed coins before its faint blue flame would fire up, sliding the Queen’s head into a green metal box attached to pipes to supply a miserly quantity of heat. I spent chunks of my spare time traipsing in and out of the local shops, shivering, in search of shillings. The shopkeepers were getting fed up with me. I caught that glazed look in their eyes when the doorbell clanged and I stepped over the threshold calling, ‘Any change?’
The house where I had my digs was a three-storey Victorian terrace on Grafton Road in Kentish Town, north London, a five-minute walk from the drama school where I was midway through my first term. My room was on the ground floor, one window with limp net curtains. The view was a grey-brick garage across a narrow street. Grey London. How I missed Heron Heights, my ‘cabin’, with its whitewashed walls, its terracotta floor tiles and the blue-green sea enclosed by giant spherical rocks.
My landladies, Moira and Ashley, were a pair of middle-aged, ginger-haired witches. Seriously. Or so they confided. There were cats everywhere. The house seemed to undulate with fur. ‘White witches we are,’ Moira qualified, as I dragged my bags and my sorrows through the front door and they watched, like a couple of dragged-up imitations of Les Dawson.
It was a far cry from Agnes’s idyll.
I baptized the place Witches Court.
‘We’ll cure you,’ promised Ashley.
Did they know? Had they sussed that I was pregnant? I was approaching twelve weeks gone, but it was too early to show. No bump in sight. In fact, I had lost weight from all the movement classes at college. We began every day with an hour and a half of stretching and strenuous exercises. I stupidly assumed that my lack of menstruation was due to the change in my lifestyle, a new departure with plenty of physical activity and a gnawing sense of misery.
Such a moron not to have twigged my condition.
It was Pierre’s – his last and most precious gift to me – but it made no odds now. I could not keep the baby. It was out of the question. I hadn’t got a penny to my name, was struggling to feed myself. I had only the rented room in Grafton Road to call home. Soon I would be approaching the close of my first term at drama school. I was a fledgling and too raw to throw myself out into the professional world of film and television in search of an agent, and even if a theatrical agency took me on, I would not have been able to earn my own living, let alone feed two of us.
Too, too, too everything.
Christmas was approaching. A new year cometh.
I had promised to spend the two weeks’ break at home with my parents in Kent. Dad would be out most evenings, gigging, so I was looking forward to keeping Mum company, cheering her up, offseting her loneliness while concealing my own.
The last time I’d seen them was when I’d stayed for a couple of weeks after I returned from France. It had been the standard living-at-home experience, my home, at least, with flashes of happiness, flashes of laughter, and then a descent into arguments, threats and, occasionally, violence. It meant that I was able, more or less, to keep my own heartbreak under lock and key. Mum looked desperately sad when I took off with my belongings for a new life in London. I wished I could confide in her, a female chit-chat, come clean with one another. It was the first time I had ever stopped to ask myself what had attracted her to my father in the first place. Had she been as besotted with him as I was with Pierre? Had she ever suspected there was a violent streak within him?
But such intimacies were out of the question.
I had no choice but to handle this alone.
To terminate my pregnancy was not the decision I wanted and I did not arrive at it lightly. It was not what I would have opted for had there been any choice. I was cornered. I didn’t want to, absolutely couldn’t, share my condition with my parents. My mum had more than enough on her plate without trouble from me, and I had no friends in London, the Big Smoke, nobody to see me through this.
I had bonded with one of the blokes in my year at drama school, Connor. If I had an ally, it was him. We went to the pub together, spent hours nattering about our ambitions in the Sir Richard Steele on Haverstock Hill. Connor was gay, yet seemed comfortable in my company, as I was in his. He invited me to the theatre to see Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical in the new year. ‘I’ve got two tickets. A belated Christmas present,’ he said.
‘Wow, fantastic,’ replied I.
It was playing at the Shaftesbury Theatre, had premiered in September a few days before I began college, soon after I’d got back from France. Tickets were gold dust but Connor boasted he had scored stalls seats, 15 and 16, row C, for Wednesday, 22 January. I was pretty excited and a bit chuffed that he had chosen me as his theatre date.
Or I would have been if I hadn’t been facing the pregnancy nightmare.
I knew I had to go through with the termination and sooner rather than later. The days were sliding by and I wanted it over and done with as soon as possible. I couldn’t bear to contemplate the notion of a life taking form within me. Looking at it from a practical angle, I needed someone to collect me and sit with me in my room for a few hours, to keep an eye on me, possibly overnight. It involved taking a day off college. I was asking myself whether I could persuade Connor to be that someone. It was a huge favour to ask, even if termination of an early pregnancy was legal now. At least I wasn’t hauling him in as an accomplice to what some would have judged my ‘sordid crime’.
The prospect of what lay ahead, how to organize everything by myself, was doing my head in. I needed funds, a doctor … What else? Could I count on the National Health Service? Alone in my flickering gas-fired room with, as company, the curled pages of a Tennessee Williams play lying untidily on the candlewick bedspread, I started to cry. There were rivers of tears to offload and I sobbed uncontrollably. I was scared out of my wits, grieving, missing Peter’s friendship and cursing myself for the mess I’d made of everything. My summer of ’68 had gone drastically awry. Looking at it from another angle, the positive aspect, I had tripped off to France in search of new experiences and I had returned with a zillion.
‘All well in there?’ A knock on my door. It was Moira.
‘Yes, just learning some lines, rehearsing, thanks, Moira, working on a scene, bit dramatic.’ I managed the lie with barely a quiver in my voice. Eventually, more out of exhaustion than anything saner, I pulled myself together, rolled off the single bed, crouched on the smelly old carpet and put the kettle on. I wasn’t the first to face this and I would, could, must get through and rise above it.
I made the appointment or, more precisely, a kindly Kentish Town doctor I registered with the following morning arranged everything on my behalf, including the requisite two signatures of approval. Moira gave me his name as I was dashing out of the door puffy-eyed.
‘Here,’ she’d said, ‘pop in and see this chap before you go to college this morning. Get yourself sorted, lass.’ She knew. They both knew. Witches, they were. Kindly souls.
I was booked to go in, fasting, at nine a.m. on Friday, 8 November. I refused to allow myself to dwell on Pierre. It was his child. I had been over the dates a million and one times. The idea that he had said farewell to this planet, and now his child, our child, was not destined to survive … That was the thought, the reality, that sent me spiralling into desolation.
For a moment or two after I regained consciousness, I couldn’t work out where I was. Then it all came crashing back to me: the South London Hospital for Women alongside Clapham Common, a red-brick monolith of 1920s design and not dissimilar to a prison. The ‘bloody deed’ had been accomplished and I had been trolleyed back to the ward
.
It was dark outside. A blizzard had blown up needles of snow. Through the window to the left of me, I could see trees illuminated in patches by streetlamps. They were waving and swaying. The wind was abating but the snow continued, closing out the light. Evening had fallen hours ago. It was past six o’clock, and visiting time was upon us.
One or two men in coats and lace-up shoes shuffled onto the ward with magazines under their arms, Woman and Woman’s Weekly. It was so reverentially silent that I could hear the squeak, like rubber toys, of their creeping shoes. They perched, still in their outdoor garments, on wooden chairs at the bedsides of their wives, looking out of place. Trilby hats, flat caps in laps, they coughed awkwardly, glancing about as though fearful of being caught in there. From brown-paper bags that crackled when opened they delivered bunches of dark-skinned grapes.
The hospital gave off an air of being involved in something illicit, something preferably not alluded to within decent society: women’s matters.
An order had been sent down to the ward to keep me in overnight due to a complication. I had suffered an excessive loss of blood. I had not prepared for that, and was lacking toothbrush and face cleanser. A little while after, a nurse bustled up to my bed and provided me with two sanitary towels in a slender white box – I was still bleeding, lightly ‘spotting’, the lady gynaecologist had called it when she’d popped in to see me – toothpaste and brush, a flannel and a bar of musty-smelling soap. The nurse, who had green sparkly eyes, rested a hand on my shoulder, stroked my hair off my face and smiled. ‘Try to rest, Grace,’ she said comfortingly. ‘It’s all behind you now.’
Dinner had been and gone. I had barely touched my tray. The food was unpalatable, congealed baked beans and a strip of gravy-sodden, unidentifiable meat that looked as though it had been hewn from a cable-stitched beige cardigan. It tasted like string. To be fair, I didn’t have much of an appetite. My throat was parched and I was persistently thirsty even after having downed several jugs of water refilled at regular intervals and left on my bedside cabinet by the kindly emerald-eyed nurse.
The House on the Edge of the Cliff Page 27
