The House on the Edge of the Cliff

by Carol Drinkwater

  I soon learned that it was vital to treat them individually and not as a pair. They were not joined at the hip, were not identical and had very different interests and characters.

  They stayed with me – us, I should say, I was still getting used to the notion of ‘us, the couple’ – until the new year when Angela returned from her trip to Switzerland. In any case, it was soon time for school, time for Peter to return to Brussels. Peter saved me the business of meeting up with his wife then by driving the girls to the family home in Paddock Wood, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent, before continuing to the Channel ferry.

  ‘It’s probably for the best that I’m away for a few weeks.’ He smiled shyly. ‘Give you a chance to catch your breath.’ He was looking dishevelled, which was unlike him. Hair tousled, one collar point of his blue denim shirt tucked inside his V-neck cashmere sweater, the other out. All our lives had been turned upside down, and we were, all four of us, attempting to get used to it.

  ‘I’ll call you when I reach Brussels before I fly to Poland.’ He had an interview scheduled with Lech Wałęsa, the newly appointed president. Peter had been working on a case that involved the violation of a Polish prisoner’s rights after an arrest in Belgium, ill-treatment while held in custody. The man, an illegal immigrant, was claiming physical abuse. One of the obstacles was that his own past record was a little on the shady side. Still, Peter was confident that he could achieve results. He specialized in assisting those with troubled histories.

  ‘Good luck.’

  ‘See you soon.’ His lips brushed lightly against mine. A squeeze of the arm – je t’aime – and he hurried down the front steps, disappearing into the car.

  The curtain had risen on 1991. I had played a central, if sometimes awkward, role within a ready-made family. Now, my single-inhabitant maisonette was returning to its emptiness, its lack of chaos, its silences and polished creaking floorboards, videos and CDs neatly in their jackets, soap and loo rolls not on the floor but where they were intended to live, a fridge containing only the basic necessities, empty Nutella jars ready for the bottle bank. Besides preparing for the evening’s show, I was at a loose end, not knowing what to do with myself.

  When my agent telephoned me early in the new year to know whether I was going to accept the prolongation of my contract, I told him no. I needed a bit of time out.

  He was momentarily silenced, surprised, never having known me turn down good work for no alternative.

  ‘Is there something you want to whisper in my ear before I read it in the press?’ I heard the smile in his voice. ‘Don’t shock me,’ Ken joked. ‘I’m too old, Grace. I only want to hear good news. The happy stuff. And if it’s delightfully effervescent, let’s do it over a new-year lunch and a bottle of something refreshing and expensive.’

  He’d caught me off-guard for a moment. The new-year lunch. Connor. So occupied had I been with the Armstrong-Soames trio, I had mentally missed the first New Year’s Day without my ‘big love’.

  ‘No, there’s nothing juicy to share, Ken. When there is, if there is, you’ll be the first to know it, I promise.’

  The Present

  Two hours. I had two hours to kill.

  I could make a rendezvous with Moulinet, get this blasted situation behind me, but I hadn’t the stamina, the guts for his third degree now. It was preposterous of Moulinet to insinuate that Peter might have pushed Gissing over the edge, as I well knew. If anyone had had a hand in the man’s death, it was me.

  It was as preposterous as Gissing’s accusation that Peter had tried to murder him all those years ago.

  In my mind’s eye, I lifted out the white Confidential envelope from Peter’s drawer.

  I am not proud of that moment, Grace.

  Oh, Peter, my darling, we all have moments we aren’t proud of.

  By keeping silent about my encounters with Gissing, I was shining a false shadow of suspicion over my own husband. Why not admit the truth and put an end to the nightmare? What was it that I so feared?

  Outside on the clinic’s forecourt, the sun was shining. I inhaled the day, the waves of heat. I might as well make the most of it. I decided to stroll to the port, perch by the boats, watch the remainder of the night’s catch being unloaded.

  Within fifteen minutes I was at the old harbour.

  I found a bar and settled at a table half in, half out of the shade. I ordered, quite out of character, a beer. My throat was dry, scratchy. My thirst was demanding. I changed the order to a bottle of San Pellegrino and a small beer. Clusters of fishermen were at the quay’s edge repairing their rafts of nylon nets. Pleasingly, even in this day and age, the old method continues. I sipped my drink and allowed the sun’s heat to calm me. The operation was over. Peter was in recuperation. The worst was behind us. Wasn’t it? We had a good life ahead to look forward to. As I sat, idling, watching the comings and goings of the harbour life, the many tourists, the screeching passage of traffic, I realized that I had chosen a seat directly across the water from the bar where I had first met Pierre. I wasn’t precisely sure which one it would have been – today it was either a pizzeria, a cocktail bar or a Mediterranean bistro.

  I picked up my phone from the table and re-dialled Moulinet’s number. It was a switchboard not a direct line. The receptionist put me through to him.

  ‘Sorry to have been abrupt. My husband is in a clinic –’

  ‘Yes, I know, and you are in Marseille.’

  Was Moulinet craftily monitoring Peter’s recovery process? Was he waiting to pounce? On an innocent man?

  ‘What can I help you with, Inspector?’

  ‘There are a couple of matters I wanted to run by you.’

  I closed my eyes, and gave Moulinet the name of the bar.

  Within twelve minutes he was settled across the table from me. From a file tucked under his arm, he pulled out the damaged wedding photos.

  ‘I wanted you to see these because, well, there is a violence about them that begs an explanation.’

  I glanced at the disfigured cuttings. I could offer no explanation for the black crosses.

  ‘Gissing: a man who was jealous of your private life?’

  I shook my head, an expression of bewilderment rather than a repudiation of his hypothesis. I had no handle on truths any more.

  ‘A fan, perhaps?’ Moulinet proposed.

  Photocopies of Gissing’s birth certificate and passport accompanied them.

  The date registered on Gissing’s birth certificate was 10 April 1958.

  My jaw dropped. This man, George Andrew Gissing, born in Bradford, would have been ten years old in 1968, according to the passport details given by Moulinet.

  Eyes: hazel.

  George’s eye colouring had been perturbing me for days. Not immediately noticed due to his sunglasses and damaged features, which drew one’s attention instantly. Alone in Thierry’s bar, when I had failed to keep my rendezvous with George, I had struggled to recall.

  Pierre, when I’d loved him, that summer of ’68, was in his early to mid-twenties. Denim-blue eyes.

  Gissing was not Pierre. Gissing was a stranger who had posed as Pierre. He was not my ex-lover at all. Yet … he seemed intimate with so many details.

  You’re surely not talking about the Gissing fellow?

  There had to be a connection.

  ‘Any thoughts, Madame Soames? Does his identity ring any bells?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m as confused as you, Inspector.’

  ‘A rather misguided admirer. A menacing stalker?’

  ‘That must be the explanation,’ I concluded, without certainty.

  I left coins on the table alongside my unfinished drinks and began my re-ascent from the water. I was eager to be in Peter’s room when he was wheeled in.

  When I arrived back on the ward, there was no update on his condition. I made myself comfortable at his empty bedside and pulled out my Kindle, which I did not open. I stared out of the window. Eventually Peter was delivered on a gurney by
two orderlies. He was still unconscious. I had expected him to be awake.

  ‘Any idea how much longer?’ I asked.

  It was now nudging four in the afternoon.

  They shrugged. They had no idea. Gently, they lifted the rather alarmingly flaccid body – one had his shoulders, the other his ankles – onto the bed and folded the light cover over him. A nurse arrived and he was clipped up and connected to a number of machines, all of which began bleeping or flashing. The hardware was formidable. There were two drips delivering liquids into his arm.

  I was shocked by Peter’s appearance. His head flopped to one side as though he had lost muscle control – had he suffered a massive stroke? – and his throat was horribly swollen. He reminded me of one of those frill-necked lizards you find in the southern hemisphere.

  When he regained consciousness would he still have full control of his faculties? Had he suffered a seizure? Might there be brain damage?

  A second nurse appeared, carrying a clipboard, which, after nodding to me, she hung from the metal bar at the foot of his bed. ‘Feeling calmer now, Madame?’

  ‘Is everything, you know, as you would expect?’

  She frowned.

  ‘Nothing untoward occurred during the procedure?’ I beseeched.

  She shrugged, ‘Too early to know the full details,’ and rested a reassuring hand on my shoulder, smiled and started to check the machines, making notes of the various figures on display, then disappeared from the room.

  My long vigil began. Peter was snoring loudly. Almost trumpeting. This pleased me greatly, made me giggle to myself. Every sound he made was a sign of life, one heartbeat closer to his recovery.

  Otherwise the time passed sluggishly and, because I could not concentrate on my book, the ticking seconds were long and boring. Time stagnated. I stared at Peter, at the walls, at the machines, none of which I could interpret.

  Occasionally, the door opened and one of the nurses stepped in. Each acknowledged my presence, checked that the bottles had not drained, that my husband’s temperature was normal, that his heart was still functioning, and then she was gone again.

  Around six o’clock I was beginning to flag. I had eaten nothing since the previous evening. The schedule the clinic had foreseen was that Peter would be released the following morning. However, one of the nurses now warned me that his discharge could be delayed by a day, maximum two, due to the length of time he had spent under anaesthesia. The consultant would decide once he’d examined Peter the following morning.

  ‘Do you have somewhere to stay, Madame? All visitors must vacate the wards by seven p.m.’

  ‘May I please stay here in the room or do you have a visitor’s sleeping area nearby?’

  ‘All the rooms are booked, I am sorry.’

  ‘How much longer before he wakes?’ I begged. ‘I had wanted to be here when he comes round.’

  ‘I am sorry but it is a rule of the clinic and they are very strict about it. Health and safety and stuff like that.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  I couldn’t face the drive back. I was utterly exhausted, drained, and decided to check into a hotel, not the one I had booked before. Another, with more life.

  Before leaving the clinic at seven, I wrote Peter a note and left it at his bedside. When he opened his eyes, he’d know I’d been waiting.

  There was a sketch I had dashed off, something silly and personal between us. And I left a small bear he had brought back for me from a trip he’d made years ago. It was a tiny worn-out skeleton of a thing that had occupied my various handbags for more than twenty years. It lacked most of its fur and was smaller than my hand, but had become very dear to me. It sat now propped up against a tumbler of water at Peter’s bedside and, I hoped, as I could not be there to greet him back into our world, it might be the first thing he focused on when he opened his eyes.

  Underneath the bear, I had written on a strip of paper torn from the back of my cheque book: I love you, Grace xx.

  April 1993

  Agnes’s gift

  The news of Peter’s windfall was brought to us by Royal Mail. It plopped through the letterbox of my Primrose Hill flat, forwarded by Angela, Peter’s first wife. Peter was home that morning and I carried the letter through to him at the breakfast table.

  He opened it without a word.

  Accompanying Angela’s scribbled note was a large printed envelope. It contained a letter and a document of several pages signed and stamped by a French notaire, whose address was given as La Ciotat.

  ‘Darling Agnes has died,’ he muttered, frowning, squeezing finger and thumb into his eyes, brushing back tears. No one could have doubted how close they had been. He read the contents of the letter twice, then placed it alongside his plate, sullied with toast crumbs and the remnants of a spoonful of raspberry jam.

  ‘She was taken to the hospital in La Ciotat and died in her sleep two days later. She survived to the grand age of eighty-seven. That was three weeks ago. I wonder why no one tried to contact me.’

  He moved his attention to the thick document that had accompanied the letter.

  ‘Agnes’s will.’ He sighed.

  We sat opposite one another in silence, both of us lost in our memories.

  For me, the mention of Agnes always recalled that hot, calamitous summer.

  ‘I should have visited her more regularly.’ He was talking to himself more than addressing me, flicking back and forth through pages dense with print. I sat across the table pouring coffee, watching him.

  Although I had not set eyes on Agnes for twenty-five years, I could still picture her. Her vibrant energy. I had loved and admired her. She was a rare bird, brave, exotic and talented.

  ‘A handsome financial gift has been bequeathed to each of the girls held in trust till their twenty-first birthday. Otherwise, dear sweet Agnes has left me pretty much everything, including Heron Heights.’

  It was late April 1993 when that letter popped through our door. A quarter of a century beyond the summer of 1968 and the demise of Pierre. I had just turned forty-one. Peter and I had been cohabiting, although our careers kept us apart, sometimes for weeks on end, for a little over two years. His divorce only recently finalized, I was not pushing for a legal endorsement of our newly rediscovered love. I was still blissfully dazed by our reconnection.

  ‘The solicitor says the house needs a fair amount of structural and renovation work. Hardly surprising. I don’t suppose she’s touched it in decades.’

  ‘Remarkable that with her increasing age she was able to continue living on that steep hillside, though I remember her as super-fit.’

  ‘I’ll need to go, Grace. I can’t deal with all this long distance.’

  Tension rose within me. I had no desire to return to that past, to the horrors of that night, and Peter was all too aware of it.

  ‘There’s no need for you to come along. Before I leave London, I’ll make an appointment with her solicitor – who sent through all this paperwork – sign all the relevant documents when I arrive, and put the property on the market with a couple of the local estate agents. I’ll sell it in its present condition. I’ll be back here within a week. Ten days at the outside. Or we can do this together …’

  I said nothing, fingers fiddling with a knife slicked with honey. Sugary fingertips. I licked them clean, fiddled with a spoon, avoiding Peter’s gaze.

  ‘We could break the spell.’ From across the table, Peter stared hard at me. ‘You aren’t still holding a candle for him? Reassure me, please, Grace, that you’re not.’

  ‘How could you even ask such a question?’

  ‘Then don’t you think it’s time to let it go?’

  ‘I have let it go.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. Every time over the past two years that I suggested a visit to Agnes, you reeled off excuses.’

  ‘Are you going to blame me because –?’

  ‘Because you adamantly refused to accompany me when I suggested paying a visit to my enfeebl
ed aunt? Foolishly, I allowed myself to listen to you and in the process I now feel I rather neglected the one family member who cared for me with an open heart.’

  ‘That is grossly unfair, Peter. You spent weeks with her, even driving the girls down with you for their summer holiday last July and August. You and I barely saw one another during two months, and you know very well I was working in the West End and couldn’t have joined you even if I’d wanted to.’

  ‘Come with me now.’

  ‘Don’t insist, please.’

  ‘Mull it over, give me your answer at the weekend. I’ll make no plans till then.’

  It took me those days, of disturbed nights, of innumerable memories recalling the heady scents of lavender and wild yellow broom drifting across the hillsides, of seaweed clinging to my flesh or beached and sulphurous in the dry heat, of the acrid inhalation of tobacco smoked with hashish, of the anguish.

  After a quarter of a century, my head was once again flooded with that summer past. The banks were breached. To be there, in the present, could only be kinder than the return of misgivings. Peter was intending to make the trip whether I accompanied him or not and so, hesitantly, tentatively, I agreed to go along.

  ‘Splendid. In that case I won’t rush in and out as I originally planned. We’ll make a holiday of it. Or what would you say to a honeymoon?’

  I was pulling glasses from a cupboard and stopped in my tracks. ‘Is that a proposal?’

  ‘Do you know? I think it is.’

  We were in the kitchen, heating lazy Sunday pizzas. Peter had been uncorking a bottle of red. He put it aside and stepped towards me. ‘Stop,’ I cried, laughing, as he began to bend to one knee. ‘There’s champagne in the fridge.’

  ‘Is that a yes?’

  ‘Do you know? I think it is.’

  Because we were going to be two now, Peter judged it ‘no fun’ simply to hop on a plane and hire a car at Nice or Marseille airport. He loved France, always had – it was his spiritual home – and here was an opportunity to indulge all his senses in the land of his youth. ‘We’ll take my car. Ferry from Dover to Calais and from there south.’