I had glimpsed his photograph from time to time, grainy black-and-white images or distant portraits, in newspapers, as he might well have spotted mine. Still, we were twenty-two years further along the road of life and I had no idea what he was doing here now, or why he had come looking for me.
He had grown so tailored. Always neat, spruce, yes, I recalled that, but now expensively so, bespoke surely, nails professionally manicured. Hair chic but not trendily styled. Everything in its place. Reassuring in appearance. Handsome, very, in a clean-cut fashion. Even the ears that I had once found so attractive, had nibbled.
What had become of that hot young revolutionary? Peter had learned that revolution is most effectively handled from within the system, he told me later. He was a highly esteemed human-rights lawyer whose office was in Brussels, and he was engaged almost full-time by the EU and the European Court of Human Rights. He was sought after. And he was at my side.
Had he come in search of me or had he been strolling along Shaftesbury Avenue after a restaurant dinner with friends, clients, spotted my name on the illuminated billboard outside the Apollo and thought, for old times’ sake, why not pop backstage and say hello?
How often during the ensuing years had he thought of me, if at all, remembered our summer, blissful and ultimately tormented? Those letters – did I still have them stored somewhere? – in which he had poured out his heart to me, baring his soul, recounting the sorrow and anguish my deception had caused him?
He wrote fine letters, sentiments well expressed, I remembered that.
I smiled silently.
He had claimed eternal love for me but what had that meant back then at twenty? We had been callow fledglings. Emotionally charged but our energies, mine anyway, undirected.
I, in my coltish credulousness, had held fast to the dream that the long-gone Pierre had been The One. How foolishly I had wept over his mysterious disappearance for too many wasted years. If he had lived, he would doubtless have proved to be a misjudgement. The lifestyle of a dope dealer would have palled very quickly.
Ribald laughter from the table of Saudis drew me back to the here and now. I glanced in Peter’s direction. He was watching me. A soft, appraising look, his handsome head tilted to one side.
I felt my defences lock down. The past was not to be reinhabited. Certainly not mine. I would make this sweet and short.
The Ruinart arrived.
Illuminated by the light of a single candle, it glowed the colour of liquefied wheat. Two flutes, delicately iced, were placed on the round polished mahogany table that marked the scant distance between us. Peter’s legs were crossed. One hand, his right, lay across his thigh. The other was loosely poised across the arm of his chair. The immaculately presented waiter, with slick black hair, removed the bottle’s cork. It slid from its glass throat with barely a sough. Glasses semi-filled, he back-stepped discreetly out of our space. Peter lifted the first flute and passed it to me. Then, taking up his own, he raised it towards me, and smiled. ‘Our very first aperitif together was champagne. Spring in Paris. Cheers.’
‘So it was.’ I smiled at the memory. ‘Santé. It was also the very first glass of champagne I had ever drunk.’ I lifted my flute to meet his and the crystal rang one against the other.
We sipped the fine wine.
‘This is quite a surprise, Peter.’
‘Yes, it’s been a very long time.’
‘Any particular reason why tonight?’
‘Several, actually, but let’s do justice to the Ruinart and we can get there all in good time. Unless you have to be somewhere?’
I shook my head and the small hard stone within me, the nugget of loneliness, lodged itself tighter in the sphincter of my gut. I sensed him observing, studying me.
Peter’s presence evoked swimming in calm waters, the saline scent off the warm sea, the sun burning my back in a pleasurable abandoned way, until I forced myself to push away where these snippets of reminiscence would take me, to the memory of a drowned man. If there had been no Pierre, would Peter and I have maintained our friendship? Might we have formed a more permanent liaison? Absurd questions after twenty-two years.
He must have sensed me starting to slip away, to sink to a place beyond the present. ‘Grace …’
‘How are your parents?’ I butted in. A trite question. I hadn’t thought of them in donkey’s years and, in truth, I didn’t care. ‘And Agnes? The wonderful vibrant Agnes. How I adored her. Is she well, still painting?’
‘Parents both gone, alas. Father died of a heart attack almost ten years ago and Mother drank herself to an early grave all the while socializing with her AA pals. Agnes is splendid and gloriously successful. I still visit her regularly. The girls adore her – well, they would, wouldn’t they? Who can fail to? – and she them.’
‘Girls?’
‘My daughters.’
I hoped he could not see the surprise settle like winter within me. What had I expected? That he wouldn’t have married, built a happy life without me? I had wished that for him. ‘Congratulations.’ I bent to my glass and took a long sip. ‘How many?’
‘Twins. We got it behind us all in one shot.’
I nodded.
‘Beautiful girls. You’d fall hook, line and sinker for them, Grace. Everyone does.’
His pride shone like a beacon, sparking violet eyes.
‘And you … live … in London, or Paris?’
‘London. A couple of times a month, I commute to Brussels and I’m frequently in Strasbourg. It’s a peripatetic existence, which suits me rather well at present. For many years, a decade or more, we’ve been resident in the UK. About the time my father died. Angela hated Paris. She wanted the girls to have an English education, my mother was alone, so we found ourselves a house and …’ he paused, and let out a sigh ‘… set down roots here.’
‘I know how you cared for your life in Paris.’ I pictured him back on the barricades, sweating, arms raised, fired by vision and the determination for a more ethical future. He seemed – what? – sober now by comparison. Restrained, subdued? But, then, we were no longer teenagers, youngsters with our lives ahead of us and none of the car crashes behind us.
‘And you?’
‘What?’
‘Children?’
I shook my head, recalling the women’s hospital, the wretched winter of ’68. My pal Connor. The loss of Connor, our shorthand with one another. Loneliness, grief swirled within me. ‘I chose not to. I’ve devoted myself to my career,’ I said softly, hoping to keep the desolation, which was a surprise to me, a new note, out of my voice.
‘And what a career,’ he replied. ‘I’ve followed your successes, watched you on television. You’re very good. Born to it, Grace.’
I laughed. ‘Moulded myself.’
It was all there was. Affairs, a relationship or two, of course, one that had staggered on for three or four years, off and on. It was work, though, that had seen me through, sustained me. Since that summer of ’68, and Pierre, my career had been my lifeline. But it would be ludicrous to claim still to be in love with a man who had been dead for more than twenty years. A golden if tarnished figure, resting at the bottom of the sea. My love for him had long since evaporated. Blurred to extinction, that imprudent infatuation. I’d come to my senses, realized it would never have worked between us – with hindsight, that much had been clear. Still, Pierre had lit a flame within me that had never been outshone.
Or might that be a half-arsed excuse for my hopeless failure at building a life with anyone else? The fact was, in all probability, I was too single-minded, too ambitious for relationships. Better off alone.
‘And your wife?’ I asked, out of politeness and to deflect my dreary late-night maudlin ruminations. I should finish my drink and hail a taxi. It was pleasant, though, to be in the company of a warm soul, to encounter Peter again. A young man who had been so overwhelmingly good to me.
‘Angela? What about her?’
‘Does she work? Ha
ve a career?’
Peter shook his head. Suddenly he was the one who seemed spent by life. ‘We’re separated, have been for a little over a year now, though the writing had been on the wall for some time. No, she never worked. I suppose she might consider it, once the divorce has been finalized, although she does have the girls living with her’ – he let out another sigh, a note of regret: mourning the loss of his permanent place alongside his beautiful children? – ‘and the pair of them are fairly full on. Bounding with energy and drive. You never married. Never gave it a shot?’
I shook my head and realized the first pulsations of a headache were settling in. I preferred not to go to wherever this conversation might be leading.
I should be on my way, get some sleep. I had an early-morning recording to get to. A dubbing for a foreign film that I wished already I had not accepted. Too late now but tiredness would damage my voice, cause it to crack and croak. Not an acceptable image, and the dubbing company in question gave me some of its best opportunities. In any case, this polite exchange was a little straining for a loner such as I had become. Foolish to romanticize the past.
‘Are you staying here? No, of course not. Peter, forgive me, I doubt I’ll be able to help you polish off this magnificent champagne. Twenty years ago, I’d have guzzled the lot, but not tonight. I have a reasonably early start tomorrow and I’m out of the habit of late nights.’
‘No, it was thoughtless of me. You’ve just finished work. I should have taken you to supper.’ He placed his glass on the table and made as if to get up.
‘No, please, there’s time to finish our glasses at least.’
‘Can I give you a lift or do you have a car in town?’
‘I come in by Tube or sometimes take a taxi. I rarely drive to the theatre. Rush hour, parking …’
‘Still in Primrose Hill?’
I frowned, puzzled. ‘Yes, how clever of you.’
‘I read it somewhere, a newspaper cutting or an interview with you. Let me give you a lift. Finish your glass, and whenever you’re ready I’ll drive you. You look worn out. My fault for imposing myself.’
‘No, please.’
Such a waltz of manners.
Outside my maisonette, set one street back from Regent’s Park, we sat a moment in the leathery warmth of the Mercedes with the engine humming, the heater on. A streetlamp illuminated our faces.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘It was good to see you.’
‘Yes, you too.’ And, surprisingly, I meant it. I put my hand up for the door as Peter leaned over to open it for me. Even replaying this moment today, I cannot recall which of us reached for the other. It was simultaneous and completely unexpected. He drew back, switched off the engine and returned his face to mine. Kissing in scarves and overcoats, a handbrake between us, never easy but we were not daunted. I had no idea I had longed for this. Or, yes, in the abstract. Sex, a lover. Passion.
‘Will you invite me in?’ he whispered in my ear, gently brushing his cheek against mine.
And I did.
The front door’s inner lock remained unturned, barely closed, shut carelessly with the heel of my stiletto. Our clothes were abandoned everywhere, on the stairs, the dining-room floor, shoes kicked off at the bedroom door. Such a rush of longing, of desire. Pressed tight against one another, leaning on the wall, a springboard to the bed. He, disrobed from the waist upwards, I almost from the waist down. Tearing at the last of our outdoor garments. Until we landed on my counterpane. The sex was rushed, furious and greedy. A thought flashed through me that it was me who had been so starved. In fact, it was both of us. Each of us devouring the other. We were strangers and yet there was a palimpsest of familiarity, a movement here or there that recalled a grungy floor in Paris, a summer bedroom in the Midi in glaring sunlight.
We lay in one another’s arms, breathing hard, hearts pounding. As though we had been running, fleeing memories, fleeing. I felt the trickle of his juice on my upper thigh. I opened my eyes and stared upwards into the darkness, asking myself what had come to pass. From where this passion had arisen.
‘You cannot know how often I’ve thought of this,’ he whispered, into the ball of my shoulder.
I felt my body go tense. He sensed it too and laid the palm of his hand across the flat of my exposed stomach. His fingers stroking me angled themselves towards my pubic hair. ‘Don’t,’ he said softly.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Push me away. Don’t run from me again.’
I was afraid of this, of intimacy, of bold confessions. I had walled myself in with supreme efficiency, hidden behind many roles both on and off screen. Peter had known a girl, a foolish girl called Grace, with wide-open eyes and an undamaged heart. She, who had been bursting with dreams and optimism. But she had long since faded away, taken her exit bow; she had vanished and could never be resurrected. This was foolhardy. A mistake. I could only reassure myself with excuses there in the dead of night. Weakness, sexual hunger, my grieving for Connor had broken my reserve, resolve, washed away at me, allowing me to become vulnerable again.
‘Listen,’ I began, my voice cracking after a show and being up too late and … ‘I have an early start ahead of me.’
‘You said. We should get some sleep.’
‘No, no, you should go, Peter. Better you go. I’m not in the habit of sleeping alongside anyone. I won’t get any rest. I need to …’
His hand was over my mouth. ‘Spare room?’
Slowly I swivelled my head to face him, to search out his violet-blue eyes in the midnight gloom. The heating, a radiator, began to click, to flame up. I could see so little but I knew that he was smiling. ‘This is … well, out of the blue and I’m not …’
‘Don’t send me home, Grace.’ His hand slid to my buttock and he dragged me, inched me gently towards him, the few remaining millimetres that had separated us were being filled in … by me, as my body squeezed up against his, his limp cock hardening again, swelling to life, and his hand pressed into the small of my back.
‘Do you know that I love you still, always have?’
‘Peter!’
‘Sssh, stop. Don’t move. Stay like this for a few more moments and then I’ll let you go. I’ll sleep on the couch or in the spare room, if there is one. Or, if you cruelly insist, I’ll leave, reluctantly. But stay like this in my arms, so close to me for these moments. Please don’t resist or reject me.’
I was pinned to him. My instinct was to break the moment, to let fly an arm, escape, but I remained static. I tamped the resistance down, breathed his tempo and allowed myself, my opposition, to melt. I lifted a leg to wrap around his thigh and within seconds he was entering me again. This time at a leisurely pace. Moving slowly in rhythm with him, I felt my head swim and my body turn to liquid. He rolled me onto my back and rose up above me. A tear ran down my cheek. I buried my face in my arm. Jesus, I was crying.
Why? For my departed father, whom I felt such judgement towards, whom I had fought with myself to forgive, to understand, and whom I still missed every day, for Connor, who still walked beside me every inch of the way but not quite close enough for me to feel the caress of his hand, and for my own bunched-up inadequacies. It was cold, but I was smiling, crying and smiling – it felt good to let the demons free – and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I surrendered. I gave myself up to another. It was fitting that it should be Peter.
When I opened my eyes, I smelt the brewing coffee. The clock read 8:30 a.m. It took a moment before I realized that, yes, I was in my own bed, this was my familiar chamber, and I was running a little late. I was alone and I was wet. Damp, sticky. Crumpled pillows next to mine. A radio was playing in the kitchen downstairs. BBC voices in debate. Peter was in a towel, making toast. The table had been laid with yoghurts and a few bits of fruit from the fridge. I entered my own well-protected space gingerly.
‘You said you had an early start so I thought I’d organize breakfast. You still begin the day with coff
ee?’
Peter had set up his domicile in a twenty-square-metre, professionally furnished studio-flat a few streets back from Victoria station. A short let contracted out by the month, renewable from week to week. After he and Angela had split up, the girls and their mother had remained in the family home and he had moved out, taking with him only the minimum. The Brussels legal firm, Human Rights Lawyers for Europe, provided him with a base in the European capital, a rather elegant one-bed, he described it, which met his requirements. Until the house was sold, he was managing and had no reason for complaint. He expressed no bitterness or regret and said he was not intending to fight over assets or possessions.
By the weekend of the following week, ten days after his appearance at the stage door, he had moved in with me. I warned myself repeatedly that I was treading an unwise and potentially precarious path. It was me who offered. He accepted and we kept smiling. He arrived with almost nothing so I was little inconvenienced. There was no need for me to move over, to shift the space on the shelves, divvy up corners of the wardrobe. I allocated a drawer for his socks and underwear, shirts were hung on hangers and he worked on his laptop at the big square kitchen table. He rose before six most mornings while I slept on. When I returned of an evening from the theatre, a light meal was waiting, a bottle of wine breathing. I felt as though I was on holiday from my own life, but that this would pass because it was too good to be true.
Our free days we spent walking together, frequently hand in hand, on Primrose Hill, contemplating the beauty of the city that unfolded before us, the rustling of leaves, a shaft of light, smiling faces, or roaming across Hampstead Heath, then home to read books, scripts, legal documents by the fire. We dined once or twice at Lemonia, and I poured out my sorrow at the loss of Connor.
Sharing. I was sharing. I had lost the knack of it, I’d thought.
I was in love. I had fallen in love with the same man, the juvenile beau who had taken my virginity more than two decades earlier, and I was having a job coming to grips with that reality. It was all so sudden and improbable that I mistrusted such a turn of Fate. Even so, the happiness flowed out of me, like a beneficent fountain. When I was alone, I had to stop myself calling out his name to the four walls that surrounded me. My fellow actors commented on the lightness of my being, the gaiety of my demeanour, the agility of my step. Even the audience must have picked up on my state of mind, of heart, because the laughs were louder, the responses more positive, the applause more resounding and the show was two minutes shorter. My energy was driven by a turbo-jet, and it was called Love.
The House on the Edge of the Cliff Page 31