The White Cliffs

Suhayl Saadi

Adam and Lily meet in a little seaside café in winter.  It’s bleak and lonely, and they’re both looking for love.  Far out to sea, they can see a dark shape that moves and shifts.  It looks like an island – but no-one else seems to know what it is.  In fact, no-one else admits to seeing it.

Adam is a writer who isn’t writing anything; Lily is a waitress who says she is French.  But nothing is what it seems.  When they reach the island it’s not black but white.  And white cliffs rise above them.  Beneath them, beneath the sea itself, lie the ghosts of the past. 

“The first time I saw Lily, she was leaning against the frame of the café door.  She was gazing far out to sea, to where the big, black rock sometimes became visible through the mist. We were on the enclosed terrace of a tea-room that sat close to the edge of the chalk cliff. It was a place where you could sit for hours and watch the day go by. To the front of the café was a small, rough garden surrounded by a rickety fence. Beyond that, was an old, whitewashed wall, and beyond that, the ground dipped sharply, eighty or ninety feet, down into the sea. Because roof and walls were mainly glass, it seemed as though the sky and the light were all around me. It was as though already I had left the land. It was as if I was in a boat, floating on the waves of the English Channel.”

RRP: £5.95
ISBN: 0-9546333-1-8

ROMANTIC MYSTERY FROM ENGLAND’S DEEP SOUTH.

Level: 2
SMOG: 13-14

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