Read The House at the Edge of the World Online
Authors: Julia Rochester
The House at the Edge of the World
THE HOUSE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
THE HOUSE AT THE EDGE OF
THE WORLD
Julia Rochester grew up on the Exe estuary
in Devon. She studied in London, Berlin and Cambridge and has worked for the BBC
Portuguese Service and for Amnesty International as Researcher on Brazil. She lives in
London with her husband and daughter.
For my parents, Ralph and Barbara
The people along
the sandAll turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the
land.They look at the sea all day.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be –
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
Robert Frost
When I was eighteen, my father fell off a
cliff. It was a stupid way to die. There was a good moon. There was no wind. There
was no excuse. He was pissing into the chine at Brock Tor on his way home from the
pub and fell headlong drunk into the spring tide with his flies open.
I spent that night on the beach with
Corwin, watching the moon silver the sea, and later an image lodged in my mind of
our father in slow descent, turning within a glittering moonlit arc of urine. When I
confided this to Corwin, he was angrier than I had ever seen him. I had fixed the
image, and now he must share it with me, as if it were a memory. He hit me, which
was fair, I thought – a back-handed swipe across the mouth that drew blood. I was so
upset that I ran to the cabin and lay there all night half awake. At dawn, Corwin
came and crawled into the bunk with me to kiss my swollen lip and say sorry. He was
more generous then.
Of course, boys had been pissing into
the chine for all time; atavistic squirts against the terrible indifference of the
North Atlantic. But my father was not a boy, he was forty-four, and it was almost
ten years before I was able to forgive him the vulgarity of his death. When,
finally, I did so, I found that the imaginary falling man was more real to me than
my memories of the living John Venton, and that all that remained of my sense of him
was the residue of my embarrassment. I remember the exact moment of forgiveness. I
was looking at a piece of sculpture in an exhibition, a model that lay on the floor.
It was the perfect reproduction of a man’s corpse but reduced to the size of a
large doll – or a baby, perhaps. It was agonizingly tender, and when I saw the
title,
Dead Dad
, I felt an emotion so violent and so
unexpected that it took me some moments to identify what it might be. I thought of
the man who had made this, how he had sat, dispassionate, by the naked corpse that
had been his father and had recorded every detail of the last of his physical
presence in the world. I envied him, I realized – the emotion I was experiencing was
envy
. Oh! I thought. That’s interesting!
I did not share this with Corwin. He was
off and away. I did think to tell Matthew, and to ask him to explain his son, my
father, to me, but by then he had become translucent with age, as if he were
screen-printed on fine silk, and I did not want to risk anything that might pierce
or rend. I should have asked, of course. And not only then: Matthew was always
disappointed to find me so un-inquisitive.
Matthew used to say that every tribe
must have a
Rememberer of History
. He often spoke in italics. It was an
annoying habit, which Corwin has inherited. Matthew said that among tribal peoples
myth and history are passed down as if the teller has experienced it himself, in the
first person. The teller does not recount, he recalls. ‘And who’s to
say,’ asked Matthew, ‘that he is not, in fact,
remembering
?
What do we know of the fate of the soul?’
Here I sit with Matthew’s map.
The whole story is contained within it – or, should I say, trapped within it? When
he was dying and we began, too late, to decode the map, I understood him better.
Matthew remembered on our behalf, and he imagined on our behalf, and he perceived
that remembering and imagining share agency: any story, whether or not rooted in
fact, may unleash any number of real events, and vice versa. Matthew’s map is
a work of his imagination, his collection of myths, histories, half-truths,
fabrications and omissions, but it is also a real world. When he drafted it, when he
began to paint for himself his very own garden of earthly delights, he drew a circle
around himself – and, it took me some time to realize, around us. Circles
are strong in magic and, whether he intended to or not, Matthew
fixed himself upon the centre. Sometimes I indulge in upsetting myself by imagining
him there, with marionette arms and legs, secured to the canvas by a butterfly
collector’s pin.
But before I get back to my father, I
need to dwell a little longer on Matthew, to remember on
his
behalf.
I’m explaining this here, now, because you might say: ‘You can’t
possibly know that. You weren’t there.’ Or you might say:
‘That’s not how I remember it.’
It doesn’t matter. This is how I
remember it. This is how I have imagined it. It doesn’t matter if you
don’t imagine it like this at all.
The house sits at the centre of the map,
framed by the Venton lands as set out in the deeds. One hundred and fifty acres fan
around it: to the north, a swathe of wooded valley, tangled branches tumbling into the
mill stream; to the south, gorse- and hazel-edged grazing; up and east, where the land
settles into wind-washed fields, what was once Thornton Farm. But by the time Matthew
painted it, most of that land had long since been lost to the Ventons. The house itself
had the bones of a farm, but had been tamed to genteel Georgian proportions, and the
Ventons, having forgotten that they had once been farmers, looked only west from their
windows, down through the indented fields, to the Atlantic.
Long before Matthew came to contain his life
within a circle, that triangle of ever-altering sea was the shape that expressed his
world. Later, when he was old enough to be let loose, he added another triangle, the
three points between which he ran and played: house, church, cabin. In those days,
before he learned to fear the sea, this triangle seemed to point towards an exit – west
across the water. Matthew sat on the cabin steps and dreamed himself agile in the
rigging, toes gripping rope – a dream unimpaired by the fact that the tall ships were
long obsolete.
It was Matthew’s father, the wilful
James, who had built the cabin. He also had dreamed of crossing the sea. He was a
restless man with ideas of escape. It had been his ambition to travel to America, and he
pictured himself striding through birch forests, crunching through snow with a rifle
slung over the shoulder of his bearskin coat. James had saved the money for his passage
and had been all packed to leave, but he had exercised his strength of
will upon Matthew’s mother and, instead of crossing the Atlantic, found himself
standing over the Norman font in Thornton church, renouncing the Devil and all his
works, with the infant Elizabeth – the first of his four children – in his arms. In the
churchyard lay dead Ventons, their bones weighted down by tombstones, while in the
church other names were remembered on memorial tablets, which echoed the lament
‘lost at sea, lost at sea’, around the cold walls. James envied them the
freedom of their souls.
Matthew was the late,
hope-long-given-up-for, son. His mother never quite lost her air of surprise that he
should be in the world. Before him were The Sisters. He thought of The Sisters in the
singular – an entity that was older and of the world in a terrifyingly practical way.
The Sisters made a lot of noise – mainly a six-legged clattering of shoes on the
flagstones – and moved at the centre of a storm of flying objects. Pots, pans and
preserving jars circled, suspended in the air, always on the point of falling. There
were flurries of wet sheets and dry underwear. Rouges, hair-pins, magazines and knitting
patterns scattered in their wake like autumn leaves. Matthew often thought that if he
hadn’t had so many sisters, things would have been very different: he would not
have spent so much time hiding in the woods on the bank of the mill leat.
He burrowed into the spaces formed by
storm-tipped trees, which he transformed into earthy dens furnished with wooden crates.
He hung lanterns from overhanging roots and hid there with his books and a sketchpad. He
sketched the plants and fungi around him and took the pictures home to identify in the
large reference books in his father’s study. After a while Matthew began to sketch
pictures of the creatures he saw or imagined there. Badgers and foxes became
increasingly anthropomorphic; leaf-clad pixies appeared. James, who took an interest in
the development of his son’s mind, was horrified – it was effeminate to believe in
fairies and talking animals. He called upon the Crab Man.
