The House at the Edge of the World (10 page)

She attempted a smile at me.
‘Hello,’ she said, and added hopefully, ‘He seems to like it
there.’ Oliver had once overheard her telling his father that ‘there must be
a place for him in the world’. Perhaps she prayed that it might be Wales.

Oliver had been the first to cut loose. We
were a bit hurt, but there had always been something ephemeral about him. We continued
to forget him and the others. It didn’t happen quickly. It was like outgrowing
skin: as though we left on the coast path tissue-thin casts of ourselves that desiccated
and broke up in the wind.

PART TWO

We left Matthew on his own in Thornton for
the first time in his life. He had tried to leave, once, at the age we were when we
left, when we stepped so blithely onto the trains that took us on, on to whatever came
next. Matthew had thought vaguely that he might go to university. It seemed like a
natural extension of school, which he had not much minded – had enjoyed even, at times.
But then came the war, which set off a ripple in the universe. It passed over the planet
and even Thornton, nudged deeper into the ground by its force, could not withstand it.
Whenever Matthew climbed out of the combe he sensed imbalance.

He was nineteen and, without vanity, his
body pleased him. He was confident of its design: the muscle under the skin, the bones
under the muscle, the heart and lungs and intestines within their perfect casing. But
did he have courage? He worried at this question, because now that The Sisters had left
to marry he was in a time of joyous, almost spiritual, solitude, and it was tempting not
to be concerned with courage. He had experienced fear, but was that the same as lack of
courage? He suspected that he might have a certain kind of courage, the kind that only
the self-sufficient possess. There was less to break in him than in a sociable man, he
thought. He would be prepared to risk more.

His father had been too old for the front in
the last war. It was another experience missed; James’s soul was riddled with the
lacunae of missed experience. Matthew’s soul, by contrast, was so full that he did
not have room for it in his body. It spilled out into his sketchbooks, onto page after
page of annotated
drawings. He wished to propitiate his father’s
disappointments, and started a portrait of him, seated before a wall of books in his
study. Matthew thought that if James could see himself, he might feel more
substantial.

One April night in 1941 a storm hammered at
the door – a great thuggish giant of a storm, flailing in an ecstasy of violence. From
his window, Matthew watched it bend the trees. There was a challenge in its diatribe,
and he wondered if this was his test, because he was sure he must be tested sooner or
later, so he went out to meet it.

It mocked him all the way down to Thornton
Mouth, shrieking in his ears, and cuffing him now and again into the furze. At the top
of the cliff steps it kicked Matthew’s legs from beneath him, and he slid down in
a scrambling reversed crawl. Once on the beach, Matthew began to fight the wind in the
direction of the cabin, but it was too strong, and pressed him up against the cliff
face. Matthew’s head was full of the storm. The waves assumed faces – demons
charged him from the sea. They scooped up handfuls of pebbles and flung them up the
beach, where they ricocheted around him, off the cliff face and off the steps, with the
crackle of artillery fire. Matthew closed his eyes and listened to the pebbles smashing
against each other, against the cliff, imagining the vortex of battle, imagining himself
in the middle of this storm in the middle of the Atlantic and he realized that the
thought of battle terrified him less than did the sea. This was the test. For the
integrity of his soul, he must enlist with the navy.

The military doctor was barely older than
Matthew, and fresh out of medical school. He made Matthew walk up and down in his
underwear. Then he made him walk up and down again. He stood behind Matthew. ‘You
have the slightest scoliosis!’ he announced, delighted with himself for spotting
it. ‘You have an almost imperceptible limp.’ And, tracing Matthew’s
spine with
his forefinger, like a reverse faith healer, he placed a
crook in Matthew’s back. ‘Too bad!’ said the doctor, cheerfully.
‘Otherwise, you’re in perfect health.’

Matthew did not go straight home. Instead he
went to sit on the bench in the churchyard, beside the lichgate. The rain had let up.
Within his view was expressed an entire myth of England, one he cherished and had been
prepared to defend. The hawthorn was in blossom, there were crocuses and daffodils.
Water dripped onto a gravestone from the snout of a gargoyle. Sheep grazed on either
side of the V of fields that framed the sea. He did not blame the doctor, who had worked
hard for his knowledge and could not be expected to keep it to himself, as an older,
more experienced man might have done. No. The slight, Matthew knew, was returned to him
by the sea, which lay before him, smooth, slate-grey, mockingly calm. Eventually he made
his way back down to the beach and the cabin and lit the stove and set a kettle on top
of it, and sat on the cabin steps waiting for the water to boil. The clouded sun laid
shadows on the sea. The tide was withdrawing in long hisses of tumbling shingle; the
shifting stones eroded infinitesimally. The sound of the waves swirled around in the
deformity in the small of his back with narcotic effect and he began to see all things
in their true scale, just as he had in the delirium of seasickness. It had not been a
test, after all. It had been an admonition.

The day after he acquired his limp, Matthew
set out at dawn. On the way out of the house he paused where he had never paused before,
at the stick stand, which contained the collected walking sticks of generations of
Venton men. He tried out a few, swinging them exaggeratedly around the porch, and
selected a thorn-stick – it was apt, he thought, and he liked the feel of the round nub
of wood in his palm.

He had hoped for a dramatic soul-cleansing
sunrise – he had read that in some languages the sun does not rise, it is born
daily. However, he had to make do with a sluggish tonal adjustment
from dark to pale grey. In his rucksack were bread, cheese and apples, and he carried a
compass. He paused for a moment outside the heavy oak door and considered whether to
walk along the coast or to head inland. Then he turned his back to the sea and began to
walk directly away from it. The path took him uphill and along the brook, past the old
manor house, and into the soon-to-be bluebell woods. A couple of deer, startled, jumped
the stream and disappeared into the trees.

Very quickly, surprisingly so, he came to
land that he did not recognize. As far as possible, he followed a straight course, but
the hedgerow forced him left and right, sucking him along the high-banked lanes. Without
his compass he would soon have lost his bearings. After a while he dipped into a wood,
then out again. He was passing houses and farmyards he had never seen before, yet
nothing was quite unfamiliar, so that he began to feel this was like dreaming, when the
known shifts into the unknown and back again. Every so often he stopped to check a
landmark against the map – a task made harder by the wartime removal of all the road
signs. But he was a good map-reader and was able to plot his wavering course in a series
of pencil marks against bridges and crossroads and farmyards.

Mid-morning his reverie was broken by the
foul blood-and-urine stench of a tanner’s yard, and then he was walking through a
small market town that he recognized from some childhood visit. And because all the
signs had been removed it was as if he secretly knew its name but could not speak it,
and he walked through the town from one end to the other, where everyone was going about
their business, buying bread and buttons and newspapers, as though he were invisible.
Only then did it occur to him that what he was doing was a very suspicious activity in
wartime, and the marked map in his rucksack suddenly acquired a great weight. He walked
on past the school, where the shouting children were on their morning break,
through the churchyard and on out of the town into more fields and
hedgerowed lanes until eventually it was midday exactly and he stopped.

He was in the middle of a field of cows. An
enormous chestnut tree stood in the centre. He walked over to it and touched it with the
flat of his hand. He could make out the roofs of some farm buildings and was able to
work out his position on the map, which he now marked with a large cross. Then he sat
down under the tree to eat his lunch and retraced his steps all the way home.

A crack of light had opened on the horizon
when he got home – a white line upon the sea. It was about six thirty. He took off his
boots and went to his room and rolled out the map on the floor. He took a pair of
compasses, stuck the point into the cross of Thornton church and opened them out to meet
the mark in the chestnut-tree field. As the crow flew it was only about twelve miles.
The lead turned around the compass point, and the circle was drawn that would contain
him for the rest of his life.

Matthew gridded up the circle and
transferred the lines of the map onto a six-by-six-foot canvas. It hung, untouched, on
his wall for several weeks before he decided how to start. In the meantime, he finished
the portrait of James. It turned out truer than he had intended – he had brought his own
disappointment to the painting. That was Matthew’s last portrait. He used to say,
‘Worlds in grains of sand, Morwenna. Worlds in grains of sand.’

But the war came to him anyway. Matthew
performed his secret service, for ever unacknowledged. The Atlantic war dead washed
ashore, in pieces, and he gathered them up, brought them up the cliff face to the
churchyard for their anonymous interment. He never dropped his ritual of stopping when
he passed a war memorial to say each name out loud. ‘Because you
never know,’ he said to me, ‘how and where they might have ended up. Their
names may be all that was left of them.’

No one ever suggested that we put up a
stone to my father. I imagined Matthew on his evening walks to the cabin, standing at
the edge of the tide and saying his son’s name out loud, into the wind:
‘John Venton!’

For seventeen years after my father died
nothing much happened, and then a pigeon flew through my window. It still feels to me
now as though it was the pigeon that precipitated events, as though it had been winging
its way towards me for years. It was like the butterfly in the Amazon that launches the
avalanche, or tidal wave, or whatever it’s supposed to launch. Of course, it was
Corwin, not the pigeon, but the pigeon’s entrance was more dramatic. Perhaps it
was part of Corwin’s subconscious, unleashed. Or perhaps even of mine.

After Mum moved out, Corwin and I claimed
Thornton for ourselves. Corwin declared that he was taking over our father’s desk,
which had always fascinated him with its secret drawer in which our father had allowed
him to conceal a hundreder conker and a Swiss army knife. Corwin swept the contents of
the desk into a box and placed it on top of the box on Mum’s side of the bedroom
wardrobe. Then I took down the Laura Ashley curtains from the garden room and moved my
workbench down there. That was how it started.

During term breaks, we dared to do what had
never been permitted our mother. We filled boxes with the domestic clutter of centuries:
dusty single balls of saved wool, battered fans, bunches of dried lavender. We threw
nothing out. Some superstition prevented us actually removing anything from the house
and upsetting the delicate chemistry of its atmosphere. We stored everything in what had
been our parents’ bedroom. At first we stored the dusty, broken, useless things.
Then we began to curate. We asked Matthew, ‘Do you mind if we move this or
that?’ And he never did seem to mind, so we stopped asking. Over
the next three years boxes piled up under the bed, on the floor, on the bed.

And we cleaned. We applied buckets of
lemon-scented Jif to every surface. We lifted furniture and hoovered up the mouse
droppings. We pulled woollen blankets out of the corners of cupboards and released
clouds of moths. We hung the rugs over the washing line and beat the dust out of them.
When the house was clean, we painted. We started in the attic – we painted everything in
my room white: the floors, the walls, the mantelpiece, the furniture. I took down the
curtains and left the windows undressed so that when I woke in the mornings I could tell
from the light in the room what colour were the sky and sea even before I opened my
eyes. We boxed up everything from Corwin’s room: Che Guevara and
The
Communist Manifesto
and
The Dark Side of the Moon
. We took his bed
apart and rolled up the carpet and shoved it in with everything else. All that remained
in Corwin’s room was a mattress on the bare floorboards and a wardrobe. Then we
shut the door on our parents’ room and locked it. We hung the heavy key in the key
cupboard in the kitchen.