The House at the Edge of the World (13 page)

‘No,’ I said. The feeling of
portent had suddenly returned. ‘Don’t answer it,’ I said, too
vehemently. ‘It’s Corwin.’ But this was an error. A frown formed on
Ed’s forehead – now he had to check. It bothered him that I always knew when it
was Corwin. He put down the drill and answered. ‘Corwin! Yes. She is.’ Ed
handed me the phone. Corwin’s voice oscillated on the crackly satellite waves. I
always felt, during these calls, as though I were at a Victorian séance, communicating
through layers of ectoplasm. Corwin said, ‘Can you go down to Thornton and meet me
there?’

‘Did Mum tell you about
Matthew?’

‘No. What?’

‘He’s not well.’

‘What’s wrong with
him?’

‘I don’t know. He won’t
talk about it.’

‘Oh. Well, I’m on my way home
anyway. I need to see you. You go on down.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Travel
safely.’

When I put the phone down, Ed was looking at
me. He distrusted the brevity of my conversations with Corwin.

I said, ‘Can I borrow your
car?’

‘Why?’

‘Corwin’s coming home. I need to
go to Thornton.’

‘When?’

‘Now.’

‘What? Just like that?

‘Something’s up with
Corwin.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. I just
know.’

‘You two freak me out!’ he said.
‘How long will you be gone for?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think I’m
going to need it this week.’

That simply wasn’t true. He never
needed it during the week. He walked or cycled everywhere. In fact, he pretty much only
drove his car when he needed to take it to the garage to repair a wing mirror that had
been smashed while it was parked on the road. But I couldn’t be bothered to
argue.

When he finished with the window he produced
a bowl of hot, soapy water. He told me to leave the carpet – he said that with carpets
you have to let things dry otherwise you end up scrubbing the dirt further into the
pile. While he was wiping down the bookshelves I packed some clothes. Ed had left his
jacket over the back of a chair in the kitchen. His car key was in one of the pockets. I
took him a cup of tea, gave him an I-don’t-deserve-you kiss, and sneaked out.

After Bristol the Sunday traffic began to
thin out. A mean, mizzling rain had kept everyone at home, nursing their seasonal
affective disorder. I stopped once for coffee and petrol and left a message on the
bindery voicemail to say that I wouldn’t be at work for a couple of days. It was a
family emergency, I said. I bought an enormous packet of crisps and ate from my lap as I
drove.

Corwin was about to make something go wrong.
I could sense it. One phone call from him from some godforsaken part of the planet and I
had lied to Ana, who was a fair boss and might not be able to tell. And I had stolen
Ed’s car. And it was raining.

The rain squatted above me all the way from
Taunton, a cold sleety rain. But around the headland the sky cleared. A single bolt of
pink unfurled across the blue. Sudden stunted bare trees reached over the lanes like
supplicant souls. By the time I arrived in Thornton the dark was rising up the sides of
the combe. There was light in the hall and in the kitchen – Matthew still had the habit
of putting the hall light on at twilight; some ritual of regard for the stray wanderer,
perhaps.

Matthew inhabited only a
part of the house now: the kitchen, his study, his bedroom. When we came down he would
venture with us into the living room, which smelt damp until we cranked up the heating.
Mum never visited us there.

He was at the kitchen table, reading and
nibbling on a plate of bread, cheese and tomato chutney. He looked up and I searched his
face for sign of illness. He was a little more drawn, perhaps. ‘Ah!
Morwenna!’ He wasn’t expecting me so soon, but he couldn’t be sure
that I hadn’t told him I was coming straight down and, anyway, he had long since
given up being surprised by anything. I kissed his forehead.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

‘Starving!’

He fetched a plate and put the cheese and
the butter dish in front of me and sliced a piece of bread. It was fresh, elastic under
the butter.

‘How’s Corwin?’ asked
Matthew.

‘He’s on his way
home.’

‘Oh, is he?’ Matthew looked up.
‘From where?’

Once Matthew had kept track of Corwin in an
old atlas, which acknowledged neither the independence of African states nor the
break-up of the Soviet Union. But Corwin had been gone so long that he had given up
trying to distinguish between the different kinds of elsewhere that held him. There was
only Thornton now. Unchanging, set in granite against the Atlantic. He no longer even
quite believed in London, although he was occasionally persuaded of it by me.

‘Sudan,’ I said.

‘Goodness! How fascinating that must
be. What has he been doing there?’

‘Oh. The same thing he does anywhere –
everywhere else but here.’

We washed up. ‘Let’s have a
nightcap in the study,’ Matthew suggested. ‘Have you anything to
read?’

‘No,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you find me something, and I’ll get the fire
going?’

I switched off the light in the kitchen. For
a moment I stood in the dark and listened. There was nothing but ancient sound – the
rushing of the brook, the hoot of an owl – then Matthew’s step in the hall. He had
found something for me.

I lit a fire in his study, and brought some
logs in from the wood shed. Matthew poured two glasses of malt whisky. He laid a book on
the coffee table – a tatty limp-bound book called
The Ghosts of Dartmoor
.
‘I thought you might make something of that,’ he said. ‘It has some
lovely woodcuts. You could turn it into a nice little book.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Oh,
and I’ve brought you a present – chilli chocolate,’ I added, handing the bar
to him. ‘I thought we could try it tomorrow with coffee.’

‘Goodness!’ said Matthew.
‘Do you really think so?’

I stood up and took my glass over to the
map. ‘Is there anything new?’ I asked.

I expected him to say, ‘You’ll
have to use your eyes.’ That was the old game – catch him at it or find it
yourself. But instead he said. ‘Ah, yes! I knew I had something to show you. Stand
back. No. Not there. Further back. So that you can see it all.’

Taking my arm he steered me around his desk
and manoeuvred me until my back was against the bookshelves on the opposite wall.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Look at it. Really
see
it – as a
whole.’

I tried to see it. All of it. All at once.
Somewhere beneath, all that glowing colour was anchored on the contours of the Ordnance
Survey map. I tried to intuit them, to disregard the painting’s wandering saints
and wronged women and poet priests; its contradictory seasons, snowdrops and roses,
fruit and blossom, spring cubs and autumn hunters. I thought, belatedly, that it was
interesting that Matthew had allowed the half of his circle that was sea to be blue,
when it was almost never that. More often, almost always in fact, it was the colour of
cloud and
rain, of bruised skin. Bisecting his circle of land and sea
were the cliffs, rising out of the water and receding into the top right quarter of the
circle, as they would appear to a walker approaching from the south-west. Off the coast
was the jagged line of a reef. Except that I knew that this reef was a ships’
graveyard, and that Matthew had recorded every ship wrecked off our coast by painting
their watery ghosts, in full rig, and, though this was only visible under the
magnifying-glass, I knew that he had written each of their names in his minuscule hand
along with the dates of their deaths. And I knew all their names: they repeated
themselves.
Perseverance
, 22 April 1842, and
Perseverance
, 30 June
1866, and
Perseverance
, 24 October 1897. There was
Hope
, and again
Hope
, and yet still more
Hope.
There were
Hannah
s and
Elizabeth
s and
Mary Ann
s. The world had sent its ships to die
there: the
Pacquebot de Brest
, and the
Maria Kyriakidis
, and
Matthew’s favourite, the
Dulce Nombre de Jesus
. And, of course, the
Constantia
, out of whose entrails Great-grandfather James had constructed
the cabin.

‘Now,’ said Matthew. ‘Let
me show you.’

He rummaged around in his plan chest and
pulled out a large roll of tracing paper. Then he pulled up his library steps and began
to tape the top edge of the roll to the top of the canvas with masking tape. Carefully,
he unrolled the paper and secured it to the edges of the stretcher so that it overlay
the whole painting, but tightly, so that the painting was visible beneath a pattern of
pencil lines. As he smoothed it over the map and fiddled with the tape and the edges
until it fitted tightly, he said, ‘I can’t believe I’d never seen it
before. Do you see it yet?’

I didn’t. He came over to stand beside
me. ‘This is quite extraordinary. If you join up these points, church,
Devil’s Stone and cabin, you mark a triangle from which you can build a pentagram
that fits exactly within the circle. There it is, Morwenna. Divine Proportion!’
You’re mad, I thought. Quite mad. You have placed yourself at the centre, and now
you detect divinity in your
design. And at the same time I thought: I
want to grow to be old and mad and afire with conviction.

We contemplated Matthew’s golden
secret for a couple of minutes, until Matthew asked, ‘When are we expecting
Corwin?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. He just told
me to meet him here.’

‘What brings him home?’

‘Perhaps he’s homesick,’ I
said. ‘Do you think he gets homesick?’

‘How could he not?’

Carefully, I removed the tracing paper. The
firelight flickered over the figure of a sleeping giant, almost invisibly folded, like a
foetus, into the belly of Squab Rock. When I turned back to Matthew, he was in his
armchair and his eyes were closed. His pipe, unlit, lay loosely in his hand. I sat by
the fire, sipping whisky and waiting, as ever, for Corwin.

The curse figure was grinning at me when I
woke up in my room. It was another leaden day. I could hear a Hoover banging around in
the hall below and wondered when Matthew had taken on a cleaner. Corwin and I had been
nagging him to do so for years, but until now he had insisted on looking after himself.
By the time I got downstairs the mystery vacuumer was no longer there. Matthew, also,
was gone, off on his meanderings. I made myself tea and toast and walked out into the
garden to look for signs of spring. The trees were poised and secretive. I went from bed
to bed, bending every so often to push away the covering of decayed leaves from emergent
bulbs.

My circuit brought me to the entrance to the
kitchen garden and, wrapping both hands around my mug of tea for warmth, I wandered
through the brick arch and into a perfectly cultivated plot, all dug over, ready for
planting. At the far end a skinny woman in blue dungarees was pushing a wheelbarrow. For
a moment I didn’t recognize her. I had last seen her from a distance in some pub
or other, plump with puppy fat in skinny white denims and silver heels – or, at least,
that was how I chose to picture her.

‘Sandra?’ I said, too late to
suppress the outrage in my voice.

She glanced over her shoulder without
stopping and continued to push the wheelbarrow in the direction of the compost heap.
Then she turned and came towards me.

‘What brings you home,
then?’

She was able to sink the ‘you’
to an enviable depth of disdain, by losing the
h
in ‘home’.

‘I wanted to see my
grandfather.’

‘Well. Fancy that!’ she said, in
reproach.

‘Sandra – what are
you doing here?’

‘Your granddad needs keeping an eye on
– that’s what I’m doing here. And the arrangement is he pays me a little and
I get use of this garden.’

‘Oh. He never mentioned it to
me!’

‘Well, he probably thinks he did. His
memory’s not so good these days.’

‘I know that!’

I wanted to say that it was
my
house,
my
garden, and that Matthew ought not make arrangements without
consulting me and Corwin, but while I was not saying that, Sandra had already become
bored with me and asked, ‘Where’s Crow to these days?’

‘Sudan,’ I said.

‘He doesn’t stay put for long,
does he?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He
doesn’t stay put for long. But he’s on his way home.’

‘About time,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know that you were a
gardener,’ I said.

‘Well, you wouldn’t, would
you?’

She was snipping cuttings into small pieces
with secateurs; they piled up in the wheelbarrow. ‘Did you want
something?’

‘No,’ I said, retreating.
‘I was just out for some air. I didn’t know you were here.’

‘See you, then,’ she said.

I had forgotten about the existence of
Sandra Stowe. One summer at primary school – I think it was the year of the Silver
Jubilee – she fixed me with a pointing finger in the playground, framed by the Gothic
window of the infants’ classroom, and declared me ‘Wi-itch! Wi-itch!’
in front of the whole school. ‘Witchy face!’ she shouted. ‘Witchy
name!’

The day before, each of us had been asked to
draw up a family tree as a homework assignment. Our teacher, Miss Arden, a pretty young
curly blonde incomer who basked in our adoration, had
enthusiastically
pieced together the jigsaw of cousins, aunts and uncles and established that two-thirds
of the class could trace a line back to only four sets of great-grandparents. A neat
diagram connecting them all together was displayed on the classroom and the class was
invited to marvel at its inbreeding. The Venton name was not on it – we didn’t
marry into the village. We were posh, and my poshness, I vaguely sensed, even at the age
of seven, lay at the root of the attack on my given name. The objection was not simply
that I was posh, it was that I was posh and not at posh school, where I belonged, and
where I was not, despite my mother’s protests, because my father had hated posh
school.