The House at the Edge of the World (16 page)

‘What about me?’ asked Ed.
‘Aren’t I an alternative?’

That was far too difficult a question.
‘Did I ever tell you,’ I asked, ‘about how Matthew came to draw the
map?’

Ed sighed a patient sigh. He was counting to
ten. I thought about all the hundreds and thousands of tens he had counted
to since we met. They stretched out into a long, long line,
disappearing off into outer space. But then they re-formed to make clumps of pinpricks
in time – tiny voids, which merged together to form an awful soul-sucking black
hole.

… nine … ten. Deep, self-controlling breath.
‘Yes,’ he said.

I ignored him. He was missing the point.
Some stories are meant to be told more than once – they have multiple applications. This
was one of them.

‘First of all,’ I said,
‘you need to understand that Matthew is absolutely terrified of the sea. He loves
it – or “her”, as he would say. But she terrifies him. Why that is, is
another long story, which belongs elsewhere.’

I let in a little more hot water. Ed was
sitting on the edge of the bath. His fingers were pushed into his hair and he leaned his
forehead against the palms of his hands. His eyes were closed.

‘So, this is the story of
Matthew’s Disappointment,’ I continued – not at all discouraged by
Ed’s despair. ‘Matthew was nineteen, and he liked being in Thornton,
although he thought perhaps he should go to university, or something
character-developing like that. But there was a war on, and even in Thornton it
could not be ignored
.’

‘And the doctor told him he had a
limp, and the very next day,’ said Ed, ‘he set out at dawn and walked as far
as he could by midday and marked it on the map and came home and made a circle around
himself and that’s how he came to paint the map.’

‘Matthew tells it better.’

‘I don’t want to talk about
Matthew.’

‘My mother thinks,’ I said,
‘that it’s “egotistical, bordering on hubristic” to place
himself at the centre of the world like that.’

‘I think I’m probably on her
side.’

I was sorry that Ed looked so forlorn. I
said so. I said, ‘I am sorry. Will that do?’

‘It looks like it’s going to
have to, doesn’t it?’

‘Do you want to get into the
bath?’

‘No,
thanks.’

‘Let’s do something different
tomorrow,’ I said, deciding that that was enough for the time being.

‘Like what?’

‘Let’s go to the Saatchi
Gallery. I haven’t been there in years.’

‘You hate all that stuff.’

‘Yes, I do,’ I admitted.
‘But I’m bored with myself. I think I should challenge my own
prejudices.’

‘Why are you bored with
yourself?’

‘Corwin once described me as a
“collection of detachments”,’ I said. ‘Do you think that’s
fair?’

Ed stood up. ‘I think “a
collection of self-indulgences” would be more accurate!’

‘Ed!’ I called out.
‘You’re cross!’

But he was already gone.

Poor Ed.

Morwenna’s Last Chance.

It was a couple of weeks before I visited
the gallery. I had made up with Ed, but our truce still felt a little fragile and I
thought it better to go on my own. The figure was smaller than I remembered it. It
appeared waxen, pliant, as if the cold, blue-veined flesh of it would dimple under the
warmth of my finger, but the label said ‘silicone and mixed media’. A hard
material, then – unyielding. I sat down on the floor next to it and crossed my legs. In
the few years since I had seen it I had given it my father’s face; or the
approximation of my father’s face that had settled upon my memory. It came as a
surprise to see another man’s face there, an older man’s. One who had taken
death slowly, given himself to it piece by piece, rather than launching into it whole
and healthy.

As I thought that word,
‘healthy’, its antithesis launched itself into my mind:
‘diseased’. Matthew was diseased, probably – cancerous, probably – although
he had told us nothing and we could only speculate.

The gallery was filling
with disappointed damp people, who had been looking forward to a turn on the London Eye
but had found the queues too long for a rainy April day. Dead Dad and me on the floor,
the smell of wet trainers, a small child’s arm being pulled back by her father –
her instinct was to touch the figure.

Could my father have had cancer? I wondered,
fully giving myself up to the thought that he might have committed suicide. What if
death had been inside him already? What if he had been growing it somewhere in the
strange universe of his body, massing an invisible malignancy, and he had wished to
spare us all?

The thought would not quite complete. Spare
us all what? Leave-taking? Certainty? I could not make it make sense – my father was not
a messy person: he liked order. His death was not orderly.

I left the gallery and went out into the
rain and leaned on the embankment wall. Even after all these years of living in London I
was surprised by the river, its rise and fall, its secret tributaries, flowing beneath
the tangled traffic, cascading from the embankment walls. And the boats – somehow I
always forgot that there were boats, and that there had been boats long before there had
been a city, and that the river connected with the sea, and that its connectedness with
the sea was the whole history of the city. Matthew never lost sight of these things. He
would chide me if he knew.

My father had never seen this river – nor
ever wanted to. Mum came regularly now, as she had done before she met my father, to
visit the galleries, to shop. We lunched together in West End restaurants.
(‘Making up for lost time, darling,’ she said. ‘Thanks a lot,
Mum!’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean you, darling. It’s not always about
you.’) I forced my thoughts back to my father. If suicide, then why? Was that
Corwin’s question? I could not imagine that our father would wish us to poke
around asking why – he was too
private. And then that struck me as the
answer – he had wanted a private death!

I rang Mum, and when she answered, I said,
‘Mum. My battery’s about to go. Can you get me Mark Luscombe’s number
quickly?’

Mum didn’t ask why. She assumed that I
wanted to talk to him about Matthew. She gave me the number, said, ‘Call me
soon!’ and I hung up.

‘Mark! Hi. It’s Morwenna
Venton.’

‘Morwenna! What a nice
surprise.’

‘I need to ask you
something.’

‘Is this about Matthew?’ His
voice was cautious.

‘No. It’s about Dad.’

A hesitation. ‘About John?’

‘Yes. I’ve been thinking … about
Dad. Was he ill when he died?’

Another hesitation. He was working out where
this was leading – had worked it out. There was sadness in his voice when he replied:
‘No, Morwenna. There was nothing physically wrong with him.’

There was a spasm in my chest. My heart was
hurting. Hearts could actually hurt!

‘“Physically”? What does
“physically” imply?’

‘Morwenna? Are you still
there?’

‘I said, “What does
“physically” imply?”’

I was shouting, but he couldn’t hear
me. ‘Morwenna? Morwenna?’

There was rain inside my phone. A boat full
of tourists went by on the churning brown river. I remembered someone telling me that
there is a reward for fishing bodies out of the Thames – she was a rower, and more than
once, she told me, a dawn training session had been interrupted to tow a suicide to the
bank. I remembered this, now that the word ‘suicide’ had introduced itself
into my thinking. No one, in the last seventeen years, had so much as whispered the word
in relation to my father – at
least, not in my presence. And yet now
there it sat, right in the middle of my forehead, pulsing gently.

Back at home I called Corwin. It was the
first time we had spoken since I had left him by the fire.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s
say I allow the possibility that it wasn’t an accident. Then what?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Well, you’ve planted the idea
now. I’m stuck with it.’

‘What idea?’

I forced myself to say it:
‘Suicide.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Fuck’s sake, Corwin. Just stop
it!’

The rain was on my window and sneaking into
my flat through the warped frame. ‘Is it raining at your end?’

‘Pissing down!’

‘Good! But why would Dad kill
himself?’ I asked. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why would he?’

‘Perhaps he did, perhaps he
didn’t,’ said Corwin, infuriatingly. ‘I don’t know. But we ought
to know. Clearly, we missed something.’

‘Do we need to know?’

‘I need to know.’

‘Why? What does it change?’

‘That’s what I need to
know.’

‘Christ, you’re being annoying.
How’s Matthew?’

‘Old. Increasingly absent.’

‘I suppose I could come down for the
weekend.’

‘Yes. That would be good.’

Perhaps, I thought, my father had not been
to see Mark but had been to see some other doctor in order to preserve his secret. Or –
another thought – unhappy people commit suicide. Had my father been unhappy? Was that
what Corwin was brooding about? We – all of us, Mum included – had cast Mum as the
Unhappy One. It had been selfish of him to be unhappy, to feed and
indulge his unhappiness, when he was the one who had got his own way. Privacy.
Unhappiness. Either way he had been secretive and selfish, and Mum knew it. That was why
she had been so furious. I had been too hard on her, and it was my father’s fault.
Now I was furious too. I resolved to go and see her, make friends. It was time that we
made friends, anyway. It was the grown-up thing to do.

I didn’t dare either to ask for more
time off or to borrow Ed’s car, so I rented a car for the weekend and set off
before sunrise on the Saturday. I baulked at my first approach to Mum’s, veered
off-course and ended up stomping through bluebell woods with mud up to my ankles,
preparing myself to behave well. When the woods opened out, I could see Mum and Fuck Off
Bob’s newly built oak-framed house tucked into the hill, and acknowledged,
painfully, that what Mum had chosen for herself was a version of the life she had
already had: a large country house, but dry and warm and unburdened by any history –
including that of Corwin and me.

At last I got back into the car and made my
way up the gravel drive and parked below a row of fashionably pleached hornbeams, which
I intended to remember to admire. Mum came to meet me at the front door, saying,
‘Look at the state of you. Take your jeans off – they’re soaked and
you’ve got mud all over them.’

The house was supernaturally clean, even the
crystals on the chandelier, which Bob had no doubt wrested from some ancient widow,
sparkled dust-free. Mum had an arsenal of sprays under the kitchen sink lined up ready
to zap any incipient stain. I imagined a pixie living in the cupboard, held captive
housekeeper by an imprudently granted wish, waiting to be released from his magical
bond. I imagined his sleeping malevolence, tucked beneath the weary face of
servitude.

‘Oh, I’m sure Bob would love
that! Me in my knickers,’ I said, before I could remember to be nice, but Mum
wasn’t rising today.

‘Bob’s out. And in any case you
can borrow something of mine.’

I took off my jeans in the
hall and Mum came down with some trousers for me to put on. They were a little too
small.

‘I was expecting you
earlier!’

‘I was feeling a little
nauseous,’ I lied. ‘I had to stop for some air.’

‘Are you pregnant?’

‘God, no!’

‘Oh, well!’ she said,
cheerfully. ‘Sugar in your tea?’

‘Please.’

‘Let’s go into the snug,
darling. I’ve put on a fire. And there’s something on the mantelpiece, for
you – you go first.’

On the mantelpiece was a cream envelope with
‘Morwenna Venton’ written on it in Mum’s most exuberant
fountain-penned italics. I put my mug on the coffee table, sat back in the charcoal-felt
Italian sofa, pulled my feet under me and slipped my thumb under the flap of the
envelope to open it.

Mum said, ‘It’s just that all
the legal ins and outs took so long, and then Corwin has never been home for more than
two seconds and now that he’s finally back for at least a while we thought better
late than never!’

There was a thick-laid card inside, embossed
print:
Robert Marsden and Valerie Venton request the pleasure of your company on the
occasion of their marriage.

‘You will come, won’t you,
darling?’

She was gabbling a little – it wasn’t
like her. Oh! I thought. She’s a tiny bit scared of me. That had never occurred to
me.

‘Of course I will,’ I said
expansively, and thought about leaping from the sofa to give Mum a forgiving hug, but my
awkwardly folded feet stalled me and it was already too late. Instead I gushed,
‘Of course! It’s time. You know, I’d sort of forgotten that you
weren’t married and, you know, it’s nice that you still want to be
married.’ Now I was gabbling. Thank God, I managed to shut up before I said
‘at your age’. I would make them a beautiful wedding present – a photo
album, bound in cream silk. (Actually, no,
that was a little too
virgin-bride. Leather would be better.) And with their names and the date debossed into
the cover.

I took refuge in the sweet tea and tried
again. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad recently. I’ve been
wondering if he was happy.’

‘Happy?’

‘Oh, never mind! I didn’t mean
to bring him into the conversation, just when you and Bob are announcing your
wedding!’

‘What do you mean by
“happy”?’

There was that word, deceptively innocuous,
unleashed. I suddenly discerned its full load of implicit rights and responsibilities,
incurred and failed duties.

‘I don’t mean anything by it – I
just mean that I’ve been trying to remember things. How Dad was. How you were as a
couple.’