The House at the Edge of the World (18 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Just home for Crow?’

‘Not exactly.’ I drained my tea.
I realized that every conversation I had ever had with Mickey had been triangular, held
either through Corwin or through Willow. Our only direct communication had been one
anomalous secret kiss, some time in the fifth year, lying in the trysting cave at
Thornton Mouth at low tide, with the dank smell of seaweed and the sandhoppers tickling
our ankles where our feet had disturbed the sand.

Corwin said, ‘It’s good to see
you. I’ve been away too long! Come on, then. I’ll buy you that
beer.’

‘I should let you two catch up,’
I said.

‘Not at all,’ said Corwin,
firmly.

I walked behind them and measured time
against their altered bodies, their lost lithe boyhood: Corwin was limping and brittle;
Mickey had inflated, but at the same time gave the impression of
having lost a little air. I expected Corwin to turn off into town, but he kept on along
the seafront, in the direction of the harbour.

‘Where are you taking us?’ I
called, suspicious, from my ten feet behind.

‘The Lighter.’

I thought: I know what you’re doing,
you bastard. But his little reconstruction experiment was spoiled: the red nylon carpet
was long gone – exposed floorboards, mismatched tables and chairs, and a chalked-up menu
extolling the local produce declared the Lighter a gastropub. Serves you right, I
thought. My father would not have recognized this as a pub; this smokeless echoing room
with piped, whingeing music. I imagined his crab-stripped bones twitching with disgust
on the sea bed.

‘Well,’ said Corwin, ‘this
is a change!’

‘Yeah,’ said Mickey, leaning up
at the bar. ‘The old place turned into a real dive. They put the landlord away for
running coke in from the continent.’

‘It all happens around here,
doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘Lost your supplier, then, did you?’

‘
No
. I don’t do that
shit!’

‘Only joking,’ I said
unconvincingly. ‘What’s everyone having?’

Corwin was laughing. ‘What’s so
funny?’ I snapped.

‘You, my lovely Morwenna,’ he
said. ‘And your beautiful tactlessness. I’ll have a pint of the
organic
bitter
.’

‘You two are still at it, then?’
said Mickey.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘All that secret sarcastic twin
stuff.’

‘What’s your pint,
Mickey?’

‘I’ll have what Crow’s
having.’

‘Three pints of the organic,
please,’ I said to the barmaid, who looked vaguely familiar. I wondered if we had
been at school together.

So we sat, sipping politically correct
bitter, and inexplicably
disliking one another – apart from Corwin, of
course, who found
everyone
lovable, each in their individual way. Corwin waited
until Mickey was three pints down and four cigarettes smoked outside in the cold before
he moved to his purpose. In the meantime we discovered that Mickey had dropped out of
college, fathered two children, neither of whom lived with him, had a stint as a
shipbuilder working out of Plymouth and returned to The Sands to set up an
outdoor-pursuits shop franchise. He offered us a discount.

‘It’s so good to see you,
Mickey,’ said Corwin, bringing the fourth round from the bar. ‘I’ve
been away so long. I’ve lost touch with all my old friends.’

‘Yeah,’ said Mickey. Alcohol had
always made him sentimental. ‘How long’s it been since we had a drink
together? At least ten years, I reckon.’

‘At least,’ said Corwin.

‘Fourteen,’ I said.

They both looked at me. ‘If you say
so,’ said Mickey, who had temporarily stopped disliking me.

‘I remember these things,’ I
said.

‘So,’ said Corwin, ‘are
you in touch with anyone? Where did Willow end up?’

‘London,’ he said curtly.
‘We don’t keep in touch.’

‘And Oliver?’

‘No idea. Completely disappeared!
Never really saw him after the sixth form – he used to come and visit his mother, but
she died a couple of years back, and last thing I heard, he and his father hadn’t
spoken to each other since he came out, so I’m guessing he doesn’t visit any
more.’

‘I miss Oliver,’ said Corwin.
‘Do you remember the night we made that enormous fire?’

‘And he wanted us all to become
vegetarians,’ laughed Mickey.

‘I did become a vegetarian!’

‘You’re joking!’

‘No, I did – I
am.’

Mickey looked incredulous, and then
recollected: ‘You were just eating sausages at the caff!’

‘I lapse, occasionally,’
admitted Corwin.

‘Seems like a lifetime ago,’
said Mickey.

‘It was – for us, at least. Our whole
adult lifetime. I always think of that night as the end of childhood.’

Mickey remembered. ‘Sorry, mate.
I’d forgotten that that was the same night.’

My dark-eyed brother Corwin! Well, well, I
thought, there is malice in you after all. You could not be so manipulative without it.
I was still only halfway through the third pint. I couldn’t keep up with them.
They were beginning to slump – drunks always seem to melt towards each other.

Suddenly furious, I said, ‘Corwin has
got it into his head that Dad committed suicide.’

Corwin, I noticed, didn’t move – he
was irritated. This was a failure of subtlety. Mickey roused himself. On his face were,
as I might have expected, embarrassment but also, as I didn’t expect, surprise –
at me. ‘Well, we did wonder,’ he said.

‘You did? Well, I didn’t. Why?
Why did you wonder?’

He began to retreat. ‘Just what people
said, you know, about how your dad was the last person anyone would expect to
…’

‘… to fall off a cliff. It’s OK,
you can say it,’ said Corwin, generously.

‘He was drunk!’ I protested.

‘Yes. I know. But your dad,
let’s face it, he was a bit of a dark horse, wasn’t he? Kept his own counsel
and all that.’

My bladder was burning. I left them at the
table and went out into the backyard. The cold air and the rain on my face woke me, and
I realized that I was not going to go back in. Instead I walked, as I had last done the
night of my father’s death, all along the seafront, up the steps and onto the
coast path, along the ridge to Brock Tor, where I didn’t pause, down into Thornton
Mouth,
and from there up past the mill, over the leat, through the
churchyard and home. The bright yellow gorse released waves of the scent of freshly
baked vanilla biscuits, but the sky and sea were pewter grey.

Matthew was asleep in his armchair when I
arrived. I stoked up the fire and sat opposite him to examine him for signs of the
illness that we were to believe he was harbouring. He did seem thinner. The V of his
jumper fell away from his shirt; the collar was loose around his neck. Was he waiting
for us to ask? I wondered. Would it be better to know and to incubate his death with
care and warmth, or would he be doing us, or himself, a favour, by permitting death to
jump him from behind? Were these the questions my father had asked himself? I wondered
about Oliver’s mother – she must still have been young, in her fifties only. I had
forgotten to ask how it was that she died.

Later, when I went to bed, I found that
Corwin had placed a book on my bedside table. It was one of the ones I had bound for him
– the most recent:
A Coastal Curacy
. I opened it, but already I was bored by
it. On the title page were pencilled the words:

Matthew, I thought. Matthew had taught him
to do that. Matthew and his anachronisms – he plants us with them. And I also thought,
This is what Corwin wants me to know about this book: that it belonged to our father.
And I put it aside. And I slept. And when I went back to London the following day,
leaving before dawn to make it to work in time, I left the book lying there.

Willow was easy to find. I told myself I was
looking for her because I’d been bullied into it by Corwin, but perhaps I needed
to find out more, if only to shut Corwin up. She popped up on Google with her own PR
firm. The girl I had known had disappeared, the one in the Edwardian camisoles and the
patched jeans with the criss-crossed shoelace in place of a zip. Her website photo
showed her as Cleopatra – sharp black fringe, kohled eyes. Intimidated by her powers of
self-reinvention, I looked at myself in the mirror. Seventeen years but, still, it was
me. Greenish eyes, brownish hair, freckles, a jumper with too-long sleeves.

‘Look at her,’ I said to Corwin
on the phone. ‘That’s someone else. How can you expect that person to
remember anything for us?’

But then she was on the phone.
‘Morwenna! Oh, my God! How are you?’ Her speech had always been full of
exclamation marks. It had been like being in a room of bursting balloons. ‘We must
have lunch!’ she shouted. I remembered to ask if she was still in touch with
Oliver, but she hadn’t seen or heard from him since school.

Oliver didn’t show up on the web. I
phoned his father’s number. It rang and rang. There was no answer.

I googled Corwin. He was quoted in a couple
of newspaper articles. His was a world of
plight.
Poor Corwin. I wanted to say
to him: I know I’m bad at this, the soothing, caressing thing that women do. But
look – the box is not empty. Look: that little unhoused mollusc in the bottom there –
that’s Hope!

I googled myself. I was
not there.

Oliver and me, I thought. We do not
appear.

Summer loomed. It’s so ruthless –
either relentless light or unwelcome rain. It’s such a relief to reach autumn. And
this summer would be full of trials: Mum’s wedding, Matthew’s decline.

I prepared myself in the only sensible way:
I pretended that nothing was happening and left Corwin to himself. He said he’d
been climbing a couple of times with Mickey. He didn’t mention our father, and it
was easy for me, so far from the coast, and with so much daylight, to ignore what I
preferred to think of as Corwin’s affliction. Corwin said that Matthew was much
the same – he would let me know if anything changed. Mum called regularly to discuss
arrangements. She had got it into her head that it was important Corwin and I were happy
with the details of her wedding – perhaps because we could be at best only indifferent
to the fact of her marriage.

As I worked on Mum’s wedding present,
I was forced to think about her. I made choices for her: the palest of grey leathers
rather than silk damask or printed Indian cotton; plain endpapers, but with a subtle
shimmer to reflect the occasion. I considered tooling flowers into the leather, but felt
that she would prefer it unembellished. In the end, it was a straightforward, elegant
object that ought not to be exposed to dirt. On the front, in a simple unserifed font,
it said, in silvered-blue lettering:
Robert and Valerie, 19 June 2005
. There, I
thought, pushing away the memory of that other wedding album at the bottom of a
cardboard box: that’s that.

That was May. I allowed myself to wish Mum
well and was at peace with myself. At the bindery we worked on a huge order of journals
that were to be party favours at some celebrity feast. It was soothingly repetitive. I
was lulled.

I tried on the outfit that Mum had asked me
to wear: an oyster
chiffon concoction with very little stride-room. It
was a while since I had worn a dress and heels. Ed said that I scrubbed up well, but
wondered why women did that to their feet, and waited for me to ask him to join me for
the wedding. Eventually I did. I thought it would be good to have a buffer.

I met Willow in the week before the
wedding. She threw her arms around me. ‘Oh, my God! Look at you!’ Her hands
waved as she talked. Her fingernails were painted pillar-box red.

‘How’s Crow?’ she asked.
‘Is he still gorgeous?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘He’s my brother. Was he?’

‘God, yes! You must have noticed! You
two were always so …’

‘What?’

She settled on ‘… close.’ But
that wasn’t what she had been intending to say.

‘He’s very thin,’ I
said.

‘Ah! Poor love. Well, it’s
hardly surprising, considering. Is he back for good?’

‘I don’t know. He’s having
a bit of a mid-life crisis.’

‘Aren’t we all, sweetie!
Aren’t we all!’

‘I’m not.’

‘Are you sure?’ she asked. She
contemplated me for a moment. ‘Well, perhaps not. You always were Little Miss
Contrary.’

‘He’s got compassion
fatigue,’ I said, not prepared to pretend to talk about myself. It seemed to me
that reunions only reminded you of all the things you hadn’t liked about a person.
I knew that once I had felt towards Willow something approximating love, but now I
couldn’t remember why. ‘And he’s got it into his head that Dad
committed suicide and he wants to know what happened. That’s why he’s
pretending to be all nostalgic. He thinks you might have noticed something back
then.’

Willow’s wine glass stopped halfway to
her mouth. She put it down again. ‘God!’ she said. ‘I’d
forgotten how harsh you can be.’

‘Sorry,’ I
said.

We sat in silence for a minute or so. The
food was Asian fusion – there were artistic crispy noodles, which were complicated to
eat when you were embarrassed. A coffee machine hissed expensively.

I relented a little. ‘I’m sure
Corwin genuinely wanted to catch up as well,’ I said.

‘But
you
don’t. Well,
thanks a million!’

‘That’s not what I
meant.’

Willow was doing her best not to sulk.

‘How’s your mum?’ I
asked.

‘Oh. You know. She’s moved to
Totnes.’

‘Where old hippies go to die!’
It was an old sixth-form joke.

She laughed. Willow had never held grudges –
life was too short. She would much rather enjoy herself. ‘So,’ she said, in
a tone of intrigue, deciding that there was something to be rescued from the meeting,
after all. ‘Tell me all about it!’