The House at the Edge of the World (2 page)

The Crab Man looked like
Matthew’s idea of Long John Silver, but without the peg-leg or the parrot.
Instead, his props were the crabs that rattled around in the metal bucket at the kitchen
door. Laughing saltily, he would take a couple out of the bucket, one in each hand, and,
with a leathery leer, wave them in Matthew’s face. Snippety-snap went the
terrifying crab claws within an inch of Matthew’s nose. They smelt of fish-water
and engine oil.

James had conceived an adventure for
Matthew, a man-making crabbing expedition. One evening, one of the Crab Man’s
children appeared at the kitchen door with the message ‘Dad reckons tomorrow will
do’, and the following early morning James shook Matthew awake and they walked
over to The Sands together in the dark. It was May, turning warm, the scent of ploughed
soil rising from the fields and the rooks stirring in the trees. In the Crab Man’s
kitchen, Matthew allowed himself to be laughed at by the older children. James had told
him to accept some tea and a bit of bread so as not to offend, but to decline any second
offers because
life was hard
for the Crab Man, and it was Matthew’s duty
to note this and learn from it.

James came with them and waved from the
harbour wall, quickly disappearing from view into the before-dawn. Already, Matthew knew
that this was a mistake. The thick, sweet smell of engine oil had travelled through his
blood to his gut and no amount of breeze would shift it. Whenever he looked back to that
day, which he did often, he saw the ink-black water swelling towards him, and remembered
the elastic falling away of the centre of his body as the boat dipped into the shining
bowl left by the wave, and the rising and re-springing of his intestines far up into the
centre of his chest as the bow lifted. As dawn greyed over, he apprehended, through the
misery that burned from his throat to his navel, that the shore, obscured by mist, was
not visible. He filled with terror at the vastness of the sea, and began to understand
the scale of ocean and, even more terrifyingly, atmosphere and universe. It seemed
impossible that this tiny molecule of a
vessel could keep them safe,
and he believed quite sincerely that he would die and that the sea, in her colossal,
insatiable greed, would swallow him whole. The waters will close over me, he thought,
and I will leave no trace. The salt water will fill my nostrils, and my lungs, and take
my voice, and I will sink. And the fish will nibble at my eyes and my flesh, and my
veins and arteries will float and trail like seaweed, and my bones will lift backwards
and forwards at the bottom of the sea and grind to sand, and no one, no one, will know
that those tiny white grains were me.

He slumped in the boat and, between bouts of
hauling himself up the gunwale to empty his stomach, prayed to all the gods that were
plausible to him. The Crab Man, who had expected this, did not hold it against him. He
and his son dropped their crab pots into the water while Matthew vomited himself dry.
Eventually, the son made Matthew a little nest of coiled rope in a locker in the bow and
pushed him in with a friendly pat on the shoulder, and there Matthew lay, passing in and
out of sleep.

Around mid-morning he woke to an altered
pitch of the boat. It was bumping very gently on its fenders against the side of the
cliff. He roused himself to see where he was and found that they were in a cove,
protected from the wind. The engine was switched off and the Crab Man was holding the
boat steady. His boy was standing on the gunwale and reaching into the cliff face. When
he pulled out his hand there were two mottled brown eggs in it, which he handed to his
father, who, seeing that Matthew was awake, held them out on the flat of his palm for
him to look at.

The gulls were strangely resigned to the
robbing of their nests, and Matthew, curious enough to overcome his nausea for a moment,
emerged to look up the height of the sheer cliff face at the wheeling gulls and the
enviably balancing boy. ‘Why don’t they attack?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ shrugged
the Crab Man. ‘I’ve often wondered that myself.’ He placed the eggs in
a bucket lined with straw. And then, to make sure that Matthew understood, ‘You
don’t take
from a full nest. You take from the nests with a
single egg, when they’ve only just started to lay – that way they’ll lay
again, see?’

On the way home, the Crab Man switched off
the engine and put up some sail, and he and his son sang, which only increased
Matthew’s misery because he could not join in. In the moment that he jumped from
the boat onto the harbour wall he experienced an ecstasy of love of dry land and a
relief to be alive that left a deep impression on his eleven-year-old mind. The thing
about land, he now perceived, was that it could be marked – you could leave upon it
scratchings and scrapings, and in the future, centuries after you were dead, an imprint
of you would remain and someone who knew how to read it might revive a memory of you.
And the more time you spent on land engraving your story upon it, the greater the chance
that there you still would be.

Matthew did not paint the Crab Man or his
boat into the map, but the cipher for the day he learned to fear the sea is there, for
anyone who knows how to read it.

A third of the way up Highcliffe is a
ledge.

And on that ledge is a nest.

And in that nest is a single seagull’s
egg.

On the morning of his death day my father
appeared in the doorway of my bedroom holding a cup of tea. He had already been up for
two hours, husbanding his vegetables, but was now changed for work, fastidiously neat in
his suit and tie. He always appeared disconnected from his suit, as though he stood in
sufferance behind a comedy cardboard cut-out for a seaside-pier holiday photo.

I wondered what he was doing there. He
didn’t usually bring me tea in the mornings. It seemed to be an impulse that he
was already regretting because now he had to speak to me and, though he loved me, he
preferred to engage with me – or anyone, for that matter – in companionable silence. He
thrust the cup of tea at me, ready to snatch his hand away quickly if I drew my
claws.

He lurked near the door and put his hands
into his pockets in case he was tempted absent-mindedly to pick up anything that might,
once in his hands, admit some unsettling insight into the female adolescent mind. At
last he found a safe place for his fingers at my workbench and they came to rest on the
handle of the book press that he had found at a junk yard, taken apart and made work –
for me. That was how he expressed love: by fixing things.

‘What’s this?’ he asked,
touching the narrow spine between the plates.

‘It’s a leaving present for
Corwin,’ I said. I didn’t want to tell him what it was, for no better reason
than that I didn’t want to tell him. In fact, it was a copy of our sixth-form
Bible,
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, which I had rescued from its scruffy cover
and repaired with cloth binding and endpapers in shades of
Orwellian
grey. I was unhappy about the endpapers: I had not paid enough attention to aligning the
grain and now the book wouldn’t close properly. On the title page I had
letter-pressed the words:

Left with nowhere to go on the subject of
the book, my father fell silent. I assumed that when he had planned this conversation,
he had rehearsed it with the pre-adolescent Me who lived on in his affections, not with
the near-adult female who lay naked under the blankets. I took pity on him.
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘what are you doing here?’

He summoned up about a morning’s worth
of speech. ‘I need to have a word with you.’

‘You’ve forgotten the sugar
again!’

‘Morwenna!’

‘I know what this is about.’

My father looked relieved and hopeful of
being spared the difficulty of elaboration. ‘Do you?’

‘Do I?’

‘What do you think this is
about?’

‘I must be more considerate of my
mother,’ I recited.

He appeared exhausted. I could tell that his
stamina for this conversation was about to expire. We all failed my mother, he more than
any of us – it was somehow connected with why he looked all wrong in a suit. He hated
his job. When people asked him what he did for a living, he used to say, ‘I design
blights on the landscape.’ Which was a conversation-stopper.

‘I’ll try,’ I said.
‘I promise. It’s not easy for me to be considerate of anyone.’

He sighed. He had to love me even though I
was not considerate. His shoulders bent a little under the burden of it.

‘Would you like a
lift into town?’ he asked.

‘No thanks. I thought I’d
walk.’

He seemed to consider placing a kiss on my
forehead, but he would have had to breach the gap between himself and my bed. As he went
downstairs I called out, ‘Thanks for the tea.’

Over the years I reconstructed this last
day. It was not a deliberate effort. But subconsciously I gave it significance. It was
as though those twenty-four hours both held and withheld my father in essence – like a
moth chrysalis on the point of cracking open. When I was able to articulate this
thought, Corwin snapped at me. He said, ‘There’s nothing transcendent about
death!’ And, by then, he should have known. Nothing distinguished that day. Even
the plea to behave better towards my mother was a regular occurrence, which inevitably
followed a row.

They rarely rowed – my father made it
difficult for my mother to engage him on points of difference, so their frustration with
each other built up slowly until it erupted about something trivial. Corwin and I called
them ‘sofa rows’ because the sofa always featured in them: that lumpy,
scratchy, Victorian chesterfield, which had been sitting in front of the fireplace on
the day that Mum moved in, and had probably been sitting in exactly the same position on
the day my grandmother moved in, symbol of the Ventons’ passive tyranny against
her. I don’t know how my father and Matthew prevented Mum from placing the
slightest personal mark on Thornton – some effort of passive resistance, I supposed.
They had conceded the garden room to her in order for her to pursue her crafts. Not that
she had any talent for crafts, but it had been the seventies, and it was expected of
her: all those poor attempts at quilting, weaving and batik – all in muddy shades of
terracotta. And all those pretty, clean, new things patterned with Laura Ashley sprigs,
which she sneaked into her room like contraband.

Corwin and I eavesdropped on the end of that
last row.

‘I really
don’t think,’ Mum was hissing, ‘that it would be extravagant to change
a sofa after an entire century.’

‘It would be profligate,’
replied my father, ‘to replace something which so adequately performs its
function.’

On the stairs, Corwin and I winced. Our
father was quiet in anger, so we measured the level of his rage by the number of
sentences completed and how heavy the weight of syllables. Mentally, we translated. What
he meant was: ‘It’s part of the house.’ Which sounded fair enough but
wasn’t, because Mum wasn’t part of the house. We were all organic to the
house, which was organic to the landscape, and she was a foreign body. The sofa
represented my mother’s failure to be a good wife and adapt to Thornton, and my
father’s failure to be a good husband and adapt Thornton to her. It made her
unhappy, we could see that. But we were ruthless. Our sympathies were with Thornton,
which was immutable. We thought she should throw in the towel.

Mum retorted that it would be nice – she
repeated this louder, hoping that Matthew would hear: he always made such a fuss about
the ‘modern insipid usage’ of the word: ‘It would be
nice
,’ she yelled, ‘to have some say in what is allegedly my own
home. And it would be even
nicer
to enter the current decade before it is
over!’

We squirmed with discomfort. To suggest
entering the eighties was guaranteed to induce a display of wrath from our father. It
was the decade of untrammelled greed, of contempt for the unfortunate, of worship of
Mammon and the Devil and all his henchmen, and he would have no part in it.

‘Valerie,’ he said, in a tone of
lacerating disappointment, ‘you know how I feel about all of that.’

‘It’s just a bloody sofa!’
screeched Mum. ‘It’s just somewhere to park your arse! It’s hardly the
privatization of British Fucking Gas!’

We heard our father move towards the door
and we scuttled
up the stairs. He always gave her the last word, but by
making an exit, so that she was left addressing the empty room.

When I came down to breakfast the chickens
had escaped and were running all over the front lawn. Mum was sitting on a garden bench
holding her face to the sun, her eyes closed. I sat next to her. She said, ‘I hate
those chickens.’

I said, ‘I know you do.’

She smelt of henna, a dry, grassy scent. She
had applied it the day before and there was a red sheen upon her dark hair, except where
it was naturally grey and had turned a sad pale orange. I considered her too old for
henna. She had missed a bit behind her ear when washing it out. I said, ‘Hold
still,’ and lifted up her hair and rubbed at the grey-green crust with my
thumb.

The chickens charged around on the grass,
straggling behind their rust-coloured leader, like a bunch of hung-over squaddies. Mum
said, ‘I hate the smell – that chicken-shit smell.’

‘Where’s Hilda?’ I asked.
Hilda was my favourite.

‘Behind the fuchsia,’ said my
mother. And then, not necessarily referring to Hilda: ‘Poor thing.’ She
leaned her head back a little further and closed her eyes, floating on a deep pool of
resignation. ‘It smells of dead Tories’ wardrobes,’ she said.
‘Mildewed tweed. That’s what it smells of.’