The House at the Edge of the World (21 page)

‘Well, that was one of his longer
sentences,’ I said. There was acid in my mouth.

‘Oliver did his wise-old-man thing and
said, “All kinds of love are possible.”’

‘Oh, Oliver too! Oh, good!’

We said nothing for a while. Corwin threw
pebbles, his arm protruding from the gap in the blanket. The tide was now close enough
to receive them.
Plop! Plop! Plop!

‘We humiliated him,’ I said.
‘You see? She was right. It was us!’

I leaned my head on his shoulder.
‘Have you noticed how we’ve been talking in euphemisms? I have no vocabulary
for this.’

‘No.’

‘Do you think we love each other too
much?’

‘What’s too much?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘are you
finally going to tell me what you’ve been doing for the last five
months?’

‘Better than that. I’m going to
show you.’

He stood and reached out his hand to help me
up to standing. Then he pulled shut the door of the cabin and returned the key to its
hiding place. I kept the blanket around my shoulders as we held hands and walked along
the beach. Then I followed
him up onto the cliff path and zigzagged up
to the ridge where the lighthouse flash up-coast beckoned us on. As I walked behind
Corwin I thought of seven-league boots. Each of our steps was taking us a great
distance. There might not be a way back.

Just before Brock Tor we turned into the
hidden path between the furze bushes, which caught on the delicate fabric of my dress
and scratched at my legs. We came out above the chine. ‘It’s OK,’ said
Corwin. ‘I’m not going to make you stand too close.’ I moved as close
to the edge as I dared until I could just see the glitter of the waterfall.

‘Now,’ said Corwin, ‘where
do you think Dad was when he fell?’

I pointed ahead of me, over the falling
stream, to where I had thrown in the box of secrets. But Corwin shook his head.
‘That was the assumption, wasn’t it? That he went over there?’ I
thought of the great shards of granite below; of my father, sliced.

‘I brought Bob up here,’ said
Corwin. ‘He wasn’t that pleased about it, but I think he thought he owed it
to me. Bob said he pissed over the waterfall, but Dad walked around.’

He took my hand again and started to lead me
around the horseshoe curve of the cliff. ‘So Dad walked around, and Bob started to
go after him. Then Bob gave up about here, and sat down and watched Dad walk around a
bit further.

‘Here,’ said Corwin. ‘Bob
said that he remembered Dad being about here.’ He pulled something out of his
jacket pocket and handed it to me. ‘This is the book you sent me,’ he said.
‘I want you to read it – I’ve marked the passage.’ He took his jacket
off. ‘You’re freezing,’ he said. ‘Put this on.’ He pulled
the blanket from my shoulders and held it while I put on his jacket. Then he wrapped me
up again and stepped away from me.

‘Corwin,’ I said.
‘You’re getting too close to the edge. You’re making me
dizzy.’

‘Wait for me at the
cabin,’ he said. ‘If I’m not there in six hours, do whatever you think
is right.’

Then he turned and spread out his arms.
Crow, I thought. Crow: about to take flight.

And then he tipped himself forward into the
deep black air.

PART THREE

Corwin dropped into the blinding dark.
Something ripped from my chest as I lurched after him – my voice: it was gone, falling
with him. He himself made no sound. I thought: I should have heard him hit the water by
now. Or the rocks; I would have heard him cry out if he had hit the rocks. I crawled
towards the cliff edge, but he had fallen into the black hiss of the sea and the
whispering of the grass. The lighthouse flashed, and then flashed, and then flashed.

I found that I was curled on the ground and
that I was very cold and that something like thought nuzzled at my brain. I held
something hard to my chest. It was the book. I raised myself up and started to walk, and
then my legs began to run and they ran me back along the cliff and down towards the
glowing shingle and splashed me through the edge of the tide. It didn’t occur to
me to disobey Corwin and go for help. I had only one instinct: to get to the cabin and
to warm myself so that I might think.

The skirt of my dress was soaked and clung
in gorse-torn shreds around my calves. I undressed to my underwear and put
Corwin’s jacket back on and fired up the stove and filled the kettle and placed it
on the hob. Then I pulled the great-aunts’ bedspread from the bunk and wrapped
myself in it and sat next to the stove and watched the kettle, fiercely. This
kettle-watching required an enormous amount of willpower and concentration. It took a
very, very long time to boil. I thought of watched kettles. I thought that I would never
speak again, that Corwin had silenced me. I resented him for it. Corwin might be dead
and bumping about on the tide leaking blood onto the water. I hoped he was. Then I made
tea.

The book lay on my lap in
its periwinkle-blue binding.
A Coastal Curacy
. I didn’t need to read it
to know what it was: the country memoir of a well-educated Victorian. It would contain
observations on flora and fauna and on the architecture of churches and stately homes:
the gentle pursuits of the English. It was a conventional book with nice enough
engravings. I opened it at Corwin’s marker and tried to read, but my mind would
not receive the words so I put it down again and fed the fire and sat some more. I
pulled the bedspread closer around me and thought of the great-aunts making it. I
thought of them pulling apart old socks and jumpers and winding the wool around cards
and steaming it with a damp cloth and a heavy old iron and then unwinding the wool
around hands held apart and rewinding the skeins into neat compact balls. I thought of
them sitting and crocheting. I wondered what they had talked about. I wondered if they
had laughed.

I had no way to measure time but the sound
of the tide edged further and further away off the shingle until it was silenced by the
soft sand. I slept, open-eyed, starting awake over and over again into the nightmare of
Corwin’s madness. Night began to lift. I stood and went to the cabin steps to feel
the sunrise. I found that I was crying. That’s interesting! I thought. I licked at
my tears and went back inside to look at myself in the cracked mirror on the shelf above
the photo of Great-grandfather James. My face cried at me. I disliked the sensation and
made myself stop.

I refilled the kettle. He will be here soon,
I thought. And then I noticed the conviction I had that he was alive. If he were dead I
would know. We were conjoined at some point of the soul. It was a terrible epiphany.
Combined, we made a monster. Somewhere I had read that in a case of conjoined twins one
tends to be stronger, sapping the other’s blood and organs. I wondered which of us
was the parasite.

The sea glinted a mackerel silver. I went to
stand on the steps
again and watched for Corwin. The tide was right
out. The sun had breached the horizon and the blush evaporated from the sky. At the end
of the tumble of rocks that spilled onto the beach dividing Thornton Mouth and the cove
below Brock Tor, I caught a scribble of movement on the dark granite. I watched hard. It
was Corwin, climbing down the jagged slabs. I watched him reach the sand. I went back
into the cabin. I knew that now I would be able to read.

Corwin limped in through the door clutching
his shoulder and fell on the bunk, turned on his back and closed his eyes. He was
shivering, a trembling right through every muscle of his body. I drank my tea.

Eventually he said, ‘Did you read
it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And? What do you think?’

‘I’m not thinking. I’m too
exhausted.’ I held my cup out. ‘Tea?’

He propped himself up to drink; the tea
shuddered in the cup. ‘I think I may have dislocated my shoulder. It really
hurts!’

‘That’ll teach you!’ I
said. ‘So? Apart from any physical damage you may have done to yourself, do you
feel better now?’

Corwin looked a little surprised.
‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Yes. As a matter of fact I do. I feel better. It was
amazing, actually.’ The words stuttered in his mouth, his teeth were chattering so
much. ‘The jump, I mean. The rest was a little hairy. But I do. I feel better. My
head is clear now.’

‘Oh, good! That must be nice for you.
Better than being dead.’

‘I knew I’d be OK.’

‘You did? Well, I
didn’t.’

He was trying to take off his wet clothes,
but couldn’t raise his arm. I helped him ease his T-shirt over his shoulder and
take off his trousers. I draped them over the drying rack and placed it close to the
stove. His skin was white and blue, his lips almost black. He had lost his shoes. His
socks were shredded and his feet
grazed and bleeding. When I touched
his skin it was so cold that I was shocked out of my numbness and suddenly I felt
anxiety for him. I stoked up the fire, then lay down next to him and cocooned us both in
the bedspread, trying to give him some of my warmth. I pulled his hands between my
thighs and took his feet between my own. His jaw vibrated at my temple. After a long
while, the shivering stopped and the warmth returned to his hands and feet; the red
returned to his mouth.

‘So you read it?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘I can see what you’re
thinking.’

‘Did you see the pencil
marks?’

‘Yes.’

‘I never realized that you
didn’t read the books,’ said Corwin. ‘I wondered at how bad some of
them were! I read them all, looking for hidden messages. I thought I’d finally
found one.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘There were
no messages. Or, rather, there was just one message. You missed it.’

After a pause I said, ‘I never
realized that you did read them.’

‘Well,’ said Corwin,
‘there are only so many times you can play Trivial Pursuit. Especially with people
who don’t have the cultural references.’

‘You are cruel,’ I said.
‘Cruel and flippant.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. I’ve had to
think a lot about that – can I be that cruel? But I had to be. Can I have some more
tea?’

I made more tea. He took the chair next to
the stove and warmed himself there.

‘So,’ I said, ‘are you
going to explain yourself?’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Well, I
had this friend, when I was working in Congo. He was called François. He’d been a
teacher in Rwanda and he was very articulate – good company. He spoke really good
English and acted as my interpreter for a while. He had this incredibly deep voice. It
was like the rumble of the earth. He
could have said anything and it
would have sounded wise. We played chess together in the evenings.’

‘Is that what you’ve been doing
for the last decade?’ I snapped. ‘Playing board games?’

‘Don’t interrupt!’ said
Corwin. ‘This is important.

‘Anyway, François was my interpreter
for about four months and I learned so much from him. We talked about Africa mostly –
about the genocide, obviously. About the future for Africa. But he never told me
anything about his family. And I never asked, because – who knew? – he might be a mass
murderer, or his family might have been wiped out, or he might have been forced at
gunpoint to rape his mother …’

‘Jesus, Corwin!’

‘Oh, don’t be so precious! The
one time I put an unpleasant image into your head you split my lip!’

‘
Unpleasant image!
What a
nice little euphemism! The way you wallow in the excrement of humanity is
perverse!’

‘Just shut up and listen! One evening,
François comes over and says he’s sorry but he has to leave. He says he’s
seen someone from his village and he doesn’t want to be recognized and he begs my
forgiveness. He says his name’s not François. He says his family thinks he’s
dead and he wants it to stay that way. And then he says, “I want to reassure you
that it was nothing that I did, I was not a participant. It was simply that I was
presented with the opportunity to be dead and I took it. And afterwards, when so many
were returning from the dead and I might have resurrected myself, I found that I did not
wish to.”’

‘What – in those exact
words?’

‘That was how he talked. He spoke
slowly, always. His sentences came out fully crafted. It’s a form of courtesy. Not
all cultures encourage the idea that every connection of the synapses should be
inflicted on other people.’

Corwin leaned over and took my hand gently.
‘And then he said, “Sometimes it’s lonely being dead, but it suits me
well.”’

‘No!’ I
flinched. ‘It’s all just coincidence.’

‘I thought about that conversation a
lot over the years. And then you sent me that book.’

We sat in silence for a while. I imagined
François walking out into the dark, into the vastness of Africa. I thought of the
sweeping arrows on historical maps that represent the mass movements of peoples after
wars and of his feet moving along them.