The House at the Edge of the World (23 page)

‘Next thing I knew, I was lying on this shore, all betangled with seaweed and
spewing like a baby. I thought I must be dead, but when I looked down I saw that my
leg was bleeding, and so I told myself that if my blood was running I must be alive
still. And I lay there until the rector found me, and he took me with him and nursed
me. And I believe that my enemies must have thought me dead, because they saw me
fall. So then I thought to myself: No one knows me here. My enemies think me dead,
and only the Devil knows my name, so he may have it, and I will take another
one.’

Twilight was now upon us, so I thanked my strange host and took my leave. I had
twice encountered the Devil during my short stay at Thornton, and had no wish for a
third meeting, and I hurried back along the cliffs to return to The Sands before
dark fell.

Underneath the sentence ‘only the Devil
knows my name, so he may have it, and I will take another one’ was a faint
pencilled line – drawn lightly, neatly. In the margin was written the name ‘John
Greenaway’. I recognized the tiny pedantic handwriting, but I could not tell if it
belonged to my father or to Matthew.

At the hospital we had said that Corwin had
slipped on the rocks, which was almost true. They patched him up and gave him some
strong painkillers. It was around midnight by the time we returned to Thornton. The
ghosts were active. We passed the memorial cross and I thought of Matthew, who never
passed it without saying the names out loud. He always appeared to read them from the
plaque, but even I, by the age of eight, knew them off by heart. I can recite them
still: from Arthur Cornish all the way down to Peter Thompson.

Once, in winter, I told Matthew that I was
frightened to be calling out the names of the dead on such a dark night, and Matthew
said, ‘What do you think those poor boys could possibly want with you? The dead
aren’t to be feared, only the living.’

And I trusted him, and was persuaded, and
have never since feared the dead. But now Corwin and I had allowed ourselves to imagine
a different kind of haunting, by the shade of a living being. We didn’t even have
a name for such a terrifying spirit.

I was frightened to leave Corwin. ‘You
have to promise!’ I said. ‘Promise me. No further action until I get back. I
don’t even want you going into Mum and Dad’s room.’

I said, ‘Patience, Corwin. Without
patience, we’ll just go mad.’ I had patience, I suddenly realized. I had a
virtue. I had patience
for things that no one else noticed. I could
spend days standing at a vice, sanding spine papers until they were smooth as silk. I
could pare leather until it was as thin as tissue. I could take as long as it took.
Corwin, on the other hand, was skittish. I didn’t trust him alone with
Matthew.

The book came back to London with me. On
the long train journey I turned it in my hands:
A Coastal Curacy
, by Ambrose
Pearce, published by some long-forgotten house in 1887. On the frontispiece the words:
John Venton. His Book
. I must have noticed at the time, and then
immediately forgotten it, this conventional book, with nice enough engravings that I had
spent precious hours of my short life in rescuing, that I had carefully teased apart and
re-stitched and pasted and pampered, when it was just a molecule in a mountain of vanity
and self-regard and utterly deserved to be forgotten and left to decompose.

I put the book back into my bag and listened
to my messages. There was nothing from Ed. There were two messages from the bindery. One
from a colleague confirming that they’d received my message saying I’d be a
day late getting back, and one from Ana saying that she would like me to keep my
lunch-break free so that we could have a chat. In fourteen years I’d never had
lunch alone with Ana. I assumed that she was going to fire me.

The green hills end long before London
begins. I looked out on the rainy suburbs. I was altered, irrevocably, by the last
forty-eight hours. A mutation had occurred in my soul or, perhaps, it had simply
completed. Maybe it had started with the imaginary falling man, or before, with the
simple act of removing my T-shirt in the middle of a hot night. The words from that song
in
Oliver!
leaped incongruously into my head: ‘I am re-
view
-ing
the situation …’ Corwin and I used to love that film. I found myself irritated by
the exclamation mark. Why was it
Oliver!
, not simply
Oliver
? It was a
very annoying piece of punctuation.

Fagin and the Artful
Dodger clowned off into an East End sunset. They sang in my head: ‘I think
I’d better think it out again.’

When I returned to the bindery, there was a
stranger working at my stool. ‘That’s Birgit,’ said Ana.
‘She’s going to be here for a few weeks. You can help out on repairs while
she’s with us.’

Birgit looked up and smiled at me, from
behind owlish glasses. She was wearing a black waistcoat, embroidered all over with what
looked like birds in flight. Meekly, I set myself up at another bench and began to take
apart a book that had been brought in for repair. It was a beautiful book, badly
damaged. An eighteenth-century copy of
Gulliver’s Travels.
It would take
time to restore. I watched Birgit from the corner of my eye. On closer examination, I
saw that the waistcoat was not covered with birds: they were books. Their pages
fluttered like the wings of parrots and birds of paradise.

Ana suggested that, as the weather was so
warm, we take some sandwiches to the Priory Church Garden. I was terrified of Ana. She
had been perched on the edge of my life for all those years like a beautiful hawk,
black-feathered with a red beak and bright collar, watchful and indifferent. I had never
heard her say anything foolish or unguarded so my respect for her was boundless. I
feared her disapproval more than Matthew’s.

We sat on a bench. Angels looked down on
Christ hanging from the cross. I had always thought that Ana came from Argentina.
‘No,’ she corrected. ‘But close. Chile. How strange that you
don’t know that after all these years, Morwenna.’

I didn’t try to defend myself. It was
true. It was strange. She said, ‘You seem troubled, Morwenna. And it’s
beginning to affect your work.’

‘Do I? Well, yes. Everything’s
falling apart a bit. I’m sorry.’

‘Are you?’

‘Am I what?’

‘Are you sorry? I
never know what English people mean when they say that.’

‘Oh.’ I had to stop to think.
‘Yes. I mean, I am sorry. I regret my unreliability. I am racked with
guilt,’ I added.

Ana sniffed, annoyed, and lit a cigarette.
She smoked in the way that people smoked before they knew it killed them: with panache.
‘That,’ she said, ‘is another word you English throw around. You say
things like “I feel so guilty because I haven’t washed the dishes for two
days.” Guilt arises out of sin. Whether or not to wash the dishes is simply a
matter of choice.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see what
you mean.’

We ate our sandwiches silently for a few
minutes. Then I said, ‘I don’t really believe in sin.’

‘In that case,’ she said,
‘you are not racked with guilt.’

‘Do you believe in sin?’

‘Of course not. It’s a
patriarchal construct designed mainly for the bullying of women.’

‘Oh!’ I said.

‘In my experience,’ she said,
‘people are troubled when they are too close to love or death or sex or power. Or
they have betrayed someone or themselves – their own ideals. I don’t need to know
what’s going on in your case – it’s always complicated to the individual and
a little sordid to everyone else.’

‘It is complicated,’ I said.
‘But mainly my grandfather’s dying. I ought to be looking after him.’
This surprised me a little. I hadn’t realized until I said it that, among all my
current concerns, Matthew took priority.

‘Morwenna. At the moment, you are
either absent or tired and distracted. You hurtle off to the end of the country and back
as if you are popping out to Tesco. Consequently, you are not much good to me at work at
the moment,’ she said. ‘Would you like to take a short
sabbatical?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said.

‘You can have four months.’

‘Thanks,’ I
said.

‘Another thing,’ she said.
‘Birgit is journeying. She did her apprenticeship in Switzerland, and now she is
travelling and working for free and needs somewhere to live. Can you put her up for a
while?’

I recognized this as a condition of
Ana’s tolerance. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. I didn’t mind,
I’d be going away. And, anyway, I wanted a chance to hold the waistcoat; see how
it was worked.

The smoke streamed from Ana’s mouth
into the June sunshine. I studied her for uncertainties. I couldn’t find any. I
said, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing that – journeying for a while.’

‘My grandfather did it,’ said
Ana. ‘On my mother’s side. He was German. But I never met him. My
grandparents were Nazis. My mother hated them. But that’s how I inherited the
habit of punctuality.’

‘When did you come to
London?’

‘A long time ago, Morwenna. A long
time ago.’

‘Were you a binder before you came
here?’

‘My father had a bindery. He was
Italian.’

She smiled at me. ‘You know, Morwenna,
when I came to London I thought: This is exile, this grey city, these strange people who
never say what they mean. But observe this garden, this peace, here in the middle of the
city. London is a sanctuary, Morwenna. A sanctuary.’

I packed for four months and handed over my
flat to Birgit. I had stayed and worked for the rest of June in a daze, waking every
morning with a heart-flutter of panic. I called Ed a couple of times. He didn’t
answer, so I left a message. I said that I was sorry, really and truly, and that I had
to go down to Thornton for the summer, and that when I got back I would like to talk to
him, if he would listen.

Corwin was waiting for me at the station,
black rings under his eyes. ‘You’re not sleeping,’ I said.

‘Matthew’s in
a lot of pain at night,’ he said. But I knew that that wasn’t it. I put my
hand on the back of his neck as he drove.

‘I’ll sleep better now that
you’re here,’ he said, smiling.

‘Have you heard from Mum?’

‘I got a postcard from
Bermuda.’

They were on a once-in-a-lifetime
round-the-world cruise, but I was still too ashamed of myself to make any snide comments
about it.

The Hare and Hounds loomed on the side of
the road – a boundary marker. We had entered Matthew’s circle.

The following day, when we sat down to
coffee, Corwin said, ‘Matthew, there’s something really important we have to
ask you.’

‘Yes,’ said Matthew, ‘of
course. It’s time.’

But he assumed we were asking about his
dying, so he told us. ‘Cancer, of course,’ he said pleasantly.
‘
Riddled
with it, apparently. And I really don’t want to be
poked and prodded and experimented on. At eighty-five I’m far too old for all of
that. No. I shall let nature take its course. I have agreed with Mark upon palliative
care. They will
make me comfortable
– I think that means industrial doses of
morphine. There’s this marvellous organization called Hospice at Home, apparently.
And I’d really much prefer to die here. I do hope that you won’t
object?’

We were humbled, then. Each of us utterly
alone, and Matthew already beyond reach.

When we were in that time, the summer of
Matthew’s dying, it seemed like an eternal season of damp mornings, rose petals
scattered on the grass by the night’s rain. It was as though Matthew’s
admission that he was dying unleashed his cancer. He gave himself up to it. Almost
overnight he became thinner and weaker. We moved his bed down to his study and
positioned it so that with the curtains open he could look out over the sea from his
pillow. Some days I pushed him to the map in a wheelchair. I had to get it down off the
wall so that he could reach it. His hand shook and I had to support his wrist to allow
him to paint. He painted bluebells. He said, ‘They have always raised my spirits,
Morwenna, and I shall never see another bluebell wood – unless
I’m wrong, of course, and there is a heaven. Goodness! How fascinating that
would be!’

One day, he painted his own name on his own
tombstone, beneath my grandmother’s name. ‘Matthew!’ I said.
‘That’s perverse!’

‘Oh, don’t make such a fuss,
Morwenna! Every painting must be signed off. If you decide to keep it, by the way, you
must remember to varnish it.’

I was still staring at his name on the
tombstone when I noticed something else. The top half of a child’s face peered out
from behind a neighbouring gravestone. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘That’s Death,’ said
Matthew. ‘Your grandmother said that Death was a small child. She could hear him
calling.’

‘When did you put him
there?’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I
don’t remember.’ Suddenly, he was disoriented, distressed. ‘I
don’t remember. I’m very tired all of a sudden, Morwenna. Please, be so kind
and help me back to bed.’

His name was the last thing he painted.
After that, there were nurses and drips and bedpans and soiled sheets. It was my first
death. Not my first bereavement, obviously, but my first acquaintanceship with the
business of dying – the routine of it, the maintenance of the failing life-support
system. The mess of it. Corwin and I lifted him, turned him, supported his head. We
undressed him and washed him. Death moved in with us. Matthew absented himself, fragment
by fragment, to spend time with him. They chatted together while I held Matthew’s
hand. I could almost see his face; the wide, frank stare of a child. He was not so
terrifying after all, and so very patient.

I was waiting for Matthew to confess, if
that’s the right word. I had more faith in him than did Corwin. I kept saying,
‘Don’t ask him yet. Wait a little longer.’ While he slept we sat on
the bed in our parents’ room and went through boxes looking for clues. Where could
our father be? If he was going to run away, where
would he run? We put
a baby monitor in Matthew’s study so that we could hear him if he called. The
monitor crackled into life every few seconds as Matthew stirred and moaned.