The House at the Edge of the World (24 page)

There were no clues. Everything in my
father’s life led back to Thornton. When Matthew was lucid, I tried some gentle
leading questions.

‘Why did Dad hate school so
much?’

‘Oh,’ said Matthew, ‘your
poor father. He hated to go anywhere. We had to take him out of school, you know. It was
too flat for him. He felt exposed to the sky. He said he expected always to be swooped
upon and caught up in great talons.’ Speech was hard for him now. Each sentence
required recovery time, snatched breath. ‘And all those
games
! He
couldn’t think of anything more pointless and soul-destroying than chasing around
after a ball. He said that he imagined Hell to be one endless ball game. We
couldn’t leave him there.’

‘Did he ever try to run
away?’

‘John? No. He was a good
boy.’

One morning, Bob appeared in the garden at
Matthew’s window. He could tell that I had seen him. Neither of us made a gesture;
he simply waited until I came out. The garden looked neglected but happy to be left
alone. The plants had knitted themselves into each other. Sandra had no time for
flowers.

Bob was very tanned and wearing red deck
shoes – my eyes kept being drawn to his feet, perhaps because if I met his gaze I was
going to have to speak, but he said, ‘Can we have a chat?’

‘OK.’

I gestured to the bench on the terrace.
‘Is this something you and Corwin cooked up?’ I asked.

‘No. This is all my idea.’

We sat at opposite ends of the bench and
stared at the sea.

‘When did you get back?’ I
asked.

‘A couple of days ago.’

‘Did you have a
good time?’

‘Yes. It was great.’

‘I suppose you want an
apology?’

‘I don’t give a shit. But I
think Val deserves one.’

‘I’d had too much to drink. I
behaved badly.’

‘Well, that ought to make you and me
even, then.’

I hadn’t thought of that.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It’s not even that any more. It’s just
decades of habitual dislike – that and the golf club and the Range Rover and the fact
that you call Mum “Val”.’

‘Wow!’ said Bob. ‘I
thought you might have grown out of that by now. But you’re still just as much of
a snob as ever!’ He was laughing. ‘Poor Val. A hippie, snob daughter, and a
sanctimonious, do-gooding son. What did she ever do to deserve that?’ I was
laughing too. It was a warm, comfortable feeling to be out in the open with our
enmity.

‘I’ll go and see her,’ I
said. ‘I’m getting the hang of this apology business. Not that she’ll
care. We don’t like each other very much.’

‘Mothers don’t get off so
lightly.’

I supposed not. I stared at his tanned
feet.

‘I’ll be off, then,’ he
said, standing up. But I followed him to the gate.

‘I’ve been going through
Dad’s old things,’ I said. ‘I’ve never understood why you and
Dad were such good friends. Why were you?’

‘We grew up together,’ he
said.

‘That doesn’t seem
enough,’ I said.

‘Well, it was,’ he said,
exasperated. Then, relenting: ‘We’d known each other for ever, climbed
together, played music together. That was enough.’

‘Do you think it was us?’ I
asked. ‘Me and Corwin? Was he depressed about us?’

Bob had been reaching for his car keys, but
stopped to sigh the sigh of the exasperated stepfather. ‘I think you and Corwin
are a couple of drama queens. John was pissed. He fell off a cliff.
Let it go!’

‘I can’t reconcile it,’ I
said.

‘What?’

‘You used to play music. I can’t
reconcile that music with this waxed-coat lifestyle.’

He shrugged his shoulders. He’d had
enough of me. ‘What can I say, Morwenna? I don’t need you to.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. He
climbed into the Range Rover. Through the open window I asked, ‘Does the name John
Greenaway mean anything to you?’

‘No? Why?’

‘Just something I came across in
something of Dad’s.’

Bob raised his hand from the steering wheel
as he drew away. It was as though he was thanking me for pulling over.

Corwin said that John Greenaway was a
distraction. It was code for an idea. Who or what he had been was an irrelevance.
‘Matthew holds the answer,’ he said. ‘Let me ask him.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not
yet.’ Because I didn’t want him to hurt Matthew, and because I didn’t
want to know, because I remembered now the ache and bewilderment of bereavement and I
didn’t want to believe that my father could knowingly inflict such pain upon
us.

Matthew’s body had shrunk. It was
nothing more now than the casing of a tired spirit, which escaped from him in curls of
vapour. Somewhere inside was an answer, hard and shining: a diamond truth.

‘What if the answer is, he
doesn’t know?’ I asked. ‘What if the truth is, he doesn’t know?
What if he believes that Dad fell off a cliff and is dead? What will you do
then?’

‘There’s only one way to find
out.’

‘Not yet.’

We were whispering. I took a sketchbook from
the shelf. I ignored the ones he had kept from his childhood – and took up the one dated
1941, the year of Matthew’s Disappointment. ‘We look for John
Greenaway,’ I said. ‘Matthew must have put him somewhere. Then we’ll
know whether he knows or not.’

That was when we started to go through the
sketchbooks. We were systematic about it, as Matthew had been; every sketchbook entry
had a corresponding cipher on the map. We needed to enter into his way of thinking to
work it out. I started in 1941 and worked forwards while Corwin worked backwards from
2005, and we gridded off the map so that we could catalogue the image
that corresponded to the sketchbook entry.

As Matthew had told me, he started with the
farting Devil. I pictured him returning from his day’s walk, spreading the
Ordnance Survey map out on the kitchen table, piercing Thornton with the sharp point of
his compass and extending it out to meet the mark he had made in the middle of a field
twelve miles away and turning the circle. Then scaling it up onto the large canvas, a
canvas of undulating lines with a tiny red and black devil at its centre.

Much of it was familiar, and we already knew
where to look on the map. On one page, two enormous cedars framed the church and beneath
the sketch he had written, ‘The Thornton Sentinels’. And then, in an older,
smaller hand, ‘Lost in the Great Storm of 1959’. Not lost to Matthew’s
map, though, where they still stood guard. But not all were so literal. At other times,
we would find a page full of details, then search and search for its cipher. Matthew had
devoted two pages to the story of a Civil War skirmish between cousins. In the
sketchbook the exact location was mapped out, but when we looked at the map, we could
find no obvious reference to the event. We were tempted to dismiss it and allow
ourselves to believe that it was a story Matthew had rejected for inclusion. But we kept
going back to it – Matthew was consistent: what appeared in the sketchbooks had a symbol
on the map. We kept looking. Eventually I found it by standing back: the family coat of
arms was painted into the bark of a trunk of a bifurcated oak tree. Once I knew it was
there, it was obvious, but my eye had slid over the image countless times.

By now I had read
A Coastal Curacy
twice; Ambrose Pearce, with his stranger’s eye, storm-shocked by both the weather
and the poverty. The people of the coast loomed misshapen and lonely out of the mists.
He imagined them wild and murderous, the beaches littered with their lantern-lured
victims, the fingers
hacked off. But there was only one mention of the
occupant of the strange cabin at Thornton Mouth.

I went looking for Ambrose Pearce. He was
easy to find. He had been curate at St Peter’s for three years in the mid-1860s,
before returning to the civilized south-east, where he wrote two other books about being
the vicar of a land-locked village with a pretty duck pond.

I went looking for John Greenaway in the
Thornton Parish Register, starting with the time of Ambrose Pearce’s curacy. I
looked for him among all the dead children, the bled-out young mothers, the consumptive,
the poxed, the drowned, and those who had managed somehow to outlive their teeth. They
must have felt a grim sense of achievement, those old women who had laid out God knew
how many sons and daughters and grandchildren in sheets fragranced with herbs. I was
thirty-four and had never seen a corpse. I thought: It will not be me who lays out
Matthew. Someone else will do that. Someone else, whose job it is. Someone who
doesn’t know him. There will be no lavender or rosemary scattered on his
sheets.

Names, names and more names, excised from
their stories. John Greenaway was not among them. I went to the churches in The Sands –
I found a couple of Greenaways, but no Johns, and no one of the right age.

‘He must have moved on and out,’
I said to Corwin. I had said ‘on and out’ as though Matthew’s circle
were a geographical feature.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he
said. ‘He’s not important.’

But now, when I went down to the cabin, I
thought about John Greenaway living on that spot. I could smell the tarred rope. Here
was a ghost that I could grapple with, a good honest ghost, who might be relied upon to
rattle a few pebble chains and appear with a warning hand raised, pointing even; he had
seen the Devil, after all – he was a ghost to heed. There were ways to dispatch a ghost
like him. Matthew knew them all –
they were in the sketchbooks: you
could throw churchyard soil at it, or declaim, ‘In the name of God, be
gone!’ Or you could set it an impossible task. If I met John Greenaway’s
ghost I would banish it from the cabin until it had translated into English each and
every scribbled stone at Thornton Mouth. That would keep it occupied for all of
eternity.

My life was full of shades: John Greenaway,
John Venton, the child, Death. I felt as though I was being called to the
Underworld.

I went to visit Mum. She bestowed her
forgiveness on the threshold, all graciousness, freshly pedicured – Rouge Noir to go
with the tan. ‘Tea?’ she asked, prescribing my penance.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you’re the only person I know who still
takes sugar in their tea.’

Her
tea, I wanted to say. Not
their.
I had apologized, but she hadn’t.

‘What lovely flowers,’ I said,
because that was the kind of thing I had to say from now on.

‘From your brother,’ she said,
allowing me to infer the unfavourable comparison. ‘How’s Matthew?’

‘Fading fast.’

‘I suppose I’d better come and
say my goodbyes.’

‘I think he’d like
that.’

That night, as I took over the vigil, I
pulled a sketchbook from the shelf. It was from 1951, and in the moment that I grasped
the spine to slide it out I knew that I had found something. The book felt wrong. I knew
how a book should feel, and this one was slightly hollow to my touch. There were pages
missing. I didn’t need to open it to know this. When I did open it I saw
immediately that the stitching was loose. I counted the pages and compared them to the
previous sketchbook. Two leaves had been removed. Matthew, surely.

I waited until he opened
his eyes. I sat there for two hours watching him, listening to his breath. Eventually,
he stirred, looked around in confusion. I took his hand. ‘Matthew,’ I said,
‘it’s me, Morwenna.’ He recognized my face then and his own relaxed
and he made a mewing sound of contentment. I gave him some water through a straw.

‘Matthew,’ I said, ‘what
do you know about John Greenaway?’

But I had left it too late. He had no full
sentences left, only single words. And, in any case, he showed no sign that he had
understood the question.

Corwin and I began to take turns to sleep in
Matthew’s room. We lived within his breathing now. It was the first sound we
listened for each time we woke. But at the beginning of August, on our thirty-fifth
birthday, Corwin suggested that we ask Sandra to sit with Matthew so that we could go
out. Sandra agreed without hesitation, generously. I had to thank her, not so much for
the favour but for loving Matthew, which cost me.

We didn’t talk much that evening.
There had been so much talking. We sat next to each other in the pub, enveloped in a
brown leather sofa, and drank beer and ate chips. It was quiz night and we paid up to
take part. ‘You and me against the world, Morwenna!’ Corwin said, clinking
his glass against mine. He became quite animated. It had given him something else to
think about.

I thought: Why always
against
the
world? Most of the quiz questions went over my head – I didn’t watch television,
had no interest in sport and had given up paying attention to the news. I looked around
me, the intense debates over each question, the laughter. Why not
of
the world?
I wanted to join in, but I didn’t know how.

Corwin did pretty well on the questions.
‘All that Trivial Pursuit,’ I said spitefully.

‘Look at your face!’ laughed
Corwin. He imitated Matthew, perfectly capturing Matthew’s anachronistic
upper-crust closed
a
’s: ‘Morwenna, I do believe that you are some
strange scowling woodland creature that has strayed into the human world by
accident!’

‘Very funny!’ I said. And then I
realized something. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I’m in there. I’m in
the map, after all!’

I had seen it so many
times recently, sitting in the branches of the oak in the middle of the cow field, a
cross creature with enormous hazel eyes, but hadn’t yet decoded it. Matthew must
have been waiting decades for me to work it out. I felt forgiven – what for, I
couldn’t have said.

We walked home through the middle of town.
Some teenagers were gathered at the high raised flowerbed that surrounded the
shopping-centre clock. It was still the triage point, just as it had been when we were
that age. We carried on past the closed-up Boots and WHSmith. A man was walking towards
us. He was wearing a denim jacket. I wouldn’t have paid him any attention (I was
thinking about Matthew, hoping that he hadn’t woken up and felt abandoned) except
that he made a sudden movement of avoidance, a shoulder-led swerve into the alley that
led to the car park, and in the moment of that movement I recognized him and saw that
Corwin had too. Corwin began to run after him, shouting his name: ‘Oliver!
Oliver!’